The science campus is a long way from the arts campus, but from time to time I make the journey to check out what my colleagues in the humanities are doing. After all, I'm actually quite interested in a lot of their stuff. I occasionally offer my own uneducated opinions on movies, books, games and music; surely I should be able to appreciate some of the scholarly opinions in the journals of film studies, musicology, literary studies, or even, heaven forbid, computer game studies? But sadly, more often than not I'm disappointed. I see article after article written in academic cant, with mediocre ideas and simplistic arguments obscured by jargon 1. The authors clearly have little concern for whether their material might interest general readers, viewers, players, or listeners; they drop the right references, and use the right tortured vocabulary, all in an attempt to appeal to a certain exclusive crowd. Their writings rarely even show much evidence of genuine passion for their subject of research 2. Their main concern seems to be their career, their reputation among other academics. Their goal is to find their own academic crevice to settle into, to coin their own pet phrase (and thus ensure a lifetime of citations), to get tenure. Their output is presumably of interest to other academics in their own little circle, but to the rest of us, it holds about as much interest as a stray corporate memo.
What went wrong with humanities academia? From my position, I can only attribute it to a severe and debilitating case of physics envy 3. Humanities academics no doubt feel awed and belittled by the success of their colleagues in science; and so, like desperate cargo cultists4, they have mimicked the form and procedure of the sciences, without understanding that what is necessary in one field is entirely meaningless in the other.
They bandy about "theories", which give their works an air of meticulousness and precision, but in truth these are poor parodies of scientific theories. A scientific theory is a model of reality, induced from precise and repeated observations of evidence, formally stated, testable, falsifiable, and with useful predictive power. A "literary theory" is just, like, your opinion, man 5. When you know the theory of gravity, you know not only why an object falls to the ground, but also how fast it will fall and how hard it will hit; and you know this for any object and any ground in the universe. When you know "reader-response theory", you just know what some guy thinks about books.
I've seen literary theories described as "powerful", and presented as great "discoveries", by people who like to fantasise that humanities academics, like scientists, are pushing at the boundaries of knowledge. But there is no real progression of knowledge in the arts world. Scientific knowledge progresses as we find out more about reality, and keep improving our models of reality; science keeps discovering real gaps, and real ways to fill them in. Science is like a neverending relay race, with each generation of scientists passing on the baton of discovery to the next; the humanities, by contrast, are like a game of pass the parcel. Ideas and "theories" get passed around, and come in and out of fashion; instead of progress, there is just a vast accumulation of opinions, some of which may be interesting, but most of which are not, and none of which are necessarily an improvement on what went before.
Arts academics use obfuscatory language to create the illusion that they, like top scientists, are the guardians of some highly esoteric knowledge that only a select few can understand. This is nonsense. There is no idea in the whole of humanities that isn't immediately accessible to anyone literate. Scientific ideas, by contrast, tend to require some training to appreciate 6. Science models reality at different levels of abstraction; it's almost always necessary to master the more basic levels before you can proceed further. You need to know about resistance before you can understand impedance; you need to know about natural numbers before you can talk about complex ones. Learning a science is like climbing a tall tree: you have to navigate the lower branches before you can consider the top. Learning a humanities subject is like eating at a buffet: you can pick and mix from all over the table, there's no reason to take the starter before the fish course, and no dish is too complex for the newcomer to digest. (Though increasingly, academics avoid the main courses and stick to the candies and appetisers.)
Like scientists, humanities academics present their work in cloistered conferences and journals; but science journals are cloistered not by design, but by necessary accident. Reality is vast and complex, the models of reality are numerous and often difficult to grasp, and knowledge of these models is widely fragmented. For any specific branch of science, perhaps a few hundred people worldwide have climbed high enough to truly understand what their neighbours on that branch are doing. Only these people can observe their neighbours' work in proper detail; for the rest of us, the best we can get is a general impression, unless we want to climb the branch ourselves. Only the people high enough on the branch are fit to peer review new work (an important process in weeding out bad scientific theories); and only other people on the branch are likely to be interested in the details. This doesn't hold for the humanities. There is no reason why the opinions of a "film theorist" should be inaccessible to anyone who has seen a film, nor is there a reason why someone's opinion should have to pass his peer review. If John L. Random has seen a film, then his opinions on the film are not necessarily of less interest than those of a professor of film studies. On the other hand, if John L. Random has seen a few rocks, his opinions on their formation are of a great deal less interest than those of a professor of geology.
Scientists climb higher on the shoulders of other scientists, who may or may not be giants. This is one reason for the mass of citations in scientific articles: a citation helps to give grounds for your statement. If you base your work on a previously published result, then there's a good chance that it is a solid foundation (and if it's not, it will be found out). And ultimately, each citation can trace its way back to reliable, observable evidence. What is the point of citations in humanities journals? It's one thing to acknowledge the source of an idea (and to help your readers find it), but quite another to name-drop, to impress others with the scope of your reading. Worse still is to imply (as many humanities academics do) that your opinion is "grounded" by a citation. The opinions of the cited academic are usually groundless themselves, and yet many authors write as if the backing of Michel Foucault, say, rendered their particular ideas beyond question.
The result of all this physics envy is that while scientists continue to progress and contribute something to the world, humanities academics do nothing but fill journal after journal with self-serving bollocks. What to do about this? I used to think the solution was simply to kick humanities departments out of universities. I had fantasies of appearing before them in a show of righteous glory, like Cromwell before the Rump Parliament, and shouting7
You have sat too long for any good you have been doing.... In the name of God, go!But now I think such an attitude was excessive, and even a bit dictatorial. After all, as I said, I do find literary criticism and the like rather interesting. I don't see why some people shouldn't be subsidised to take it to a high level, and instil other people with their passion for it; my problem is really that this isn't happening now.
So here is my new solution: treat the university as a marketplace 8. Close down the cloistered humanities journals and conferences, and throw open the doors. Keep the same academics, but let everyone into their lectures; advertise them far and wide. Print their work in mass market magazines, heavily-linked blogs, prominently-positioned paperbacks. Ditch the citations and the dry academic format, and put their conferences on TV and podcasts. And most importantly, let other people take part in the process. Put their opinions next to the opinions of humble laymen, intersperse their speeches with the speeches of random enthusiasts, discuss their work on talk shows and web forums, get pop personalities to preface their monographs. Immerse their world in a free exchange of exciting ideas.
Note here that I'm using the term "marketplace" in an idealised sense, in the sense of the Agora of ancient Greece, where philosophers and public figures debated their ideas before the common people. I do not mean that the ideas of academics should have to support themselves in what is now known as the "free market" 9. Far from it; indeed, I would even increase their subsidies protect them from the free market, to ensure that their ideas get the maximum exposure possible. Their magazine articles should be in every newsagent in every town and village; their speeches and discussions should take up huge tracts of prime-time TV.
However, I suspect that even if I were to offer today's humanities academics such a deal, they would be reluctant to take it. The truth is that they would be shown up, badly. Exposed to mass public scrunity, they would find their style laughed at; their careerism and hypocrisy would look a mile wide. Forced to give an account of themselves in simple language, they would be at a loss; put next to the ideas of people who can actually write, their ideas would look very banal and unsatisfying indeed. If the university really were a marketplace, I have no doubt that the miserable self-serving circle jerk that is humanities academia would die a very rapid death. So it's very much in their interests for physics envy to continue.
1. I strongly suspect that the inaccessibility of
the text is inversely proportional to the quality of the subject matter, and
the ideas therein. Articles about performance practice in Early Music
are generally quite readable; articles about Hip-Hop theory in
Contemporary Music Review tend to be written in impenetrable jargon.
And the very worst, most vacuous, pompous and turgid academic writing I've
ever encountered was on the subject of text adventure games. I don't want to
mention the author here, but suffice it to say, his work was a load of Aarse.
2. Insiders in humanties departments tell me that is it
not unusual for professors to be openly disdainful of the subject they
study. One literary professor claimed never to read novels; one
musicologist rarely listened to music, and didn't even have much interest
in it.
3. The term is not my own. I first encountered it in
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, and there it was
acknowledged that someone else had coined it. But I've lent my copy to a
friend and can't at this stage find out who that someone was. My apologies.
4. As described in Cargo Cult Science by Richard
Feynmann. A book I haven't read, but that never stopped anyone from citing
Derrida.
5. As "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski might say.
6. And this, dare I say it, is why science departments
tend to get the better students. As Kurt Vonnegut said of Allen Ginsberg's
Howl: "I wouldn't look for the best minds of any generation in an
undergraduate English department anywhere."
7. From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_Parliament, unless someone has changed
it in the meantime. The perils of citing from Wikipedia!
8. Citation where it's due. I take this idea from
Alexander et al, A Pattern Langauge, OUP 1977. Every nerd's favourite
architecture book.
9. Though I would appreciate the irony of those academics
on the "new left", who insist that art should
pay for itself on the marketplace, falling victim to their own principles.