Once more into the breech: The problem with the humanities (not quite)

That’s a facebook post by Michael Bérubé. There’s a bunch of comments, which you’re welcome to read by scrolling over to Facebook. I’m putting my own comment right here:

I’m of two minds about this whole business, Michael, and by “whole business” I mean not only that report and your response – I’ve only glanced at both – but this whole “woe is the humanities” business. My trouble is that I am not a humanist. Oh, I’ve got a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo, I’ve published in MLN, Semiotica, PMLA (but only a letter, about how boring deconstruction had become), I’ve even got a page and a half in the volume from that notorious 1966 structuralism conference, but I was kicked out of the club sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

There was never an official  “drumming out” ceremony, no written reprimand, no detailing of reasons, but it happened nonetheless. And I know why it happened. I took Lévi-Strauss too seriously, deciding that there was more to him than binary oppositions. That led me to cognitive science and – the horror! the horror! – to computational linguistics. Back at Buffalo in the mid 1970s, yes, I was in the English Department, but I also strayed over into Linguistics and studied computational semantics with David Hays. Now at the time it looked like I was venturing into new territory, you know, going boldly etc. and I was. But by the 80s it was clear that I had been walking over a bridge too damn far. And so I left.

As for the current fracas, I understand that it concerns this “ideological monoculture.” Well I can see that, and I do think there is an issue here. I also don’t think it’s as bad as all that.

But the computer and computation, now that’s a deeper issue, and more complicated. There’s been a lot of interesting work in the so-called “digital humanities,” which has been marginalized within the humanities. And the issue is deeper than cultural analytics, a somewhat newer term. The issue is right there in the Centennial Issue of MLN, published as a special issue in 1976. Northrup Fry headlined the issue, but it also had articles by Edward Said, Eugenio Donato, Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and others, and me. My article was “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics.” It was full of diagrams, those cognitive networks, which I used to analyze Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That’s why I was ultimately kicked out, and that’s indicative of the issue the humanities are not at all facing. Oddly enough, it’s not so very far from the issue Susan Sontag raised in perhaps her most famous essay, “Against Interpretation.”

Which is why I tend to think this current business is just a tempest in a teapot. Very important if you’re at the tea party. But if you’ve been kicked out, not so important.