One: The Humanities of Negation

Every week, teaching the humanities becomes more and more difficult—but not primarily because, as many have complained, of a lack of robust financial support from the state or university administrations.

That is a serious obstacle, but not a paralyzing one. Nor is the mounting difficulty of teaching the humanities caused by distracted students, another common complaint.

One of the main tasks of the humanities is, in fact, to address the distracted ones.

In his book Either/Or, Kierkegaard calls the distracted the "unhappiest ones." Hegel had described "unhappy consciousness" as an "inwardly disrupted consciousness" (Phenomenology of Spirit 207). Kierkegaard sees the cause of unhappiness as being "distracted by the exterior" (173). "The unhappy one," he writes, "is the person who in one way or another has… his life,… his essential nature, outside himself" (222). He is "always absent from himself" (222).

The humanities engage the "absent ones." Self-absence is caused not by individual failings—self-abandonment, inattention, or ignorance—but by material social conditions that make daily life precarious, a web of "fear and trembling," and drive individuals toward the distractions of the culture industry as an escape from this precarity.

The humanities interpret these conditions and show how absence furtively takes over one's being so secretly that one does not even know that one is absent from oneself.

Reading Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street, for example, the humanities point out how Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is an insurgency against having one's life outside oneself, being "absent" to oneself. His words, as Gilles Deleuze says, "carv[e] out a kind of foreign language within language" ("Bartleby; or, The Formula" 71). The humanities are the pedagogies of making the normal abnormal, and its lessons are "carving" a "foreign" idiom within the vernacular and the familiar.

The difficulty of teaching the humanities is the difficulty of teaching the humanities of negation—where reading "I would prefer not to" the student learns the languages of negation and says "No!" to the way things are, not just their own self-absence but the absence of justice in the body politic.

To teach humanities of negation is to teach humanities of change which requires teaching difficult texts with difficult turns of interpretation. But this teaching—that teaches students how to change the precarious social conditions that produce the absence of justice in the social relations—is what is made difficult and decried, especially in state and general universities, as "elitist" pedagogy.

Teaching the humanities becomes more and more difficult because of the administrative culture of the universities. Within this administrative culture, teaching the humanities of negation is dismissed as exclusive, elitist, and indifferent to the needs of students.

The un-said assumption of dismissing such teaching as "elitist" is that it is conceptually so demanding that it does not belong in the general university classroom.

Such a complex teaching, it is assumed, belongs to private universities where the high managers of transnational corporations are "educated." It is said that because the students who come to the university have their roots in working families, they need practical skills for getting jobs. They need applied humanities, not the "luxury" of the humanities of negation.

The applied humanities by which students are "trained" in skills (not "educated" in concepts) reduces the humanities as the interpretive ethics of social justice to the linear skills of reading, writing and digital communication.

By reducing the humanities to linear skills, the pedagogy of concepts in the humanities is transformed into the pedagogy of empiricism. Empiricism is an evasion of explanation and displacing of it with description. Description describes the way things are, not as they ought to be; it is a way of affirming the dominant power relations.

This is why the empiricist mode of "evidence-based" teaching has become the privileged mode of pedagogy by education lobbyists whose job is to make money by making the existing forms of power normal by teaching skills rather than conceptual thinking. Conceptual thinking will detect the fault lines of the dominant relations and works through them to change the relations of power. Empiricist pedagogy makes the university, in Althusser's words, "like the Church"—that is, to teach "'know-how'" and teach it "in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its 'practice'" (133).

Applied humanities and its empiricist pedagogy are the domain of calculatory reason: they teach skills by which the dominant order of things is recognized, accepted, and preserved.

To ensure that students deploy them to affirm the way things are, the skills of students are assessed over and over. Students (and their teachers) are continually measured against standardized rubrics which teaches students (and their teachers) that what matters is measured and what is measured is only what is measurable.

The (class) irony is that while elite students get to "think," students at state universities are trained to "do." Do what is thought by someone else.

Conceptual thinking opens new pathways of thinking and being and is for that reason vital.

The applied humanities are the instruments of producing and perpetuating permanent workers in precarity: workers who must work under alienating conditions that reduce them to a mere physical source of labor power, such that, as Marx writes, "it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker" (273). The humanities of negation are lessons of freedom from such abject conditions.

Two: The Humanities of Surveillance 

The humanities are, for the reasons we mentioned, the ethical consciousness of a democratic society.

Through interpretation of different texts of diverse cultures and their heterogeneous understandings of meanings and values of the social world, they produce collective affinities by which humans of all cultures, races, sexualities, genders, and transidentities recognize differences in themselves and others and treat these differences as fundamental to an inclusive community.

The humanities, consequently, are worldly; they are not transcendental nor are they insular. They engage the complexities and singularities of human life within a universal perspective as in, for example, Plato's The Republic, The Upanishads, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Dante's "Purgatorio," Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, Emily Dickinson's poems, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Richard Wright's "The Man Who Was Almost a Man," Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Samina Ali's Madras on Rainy Days, and, and, and…

The lesson of all lessons in the humanities is grounded in what John Keats in his own interpretation of Shakespeare's plays calls "negative capability," by which he means to be "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (60). Cultivating "negative capability" is the main task of the humanities because it develops a tolerance of ambiguity which is essential for living in a society of differences. It is not an absence of knowing but is, as Terry Eagleton puts it, the "free play of the mind" which "in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare" is what enables humanity to think beyond the stunted life of the market and to imagine "alternative visions of the future" in which the free human development of all is the guiding principle of social life.

Difference and otherness have shaped worldly humanities because they are the very substance of social life and yet are elusive, complex, and in many ways un-manage-able. The humanities, to use Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze's word, "deterritorialize" the managed and the managerial: they teach becoming a cultural "nomad," "the life of the nomad is the intermezzo" (380)—never settled; always in change. To put it differently, the humanities teach the impossibility of "establishing oneself anywhere" forever (Derrida, Negotiations 12).

The teaching of the humanities in universities is being moved by the administration of universities, against the resistance by many humanities scholars, in the other direction. The managerial machine teaches fixed positions and settled habits and makes the pedagogical a zone of regulations. The humanities as the exploring of uncertainties, learning to become at home with paradoxes, aporias and the aleatory, are being transformed into applied humanities; the humanities of pragmatic skills that are measurable, "assessable," within the calculatory regime of "accountability." Accountability, however, is an ethical act outside the measurable. What is measurable is not accountability, it is countability.

The humanities of "negative capability" are not countable. Only the applied humanities are.

In place of educating students into a culture of plurality and a thoughtful life tolerant of ambiguity that is beyond "assessment" and by its very constitution immeasurable and thus open to uncertainties, the applied humanities trains students in skills that can be measured, calculated, and "assessed." In the culture of "assessment," teaching humanities as lessons in "negative capability" is seen as a luxury for students who are for the most part from working families. Learning to honor the complexity of otherness and the uncanny and live with the ethics of the undecidable is, as we have said, assumed to be the privilege of the wealthy.

Managerialism argues that teaching applied humanities is a means for bringing equality to all, to make the working-class student competitive with the children of the wealthy. However, the reduction of knowledge to exchangeable skills does not produce equality: it perpetuates the class divisions between those who think and those who carry out the orders of thinkers.

"Assessment" and "feedback loops" are instruments of solidifying not abolishing inequalities.

The culture of "assessment" and the "feedback loop," which like the managerial machine extend far beyond the walls of universities, is the culture of what Michel Foucault in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison calls "surveillance" (174), the institutional instrument of "control societies" (Deleuze, Negotiations 177-82). A main feature of control societies is a "pedagogy of metrics," the main task of which is to prepare the rising labor force with the "appropriate" consciousness skills that direct people how to freely accept their unfreedom: "I do, vote for, teach, buy… what I want, not what I am told." The "what I want" is always already what the managerial machine has constructed by interpreting meanings and values in the sense that they represent freedom as a commodity, a good to be exchanged for a wage or salary.

The humanities of surveillance is the instrument of the owner class that turns humans into suppliers of labor power (skills) that run its factories and offices, and which reconstructs the entire society as a network of offices and factories. Working in these offices and factories becomes the only way they can earn means of subsistence to exist. Their existence becomes mere "physical" existence (Marx 273). The managerial humanities will construct a network of meaning and values which normalizes life as having a set of skills, as physical existence ("I am happy to have a job").

The deterritorializing humanities is the road to the world outside life as physical existence, a world beyond "I am happy to have a job," a world in which factories are for humans and not humans for factories, a world in which humans will return to themselves as "social beings."

Three: The Immeasurable Humanities 

It would be absurd if after reading Plato's Gorgias, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, The Analects of Confucius, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood, or The Confessions of Saint Augustine someone tried to quantifiably measure the effects any of these writers and their books have had on you, and, based on that measurement, judge whether these are "good" writers and their writing is worth reading. It is absurd because what one learns from Plato, Woolf, Ngũgĩ, Saint Augustine, and other great writers and thinkers exceeds all standard calculations. Learning worthy of the name surpasses all familiar interpretive frames of accounting because such learning introduces a new order of knowing and understanding that cannot be counted for through commonsensical representations. Such learning is not measurable but immeasurable; it exceeds the boundaries of existing measures and opens a space for a new way of being in the world.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is immeasurable because its impact on the reader is uncanny, wavering, uncertain, and bordering on an ethical act that philosopher Jacques Derrida calls "undecidability" (“Force of Law” 24). By undecidability, Derrida means a decision that cannot be made within existing interpretative settings and has to be thought in its own terms.

This immeasurable freedom of the mind is what the humanities teach. To the Lighthouse represents the freedom of the human mind from codes and imposed formulations that are designed by those for whom reality is real only when it can be fit into a pre-ordered frame—an "evidence-based" reality. In To the Lighthouse "evidence-based reality" collapses. In Plato's Gorgias, it is the very "evidence-based reality" that is subjected to a Socratic dialectic. This form of knowledge is so fundamental to a democracy that is grounded on the thoughtfulness of its citizens that in all universities and colleges students have been asked to study the humanities and learn the lesson of cohabiting with the other and otherness.

At universities, the otherness of the other taught by such immeasurable teaching is now banned. The university has made "evidence-based teaching" its official pedagogy and has forbidden all other forms of teaching. Forbidden not in the sense that it prevents other forms of teaching—that would be in violation of "academic freedom." But "academic freedom" is made a mockery of by the career punishment meted out to the practitioners of other modes of teaching.

Why have universities instituted "evidence-based teaching"? Most universities and colleges that train the labor force for big business operate with "evidence-based teaching." The larger question is what has made "evidence-based teaching" the dominant method (it is a regulated "method") of these universities and colleges. After all, "evidence-based teaching" hasn't fallen from the sky. It is designed on earth for earthly purposes. Its purpose is to train an acquiescent labor force for big business.

What does "evidence-based teaching" do for big business?

"Evidence-based teaching" is a simple (if not simplistic) circle of communication: the boss (teacher) sends a code (an order/lesson on a particular subject), and the addressee signals back that they have received it. The ability of the boss (teacher) is measured by the number of responses that fit in the predetermined codes. These are codes of agreement within the established rules. This is a behavioralist model of pedagogy, one which reduces the teaching in the classroom to the repetitive measuring of "intended behaviors which the student shall display at the end of some period of education" (Bloom et al. 16). Such teaching is the opposite of the teaching of negation that is vital for the humanities—it is the teaching of affirmation for the way things are and for fitting into the existing demands of the workplace. It is not a human pedagogy—teaching for the full development of human beings—but a machinic one—teaching as training to think and act like a machine.

Teaching in the elite private universities is radically different. If state and general universities train workers and low-level managers, the elite universities educate the high-level managers—the bosses. Elite universities, in other words, educate high management cadres for international corporations and educate them in unbounded thinking and decision making. At Yale, for example, the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning celebrates the "teaching that can only be defined by quality of thought" and "curiosity for truth"—that is, the immeasurableness of teaching—over the kind of measurable "data mine teaching" that "insist(s) solely on measurable outcomes" that is now required at most state and general universities.

General universities and colleges, through "evidence-based teaching," train a workforce that learns how to respond to codes sent by the boss and how to acknowledge that they have received the order and will act on it without question. "Evidence-based teaching" is a teaching organized by the power of the class in dominance that owns the means of producing wealth: it turns the students from working class families who attend general universities and colleges into a permanent working class while Yale and other elite universities educate the bosses of this working class: a cadre of permanent bosses.

The "evidence" of "evidence-based teaching" is reality closed in on itself: its evidence is not evident because, like all positivisms, it cannot account for its own cause. It "gives up the search after the origin and hidden causes" and comforts itself instead with "succession and likeness" (Comte 2). Such positivist modes of teaching, which replace the material evidence of causes with a simulacrum of evidence in the form of disembodied "data," are appealing to big business because they place teaching in the prison house of empiricism and pragmatism in which truth "is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons… 'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving" (James 36, 98).

The culture of assessment that now shapes most working- and middle-class colleges and universities has become a shaping culture in the 21st century because its culture is a culture of expediency, in which the complex inquiry into truth and causes and the ethics of otherness are casualties of a market logic that relentlessly transforms use value into (calculable) exchange value.

By instituting the regime of "evidence-based teaching," the humanities have been turned into a workshop of corporate skills training. Students in the "evidence-based" humanities are transformed into data points, and "good" teaching is reduced to teaching that is measured by demonstrating efficiency in relaying commands to move these data points toward improved completion of the tasks that are said to establish competency in basic skills. And, as every new teacher now quickly learns, only teaching that speaks in "measurable verbs" counts.

"Evidence-based teaching" teaches students from working class families that only what is measurable is valuable, while the immeasurable is reserved for the children of the elite. In fact, such thinking has become so pervasive in universities that without any intellectual embarrassment curricula discussions focus on "simplifying" the curriculum with claims that the students who attend state and comprehensive universities are "intimidated" by abstract thinking, thinking that cannot be easily measured.

Students are, of course, aware of the hollowness of the "evidence-based" humanities. There's an "enrollment" crisis in the humanities in general universities not because, as the popular view has it, the humanities have become irrelevant in a digital age but because "evidence-based teaching" has emptied the humanities of its analytical substance, its poetics of knowing, and its social task in a democracy: to educate thoughtful people who are ethical, honor the other and otherness, and are at home with what Keats in his reading of Shakespeare calls "Negative Capability," by which he means being "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (60).

Four: Humanities and the Market 

What is a college education for? Is it for a (hopefully) well-paying job?

As the skepticism on the value of college education, the cost of it, and the economic prospect of college graduates grows, the answer to this question has become more and more a firm "Yes!"

This "Yes!" that makes college a job placement center and college education a mere qualification for a job is a narrow and very limiting "yes."

What makes this "limiting" response more limiting and gives it a "normal" sense is the unthoughtful support of the college administrators who support the "yes"—"a college education is for getting a job." The college administrators' affirmative yes should not be taken seriously since they are more concerned about course enrollment numbers and college budgets than the life meaning of students. The irony, of course, is that the more administrators focus on the job-limited "yes," the more skeptical people become about college education, and the more enrollments decline.

The "yes" is narrow and limiting because it instrumentalizes human life and confines human possibilities and human freedom. True freedom is the free development of each individual as an end in itself and not training for a job.

The "yes" is the "yes" of the practical consciousness. The practical consciousness, Adorno thought, is the undoing of thought and meaningfulness because it consigns one to the "familiar" (80) and therefore familiarizes the world in which "life has become the sphere of private existence" (15). To normalize the relations of such a life, "teaching of the good life"—the question of ethics and the meaningfulness of life that are at the core of the humanities of negation—has been consigned to "oblivion" (15).

What, however, always haunts the practical is the existential: what is the value of practical success in an existential vacuum? What is the value of having a good, well-paying job without an arch of meaning that can give direction to life and bring new dimensions to it? To the practical consciousness, talking about an arch of meaning seems like a luxury, an elitist "extra something" that one can do without. It is not. Those who tie human life to practicality often use "elitist" as a way of making the practical the only thing that matters in life.

An arch of meaning clarifies life in its totality. It is different from the "clever" tactical answers and compromises that one is forced into to survive. Surviving is not living; it is waiting for living to come later. The later never comes. Life without meaning is what Schopenhauer describes as a state in which "nothing remains" to the individual "but abandonment to boredom" (37-38).

A college education is to learn how to build an arch of meaning.

The practical consciousness knows that it needs continuing meaning in life but takes the easy road of importing meaning from current ideologies whether they wear the cloak of religion, politics, patriotism, family… None of these actually give life an integrated consistency and ethical oneness because the imported meanings are an ideological simulation of meaning not meaning.

Finding such ideological meanings empty, people become cynical and often take refuge in "nihilism" which, as Nietzsche writes, is "symptomatic of a desperate soul in a state of deadly exhaustion, however brave such virtuous posturing may appear. With stronger, livelier thinkers, however, thinkers who still have a thirst for life, things look different" (11).

College education is an education in learning how to make things look different, how to be an active agent and not simply accept what is the thought of the day.

The thought of the day is always the thought of those who use the practical persons who have not developed a sense of meaningful direction in life for their own ends. Heidegger calls them "the they" (164).

"The they," in the name of caring and concern for the young person, reject the very concept of an enlightening arch of meaning as elitist and advise the young to be pragmatic and to not take seriously any ideas about larger meanings in life. "The they" subject the practical person to ideological manipulations.

To put it in a more critical perspective, college education is a resistance to practicality. Why? Because to live without a vision of life in its totality deprives one of one's human freedom to choose and act. It subjects one to the wills and decisions of others who, in the absence of an arch of meaning in life, fill that vacuum with not just empty homilies but with day-to-day practicality.

One doesn't have to be a theologian or a philosopher to realize that without meaning integrated into all aspects of one's life, one's life becomes mechanical—a drudgery of mindless "bad" habits which, as Hegel describes it, are "opposed by another purpose; the habit of right in general, of the ethical… of freedom" (Philosophy of Mind 131).

What we have said is not against getting jobs. Jobs are absolutely necessary for one's economic well-being. What we are arguing is that economic well-being without directions and existential dimensions is a sad, empty, and lonely life that forces us to always look to somewhere else, to something else to find some sense of coherence in life.

Practicality is especially threatening for one's free existence in a country like the USA that is dominated by capitalism. Capitalism uses the practical consciousness of people to squeeze in "the working day" as much labor out of them as possible for its own maximum profit.

To return to one of Marx's more well-known books, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where he writes about what he calls "alienated labor" and describes how capitalism takes advantage of the practical, how it reduces a person's life to mere physical existence: a practical (job)

enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker. (273)

College education is not for getting a job. It is a resistance against the conditions that reduce one to mere physical existence. It is for refusing to accept all conditions, making all kinds of compromises, and abandoning all human ideas to survive a physical life.

Previous versions of this essay were published in the La Crosse Tribune.