Efficient” Creativity and the Residue of the Humanities

Abstract

The humanities are having a hard time as a disciplinary field, increasingly having to prove themselves as necessary or useful. This reality occurs as academy undergoes a neoliberal institutionalization, which involves privileging of hard proof and pressure to produce useful, valuable, and practical research--what Bill Readings in The University in Ruins (1996) calls excellent and Alan Liu in The Laws of Cool (2004) calls knowledge work The academy today operates at intersections of information culture, cultural dominance of technology, and capitalist craze. In this way, it resembles Neil Postman's theory of technopoly: founded on principles of industrial invention (42), technopoly favours progress over tradition with belief that what cannot measured either does not exist or is of value (51). Shaping and controlling societies and institutions, technopoly informs contemporary neoliberalism; through neoliberal restructuring of university and its research, technopological academy is realized. The danger for humanities scholars and students with regard to meeting demands for useful, valuable, and practical research is that we perpetuate larger, systemic conditions that shape such expectations and of which such expectations are symptomatic. Additionally, we ignore that humanities are being devalued for practising they preach: for being theoretical, creative, reflexive, and humanist--characteristics that not coincidentally are polarized from technopoly. Inherent in a technopological neoliberalism and technopological academy is a capitalist drive that more and more espouses a maximum productive performance (Schumpeter 81). Coined by Joseph A. Schumpeter (1942) as destruction, this drive fosters constant revolution of the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying old one, incessantly creating a new one (83), a cycle of growth that Alan Liu shows has reached a modern apex in form of postcapital, postindustrial information culture. In particular, Liu voices a concern over creative destruction of historical consciousness in humanities, arguing that with technologies, techniques, and efficiency of their alignment ... [there is a] predetermined result that contemporary almost always outmatches (TheLaws of Cool 302). Tradition becomes perceived as opposite of progress, as with technopological turn, which saw that there was no time to look back or to contemplate was being lost (Postman 45). As such, technopoly today and its drive of creative destruction performs instrumentalism, eliminating] alternatives to itself ... It does not make them illegal ... It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant (48). The drive to create comes at price of forcibly forgetting past and, in doing so, culturally destroying it. In same vein as postmodernist fears of weakening historicity, Liu observes that humanities are being asked to prove pertinence of historical thinking and historical consciousness in today's research output (The Laws of Cool 5), being made to ask, wow? Why is this relevant now? Under such a treatment, history is useful only insofar as its relevance and application to current concerns can proven, prompting Liu to argue that information culture and postindustrial society create a circumstance and style of thinking that is governed by 'now' (The Laws of Cool 8). Invested in pragmatics of present, eternal now concurrently anticipates progress through change and is ready to become its own next stage. In this way, history, time, memory, and modes of thinking that use reflection--by which I mean acts of comparative thinking about that which exists in past and present moments--become engulfed in a will be condition. Lost is a regard for future as a part of a process of history; information culture and postindustrialism pretend that there is arc of trajectory, only here, current position, and there, goal that is to reached. …