The Humanities without Critique: On a Service Industry for Neoliberal Academe

Abstract

The Humanities without Critique:On a Service Industry for Neoliberal Academe Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) It is unusual for a movement in the humanities to have a theme song. This particular theme song was written in 1968 by Mark James, who also released it the same year. It begins, "We're caught in a trap / I can't walk out / Because I love you too much baby." The song, "Suspicious Minds," became famous the following year when it was covered by Elvis Presley. In 1969, it would become his last number one single in the United States. Its chorus, "We can't go on together / With suspicious minds / And we can't build our dreams / On suspicious minds" perfectly foreshadows the heated debate of late over the role of "suspicious reading" in the humanities. The question upon which the fate of the humanities appears to be hanging in the balance—and to which "Suspicious Minds" is the unofficial theme song—is whether suspicion is the proper way for students to read texts. Back in the early 1970s, the philosopher Paul Ricouer provided what has become the classic formulation of suspicious reading. In his book, Freud and Philosophy, Ricouer proposed two general directions for interpretation. One direction seeks to "purify discourse of its excrescences, liquidate the idols, go from drunkenness to sobriety, realize our state of poverty once and for all" (Ricouer 1970, 27). The other direction "use[s] the most 'nihilistic,' destructive, iconoclastic movement so as to let speak what once, what each time, was said, when meaning appeared anew, when meaning was its fullest" (Ricouer 27). For Ricouer, all textual interpretation is "animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience," a "tension" and "extreme polarity" that is the "truest expression of our 'modernity'" (Ricouer 27). One direction he calls the "school of reminiscence" and the other the "school of suspicion" (Ricouer 1970, 32). If the aim of the school of reminiscence is the restoration of meaning, then the aim of its opposite, the school of suspicion, is the demystification of meaning. For Ricouer, the three "masters" that dominate the school of suspicion are Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (Ricouer 32). Though their lines of thought are "seemingly mutually exclusive," "[a]ll three begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering" (Ricouer 34). Thus, for Ricouer, "the Genealogy of Morals in Nietzsche's sense, the theory of ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideals [End Page 527] and illusions in Freud's sense represent three convergent procedures of demystification" (Ricouer 34). Now, fifty years after Ricouer dubbed Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the masters of the school of suspicion, some scholars are arguing that these masters and their theoreticial legacies are at the root of the problems facing the humanities today. The shorthand way of terming their approach to interpretating texts and documents is the word critique—which is widely regarded as the modus operandi of the humanities. But if the humanities are indeed in peril, is it possible then to save them by simply rejecting critique, their modus operandi? This "conviction," writes Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, is one that is "shared by a growing number of scholars" (2015, 186). For these "postcritique" scholars, continues Felski, rejecting critique and its "rhetoric of suspicious reading in literary studies and in the humanities and interpretive sciences generally" (187) is the solution to the woes facing the humanities.1 While Felski recognizes the criticism that rejecting critique is tantamount to becoming a "pawn of neoliberal interests" (2015, 186), she nonetheless tries to distance herself from the neoliberal agenda for the humanities by saying that her real motivation is elsewhere. Namely, it is "a desire to articulate a positive vision for humanistic thought in the face of growing skepticism about its value" (Felski 186). But in spite of her claims to articulate a "positive vision" for the humanities, Felski does the opposite. The postcritique that she promotes has produced a virulent and highly destructive form of antitheory, if not also, anti-humanities.2 Felski has become the poster...