Is Liberal Arts Education Responsible for its Own Dissolution?

Michel Valentin
French
UM-Missoula

In this early 21st century, a majority of the liberal arts' professoriate feels marginalized by the emphasis university administrations currently place on business, technical, or vocational training. Pricked by accusations of irrelevance, liberal arts academics often hold lofty conceptions in defense of their profession and the liberal arts. Two views especially require careful analysis. The first is that if academia is becoming increasingly commercialized, it is because the precepts of the liberal arts are being abandoned through academia's collaboration with the established power systems./1/ The second is that a liberal arts education improves the human condition through its inherent understanding of society and suffering humanity./2/ Although not necessarily all wrong, both views ignore the complex relationship the liberal arts have always had with the power structures of societies./3/

I will first address the question of whether the "commercialization of society" results in abandonment of the liberal arts. Later in this essay, I will address questions concerning improvements of the human condition in general through a large dose of liberal arts education. I will argue that liberal arts education must reinvent itself so as to be able to achieve the establishment of a new culture and a new idealism.

Liberal Arts Education's False Claims and Failures

Concern and engagement in, or withdrawal from, the world has long been pondered--at times with magnificence: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, /Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?" The active and political responsibility to fight--"The oppressors' wrong, the proud man's contumely...the law's delay, / The insolence of office..."--has already been poetically balanced against the "consummation devoutly to be wish'd...to sleep" and to ignore the wrongs of society./4/ These "quasi-existential haikus" are now part of the canonical basis expressive of the state of (irreconcilable?) tension between theory and practice, life and ideals, and life and the arts. This tension is embedded at the heart of the liberal arts education merits debate.

Educators have often been accused of treason, self-interest and diffidence in regard to the power-structure they are supposed to enlighten, reform, or attack. For instance, Julien Benda's La trahison des clercs, Paul Nizan's Les Chiens de Garde, and Régis Debray's Le Scribe/5/ mapped the arcane configurations of Western intellectuals' complicity with a power always ready to liquidate them (or render them obsolete) when their service is deemed negative or counter-productive./6/ These writers all criticize the hypocrisy of intellectuals and academics with regard to oppressive politics, atrocities, the bourgeois order of things, the commodification of knowledge, and the duplicitous role of universities./7/ Nizan remarks that intellectuals will never sacrifice "their comfort, security, order, even their lives" to overthrow the status quo./8/ It is true that--too often--poets and intellectuals in academia refuse to rock the boat and "refrain from radical action in order to obtain academic tenure."/9/ Benda, Nizan, and Debray accuse them of either being too easily satisfied with looking passively at the world, or, to accommodate their guilt, limiting their actions to mere symbolic and useless "gestures and postures."

Particularly problematic is the view that the classic understanding of academia and liberal arts education (directly linked to high-brow culture) exemplifies a state and condition of higher learning that is above and contrary to the "selling out" of academia in American capitalist commodification, and that high-brow culture's and liberal arts education's tenets and practices directly improve the human condition. If academia is becoming commercialized, it is argued, it is because the precepts underlying liberal arts education have been abandoned./10/

Such arguments are flawed because they ignore the facts that high-brow culture and idealism (exemplified by the liberal arts) have always existed in symbiosis with the established power systems just as, for example, the Church that (come hell or high-water) has always co-existed with secular power./11/ Scholarly ideals and scholastic principia often went along hand in hand. Of course, markers at the crossroads of this famous ongoing "march and quest for knowledge and truth"--so dear to the liberal arts tradition that its institutions iconized it with mottos: Ars & Veritas, Fiat Lux, Lux et Veritas (The University of Montana), Dominus illuminatio mea (Oxford)--and let us not forget Saint John's Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraqua--bear testimony to the violent contradictions of this collaboration./12/

Every human endeavor has its "martyrs." Medieval and Early Renaissance heretical thinkers were burned at the stake, Galileo had to recant and it is but relatively recently that the power systems and education "shifted gear." But capitalism, in order to reach a higher stage of development and level of abstraction, had to modify the relations between society and intellectuals, power and dissent: the result is between modernity. Enlightenment and post-enlightenment capitalism (Protestant and Catholic bourgeois systems) proclaimed the freedom of thought and conscience. The power structures even tolerated within society a sphere of negation, contradiction, protest, dissent, and criticism, especially within the isolated, protected territory of academe. They appeal to idealism and liberal arts as philistine counter-arguments to attain legitimization and justify conquering Western enterprise, to ground the humanitarian concern necessary to the development of the modern individual and consumer into more solid affective soil, and to whitewash the public façade of the power structure's past./13/ Public intellectuals, the University, and even the avant-garde became the only sanctioned forms of contradiction. Although repressive, the different bourgeois systems rarely dared radically to infringe upon these refuges and sinecures, declaring an intellectual curfew only when radically threatened. But all things considered, the privileged, isolated cultivation of liberal arts never really threatened the power systems. At the level of higher education, the sciences, education, the arts, and literature, never offered a radically satisfying and efficient matrix of resistance. It is true that the avant-garde radically positioned itself but, prisoner of its forward position, it could not affect the general public and its artistic discoveries were appropriated by mass advertising.

This disquieting mutual insularity of the world and liberal arts education can be summarized by three instances, corresponding to three different and successive social modes. The first is characterized by George Orwell's provocative remark: "In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane...."/14/ The second is John Berger's statement showing that art, capitalism, and class-based authoritarianism often work hand-in-hand, re-enforcing the working class public's estrangement from high-brow art and museums: "Reproductions are still used to bolster the illusion that nothing has changed..., that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling."/15/ The third, from Leïla Sebbar's novel poignantly illustrates how third-world, second-generation immigrants' post-modern hostility towards Western high-brow culture, knowledge, and intellectuality reflects the marginalization they suffered from that very West. For beurs (young French-Arab citizens), painting and art in general represent the capitalist, racist, and supremacist world of the Occident: "Pour eux, la peinture de musée c'était la culture bourgeoise pourrie, l' Occident décadent, c'était vieux, rassis, mort, ça n'existait pas."/16/,/17/

High-brow culture negates its inherent contradictions through transcendence, by denying the material and economic situation of the human condition. High culture not only conveniently forgets its class-based biases but also wants to pass them off as universals by rendering them classless (perennial, absolute), obeying a methodological transcendence believed to deliver the ontological immanence of the human being. Traditional liberal arts educational systems--however gratifying and seductive--have always been, by definition, elitist and devoted to the interests of the elite. Thus, they ignore the suffering of society's slaves or proletariat, indigenous people's condition as colonized by Europe's mercantile interests, and the specificities of the feminine condition--with a few remarkable exceptions./18/ In fact, many colonial administrators were Oxford, Cambridge, or the Sorbonne educated. Rudyard Kipling, the greatest herald of British imperialism was a "practitioner of liberal arts" and a Nobel Prize winner for literature. His celebration of British imperialism cannot be separated from his writing. There exists a direct (although obfuscated) connection between liberal arts education's and high-brow culture's leading ideas and the way things are (and "are not") in society. Their idealistic underpinnings ignore and negate the social status quo in the same way as what is named "democracy" implies a certain naïvety. It means that its practitioners and believers prefer to leave some things unspoken, some stones unturned, and do as if nobody knew about its dark, hidden side. Here, democracy seems possible only if a consensual, blissful ignorance exists.

Moreover, liberal arts' hidden tendencies are perversely and subconsciously linked to their "totalitarian liquidation." In fact, totalitarianism directly feeds upon the obfuscated negatives and hidden contradictions of high-brow culture, concretizing the buried contradictory logic of Western philosophy and civilization./19/ Superficially, totalitarianism is an outside system, alien and contrary to bourgeois society and civilized behavior. Fundamentally, it is also a "total" response to the bourgeoisie's perceived threat of radical destabilization. Nazism was an antibody generated by capitalism to destroy radical socialism and communism./20/ The postmodern way of controlling people through mass-advertising and consumerism, desire and needs manipulation, market research, industrial psychology and behavior modification, tele-information technologies, the sciences of human relations and communication, and ego-psychology now forms the new totalitarianism. But it does not come out of the clear blue sky--if it does it is because the "blue sky" may symbolically incarnate civilization's alienating force and renouncement through idealism. This is why, in their struggle against bourgeois idealism and repression, the surrealist and Dadaist revolt slices up the moon/eye with a razor in the silent film masterpiece Un Chien Andalou./21/ The new postmodern totalitarianism is the convergent result of positivist and authoritarian trends inherent in Western philosophy and sociology as well as the power system's logical conclusions that production must reign supreme and set everything and everybody under its sway. These new quantitative hierarchies now constitute a never before imagined soft technology of total administration of humanity on a global scale./22/ This state-of-the-art, soft, global, all-encompassing totality--hence totalitarianism--is more efficient, persuasive, and seductive than its older German forms, since it is less physically brutal and obvious. It works through desire's co-optation.

All this means that the liberal arts education's idealism, love of beauty, and truth never constituted the necessary rampart against any type of totalitarianism, philistinism, jingoism, fascist behavior, mercantilism, and the like. Already, in ancient Greece, the good--and even by modern standards educated and sophisticated--all-male Athenian citizens, while supporting the "Good Life" through slavery and women's subjugation, sentenced Socrates to death. General Custer, an arrogant, prejudiced white man par excellence, was educated at West Point, where liberal arts constituted the core of the curriculum. World War I generals were well-versed in literature, educated, privileged, and were famous for their gourmet meals and fine wines; yet they did not hesitate to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers into slaughter with the stroke of a pen./23/ Many a Nazi official enjoyed classical music and The Great Books, and even collected high-brow art with a vengeance. Hitler was an aquarellist and a vegetarian, listened to Beethoven and Wagner, and used to faint at the sight of blood. CEOs, always ready to sell employees and companies, often received a very good liberal arts education./24/ Pol Pot, the butcher of Cambodia, was Sorbonne-educated.

What can a liberal arts education do against what the Congolese writer Bolya denounced: the mass rape of hundreds of thousands of women in the ongoing African civil wars, where the penis and HIV-contaminated sperm are used as the poor man's bacteriological weapon of mass destruction to annihilate the ethnic other?/25/ The list is endless. As Kathie Jenni writes: "contrasting images of ongoing catastrophe with a view of daily academic practice produces an acute sense of inappropriateness--a profound lack of it."/26/ In the very names of idealism, religious orthodoxy, political expediency, or party politics, hundreds of millions of people have been sacrificed throughout history. In fact, as Jean Améry writes, "the word always dies where the claim of some reality is total."/27/ This means that, although necessary, a liberal arts education is not enough; and more seriously, that, perhaps, something in it is its own worst enemy./28/ The whole point is to find out what. Perhaps we are facing here a certain perversity of idealism. Victor Hugo wrote that each time a school opened up, a prison shut down. But let's also not forget that it is partly because of idealism, the cultivation of art and truth for their own sakes, in the rarefied (and often stale) ether of academia for the cogniscenti alone, that things are as they are; that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Idealism conveniently ignores economic limitations because it refuses to acknowledge the material contradictions of its own production; and when something fundamental cannot be acknowledged, it tends to return with a vengeance from the negative side of things./29/ How does one justify liberal arts education's demands on students who have been sacrificed by a mediocre, intellectually-corseting, emotionally cosseting, and basically unchallenging high school system, and now have to work 30 hours a week to pay tuition and come out as "$30,000-in-debt-Bachelors"?

Henry Lee Allen writes that "coming from disadvantaged social origins myself, I find the life of higher education has greatly enriched my being and inoculated me from the most insidious, banal aspects of capitalism."/30/ The idea that a liberal arts education, by inculcating and nurturing the veneration of the canonized ideals and virtues of truth and beauty, automatically imparts in its disciple a sense of distance from the self-interested pragmatism and practicality of the business world conjugated with a certain human goodness, is problematic. Isn't it naïve to assume that liberal arts education's virtues (aka idealism, pursuit of truth, and beauty) make us better and that academia's nurturing of the moral and intellectual reasoning of students (mind's higher powers) will accelerate the termination of injustice, suffering, and exploitation and succeed where religions have failed? Although liberal arts education's high ideas do possess a certain relatively enlightening relevance, depending on the social context of their implementation and enunciation, the opposite could easily be sustained. It is precisely because of something contained in the idealistic "higher learning," that "the selling out," or the "democratic abolition of thought" (to borrow from Herbert Marcuse) so easily came about in America. In and of itself, a liberal arts education is not enough to guarantee freedom and independence of thought, more humane behavior, and the improvement of people's condition. In more ways than one, the message of An Andalusian Dog is still relevant.

The Liberal Arts Education and the Artist: An Analogy

Although the arcane play of dichotomies governing the arts does not quite correspond to the nexus of contradictions encountered in liberal arts and higher education, nevertheless the latter can be better understood if one examines the paradoxes of the artistic process.

The practice and study of the arts and literature is a praxis inscribed in a double-bind type of logic; structured by the tension between, and satisfying to the synergy generated by, two multi-layered poles. The quality of interaction between these two poles commands art's success or failure. They have their paradoxical logics, both fraught with negatives and positives, danger and triumph, conflictive results, and advantages. This quasi-sublime opposition also governs the role of Christian religion in Western society. For a long time, oppositional tactics and strategies (and even philosophies) existed between two approaches, the secular (temporal) and the non-secular (the divine and spiritual), resulting in two types of clergy, priests, and monks, and corresponding to two types of spiritual activities: one of Christian faith engagement in the siècle (century) and the world (secular), and another one of contemplation and divine meditation, of disengagement from society and the world. The Western Christian dilemma (priest as social worker versus spiritual being or exiled mystique) is iconicized by the film Le journal d'un curé de campagne, and exemplified by the unease shown by the Catholic hierarchy towards the 1960s' prêtre-ouvrier (worker-priest) movement and 1970s' liberation theology./31/

The situation of arts and literature at the level of production and creation, and at the level of transmission and education, deals with some of the same paradoxes and contradictions and may be consulted to throw some light on the plight of liberal arts education and academe in postmodernity. There are several analogous features.

Artists need isolation, austerity, and solitude to do significant work. They have to retreat somehow into themselves. They (re-)write the world from their inner solitude and fortitude (Virginia Wolfe's A Room of One's Own) where they explore their invented universe. On the other hand, artists need the public, the solace and appreciation provided by an audience; the critical re-enforcement which means that they are being read, seen, or listened to.

Artists must establish a relative but assured distance between themselves and the world, the mundane, society and politics, because artists cannot function as puppets at the mercy of fads, modes, conflicting currents, and tendencies. They must have a certain independence of mind, even indifference to the world--of course, what is meant here is a radical indifference of the type worked out by Blanchot, Mallarmé, or the pianist Glen Gould, that will give artists access to the "diachronic temporality" in humanity's condition. On the other hand, if their work has to have relevance and avoid sterility and artificiality, it has to be engaged--involved in the great and serious problems affecting their times. The French word "engagement" means that one has a physical effect on the material and emotional world (in French, a gear, a clutch, or cogs are engagés or libres--in gear or free-wheeling). For instance, literature must have and always has had, in spite of itself somehow, a certain social dimension, even though art is often created by asocial beings: humans who refuse to have or have freed themselves from any duties, missions, boundaries, belongingness, or faithfulness, who have acute problems, and who are often anti-social. It is the price they pay to have a-temporal relevance and not periodic signification only. An artist must somehow be in exile from society, from the others, and often from him or herself.

As a correlative to the first two paradoxes, the piece of art must express and convey a tragic dimension (perennial, eternal, etc.) of metaphysical and spiritual import. On the other hand, it must be entertaining and attractive, which may divert the piece of art from the tragic dimension. This is the whole problematic, well-explained by Pascal's notion of divertissement (entertainment--"the spectacle" in postmodern times), which is the enemy of the spiritual and the divine. To divertir (entertain oneself and divert oneself from) is also to divert from metaphysical, philosophical, or spiritual importance. The artist must also make "attractive" the repulsive, the horrible, by seizing the audience's attention and not letting go. It is only by "grabbing" readers' attentions that artists can claim to change their intentions. This "grabbing" constitutes a fundamental part of the "entertainment" factor. If art works are too commanded by the entertainment factor, they submit to the diktats of commercialism and then exit the domain of art--as do so many Hollywood movies.

Artists' work must be possessed by a certain esotericism (hermeticism). Its message and formal dimension must be closed somehow. But if it's too closed and personal, it veers into solipsism and pure subjectivity and falls into incommunicability (the reproach made to the symbolists, the formalists, and the avant-garde). On the other hand, it must be open and accessible enough for communication, enjoyment, appreciation, and comprehensibility. It must be open enough to allow communication to flow (to be read by the largest possible audience). It must believe in what Abraham Lincoln once said: "I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them real facts." Although the "reality of fact" that the artist brings to the people is often not the same as the politician's, nevertheless the principle is the same. If it's too open, it will degenerate into faddishness, facility, artistic irrelevance, or kitsch (although kitsch may have a certain political dimension--depending how it is presented--a situationist move).

Artists must express moral indignation against humanity's inhumanity, exploitation, and oppression in order to mass-educate. They must indict. Remember Zola's famous J'accuse! The best writers of the 19th century considered it an honor to be read by popular audiences and participate in their intellectual emancipation. Zola gave permission to socialist newspapers to publish Germinal free of charge. The artist may use brutal realism, even a calculated dose of sadism, to force people to reflect on their lives and destinies or on those of women, workers, and peasants. Francophone, neo-colonial, third world, or feminist writers often use literature or cinema (the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, for instance) as a direct medium to educate, liberate, instruct, motivate people to change, free themselves, and improve their social conditions. Others, more pessimistic, realistic, or puritanical, prefer to indict humans' self-indulgence, mediocrity, complacency, or hypocrisy, rather than glorify daily fights and heroic stands. Take for instance, gnomic and moralist writers such as La Bruyère and La Fontaine, and artists such as Bosch, Breughel, and Goya. On the other hand, one cannot make good art with good intentions and moral indignation alone. Marshall McLuhan once wrote that moral indignation is the standard strategy that any idiot takes on in order to gain dignity.

Artists often militate for the betterment of the world and its reformation through personal vision, believing that they are endowed with a fundamental ethical or noetic function./32/ On the other hand, the artists do not necessarily militate directly for a better world and are often not convinced of the need to communicate their opinions. Very often, the artists explode the foundations and certitudes of society. They are the agents of chaos or radical liberation (to liberate "reality" from what alienates or condemns it), giving utterance to despair or pronouncing radical atonement./33/ Like "nosy Alice," the artists are the only individuals able to see how far down the rabbit hole goes. Writing or creating is then an act of radical accusation directed against the whole world and even against God. The artists may be the ones who widen and deepen the wound--the lonely man who avenges himself on society like Philip Roth's protagonist in The Human Stain, where he is a university professor, who, a victim of the madness of the world, decides to withdraw from it./34/ The writer may be the free radical of total liberty.

But many artists' works partake in all these tendencies at once. Others, although having cultivated some, still have relevance years after their authorial production. Harriet Beecher-Stowe, not considered a great writer (except by Tolstoy), wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin as a socio-political pamphlet to condemn slavery as an institution. Taking into account the public, she succeeded letting average readers see through a slave's eyes in order to sensitize them to slavery's horrors. Lincoln even declared that without her novel, the Civil War would not have occurred. Also, Solzhenitsyn's One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was first and foremost written as a direct political work by bringing his readers into identification with the goulags'zeks (prisoners). Khruschev even said: "This man gave a true image of Stalinist society." Without his work, Stalinism would have, perhaps, lasted longer. Picasso's Guernica is another example of directly engaged art, where the viewer is grabbed, captivated, entertained, and consequently impressed and moved to conclusions and intention modification. But was it followed by radical behavior modification on a large scale? Of course not. A great writer, or a writer that wants to gain contact, communication, and have influence on an audience, must know how to entertain it (as did Tolstoy, Gogol, Zola, etc.).

Several factors totally change the picture of today: (a) the way hyper- or virtual reality displaces reality (any reality and referent); (b) the way mass media, TV, and the audio-visual dimension changed all parameters (akin to Gütenberg's reproduction revolution); (c) the commodifying of all sectors of human activity; (d) the cosmic speed of radical high-tech development that is changing the very definition of what it means to be human.

The Task of Liberal Arts Education

The challenge offered by post-modernism is that it sublates, sublimates, displaces, or annihilates any traditional referential/references. Literature (painting, etc.) cannot coincide with itself any longer, which causes it not to believe in itself. Art does not believe any longer in its otherness (although it tries to occupy the place of otherness), and it cannot coincide with itself. It does not believe in itself any longer since the traditional values, roles, and ontology that used to ground art and literature, qua literature and art, have disappeared. This is why the dimension of contemporary literature, which still occupies a social function, often does not realize that postmodernism has turned many aspect of this social reality into a fiction, a simulation. This is also why "academic integrationists...who integrate direct social service with the indirect service academic professions provide" see their action limited in time and scope./35/

Although the alleviation of human suffering certainly constitutes a very important part of higher education's mission, the point is not so much to respond to global suffering, case after case, as to try to make global, social and political suffering impossible./36/ Although radically engaged, true intellectuals cannot become priests, social workers, psychologists, or political activists because they have to set aside time to read (and read, and read...), think (and think, and think...), keep informed, keep on the critical edge, and analyze (and analyze, analyze...), and write and communicate, while, all the time, staying actively, emotionally, and physically connected to the very (human) reasons that motivate their searches. The problem is that post-modernity has liquidated the universal and the macro-sphere, and replaced it with the particular and the micro. Also, academics are too busy with interpreting texts according to their own neo-tribal, peculiar, individualistic preferences, tastes, ways of understanding, and enjoying--as if we were all in it alone, or in small atomized groups! The dichotomous divisions of action from theory and life-world from academia are, in fact, products of the mind/body, manual labor/intellectual labor divisions of bourgeois society. The Communist party, well aware of this, tried to circumvent the problem by fusing action and theory into a new concept functionally supposed to "dialecticize" the dichotomy and avoid its divisionary and exclusionary pitfalls: praxis. Perhaps Higher Education should become a praxis of some sort while avoiding the pitfalls that forced the Communist Party into extinction.

Keats showed us that moaning is another way of meaning. What many conservative defenders of liberal arts education really want to deplore, but cannot overtly declare (another example of the American professoriate's impotence and timorousness), is that higher education is not anti-capitalist. They want the liberal arts to be "anti-capitalist" in appearance only. Hence, they refuse to give students the very tools and philosophy whose transmission would turn liberal arts education into an intelligent and responsible war-machine against the evils of capitalism. Academia is "selling out" to capital.

Marx wrote that the extreme robotizing of production necessitated by global capital, together with the setting of surplus value as the condition sine qua non of all that is necessary and desired (desirable), and the ultra-disciplining of the producer and consumer requires the univocal valorization of the positive accumulated knowledge of society and human potentiality: practicality and practice, utilitarianism, experimental sciences, material creativity, axiometrics, behavioral sciences, "computer literacy," and symbolic systems, sciences of experimentation and control, calculability and reckoning systems, self-objectifying knowledge, i.e., "organizational man."/37/

Academia has no credible, intellectual, theoretical, or critical mass to persuade academics to counteract with successful energy the push of capital into academe. The study, in the seclusion of the ivy-covered Ivory Tower, of the most iconoclastic, radical, anarchistic, and anti-bourgeois forms that liberal arts education can offer (of its literary and artistic works at their most progressive) is, of course, not enough to thwart the energy of global capital that has been unleashed by the postmodern condition, which aims at commodifying everything and everybody, at superseding space through time./38/ What the traditional liberal arts faculty wants is the impossible, viz., to ask a bourgeois culture and philosophy (i.e., high-brow culture and liberal arts education as product of Western capitalism) to be anti-bourgeois, anti-pragmatic, and anti-commercial. The outside world is within us and within academia, like it or not. It is liberal arts' educators and not businessmen or women who taught students to respect indifference under the guise of tolerance; to adulate power under the pretext of respecting authority; to adhere to middle-of-the-road solutions and opinions under the guise of fair play, restraint, and safety; to believe in professional immunity under the guise of professionalism; to practice conformism under the pretext of belongingness and group psychology. Business courses can only thrive in the trail blazed by the liberal arts. Management curriculum and behavioral models developed cynicism, competition, and individualism. The blind cult of technological prowess and progress nurtured technology's depersonalization. But all this would not have been possible if educators and liberal arts curricula had adopted the lessons and tools forged by critical reason, if, as intellectuals, they had kept alive their mastery over the power of words, symbols and images, the true power of the intellectual.

Most higher education courses only deal with the Great Books while dishing out meager portions of Marx, Freud, Einstein, or post-structuralism. Practically nothing relevant is said (or only in the margins) about the non-Western experience or the late 20th century major, radical new ways of treating a text--of critically expanding one's reasoning and analytical powers. To students conditioned by mass-advertising, MTV, ready-made images, Internet/Web communication, and fast thinking--academia, instead of teaching students key critical ways of distancing themselves from the screen and the me/assages of the medium, dishes out The Banquet's leftovers: old slices of Aristotle; a regimen of smoked Christian thinkers--without Bacon; an unsavory diet of British pragmatism and utilitarianism; cold cut dishes of white meats and bourgeois idealism; the insipid vegetarianism of environmental feminism; no "wet bourgeoisie;"/39/ no hearty German philosophy; very little structural anthropology (no cannibals, no table manners); and very little critical sociology. Ideas are prepared à la Wellington. The plats de résistance are served chasseur style, or à la hussarde. The heavy, complex, but mind-enhancing sauces of Marxism and neo-Marxist theories are totally ignored. All that is spicy, powerful, raw, cooked, foreign, baroque, queer, wild, "sexy," and "gamy" is swept under the faded red tablecloth, which, of course, becomes a ready-made carpet for corporate interests. The trim, light, flambé, eccentric but mind- and taste-blowing Nouvelle Cuisine of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Althüsser, Kristeva, Barthes, etc., not to mention the heavily spiced non-Western literatures, are on the last page of the menu, à la carte--or gone with the chef. There are no copious libations at the academic table of liberal arts--just a demitasse of liberation. The Banquet has become a sad and stern party.

In 2003, in U.S. academia, continental cuisine is, for the most part, out. Excellent imported vintages are rare (or reserved for elite gourmet and connoisseur consumption in the Ivy League's mental eateries), and so are foreign or independent images./40/ Of course, fast food, utilitarianism and "psychic pop" are in: behaviorism, analytical philosophy, professional ethics, management, political correctness, cultural roots, individual self-enhancement, and "feel-good" courses. Literacy has displaced literature, competency testing and standardized tests analytical papers, capitalist materialism historical materialism, symbolic systems (logic, mathematics and music theory) foreign languages.

Why all this? Because the reactionary, conservative, static and "quietist" lobby within, and bent of, liberal arts education straight-jacketed and straight-laced the curriculum (even the version the political right calls "liberal"). Let us take one example. The "old male and female guard" in the English department of the University of Missouri-Columbia united forces to "torpedo" a young, very smart, poststructuralist and post-modernist female Chair a few years ago. She was going to propel the department into a brilliant future and onto a higher intellectual plane of international repute and relevance--which would have radically impacted the socio-political structures of the university. The forces of reaction and conservatism, by sheer number and dead weight, imposed their status quo. This reflects liberal arts education's paradoxical respect for society's status quo. In academia, too often, inertia wins over energy: energy is only spent to keep things as they are. As good old Henry Miller once wrote, more obscene than anything is the law of inertia.

It is up to us as educators to devise the means to nurture the psychological, spiritual, intellectual structures, and the critical-material mindset, that will allow students to make a difference, if not the "total difference," in a world of progressively increasing materialism, consumerism, and technological abstraction. The '60s French existentialists, who opposed the alienated social reality and the disengagement from politics created by the culture of bourgeois idealism, invented a combative expression to fight hypocrisy, irresponsibility, and injustice: l'Engagement./41/ Let's inspire ourselves with it. We have to re-invent a pedagogy of engaged scholarship, learning and teaching that will:

In a civilization radically revamped by triumphant mercantile values, academia must learn how to re-invent a culture and a new idealism. This is the true task of a liberal arts education in our time. That culture and idealism must be realizable by every individual and accompanied by a transformation of the state of fact. It must be based on a renewed, ethical historically-material basis, on critical and radical textual paradigms. It must incorporate a reactivated and re-energized utopianism, and it must inculcate an effective responsibility to human suffering.

The new liberal arts education has to tap poetic inventiveness and surreal creativity, and not only hyper-reality, by taking advantage of the fact that high-tech allows humans to be set free from serving and working (servitude and service) in order to think, create, know, experiment, play, be, etc./43/ Contemporary education should be the study and spring-board of a new civilization that would free humans from being forced into a semi-slave existence of high taxes and crippling debts, long hours of labor, rampant depression, and conflicting religious beliefs reduced to superstitions. It should herald hope for a more humane world, "one in which poets might have as powerful a voice as bankers."/44/ What academia needs is not a surplus of "positivity" or positivism, but an influx of negativity. Because: Something is [always] rotten in the state of Denmark.

Notes

  1. Views well illustrated by John Snider (English, MSU-Northern): "Conformity of Thought" (The Missoulian, 17 November 2002) and "Education is a Quest for Truth, not Money" (Kaimin, 22 November 2002).[Back]

  2. A view well summarized by Henry Lee Allen (Assoc. Prof, Sociology, Wheaton College): "The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: American Higher Education in the 21st Century," Thought & Action 18.1&2 (Fall 2002).[Back]

  3. Concept used in its full extension (as defined by Michel Foucault, for instance).[Back]

  4. Shakespeare's Hamlet.[Back]

  5. The Intellectual Betrayal (1927), The Watchdogs (1965), and The Scribe (1992).[Back]

  6. For instance, when the good conscience and the guilt feelings they "manufacture" are phased out for no longer being "in tune" with the new power-systems' contradictions.[Back]

  7. What we would now call "crimes against humanity."[Back]

  8. When approached about "doing something" for the temporary faculty members whose contracts had been terminated, one of the arguments invoked by The University of Montana Teachers Union's past President was to protest vehemently that "he did not want to go to jail."[Back]

  9. From Kathie Jenni's seminal article: "The Moral Responsibilities of Intellectuals," Social Theory and Practice 27.3 (July 2001): 449-450.[Back]

  10. Canonical and idealistic.[Back]

  11. In more ways than one.[Back]

  12. I thank Professor Hayden Ausland from the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Montana for his valuable knowledge in modern institutional Latin iconography.[Back]

  13. Obliteration of the traumatic past of history by the ruling ideology of the New Age's "End of History" attitude.[Back]

  14. 1984 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 174.[Back]

  15. Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 29.[Back]

  16. Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée les yeux verts (Paris: Stock, 1982), 238.[Back]

  17. I must thank Bethany O'Connell (UM Graduate Student, French) for having brought this passage to my attention. ("For them, museums and their paintings meant rotten middle-class culture, Western decadence; it was all old, stale, dead; it did not exist.")[Back]

  18. Montaigne, Las Casas, Rousseau, Tolstoy, etc.[Back]

  19. Well exemplified by Visconti's movie The Damned (1969).[Back]

  20. National Socialism as bourgeois totalitarianism against socialist internationalism and against soviet totalitarianism.[Back]

  21. Buñuel/Dali, An Andalusian Dog (1928).[Back]

  22. Cf. George Ritzer's MacDonaldization of Society.[Back]

  23. Stanley Kubrick's excellent movie Paths of Glory (1960).[Back]

  24. "Many students enter college with materialistic goals that never change, even with exposure to the best of humanistic thinking." Kathie Jenni, "The Moral Responsibilities of Intellectuals," Social Theory and Practice 27.3 (July 2001): 444.[Back]

  25. Afrique, le maillon faible. Serpent à plumes. Paris, 2002.[Back]

  26. Jenni, 445.[Back]

  27. At The Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 20. Quoted in the excellent essay by Kathie Jenni [note 24], 439.[Back]

  28. Condition nécessaire mais non suffisante.[Back]

  29. Cf. with Artaud.[Back]

  30. Henry Lee Allen, [note 2], 91.[Back]

  31. Robert Bresson, 1951 (from a George Bernanos' novel).[Back]

  32. The writers of French Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, etc.), post-romanticism (Victor Hugo, etc.), and "bourgeois naturalism" (Zola, etc.).[Back]

  33. Cf. with l'artiste maudit 'the accursed artist' of de Sade, Byron, Baudelaire, Borges, Genêt, Beckett, etc.[Back]

  34. Perhaps akin, here, to John Snider's position [note 1].[Back]

  35. Kathie Jenni [note 24].[Back]

  36. Cf. K. Marx's desire to change the world instead of just explaining it.[Back]

  37. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen ökonomie (Berlin, 1953), 593.[Back]

  38. Jean-François Lyotard.[Back]

  39. As the French mystic and writer Charles Péguy once wrote "grace does not make the bourgeoisie wet" (les gens bien ne mouillent pas à la grâce).[Back]

  40. In spite of what Mario Vargas Llosa is saying.[Back]

  41. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme.[Back]

  42. Cf. with the study just released by scientists at Duke University, stating that life is too hard. See Ian Frazier's "Researchers Say," The New Yorker, 9 December 2002, 80-81.[Back]

  43. The "Pope of Surrealism," André Breton, said that "Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be."[Back]

  44. From President Vaclav Havel's speech given at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, on his last official trip to the USA as President of the Czech Republic.[Back]

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