Humanities Retooled: A Manifesto of Sorts By Frederick Luis Aldama

I

"Humanities Retooled" aims to provide a forum to advance our critical thinking about literature, music, film, art, and other cultural phenomena.  Since the time of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors we have evolved both as biological and social beings.  We have evolved by simultaneously  reproducing biologically and producing culturally ourselves.  We have not only evolved a "higher minded" self (as a result of our ability to exist holographically in a past, present, and future as well as our universal capacity for grammar and empathy or Theory of Mind, for example) and along with this we have refined our senses and physical ability that in turn allow us to continually refine, revise, and create anew works of art and a capacity to enjoy them.  Rather then turn to esoteric and speculative analytical rubrics, "Humanities Retooled" turns to those tools provided by the many disciplines--history, literature, economics, cognitive science, to name a few--that will be most useful and reasoned in pouring a solid foundation for building a knowledge of the many cultural forms we create and engage with today.

Why "Retooled"? Since French poststructuralism--and a brand of British cultural studies--made the trans-Atlantic swim in the late 1960s, humanistic investigations have become inflated with much obscurantism and mysticism.  The self and world are textual constructs and the destabilizing master narratives becomes a resistance to a power that is everywhere.  Derrida's "différance", Foucault's "power/knowledge", and Lacan's "the name of the father" and "the Phallus" as well as Baudrillard's claim that everything is simulacra devoid of any reference to the real, these maîtres-à-penser (or more appropriately, "opinion makers") and there ideas have transmigrated and become visible in today's buzz-concepts like "resistant peformativity", "counternation", "alternative citizenship", "symbolic reterritorializing", "discursive political praxis", "mimicry", "radical hybridity", "sly civility", "politics of asavagism", fill out the pages of scholarly inquiry.  One way or another, such formulations propose the transformation of matter into spirit--the transmutation of basely material realities into Logos (or Pneuma, or Word, or Text, or Discourse) with no material author and no discernible origin.  It Speaks ("Ça Parle"); or, as in the New Testament, "In the beginning was the Word".  And, with a strong inflection of piety and rectitude, such proclamations become god-like:  Xenophanes explains to Pascal, "God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere". 

"Retooled" because the field of the humanities appears to have filled up with ahistorical and amaterial Nietzschean-like wonderisms.  Nietzche preferred a style of writing (the aphorism) to express his desire to "live dangerously" in the world--sans the requisite "real" encounter with peril and/or a "real" accounting of the history of social transformation--and advance a "solution for all the riddles of the world" as "the will to power--and nothing besides!".  "Retooled" because of the need to move away from the erstwhile free-for-all construction and consumption of notions like  "truth" as "something that must be created" (cf. Nietzche) and/or the study of our world as "eternal recurrence" (cf. Nietzche).. "Retooled" because all such esoteric formulations (and this also includes the syllogistic method of New Criticism, for example) are based on grounds that are not necessary for an understanding and explanation of cultural phenomena such as literature, music, art, and film as a "theodicy of the text" or a "negative or apophatic theology"  

"Humanities Retooled" is a forum for untangling what has become an arm-chair political praxis.  That is while it is a forum for testing, refashioning, discarding tools to understand better the cultural phenomena that make up our world, in its questioning of a de facto relationship between politics (union and worker protest organization en masse) and, say, the study of literature or film, it also aims to articulate how capitalism and the nation "really" function .  This is not the decoding of cultural phenomena as a way to destabilize and intervene into global capitalist hegemonies; such formulations while fashionable in the humanities have not curtailed our speedy spiral towards absolute barbarism.  This spiraling backwards is not to medieval times of cathedrals, Gregorian chants, troubadourian poems, Arthurian narratives, or “juglaría” and “clerecía” poetry, but to the post-modernity of a new (Nietzschean-Heideggerian-Derridean-Foucaultian) doxa, to the negative theology of a new Dark Ages in synchrony with a globalized world ruled by American capital, and to a new “dark night of the soul” (Saint John of The Cross) where all hope of a revolutionary suppression of exploitation and oppression is supposed to have disappeared.

Que sais-je?, Montaigne asks. Not all our ideas about the world are fictions.  Indeed, it is because of our building of and revising verifiable facts, as established by the methodological and experimental exigencies of the likes of Bacon, Copernicus, and Newton, and that has continued up to now, that we can understand better the earth's history, the evolution of life, and that today's capitalist system based on profit (surplus-value) resides in the use of labor-power by the private owners of the means of production.  Indeed, rather then shun reasoned method, it is to be embraced if we are to continue this long and difficult process to develop true knowledge of the world we inhabit and co-create.  This is especially so given today's skyrocketing unemployment and homelessness rates, delirious dissipation of basic civil rights, and gaping genocidal wounds worldwide, more then ever we must turn from the all-pervasive onto-theology that has proclaimed an end of history, social class struggle, and the end of the nation-state.  We must more then ever know the difference between ideas and the "material force" (cf. Marx) required to advance and maintain basic civil rights (access to education, representation, health care, transportation, and communication) for all.

II

"Humanities Retooled" grows out of a sense of being born too late.  That’s the fate all members of my generation working in these so-called "postmodern" times when others tell us that we have arrived into a world that is dead: at the end of history, end of art, of ideology, of science, of the whole Western metaphysical thought and philosophy, of the end of social classes and class-warfare, of social reality even.  So we are now all posthumous witnesses of the universal demise of all those hardworking, faithful, time-honored and much regretted concepts of truth, good, and beauty, and of all other concepts and categories such time, space, substance, quantity, quality, relation, position, possession, action, and passion, as identified first in Aristotle's Organon.

Yes, to lack divine status and to be born in 1969 meant being born with an insurmountable deficit and tardiness.  By 1967 Derrida had already set down the prolegomena to all future post-onto-theological thought and action; Foucault had established the socio-psychological mechanisms involved in all forms of (bio)power and self-government; Lacan (already pushing seventy by then) had identified all the ingredients that create, shape and determine the human mind, more generally the self, and even more generally society as such.

However, to be born late did not mean that there weren't other possible venues for understanding the world.  Faulkner, Joyce, Flaubert, Rabelais, Diderot, Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Dos Passos, Rushdie, Kawabata, Ishiguro, Islas, García Márquez, Goytisolo, Wright, Gunter Grass, Fernando del Paso, Rulfo, Castillo, Kureishi, Roth, to name only a few authors, as well as Georg Lukacs (especially his "Assault on Reason" and other of polemics against modern-day obscurantism but not his more Stalinist subservient "History and Class Consciousness" nor his bourgeois idealist "Ontology"), Lenin (his criticizing of fanciful and speculative thought devoid of any practical connection with the real world and that reified the worker's consciousness), and Marx because of their solid re-establishment of the category "realism" as an extremely organized and elaborated form of reality out there.  Darwin, Russell, Peirce, Dewey, and Chomsky because other their respecte for evidence and their massive expansion of what we know about our world. of Added to this was the work of such disparate scholars of literature as Gerard Genette and Barbara Christian:  Genette provided the initial tools for understanding how literary texts are organized and how they engage the reader (narratology, rhetoric, stylistics).  And Christian's resistance to participate in the "race for theory" and instead promote the pleasures (and pains) of reading literature its power to open our eyes to new ways of seeing the world. 

"Humanities Retooled" continues to explore by looking to other disciplines in an attempt to answer and/or refute questions and hypotheses: 

•What is music?  What is film?  What is literature?  What can these different cultural phenomena actually do in the world?  Certainly, history, sociology, politics, economics etc. inflect the novel, but does this mean that novels are stand-ins for history?  Likewise, is literature produced by the people that make up the nation, or is it produced by individual author? 

•What is the nation?  Is the nation a discursively produced space?  Do novels, essays, do not have the same ontological status and power to alter the world out there as the constitutions, legislations, decrees, treatises, political documents? they do not have the same power to define nation as the political institutions (executive, legislative, and judicial powers, political parties, trade unions, and etc.); moreover, novels, essays, etc. even today (not to mention 17th and 18th century) are read by few in comparison to the vast majority of people (many illiterate) that have made and maintained nations for centuries.

•What is the subject?  What is democracy?  What is resistance and what is power?  The war on the Iraqi people is not Bush's war: it's the war of the American capitalist class in toto, with its two political parties (Republican and Democratic), against the working population of the United States AND the working population of the rest of the world, most patently in progress today in Iraq and all the Middle East, but also here with the attacks against Medicare, etc., plus the policy of systematically suppressing our civil rights and our freedom of expression. For these and other reasons I believe the workers in the US (all of them, legally or illegally residing in the country) need their own independent party, most likely, in my opinion, a union-based labor party.

•What is this rather massive and amorphous thing called culture?  Is it the meaning generated in and around certain objects--art, music, food, fashion, language, literacy education, for example--that allow people to collectively determine group identity and collectively define group experience?  Are novels and essays--only one element of this vast sphere of cultural phenomena produced by our species--equivalent to the making of nation, or is it simply a means through which we infuse meaning into their everyday social existence?  Literature--novels, essays, and etc.--is a part of culture and as such is a way to make meaning out of reality, but it is not necessary in the same way that language is necessary for organizing (trade unions etc.) or that eating/drinking and shelter are necessary for our survival.  Can theories that based on a fundamental misconception of cultural production, language, and reality "really" offer forms of social critique and resistance?  Can cultural phenomena--from genre bending musicscapes, graffiti, tattooed/pierced bodies, performance art, to football--or literary texts that resist "mastery" really work as sites of resistance and as modes of political intervention?  Can the individual--or subcultural group--present localized forms of cultural production and knowledge that can really rewrite the nation? 

•What is the role of the humanities in the university?  This is also a very complex problem that many have been trying to tackle for some time now.  The university is not just a "center of ideology".  If we consider that ideologies are false, unfounded, deceiving, concealing, obstructing of class-action and protecting of the status quo's ideas, we can safely say that universities in this country and elsewhere are all "producers and reproducers" of ideologies and ideologues.  They all accomplish that role in all of the so-called "humanities" and "social-sciences" departments, for example.  Most of what passes today for "science" in economics, sociology, history, ethnology, psychology, psycho- and socio-linguistics, cultural and literary studies, is sheer ideology in this sense.  There no science in those "disciplines" (or very little, most of it "imported" from scientific studies and disfigured and even thoroughly adulterated in the process).  

In beginning to answer and explore such questions, the scholarly work presented at "Humanities Retooled" seeks to reestablish fact in the study of the sociobioligcal basis of the self and our making and engaging with culture; here reason and method supplant the relativist, constructivist, and/or esoteric mystifications when it comes to research in literature, musicology, art, film,  history, sociology, economics, and politics.  Humanities Retooled sidesteps flatus voci and pseudoJoycean wordplay and instead provides a scholarly space committed to clarifying the correspondence between our assertions and reality.