Ana Hatherly, As Ruas de Lisboa, 1977
I think we’ve all had enough, over the recent years, of talking about, brooding about, complaining about the critical situation and the ailment of the Humanities today! Indeed we all, teachers, students, researchers, have been suffering from it, lived through it, some have succumbed and therefore quitted the profession or even worse, given up the dream to have one, while others have kept on struggling with whatever left stamina and resilient spirit we had deepest in ourselves.
However, I think it’s time to put an end to this inhibiting and self-destructive cycle, and start talking about, or at least envisaging, the “Humanities tomorrow”, which is to say, a new cycle, towards the future of the Humanities! This involves getting out of the grey cloud, the “cul de sac” where it seems we have been irremediably trapped, for too long the hostages of a rhetoric of self-depreciation, low self-esteem and a sense of lack of purpose and social usefulness, ie, credibility. Asserting the need to look beyond the crisis, rather than through the crisis which, like a giant medusa has been asphyxiating our creativity, our self-reliance and our collective sense of belonging, leaving us numb and passive, and thus an easy prey of a defeatist rhetoric, is the urgent means to our survival.
And, notwithstanding, the Humanities are empowering, precisely because they live in a permanent crisis, but that knowledge, that awareness, cannot, should not prevent us from looking ahead and reclaiming our say in society, in culture, in politics, as citizens.
Recently, for the purpose of my academic work, I was rereading a text by a reputed scholar and literary critic famous in the 1980s (which sounds almost like another age, but which truly marked the beginning of much radical critical scholarship and a major turning point in the fields and disciplines that constitute the ‘almost canonical’ or at least largely accepted territory of the Humanities today, such as, cultural studies, race studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, performance studies), without which academic work today is truly unthinkable and inhabitable. And yet, these fields and disciplined were launched at the out start of the 1980s, through much polemics, struggling and a lot of personal devotion and collective commitment.
Jonathan Culler, the critic I was referring to above, defended this view in a text entitled “The Humanities tomorrow”, a chapter in a book tellingly named Framing the Sign. Criticism and its institutions (1988). Here he claims:
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“Talk of the future tempts speakers to produce apocalyptic visions, crisis narratives, in which their fears or dissatisfactions about aspects of present practice can be imaginatively dramatized as tales of disaster, but it nevertheless has its uses. It compels us to imagine the consequences of our actions and in particular to postulate how our thinking, teaching and writing might work itself out in institutions” (p. 41) (…)
“Questions about the future of the Humanities are increasingly questions about how the concerns and activities of those who teach and write about these materials will function in institutional contexts and what effect they may have” (p.41).
Hence, as Culler suggests, a reflection on the future of the Humanities, or the Humanities tomorrow, that is, our vision projected beyond the tangible constrains and the stifling inertia that a continuous discourse on the “crisis” necessarily produces, inhibiting or at worse censoring any kind of possible future or a scenery “out of the crisis”, makes one positively anticipate how much the Humanities have adjusted already, how resilient they are, through the kind of response to the crisis itself, embodied in the creation of new or expanded territories of scholarship and cultural practice (as some named above), in the face of the challenges of the world today. Moreover, as Jonathan Culler reminds us, the future of the Humanities is largely signified by this concrete engagement with a fast changing reality, through a practice that evidences “how the university structures are affecting and are affected by intellectual activity” (p.42).
In sum, one could say (and truly hope for!) that the crisis in the Humanities can only bring about the empowerment of the Humanities as a field of knowledge, research and communal practice, ideally restored to a central role within society, which does not mean adjusted to their former role in the past, but critically and prospectively envisaged as agents and coadjutants of social transformation.
Ana Gabriela Macedo, CEHUM/UMinho, Abril 2015
filling the GAPS 