My post on the Mellon Foundation’s announcement that it would orient all its future funding decisions toward projects that advance social justice generated a conversation on Facebook. You can read the give-and-take by going to my FaceBook page.
Here I want to make my position clear (which is hard because I have mixed feelings on the topic)—and elaborate on my rationale for those feelings.
Let me state my opinion at the outset—and then the rest of the post tries to explain that opinion. Mellon has been the biggest foundation funder (by orders of magnitude) of work in the arts and humanities for many years now. It was especially important because it funded institutions—museums, theaters, dance companies, learned societies, universities, small presses and the like—as well as individuals. And (this is my big point) is was one of very few places where people in the arts and humanities did not have to justify their work by reasons external to the work itself. You certainly had to convince Mellon that the work you were doing was of excellent quality and make a case that it was deemed significant and superb in the relevant field, but you didn’t have to claim external benefits.
Why is that important? Because the arts and humanities cannot exist in a market society unsubsidized. The major source of subsidy is the educational system, from kindergarten through to universities. 95% (to pick a plausible number out of thin air) of artists and humanists will make the majority of their income from teaching. And that means the arts and humanities are continually burdened with making the case that they are pedagogically useful. The insistence that that case be made—accompanied by an increasing skepticism about that case—is familiar to anyone who works in these fields. So Jessica Berman is absolutely right that we need to be adept at making that case since we will be called on—repeatedly—to make it.
But that need to make the case means the arts and humanities are continually and increasingly on the defensive, trapped within a game they cannot win but must play. Thus the endless shouting into the wind about the benefits of a liberal arts education. I am not saying those arguments are untrue. I am simply saying they never convince the people who demand that we make those arguments even though they have closed their minds to them long ago. It’s a pointless, frustrating, undermining game. What a relief it was to not have to play it to secure support from Mellon.
Now let me tell you a true story. I taught in the Humanities Department of the Eastman School of Music for eight year. My students were all aspiring musicians. Because I am deeply committed to the notion of an informed citizenry, my classes there were usually designed to give students an understanding of the state of these United States. At the end of one semester, a promising young pianist came to tell me he was going to abandon music because the world was in too bad a shape for him to continue in good conscience. I hope that you would in a similar circumstance be as horrified as I was.
That was not what I meant at all, I hastened to tell him. I want you to be an informed democratic citizen, but I never intended to make you think you should give up trying to become a concert pianist. You have an enormous talent and the world needs great pianists. Your first responsibility to yourself and to the world is the nurturing of your talent.
Here comes the hard part. I don’t think Beethoven and golf are significantly different as human endeavors. Both are difficult, intricate, capable of being endlessly fascinating. To become a master of either you need to be obsessed to the point of being a bit crazy, certainly to the point of neglecting much else that most of us think part and parcel of a well-rounded life. Both deliver something to the practitioner (discipline, interest, satisfaction/frustration) and to those who enjoy watching/listening to adept practitioners (fandom, pleasure, the joy of watching something very difficult being done superbly well). I don’t really see (despite the somersaults we go through—and it is always somersaults if Adorno is our guide) that claims about why Beethoven should be in the school curriculum but not golf hold water. If it’s complexity and mental agility and an ability to pay close attention that we are after, golf could do the trick just as well.
This last point is driven home (admittedly to my despair) by the fact that sports are a much larger presence in our schools than the arts and humanities. Certainly in terms of money spent, sports (at least from ninth grade on) garner much larger budgets. And when (as is seldom the case, but not never) sports have to justify their presence in the curriculum, they offer reasons that echo the ones trotted out to justify the liberal arts. Reasons about mental discipline, learning to work with others etc. (Side note: isn’t it wonderful that Stanford has dropped eleven sports instead of cutting the music department? Let’s hope other universities follow their lead.)
What about social justice? I hate to think of the somersaults that are going to be required to demonstrate that work on Beethoven will contribute to social justice. (As I said in my first post, I predict the route taken will be to make Beethoven more available to audiences traditionally unexposed to him.) Some authors (Dickens, Carolyn Forché) are going to be much easier to link to a social justice agenda than others (Nabokov, Jorie Graham).
Even with the more obviously politically relevant authors, I think the rationale is often a subterfuge. I think of all the work in the past thirty years about Melville’s relationship to slavery. Solid work—but driven, I think, primarily by an interest in Melville not by an interest in slavery. Melville was not an important figure in abolitionist circles; if you are really interested in the history of slavery in the US, of attitudes toward it, and its practices, Melville is way down the list of places you would go. He only acquired any significance long after slavery was abolished, and our investment in him now is disciplinary (having to do with the canon) and aesthetic (in the sense that we think him a superb novelist). Yes, we want to know about his reactions to slavery—but not because they tell us all that much about slavery and abolition efforts, but because they tell us about Melville who we think is significant enough as an artist that knowing more about him is worthwhile. What drives the scholarship is not the advancement of social justice, but the advancement of our knowledge of Melville.
I know I am going to be misunderstood on this point. So let me state it in different words. Literary studies bestows authority on certain figures; it has a canon. Efforts to break open that canon—and to examine the processes that go into its formation—are (I think) directly political. But such efforts have been modestly successful. The undergraduate curriculum, even for majors, remains mostly canonical. And scholarship, while certainly more historicist over the past forty years, still tends to be anchored by one or two “major” figures even as it explores less honored (or taught) writers. It is the authority attached to those major figures that still matters greatly—with its assumption that 1) learning more about those writers is a self-justifying scholarly motive in the discipline, and 2) that what those major figures thought and did is significant because of who they are. (The kind of circular reasoning about significance that drove Barbara Herrnstein Smith crazy in her attack on aesthetics, Contingencies of Value.)
To state for about the millionth time in my lifetime, my basic take on this relationship between art/scholarship and politics. I just don’t buy that writing about social class in Dickens is political, and certainly don’t see it as an advancement of social justice. Political work engages in changing institutions, in working on facts on the ground. Scholarly work can change political opinions, just as Dickens’ novels can, but we have a very attenuated sense of the political if we think that our job is done when we teach Bleak House and write an essay about its views of social responsibility. If, in fact, our reason for being in the classroom and doing our scholarship is political, then we are acting in bad faith. If you really take politics as your primary motive in life, then making art or writing literary criticism is not what you should be doing.
I don’t think we advance social justice one iota if we confuse direct political action with the indirect attention to political questions that can occur in our classrooms and in our scholarship. So my fear is that Mellon’s insistence that we tie our work to social justice will just abet this confusion of the direct with the indirect. It is hard enough to be honest about our motives for what we devote our time and energy to. And it is equally hard to be realistic about what our work can and cannot accomplish. I think Mellon’s new orientation will encourage comforting lies we already too often are tempted to tell ourselves.
To be blunt: I hate the gestural politics on display at the Whitney and in the halls of the MLA. It’s cheap in the sense that it costs its practitioner nothing and seems mostly directed at garnering the approval of his peers. There are, of course, notable exceptions—Banksy, James Baldwin, and Edward Said come to mind immediately—so I need to be careful not to claim that it is impossible for art and scholarship to be political. But it is damn difficult.
If our work as artists and teachers is not political, what is it? I have backed myself into a corner here, pushing me toward an answer I would have scorned most of my (misdirected? misunderstood?) career. (In short, I was as committed, maybe even more so, to literary studies’ efforts to be political–and thus avoided saying, to myself or others, what I was actually practicing everyday as a teacher.) Cultivation of a sensibility of open-ness and appreciation.
Another story to indicate what I mean. Some years back I discovered that all the students in a class I was teaching had never seen “Casablanca.” My deepest commitments were brought home to me. I didn’t deeply care if they never read Pope’s “Epistle to Man,” but to never see “Casablanca” would be to go to the grave without having passed through life. My goal as a teacher was to open eyes to the richness of the word and the life it was possible to live in that world. To move my students toward the “quickened consciousness” Pater extolled. That goal did mean I wanted them to see how cruel, how unequal, how unjust the contemporary world is, but bringing that point home was part of the larger project of their seeing “life” and “the world” in all its many-sided splendor and squalor. And it is in the arts that that splendor and squalor are most fully on display.
This last point brings me back to cakes and ale. William James was interested in what he called “moral holidays.” He did not mean the term pejoratively. He knew that everyone of us grants ourselves such holidays. So how do we justify them? Peter Singer is the utilitarian philosopher who makes the absolutely stringent case against such holidays. There is no way, Singer argues, to justify spending $150 to see “Hamilton” when that same sum, given to Oxfam, can feed 40 people. No cakes and ale without an obligatory side dish of guilt.
Singer’s challenge returns us to my Eastman student’s crisis of conscience about playing the piano. We can do somersaults to justify our cakes an ale. Even when admitting they are no good for the world or even to ourselves (sugar and alcohol?), we will talk about psychological well-being, letting off steam, all work and no play, etc. etc. Because, of course, we all do take moral holidays.
My utopia is a world where we are relieved of the felt necessity to justify the holidays. They are just good in and of themselves. (Of course, traditional aesthetics keeps returning to this issue of intrinsic value again and again.) There is nothing wrong about pleasure, about things that fascinate us by their intricacy and difficulty (we can imagine the “holidays whisperer” crooning in our ear.)
Hannah Arendt, with her obsession with amor mundi (love of the world), approached these issues in a somewhat different way. She talks about the “freedom from politics” as among the freedoms to be protected and cherished. One hallmark of totalitarianism is that everything becomes political; nothing gets to escape signifying one’s political allegiances, and one is either applauded or persecuted for every single taste or action. We are in a bad way when wearing a mask during a pandemic becomes politicized. Zones of the non-political are liberating in the way that “moral holidays” are.
Just think of how dreary a world without music, without novels, without holidays would be. That world would certainly be hard to love. That’s all the justification we need. More importantly, it is all the justification we are going to get. All the other rationales are threadbare, barely plausible.
Mellon used to be a place where you didn’t have to do lip service by trotting out those all too familiar rationalizations. Apparently no more.
McGowanBlog 
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