New Episode - Looking Forward to Season Three!

Hello, listeners!

We're back for season three of Remixing the Humanities! In this short preview episode, we tease some of our upcoming content, as well as solicit some more participants for both our "Remixing Teaching" and "Humanities from the Margins" series. If you're interested, or know someone who's really remixing humanities education in research in interesting ways, please send them our way! They can reach us on Twitter at @humanitiesremix or via email at humanitiesremix@gmail.com. Or, comment below!

We'll be back with our fascinating discussion with Jason Farr and Travis Lau in early September!

Check out the episode here!

The State of the Humanities Revisited: Toward a Public Humanities

We ended our second episode (over a year ago) with a discussion about the humanities’ digital future. Flash forward. In a recent public talk, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the 21st Century has given rise to humans as “hackable animals,” by which he means our current predisposition to allow algorithms to make our choices for us. From Netflix to Spotify, or Blue Apron to Stitch Fix, Harari surmises that we frequently give over our free will for the convenience of tailored content. The stakes of such tailoring are high (much like that of an intrusive inseam): we’ve placed too much trust in the tailor, and now we’re walking (and thinking) with a limp. More to the point: we trust algorithms more than we trust ourselves. Why not, so the logic goes, let the computers make choices for us? In effect, digitization of this sort has the potential to beget dehumanization. Or so Harari warns. 

Just to be clear, I’m not proposing that all things “digital” are the boogeyman. Rather, in the spirit of reflection, “digital” serves as a helpful interlocutor for conversations about “the humanities.” To return to Harari, the problem is not the proliferation of algorithms in contemporary culture. That ship has sailed and will likely never be returning to port. The problem is the potential for human willingness to give over our capacity to think for ourselves, turning instead to the slick comfort (some might say the apathy or indifference) of digital decidability. Let Yelp pick tonight’s dinner choice. Let Spotify choose music that I will like. Let Netflix decide what I want to watch. Let Trunk Club tell me what I should wear. Let OkCupid (or if you’re an academic, EliteSingles) pander to my need for intimacy. The peril here is the potential for scalable de-intellectualism: why bother thinking for yourself? There’s an app for that. 

Perhaps this is the true “crisis” in the humanities, or indeed the humanities’ perpetual state. The word crisis is etymologically derived from the Greek term “to decide.” As the OED can attest, crisis carries medical-pathological inflection (“the point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; the turning-point of a disease for better or worse”), as well as figurative meaning (“a vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point”). This medical language is telling. As Blane Greteman reminds us, Robert Burton’s 1621 treatise on melancholia places the humanities in direct contact with disease. Indeed, the humanities cause us great dis-ease (or they should). That is the whole point of the humanities. The “crisis” of the humanities is that of ever recognizing the turning-points within our cultural and historical currents in order to better navigate toward a more humane future--to choose recovery or death. 

Today, my hope is being renewed by the resurgence of a humanities whose public-facing works seek to challenge the anti-intellectualism so prominent in our culture. In this context, the famed (or perhaps infamous) Zizek vs Peterson debate comes to mind. Their exchange, “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism,” sold out a stadium this April. A stadium. To be more specific, Toronto’s Sony Centre, Canada’s largest sports and music venue. Such an event would suggest public interest in what we might call humanities thinking. Other (more personal) examples include ASU’s Symposium: Race Before Race and its follow up Race and Periodization: a #RaceB4Race Symposium, to be hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library this September. 

If, as we surmised at the end of our second episode, the future of the humanities will follow a digital trajectory, then this trajectory ought to leverage the potential of the digital to think with one another. Twitter, Podcasts, and YouTube all come to mind, as well as open-access digital print venues. The emphasis here lies in the potential for the digital to both create and leverage shared spaces for thought and engagement, for community building and social progress. 

On this note, I’d like to close this post with two gestures toward a public humanities. First, given the (necessary) brevity of blogging as a medium, I would encourage interested parties to explore the current issue of Profession (the MLA’s online magazine) which takes “Public Humanities” as its theme. Second, for those who are members of the Shakespeare Association of America (or those who wish to become members), I’d like to invite you to participate in our 2020 Seminar: “Public Shakespeares and New Media: Critical Approaches.” Let’s share ideas together, and, in the words of philosopher Andy Clark, work collectively “to build better worlds to think in.”