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In preparation for a discussion with my smart advisees this past weekend I recently re-read Kandace Chuh’s short but powerful text, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘after Man'” (Duke UP, 2019). Chuh starts her argument from the current ‘state’ of the Humanities in U.S. universities, a state that is usually expressed as crisis, but which I would express as suffocation from the neoliberal university’s datafication agendas and gasping from the near-complete saturation of market logics into everything that touches student’s lives, including their coursework, time management, and concern for the future. In light of the curricular and programmatic challenges we in the Humanities now face, Chuh offers two premises that we might use to differently contour university course content and ‘learning objectives.’
The first premise is that instead of clinging to the achievements of “liberal education,” which have traditionally afforded college students the intellectual and class distinction (Bourdieu) of knowing all that is sweetness and light (Arnold) in Western civilization, Humanities scholars might collaborate on developing illiberal humanisms in our courses and programs (Chuh, 2). As Chuh writes,
“The illiberal humanisms are directed toward the protection and flourishing of people and of ways of being and knowing and of inhabiting the planet that liberal humanism, wrought through the defining structures of modernity, tries so hard to extinguish.”
The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘after Man'” (Duke UP, 2019), 2.
These illiberal strains of humanistic inquiry are not new, Chuch is quick to note. But though they have always pulsed beneath and outside of the liberal humanisms that bolster the white, capitalist, European hegemony that dominates most axes of identity (race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion), they have yet to be mainstreamed. I would add that such illiberal humanisms have yet to be situated as the central axis of Humanistic inquiry, though they need to be.
The second premise Chuh offers is that of her title, the difference of aesthetics. By aesthetics, Chuh means to encompass both the classical philosophical inquiry into art and beauty and the etymological index of the general human sensorium (aesthesis is feeling). As an English professor and former President of the MLA, it’s no surprise that Chuh turns primarily to literature as her exempla of aesthetic objects, and she engages them for what they perform about, and how they challenge, normalized, status quo affects and sensibilities.
Chuh notes up front that she draws both the premise of illiberal humanisms and the premise of aesthetic difference from her reading of Sylvia Wynter. The subtitle, “on the Humanities ‘after Man'” is a quotation of Wynter, whose rich and sometimes baffling theorizations begin from her assertion that “MAN” is a concept that “overrepresents” itself, that is, the concept of “Man” claims a universality or at least a generality that is false. Wynter’s sentences are often complex. Here, for instance, is her opening sentence (and also her opening paragraph) of her well-cited essay, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument”:
The argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which is defined in the first part of the title as the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the “Racism/ Ethnicism complex,” on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards (Quijano 1999, 2000), and of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational “colonial difference” on which the world of modernity was to institute itself (Mignolo 1999, 2000).
“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” at https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2432989/Wynter-2003-Unsettling-the-Coloniality-of-Being.pdf
The sentence is quite a bit to take in, but Wynter’s meaning is crystal clear. The “Western bourgeois” ethnoclass has usurped and colonized the very concept of the Human (“Man”) for itself, killing off or violently repressing other concepts of human being. The struggle of this century is between the forces that wish to maintain this illegitimate overrepresentation, and forces trying to establish and protect the full range of thought and action both instantiated and possible in the human species.
Chuh’s chapters are elegant investigations into colonial violence and displacement, the fugitivity crafted before racist oppression, and models of subjectivity that are based on entanglement instead of individuality. They exemplify the struggle that Wynter calls for. My first time through her book I was moved and inspired by her constellations of figures and discussions, and they did directly affect how I constructed my syllabi.
This second time through Chuh’s argument, I had in mind my university’s recent few year’s worth of debates around DEIA clusters, hires, and course requirements. DEIA stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, and access–in other words, it is a kind of Nike “swoosh” for what Chuh canopies under “illiberal humanisms.” From this perspective, we might view Chuh’s text gives the marching orders for why but also how to implement institutional DEIA goals. But what her book omits is also what is typically omitted from university administrator’s agendas, namely, the high costs in time and money for faculty retreats, discussions with students, and the hands-on retooling that is necessary to effectively re-contour curricula and programs toward DEIA. Instead, administrators hope that a single freshman course and a spattering of “required courses” (not all of which are clearly taught by faculty invested in DEIA) will suffice.
No one doubts the reasons for such a superficial engagement by the institution. In a national political climate in which accusing someone of offering a “liberal education” is intended as a pejorative, it’s hardly clear who or how a deep dive into illiberality will occur. Perhaps it is necessary for universities to stake a claim on another word to which Chuh has recourse: democracy. If liberal humanities has arrogantly stood in for all humanity, then this is profoundly anti-democratic and therefore, counter to a long-standing aspiration of higher education to be nurturing grounds for global democratic success (in patriotic lingo, for “liberty and justice for all“). This is not language I typically use or ascribe to, but it seems pragmatic for our moment. We need a DEIA humanities curriculum that centers illiberal traditions, but we need to argue for this in the precious language of democracy, freedom, and justice.
My thanks to my students who are patient with my crankiness and always help me see matters more clearly.