Accidental Thoughts On Austerity
I don’t really do more general link posts here, figuring it’s just as easy for someone to subscribe to the RSS feed of my Linklog folder on Instapaper, but there are a couple of disparate and unconnected things I read this week that I do feel like highlighting.
Tyler Austin Harper for The Atlantic has a defense of the humanities against any and all who would insist that they make themselves “of use”—and I’m making an exception to my usual rule by skipping right to the end here.
Ironically, activist faculty and their conservative critics share the same nihilistic vision of the future of higher education: Both believe that the only valuable forms of research and teaching are those that accomplish something obviously useful. Such views are born of austerity], and they are utterly foreign to me. When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly *useless *in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me–and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med–because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital. As a blue-collar undergraduate, that was a radical proposition. And it’s the only kind of politics we should expect–or require–from the humanities.
Harper’s become something of a gadfly, pushing back against an academic culture that often tries to push him to be “more Black” as an academic, so I could see some readers having trouble with his piece, but readers here know I’m big on the idea that too much of how we live is evaluated based upon whether or not it’s “of use”, so I think what Harper is saying here is important on that level.
Michael J. Harris For PopMatters has a good look at cyberpunk’s somewhat-enduring speculative aesthetic through the pivotal lens of Blade Runner, which remains its most well-knock example.
Crucially, this is a stagnant future, both in the sense that it keeps recurring in our visions and also in itself. Despite the flying cars and the ability to fabricate ‘people’, this future feels static. There’s no sense of dynamism or progress here, no hope that things might get better. The Tyrell Corporation might be intent to advance its replicant technologies, but it’s detached from any sense of social advancement. The future won’t be trickling down from its gleaming corporate pyramid to the dirty, suffocating streets hundreds of floors below.
Welcome to our default future. As writer and game designer Kyle Marquis put it in a well-known 2013 tweet: “Yearly reminder: unless you’re over 60, you weren’t promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.”
I’m drawn to Harris’ idea that as much as there might be calls for more hopeful speculation in our fictions and our aesthetics, we should examine the idea that “it’s not a failing of creators’ imaginations that we’re stuck in dystopian visions of the future; it’s that politically, economically, and socially, we’ve been stuck on the same trajectory toward futures that are decidedly dystopian”.
I do think what’s missing from Harper’s analysis (in that piece; I can’t speak to anything else he’s written on the subject) is any discussion of what sorts of innate political agenda might exist in the ways the humanities more traditionally have been construed and constructed. Cultural defaults are not neutral. That doesn’t mean we have to capital-P politicize anything and everything, per se, but I don’t think we can talk about the humanities without talking about that part: its traditional defaults.
In that sense, I was a bit wrong when I said at the start these were disparate and unconnected. All the more so given Harper’s mention of austerity as the enemy of the humanities, because I realize now that cyberpunk essentially depicts humanity under austerity’s outer edge. What happens, it asks, if we fail to interrogate the defaults under which we currently live?
I seem to be surrounded by austerity at the moment, as I’m also making my way through The Capital Order by Clara E. Mattei, which depicts how capitalism’s claim to “naturalness” was undermined by governments’ choices in order to wage World War I, which opened up a brief window of opportunity for new forms of political economy only to have them crushed by the architects of the modern austerity paradigm which persists today.
Per the Harris: we can’t simply turn to newer, more hopeful speculations without first addressing the austere elephant in the room, and identifying it as nothing more than a Trojan horse whose claims to naturalness are fabricated.