The Death Drive in the Humanities: A Living Rant

Opening Salvo: The next issue of the PLMA features an(other) article mordantly entitled, “The End of Post-Colonial Theory,” or similar refrain (sigh). They author's didn't go with "death of," but that's what they meant, and we know it. We’re all in the last stages of grief over post-colonial theory’s parent, Theory. I’m not sure that we’ve laid new sod on the graves of Fiction, Poetry, and Art as yet but I can hear the truck rumbling through the cemetery. Which prompts me to ask: why is it that the most interesting thing we can do lately, especially in literary studies, is die? When did we all turn into well-dressed Goths? Why is it that the established scholars, critics, writers, theorists keep screaming that we’re over, 86ed? I, for one, would like to see this death drive die. Death is boring. Being so common and all. I declare a moritorium on ravens.

I wonder, because I don’t see departments admitting fewer grad students, full of verve and hope, to teach Grunt Work 101, contributing to a flooded, and therefore, a buyer’s job market bogged up with hopeful if deluded or unqualified or untutored candidates. It would seem that these death rattles are not intended to, or are prevented from the effect of, dissuading the bajillion idealists who keep majoring in and dedicating their lives to the Humanities, incurring over a thirty year term as much as $200,000 dollars in debt counting interest and marching over the cliff of their own talent or lack of it to their doom. On the advice of their advisors, mind you.

What is so mortally ill other than conscience? The thing with melancholics is that they mistakenly believe there is something special, personal, about their death. Nothing could be further from truth. The per capita death rate is a steady 100%. Melancholics are essentially interested in the uninteresting.

Nor do I see those young scholar apprentices writing morbid essays staging these alarmingly grievous debates. I see them, even errant and beleaguered adjuncts, cooking up new and sometimes revolutionary scholarship and art all the time – though less of it than they might. I wonder, are the established scholars just tired? Exhaustion would be understandable. Ours is not the eat-cake-have-it-too vocation many civilians fantasize it to be. We are simultaneous scholars and writers, advisors and teachers, managers and worker bees – ours is not a forty-per gig. That we occasionally get a summer to think or relate to our families can hardly be grudged, though not world enough and time for many of us to recharge our shiny little lights.

Point the first: Every school of thought, like every person, runs its course. At the end of its course, it does not Die. It evolves, into spirit or dust or both. It’s not that we Can’t Do That anymore, it’s that we emerge to Do That Differently or, one hopes, to Do Something Else. That the new activity does not yet have a name is no concern. Labels come long after invention, just as gravestones are properly engraved post mortem. That so many of us/you are surprised by the natural cycles of intellectual evolution, and thus over-react to them, is embarrassing.

Point the second: Given point the first, I would like to advise any established and thereby exhausted scholars that, should you have used up your imagination for new ventures in thought or critique or creation -- Get out of the damn way. If your subject of preoccupation is that you find yourself without preoccupation– it’s time to hang up your glasses and pour yourselves one. I go so far as to say: it’s your ethical duty to quit, retire, take that trip to Belize or Tibet you’ve dreaming about, visit your cousins, become political activists -- whatever. This is your duty to the Humanities, your profession, your vocation, your grad students.

In my learning, the one constant is this: the Humanities have always been about attending to and remembering our past traditions, examining them for limitations or errors or missed opportunities, and imagining our futures: the futures of our subjects, and futures of being human beings. Both critical and imaginative, preferably at once. Not just ironically, but with the vital force of our sincerity and desire. If you’re not up for that double duty, go lie down. No one will call you out your grave for your honesty and realism. We will honor you for your courage.

YOUR Theory, Art, Fiction, Poetry may be dead (though I don’t think so), but the next generations needn’t dedicate themselves to playing ghost in the graveyard. Unless, perish the thought, unless that’s what you want?

Maybe all that sex back in the 80s and 90s wore you out? Can’t find your creative or critical vasodilator or hormone replacement therapy? Fine, hie thee to the undiscovered country. Sad. But fine. You were our teachers, our inspiration. But, really, if all that is thinkable now is expiration, insert the morphine drip and get honorably on with it.

Point the third: Is it possible that these comas, these periods of unconsciousness, these doldrums, this collective melancholy is partly a result of the structure of our professions now? Or should I say the simultaneous corporatization and de-professionalization of our profession? Yes, I should.

It’s not hard to understand how, caught between that Scylla and that Charybdis, our tenured and established colleagues might drop out of the game. I mean, among those who grew up in the old game who really feels up to the fight of correcting the new game? The game in which students who probably shouldn’t be admitted to Gradual School are admitted because they’ll teach Grunt 101 tolerably well and write masters theses soon consigned to the digital oubliette of the UMI database? The game in which schools employ so many migrant adjuncts that the energy of our new generations of scholars is given to surviving commutes over adventurous scholarship? The game in which the Humanities are considered, more and more collectively, service departments little more distinguished or erudite than campus writing centers? This is not the anti-oxidant fruit smoothie of our collective well being. If you were tenured very nearly just for obtaining your doctorate, how could you, really, imagine our way out of this deliciously non-nutritional carbo-cluster?

Point the fourth: It’s also possible that, as with melancholics, you/we are just expecting too much of life at the moment, and that, because things aren’t Super Exciting you/we are feeling a bit blue and put out? Are you/we just exaggerating? Quite possibly.

Coupe de Grace: That there isn’t yet a new Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, a new Kenner, a new Derrida, a new Rorty, a new Fox-Genovese, a new Spivak, a new Perloff, a new David Foster Wallace or Carole Maso or Jorie Graham doesn’t mean that there will not or can not be (wait, Graham IS a new Eliot, Wallace is a new Joyce, Maso is a new Woolf – and all quite alive):-- except it’s harder to be A Genius when mostly a deprofessionalized corporate drone.

Are you really dying, established professoriate, Theory, whoever? Choose. You can die, which is restful and calm; or you can live, which is restive and cacophonous. But choose. Do not be so ungracious as to sing your own elegies. Sing the odes of the next generations instead. Some of us struggle lively to put that food for worms to the service of imagination. Theory and criticism will catch up again with the situation on the ground. It’s as inevitable as nevermore.

UPDATE: This at Harvard UPs Off the Page.