I found Meir Kohn's op-ed "Teaching and Research" (May 18) insightful until about the halfway point. There, Kohn switched his focus from teaching and research in the natural and social sciences to teaching and research in the humanities. It becomes clear very quickly that Kohn, a professor of economics, has little idea what he is talking about on this territory when he dismisses work going on in the humanities as "post-modernist, neo-Marxist claptrap." These are buzzwords (the first not even correct, really) thrown around by conservatives and philistines who come from other disciplines but believe they can dismiss work in the humanities with which they have little familiarity. As an English major and linguistics minor, I would never feign to grasp the entirety of economics, but Kohn seems remarkably confident that he has mastered the vast and complex set of studies that comprise the theoretical humanities. I would be interested to discuss the works of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, Kristeva, Said, Heidegger, Nietzsche and many more in a session with him.
Despite Kohn's broad familiarity with the subject, however, his understanding is stunningly shallow. He sums up humanities professors with this nuanced statement: "They have no truth or knowledge to impart -- only attitude. Indeed they deny there is such a thing as truth or knowledge."
I'll respond in several ways. First, I would like Kohn to better define truth for me. He seems to have figured it out. But even someone with a modicum of knowledge about the history of ideas could tell you how often people have concluded they knew the nature of truth, and how inadequate their understanding of truth was. Where would our civilization be had we all been content to reify truth as Kohn does, and never challenge our view of the concept? Kant's radical questioning of truth met with some of the same reaction that Kohn is guilty of against "post-modernist claptrap." Many of these postmodern theorists, I would argue, are working in the tradition of Kant, pushing the same (and new) epistemological questions to their limits. Simply historicizing the debate shows Kohn to be the fool in this respect.
Second, despite their often elusive rhetoric and ethical/philosophical reluctance, most contemporary theorists in the humanities would eventually say that, yes, they do indeed pursue some notion of truth in their work. Even Derrida, the slipperiest deconstructionist of them all, once said so. Otherwise, what would be the point? Just because we take the position that truth can be the product of social discourse does not mean we deny the existence of truth. This is a challenging subtlety, even paradox, that lies at the heart of much work in the theoretical humanities. In fact, a similar kind of paradox plagues (and enlivens) a discipline as far removed as mathematics.
Third, we have the political issue. Kohn writes, "The political views of professors of anatomy, organic chemistry or electrical engineering matter very little, since they are unlikely to find expression in what they teach. Not so in multicultural and postcolonial studies or in GLBT studies." I can't help thinking that he, as an economist, is personally offended by the "neo-Marxist" aspect he perceives in the humanities. So I'll say this: if capitalism is the dominant social order of the last four or five centuries, and if good art, the kind worth studying, generally addresses the social order of its time (controversial assumption, I know, I'll just refer you to Adorno for why this might be so), and if criticism is about explaining the meaning of art, should we avoid studying the meanings of works that examine the cultural effects of capitalism? Also: I highly doubt these humanities professors are voting the Communist or Socialist ticket in elections, and I've never seen them teach Marxist "laws" of production or anything close. Humanities professors do, however, believe in studying the cultural significance of capitalism, and that pursuit, for better or worse, tends to fall under the name of Marxist studies. If it preserved a few concepts about class and alienation, it could probably be renamed "capitalist studies" -- it just might not have the same edge. I hope you can understand how gender and postcolonial studies have similar logic behind them: they are about studying political orders that have been pervasive (but also dynamic), and they require attempting to think outside those political orders in order to accomplish that.
I've just about had it with the uninformed dismissals of the humanities by people who don't study them, don't understand them, and don't care to study or understand them. English, for example, is ten times more legitimate a major than it was in 1950, when students read what they were told were the masterpieces and wrote largely about why they were the masterpieces. Nowadays, we learn how to read a text like Kohn's own op-ed, take apart its language, and see through the values, assumptions and contradictions that are written all under it. So, actually, keep 'em coming, Professor Kohn. We feed on this kind of thing, and we'll all learn from it.
