Catastrophe?

Examined Life was at times a very engaging film (I will not dwell on Avital Ronell, as I believe Jana has taken up the very point I’d make here). I found the Butler and Zizek segments most accessible, in part because they were the least mechanically “framed” as the philosopher in motion, and because I found the language of each engaging on immediate levels – and they both successfully made jokes, which I think anyone who has struggled through their texts would find highly entertaining. Zizek’s critique of the so-called myths of ecology was most thought-provoking for me, and I think much of what he said could be applied to our questions about the status of the university.

What constitutes a catastrophe? I remain optimistic that a bad grade or a rejection of a grant application doesn’t fit the bill (really), but Zizek’s comments on our relationship to ecological catastrophe got me thinking about what catastrophe means in terms of humanities traditions. Is the closure of humanities departments a catastrophe? Perhaps. What if the humanities departments are all rolled into one big department at each university? Is it necessarily and only a bad thing? I’m going to propose a very tentative “maybe.” Obviously, for everyone attempting (or hoping) to eke out a living in those departments, job availability and security is/ has already been basically eliminated. I wondered, however, if there is a possibility to look forward to and engage with the other side of the catastrophe. What does a Canadian university look like in 10 years and how will the humanities be a part of that institution? Perhaps, even, should they be? (oh crap are we the dinosaurs that will be someone else’s oil?)

This also leads me to the question of our own activism (or lack thereof) on behalf of the humanities. Do we need to do something to save ourselves from obliteration (if indeed that is what we’re facing…) Not as individual researches but as a collective voice in the national or North American institutions of higher education? (is there some kind of coalition that don’t know about?)

I realize this is troubling in a number of ways, considering the multivalent and in some cases contradictory approaches in the arts. The ethical strengths of the humanities are also, perhaps its worst PR nightmare. This is also a reaching out beyond what I see as our individual aspirations to a kind of collective examination that might make everyone really, really uncomfortable. But I can’t help but wonder (and I am NOT comparing loss of tenured positions to an oil spill here) what we can expect if, as Zizek suggests, we effectively disavow what is in front of us, that we watch what is happening in universities and then naively continue to pursue careers that are ceasing to exist.