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I have to go to a meeting soon but just wanted to dump a thought on the angst over the humanities, which is a reflection on my life and much great convo with @samhaselby. So, short (I hope) thread.
As late as a few years ago it struck me as strange to have arts (music performance, painting, poetry production) in universities. My attitude was it was a social service to have them in places of scholarship - a haven, just like universities sometimes store seeds.
I became damaged enough by the crap that happened to me in the process of writing/following up on "Galileo's Middle Finger" that I ended up needing art myself. I started writing (privately) in a way that was art, not my usual history or journalism. I also consumed much more art.
I came to understand that the production and consumption of art (sorry for capitalistic terms) really did help me understand humanity in a way history and journalism alone did not. I understood more about the real world via the imagined world.
So, I've come to believe that there is knowledge production of a kind in the arts -- that it is more than art production. And so it makes more sense to me to think of the arts as having a real home in places of scholarship (universities). However...
What makes no sense to me is taking fields that are supposed to be fact-based -- and by this I mean History -- and turning them into imaginary art fields. This strikes me as wasteful, backwards, and dangerous.
I am perpetually confused why people in humanities fields that are supposed to care about facts sometimes decry right-wing fantasies that pretend to be fact-based. I just don't get it.
Insight obtained via art production and consumption is important. We might even think of it as knowledge - that makes sense to me. But confusing it with accounts of reality, or subbing it in for that in History Departments, is really troubling. It's a justice issue.
Just one more (for now): I remember being at a conference where a grad student kept making what were effectively empirical claims about a text, all of which were really just his artistic response to the text. I kept asking, "Where is the evidence for your reading?"
He literally could not understand my question. Members of the audience tried to explain to him my question. He had been led to believe by his mentors that his artistic reading of an historical text was History -- historical scholarship. It was not. It was lazy and ahistorical.
