Dear Institute,
It is sad that the Arts and Humanities have not survived their own critique, a revisionism with which scholars, teachers and students – following the ‘discipline’ – have been engaged for at least the last fifty years. But it is no surprise. Surprising is how complicity – at the level both of institutions and of individuals – can be advocated for as a way … to do what? protect jobs?
Or is there a value here out of reach of the techno-corpocratic estimation of STEM [wiki] subjects (and subjections), out of reach, that is, of political meddling in institutions?
The loss of autonomy of institutions where Arts and Humanities have had a place appears to be the flaw being exploited to political ends (on economic pretexts). But I would rehearse an argument I have advanced elsewhere: the state will eat its own before admitting its powerlessness before the corporational network; and eating its own begins with denying society, public life exists, except in order to be consumed; it has as its main dish the institutions under the aegis of which erstwhile civic life has been conducted; and ends in a Promethean petrochemical flambé of the financial organs feeding the ‘growth of trade,’ and ‘national economies,’ which organs are assumed to regenerate, like livers, overnight! but which have long since ceased to be organic and will expire in the smoke of the energetic consumption that sustains them. With a faint smell of burning rubber.
Best,
Simon Taylor
