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An Addiction from Which We Never Get Free

Rey Chow

t is common nowadays to hear talk about a crisis in the humanities. From the day-to-day observations by colleagues about the
waning interests on the part of students, including graduate students, in the pursuit of subjects such as philosophy and literature, to the
in-depth analyses of the historical evolution and demise of the organizational concept of culture in Western universities,1 to the sense of urgency
accompanying the advocacy of foreign language study by professional
organizations such as the Modern Language Association, the status and
future of the humanities seem to have arrived at some kind of impasse.
What seems to be the consensus is that a particular type of knowledge
acquisition, dissemination, and preservation is in the process of either a
historical mutation to become something quite different or, as some
fear, being erased.
When considering the matter closely, however, one notices that there
is not always unanimity as to what exactly is designated by humanistic
knowledge. This categorical uncertainty is probably a major factor
contributing to the currently heightened sense of anxiety. In the AngloAmerican academic world, the humanities typically include disciplines
such as literature (in its various national linguistic denominations),
philosophy, history, classics, and a select group of programs in what are
commonly called studiesfilm studies, cultural studies, gender studies,
ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and their like. With studies in the
picture, though, the boundaries of the humanities are increasingly
intersecting with those of the social sciences and occasionally the hard
sciences, so that the investigation of identities undertaken in some of
these studies programs, for instance, cannot always remain confined
within the parameters of the humanities. In this regard, the term human
sciences, as used by some European theorists, may provide an alternative
way of approachingthough not necessarily resolvingthe problem of
the putative crisis in the humanities. In his unfinished study Introduction
to the Human Sciences (1883), Wilhelm Dilthey defined the human
sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) as the disciplines that have sociohistorical
reality as their subject matterdisciplines that, in todays terms, would
be classified as either the humanities or the social sciences. Diltheys
New Literary History, 2005, 36: 4755

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hermeneutic project was to delineate the human sciences as an independent epistemological whole against the natural sciences by theorizing
the philosophical foundations that underlie lived human experiences.2
In his early work The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault used the
term sciences humaines in an even broader sense to refer to various postRenaissance fields of knowledge in which man has appeared both as
the object and subject of investigation, and that include disciplines as
diverse as language and literature, the life sciences, and economics.3
Whereas the more restrictive term humanities relies on human mental
activity, consciousness, or subjectivity as its cohering rationale,4 the
broader term human sciences allows for the objective study of human
beings in relation to cultural systems of meaning such as grammar,
biology, economics, medicine, theology, pedagogy, or law.5 To be sure,
this kind of distinction between subjective and objective knowledge (a
distinction that in the Anglo-American context constitutes the traditional basis distinguishing the humanities from the natural and social
sciences) is, as Michel Chaouli points out, itself apparently no longer
tenable, and that is precisely one reason the humanities as we know
them have become, for better or for worse, imperiled.6
As I drafted this short essay in Hong Kong in the summer of 2004, I
could not but ask myself how global geopolitics affects my own conception of the topic at hand. A sophisticatedly high-tech, affluent, postBritish colonial, yet politically dependent, territory (its official title now
being the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, or SAR, of the
Peoples Republic of China), Hong Kong confronts one first and
foremost with a question that, perhaps even more than the categorical
question of what the humanities are, challenges what scholars do in a
fundamental way: what is knowledge in a twenty-first-century context of
fervent commercialism? For a long time, the custom has been to view
the production of knowledge in places such as Hong Kong (or some of
its neighbors, such as Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and now
increasingly mainland China, India, and the rest of South and Southeast
Asia) as a matter, long accepted as a fact of life, of modern instrumentalism, whereby concrete industrial, technological, and mercantile concerns predominate over the pursuits of abstract learning. In the local
universities and even secondary schools, this means that students
typically tend to orient themselves, or are encouraged to orient themselves, toward the kinds of academic subjects that would eventually offer
financial reward and socioeconomic standing. Even by watching television commercials, which as a kind of signification easily stand as the
ultimate instance of the separation between signified and signifier, one
catches a glimpse of this deep-rooted, tenacious linkage between abstract knowledge and practical ends: the preservation of family values

an addiction from which we never get free

49

(an ideological and moral telos) can be tied to the promotion of

investment banking or long-distance phone services; new-age environmental concerns can be used to market profit-generating modalities of
body slimming for sexual attractiveness; the lofty respect for education
can go hand in hand with unabashed economic elitism and class
privilege. The list goes on.
But such a smooth amalgamation of knowledge with modern technology, commerce, and social operations is perhaps less a reflection of oldfashioned instrumentalism (which often works with local and particular
cultural emphases) than it is the manifestation of a process characteristic of globalizationthe transformation of knowledge itself into information. What the so-called instrumentalization of knowledge highlights
is what the phrase says: the turning of knowledge into an instrument or
a tool that can then be used for a specific, identifiable end. Studying the
Confucian classics, for instance, might lead one to appreciate the value
of filial piety, but it is the acquisition of a degree in medicine,
engineering, computer science, or executive business administration
that would generate the monetary means to help realize the goal of such
profound knowledge. Thus it is perfectly logical to combine the act of
knowing (the immaterial, the spiritual, and the ethical) with the more
practical know-how of the trade professions. Indeed, such an
instrumentalization of knowledge is often considered a mark of maturity.
With knowledge being transformed into information, things have
shifted onto a different plane. Although information may still be
considered an instrument, the way it functions has much exceeded the
utilitarian, tool-for-an-end nature of instrumentalism. In contrast to the
principle of reflective delay that is characteristic of book knowledge, as
mentioned by Geoffrey Harpham, in the realm of information the
primary criterion is not so much practical usefulness as speedthe
reduction, minimization, and, if possible, elimination of the lapse of
timefor the purpose of making factoids instantaneously available for
circulation. Hong Kong is simply one of many places in the world today
where it is much less the deliberate and reflective search for knowledge
than the expedient access to information that defines what it means to
knowwhat it means, in other words, to be a socially connected,
because copiously informed, human being. The speed at which
information arrives in ones visual and aural fields also means that
information can and must be discarded quickly, since the human
sensorium is incapable of retaining such massive input, and there is
always more information on the way, accessible ad infinitum by mail, email, the Internet, the camera-phone, and ever-newer technologies.
Whereas an old-fashioned scientist, like the old-fashioned humanist,
would have firmly supported the idea of gradual accumulation of

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(pragmatic) knowledge through time (in the case of science, through

training, practice, experimentation, and testing) before knowledge
could be properly instrumentalized, the informationalization of knowledge
casts knowledge rather in the form of an infinite flow, the crucial aspect
of which is not so much substance as continuous movement, instant
disposability, and, massive inputs notwithstanding, a constant need for
replenishment. As Walter Benjamin writes, for information (which he
contrasts with storytelling) the prime requirement is prompt verifiabilitythat it appear understandable in itself, rather than depend for
its validity on lived experience, on the kind of intelligence and amplitude that are the cumulative effects of spatial and/or temporal distance.7 Prompt verifiability is, of course, exactly the other side of
disposability: once understood or deemed plausible, a factoid must be
set aside to make way for the next.
What does all this imply for humanistic knowledge? When
informationalization means that the smart and attractive advertisement
has become, willy-nilly, the paradigm for the creation and distribution of
knowledge, and when even instrumentalism may no longer serve as a
secure defense for abstract learning, how is intellectual work as such
transfigured and redefined?
Clearly, a major incommensurability between traditional humanistic
knowledge and the new media technology lies in the changing sense of
value attached to the process of knowledge acquisition, dissemination,
and preservation. Whereas value for traditional learning has much to do
with the work of stored timeof memory and resonance, of trials and
errors by generations of active and passive participants, of layers of
debates and rereadingsthe evaluation criteria that undergird information, whose chief modus operandi is a tendency to get on to the next
new item at the highest possible speed, cannot be time-bound in the
same cumulative or qualitative sense. The result is an increasingly vague,
because constantly uprooted and uprootable, notion, let alone consensus, of what is valuable at all (apart from what may be accounted for
numerically). As Bill Readings famously mentions throughout The
University in Ruins, a (supposedly meaningful) superlative term such as
excellence has become utterly vacuous these days because virtually anything can be described as excellenta study of Milton, a top university
administrators vision for his/her fundraising campaign, or a six-star
hotels room service. That humanities scholars must (whether or not
they like it or know it) compete with myriad other claims to excellence
in this manner means that the kinds of value that might once have been
more firmly subscribed to as organizing principlesmetanarratives of
truth and culture of which scholars were deemed custodianshave
become thoroughly relativized, their grounds of assurance long since

an addiction from which we never get free

51

removed from underneath them. As Harpham puts it succinctly: [O]ne

point emerges with considerable regularity and emphasis: humanistic
scholars, fragmented and confused about their mission, suffer from an
inability to convey to those on the outside and even to some on the
inside the specific value they offer to public culture; they suffer, that is,
from what the scholar and critic Louis Menand calls a crisis of
rationale.
Such relativization of traditional humanistic values has been encountered much earlier by those who have lived through colonialism.
Growing up in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, young people of my
generation were keenly aware of the impracticability of a course of
learning in Chinese poetry, history, or philosophy. Although such
learning would have been the staple and often the path of worldly
success for the scholar-official class in premodern China, and whereas
lip service continues to this day to be paid to the values embedded in
such a process of cultivation, even nave adolescents understood the
reality of the steady evisceration and peripheralization of a classical
intellectual (that is, humanistic) upbringing, and parents often made
sure that their children opted for the sciences in school, and thus for
lucrative future careers, with a predominant emphasis placed on communication skills in the English language, rather than in Chinese.
In mentioning this local history, my point is not exactly to offer a
cynical reappraisal of a personal past. It is rather to contend that as a
colonywhat to many was a cultural desert and intellectual backwater
Hong Kong, like much of the colonized world, was probably in the
forefront of what has since become a first-world experience of the
demise of humanistic knowledge defined in the more narrow senseas
linguistic, literary, historical, and philosophical learning. The fact that
Hong Kong was ruled by the British has meant that such demise was
temporarily veiled and displaced by a hierarchy of differentiation based
on ethnicity and racethat it was the Chinese tradition that was
demeaned while English letters continued to be valorized and granted
practical social relevance. But such a process of colonial veiling and
displacement, albeit with long-term effects of its own, did not and does
not change the larger picture of an ongoing global process of the
relativization of value associated with humanistic pursuits. This is
demonstrated, among other things, by the fact that intellectuals back in
the mother country and its former colony across the Atlantic were
themselves lamenting the decline of humanistic knowledge in the age of
science and technologyone is reminded of the Anglo-American New
Critics and their attempts to revitalize close attention to literary language and to restore the social function, especially, of the poetand by
the fact that post-British Hong Kong since 1997 has not exactly seen a

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return to widespread enthusiastic support for traditional Chinese learning or even for the use of the Chinese language as the medium of
instruction in local schools. (Indeed, on the Chinese mainland itself, the
informationalization of knowledge these days includes frenzied attempts
at popularizing the use of the English language as information, with
words and phrases reiterated by masses like political and/or commercial
slogans.8 )
To this extent, Foucaults The Order of Things remains for me perhaps
the most thought-provoking exploration of humanistic knowledge as a
historical problematic. Whereas the notion of the humanities as the
Anglo-American academic world adopts it and the notion of the human
sciences as Dilthey attempted to delineate it share an unmistakable
investment in man as a unique being, essentially distinct from the rest
of the natural/animal world, Foucaults emphasis is decidedly different.
In Foucaults work, man is much less to be understood as a spirit,
mind, or consciousness than as an inventiona particular epistemological relation and imprint that has been produced, since the Renaissance,
in the archeological interstices among various historically determined
and intertwined discourses. As Foucault analyzes it, therefore, the status
of the anthropocentric human sciences in the West is by no means
essential or eternal: just as it is necessary to come to grips with the
processes by which they came into being, so is it necessary to contemplate the likelihood of their disappearancethat is to say, their ineluctable transformation into and reconstitution as something of a different
order over the course of time. Viewed in this light, the putative crisis of
the humanities, be it the result of the blurring of disciplinary boundaries
within the scholarly realm or the result of the hegemony of information
worldwide, or both, may well be an interesting threshold at which an
apparently stable, but nonetheless historical, conceptual arrangement
of knowledge is about to embark on an alternative existence.
To return to the incommensurability between traditional humanistic
learning and the age of informationalization: if the tendency of information is to render knowledge infinitely disposable, what are the possibilities of a nondisposable knowledge? Does nondisposable knowledge still
exist and how may it be preserved? Is there something about the
reading, writing, and thinking habits that scholars have cultivated for
centuries that may still be relevant here?
Insofar as the informationalization of knowledge is always predicated
on flow, speed, and efficiency, it in fact provides nothing short of a
closure on the openness of reflective delay that is characteristic of
thought. Ironically, because the advances in computerization mean that
it is always retrievable and never lost, the disposable factoid has also led
to the appearance of a new kind of human mind, one that does not need

an addiction from which we never get free

53

to retain or rememberand that, one might add, may be emancipated

once and for all from the sluggish, cumbersome processes of thought
itself. It is this frightfulfrightful to some of usvision of a future world
without thought that leads Readings to make what is perhaps the most
radical pronouncement in his book. Speaking of the possibility of a
different type of university from the one we currently know, he argues
for a pedagogy that refuses to justify the University in terms of a
metanarrative of emancipation, that recognizes that thought is necessarily
an addiction from which we never get free.9
Thinking, thus, may yet be the most vital, though also the most
elusive, thing we need to redeem from informationalization. And this
need not be a simple reinvestment in the anthropocentric notion of
man as a consciousness, a spirit, and a mind. Such a redemption, I
believe, can take the form of reconceptualizing how the humanities
the writings, images, and sounds that constitute all those treasured
records from the pastmay become dialogue partners with
nonhumanistic fields. Such a dialogue, involving the understanding of
how knowledge boundaries become established in the first place, would
not only help contextualize the more narrow conception of the humanities and restore the latters proximities and affinities with the other
human sciences. It would also make possible cross-disciplinary, crossreferential kinds of writing and reading that would have as their
preoccupation not the defensive or nostalgic perpetuation of a particular kind of conceptual arrangement, but rather the intelligent construction of possible movements and passages among different conceptual
arrangements. As Harpham writes: One of the most promising features
of the present moment is the new urgency gathering at the interface of
the humanities and nonhumanistic disciplines as they confront not only
such new subjects as genetic engineering, environmental trauma, and
the cognitive capacities of animals or machines, but also, and most
intriguingly, such traditional subjects as the nature of language and the
distinctive features of a specifically human being.
In whatever disciplinary category, modality, or conceptual division
or the interstices among themthe engagement with thought would
need to have as its primary requirement thoughts own agility. Contrary
to common sense, this would not necessarily be in the form of expediency and flux, but would consist rather in a capacity for reflective
deliberation and elaboration, for a repetitive, compulsive obsession with
the pleasures of mental labor. Thoughts agility, in other words, is about
questioning the obvious, and most of all about not being complacent
with the conclusions that have been reached. I like this formulation by
Clifford Geertz: Why do we teach Jane Austen, or Icelandic sagas, or
Hindu funerals? Just that: to wound our complacency, to make us a little

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less confident in and satisfied with the immediate deliverances of our

here-and-now imperious world. Such teaching is indeed a subversive
business. But what it subverts is not morality. What it subverts is bluster,
obduracy, and a closure to experience. Pride, one could say, and
prejudice.10 Clearly, this will resolve none of the conflicts in the
university, the profession, or the world around us. Instead, as Chaouli
writes: In our departments, we must juggle the discordant exigencies of
power and knowledge. In the humanities, we try to understand the
tension between understanding and its lack, as a result of which we
come up with ever more refined techniques of describing what remains
incomprehensible in comprehension (e.g., hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction). In the university, we find ourselves confronted with
the mutually exclusive demands of truth and morality. The severity of
these predicaments may dispirit us, but I believe it can also energize.11
As Harpham concludes, Crisis in this sense is not a threat or a disaster
but one, perhaps overly dramatized, way of describing a permanent
feature of the humanities, one that humanists would do well not just to
accept but to promote with all the resources at their command.
An addiction from which we never get free: the task facing those of
us interested in humanistic knowledge is really how, pedagogically, to
transmit this sense of addiction to our students, and how, institutionally,
to forge the kinds of critical masses that would enable rather than
disable the continuation of such a process of transmission. In the age of
information, in which human beings themselves have become factoids
(which is not necessarily a lamentable thing), and in which we have
come to realize that the human mind as such is a historical rather than
an essential phenomenon, how do we hold onto the dream of thinking?
Paradoxical though it may sound, this question seems to me the crux of
our challenge.
Brown University
NOTES
1 See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996).
2 Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, vol. 1 of Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A.
Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, trans. Michael Neville, Jeffrey Barnouw, Franz Schreiner, and
Rudolf A. Makkreel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Earlier translations
of Diltheys writings have used the term human studies for Geisteswissenschaften.
3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970).
4 As Geoffrey Galt Harpham writes: If traditional rationales for humanistic study were
to be condensed into a single sentence, that sentence might be the following: The scholarly
study of documents and artifacts produced by human beings in the past enables us to see the world

an addiction from which we never get free

55

from different points of view so that we may better understand ourselves. Beneath and Beyond the
Crisis in the Humanities, this issue; emphasis in the original.
5 Although Dilthey, too, uses human self-reflection or consciousness as the basis for
distinguishing the human sciences from the natural sciences, his project, as I mentioned,
includes a significantly broader range of disciplines than is allowed by the North American
notion of the humanities.
6 See Michel Chaouli, The Perpetual Conflict in Cultural Studies: An Apology,
Profession, 2003, no. 1:5565. Chaouli also offers an interesting analysis of the conflicting
mandates of the American university, which is caught between the moral liberal arts
mission of the college and the research mission of graduate study guided by an interest in
truth: For a number of different reasons humanities departments have become the
primary agencies in American universities charged with the moral amelioration of the
young and thus the flash point for the most vehement conflicts between the different
mandates of the university (63). Whereas Chaoulis argument tends toward reinvigorating the research model of the university, Bill Readings, by contrast, holds that even that
will not save the humanities; see Readings, The University in Ruins, 17475.
7 Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 89.
8 The reader may get a glimpse of this mass event by watching the documentary film
Crazy English (2000), directed by Zhang Yuan.
9 Readings, The University in Ruins, 128; my emphasis.
10 Clifford Geertz, A Strange Romance: Anthropology and Literature, Profession, 2003,
no. 1:33.
11 Chaouli, Perpetual Conflict in Cultural Studies, 6364.