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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i do think that legions of academics in recent decades have indulged in excesses brought about by the mindless following of intellectual fashions, and thus lost a good amount of influence and relevance in society at large.
i'm not throwing out the baby with the bathwater though. I know in spite of the overabundance of shit disciplines there is some great work happening in places, necessary work, important work, which unfortunately is being obscured by the charlatans.
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But surely part of that is a question of perspective - there are quantitatively more people working in academia today, that's for certain. I don't think they in any way obscure the good people. No-one's actually named a single pointless, workaday, sheepish academic so far (I'll name one: John Fiske) because we simply don't remember them. The references have always been to the 'big guns', because it's just not in anyone's interest to remember the silent herd of feckless shites. Lacan might have been widely misinterpreted, but we're trying to get at him, not his inadvertent detractors.
Similarly, we don't know much about the contemporaries of Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Gallileo, Newton and so forth simply because history has decided to ignore them. I'm in the process of writing an essay on one of the more obscure Patristic fathers, so I've read a lot of the characters that aren't Chrystostum, Origen, Clement and so on. The reason there's not a great deal of writing on the incidental characters (who are the equivalent of our modern landfill academics) is because it's simply better covered, more clearly, elsewhere.
So I suppose I'd say that if the restriction of humanities does lead to a redressing of the humanities' purpose - the academic reform Bowels and Rail mentioned - that'd definitely be a good thing; however, if this reform means that the humanities is forced into reducing itself to narrow (or 'properly') economic terms, or forced into making 'plain sense' writing, then that would reduce what merit it
does have. Everyone is familiar (whether they know it or not) with ideas like Descartes' Cogito or Plato's Cave - but if you return to the original texts, there's very little in the way of 'simple writing'. Plato I continue to find excruciating, and possibly always will, and Descartes I found incredibly hard work (but rewarding once I got there).