I’m so tired that I watched the movie I Love You, Man from start to finish and I cried. Because it was touching. 

I listened to a Stanford professor of French literature go on and on about the amazingness of digital Humanities and I wondered at how oblivious he can afford to be to what this ridiculous concept really is about. 

The goal of digital Humanities is to rob scholars of literature of any residual independence from capital that we still enjoy. To do my research, all I need is a book, a pen, and a notepad. Google is helpful, too. But I don’t need grants, I don’t need to compete for funding, I don’t need any institutional support, I don’t need to beg capital to fund my existence. It’s good to have grants, funding and support but they are not necessary. 

Once we allow ourselves to be trapped in the belief that we are nothing without databases, JSTOR, NEH, Project Muse, and all these expensive devices of exclusion, we lose our freedom from chasing money. We are letting ourselves be convinced that a scholar who works without all this – and I repeat, expensive – shit is somehow deficient. My university can’t even afford Project Muse anymore, so I guess that excludes all of us who work there from creating great research accessible to rich folks from Stanford.

And do you know what profound conclusions the Stanford fellow managed to draw on the basis of his tables, graphs and the rest of the digital crap? That the concept of human rights was invented in the 18th century. Gosh, at this pace, he will soon discover the shocking news that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Right now, I can shut up any administrator who points out that I don’t “bring in any external funding” with a dismissive “I don’t need any funding.” It’s true and it feels damn good to be able to do that. But once we are forced to defend ourselves as digital humanists, that’s it for this kind of freedom. We’ll enter the dumb rat race for the funding that we don’t even need.

Reject the tyranny of capital! Reject digital Humanities! Occupy literature. 

Since my book is about to be published, I need a new project. I’m walking around the MLA exhibit, looking at book titles, and making note of which words in them attract me. For now it looks like the word “citizenship” draws me in a lot.

Of course, I never know where my project will take me. The current book was supposed to be about the Spanish Civil War but it turned into Spain’s Engagement with Liquid Capital. 

I love being at the start of a new project. It’s like I’m about to start unwrapping an amazing gift. The project I just finished brought me an understanding of the erosion of the nation-state, the liquid economy, and the fascinating stuff we’ve been discussing on this blog for the past 3 years. 

This will be fun!

Hey, folks, if you are at the MLA, head over to the exhibit. Viet Thanh Nguyen is giving out signed copies of his novel and short stories for free. I was going to buy but they refused to sell them because it’s all free right now. 

The exhibit rocks, by the way. I left because I need a break but I’ll go again later. Many opportunities for free books if you sign up for newsletters. 

I hate the MLA exhibit. There are so many amazing books, and I only have a tiny overnight suitcase. 

I’m suffering. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of the best-selling Pulitzer Prize winner The Sympathizer, is a very special snowflake and very full of himself (“Of course, I can’t write in a way that my mother would understand because she’s a peasant and I’m an English professor” – a literal quote.) 

But I’m glad I kept listening because in spite of the insufferable pompousness he’s a pretty profound fellow. He poked vicious fun at the Liberal American mantra of, “We Americans are so evil, we have victimized everybody in the world, we are totally the worst.” Nguyen pointed out that it’s exceptionalism, pure and simple, and it’s annoying as all hell. 

I wasn’t going to read his book but now I will.

A colleague reminded us yesterday that initially a Humanities education existed to strengthen the class divisions between the gentlemen class and the riff-raff. Only after a BA became the pre-requisite for doctors and lawyers did these professions become fit for gentlemen to practice. The liberal arts education was aimed at fostering a certain kind of sensibility, a way of being in the world that would set its recipients apart from the lowly classes.

This, of course, was a wrong and unjust approach. But the way to fight against it that we adopted was misguided (say I and not yesterday’s speaker.) Denying the existence of a more refined sensibility that can be reached through an exposure to the Humanities is not the way. Opening the access to it to more people- ideally, to everybody who wants it – is.

I’m some sort of a huge iconoclast for saying that a developed intellect is needed to enjoy opera but not to enjoy Eminem. This doesn’t mean that intellectuals can’t dig Eminem. Of course, they can. But there is a clear qualitative difference between texts created by Cervantes and texts delivered by Justin Bieber. This sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but academics -people who go to school for years to be able to understand Cervantes- go into fits when they hear it. 

Once we have relinquished the idea that a Humanities education facilitates an entrance to a refined sensibility, what can we offer to students? All that’s left is that we are selling a chance to get a good job. And we all know where that marketing strategy led us.

And there’s so much hypocrisy. People who drag their children to the symphony from the age of 3 and who’d never release their kids into the job market with a habitual use of double negatives argue that correcting students’ speech is elitist. All of the empty social justice verbiage conceals the fact that many jobs are only accessible to those who have adopted the correct speech patterns, manners and refined sensibilities. We actually manufacture exclusion with our pathetic and dishonest blabber about inclusivity. 

Several of the sessions I attended reached the same disconcerted conclusion that left academic with the feeling of, “God, what have we done?”

We have insisted for so long that all hierarchies are bad, that knowledge is a tool of imperialist and capitalist domination, that experts are evil, that professors should listen humbly to the illiterate, that the worst thing to be is a snob, that worshipping inclusivity means never telling anybody they are unqualified to join any discussion, that pole-dancers are as capable of offering valuable insights into organic chemistry or post-structuralism as people who publish academic volumes on the subject, that of course all opinions are equally valid.

And now we are seeing the results of all this. As we have all noticed by now, the results are not good. But there’s nothing we can say because it’s what we advocated for since forever. Or at least since 1982.

So did you know that social assistance programs (e.g. food stamps, SSI, etc) give incentives for living alone? If people pool resources and live together with siblings, parents, friends, etc, they all get less assistance. The SSI is reduced by a third. Food stamps are also reduced for each person living together. 

I went to a cheap Indian restaurant and they brought me an unfamiliar appetizer that has cold potatoes, chickpeas, crunchy breads, sour cream, a sweet red sauce and a spicy green sauce all mixed together. It’s heavenly.