Liner Note 11: Humanities Funding, Gaza, Anticipatory Obedience

MLA New Orleans on January 11, 2025

This is the first section of my talk at the MLA Convention, "Humanities Dies in Darkness," an extension of a theme.  It's paired with the Public Humanities paper.  I go into more detail in another section about why I think anticipatory obedience is the right term for the profession's relation to its funding masters. I'll elaborate in a later post.

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In spite of its very bad start, the thought of our new year 2025 leaves me somewhat optimistic, or at least determined. 

The first reason for this is that Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza has generated the strongest anti-war movement of the past 50 years. This movement has changed public discourse, so that recently unsayable terms—genocide, apartheid—have become central terms of public discussion of Israeli policy.  The movement has opened up new possibilities for peace, for Palestine, for the Middle East, even as these possibilities face new waves of repression and nasty uphill battles. Many of us in the room have been active in this struggle, including in the struggle to allow debate of a resolution in the MLA’s Delegate Assembly. Please join me in thanking them for their work. I’ll say more about this in the talk.

The second reason for my determination is that our scholarship has never been better. So much work keeps opening our eyes to new things. I can barely keep up with the podcast version of literary books on the New Books Network. I’d also mention Matt Seybold’s American Vandal podcast series, which has become the decade’s more or less best genealogy and critique of the profession’s current institutional conditions. It is another reminder of how our intellectual lives thrive in spite of material conditions that do not.

The third reason for optimism is that the elements are in place to make Trump Part 2 the end of our current long political cycle rather than its revitalization.  This ending won’t be pleasant, and I obviously can’t time it. But I can talk about what our profession needs to do with the elements that are in place—emphasis on the word do.  

This is not the first time that we confront a Western government in the grip of authoritarian populism, as Stuart Hall named it in 1978. This term refers to a socio-political and cultural condition in which leaders build authoritarian state power with the consent of a voting bloc that believes these leaders will uniquely address their genuine needs. Hall saw that the power of Thatcherism lay in its insight that cultural power would decide its fate, not just state power or economic policy.

Now in 2025, the second Trump administration will again try to remake society from above while alleging that this expresses the national will. Trump and Musk seem to be trying to create steampunk 19th century American imperial expansionism for a world to be run by a League of Extraordinary Dictators. At home and abroad, culture war will remain central: smearing the identities of migrants and trans people, exclusionary definitions of normative values—these are not by-products of Trumpism but Trumpism as such. 

One thing that has changed since 1978, or 2008, or 2016 is the destabilizing crisis in the culture industries of which the academic humanities are a part.  Authoritarian populism has always targeted rival cultural producers for destruction. As it continues to do so, it can take advantage of a materially weakened opposition that is also not well organized institutionally. 

I’m talking about us of course--cultural producers whose employment base has been under attack from various directions for 30 to 50 years. Language instructors, journalists, screenwriters, poets, musicians, playwrights—all of our colleagues in culture have been facing steadily increasing levels of precarity, inadequate salaries, unemployment, or replacement, and also few organizational tools to establish basic parity. 

Trump’s return will deepen the well-structured assault on all non-reactionary cultural knowledge production and on their institutions, especially the news media and the university. In addition, Trump’s Big Tech brigades will use so-called artificial intelligence to make this even worse.  We are facing a unique conjuncture within a system that has been under construction for 50 years.

At this point in this system’s cycle, we must confront and reject the humanities fields’ standard response to adversity. Our response has been, in my view, accommodation, coupled with a passive-aggressive reluctance to engage the external demands for positive public knowledge that the university’s social contract involves.   It’s submissive individualism, inherited from Emerson among many others.  

A related term that emerged thirty years ago to describe such a response to authoritarian systems, and now popularized by the historian Timothy Snyder, is anticipatory obedience.  I  want to pose the following question in the context of the MLA Executive Council’s recent decision to block debate of a valid resolution about boycotting Israel: if we cannot debate BDS, how can we demand that others—Congress, university presidents--debate the unacceptable material conditions of our own cultural and academic labor? Without confrontational courage, across the full range of justice issues, how, regarding my topic here, can literary study avoid further budgetary defeat?

Obedience damages the state of others, and also of ourselves.  Overcoming our long-running financial defeat now requires building a countermodel for an alternative culture and society, using elements of both dominant and emergent cultures, in Raymond Williams’ terms. Building a United States not dominated by Trumpism—a minimal but difficult step-- will not happen without the kind of discursive and cultural analysis that defines the work of most of the members of the MLA. I believe that the study of literature, language, writing, and culture will either be central to the next historical cycle or that next positive cycle will occur too late.

I have four points to make about this today. The first is that MLA disciplines cannot be bystanders to building the countermodel.  

The second is that when critics like Hall, Williams, and also Said, Ferguson, Butler, and many others called for the conceptual tools that would build away from authoritarian-democratic and white-nationalist societies in what Williams called the long revolution—literary study successfully answered the call.  Our fields have developed the forms of knowledge that can enable this transition. This development has not slowed down but sped up over the past twenty years.  I only assert this now—perhaps we can discuss a bit later.

Third, we have the intellectual means to attain meaningful public significance as producers of knowledge. But we lack the institutional and financial means.  We are not too slow or too radical to sit at the research table. We are too poor. What this means is that we are unable to fulfill the tacit social contract under which all academic disciplines labor, which is to produce knowledge that ordinary people can use to solve problems in their lives—intellectual problems, not just problems of employment.  I will lay out our financial poverty in the humanities and define it as a social problem and enormous intellectual block.

Fourth, on top the funding scandal is the scandal of our lack of will and failure to confront the funding crisis over a period of decades.  When I say we are intellectually ready but not ready with the required infrastructure, it is partly our own fault. I’ll end by calling for us to transform our relation to funding politics, which must include transforming our structure of feeling about research capital and its institutions. 

We will need a new level of militance if the profession is to survive to fight another day, to say nothing of contributing to the long revolution in democratic affects and practices on which peace and ultimately human survival depend.