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Humanities live, Paulson says
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
Fetishists of technology, beware. Bill Paulson's in town and his aim is true. Paulson is a polymath with a mission—to challenge assumptions that the culture of the "impractical," "non-empirical" humanities must be cast off in favor of total immersion in a world of "matter, creatures and things."
The distinguished author, translator, specialist in 18th and 19th-century French literature and professor of romance languages at the University of Michigan will speak at UB on Monday. The talk, entitled "Literary Studies in the 21st Century," will take place at 1:30 p.m. in 330 Student Union, North Campus.
Paulson acknowledges that such academic fields as informatics, molecular chemistry and earthquake engineering hold center stage in most universities today. They are a source of far greater funding, startling research and public interest than, say, German intellectual history.
This has been the case throughout the 20th century, but today, our national star is hitched fast to research in the natural sciences, medicine and technology. As a result, serious questions have been raised about the very future of the humanities. In fact, some wonder if the humanities even have a future, much less one that is relevant.
Into this breech rides Paulson, guns flaring, to acknowledge that while the humanities are considered by some to be residual in an era in which scientific, electronic and audiovisual technology is ascendant, they are not neither passé nor moribund, but an inexhaustible resource for knowing the world and living one's life in it.
In his influential book, "The Noise of Culture"—a term Paulson used to describe literature itself—he argues that most communication systems are constructed to code and decode messages with as little interpretation as possible. Literature, however, both requires and resists interpretation, making it a valuable noise, one that offers negative feedback on machine consciousness. The same can be said of most of the humanities.
William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, describes the humanities as "the intellectual air we breathe, the cultural sea we swim in...where humankind's best insights into our values, traditions and ideals can be found."
The humanities, then, can hardly be dead. In fact, Paulson, a literary scholar, notes that contemporary literature, instead of rolling over before the technological onslaught, has employed the new medias. The novel, he says, "has redefined its territory of representation and range of techniques and play" to produce such forms as postmodernist novels, cyberpunk and hypertext fiction.
Poetry, too, has new forms: e-poetry that dances, sings, changes shape and plays with words and meaning in ways that were once impossible. The fields of electronic and computer music also represent adaptations to technological change, as does computer art in its many iterations.
New discoveries about cognition and language have been made by linguistic scholars, whose work has been dramatically advanced by PET (Positron Emission Technology) scans that allow them to watch activity in the brain during language activities. Classicists and archaeologists are constructing "virtual" ancient sites that are predicted to take the place of diagrams and drawings used to describe their work. The list goes on, with research and collaboration taking place online in every field.
In the introduction to his 2000 book, "Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities," Paulson nevertheless expressed concern that rapid changes in the technologies and media of communications had been fetishized to such an extent that doubts have been raised about the place of serious reading and writing in the education of future generations.
Students and teachers anxious to cast off vestiges of an egalitarian past have, he wrote, "denounced literature's privileged role in education as an irrelevant or elitist relic, probably best left behind in favor of more popular, democratically shared forms of cultural production, notably those of the audiovisual and electronic media."
Today, however, he says, "the world of nature and the world of human making, conceptually separated since the Enlightenment, are...bound together more strongly and in more ways than ever."
"Great advances in our knowledge of the nonhuman realms of bacteria and viruses, oceans and atmosphere, the rapid growth of global trade and communications, new technologies in medicine and genetics, the sheer size of industry and agriculture" are astonishing, says Paulson, and "give human beings unprecedented power to act on the condition of life itself."
Lest we be held in their thrall, however, he points out that these developments are "casting humanity, its institutions and habitats forward into a vast uncontrolled experiment, and no one can confidently claim how it will turn out."
It is the humanities, Paulson says, citing not only art, music, philosophy, literature and language, but fields like anthropology, history, film studies and women's studies, that maintain and enhance a skeptical look at our present course, offering "an understanding of how it got there and inventive thinking about its options and future headings."
To ensure that we are in a position to map our future in many contexts, to consider and then determine the direction in which new technologies take us, Paulson is a strong proponent of requiring that college graduates be firmly grounded in the humanities and at least one scientific or technological field."
Not only the technologists and scientists riding the crest of the wave of discovery, he says, but the rest of us, "writer, reader and critic are all passengers on this wild ride and, to the extent that we are citizens of meaningful democracies, its drivers as well."