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STEVEN MARCUS
years behind-hand-although the general speedup has tended
to
shrink that lag or interval as well. What will happen when there is no
movement-such as modernism-to provide the kind of conceptual
coherence that academic humanists, and others, seem to require is
another matter altogether. I think, however, that it is probably war–
ranted to make a kind of negative prediction. It is likely that academic
humanists will more or less continue to be unprepared and will con–
tinue to lack the confidence to teach the one thing they ought to be
qualified and competent
to
do-to instruct their students in the
reasoned criticism of their own history and culture and its traditions.
Yet this crisis does not belong to them alone; it is part of a much wider
set of circumstances.
The foregoing discussion is not of course meant to be a dismissal
of everything that is going on today. Almost every situation of de–
composition contains within itself the seeds of new developments
-though it is difficult if not impossible to see what new currents or
directions will emerge from the welter of talents currently in view.
What I have been doing is relating the current state of the humanities
to
certain of the dominant moods outside of the academy and within
the arts and critical thinking.
Nevertheless, this negative prediction is not necessarily fatalistic.
Analysis of the problems that beset the humanities also suggests what
is needful: namely an active attempt on the part of the humanities to
achieve through the processes of self-clarification an improved and
informed consciousness of the present and their relationship to it.
It
is
in this way that relationships to the past-even and especially in their
discontinuities-begin
to
emerge out of semi-consciousness; and it is
in this way as well that the humanities can begin consciously to par–
ticipate in the working through of the present.
For example, there is the widespread sense among humanists in
the university that they are not merely treated as second class citizens
but that they actually are second class citizens. (Let us leave to one side
the interesting question of whether they have earned or merited this
status.) This generalized sense of demoralization has many sides to it,
but one of those sides accurately represents and is a response
to
changes in the character of education. The university and higher
education as a whole have become auxiliary institutions of produc–
tion. In this connection it has to be noted that the humanities nor-
