PARTISAN REVIEW
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mally neither produce use nor exchange values, nor do they train
human beings to produce them in turn. What they actually do in
terms of this newly emerging context of the university as part of the
system of production is precisely a project upon which self–
clarification and working through are required.
5
Something similar is to be observed in the current intense interest
in "values" and in the crises out of which such interest has arisen.
There is an undercurrent of expectation that the humanities are or
should go into the business of creating values, new or old, for society.
This circumstance deserves intense and rigorous examination. The
expectation in question envisages striking resemblances
to
what is
known in the social sciences as a "technological ·fix." A "value fix"
accordingly would assume that the present social and cultural crises
can be met by finding a short-cut route of somehow providing or
promoting new values. This view regards the humanities as being in
the business of supplying a value-technology for society. A "value fix"
in effect assumes that the "solution" of cultural and social problems
does not consist in real solutions of such problems in their proper
realms and by the actual people involved, but that such solutions can,
as it were, be applied from the outside. The idea that the humanities
should become involved in the production of values as social or cul–
tural commodities means that they should be engaged not in the
activities of clarification and self-clarification, but rather that they be
primarily engaged in an important aspect of the mental management
of society and history. Apart from the question of whether this should
be the proper role for the humanities now or in the future, one
should recall that this was in general the path that the established
social sciences chose to pursue, and that their way has been increas–
ingly strewn with boulders. As the humanities undertake in this dif–
ficult period the correspondingly difficult task of self-examination,
such questions have to be kept in the forefront of consciousness. If the
work of critical self-clarification and appraisal can help to begin to
create and keep in the open a vision of the present in its continuities
5. As Christopher Lasch has reminded me, it isn't quite precise to sever the humanities so
peremptorily from the productionofuse values and exchange values.The humanities have
had over the past two decades important relations with the knowledge industry-which is
itself the principal agent (and beneficiary) ofthe diffusion ofthe decomposed elements of
modernism throughout the larger culture and society that I have referred to.
