The Public Futures - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

The Public Futures
of the Humanities

Judith Butler

The challenge of demonstrating the value of the humanities can never be fully ac-
complished by showing that the humanities serve other disciplines. That argument
assumes the value of those other disciplines, especially STEM fields, and relegates
the humanities to a secondary position whose value is, a lo sumo, instrumental. El
task is to show the distinctive contribution that the humanities can make to all fields
of knowledge by keeping alive values that are irreducible to both instrumentality
and profitability. The public humanities stand the best chance of accomplishing this
task since it not only shows what the humanities have to offer the public sphere, pero
how various publics are framing what the humanities do within the university. Fur-
ther, the public humanities have the potential to reorient the mission of the universi-
ty. One reason the humanities are underfunded is that they have the power to chal-
lenge the hegemony of neoliberalism, its market metrics and financial rationality.
Universities should be more fully engaged with public art, including literary and arts
events, and the public for open debate as a way of demonstrating why the public re-
quires the humanities, and is already engaged in its practices.

T he question of the future of the humanities takes several forms, the most

obvious of which is what that future might look like. And yet the question
of the future is also a predominant problem for the humanities, one that

we would rightly understand as recurrent.

The humanities, in my view, include language and literature programs, el
letras (such as theater, actuación, película, television, visual arts, música, and mu-
sicology), philosophy, classics, cultural studies, and some portion of gender and
women’s studies, African American and Africana studies, and ethnic studies, a
name but a few. De hecho, it turns out that all of these fields have different ways of ap-
proaching the future, whether unknown, uncertain, promising, or fatal. Y todavía
each field is also contemplating, with no small measure of anxiety, the question of
their own future as a discipline and field of study. That question is often bound up
not only with the question of the future of the humanities, but also of the univer-
sity, increasingly run by corporate administrators deploying neoliberal metrics.
And under conditions of drastic climate change, there is also for all of the human-

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ities the question of the future itself. En efecto, although we are surely called upon
to address the future of the humanities, it turns out that our task is linked with at
least two others: How do the humanities address the future? And how do the hu-
manities think about the future under climate conditions in which a livable future
and an inhabitable Earth are increasingly called into question?

One might suspect that one of the irritating characteristics of the humanities
these days is that faculty and students turn initial questions inside out and end up
addressing a separate issue, or they examine initial questions endlessly and get
bogged down with a close dissection of the terms and assumptions. I would like
to suggest that this practice of turning a question over is neither merely clever,
nor indulgent, but part of the tradition of philosophical rhetoric that is concerned
with persuasion and demonstration. A veces, as Socrates himself clearly
presentado, a question must be questioned in order to start to fathom the best an-
responder: “How do we live a just life?” requires that we take some time to think about
what we mean by justice and whether our meaning is coherent or contradictory or
contested by other meanings. Similarmente, if we ask what future there is for the hu-
manities, we seem to expect a certain kind of answer, but perhaps we are instead
asking a broader question: a saber, whether there is any future at all, whether the
humanities as we know it will be eclipsed and left to vanish. De este modo, if one asks what
future there is for the humanities or for any other set of institutions and practices,
the assumption is that there will be a future and we just do not know whether the
humanities will be part of it. This presumes, sin embargo, that the social and climactic
conditions for the future will persist, and yet we can no longer make that assump-
ción. Whether or not there will be a future for the humanities depends, por supuesto,
on whether there is a future at all.

It is thus with anxiety, if not manifest anguish, that we pose the question of the
future of the humanities. We do not generally assume that there will be a future, entonces
two questions converge: Is there a future and, if so, what future is that? And who
is posing the question, and how is it asked? Is it the humanities? Is pursuing that
question one present and future task of the humanities?

The problem is not only climate change and destruction, but the neoliberal val-
ues that increasingly pervade higher education. Some worry that the humanities
will become absorbed into other fields whose value is already settled or increas-
ingly dominant, or that the humanities will become occasional ornaments for cur-
ricula based more profitably in the fields of science, tecnología, engineering, y
matemáticas (STEM). According to either scenario, the value of the humanities
would become subsumed under other fields, deriving its value from those fields
o, as an accessory, losing its independent value. In the one case (the “we will serve
tú!” alternative), we presume that the value of the humanities is derived from
the superior value accorded to other fields, especially STEM fields. By arguing that
we have an instrumental use, we assume that the humanities serve fields and insti-

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151 (3) Summer 2022Judith Butler

tutions whose value is superior. In the other case (the “keep us around!” alterna-
tivo), we also accept subservience, but insist upon our singular contribution: nosotros
seek either to show that there is an intrinsic value to the humanities (subordinate,
Sí, to the values of other fields and disciplines, but still valuable) or that we are
uniquely equipped to enhance communication skills that will serve students as
they seek employment.

I begin this essay by distinguishing a set of different but interlocking questions
presupposed or implied by asking the question of the future of the humanities.
Primero, there is the question of whether there will be any future at all. Segundo, como-
suming that there will be a future for the humanities, what kind of future will that
ser? Will it be vibrant or weak, compelling or negligible, supported or abandoned?
Tercero, will the future of the humanities, understood as a field, be informed by hu-
manities scholarship concerned with the problem of the future? This last ques-
tion is important because it implies a fourth and related one: will the “future” of
the humanities be decided by calculations and formulae generated by fields exter-
nal to the humanities, such as sociology, economics, and public policy? Or will
the humanities have a say on the matter of its future? Quinto, what will the future
of the humanities be now that the future itself is uncertain? And last, is there any
chance that the future of the humanities is not something utterly new, but resides
as practice and potential in some of its current methods?

The question of the future of the humanities is tied to the question of the value
of the humanities and the general task of making public what that value is: eso
es, establishing the humanities as a public value or, en efecto, a public good. I be-
lieve that this is especially important under economic and climactic conditions
in which many people worry about their futures and are concerned about the de-
struction of future times. This can happen in different ways: living under condi-
tions of oppression that were never dismantled; living with unpayable student
debts that are guaranteed to suffuse and outlast the time of one’s own life; living
with the unlivable wages of an adjunct teacher; living with increased carbon emis-
sions that threaten to destroy the climactic conditions of present and future life,
imperiling biodiversity and animal breathing. I write this against the backdrop of
fires in Northern California. My friends in Greece and Oregon alternate between
their antiviral masks and their antiparticulate masks depending on whether at any
given moment the air threatens disease or toxicity. We all pose the question of the
future of the humanities from some location and within a lived sense of historical
tiempo. The question emerges from somewhere and at some point, so those spatio-
temporal coordinates are there as conditions of enunciation of the question itself.
The question is thus no idle musing, but emerges from a contemporary crisis, a
critical situation, one that calls for critical thought. En efecto, critique is itself a form
of imagining a way out of crisis, prompted by a dire situation that calls for a new
modality of thought and judgment.

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesThe Public Futures of the Humanities

I f we are faculty in humanities departments, we are aware that our budgets

are increasingly restricted, that we cannot hire new faculty at the same pace
como antes, that our undergraduates are enrolled in increasingly larger courses,
and that our graduate students are living on wages that barely rise to poverty lev-
los. The days are nearly gone when scholars openly argue that faculty should not
care about fiscal matters in the humanities since the life of the mind is its own re-
ward, and finances are the proper concern of others. Humanists have increasingly
become part of these discussions.1 At least in public universities, fiscal crises reg-
ularly lead administrators to decide among programs and departments to fund,
and in some cases, a fiscal crisis is declared precisely in order to cut programs that
are considered a “drain” on the budget. This idea of the “drain,” however, derives
from a cost-benefit analysis that determines value according to economistic met-
rics. Or it follows a neoliberal model in which each department is required to be-
come an entrepreneur of its own future, fundraising to support its staff and stu-
abolladuras. The metrics used to decide what programs to defund, what programs to
leave to languish are rarely, if ever, informed by values produced by the human-
ities themselves. Those programs that prove profitable–that is, that enhance the
cultural capital of the institution, that prove effective at raising funds or attract-
ing grants and fellowships–will be those that are duly rewarded. But university-
supported funding is not something any program can now take for granted. De-
funding and merging function are the operative threats, and programs are at once
deprived of guaranteed institutional support and then treated like clients who
have to pay up or pay back to remain in the game. At the University of Califor-
nia, berkeley, even lecture halls once used by any program for public events now
have to be rented for a fee; in this sense and others the university has become a
rent-seeking operation, demanding funds from defunded units it should be sup-
porting. The administration no longer considers such spaces to be shared spaces,
thresholds that connect the university with the community, open to all. En cambio,
the large lecture hall and even humanities centers are treated as opportunities to
glean, or “claw back,” more money from departments and programs whose very
survival is now linked to their entrepreneurial credentials. This situation is exac-
erbated by the fact that the humanities tend not to draw in grants that are as lu-
crative as those garnered by the social sciences and the sciences. Opinions among
humanists are divided about whether to get better at raising funds or whether to
sharpen the critique of the neoliberal model that makes entrepreneurial prowess
a prerequisite for departmental survival.

Some faculty, administradores, and professional organizations representing the
humanities have responded to this situation by seeking to show how the human-
ities serve other disciplines: the social sciences, the sciences, public policy, law,
and the study of the environment. This service is doubtless important, pero ellos
do not always engage a collaborative model in which different fields make distinct

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151 (3) Summer 2022Judith Butler

and equal contributions to the projects at hand. To avoid ratifying the subordi-
nate and derivative status of the humanities, it is imperative to show how all of
the disciplines also require the humanities.2 If we only seek to show how we might
be useful to the STEM fields and other lucrative disciplines, we pursue a strategy
that accepts the hierarchy of values that casts the humanities as secondary and
derivative. No public defense of the humanities can proceed on the basis of the as-
sumption that the humanities only gain their value by serving more highly funded
disciplines and fields. Sí, we are all worried about where humanities PhDs will
find work and we are eager to showcase the many talents of our graduates, but if
the rationale we use for that purpose admits that the humanities have no value in
ellos mismos, we are contributing to the demise of the humanities, making our sit-
uation even more dire than it already is.

It is important, entonces, to make a distinction between 1) showing that the hu-
manities can serve other disciplines in order to establish their instrumental val-
ue and 2) showing the distinctive contribution that the humanities can make to
all fields of knowledge by keeping alive fields of value that are irreducible to in-
strumentality and profitability. Arguments like these are often dismissed as ro-
mantic or unrealistic, but there are grounds to resist such conclusions. Después de todo,
faculty and administrators in the humanities can, and should, become schooled
in fiscal budgets and decision-making if only to become knowledgeable partici-
pants in such decision-making processes or to hold those making such decisions
accountable for their actions. The claim that “cuts have to be made” does not by
itself explain which cuts have to be made, y por qué. De este modo, entering into those dis-
cussions equipped with an understanding of budgetary decision-making process-
es is vital for the future of the humanities. Al mismo tiempo, the humanities com-
prise precisely those locations within the university where metrics of values are
discussed and evaluated. If we ask, according to what measure shall we make a
judgment to support or abandon a program, we are implicitly asking what metric
of value should be invoked and applied in this decision? That question can only
be answered through recourse to another set of values, including those generated
by the humanities. If the economic metric is invoked on its own, then the implic-
it assumption is that there are no other measures of value or, if there are, ellos son
irrelevant or devalued. De este modo, it is no contradiction to insist that fiscal decisions
be based on a general understanding of the value of the humanities and in light
of the measure of value yielded by the humanities, or that fiscal decisions should
be made with reference to the general aims of the university and the public goods
that the humanities have to offer.

The point is neither to dismantle all forms of economic analysis or fiscal calcu-
lation nor to accept the subordination of the humanities as merely useful to those
other fields that are understood as more productive and profitable: eso es, draw-
ing in more grants and donations, producing lucrative patents, securing licens-

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesThe Public Futures of the Humanities

es for intellectual property, collecting tuition fees for masters programs or “cash
cows,” all of which generate revenue that can be diverted to fund other programs.
The way around such a conundrum is to show not just how the humanities address
fundamental public concerns, but to elaborate its public value. The temptation is
to understand such a call as nothing other than a further instance of instrumen-
talism: the humanities are valuable because they serve the public. What needs to
be demonstrated, sin embargo, is that the public, the public good, vida, and futurity all
depend upon the humanities, and that without the humanities, not only is the fu-
ture itself bleak or vanishing, but we have no way of describing, comprensión, o
countering that bleakness. In this way, it is important that the humanities not be
fully justified within the terms of the market, for that marketization of the univer-
sity is precisely what has diminished and sidelined the humanities.

The problems of precarious labor, unpayable debt, and vanishing climactic
conditions for life, to name but a few issues threatening to foreclose a sense of fu-
turity, all result from the unchallenged metrics of profit, unchecked productivity,
increasingly pervasive market rationality, and neoliberal values more generally.
Por eso, for the sake of the future of labor, de la vida, and of the Earth, we have to ask:
how can the humanities become a more vital dimension of our public worlds?
Sí, we have finally turned the question around, but perhaps it is now clear why
such an inversion is necessary. As much as it is important to support graduate stu-
dents as they retrain in order to find paid employment, it is equally important to
sustain a criticism of the market values that have made the importance of the hu-
manities increasingly difficult to discern and defend.

T he case for the public humanities has been at the center of efforts on the

part of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and other fund-
ing institutions to show the importance of the humanities to public life.
We hear of “public engagement” offices in universities, and it seems that estab-
lishing a relationship between the humanities (and the university) and the public
is widely regarded as important to maintaining fields of study and institutions of
higher education alike. Not long ago there was a convention according to which
some scholars would be designated by the media and universities as “public intel-
lectuals.” These were scholars who departed from their scholarly work in order to
take public stands on issues of common concern. In the humanities, Edward Said
and Cornel West are perhaps the most well-known of such scholars. One problem
with the title, sin embargo, is that it assumes that these scholars make a distinction be-
tween scholarship, Por un lado, and public thinking, en el otro, and it sug-
gests that very few individuals, usually from elite institutions, could be named in
such a way. As much as the group called public intellectuals show the importance
of intellectual thought for cultural and political matters of common concern, ellos
can only make an indirect case for what the humanities could offer. They serve

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151 (3) Summer 2022Judith Butler

as models for the humanities, but they are also treated as exceptions, having left
the walls of the academy to enter public life. That last impression, sin embargo, como-
sumes a generally nonporous wall between the academy and its publics. The shift
from “public intellectuals” to “public humanities” surely changed both of those
suposiciones, not only explaining what humanities scholars do for a wider public
but showing how the humanities are themselves a public exercise, a defining and
even invaluable feature of public life.

El problema, sin embargo, is that there are at least two ways of describing what
the public humanities are and this seems related to how we think about “public
engagement.” Public engagement can be public relations, addressing the media
and various constituencies on the value of what various research projects are, el
success of pedagogical innovation, and so on. Public engagement can also de-
scribe community-oriented projects, contributions to K–12 curricula, pro bono
legal services offered by law schools, translation services for migrants, and prison
university programs. All these are indisputably important, and they may well in-
volve students and faculty from the fields in the humanities. But they each repre-
sent different versions of what the public humanities are, and can be. The public
humanidades, sin embargo, cannot be reduced to the presence of humanists in forms of
public engagement undertaken by universities in an effort to advertise its mission
to a broader public, to engage with local businesses and nonprofits, or even in its
service-oriented contribution to local communities. As much as service is impor-
tante, it is equally imperative to undertake service in such a way that foregrounds
rather than negates the value of the humanities.

The University of Michigan, por ejemplo, describes its “Public Engagement

and the Humanities” program as providing goods and services:

We define public goods in the humanities broadly: products or services that are pro-
vided without profit to all members of a society. Examples might include exhibits, oral
histories, archives, audiovisual projects, community engagement projects, K–12 fo-
cused projects, public programming endeavors, etc..

These are all important projects worthy of support, but does the rationale pro-
vided imply that public humanities should be defined as public services? If so,
it would appear that public humanities practitioners emerge from the university
and then enter the public to undertake such services, but the wall between the uni-
versity and the public is kept intact.

A slightly but still significantly different version of the public humanities
comes from New York University’s website. They state upfront and unequivocally
that “diverse publics frame our scholarly endeavors and inform our teaching and
research.”3 A straightforward claim, but note that “the publics” are notably plu-
ral, implying that the public sphere is not unitary, but composed of communities
that have not always been included in the dominant idea of “the public.”4 Fur-

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesThe Public Futures of the Humanities

ther, these publics are not a target audience or an identified recipient of services.
Those publics are framing the scholarship within the university. Their statement
breaks down the distinction between universities and publics when they refer to
“the responsibility to engage deeply with the broader publics in which we all play
a part.” Such a formulation suggests that scholars are, from the start, also mem-
bers of those publics, and that their work is a way of operating within those public
spheres. Más, the main task of such scholarship, teaching, and career prepa-
ration is, according to the NYU public humanities project, “to integrate modes of
public engagement into their scholarship.”5 In other words, public worlds are not
over there, beyond the walls, into which scholars occasionally enter to provide
goods and services; bastante, those various publics frame the way scholarship and
teaching is undertaken, the questions asked, the hypotheticals with which we be-
gin, the purpose for which we undertake our various projects. Those publics are
in the university from the beginning, and include students, staff, administradores,
and faculty.

I underscore this distinction between public engagement and public human-
ities to suggest that the public humanities can ideally reorient the mission of the
university. This would be a quite different task from defending and defining the
humanities within the university in ever more refined terms. It would, bastante, dejar
the humanities now be framed and animated by the various publics that, Sí, uni-
versities serve, and of which they are a part. En breve, perhaps there is no future
for the humanities without first reorienting the relation between universities and
their publics.

The decreasing number of tenure-track positions within the humanities
makes it urgent to find alternate career pathways for PhDs.6 The sense of urgency
is clearly warranted, but it would be a mistake to conclude that we need to cede all
ground to and accept the hegemony of market values and retrain students in busi-
ness and tech as quickly as possible. We think that retraining PhDs will strength-
en the placement records of graduate programs, records that now include “alt-ac”
(alternative academic) as legitimate trajectories. We are probably right, for there
is no doubt that nonacademic careers are equally legitimate and should not be re-
garded as less valuable, as they are by those who understand the tenure-track line
as the only sign of success. That mindset is changing, and none too soon. But if we
rush to make humanities PhDs marketable, are we not strengthening precisely the
metrics that have diminished the value of the humanities within universities? Nosotros
are mightily split when we lament the destructive effect of market values on our
disciplines while at the same time seeking to convert our PhDs into marketable
workers.

Not all alternate career pathways, sin embargo, are equally driven by market val-
ues. And one task of public humanities programs, whether regarded as tracks
within existing humanities PhD programs, or as separate programs, is to find ways

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151 (3) Summer 2022Judith Butler

in which humanities PhDs can bring distinct values into public and nonprofit pro-
gramos. The ACLS describes its aim as fostering “the dynamic potential of the hu-
manities PhD by placing recent PhDs in professional roles with nonprofit and gov-
ernment organizations in the fields of arts management, desarrollo, comunal-
cations, public administration, política, and digital media.”7 Such a program clearly
seeks to advance careers in nonprofit and public services, and in such cases, el
formation in the humanities is not negated in order to gain paid employment: rath-
es, it brings a new set of values, including imagination, idioma, traducción, y
critical thought, to the public and nonprofit domain. Tal como, it does not reduce
the humanities to their potential market values, but continues to contest those
valores, and to affirm a different set of values in the public and nonprofit spheres.

One problem with insisting that the public humanities engage with public
and nonprofit organizations is that neoliberalism affects for-profit industries and
negocios, public service administration, and nonprofits alike.8 Institutions in
each sphere are concerned with securing funding sources, establishing brand and
investment strategies, and hiring people who can bring in more funding or en-
hance cultural capital. The internal administration of these goals operates accord-
ing to their own logics, and too often the social aims of a nonprofit are supplanted
by the internal aims of its neoliberal workings, with the consequence that the in-
ternal hierarchies and income differentials of the organization war with its stated
social goals (like economic and environmental justice), treating low-paid workers
as dispensable, and often failing to provide health care benefits. If the public hu-
manities place students in nonprofits of this kind, it teaches them a brutal lesson
about increased marketization and the precarious character of work. En efecto, si
the point of an internship is to provide training that will open an alternative to
precarious work within the academy, it makes no sense to funnel graduate stu-
dents into nonprofits that are operating according to the same neoliberal logics.
al mismo tiempo, having a paid internship can open doors, and it is an impor-
tant way to counter the situation in which the intern class in radio and public me-
es, por ejemplo, is restricted to those who can draw on family wealth for basic
income during that period. Funding for such internships is generally considered
an obligatory part of such programs, as we can see at NYU and at other sponsoring
institutions.

Por supuesto, some of these programs borrow neoliberal language–“skill-build-
ing” for the market–but that should not mean that PhDs are now reduced to a set
of skills. Community organizations in the arts, por ejemplo, are more often than
not engaging public practices, seeking to sustain and transform public spheres,
and many of them are aiming to keep alive values that are being decimated by
market forces, including social and economic inequality, systemic racism, y el
destruction of the environment. Groups that combat climate destruction, oppose
racism, and support LGBTQI rights and women’s rights can be at once mired in

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neoliberal discourse and still fight for values contrary to neoliberalism, inspired
by the Mellon-ACLS model focused on preparing PhDs in the humanities for non-
profits. Por eso, although it is important to orient PhDs in the humanities to non-
profits and public services, it does not mean that the very sources destroying the
humanities will not be on full display in that “alternative” career.

My point is not to return to a purism that refuses to engage in the market real-
ities of our time. As I have argued, it is important that humanists become fluent
in fiscal matters within the university, regardless of whether they were originally
trained in such matters. “Retraining” is an imperative for those of us teaching,
mentoring, and administering as well. Similarmente, it is crucial that PhDs come to
know of valuable opportunities outside of the tenure-track, even if that means
adapting to new environments and losing the centrality of scholarship in one’s
vida. Al mismo tiempo, if adaptation to market values becomes all that we do, we do
nothing to contest the reign of market values. En efecto, if market metrics become
the new realism, and critics of that very historical situation are dismissed as naive
idealists, then the loss is both enormous and unacceptable. That loss is not only
the loss of the humanities, but the loss of the critique of market values and what
they have done to the university, the social world, and the Earth.

Perhaps we humanists believe that a new book on the value of the humanities
will be persuasive and demonstrate to administrators and funders why human-
ities departments and their students should be supported. Or perhaps new fields,
such as the digital humanities, will lead the way in establishing the humanities
as relevant. Sí, that could be. The problem, sin embargo, is not just that we need
to innovate according to the fast-paced world of digital technology (which also
brought us the surveillance of the algorithm), or translate what we do into market
valores, but to find ways, digital and otherwise, to insist upon a rival set of values,
and to demand that the public value of the humanities be affirmed and provided
for in the name of the public and the future.

If there is a single hope that any of us can have for the future of the humanities,
it is that the public humanities become a way to assert the public value of the hu-
manities, a way of thinking about the fate of the Earth, our common and uncom-
mon lives together, ways of telling our histories and imagining our futures. El
humanities are underfunded precisely because they represent values that chal-
lenge the hegemony of neoliberalism and its market metrics. We should perhaps
allow that critique to live. And though some skeptics maintain that critique is de-
structive and purely negative, they tend not to understand the relation between
critique and dissent, the power of the imagination to think beyond the status quo,
to establish a critical distance on neoliberalism, and to open up possibilities pre-
cisely when the felt sense of the world is dire.9 If we can imagine beyond the fiscal
realism of the present, then we are already practitioners of the humanities. Nosotros
hold out not just for the future of the humanities, but for the future of the world.

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151 (3) Summer 2022Judith Butler

A recent survey conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’

Humanities Indicators found that 84 percent of adults in the United
States have a positive view of literature, and yet many reported that the
teaching of literature at the college or university level is a “waste of time” or “costs
too much.”10 The immediate question, entonces, is why so many people value litera-
ture yet also voice skepticism of or disdain for the teaching of literature in high-
er education. Why can we not make good on the high value placed on literature?
The answer may have less to do with the gap of understanding that exists between
literary critical schools and the public love of literature than with the structure of
higher education as a whole, específicamente, with the difficulty of making higher edu-
cation affordable and responsive to its public. Would literature still be considered
a waste of time if it were measured less by productivity and profit and more by
its ability to help us consider critically the making and unmaking of worlds? Do
art and scholarship become regarded as wasteful or even self-indulgent when the
gifts they offer fail to be measured by the available metrics? Certainly, it would
be unwise to ignore such market values as we argue for our place within higher
education. But if those values come to define what we do, we would be shutting
down that horizon of alternative values that gives a sense of life outside the mar-
ket, against the market, configured through values that affirm the aspirations of a
common world and sustainable Earth. Market values not only narrow our ideas of
what kind of knowledge is worthwhile, but they are also responsible for the pre-
carious labor of adjuncts who are often working without a livable wage and health
insurance. The limiting of imagination and the acceptance of wretched work con-
ditions go hand in hand, following from a “realism” whose terms are too often de-
termined by an unchallenged market rationality.

How do we make the case for what we do that appeals to those who already val-
ue literature and the imagination and want to see their connection to their public
worlds as something different from a connection to markets and finance? Surveys
are a strange form of knowledge gathering, and I have my questions about some
of the categories and methods deployed in the Humanities Indicators report. Y
yet the report offers some insights that illuminate a path forward. So-called po-
litical liberals generally have a favorable impression of the term foreign languages,
while far fewer conservatives perceive that term favorably. Question: What has
nationalism got to do with it? Curiosamente, it appears that Black, Latinx, y
Asian Americans are substantially more likely to believe it is important that young
people learn languages other than English, and those who are less affluent are
more in favor of learning foreign languages than those who are affluent.11 This last
finding raises a crucial question: what does learning across national and linguis-
tic boundaries offer underrepresented communities? Consider another finding:
Latinx and Black Americans are “nearly three times as likely to have frequently
attended [poetry/literature readings and other literary] events as White [Ameri-

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesThe Public Futures of the Humanities

cans], and the youngest American adults [(siglos 18 a 29)] were more than twice as
likely as those 45 and older.”12 If the task ahead is to translate the general appreci-
ation for literature and the arts into an appreciation for what colleges and univer-
sities have to offer, we should perhaps take as our point of departure those public
poetry and literature readings that compel people, especially young people from
communities of color, to show up or tune in with the hope of making sense of
su mundo, reckoning with their histories and their desires. The fields of African
American and African diasporic studies are rife with memoir, historia, poetry, y
experimental writing, including Afro and critical fabulations, providing examples
of performance that combine poetry, historia, and narration.13 Indigenous peo-
ples across the Americas rely on poetry and ritual art to preserve their traditions,
tell their stories, and negotiate the relations to time and space against a history
of genocide and its denial. Throughout Latinx literatures, as diverse as they are, a
poetics is operative not only as the study of the technique of poems but also as the
technique of persisting while burdened and scarred by a history of colonial expan-
sion and effacement. Feminist, queer, and trans writing has always been linked
with fundamental questions of how to survive, live, fight, florecer, and pursue the
promise of a collective radical transformation of the world.

W hatever the future of the humanities might be, it will be critical not

to separate the humanities from the various art forms on which it
depends. English departments teach poets they would not hire or, si
they do hire them, pay them less than scholars with many scholarly books. El
“arts” are sequestered in programs and projects that do not recognize that the
humanities could not exist without the arts, including the language arts, perfor-
mance, theater, and oral histories. Similarmente, the very artworks that compel public
attention are not always present in the university curricula, which distinguishes
between popular and academic objects of study. Packed into this distinction be-
tween popular and academic, sin embargo, is the presumption that the university de-
fines itself, and its elitist sense of value, through differentiating itself from public
culturas. And yet it is this engagement that is most important for the future of the
humanidades.

Public events that include performance art, poetry, and literature often draw
from publics whose histories and creative works are not included in narrow ver-
sions of the literary canon. This is not news. The literatures and art forms includ-
ed in ethnic studies teaching, Por ejemplo, are generally related both to a history
of exclusion, effacement, extractivism, and empire and to a way of imagining a
better world. Palestinian poetry cannot be fully understood apart from the way
that it enters and registers the rhythms of ordinary life, the effort to preserve a
people’s memory against its erasure by official history, a memory linked through
recitation to the task of persisting under protracted conditions of occupation and

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151 (3) Summer 2022Judith Butler

dispossession. These are among the many examples in which the connection to
public worlds is already being made; these sites should be supported as the portals
to a broader world, the link between the university and those who require the hu-
manities to live a more illuminated life. The future of the humanities may well de-
pend on realizing that the best case for art, poetry, literature, visual culture, digital
arte, and performance can only be made if we maintain the connection between
the arts and the humanities. The case for the humanities can only be made if we
start with the love for the humanities that exists outside the university, in the vari-
ous publics who depend on art and literature to live and flourish, and then rebuild
our institutions to respond to that love, that life call, to foster a critical imagina-
tion that helps us rethink the settled version of reality.

Sobre el Autor

Judith Butler, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2019, is Distinguished
Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, berkeley. Ella es
the author of several books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1996), Undoing Gender
(2004), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2010), y, más reciente, The Force of
Nonviolence (2020).

notas finales

1 See Christopher Newfield’s important blog and his publications on humanities funding:
Christopher Newfield, Remaking the University, http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/;
Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class
(Cambridge, Masa.: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Christopher Newfield, El
Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (baltimore, Maryland.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

2 Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

3 Susan Antón, Aida Gueghian, Craig Lanier Allen, and Carolyn Dinshaw, “GSAS Public

Humanities PhD Initiative Mission Statement,” New York University.
4 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Nueva York: Zone Books, 2005).
5 Antón et al., “GSAS Public Humanities PhD Initiative Mission Statement.”

6 Modern Language Association, “Careers Outside the Academy,” Final Report from the
Committee on Professional Employment (Nueva York: Modern Language Association, 1997),
https://www.mla.org/Resources/Research/Surveys-Reports-and-Other-Documents/
Staffing-Salaries-and-Other-Professional-Issues/Final-Report-from-the-Committee
-on-Professional-Employment/Careers-outside-the-Academy.

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7 “Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows: Information for Potential Host Organizations,” ACLS,
Octubre 30, 2020, accessible on the Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/
20201030190514/http:/www.acls.org/programs/publicfellowshosts.

8 Soniya Munshi and Graig Willse, editores., “Navigating Neoliberalism in the Academy,
Nonprofits, and Beyond,” S&F Online 13 (2) (2016), https://sfonline.barnard.edu/
navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/.

9 See my response to the American Association of University Professors’ 2019 report on
the future of knowledge: Judith Butler, “A Dissenting View from the Humanities on
the AAUP’s Statement on Knowledge,” Academe 106 (2) (2020), https://www.aaup.org/
article/dissenting-view-humanities-aaup%E2%80%99s-statement-knowledge#.YRvh
-NNKh0s.

10 Humanities Indicators, The Humanities in American Life: Insights from a Survey of the Public’s
Attitudes and Engagement (Cambridge, Masa.: American Academy of Arts and Scienc-
es, 2020), 1, https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/The
-Humanities-in-American-Life.pdf.

11 Ibídem., 47.
12 Ibídem., 24.
13 On critical fabulation, see Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate
Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Nueva York: norton,
2019); Tavia N’yongo, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (Nueva York: Nuevo
York University Press, 2018); and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). See also David M. Berry, “What Are
the Digital Humanities?” The British Academy blog, Febrero 19, 2019, https://www
.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/what-are-digital-humanities/.

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151 (3) Summer 2022Judith Butler
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