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The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—introduction
Abstract
This kaleidoscope of short pieces derives from two Fellows Engagement Week sessions (2022, 2023) in which speakers from across the British Academy—Theatre Studies, Anthropology, Modern History, History of Science, English, Philosophy, Music—gave ten-minute talks on the civic value of the arts and humanities. The British Academy’s SHAPE acronym, answering the Royal Society’s STEM formulation, understandably stresses the economic importance of arts and humanities in today’s challenging technological world (E is for Economy). The remit of this forum, however, was to remake and reclaim arguments for the civic importance of arts and humanities, recognising that accounts of the arts are often based on 19th-century arguments that no longer have force today. Three themes emerge from this forum: the importance of collaboration, the non-instrumental significance of aesthetic experience, and the centrality of language to civic life. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
SHAPESTEMartshumanitiesciviccollaborationaestheticlanguage In 2022 and 2023 I organised, with advice from Helen Small, who chaired the first session, two roundtables on the Civic Value of the Arts and Humanities. The ten short commentaries in this collection are drawn from these ‘Fellows Engagement Week’ events. Speakers came from across the British Academy—from Theatre Studies, Anthropology, Modern History, History of Science, English, Philosophy, Music.
Necessarily, given the current insecure standing of the arts and humanities, much energy has been devoted to the economic importance of the arts and humanities. The British Academy’s ingenious acronym, SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) that is now familiarly used in contradistinction to the Royal Society’s STEM, makes the economy central to our projects. The Academy’s powerfully vigorous Manifesto for the Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, addressed to the incoming government, stresses the importance of the workforce, investment in technologies and an environment that is valued by innovators and investors. The Academy has conducted some significant research on SHAPE graduate outcomes and salaries through the key facts and figures on its SHAPE Observatory website. Other bodies, particularly the Institute for English Studies, have impressively and buoyantly defended the subject against wrongful accounts of its economic and skills deficit.1
An argument less well made, and sometimes forgotten, is for the communal and social valence of the arts and humanities and the centrality of aesthetic experience to our culture. The assumption of this Engagement Week project was that the familiar non-instrumental (and often 19th-century-derived) arguments in defence of the arts no longer work for us. The two Engagement Week sessions were therefore set up to remake and reclaim arguments for the civic importance of the arts and humanities. This is the context of the following discussions—though contributors often ranged beyond the civic in their explorations of value. Contributors were asked to create a ten-minute talk. Ten of these contributions are reproduced here. The informality of the pieces, with as little academic apparatus as possible, reflects the original setting. The original order of the two years of contributions has been abandoned in favour of a sequence where discussions reflect on each other and indeed sometimes become interlocutors of one another. What follows is a many-sided kaleidoscopic debate.
The Editors of the Journal have asked me to give a brief account of the rationale of the contributions. In what follows I will inevitably over-simplify the richness, enthralling imagination and scholarship of the writing. And before I embark on the work of precis, I must thank the very busy contributors (who never expected to have to formalise their original insights) for their generosity.
The first cluster of four commentaries pursues, in different ways, the meaning of collaboration. Simon Shepherd’s contribution on drama, ‘Tear here’, punctuated by clapping and readings, was a mini drama in itself. Theatre turns on collaboration: he contrasted the grass roots democratic collaborations of early-20th-century amateur drama (the municipal theatre movement, playgoers societies, the British Drama League in the UK, community playhouses in the US) with the community clapping during Covid, which became inauthentic because the applause had no real participatory base, past or future, in shared thinking. But collaboration, he demonstrated, is always fragile, ephemeral, always needs renewing.
Collaboration, heretofore barely envisaged, between scholars, researchers and refugees, is the theme of Peter Gatrell’s ‘A refugee history perspective’. Drawing on his research and scholarship in the archives of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Geneva, he demonstrates the urgency of replacing the persistent paradigm of the refugee, Barthes’ ‘eternal essence’—essentialised, de-historicised, de-politicised, often agonistic—by a perception of the refugee’s unique identity, agency and empowerment. To think with refugees and not about them is the aim. And to think also beyond the nation state. His own practice (and that of others) of collaborative writing and joint production with refugees is a means of avoiding reductive thinking. It draws attention to the multiple ethnicities, origins and political circumstances that make each refugee unique.
Dawn Chatty’s, ‘Contemplative solidarity’, an anthropological perspective on collaboration, reaches back to the great 14th-century Middle Eastern Jurist, Ibn Khaldun, and his sociology of ‘solidarity’ in social groups. Admired by Arnold Toynbee, he studied the rise and fall of urban civilisations grown distinct from desert culture and theorised failure as the collapse of solidarity. These insights are followed up in the work of the 20th-century anthropologist Jacques Maquet, who saw contemplative solidarity in social spaces set aside in ways that drew a community together—green spaces, galleries, museums, storytelling, even communal meals.
Sally Shuttleworth’s fascinating research into the founding of the civic universities—the case history is Sheffield, awarded a Charter in 1905—‘The UNIVERSITY will be for the people’, describes an institution set up certainly to enhance science and industry in the face of competition from Germany, with a remit to support coalmining and engineering, but with an equal commitment to serve the local community, to humanities courses, to public lectures and to the civic collaboration of university extension teaching. Outreach work by students themselves was encouraged. Sally discusses several formative figures, academics and philanthropists who shaped the university’s humanistic and arts agenda. Perhaps the outstanding VC (1919–30) is Sir William Henry Hadow who saw music as essential in schools and universities, and ‘a general and humane education’ as a prerequisite for citizenship. A commitment to the local characterises the civic university.
The next group of three commentaries is concerned with the category of the aesthetic: Greg Currie, ‘Art and civic values: the role of fiction-reading’, Julian Johnson, ‘Speaking for music?’, Georgina Born, ‘As though the ’80s never happened–recalibrating value through music’.
Greg Currie describes the search for evidence for what are generally left as a priori assumptions about the value of literature—the capacity of fiction-reading to produce empathy and moral insight. Empirical experiment and data analysis, though he sees these as necessary, only take us some way. The cognitive effects of lifetime reading, often self-reported and small scale, are difficult to gauge, since on repetition of tests results differ. Though large-scale meta-analysis of the cognitive effects of reading does yield a small-sized positive relationship between reading and cognitive benefit, a correlation is not a cause. He concludes that we should not give up testing: as testing is refined, so too the ethical and imaginative qualities that we value are more deeply conceptualised.
Julian Johnson, ‘Speaking for music?’, also engages with the scientific expectations of musicology and with empirical readings of music. He charts the new academic contexts of musicology—sociology, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, communication theory. But he insists that we explore what music affords beyond its instrumental uses, beyond consumerist thinking. Music’s unique non-linguistic modes of cognition and experience are crucial and constitute the aesthetic experience that is central to our lives. He invokes the transformative thinking about aesthetic experience that questions our modelling of the world explored by critics such as Rita Felski. But not before he has offered an account of Pelléas and Mélisande as an allegory of the mysterious muteness of music, its way of being embodied affective thought, that constantly challenges interpretation. This demonstrates a new kind of music criticism. Music’s absence from schools today is deeply regrettable, he concludes.
Georgina Born’s title, ‘As though the ’80s never happened–recalibrating value through music’, aligns her with Johnson, but her argument takes a different tack. Arguments for civic value will not be convincing unless we ‘get our own house in order’, she affirms. This means first, abandoning traditional but now irrelevant 19th-century arguments for art and, second, confronting current instrumental sociological readings of art. She describes the audit-led neoliberal reading of art—its reliance on extrinsic and mainly sociological criteria of legitimation (environment, health and wellbeing, for example). Her plea is not to abandon such criteria but to not think of the arts and humanities as if ‘this is all there is’. That music is ‘a vital medium for living’ and part of ‘a collective social force’, sustaining depleted lives, enabling participation among many different social groups, ethnicities and their different musics, is fundamental to its aesthetic force. This is a passionate argument.
The next two commentaries, James A. Secord’s ‘Violence and the public narratives of history of science’ and M.M. McCabe’s ‘Philosophy in prison’, both turn on language and its profound resonance in culture. (Regenia Gagnier’s contribution on two kinds of English, global English and world English and their very different place in civic life, the first neoliberal and the second cosmopolitan, would have belonged here. But an expanded version of her contribution has already appeared in the Journal (Gagnier 2024).)
James Secord heads his discussion with Rebecca Solnit’s remark that the revolt against brutality begins with the language of brutality. ‘Revolution is the wrong category for telling stories about science’, he writes, but the history of science is characterised by a persistent and stubborn taxonomy of revolution inevitably invoking the language of epistemic violence. Revolution emerges as a standardised shorthand around 1900 under the alibi of teaching scientific method and since then multiple revolutions have emerged, from the Copernican to the Darwinian. Secord instances Thomas Kuhn’s formative work on the structure of revolution (1962), but warns that the model of revolution brings along with it the repressed language of capital and empire. Moreover, cutting science off from global history, revolution narratives support an episteme of subjugation. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Fredric Jameson provide the counter-language that exposes the model of revolution.
M.M. McCabe’s ‘Philosophy in prison’ begins with the extraordinary restrictions on educational experience in prison, from the repercussions of overcrowding, to limits on taking degrees, to the 57 per cent of the prison population with literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old. Against these immense disadvantages Philosophy can do two things: because it is based on oral discussion in which all can engage, because it claims neither moral reform nor therapy but simply, as she puts it, an ‘equality of bewilderment’ in the face of perennial philosophical puzzles, in an environment when ‘no one knows best’: even when a culture of shouting pervades, it is enabling. Understanding the nature of discussion is at its heart. Discussion, secondly, restores identity and naming to the prisoner. No longer are they simply numbered and colour-coded according the category of their crime. Through discussion they become civic beings.
Conclusion
I left my own contribution on John Dewey to the end. Properly speaking it belongs to the group of commentaries on the aesthetic as a category, but I wanted to end with Dewey’s extraordinary optimism, his astonishing democratic belief that art makes us all into makers and creators and hence into thinkers. His lifelong commitment to progressive education gives him an important place in educational history and entailed impressive academic and scholarly publication. This and his deep belief in access to art for all, which entailed, with Albert C. Barnes, the amassing of an important post-impressionist art collection open to the public, belong to an era that looks to our neoliberal age, remote. But Dewey’s sustained intellectual work exists as a reminder that things can be otherwise.
A final word on the learning experience of organising this symposium. As I have remarked, the invention of the SHAPE acronym has certainly enabled a necessary economic, skills-based reading of the arts and humanities. The STEM/SHAPE duality tends to put these knowledges in opposition, as each becomes the deficit mode of the other, rather than sharing what they have in common. But it is a timely stratagem. Yet rather than the E-element for economic it is the P-element in SHAPE—People—that this group of discussions brings to the fore: theatre-goers, refugees, students, fiction-readers, music listeners, the deprived, the prisoners. And this makes it important to reiterate Georgina Born’s reminder that we can acknowledge the sociological and economic dimensions of the arts and humanities without ‘suggesting that this is all there is’.
What else is there then? Often the ‘what else’ is consigned to the arena of ‘creativity’. But what does creativity create? And why should a whole institutional structure of funded high research and scholarship be a corollary of the creative arts? The creativity argument on its own is not enough.
The arts and humanities are a culture’s way of thinking about itself past and present, imagining itself, re-thinking and re-imagining. This process is interrogative, reflexive, revisionary, an inquiry about knowledge and knowledges in many different arenas. It is collaborative and questioning, just as culture is not a unitary formation. At its centre is language. To be freed into language so that its analytical and expressive resources can be imaginatively understood and intellectually available in many different ways and contexts endows lives with social meaning. It is what enables civic experience. As in M.M. McCabe’s prison context, it enables people to become civic beings. This is both a skill and an expressive experience. The sophisticated abuses of language in the polis—racism, propaganda, disinformation—are so pervasive that a population critically aware of the resources of analysis is essential. This is the other side of a culture that can create and re-create the resources of language. Theatregoers, refugees, students, fiction-readers, music listeners, the deprived, the prisoners—coming into language is a civic education. I do not mean mechanical access to an abstract ‘standard’ language as skill. I mean the critical and creative use of language which leads both to delight and empowerment—and to new kinds of knowledge making. It is the arts and humanities that constantly renew our language, constantly becoming in the process new forms of knowledge. But this does not happen by accident. It is made possible by the existence of centres for learning. The institutional structures for learning, thinking, scholarship, are a prerequisite for generating a culture of language-makers.
List of contributors (with their British Academy ‘Section’ affiliations) and their contributions
Simon Shepherd (Culture Media and Performance): ‘Tear here’
Peter Gatrell (Modern History since 1850): ‘A refugee history perspective’
Dawn Chatty (Anthropology and Geography): ‘Contemplative solidarity’
Sally Shuttleworth (Modern Languages, Literatures and other Media from 1830): ‘“The UNIVERSITY will be for the people”: arts, humanities and the founding of the civic universities’
Greg Currie (Philosophy): ‘Art and civic values: the role of fiction-reading’
Julian Johnson (History of Art and Music): ‘Speaking for music?’
Georgina Born (Culture, Media and Performance): ‘As though the ’80s never happened–recalibrating value through music’
James A. Secord (Early Modern History to 1850): ‘Violence and the public narratives of history of science’
M.M. McCabe (Philosophy): ‘Philosophy in prison’
Isobel Armstrong (Modern Languages, Literatures and other Media from 1830): ‘The civic importance of John Dewey’s Art As Experience (1934)’
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is by Gilber Franco on Unsplash.
References
GagnierR. (2024), ‘Language and literature in the information economy: the state of English, English and the state’, Journal of the British Academy, 12: a11. https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a11
1
See the letter on the IES (Institute of English Studies) website to University of Kent arguing for English as a subject capable of entrepreneurial skills in a digital future (Professor Clare Lees, Director, IES: Professor Gail Marshall, Chair, University English, Professor Jennifer Richards, Chair, Higher Education Committee, English Association).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a32
Published on: 10 September 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 329
Article download count: 19
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Armstrong, I. (2024), ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—introduction’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a32 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a32Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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