“Lesbian Dance Theory” & English Departments

My response to an attack on left-wing humanities

Yesterday, I was listening to Andrew Sullivan’s podcast, and he was interviewing the English cultural critic Douglas Murray. They were discussing Trump’s attacks on universities, and they lamented that Trump was going after the sciences, which they agreed were actually useful, when in fact it would be nice if Trump could target his enmity, contempt, and budget cuts at the humanities. At one point, they have this exchange:

Sullivan: Well, how about a straightforward one then? Either these universities pay for themselves and the strange cults that they like to cultivate, or they could cut the things that aren't research. I mean, I don't want America not to be at the cutting edge of STEM.

Murray: Well, I don’t think it needs to be at the cutting edge of lesbian dance theory. And I don't think it needs to be at the forefront of the dialectics of post-colonial, post-brain fart stuff. None of this stuff is any use. None of it’s done anything. All of the aims to problematize everything. They’ve never solved a problem, these departments. They’ve created problems … So no American taxpayer’s money should go to any institution that does that crap.

Having seen some of the nonsense that gets taught to unsuspecting students in elite humanities departments, I am sympathetic to this sort of sneering. The sneering even feels good, for a minute or two. But it is ultimately silly, and advocates of the Western humanistic tradition, like Sullivan and Murray, should know better.

They are making a thought mistake, which is this: “In a less politicized [or smarter, or saner] world, we could have college English classes that never taught theory or literary criticism that seemed silly, politicized, or unsupportable. What’s more, the teaching of literature would never be infected by identity politics or contemporary political agendas.”

The problem is that, even if such a state of affairs were entirely desirable, that is not the way free inquiry works. Free inquiry in the humanities is, at heart, an ongoing conversation. It’s not a science; there is no “right” answer, but rather attempts to make sense of how literature (say) affects us the way it does, how it works, why certain art succeeds with certain audiences, etc. If we see the humanities as a conversation (often an evidence-based one, to be sure), then we can realize that, in any conversation, especially one with many participants that takes place across time and space, some people will have silly ideas. Some people will have ideas that seem silly at the time but later seem more sensible—while others will have ideas that seem perfectly reasonable at the time, but later seem insane (“How could anyone have believed that?”).

That is not a bug of conversation—it’s a feature. A conversation in which nobody ever floated a daft idea would be a painfully circumscribed one. In talking about Macbeth, there will always be people with hackneyed ideas about it; others with predictable ideas; others with adventuresome ideas; others with ideas that at first seem radical, even crazy. That is how conversation with lots of people goes.

To be fair to Murray et al., their response would probably be, “Sure, but the crazies should be among the students—they should not be the paid, tenured professors.” And I agree that the best departments are the ones that have promoted the adults in the room, the ones with a bit of wisdom and good bullshit detectors. But even then, they will want to advance knowledge, not rehash it. To take Murray’s example, which he apparently thinks is slam-dunk: is it not possible—even likely—that lesbians might have a different relationship to dance (in some cases) than straight people? In traditional partner dance, the male leads—what happens when there is no male? Might certain dance styles have evolved at lesbian bars and clubs? What about dancing at women’s music festivals—there were unique dances that emerged at Grateful Dead concerts, so why not in lesbian music scenes?

(For the curious, here is the Google Scholar search page on “lesbian dance.”)