To continue from last time, I want to think about some prospects and histories of the humanities in considering the phenomenon of a state-sponsored social tradition, specifically Confucianism in contemporary China.
Like the Confucian revival, Western liberal arts can also be seen as form of learning imposed from a top upon those below. The 20th-century humanities, especially since the 1980s, are of course of a different sort than the putative Confucian revival in China. I want to keep that comparison and contrast in mind in thinking of a alternate possibilities for our beloved useless arts.
"Belles-lettres: what are they good for?" That's the name of a pop song written by many a college-dad. At least this is true of Petrarch, whose father forced him into law school, which he hated and was always trying to get at his poetic calling. To page forward some, the humanities survived the evacuation of Christianity from powerful universities in the late 19th century in large part to give a bourgeois elite a purchase on the values that defined an emerging order. Aristotle portable for running Africa or India.
This kind of culture was promoted by big institutions and the men who aspired to their vision. In turn of the century America, the institutions were private, in parallel to the development of religious and earthly humanistic studies in the Islamic world as studied by George Makdisi. But, in modern times virtually all higher education in Western Europe and East Asia came at the direction of the state. In these areas, the wealthy countries, state interest in culture also intensified in the production and curation of what many people call classics in modern Western film, theater and the visual arts.
This abbreviates a complicated story, but I want to suggest that state sponsorship, even in aggressive and chauvinistic forms, is a defining part of many of us consider humanistic refinements. The US National Endowment for the Arts may not be to American art what Cinecittà is to Italian film, but managerial forms of control bound up in manipulable ideas of social good are part of both. So, what could those models of flourishing tell us about the possibilities of what authorities might have in China with their new interest in traditional arts and letters?
With the humanities in the state they're in, how do we think about the values of our traditions in the arts and letters with the specific possibilities present in the state-led Confucian revival? I suggest we shouldn't automatically be so suspicious of formations like the Confucius Institute. We should at least remember that non-Western studies in the US would probably never have spread and thrived without the Cold War sponsorship of strategic studies by the federal government.
If academic and institutional norms don't reduce to us-free, them-unfree formulas, what might a vital, engaged and different humanities look like under official auspices of someone like President Xi?
In China, the precedent I would think of would be an academic institution like the Beijing Film Academy and the Central Academy of Drama. From marquee-auteur directors like Zhang Yimou 张艺谋 and Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 to their leading stars like Zhang Ziyi 章子怡 and Gong Li 巩俐, these two alumni lists are the most important in the flowering of Chinese film in the last two decades. Their star power and political savvy steered the industry out of the propaganda form into critical and commercial global standing, and they did it when so much else in China was shutting down.
Great directors may still need to sell out to earn blessings, and often their daring early work is obscured by mainland censors. Nevertheless, the carefully-supervised movie business has room now for skillful artists to negotiate the film-festivals and the broader market making movies as sharp, as sensual and as serious as any I've seen in the Atlantic film world. Might we imagine a state-run Chinese humanities similarly open to talented scholars? Might this in fact be easier when so many important academics already occupy quasi-bureaucratic roles in think-tanks and advisory boards?
To conclude, I want to think about the analogy of film and scholarship in a different light. Aside from these auteurs, most Chinese movies broad and forgettable, conservatively adherent in story-form and content. That is to say, it is hard to compare them favorably to most Hollywood movies at any given time. The point is that the excesses and incongruities of the system sometimes let through beautiful and challenging work.
If the humanities grow in China with state sponsorship, the system that directs or challenges thoughtful scholarship will be different than ours. However, at a time when the liberal arts are in serious trouble in the liberal West, we shouldn't limit our thinking to concern about the convenience or chauvinism of a Confucian humanities. We need to be more aware of the partiality and politics of our own disciplinary formation to appreciate how others might work.
