Theory Pedagogy Politics: The Crisis of "The Subject" in the Humanities

Abstract

The contest over the structure and contents of the humanities curriculum has always been a struggle of various social classes and economic and political groups over the meaning of the social signs that intersect to form codes out of which the is constructed. What is at stake in the humanities curriculum, in other words, is the meaning of the in culture. The fact that almost all existing humanities programs will deny and reject the theory of the individual implied in our opening sentence is itself a mark of contestation. The traditional humanities curriculum is based on the idea that the individual is the cause and not the effect of social meanings: he is the origin of signification. In fact theoreticians of the traditionalist curriculum remind us constantly that the Liberal Arts program derives its authority from the two concepts inscribed in the term liberal, from the Latin liberus meaning The goal of the humanities program, they believe, is to educate this free man. However, they take both of these concepts to be self-evident and beyond the contingencies of history. Free and man are, in the traditionalists' theories, timeless essences on which the humanities curriculum is founded. The outcome of such an education is equally timeless and ahistorical; that outcome is, in