Neuroaesthetics and the Time-Spaces of the Academy
Debates are breaking out about the emerging field of neuroaesthetics — the effort to quantify, chart, and make “scientific” our experiences of art and affect. The Times Literary Supplement has recently entered the debate with
The debate has recently been extended in the Toronto Star to the time-space of academe. Stephen Marche observes that this whole kerfuffle is grappling with a moot point given that the market forces of academia “will do away with it long before its intellectual silliness has a chance to become apparent.”
He notes that although philology “is vital to scholarship […] almost nobody does it now.” Instead, theorists in the humanities and social sciences study “Deleuze or Irigary” since they can “get the gist in six months.” It follows, suggests Marche, that “the old academic books that took a lifetime of lecturing to produce, and which often were readable, and even beautiful, have no place.”
Marche’s suggestion is that the spaces of academe, whether or not neorobiology is able to inform them, do not have the patience for so complex a “problem.” Instead, he implies, with a focus on churning out publications and looking productive, graduate students and faculty develop vague aesthetically-inclined discourses, thereby condemning aesthetics (thankfully?) to an ongoing life of mystery. He explains:
Typically, young academics are given four years to write a Ph.D., during which time they are probably teaching a heavy load, paying their dues as cheap replacements for the professors the university can’t afford to hire. They must also publish articles if they want to be hireable once they graduate. If the student takes too long writing the dissertation, the university stops its financial “support,” which in the humanities is a term that must always be chaperoned by quotation marks. For junior professors, the institutional hunger for publications cannot ever be satisfied. They simply must always produce more — quality is unmeasurable so it is not measured. The spew of publications must be continual and prodigious. In such a system, who on earth is going to go to the trouble of learning neurology? If anyone were foolish enough to attempt it, by the time he or she had written anything, neuroscience would most likely have changed and the work would be worthless. Better and easier to rummage around the archives or the old enthusiasms, and find something manageable, like a dress Queen Victoria wore which you can relate to Great Expectations, or a few untapped sadomasochistic longings of John Donne. Neuroaesthetics is too lousy a gamble. There’s no need to bomb this airfield, the planes were never going to fly anyway.
- Matthew