For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because “something similar happened to me recently” (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type. You’ve certainly met these people or been taught by them; they are often motivated by personal attachments to specific works, and my hunch is that they represent the majority of those who care about art today.

Secondary Source People are different; they become obsessed with the discourse about the objects being studied. Professional critics, “theory bros” (gender neutral), Letterboxd reviewers who primarily read other Letterboxd reviews, the weirdly combative people in your seminars who know all about the different scholarly camps on a topic—this group prioritizes the conversations, contexts, and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves. Secondary Source People are the main contingent both producing and consuming academic writing. For them, the question of a text’s beauty or capacity to immerse is less important than how its ideas expand or contract as we engage with them.

I realize this demographic distinction is crude, filled with exceptions, and only helpful up to a point, but I stand by it as a general heuristic. Personally, I’m a secondary source guy. I took a great deal of pleasure, for example, reading Frankenstein for the first time in English 101, but what I loved most was situating that text in an intellectual conversation that extended into the present. Discovering that Shelley’s creation was an answer to Malthusian theories of population, a critique of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, a conversation with Locke’s philosophy of mind—and thus a problem for contemporary discussions of feminism, humanism, eugenics, and colonialism—made the novel more interesting, more complicated, and more fun to read. None of those connections could have been made in advance of additional secondary reading; they aren’t points of data that, once established, now and forever adhere to the primary source; they are arguments whose coherence requires readers work their way through the recalcitrance of rhetorical language and construct those interpretive associations. To get there, to experience those distinct pleasures, you have to interact with secondary sources, and that sphere of cultural production hasn’t been faring so well in the popular imagination lately. 

If you’ve glanced at the news, you’ve probably noticed that Secondary Source People are on the back foot. Not only have conservatives—with the help of many liberals—set the discursive terms of the culture wars as a battle between “appreciation” and “critique,” but there’s also a growing consensus from both ends of the political spectrum that academic cultural criticism is essentially bad: boring, impenetrable, hermetic, pointless.

To give just one example: Every few months, the internet goes berserk over one specific quotation from Judith Butler, excerpted from a 1997 Diacritics article, where the philosopher describes the contributions of poststructuralist theory to contemporary Marxist thought. This is not a niche topic; it’s part of an intellectual history that has launched a thousand special issues, been anthologized in multiple readers, and summarized in countless classrooms, and Butler presents it in language that is absolutely the norm for continental philosophy. And yet, here is the paragraph that makes online cultural crusaders shit their pants twice a quarter:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Someone, usually an anti-woke Christopher Rufo–type, circulates this passage as evidence of everything wrong with the humanities today: its jargon, its circumlocution, its irrelevance. And even though this provocation is always made in bad faith—no Butler-hater is going to be swayed by the rebuttal that “hegemony,” “structural totalities,” and “Althusserian theory” are coherent terms with robust genealogies—humanities sympathizers nevertheless reply from the already compromised position that actually, you guys, this is not nonsense—it really means something! “Sure,” the Butler defenders respond, “the writing isn’t great, but…” or “yes, the language could be simplified, but...,” and then provide a condensed, bite-sized version of the passage that reads like (and maybe is) an AI synopsis. Everything about the endlessly repetitive Butler discourse cycle sucks, but especially humanists’ capitulation to the premise that our bad writing is obscuring our already barely legible and essentially inconsequential ideas about the world.

The extent to which humanists themselves distrust and despise humanities scholarship is depressing, and it’s paved the way for increasingly hostile calls from both inside and outside the house. Recently, The Atlantic (“a sort of conservatism-laundering machine for liberal elites,” in Samuel Catlin’s indelible phrasing) blamed faculty’s leftist biases for exacerbating the obviously MAGA-led assault on higher education in the U.S. Meanwhile, a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences”—drafted by the analytic philosopher Paul Boghossian and a handful of likeminded co-signers—accused humanists of trafficking in relativism, obscurantism, and social justice–motivated scholarship. The report masquerades as a clarion call for objectivity and neutrality but, as Greg Afinogenov has recently pointed out, is more stridently political than the fields it seeks to police. 

Like many conservative critiques of academia, the Boghossian Report is obsessed with making shit up and getting mad about it. During one of Boghossian’s many insincere caveats that not all ideology critique is bad, he nevertheless hallucinates “an intellectual climate in which any sympathetic treatment of Milton’s poetry is automatically coded as reactionary on the ground that Milton is a god of the high art canon whose entrenchment can only serve the interests of the ruling class.” I’ll just state outright that what Boghossian describes does not and has never actually happened, and any cursory glance at the current state of Milton scholarship confirms this. Moreover, not only does the report exhibit the worst kind of “primary source” thinking—i.e., a text can only be engaged productively if your professor really loves it—it dovetails perfectly with the perspectives of purportedly progressive humanists who claim that defunded departments and declining enrollments are the result of scholars underappreciating their aesthetic objects. 

There are many problems with the Boghossian Report, but the most glaring and the most representative of all attempts to pathologize humanities scholarship is that its authors neither want nor know how to read. I mean this very literally. Two long quotations, one from Jacques Derrida and one from the physicist/philosopher Karen Barad, are presented (like the Butler quotation) without commentary or context, save the observation that they are “obscure.” Obscure is an interesting pejorative here, because it rhetorically elides the sense of difficulty with the sense of minor or unknown; that thousands upon thousands of scholars have overcome this difficulty says more about Boghossian and company than it does about Derrida.

In a reference to Gayatri Spivak’s field-defining essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” meant to highlight its complicity with the demise of reason in the academy, Boghossian et al. write, “A central claim of post-colonial theory is that hegemonic powers have employed the rhetoric of objective history and social science to suppress subaltern voices.” This is an undergraduate-level misunderstanding of the argument, which elaborates almost the exact opposite thesis on its very first page: that Western philosophers, famous for their so-called relativism, nevertheless locate subalternity as the site of unmediated, “objective” truth. Ironically, what Spivak diagnoses here as the fantastical desire to bypass the problem of interpretation—the desire to see reality “as it is” without the mediators of language, culture, and figuration—is exactly what Boghossian and company hope to achieve in their contextless block-quoting, what the online summarizers seek to make of Butler’s prose, as well as what many humanists today advocate for in turning away from the technical vocabulary of “theory” toward personal experience and memoir. The assumption that language obscures our access to the real, rather than constitutes it, haunts each of these accounts. What they share, in other words, is the desire to capture the discrete kernel of singular meaning in all its ahistoric immediacy without the work of reading. This is a bad thing, and in capitulating to the assumption that it’s desirable, we’re ceding too much to our enemies and abdicating our own vocation. 

I have to be blunt here: Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy. We need to stop taking their trolling in good faith, and we need to stop apologizing for our work. The truth is that every purportedly obvious problem with humanities writing—every bogeyman of bias, difficulty, obscurity, and irrelevance—dissolves into something else, something much more interesting, as soon as we wade into the spaces where the scholarship exists. What actually happens when we read the words on the page, look up the key terms, push against the ideas in a text, scan a bibliography, find the sources, identify a conversation, and put down our own thoughts in language? What happens when we act like real Secondary Source People? 

To return to the infamous Judith Butler passage, doing so would help us move beyond the false binary of utter nonsense and unquestioning reverence that its critics present as our only interpretive options. Butler’s synopsis is not infallible, but its tensions exist at the level of form—i.e., the matter of how its terms are laid out—rather than the literal level of its content. Butler’s use of words like “contingent,” “repetition,” and “rearticulation” characterize poststructuralism as bringing dynamism to 20th-century Marxism, whose alleged stasis as a theory is signaled by the different cluster of terms “structure,” “totality,” and “homology.” This is a rhetorical opposition, a strategy of argumentation rather than a taken-for-granted “fact” about the sources at hand. All of a sudden, though, the world opens up, and a new set of questions arise: Is Butler’s characterization of this historical shift accurate? Does poststructuralism see itself as bringing movement to static systems? Does this thing called “Althusserian theory” fail to address contingency and change in its account of power? Butler’s summary produces its own set of unstable binaries that may not hold upon closer examination. 

Closer examination is key here, and it’s only at this level that the cultural phantoms of the humanities crisis begin to dissolve in front of our eyes. Where is the “political bias” located here? The question of deconstruction’s politics is debated to this very day; the answer is not in this paragraph. Where is the “epistemic relativism”? Butler is attempting to provide a concrete account of 20th-century intellectual history; the point of these sentences is precisely that reality is not “anything we want it to be.” Where is the notorious difficulty? Certainly not in the words themselves (provided you’re literate); rather, the difficulty is elsewhere, in the connections with other texts that inform this one, and in the shorthands and condensations Butler is by necessity performing to make their argument. 

Very smart people have already defended humanities scholarship for its difficulty as well as its sometimes intimidating specialization. Jordy Rosenberg, in the now-defunct AVIDLY section of the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote a wonderful personal essay about the joys of struggling with Judith Butler’s ideas specifically. My point here is not to defend the alleged properties of our writing—which, as I’ve suggested, are mostly projections—but rather the specific reading practices already intrinsic to humanities teaching and research that attend to the difficulties of making thought manifest in language. Call it form, call it figuration, call it rhetoric; these are the features of communication that render its use irreducible to the simple transmission of data bytes and incompatible with the reactionary desire for immediacy. 

Secondary Source People recognize the immense pleasures of reading academic scholarship, where agreement and disagreement are two of the least interesting responses. Just as importantly, their skills are portable. When I was an instructor at the Princeton Writing Program, I taught a course called “Living With Parasites,” which required reading a great deal of STEM research on everything from toxoplasmosis to the “parasite-stress hypothesis,” the insane but also hilarious idea that societies derive their political alignments based on their geographical proximity to infectious parasites. While preparing the course, I was apprehensive: How was I going to get 18-year-olds to argue productively with “hard” science? These anxieties evaporated as soon as I saw how scientists actually write. The assumptions that fields other than the humanities are operating in some value-neutral world devoid of metaphors and cultural values, or that the only ways students can engage with these works require the mediation of laboratories and technical equipment, disappear from the very first sentence. Scientists use terms like “social behavior,” “human cognition,” “collectivism,” and “individualism” as if they are self-evident, and they relate them causally to one another in ways you cannot even imagine. At one point, our class realized the claim that toxoplasmosis infections increase “risky” behavior in humans relied on a psychology study testing the willingness of participants to hand over their wallets to examiners. And it’s precisely because of these opacities and leaps in logic that reading this sort of work is fun: The world reveals itself to us in a rewritten form, and the only way out is through. 

Every day, scientists are allowed to publish sentences like, “Many assume there is a close connection between human history and culture (Donaldson 2019)," and yet English departments are the problem? It’s crazy that amidst our unending contrition we’ve forgotten a truism of academic life: that humanists are very obviously the best writers. Even our most cringe takes are good. A few years ago, people on the internet popped off at the title of a 2015 essay by Cara Daggett published in The International Feminist Journal of Politics called “Drone Disorientations: How ‘Unmanned’ Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War.” You can imagine the responses: Conservatives hated it because it sounds gay, and leftists hated it because it appears to make light of imperial violence, a literalization of the “I Sexually Identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter” meme. Real Secondary Source heads know that both accounts were wrong: The essay fucking rocks, and it does so because of its woke, granular, and idiosyncratic weirdness. The first thing you notice when actually cracking open a text like this is how obviously, incontrovertibly correct its premises are: Of course technologies are gendered; of course they facilitate different orientations toward embodiment; of course these orientations are harnessed to rationalize acts of violence. No one understands these connections better than the U.S. military, who, in embracing drone warfare, have inadvertently created a new class of emasculated assassins: soft, domesticated, gamer-like. Daggett’s essay is filled with incredible examples from both popular and institutional culture characterizing drone pilots as “Dilbert[s] at War,” the “chair force,” dropping Hot Pockets on their laps, playing with their little joysticks, and doing errands for their wives between missions. Daggett’s point is that when the “warrior ideal” of sovereign masculinity undergoes drone mediation, both the pilots and the organization are confronted with a messaging problem.

Again, though, the pleasures of engaging with this kind of work are inextricable from the problems of its argument, the way its thinking occasionally works against itself in surprising ways. Daggett is writing at a moment in Queer Theory when the word “queer” cleaves in two directions at once: on the one hand, as a descriptive designator of non-normativity (in this case, the feminized, hypermediated, “cyborg” body of the drone pilot), and on the other, as a prescriptive shorthand for an undefined subversive potential. “Drones have opened up an unusual moment of vertigo in the gender-war matrix,” writes Daggett, a situation that “inspires both anxiety and hope.” Daggett’s pre-Trump allegiance with “hope” feels particularly wrongfooted here, a function of contradictions internal to queer theory rather than the evidence under analysis. The “queerness” of drone warfare’s gender disorientations is interesting less as a site of individual resistance to American empire than as a structural problem to be contained—for example, in Pete Hegseth’s plans to provide complimentary testosterone therapy to troops as a way to “stabilize” masculinity at the biological level. It’s hard to imagine a more strident acknowledgement of gender’s queerness, but we’re in Woke 2 now, and “queer” is not synonymous with “good.”

Written off for its title online, “Drone Disorientations” would make a fascinating teaching object. Of course, the capacity to do that kind of interdisciplinary work in the classroom is rapidly dwindling. Harvard University just laid off its Writing Program Director along with dozens of other staff in a “restructuring” that many speculate is motivated by the school’s embrace of AI models. We’re occupying a strange political moment in which humanities work is both massively undervalued and everywhere extracted as a valuable resource. Recently, the AI company Anthropic settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit involving over 300,000 plaintiffs for stealing archives of 7 million digitized books without compensation. During the proceedings, internal documents emerged revealing what the company called “Project Panama,” “our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” not just digital ones.

Just as the end of reading coincides with a massive arms race for text, the end of universities coincides with a voracious cultural desire for message board–style soundbites of streamlined information. The internet is full of hapless would-be Deleuzians who want things explained to them right now. As higher education comes under ever-escalating right-wing assaults, “restructuring,” and austerity measures, it makes no sense to concede that we humanists are part of the problem. Our work is being made impossible to perform whether we like it or not. If that puts me in the Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong camp, then so be it. I’d even go a step further: We’re one of the last bastions of Good Brain Thinking today—wokeness, esotericism, and nitpickiness included. Against the forces of anti-intellectual fascists and AI tech lords, self-flagellating academics and immediacy fetishists alike, we need to champion the difficulties and pleasures of humanities scholarship with our whole chests.