If the humanities were ever really locked up in the proverbial ivory tower, they are no more. The arts and humanities play highly diverse roles in contemporary culture. The "culture wars" of recent decades alone indicate how strongly Americans from all walks of life feel about their cultural inheritance and its future. But the strength of our cultural allegiances is matched only by their complexity. We do not divide neatly into lovers of "high" vs. "popular" culture, "canonical" vs. "diverse" curricula, techies vs. Luddites, and the fact that we are conflicted within ourselves may well be one reason we we have fought so hard over National History Standards and the funding of Piss-Christs and elephant-dung Madonnas.

We constantly cross the very cultural boundaries we defend (though, of course, we don't always know it). Few people write more movingly about Greek literature than Toni Morrison. Vanessa Mae's breathtaking video arrangement of Scottish airs was a huge crossover hit. Academic knowledge can be found in unexpected places; when Barbie and Ken are garbed as "King Arthur and Queen Guinevere of Camelot," their costumes are as meticulously researched as any period drama on film. Shakespeare is more popular than ever; academics study hip-hop; corporations use the findings of organizational psychologists and Feng Shui consultants to develop management strategies and improve employee morale, and the State Department still asks psychoanalysts for help in developing profiles of foreign leaders. Undergraduates at Bible colleges are more likely to major in communications than in the Judaeo-Christian literary canon. A team of high techies recently featured on the television show Junkyard Wars called themselves the "Geek Deconstructionists." Terry Jones, of Monty Python and the Holy Grail fame, is the author of a scholarly book about Chaucer's Knight's Tale.; this summer "Chaucer" was a character in the movie A Knight's Tale. The author of the Harry Potter books may really have been a poor single mother unable to afford xeroxing, but her work nonetheless draws very effectively on the venerable and "comfortably-off" tradition of boarding-school novels, like Witch Week and The Mystery of the Secret Marks. Academic and popular culture, the sciences and the humanities, policy wonking and bestsellers crisscross every day in every way.

But we often seem to think otherwise. Respect for the arts and humanities may not be at an all-time low, but surely we must be getting there. According to Engell & Dangerfield, by 1994 there were four times as many business majors as English majors; on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, only 9 percent of students now indicate interest in the humanities. Not unexpectedly therefore, verbal ability is falling by every measure. The average number of words in the written vocabulary of a 6- to 14-year-old American child in 1945 was 25,000; the average number today is 10,000. (Harper's Index, 8/2000). Should this alarm us? It doesn't even seem to send us scurrying for our checkbooks, let alone the barricades. As Lewis Lapham notes, Bush made the "education crisis" the keystone of his presidential campaign, offering $13.5 billion over five years, with Gore offering $115 billion over ten years—but both are "negligible sums when compared with the price of an aircraft carrier or the annual cost of the milk subsidy." Neither Bush nor the U.S. Congress made education (of any sort—technical, scientific, humanistic) a keystone of the recent federal budget, despite the fact that last year 76% of respondents to opinion polls were more worried about education that anything else on the national agenda (Lapham). Why don't we care? Is it that the downturn in the economy has given 76% of us other things to worry about? Are we all doing home schooling? Is it because we believe that occupational majors like "transportation" and "computer security" or "pre-business" courses in economics will guarantee us financial well-being even if we can't construct a paragraph?

Unfortunately, occupational majors "fail to demonstrate that they're better preparation than the liberal arts and sciences for their associated occupations and professions" (Engell and Dangerfield). Prominent architecture schools, for example UT Austin, are phasing out "pre-architecture" majors because graduates of such programs have too little knowledge of the world and of history to make good architects. According to Engell and Dangerfield, "medical schools do not prefer particular majors, not even biology, as long as basic pre-med courses are taken successfully. The Association of American Law Schools recommends courses that stress reading, writing, speaking, critical and logical thinking. Law schools report that by yardsticks of law review and grades, their top students come from math, the classics, and literature." Apparently we don't need to try to defend the arts and humanities on the grounds that they help us lead the examined life. Even for those who want higher salaries and little else, studying the liberal arts turns out to be a very practical idea. But why, on the whole, do we ignore these facts? Why is the fruitfulness of humanities research and teaching for our national creativity and productivity such a well-kept secret?

One thing we need to stress if we are going to explore this question is that the arts and humanities function as a "spectacular example"—one might even say scapegoat—for larger anxieties about the nature of knowledge. Early in the twentieth century, scientists—way ahead of postmodernists—thought up relativity, uncertainty principles, and probability theory. (Roughly contemporary forays into hermeneutics, like Wimsatt's critique of the "intentional fallacy" and Empson's study of ambiguity, seem tame by comparison.) Now we have chaos theory, which, insofar as it has migrated into the humanities, hasn't stopped very many humanists from thinking about history in fairly traditional ways. Biologists frankly acknowledge that they can't define "life," a puzzlement made even richer by the possibility of "virtual life," and the study of light has produced a now-proverbial example of the rôle played by the observer in constructing his or her observations: is light a wave or a particle? It depends on how you look at it. One almost feels that the humanities, far from being responsible for the erosion of our belief in "truth," have been rather stodgy and behindhand in questioning verities like "period" or the "author." Can the idea that there is no single text, but only freeze-framed moments of intertextuality, really be powerful enough to undermine Western Civilization by comparison with the idea that the sine qua non of the "organism" is a "vesicle?" Despite the very real differences between the scientific commitment to testability and "verifiable result," on the one hand, and on the other the humanistic curiosity about the very elements of virtuosity, singularity, or historical context that hamper the quantitative and experimental production of verifiable results, it behoves us always to remember that the siences and quantitative social sciences have been, at the very least, staunch companions of the arts and humanities in emphasizing the role of the interpreter in interpretation and even, in some cases, the productivity of ambiguity. Most humanists today would agree that experimentation with models, fictions, and even "metaphors" (all terms used by scientists) is a form of action on the world rather than a failure to know its truth. The social sciences have pointed out repeatedly that, e.g., anthropologists create artifacts rather than factual accounts, since their presence transforms the very cultures they mean to record dispassionately; but social science has also repeatedly stressed that these inventions are still adjudicable. The "difference" made by the humanities—e.g. its supposedly exclusive postmodernist rôle in the erosion of credence and credibility—is used to symbolize a fault line that runs through knowledge-production in general. Experimental physicists are prone to regard theoretical physicists as delusional; theoretical physicists often see experimental physics as mere gadget-love. When Frank Gehry was training to become an architect, his fellows avoided art students like the plague because the latter always seemed to want to make some kind of "statement" and therefore were not "objective." Sociologists and other social scientists still fight over whether quantification or interpretation is the essence of their discipline(s). Throughout the twentieth century, linguists had major debates about whether langue or parole, "competence" or "performance" is the right or most important level at which to study the phenomenon of language. Historians can't decide whether they gather and present facts from the archives or tell stories. Are stories themselves counterfactual statements or meaningful constructs whose validity (elegance of argument, use of evidence, knowledge of similar objects and so on) can be judged by comparison with others? And what's history good for anyway? Does study of the history of cinema have any actual value to the study of film production? If even educators ignore the power of invention and interpretation in the production of knowledge, why do we hope that re-educating other Americans about the arts and humanities can accomplish anything?.

Lapham thinks that corporate America is responsible for our woes because it wants a public that "asks for little else except the comfort of being constantly amused." It's not hard to read things this way; a recent puff-piece praised Stanford University's innovative approach to the education crisis, namely, bringing corporations into the university so that research can be more carefully guided by considerations of future profitability. (One of the biggest problems with this idea is that science does its best work when allowed to work or play freely, a fact not always lost on corporations themselves, however often it may be lost on universities.) Humanities departments are also being asked to make their offerings more resonant with business, for example by developing special M.A. programs offered outside the confines of regular curriculum and program requirements. We return the interest, researching corporate culture and its products, teaching courses on hypertext fiction, gaming, and the effects of satellite technology (Liu, Newfield, Silver). But even those of us fascinated by the differences corporate culture makes often doubt their value, and many of us are manning the barricades. Julia Kristeva calls us to action in one of her recent books: "the primacy of the market economy over the body is certainly something to worry about, perhaps even to become dramatic about"; "the very notion of culture as revolt and of art as revolt is in peril, submerged as we are in the culture of entertainment."

Anxieties about the debilitating effects of amusement have been around for a very long time. Kristeva can speak of our being "submerged" in the culture of entertainment because the semantic history of "entertainment" includes the "semes" of boundary-dissolution and softening of perception. She can speak of a "culture of entertainment" because of the related semes of a power that draws energy to itself and/or takes things over. In contemporary usage, the phrase "entertainment value" usually implies three things: entertainment does have some kind of value; something that has entertainment value isn't very valuable otherwise; and (paradoxically) this very lack of value is what gives entertainment its ability to enchant and manipulate both masses and individuals. "Entertainment" now is always already "lite"; yet again, its triviality is held responsible for its power to stupefy an entire planet, raise the violence levels of entire populations, corrupt youth with porn, and destroy cultural diversity. The apparent contradiction in this attitude toward entertainment (a useless little fiction like Harry Potter nonetheless has the power to turn our children into stsinatas)* is a characteristic of anxiety, and we need to inquire into what anxiety is, how it works and why, and how this knowledge might help us to help ourselves. We hope to address these three questions, among others, in our conference on "Entertainment Value."

Throughout its history, "entertainment" has straddled the fault line between individual and group experience. It has been linked with the semes of "holding mutually," or "holding intertwined." These semes appear in discourses on community; "entertain" could indicate "supporting" or "sustaining" an entire country in "a certain state or condition." But it could also mean holding a particular someone "intertwined," that is, supporting or maintaining relations with someone, and even communicating with them. could mean "to hold mutually, to hold intertwined," "to keep a . . . country in a certain state or condition," to support or maintain relations or communicate with someone. So, in addition to—and subtending—the notion of mass appeal, "entertainment" has designs on another person's mind or soul or psyche: to entertain is to "engage" or "occupy" the attention, thoughts, or time of a person, and only thence "fill up, while away time." The seme "occupy" can head in at least two, apparently contradictory, directions: "occupying time," meaning filling up something empty with something that has value only as filler; and "occupying someone's attention," meaning, as it were, absorbing and binding them ("engage"), keeping them to oneself and away from others. It is clear, at least, that one aspect of the anxiety-structure associated with entertainment is the capacity of the self to absent itself, to become engaged with or to be possessed by matters of quite indifferent importance to the individual. Anxiety specifically is fear of future developments, here in the form of the question of how time ("whiling away time") might become empty and thereby empty us out. Entertainment perhaps assuages but also clearly points to the problem of the emptiness of time. Supposedly it is the enemy of a boredom that has the power to isolate the subject from the world, there being nothing in it to interest him, and even from himself. This function of amusement is addressed in contemporary psychology as "self-distraction" from "unwanted thoughts" (White Bears)—thoughts being, of course, the only things capable of anticipating what doesn't yet exist, things that are negligible—little fictions, not real catastrophes—but yet have the power to oppress us when linked to the semes of realization ("my fears came true," "O my prophetic soul") and defensive anticipation ("I'm going to get him before he gets me"). The power of entertainment to incite violence is an important topic and has received much discussion from the mainstream media. Where boredom is concerned—its nature, structure, processes, significance for individual and group subjectivity—one hears it remarked that "kids don't have enough to do" and that's why they get into trouble, whether "trouble" means obsessive video gaming or shooting the place up; and many critiques of consumer culture attribute to popular entertainment the power to dull the passions, to hold us in suspense with the minimum possible degree of excitement. Boredom and anxiety may seem prima facie to be almost at opposing ends of the spectrum of human affect, but boredom is actually difficult to tolerate precisely because it entails a rapid build-up of anxiety. Exploring the nature of boredom will, we hope, open up fresh approaches to social and cultural dilemmas currently in impasse.

Entertainment" seems to offer, much more pointedly than "art," pleasures whose purpose is to alleviate boredom and anxiety, e.g. the time of "waiting," itself an important seme in the avant-garde discourses of the earlier twentieth century. This is one reason why "entertainment" has also, throughout its history, straddled the fault line between the sublime and the trivial or even ridiculous. It is linked to the semes of passing the time ("pastime") or happening in between ("interlude"). But while it's whiling away the time, it can take hold within us; to "entertain" is not only "to admit an idea into consideration" but also "to keep, hold, or maintain in the mind with favor; to harbor; to cherish" (my emphasis). Thus it's understood in this semantic range that pleasure helps to fix things in the mind. Forming attachments to objects or activities is thus difficult to separate from the experience of pleasure. The "fixed impression" pleasure enables in the subject is decisively, in the semantic range of entertainment, the fixed impression of "the other." "Entertainment" happens when the other, even when the-group-as-other, is implanted in the subject and held there by pleasure, more specifically by the promise of a repetition of the pleasurable experience; i.e. against our anxiety we hold, in reserve, the object that we intend to have a future with, or which has a future within our minds. That processes meant to assuage anxiety can also exacerbate it—this is what happens when we worry about the value of entertainment—is not surprising, since the aim of anxiety (the future) is always by definition out of reach, the inevitable result of which is anxiety about whether one is trying to reach that future in an effective way (meaning also, whether the object one has chosen to help out in this quest is any good). Since verifiability of the object's worth is is by definition banned (it can only happen in the future, and then has to be repeated again and again because there's always more future), the further result is a restlessness specifically about choice and decision-making. Thus inflected by anxiety, the object that will keep us going will ideally be as emptied out as possible; that is, fixing this or that particular object in the mind will soothe but also generate further anxiety, so what is wanted above all is (repeated) verification of the possibility of such an object, i.e. putting the object itself into the future as not yet proven incapable; what's wanted is, in Derrida's sense, a "spectral" object. Hence the remote control, fandom, and the allure of flexible character-construction in contemporary video gaming.

Anxiety about the influence of the very object meant to assuage anxiety ("I'm afraid to love") is a function (or possibly vice-versa) of the semantic positioning of "entertainment" at the crossroads between individual and group experience. When we're inveighing against it, "entertainment" can either turn us into zombies or confine us to the awesome solitude of technogeek basement dwellings (The Score). More benignly, we have "let me entertain you" [my emphasis]. The emphasis in the semantic range of "entertainment" on the possible or spectral object makes "me" and "you" simultaneously more abstract and even more compelling.

Entertainment" has thoughout its history emphasized the role of "the other" (which can be ideas or countries as well as people) in the production of pleasure and the knowledge of pleasure ("taste," "culture," "sophistication," "sensitivity," and so on). The links between entertainment and the semes associated with "play" are also particularly important. Children entertain themselves—that is, they play--and as a consequence become inventive. But they have learned how to entertain themselves from others. Caregivers spend at least as much time entertaining babies as they do feeding them or even soothing them. Entertaining can be soothing, and vice-versa; and both happen while or because babies are eating or being warmed or washed. Entertainment therefore always appeals to bodily experience, and hence to production as well as reproduction: making the body more sublime, extending its power over time and space, by means of the production of prosthetic objects. Merlin Donald (Origins of the Modern Mind) argues that the ability to imagine hypothetical situations and therefore "fictions" (i.e. things that could happen in the future) is crucial to the process of tool-making (i.e., technology). The preparation of the body for the future points to making as a means of alleviating future shock (I use the latter term loosely). We might be tempted to see entertainment as that which happens in between periods of productivity. But given the importance of the seme of "fiction" to anxiety as well as to production, we should explore the situation further.

As Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain, we remake our world in order to extend our powers of perception and sensation. Telescopes allow us to "see" the stars; strange, elaborate go-carts allow us to creep along the bottom of the ocean. But these tools and artifacts also extend our capacity for enjoyment. Just as the body protects the vital organs, the Taj Mahal protects the body, but foregrounds the function of beauty. It is a ridiculously sublime and extravagant setting for a passionately desired body. The Taj Mahal is a symbol for how the body is never "merely" something to be kept alive or used to reproduce, but rather is always "for" enjoyment; there is always something "beyond necessity" from which "necessity" can never disentangle itself. Caregivers don't exclusively entertain babies to distract them from things they want that they can't have, etc.; they entertain babies because it gives them pleasure to do so. Many people can't walk past a perfectly unknown baby without smiling. Many of us stop to utter meaningless sounds—i.e. the signifier in its purest and most basic function of making an attempt on the other—and/or to help babies internalize images of the body as enjoyable ("look at your little fingers! aren't they adorable!"—not "look at your little fingers! someday soon they'll be pumping gas!"). And babies mirror back to us these attempt to amuse. They become subjects in large part through these exchanges of amusement. They learn to amuse others by making others feel they've successfully amused them. "It's the giggle pool!" while the "us" being so assured is, most of the time and most continuously, the caregiver—and this is the aspect where the possibility of the object's specificity becomes so important--entertainment is also for the baby one of the chief ways it interfaces with strangers. The "other" who comes and goes, who's different every time but for some reason wants to please me and be pleased by me—this is the other we meet in the pram, park, plane, store, street. Here (everywhere) the object acquires the dimension of abstract possibility and hence of improved repeatability so important in entertainment. But let us note that the desire to improve the repeatability of the object doesn't necessarily consume itself with anxiety; it's a desire that can also find action in inventing or re-inventing/making the world (Freud, Deleuze and Guattari).

Whatever else it may be, entertainment is a sign of the possibility of the other's love and of reciprocity. In the movie Babe, Babe (a pig who wants to be herd sheep) is at one point dreadfully depressed and can't be consoled by the food his farmer offers him. He is depressed because he has discovered the extent and nature of the gulf that separates him, as a farm animal, from his human farmer. It's thus logical, in a way, that in this condition he loses the wish to be a sheepdog—to do the work of the other, of a very different sort of animal, the kind that protects the kind that is eaten by humans but is itself never eaten itself, but which has nonetheless allowed Babe to call it "Mom." (Talk about fictions—and "substitute" objects!) Babe is inspired to once more live and do this work of the other only when his farmer dances and sings for him. Moreover, the farmer sings a song about how love means wishing that your signifiers could really change the world for the other: "If I had the words to sing a day for you/ I would sing you a morning golden and true." Despite the gaps between them, Babe and his beloved farmer are not solitary artists but artful as a consequence of exchange (and the version of exchange that is technology—it's a FAX machine that gets Babe into the sheepdog trials, given to the farmer as a birthday present by his children who think he's living in the past and ill-prepared for the future), and this artfulness is every bit as integral to human babies' raisons d'être.

Moreover, providing entertainment is, and seems always to have been, part of hospitality. Entertainment is one of the chief means by which strangeness is transformed into familiarity--guests into friends, employers into patrons, obligations into pleasures (or back again). Entertainment familiarizes the strange so that we can taste it, spit it out if we don't like it, or try it with Cool-Whip. Coming close to trauma can be thrilling when entertainment takes us there, because we will still be sufficiently in one piece to enjoy, or to remember enjoying, the vertiginous fall and meteoric rise. Entertainment helps us to master trauma, "unwanted thoughts," as is exemplified by Shadrack's celebration of National Suicide Day in Sula. Morrison stresses, moreover, the sociality of this solution to post-traumatic stress syndrome; Shadrack, a solitary man otherwise, parades; the townsfolk start dating events according to whether or not they happened before or after National Suicide Day. The townsfolk accept something strange; they become accustomed, National Suicide Day becomes a way of marking the rhythms of their lives and loves. It's a mark that articulates difference, a change or transition or transformation. But it's a mark that enables a rhythm, and it's this possibility of repeatability that, while threatening compulsive rigidity or consuming restlessness or other forms of anxiety-management, is also what allows us to imagine a better future which might even be in our power to make or craft.

The power of repetition to soothe is perhaps why we fear that entertainment de-sensitizes us to suffering. Can we over-familiarize ourselves with pain, in particular with the pain of the other? Can "mastery" lead to a dulling of compassion rather than an enhanced capacity to believe in, and act on, the possiblity of healing? Perhaps, though in this context the psychoanalytic term "mastery" means "working through," not "repression" or "indifference." It's in part the role of entertainment in "working through"—or , it's entertainment as working through—which this conference hopes to explore and articulate more carefully. Because entertainment is a process of alteration, its alterations can fail, sometimes spectacularly—"not go far enough," "go too far"--so we fear both that it will destroy innocence (go too far) or stunt intellectual growth (not go far enough). But these concerns have been sensationalized in the absence of a corresponding need-to-know why entertainment is capable of producing spectacularly bad or good results of this or that kind. What is the nature of entertainment as a process of alteration, even as a means of enjoying or learning to enjoy alteration, or even of learning to enjoy learning? Are the down-sides of entertainment inevitable concomitants of its power to help us "manage" and perhaps even heal anxiety, rather than simply to escape from it? Or is escapism paradoxically an inevitable concomitant of a power of alteration?

Entertainment situates itself on the cusp of passivity and activity, of delight and the attempt to become a giver of delight. We are unfortunately prone to discount entertainment as escapism—or to discount escapism as trivial—because our habits of thought lead us to prize activity over passivity, originality over imitation, independence over dependence, risk over safety. Assimilating, accustoming, keeping new things "in perspective" hardly seem to be the preoccupations of .geniuses, pioneers, and revolutionaries. But when we "accustom" ourselves to something we are inevitably transformed, whether we are prepared to acknowledge this or not. It's precisely because entertainment is the means by which we cross over from passivity into activity or familiarity into heightened awareness that we worry about it so much (Being John Malkovich). The problem is not that entertainment, being trivial, gives the brain such an easy time that it loses the ability to reason and reflect, but rather that entertainment is the very means whereby inattention is transformed into attention, indifference into the possibility of attachment, ignorance into a willingness to "at least try it—come on, it's really good, look, Daddy likes it, see?" Finally, entertainment is not something we can choose to add and subtract from education, but is instead a structure of learning—learning to feel and know pleasure, learning about the other through the exchange of pleasure, which means also learning about the pleasure of exchange itself (regardless of whether "the other" is a person, or an antique text, or a new life-form, or an unfamiliar and possibly troubling idea. Entertainment is threatening because it simply is educational—education itself being a mode of enjoyment, discontented a form this might take--and because it is experimental—therefore, like all experiments, capable of going farther than we might be able to imagine or predict at the outset, hence potentially seductive precisely because we imagine ourselves to be safely ensconced in "controlled conditions." It is, as Freud recognized long ago, the pleasure principle that makes us want to know the world, to explore it and construct models of it that tell us as much about it as possible for our enjoyment.

The final focus of this conference is on reception or receptivity—our remarkable ability to take something other into ourselves and "taste" it. The conference will explore the connections between reception and invention, and the power of entertainment to make these connections possible. It's oversimple to assume that we're terribly easily influenced, since we are also terribly defended against new knowledge and modes of enjoyment. To be sure, the capacity of entertainment to open us up to the appeal of the other--to the pleasure we take in the other's desire to please us, or the pleasure we take in pleasing the other—is a dangerous thing precisely because it's so effective. Receptivity can be manipulated, turned away from curiosity, wonder, and the desire to imitate on which all invention is founded. We hope our discussions will help us get beyond the impasse that characterizes current discussions of the power of media technology (e.g., it can open up new horizons but also control us even more effectively than previous technologies did, duh) by trying to figure out how entertainment actually achieves its effects and by exploring the concept of receptivity, the idea that receptivity is always already at some level a choice and an invitation to the other, and is therefore also an invitation to a future—what we might optimistically call a transformation of anxiety into the promise that fictions, models, and tools do change the world (Space Odyssey 2001), and that our capacity to "essay" things might even mitigate the catastrophe of discovery.