Led by the UCSB English Department's Public Humanities Initiative (co-directed by L. O. Aranye Fradenburg and Alan Liu), a group of faculty from the Art, English, Film Studies, and German departments have organized a conference called "Entertainment Value" for May 3-4, 2002. "Entertainment Value" will bring together scholars, representatives of the entertainment industries, and members of the general public to think about the relation between the contemporary humanities and "entertainment." The conference includes panels on leisure and violence, gaming culture, entertainment and built environments, and the way certain audience-groups intervene in, alter, or "hack" mass entertainment. There are also two special events designed to allow for extended conversation with leading figures in public entertainment or architecture. The intended audience of the conference is not only the academic community but members of industry, the Santa Barbara community,and general public. Admission is free.

Next: Background of Public Humanities Initiative

In the past, the Public Humanities Initiative has organized events in which faculty and graduate students from many disciplines have considered the issues involved in creating a public stance for the humanities. Participants from outside UCSB in these events included not only such well-known theoreticians of academic culture as John Guillory (NYU), Constance Penley (UCSB), and David Simpson (UC Davis) but also scholars, heads of humanities consortiums, and academic development officers with practical experience on the frontier between the academy and the public (e.g., Kathleen Woodward and Mary Childers). Past PHI events each culminated in a forum on "Building a Public Humanities Agenda." (See the PHI Web site for details about past events: /initiatives/public-humanities/)

As a result of its planning forums, the PHI last year decided to create a major event at UCSB that wouldl bring together scholars and experts from other areas of society to focus on the impact of the humanities on the public, and vice versa. The theme chosen for this purpose is "entertainment," an individual and collective experience whose bodily, mental, and social pleasures are shaped by many sectors of society—including the academy.

Next: Rationale of This Conference

The French theorist 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. 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 otherwise very valuable (not "That's entertainment!," in other words, but "That's just entertainment!"); 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 stupify the planet, raise the violence levels of entire populations, corrupt youth with porn, and destroy cultural diversity.

This stealth-power of entertainment has something to do with its ability at once to assuage and magnify the emptiness of time. Supposedly, entertainment fixes the enormous boredom of people for whom the essential emptiness of work and life breed forms of leisure that isolate the individual not just from the gray world but even from him or herself. But entertainment is not just "killing time." Indeed, killing time itself is not just killing time. Especially in its more compulsive and violent forms, entertainment doesn't only insulate us from the world; it is also a way to perform, rehearse, contain, or manage a world whose "boredom" is really a thin membrane stretched tightly over terrifying anxieties.

So, too, the stealth-power of entertainment has something to do with the enormous variety of the ways in which "play" and "game" act out our anxious yet pleasurable relations to ourselves and to others–perhaps most importantly to others, whose lives and locales (as in a film of play's "setting") we might otherwise never entertain as a possibility. Children entertain themselves—that is, they play—and as a consequence become inventive. But they learn how to entertain themselves from others. Caregivers spend at least as much time entertaining children as they do feeding them or even soothing them. Whatever else it is, in other words, entertainment is a sign of the possibility of the other's love and of reciprocity.

Finally, entertainment is not something we can choose to add to or subtract from education, but is itself a structure of learning—learning to feel and know pleasure, learning about the other through the exchange of pleasure (regardless of whether the "other" is a person, an antique text, a new life-form, or an unfamiliar and possibly troubling idea), and ultimately learning about the pleasures and anxieties of exchange itself. Entertainment value has long been part of the heritage of the humanities, which seek—as Horace long ago said about poetry—at once to "teach and delight."

The apparent contradiction in our attitudes toward entertainment is characteristic of anxiety, and we need to inquire into what the anxiety of our pleasures is, how it works and why, and how this knowledge might help us to help ourselves. Most of all, we want to inquire how the humanities and other sectors of society can meet on common ground to shape a humane vision of entertainment. The PHI hopes to address these questions, among others, in its conference on "Entertainment Value."

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