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smith accuses academics of ignoring the supposed importance of emotions, for not just taking in beauty, for having to complicate something pure and lovely. i have a response to this. my writing is really rough here, forgive me.

emotion has a certain place in the humanities, but a subtler one than she can imagine. in academic writing, you don't have emotion like you do in a novel, obviously, but emotion is what leads to the intellectual ideas of the piece, is what leads to the dedication to write it. smith doesn't know that the author is never as calm as her prose, and that prose can speak about and inspire emotion without needing to be emotional. why does everything have to be? why should an academic talk about beauty if he doesn't want to? can't beauty hurt? i guess smith would find laura mulvey heartless, too. to get many things done in life, you have to ignore your emotions. you have to fill out forms, take classes you don't want, be nice to jerks, attend boring meetings (as she describes) there's a lot you have to just get yourself to do. but if you're in the humanities, your emotions are significant, because they fuel your ideas, because you can pour them into what you read, see, and write. it's not about bypassing emotions, it's just that you aren't explicit about them. they're not the central focus, and they shouldn't always have to be.

part of the joy of the humanities is that you can pour your emotions into them, but another great element is that you can forget your emotions, which can bog you down, you can create ideas about something that isn't you; you can transcend yourself and the pettiness of your environment. ads for panzani "italian" products are cheap and stupid, but barthes' analysis of them is not. petty things can be ignored but they can also be transformed simply because they are analyzed, and great art becomes heightened with analysis too. academics (subjects not people) can be, in a sense, beautiful when they have nothing to do with beauty, and also when they renounce it.

if you're an actor, or a businessman, or a politician, you have to adopt, and therefore at least partially believe in, society's stifling concept of beauty, because you're success in these fields is limited if you dont' look "beautiful" enough and that leads to a lot of hard work, anxiety, and narcissism (not "video and the aesthetics of narcissism" narcissism). but if you're an intellectual, you can explore other options. so the fact that howard does fictional work that escapes the idea of beauty is liberating, even if he's at an impasse. if you consider academic writing to be stifling, beauty can be too.