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 demarcation that marks the professional perspective, above all that of the university professor.’14 Such social demarcation, mirrored internally within academic institutions through disciplinarity, generates a dilemma for the humanities. On the one hand, the humanities form a study of difference, designed to explore and preserve plurality. As Weber notes, however, the moment that the speciﬁcity of this tolerance is deﬁned in the service of expertise, it retreats to a stance of isolation in pursuit of authority. In other words, to be an expert means isolating a ﬁeld of knowledge in which one becomes authoritative, an act of demarcation. It makes little sense to say, however, that the demarcating feature of the humanities is to pursue the erasure of demarcation.15 While such anti-disciplinary thinking may be theoretically valuable (and could chime with the aims of the humanities), it is, of course, extremely difﬁcult to implement within existing structures of the academy.

As Bill Readings accurately diagnoses, however, the ‘internal legitimation struggle concerning the nature of the knowledge produced in the humanities. . . would not take on crisis proportions were it not accompanied by an external legitimation crisis’.16 Indeed, the state of constant emergency for the humanities through its external, public perception is only set to continue. Due to various legislative shifts, which are fundamentally bound up with governmental market-orientated transformations of the university, there is topdown demand for transparency in academic dealings and for a quantiﬁable legitimation of the academy’s activities.17 Although, as Thomas Docherty notes, this transparency agenda seems to have evolved simultaneously with ‘the growth and distribution of higher education, with a watering down of class prejudices and Establishment certainties, and with an ostensibly democratic demand for an opening of the doors of opportunity to all’, it also speciﬁes the priority of accountability and transparency, with the seeming aim to produce the ultimate rational market actor: one who has access to all information and therefore behaves in a predictably self-interested fashion.18 While, then, it is possible to identify potentially irresolvable paradoxes at the heart of humanities study (demarcation/ legitimation/utility), it will be much more difﬁcult to overcome the smaller, more soluble challenges to the ‘value’ of work in the humanities if a resolution to the problem of external institutional