tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1057646105981087139.post4683952187358154061..comments2024-01-18T04:37:03.214-05:00Comments on Rustbelt Intellectual: TALKING ABOUT MY GENERATIONTom Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02186723526374103977noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1057646105981087139.post-41722399450802290232010-11-16T01:00:33.926-05:002010-11-16T01:00:33.926-05:00Obama Is Lying<1>Office 2010When was the las...Obama Is Lying<1><a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Office 2010</a>When was the last time the MSM took<a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Outlook 2010</a> a Republican's side in<a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Microsoft outlook 2010</a>a fight over credibility with a Democratic opponent? Well, it has been a while. <a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Microsoft Office 2010</a><br />However, <a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Office 2007 download</a>conservatives have little to grumble about<a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Microsoft outlook</a> in the recent face-off between Barack Obama and<a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/windows-7-c-2.html" rel="nofollow">Windows 7</a>John McCain over McCain's statement that <a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Microsoft word</a>troops might have to remain for "100 years" in Iraq "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed" after <a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Office 2007</a><a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Microsoft Office</a><a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Microsoft Office 2007</a> <a href="http://www.software-hotbuy.com/" rel="nofollow">Office 2007 key</a>aiyahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11926567556955437833noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1057646105981087139.post-36507977750576467862008-07-06T15:29:00.000-04:002008-07-06T15:29:00.000-04:00Greetings, Comrade and thanks for this thoughtful ...Greetings, Comrade and thanks for this thoughtful post. There’s so much here that I’ll stick to a few points. 1) All good intellectuals eschew facile labels and self-advertising in favor of heavy lifting and reflexive thinking. 2) Celebrity worship is one of the many ways in which neoliberalism has transformed the academy: the academic marketplace usually rewards the performance of radicalism rather than the hard intellectual and political work of scholarship and activism. There are some scholars who are exceptions, but in my experience those most deserving of celebrity are one or two rungs down the ladder of recognition from their glib, polysyllabic, theatrical, and usually less intellectually rigorous or important counterparts. 3) Relevant to whom?—-your question—-is THE question that all politically engaged intellectuals should be asking. 4) I need to read more about public sociology—and when I do, I’ll post something. 5) Having spent time with my counterparts in France, Germany, Japan, and Canada, I agree wholly with your point about what the relationship of Marxist and “radical” scholarship to the mainstream. Though I am loathe to label myself an American exceptionalist, there are ways that the lack of a vigorous (or even once vigorous) left in the United States narrows the range of academic discourse. What passes for radical scholarship today in certain fields (I’m thinking especially of American Studies) is often fairly mainstream, conventional scholarship with a theoretical patina or a superficial nod toward radicalism (many good examples in recent issues of the Radical History Review). By contrast, a lot of French scholarship (which I’ve been reading lately) is deeply engaged in larger theoretical debates. And most refreshingly, its authors don’t feel compelled to name-drop or sprinkle neologisms to prove their politics. 6) The corrolary to my last point is that there are few left-identified scholars with the intellectual toolkit to challenge various revanchist scholarly methods, like rational choice theory and, now, the socio-biological turn, that have spread like kudzu in the American academy since the 1980s (see my posts on Charles Tilly and on neuroscience and social science on these points.)Tom Shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02186723526374103977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1057646105981087139.post-1357132456792171432008-07-06T14:04:00.000-04:002008-07-06T14:04:00.000-04:00I had some mixed feelings reading this article, fr...I had some mixed feelings reading this article, from the perspective of a self-hating leftist. Part of me actually doesn't think it's all a bad thing. In my own (informal and anecdotal) experience, too many self-consciously radical/leftist/"activist" graduate students I have met are more into that label and advertising themselves as such than in doing the heavy intellectual lifting that it should require (and really thinking reflexively, as Genovese did in "On Being a Socialist and a Historian" better than anyone else since, about the activist-academic boundary, the pro's and con's of blurring it, and the limits of the intellectual's role in social change). I've also seen lots of left academic celebrity worship, especially among the TheoryHeads, though that's not exclusive to the left (but we should be above it and often aren't.) And left activity in academia too often takes the form of toothless petitions, new disciplinary causes, and short-lived ad hoc committees and letterhead organizations that stand in for sustained political activity (not that I think any academic should feel obligated or guilt-tripped into doing any). I wouldn't be too sorry to see the above decline.<BR/><BR/>This all said, I agree with the general trends identified in the NYTimes piece (again based on informal experience only) and share the blog post's concern. It's interesting to note the concurrent (and paradoxical) strong interest among graduate students in "relevance" and becoming "public intellectuals." Coupled with apoliticism or bland, uncritical politics, this relevance chic seems pretty dangerous to me since it omits the critical "relevant to WHOM?" question, along with related concerns about how catering to mainstream tastes and the imperatives of mass consumer media, and (especially) dancing with power, can erode intellectual integrity and independence. Less important, but still grating, so much of the conversation about "public" whatevering is ABOUT "public" whatevering rather than actual output worthy of the name. (For an example, see all the treatises on "public sociology" at http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/PS.htm and compare it to the amount of actual "public sociology" produced, which isn't much.) At its worst, what might be called The Jacoby Disease seems to just mask the existential hang-ups of people who can't register that scholarship doesn't always pay short-term immediately "relevant" dividends, and who fail to appreciate that having 200 people read one's book or article -- and thousands more listen to its contents in lectures and seminars -- still amounts to more attention than most people get in their lives. But I do think periods of political de-mobilization give way to political empty fads like the "public"/"relevant" thing. (By the way, I'm not against public writing by academics at all -- just aspiring to "public intellectual" status for the sake of it and no real consistent message or politics behind it all.)<BR/><BR/>Finally, the piece quotes the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright a few times. It made me think again about the absence of a significant Marxist presence in the American university and its intellectual consequences. (One of the most interesting conversations I had in graduate school was with a Belgian exchange student who found the critique of methodological individualism that we were reading for class very standard and remarked that, in Western Europe, the "alternative" social science that it proposed was in fact much more widespread and accepted. It's true -- compare the Cambridge Journal of Economics to the American Economic Review.) American Marxist scholarship (of many strands) had its moment from the late 1960s to early 1980s. It gave us a bunch of great journals like Politics and Society, the early Telos, and the Review of Radical Political Economics, dramatically reshaped entire disciplines (geography and history especially), and shaped individual students who successfully made significant inroads later into departments here and there, Penn among them. But it stagnated at some point, especially post-1989/1991. Nowadays, most references to "Marxism" that I hear come in the form of single-word pejorative shorthand, often by people who have barely tried to work through the texts themselves (and who don't realize how much their own theoretical inclinations in fact originated out of response to or extension of the strawman that they attack.) The increasing re-marginalization of Marxist/left ideas in the academy, I think, has to have blunted the critical ability and political sharpness of the new generation, though it's only a partial explanation, of course. It has also made most leftists in the academy ill-equipped to critique capitalism in any rigorous manner, thus ceding that critical terrain to economics departments. I do think the growing economic inequality and turbulence and frightening militarism of the early 21st-century will make these post-Cold War dismissals of Marxist and socialist thought look increasingly premature.<BR/><BR/>Of course, I'd prefer a bland academy any day to real-world political and economic turbulence.<BR/><BR/>This was unfortunately the only screenname I could get close enough to what I wanted, even though it's pretty stupid still.Comrade Mhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08287546373972211043noreply@blogger.com