====> Jim Craven's acerbic comment on academic patois was necessary
but ultimately futile, for this is an old problem that never
really changes.
What follows is - in case you can't tell - a cri de coeur
on the subject from a member of Berkeley's Bad Subjects Collective.
valis
Public Intellectuals
Joe Sartelle
Bad Subjects, Issue #3, November 1992
Copyright (c) 1992 by Joe Sartelle. All rights reserved.
This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use
provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and
redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are
notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution,
or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires
the consent of the author and the notification of Bad Subjects.
_________________________________________________________________
I have a confession to make. In the essay I wrote for last month's
issue of Bad Subjects, "Cynicism and the Election," I engaged in an
unnecessary and perhaps even gratuitous use of theory: I made
reference to the works of cultural theorists Peter Sloterdijk and
Slavoj Zizek in order to explain the concepts of "cynical reason"
and "cynical spectatorship." It wasn't necessary for me to mention
them in order to make my argument effectively and clearly. However,
I am a graduate student in the English Department at UC-Berkeley,
and as such I am accustomed by training, habit, professional
incentive and plain old peer pressure to feeling that unless I can
drop a few theoretical references into my discussion, my arguments
are going to seem weak, unimpressive ,inadequate. In other words,
Sloterdijk and Zizek are there primarily to impress you, not to
enlighten you -- that latter task could have been accomplished
quite well without the academic phrasings. And the term "academic"
pretty much gives the game away: finally, I am simply confessing to
writing like an academic.
From the perspective of academia itself, of course, this is hardly
a sin to be confessed and atoned for; indeed, the practice of
legitimating one's argument by studding it with theoretical terms
and references is a sign of one's promise, a measure of how much
one has succeeded in assimilating to the interests, protocols and
conventions of the profession. As a graduate student, an academic
in training, I am supposed to seek to impress my colleagues (peers
and superiors) with my knowledge of the latest models or revivals
of European theory -- "theory" meaning simply the multiple
philosophical and critical perspectives with which academics in the
humanities, especially those who do "cultural studies," construct
meanings from the increasingly various objects or "texts" that we
study. "Theory" is certainly not all I am expected to know, but
effective command over at least one or two theoretical "languages"
is one of the main criteria by which the profession determines who
qualifies for the top ranks and thus receives the best rewards, in
the form of faculty support and sponsorship, fellowships,
opportunities to speak at prestigious conferences and publish in
prestigious journals, and -- this is what it's finally all about,
selling your labor power in a competitive market -- who gets the
best jobs at the best institutions.
I sometimes think that the professional hierarchy of prestige goes
like this: those who "do theory" well, those who "do theory" at
all, and those who don't "do theory." I have read far too many
articles and heard far too many talks -- especially when the talks
are by individuals seeking academic employment -- in which there is
an argument, often a very interesting one, that might have been
effectively and sharply presented in half the space and time that
was actually taken, but which was overburdened with strictly
academic terms and references because of the very real need to
Impress The Audience, which in academia means Getting In As Many
Theoretical References As Possible Without Showing Off Too Much.
For it is not entirely a cynical joke within academia that the more
obscure and difficult your argument is, the more impressed (or
intimidated) your audience will be. Since I am convinced that most
of us claim, in varying degrees, to read and understand more theory
than we actually do, when confronted with a theoretically dense and
opaque article or talk, our response is more likely to be a vaguely
threatened "Wow! How smart!" rather than "Huh? What are you talking
about?" -- out of fear that we will be seen as intellectually
deficient and thus unprepared to compete on the professional
market. After all, the very last thing anyone wants in this
profession is to seem stupid. Currently, the situation in academia
is one in which an awful lot of very smart people are being
rewarded for producing a great deal of arguably very bad writing --
"bad" in this case because its very nature is to exclude all but a
very specialized group of readers.
I am exaggerating the situation a bit, of course. But not much. On
the other hand, and to be fair, from the perspective of the
profession itself, what I have described is not a problem at all
but simply the very nature of academic study. Specialization in
both what we study and how we communicate our observations is
healthy for the profession, the argument usually runs, because it
expands the frontiers of knowledge, and eventually even the most
arcane theoretical ideas will be translated into more accessible
terms as they are disseminated, particularly through our teaching.
And unless we are encouraged to compete and specialize, there will
be no incentive for us to push forward the frontiers of knowledge,
and thus no new wisdom to pass along to the less-educated minds
behind us. There is certainly some validity to this argument, and I
do not want to come across as hostile to theory and specialization;
I merely wish to raise some questions about what academics tend to
do with theory and specialization.
What is fundamentally at stake here is the question of
accountability -- to whom are we, as professional academics,
finally responsible? According to the reasoning I have just
outlined, academics must be accountable to their professional
colleagues. These are the people who make the decisions that affect
our livelihood, who determine who will get hired, get published,
get tenure. This would make more sense if research within our
professional fields were all that academics are expected to do --
but we are also teachers, as well as citizens, and those of us who
work for public institutions like the University of California are
also public servants. But in terms of our careers, it is the
judgment of the profession that matters most. While the situation
certainly varies from place to place, professional prestige is
mainly achieved by impressing our colleagues, not our students, and
not the public at large. In fact, the competitive pressures to
distinguish oneself professionally seem to foster an attitude of
disregard if not outright contempt for the opinion of these latter
two groups among many in the profession; and this is
understandable, since it is currently very difficult to please all
of these audiences simultaneously, and taking sides with the
students and making teaching one's top concern is not the most
promising career strategy.
The problem of the conflict between research and teaching among
academics is something of a commonplace, and I don't want to
belabor a point that so many of you are already familiar with. I am
primarily interested here in what this problem means for academics
who, like myself, identify themselves as "leftist" or
"progressive." We are people whose political values and beliefs are
democratic and inclusive, yet we have chosen a profession which is
elitist and exclusive. And, especially as graduate students, we
agonize over this contradiction, even as we allow ourselves to be
complicit with it. Frequently the problem is framed in terms of the
split between "academia" and "activism." One of the underlying and
often unacknowledged assumptions of this perspective is that what
we do as academics is politically worthless, so if you want to be
"really" political, you become an activist outside of the
university, or at the very least you march in demonstrations, write
letters to Congress, or volunteer time with community-service
organizations. I am not surprised that activists display such open
contempt for what academics do (we don't "do" anything, according
to the extreme version of this perspective, except sit around and
bullshit while people suffer miserably in the streets outside our
"ivory towers"); I regret it and I resent it, but it does not
surprise me. What does surprise and sadden me is how many leftist
academics share in this contempt for what they have chosen to do
with their lives. It is something we all struggle with to some
degree.
As well we should -- there is more than a little truth to the
anti-academic position, which is no doubt why it seldom fails to
sting us a little. One response to the problem of "academia vs.
activism" is to concede that the anti-academic position is correct,
that our work as academic scholars is largely irrelevant
politically, and that we are therefore disingenuous about our
leftist commitments unless we are engaged in some form of "real
world" political action. What is usually overlooked about this
response is that one of its consequences is to allow academics
freedom to be politically irresponsible, since if what we do as
academics doesn't make any difference, then we are free to do
whatever we please in our work. We need not worry about its
political value, since by definition it has virtually no value.
Thus the difficult question of how we might use our special skills
as academics to serve progressive interests is thus conveniently
side-stepped, and everyone can get on with business as usual.
A different response to the problem has been one that tries to
resolve the contradiction by making academic work into a kind of
activism, an approach that has had tremendous success over the past
two decades, resulting in, among other things, the establishment of
ethnic and women's studies programs and departments, the opening of
the curriculum to new cultures, voices and perspectives, and the
erosion of traditional disciplinary boundaries and the emergence of
anti-disciplinary "cultural studies." The recent wave of attacks in
the mainstream media on "political correctness" should be seen as
testimony to the significance of these democratizing changes in the
"ivory towers" of academia: at least some influential people are
threatened enough by the political nature of these reforms to try
to discredit them. Unfortunately, progressive academics have not
done a very good job of responding to these attacks, which can be
seen in the fact that "political correctness" has entered the
vocabulary of popular culture with largely negative connotations:
it is seen as either silly or repressive, or both. In the absence
of a strong and credible defense within the mainstream media from
progressive academics, a watered-down version of the reactionary
view of "political correctness" has achieved the status of common
sense. Too often, the reaction on the academic left to such attacks
is either to whine about them or smugly ridicule them; seldom do we
engage them substantively and publicly.
I think that the progressive "democratizing" approach to the
politics of academia has accomplished enough that we can begin to
assess its limitations. I am most interested here in the fact that
while academics are now talking about a more diverse and truly
representative range of subjects than ever before, we are still
talking about them in much the same old exclusionary professional
languages. So while we can now study Madonna's videos, or
African-American urban street culture, or the politics of sitcoms,
we still tend to write about these topics in ways that make our
ideas largely inaccessible or incomprehensible to the vast majority
of the people who produce and consume the objects we study -- even
as we claim that our work is somehow about "empowering" these very
same people by taking their cultural preferences seriously. The
history of what is known as "cultural studies" is telling: as many
have noted, what started out as an arguably insurgent and political
movement aimed at making academic work more relevant to the
problems and concerns of people outside academia, particularly
those we like to call "the oppressed," has increasingly become one
more academic "discipline" among all the others, in which academics
with potentially disruptive political perspectives can be contained
by providing them with their own journals, conferences, and faculty
positions.
So perhaps the time has come for those of us on the academic left
to admit that making our work political by democratizing its
content was a necessary step, but is no longer sufficient. We must
consider the irony that there has probably never before been such
an accumulated mass of scholarship showing in intricate detail the
workings of oppression, both subtle and crude, at every level of
society and culture; yet this accumulated critique has been more
successful as a new growth industry within academia than as an
effective intervention to change the very conditions that prompt us
to make the critique in the first place. In other words, maybe the
time has come for us to consider the question of our
accountability. For I still earnestly believe that much of the
knowledge and insight that leftist or progressive academics produce
as cultural critics is potentially genuinely empowering; we just
need to find the right ways of presenting it to the right
audiences. The point I have been trying to make is that right now,
we are mostly presenting such knowledge in the wrong ways to the
wrong audiences. We are still largely trapped by the problem of a
small elite of specialists talking to each other in specialized and
exclusionary ways.
What I am proposing is that academic leftists need to start seeing
ourselves as primarily accountable not to our fellow academics, but
to a larger public -- however that may be defined. We need to
reimagine ourselves as public intellectuals. We already have some
good role models to imitate: the names of Barbara Ehrenreich, Anita
Hill and Noam Chomsky immediately come to mind, each offering a
very different sort of example, yet each qualifying, I think, as a
courageous "public intellectual." All have tried to reach as broad
and diverse an audience as possible. Their success is debatable;
their efforts are not. One important task of the
academically-trained and university-based public intellectual would
be to work as a kind of translator: to make the insights and
perspectives of our professional work accessible, meaningful and
relevant to as broad a public as possible. We need to justify our
work, to show that it matters. (As for "leftist" academics who
don't think that what they do matters, I can only wonder why they
do not simply find a new line of work.) There is, of course, one
way in which academics are already serving as public intellectuals,
and that is as teachers in classrooms at the undergraduate level,
where we routinely present ourselve s and our ideas to an audience
of people from diverse backgrounds, who will go on to occupy a
broad range of positions in society. The idea of teaching as a form
of public activism for academic leftists is one I'll leave for a
different essay; for now, let me just say that I think that if we
are truly serious about our political commitments, then everything
we say and do in our classrooms, every aspect of our teaching from
the syllabus to our relations with our students, should be seen as
an extension of and reflection upon our political values. If we
believe in those values, then we want our students to embrace them,
too: we are there to set an example.
In calling upon the academic left to start thinking of itself in
terms of public intellectuals, I am all too aware of the
difficulties involved. So much of our profession works against the
idea. We are certainly not encouraged in our professional training
to appeal to a general audience in our thinking and writing,
especially at the formative level of apprenticeship as graduate
student. In order to succeed, we must cultivate habits of mind that
serve the interests of colleagues and superiors, and these are very
specific and specialized interests indeed. Habits of the mind, once
firmly entrenched, are difficult to break: that's the problem I
confront every time I sit down to write a piece for Bad Subjects.
Another very real problem is that the writing we do for
non-academic audiences isn't likely to count for much in terms of
professional prestige and recognition. Getting a smart and
accessible critique published in, say, the Sunday supplements may
provide you with an audience vastly larger than an academicized
version in a scholarly journal, but only the latter will help you
get tenure. In other words, we have to face up to the fact that our
political commitments may be in real conflict with our professional
ambitions. If time spent on writing fo r a non-academic public is
time taken away from scholarly research and writing, then those of
us who call ourselves academic leftists may have to make the
painful decision to sacrifice some individual professional success
in order to serve our larger collective political interests. But
isn't this the very definition of public service?
It will take us a lot of time and practice to figure out just what
it would mean to conceive of ourselves as public intellectuals.
This is where Bad Subjects is relevant. The purpose behind Bad
Subjects, at least as Annalee Newitz and myself have envisioned it,
is to provide a public forum, however limited, in which leftists
and progressives can experiment with imagining and building some
kind of new public culture. In particular, we hope that graduate
students (among others) who feel frustrated by the lack of
opportunities to make their academic work more relevant and
accessible will use Bad Subjects for that purpose. As we said in
the first issue, Bad Subjects is intended to promote public
education about the political implications of everyday life. It is
also meant to be a platform upon which we might begin to build
alliances. As academics we have few resources beyond our highly
specialized intellectual skills. One reason for trying to make
those skills of service to a broader public is to demonstrate our
usefulness to others who possess skills and resources academics
don't have. Politically-committed academics won't be able to do
much without forming coalitions with others outside academia -- but
that doesn't mean we have to renounce our distinctive abilities to
do so. We must simply prove our value. We must be accountable.
Bad Subjects, then, is an experiment. We do not claim that our
audience represents "the general public" or "society at large." But
while this particular essay is addressed mainly to academics, Bad
Subjects in general is not. We are addressing the Berkeley campus
community, and that's a relatively diverse group of potential
readers; it is certainly more diverse than the audience academics
write for professionally. We know that our readership includes
graduate students and undergraduates, faculty and staff, as well as
people who do not fall into any of these categories. This makes for
some genuine confusion about what sort of language to adopt, the
sort of confusion that was a factor in the "gratuitous use of
theory" I confessed to in this essay's opening. A big part of the
point in writing for Bad Subjects, for me at least, is to get some
practice with developing the voice of a "public intellectual." We
need to hear from more of you, and not just those of you who are
academics, because the more examples we have to consider, the more
we will all learn about what the voice of the leftist public
intellectual might sound like.
Finally, then, this article is a pitch for submissions. Without
contributions from you, and soon, Bad Subjects will be history.
This is how we're doing so far: More than 250 copies of Issue #1
went into circulation, and more than 400 copies of Issue # 2; we
expect to print 400 to 500 copies of this issue. People have also
been photocopying Bad Subjects and distributing it themselves
(thank you!), but we don't know how many copies have been produced
this way. We know that people are reading Bad Subjects not only in
Berkeley and the Bay Area, but also in Los Angeles, Boston, Madison
(Wisc.), and in Cairo, Egypt. Most intriguingly, perhaps, we know
that several copies of the first two issues were made available in
one of the installations where Department of Defense work on
military communications satellites is done at Lockheed in
Sunnyvale, California. And again, that's just what we know about. I
hope this information will encourage more of you to contribute: Bad
Subjects is getting some attention, and thus so will you if you
write for it. Politically speaking, Bad Subjects is no solution to
anything. It could, however, be a tool with which we might be able,
collectively and individually, to build some solutions.
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