Keep working on that sense of humour, Barkley.
More seriously, I'm curious what Barkley (and others) might recommend. Let's
assume, for the sake of argument, that you inhabit a small corner of the
academic world. Let's further assume that you have progressive politics, as
defined by the 'p' in PEN-L, say. The left opposition, let alone socialist or
historical materialist, is largely defunct and the critical position has been
more or less colonized by various forms of poststructuralist and postmodern
work. Words like totalising, economistic and reductionist tend to get bandied
around a lot. Obviously you don't devote all of your time to trying to debunk
this sort of thing but what should you do? There are a variety of options.
Do you 1) ignore it and simply acquiesce as devotees acquire more control of
the means of academic production (editorships of major journals, positions on
the boards of funding agencies, editorships of book series, chairs of depart-
ments etc etc.)? 2) join in -- 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong? 3) write
at least one paper that tries to point out where and how this stuff is wrong?
4) talk to your friends, and mutter about the decline of intellectual life or
blame it on the dialectic ('post-Fordism is responsible for post-modernism,
gosh darn it and there ain't a thing we can do about it')? 5) quit academe?
(I went with 3 obviously, which alas does require reading and citing Butler).
Mark Laffey
