> Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 11:58:30 -0400 > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: [PEN-L:7204] jim o'connor on harvey review > Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Michael Perelman: > >Academic publishing, like posting to the Internet, only goes beyond personal > >gratification if it serves some larger purpose. In that sense, I think > that we > >might do well to pursue the matter. > > Okay, Michael. Here's the problem. As much as I admire the books you've > produced over the years, isn't a serious problem that virtually nobody > outside the academic world except someone like myself reads them? If I had > not stumbled across PEN-L and discovered all these academic Marxist debates > (and that's really what they are), how would an ordinary socialist activist > find out about them? Your books are not for sale in places like Revolution > Books. Nor are journals like Rethinking Marxism or CNS. One finds out about > them through the network of academic conferences which form the basis for > professional collaboration, as is the case for all such disciplines. The > MLA is to literature as the Amherst conferences are to Marxism. If anybody > thinks different, they are deluding themselves. All the PhDs who publish in > S&S or for Guilford are basically writing for each other. No ordinary > working people read this material. Furthermore, it is not even directed to > them. Except for Monthly Review and the party presses, this world is > self-contained and with virtually no impact on politics in the outside world. > > Louis Proyect Even if we were to leave aside Proyect's politics and personal attacks on jim o'connor (though i did have a laugh or two reading his 'unintended' posting) some of the issues raised by him are real: - However much time they spent criticizing hierarchies, left-wing scholars will always produce their own internal hierarchies based on academic credentials. The left has its own stars, many of whom have contributed to knowledge as much as Julia Roberts has to movies. - The habitus (Bourdieu's term) of the academic is not, never will be that of the worker. To academics the most important goal is to excel within their own habitus; publication being the main strategy for success. While academic journals and books are hardly published with a view to profit maximization, there is a cultural marketplace in which academics can accumulate cultural capital which they can use to further improve their position. - I sympathize with Rorty that the academic left of today is more self-involved than ever: "I did not think that deconstruction had done much either for the study of literature or for a grasp of our political problems - not because deconstruction is bad philosophy, but because we should not expect too much of philosophy. We should not ask philosophy, of whatever sort, to accomplish tasks for which it is unsuited. Although I have learned a great deal from Laclau's writings, I nevertheless think of him as overestimating Derrida's political utility, and thereby contributing to an unfortunate over-philosophication of leftist political debate. That over-philosophication has helped create, in the universities of the US and Britain a self-involved academic left which has become increasingly irrelevant to substantive political discussion."
