Doug Henwood wrote: > > On Aug 29, 2006, at 11:33 AM, Mark Lause wrote: > > > In fact, I'd argue that fads (queery theory included) exist > > primarily to > > translate areas of potentially dangerous thought in the wider > > society and > > put them safely in the academic zoo with the right label on the cage. > > So is that why the right-wing is so upset about the influence of > Theory, "queery" and otherwise, on campus? Because it's a way of > containing dangerous critical viruses? Or is it more likely that > they're worried that impressionable young minds might be inspired to > ask some questions?
Mark is still wrestling with survival on the university campus, and undoubtedly familiar with what is going on now, which involves something rather different from the few big names Doug may be acquainted with. And "theory" as it exists month by month in hundreds of journals and thousands of classrooms is no more (though perhaps no less) instigative of "asking questions" than any other university fashion over the last 100 years. The campus movement of the '60s arose not from "theory" (as now used) but from classrooms dominated by a scholarly tradition which aimed precisely at _killing_ questions in the classroom. The New Criticism in its origins was more or less deliberately constructed to deny the title of John C. Whitaker's book, _We Cannot Escape History_. Oh yes we can, said Tate and Brooks and Ransom. Tate's fairly good poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead," essentially freezes history, thereby taking history out of history. Imagine a classroom that makes Kafka's "The Penal Colony" a defense of orthodoxy in religion! And _that_ sort of teaching produced SDS! As far as right-wing worry goes -- a child's fear of monsters under the bed is no reason to hope that maybe there is an exciting monster hiding there. There simply is no direct link between any book (or classroom practice) and political practice. The books that probably prepared me to become a marxist (though that was hardly the spirit in which I read them to begin with) were Pound's Cantos, Arendt's Human Condition, and Maynard Mack's Introduction to The Essay on Man. The same books could and did lead others towards profoundly conservative or reactionary positions. And had it not been for SNCC & Ho they would probably have led me in that direction. Carrol > > Doug
