One would not know it from reading his discussion of my Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia University Press, 2006), but Todd Gitlin and I share many of the same political instincts (“The Self-Inflicted Wounds of the Academic Left,” The Chronicle Review, May 5). Elections, labor, national legal structures, organizational politics, social justice — these are issues about which we agree, although he pretends otherwise.
We part company on the relevance of philosophy and theoretical modes of analysis to public life. He finds them silly, jargon-ridden, pretentious, and inconsequential; I consider them the underlying stuff of political movements, policy trends, and cultural shifts. He scores points lampooning the microdramas of theory; I find a certain version of theory guilty of abdicating responsibility — but not abstract thought as such, which plays a forceful part in shaping our common understandings.
The problem with Gitlin’s perspective is that — as is the case with many others interested chiefly in media coverage — he doesn’t do nuance. So he cannot explain (or even understand) why theory has become fashionable — at times with deleterious effects — within not only the humanities but society at large: why Michel Foucault’s books are mentioned in The West Wing and Jean Baudrillard’s in The Matrix, or why Antonio Negri is featured in Time.
Gitlin can do no more than echo the frustration of think-tank pundits of the right, who are too lazy to absorb the ideas they have the audacity to ridicule. The more dismissive the jab, the more nervous is their intimation that a large number of people are speaking a language that bewilders them.
Sophistication can be a veil, but it is not worthless. In fact, Gitlin could use more of it instead of sticking to homespun wisdom, or that “we’re sick and tired of all this” attitude so prevalent in the United States today, which is fundamentally an appeal to herd mentality.
Academics are not all toothless ideologues, liberals are not always on the left, and conservatives are not always on the right.
His well-intentioned superficiality aside, I want to complain also about the way Gitlin at times expresses disagreement. It is high time we lost the habit of mobilizing cold-war language for the cheap debater’s trick. At one point, Gitlin sneers that I speak “in behalf of the world’s proletariat,” stand for “root-and-branch class-based revolutionism — a variant of the old-time religion.” Neither of these views has anything to do with my book; he simply invents them.
Actually, what I am defending is simpler and more direct: a politics based not on identity but on belief, a collective politics of debate, decision making, and organization. But my argument is also about the way intellectual histories affect sociopolitical history, and about the vital influence of certain modes of philosophy and criticism (primarily Hegelian).
What Gitlin fails to grasp is that current fashions in the humanities, despite being labeled Marxist by the media, are nothing of the sort. On the contrary, they draw their inspiration from right-wing philosophers of the 1920s and 1930s. They are in fact deeply hostile to leftist thinking and have actively sought to censor it.
If the rise of Reaganism represented a move to the right, trends in the humanities — usually portrayed as the ideas of a radical fringe — were versions of a similar movement within the academy. The two were secret sharers. Like the triumphant neoliberal center of American politics, the academic left abjures government, is obsessed with subjectivity, wants to transcend national sovereignty in the name of globalism, and revels (like any good offshore banker) in ambiguous nonplaces whose jurisdiction and identity are in flux or indefinable.
In my book, I try to show how throughout the 1980s and 1990s, diverse forces converged to create a confusion of left and right, making it difficult to tell them apart. The humanities (not all confined to the ivory tower) have played a prominent public role, developing a form of expression that is essentially religious — in the peremptory sense of the word. Debate, evidence, and argument (long the tools of intellectual work) have been replaced by a kind of oracular speaking that is by its nature hostile to debate and disagreement; this, I argue, is also its philosophical conviction.
Whatever the merits and demerits of my book, there is still a lot to be learned by examining academic rituals and codes of meaning. After all, these were the lessons of Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class and Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. The divorce between academics and public life is a populist myth.
Timothy Brennan is a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, and of English, at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 40, Page B16