That Obscure Object of Discipline (was lingua franca on "stars" in academia)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Jan 25 15:26:25 PST 1999


d-m-c at worldnet.att.net wrote:
>HOWEVER, I guess I'd like to see just
>a wee bit less condescencion toward these folks and their deluded ideas
>about how academics have it so much easier than them. ("The English Dept.
>is now a symbol of what ordinary workers are denied: the chance to combine
>paid employment and hobby. Hard to believe, Jamie, but tenured English
>profs have become "that obscure object of desire."") I think that workers
>ought to be given just a little more credit than that and

Lighten up. Don't worry. By 'workers' you mean workers who are denied tertiary education or those who fit our ideas of the 'working class.' The ideology I analyzed in the previous post is most definitely _not_ held by people to whom you think I showed condescension--Egad!. (For instance, my dad, who used to be a steelworker, now a security guard, is violently happy about my being so educated and polylingual and culture-laden. Read Studs Terkel's interview with a steelworker in _Working_, to take another example.)

That dialectical game of professionalism and anti-professionalism is strictly played by us and people like us: paid intellectuals in universities, think tanks, and the media, along with the book-reading & cyber-literate types who show up on e-lists. It's a game played by 'insiders,' so to speak. 'Workers' (the kind we imagine to be 'authentic' workers without book-knowledge) show up only as a figure of speech in this game. (It's like the PC scare executed by the media.) As a matter of fact, those who play this game with the most fervor are humanities intellectuals. It has something to do with our general discomfort with professionalization of 'culture,' guilty feelings about being mental workers, despair of not having any effect on anything, not being able to justify our work or even presence to 'taxpayers,' and so on.

'Shame on You' is the name of the game (which, alas, you also played on me), and it mainly allows intellectual types to waste time. That's how ideology works. Let's not waste time.

Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list