i like your posts--especially the most recent one that began as a response to curtiss. i won't reproduce more of it than enough to identify it and to get to the part to which i wanted to respond:
At 06:13 PM 1/26/99 +1100, you wrote:
>hi curtiss,
>
>curtiss_leung at ibi.com wrote:
>
>> Marx was trying to show that the commodity was not as it appeared,
>> true, but is that a license for the overwrought prose of some posties?
[much deleted material]
>different? and, i think we can't simply write off the academy as an
>ivory-tower in the way that would have actually meant something in the
times of
>a not-so-mass education system. if the universities are increasingly a
site of
>production (as i think they are) and if the majority of students are destined
>to be working class (which i think is now more than ever true) and if there is
>now the not-so-clean symmetry between productive labour and manual labour as
>there was before (true for me), then the academy as a site of class
struggle is
>more than just a banal statement, and one that marxists can't take
seriously if
>they think it is all ivory-tower stuff. aesthetics no less than the
philosophy
>of science or economics is our terrain - especially when what was usually
>regarded as epiphenomenal to the 'base' is i reckon now more or less another
>branch of prodn. (now, there's a provocation to end off on....
there are some interesting things out there that contribute (in varying degrees) to what you're outlining above (some with regard to the university generally and others with regard to english departments specifically). you may already know some or all of what i suggest: *Ideas of the University* (ed.) Terry Smith (from the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney); *University in Ruins* Bill Readings (Harvard Press); some of the articles in *Class Issues* (ed.) Amitava Kumar (especially Alan Wald's, Peter Hitchock's, Ron Strickland's, Tim Brennan's, and Carol Stabile's (among others) NYU Press; *English in America* Richard Ohmann (2nd ed.); and *Work Time* Evan Watkins. i'm not suggesting any of these things in a com- pletely uncritical way, but because they speak in different and useful ways to the issues that i see you raising above.
wahneema