i'm not a litcritter, but some related comments on the academy and struggles:
i'm not sure that the problem is the absence of a relationship between struggles outside the academy and academic work, nor even that the ideas within (say) the humanities were *imported* from those struggles. ie., there is always a relationship, however reified (or should i say, reifying) between class struggles and disciplinary practices, just as there is always struggle; whether or not it's overtly apprehended as such within disciplinary discourses goes to the character of disciplinary practice itself.
goran therborn in _science, class and society_ puts it like this:
"in the development of the social concerns of sociology the 'red' revolution was a very real historical spectre. ... The revolutionary proletariat haunted even the American sociologists of the classical era. Today this may sound incredible but in the period of the Haymarket and Homestead massacres, the Pullman strike and other violent class struggles, when the American labour movement was rapidly developing, it was only natural. ... The decade of the rise of classical sociology, the 1890's, was at the same time the decade of the rapid rise of the labour movement.
...one can hear the echoes of it [the Paris Commune of 1871] in Durkheim's _Division of Labour in Society_, where the author refers to 'class wars', civil wars which occur 'due to the manner in which labour is distributed'. We can probably catch a glimpse of what Durkheim thought were its lessons in his account of the tasks of a teacher of philosophy... 'To the teacher of philosophy also belongs the task of awakening in the minds that are entrusted to his care the concept of the law; of making them understand that mental and social phenomena are like other phenomena, subject to laws that the human will cannot upset simply by willing, and therefore that revolutions, taking the word literally, are as impossible as miracles'. Max Weber seems to have been even more anxious than Tonnies at the danger threatening traditional Prussian institutions in those days [circa 1918]. He was especially worried about the prospect of a dissolution of the army, which was necessary to maintain order -- above all against 'the mad Liebknecht gang'...".
hence durkheimian functionalism (and corporatism) and weberian neo-kantianism (the distinction b/n values and validity, politics and method), and indeed the 'anomalies' (or limit-concepts) of both -- as durkeim's concept of anomie and weber's passion for the army as the last resort to restore order. fast forward to recent times, and therefore quite different pressures on the concepts of law, society, state and civil society that are the stuff of the social sciences, negri and hardt write in _labour of dionysus_:
"With the end of the 1970s, there also ended particular conceptions of worker subjectivity, class struggle, and leftist politics in general. The 1980s seemed in many respects one long celebration of the definitive victory of capital over labour, from the neoliberal economic revolutions of Reagan and Thatcher in the early eighties to the 'death of communism' dramatized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Labour seemed to disappear from the scene while capital assumed the role of the primary productive force. The master had finally put an end to that annoying struggle and simply done away with the slave. ...
[there is a] profound resonance between the interpretation of Rawls that we have conducted thus far and the crisis of the Welfare State in the 1980s. We have emphasized the exclusion of the categories of production and labour in Rawls's theory of right and the exclusion of any role for intersubjective bargaining or negotiation in his conception of the social contract. In a parallel fashion, the 1980s saw the end of corporatism and collective bargaining as methods of State legitimation and planning for social and economic stability. ... The economic crisis was above all a crisis of capital's ability to master its conflictual relationship with labour throough a social and political dialectic. Excessive demands of labor (whether recognised as high wages, insubordination in the process of production, or refusal of the social mechanisms of command) pushed the dialectical process to the point of rupture, making mediation unfeasible. The strategies for crisis-management, then, shifted from mediation to exclusion: both exclusion of the traditional process of negotiation and the exclusion of labor itself from the site of production.
...It seems that this pragmatic Hegelian approach [Steven Smith] to morality calls for a re-creation of the Keynsian State in which now the economic terms are all replaced by moral terms. The intervention of the moral planner-State (or rather, the moral welfare State) is the only way to avoid the catastrophe brought on by liberalism's chaotic free-market approach to value; it is the only way to produce stability necessary for the mass production of subjectivity, for the development of a coherent community of values. ...The communitarians, then, envision a program that would finally make good on Reagan's promises of a national moral community. ...The only way to qualify this 'we' is through identification to the whole -- we Americans, we members of the procedural republic. The State inheres in these arguments as a necessity, as the only verifiable subject of community, as the full realisation of embodied subjectivity. ...In the final instance, the communitarian preoccupation with the theory of the subject leads to the proposition of the State as the only fully realised and autonomous subject."
so, we arrive at weber sans the distinction between society and state (which is the necessary corollary of any neo-kantian distinction between values and validity), durkheim sans the corporatist identities and their mediations, hegel sans civil society. law, violence and exclusion.
"The State no longer rules primarily through disciplinary deployments, but through networks of control. In this regard, the contemporary shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control that Gilles Deleuze recognises in the work of Michel Foucault corresponds very well to the Marxian historical passage from the formal to the real subsumption, or rather it shows another face of this same tendency. (See [Deleuze's] 'Postscript on the Societies of Control')."
and that passage has done more to transform the academy than anything else, founded as it was as a kind of bridge between state and society, premised on a distinction between structures and surperstructures, on the perfection and/or amelioration of the disciplinary forms of the factory, school, family, sexuality, etc. the academy is just, or increasingly, another site of production, entirely a "friggin organ of government and corporate puke". michael yates comments go directly to this.
Angela _________