>the academy can't really be characterized as a factory in which its
workers mindlessly conform, as absent contradictions, fissures, ruptures,
than we can or would want to characterize any other factory and its
workers.<
i'm the last person who'd characterise any factory as a smoothly functioning machine full of mindless conformism. amongst other things, there is surplus value, after all. until capital figures out a way to fully automate production (something i'm not going to complain about) then the factory is always going to be a place of antagonism, by definition. btw, a more detailed run down on the politics of ASA would interest me.
steve wrote:
> that's a very provocative set of quotations you've
> marshalled, angela, but can't the point of it all be
> put more simply? i.e., the academy always shills for
> state power (and the "natural" pre-eminence of the ruling
> orders)?
but it wasn't that simple at all. ie., the point of the different quotations -- from therborn's analysis of classical sociology in the 1890s-1920s to negri and hardt's comments on rawls et al after the 980s -- was to try and point to how the character of the academy (esp the social sciences in this instance) has changed and why those changes have taken place. (as i said, i'm not a litcritter, so the trajectory for litcrit may well be quite different, i don't know.)
> and that's true whether it's a matter of prescriptive
> sociology or the more contemporary pomo "radicalism,"
> which serves mainly to create/reinforce a sense of
> powerlessness.
yes, most likely all disciplines begin with the supposition that professionalised thinking is where it's at, which is why all disciplines -- whether they're experiencing a reconstruction, crisis or founding themselves -- pose epsitemological questions: what is the object we're studying, how can we arrive at the truth of this object, what are the ways in which the truth of x can be verified ... ? crudely, ie., they objectify what they're meant to be studying and subjectify those doing the studying/thinking as the way of aserting their own disciplinary claims. but the kind of idealism which made epistemology the priveliged terrain for asserting legitimacy (ie., which made thinking the agent of truth), whilst it still exists, is premised on a whole range of historically specific instances that might well make it more nostalgic than anything else. does the academy still entail the same kind of idealism if it's also a branch 0f production rather than, as it has been historically, an adjunct to production?
but more importantly, didn't you get a sense from the citations not simply that the ruling class rules, but that the character of the changes within the social sciences (from classical sociology to rawlsian legal theory) suggests quite strongly that the particular answers those disciplines gave to the question of social order are specifically questions about how to engender social order in quite particular circumstances?
ie., they might well seek to establish powerlessness as an epistemological fact, but what they're actually doing (and i think both citations showed clearly) is responding to the absense of this much-touted social order. ie., in a reified sense, they actually acknowledge the power of the masses, just like classical political economy acknowledged the decisiveness of labour for capitalist production at the same time as it rendered labour into an inert object, or tried to. that's why they're called disciplines. and that's why they change: because the discipline fails. it's also the best reason to keep reading these kinds of books: to see just how they fail.
the next question would be, of course, what's the character of this power that we have?
Angela _________