DJ Freddy J Spins the Phat Trax

Christian Gregory christian11 at mindspring.com
Sun Jul 8 11:33:48 PDT 2001



>
> Tenure? [Insert peals of laughter]. Sorry, but Fred got hired during the
> Long Boom of 1945-70. Us Marxist-Adornist radicals are mostly unhired or
> completely excluded from academe. Mike Hardt is very much the exception.
> I've written two state-of-the-art books, translated "Negative Dialectics"
> myself (think this is easy? try it sometime), and am finishing a third,
> taught hugely popular classes, garnered kickass evaluations, but I haven't
> even landed a goddamn *interview* yet (this, after two years on the
> market).

First, I wasn't casting aspersions on the amount or quality of work you've done. (Translating ND is an amazing achievement, in particular. Why don't you talk to presses about it?) Second, you've only just now graduated, so your two years on the market don't really count. This fall, you will probably have a dozen interviews.

My point is simply this: the justification of urbane cosmopolitanist rhetoric as a sign of one's sensitivity to the world's complexity doesn't wash. Academics who do so are basically casting themselves as world-historical Hamlets, justifying their own pedantry by whining about the time being out of joint. "Clarity" in one's prose or linguistic register--even granting the ideological character of the term--doesn't mean stupidity or simplemindedness, or any kind of lack of sensitivity to complexity. Just the opposite. (And I take our eminent listowner and most of the list's members as examples of this.) Only those who have no faith in their audiences insist on their difficulty as a badge of honor--it keeps the wrong sort of readers away.

Christian



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