> your two years on the market don't really count. This fall, you will
> probably have a dozen interviews.
I sure will -- but they won't be with literature departments. I don't want to claim any special privileges for my sojourn in academic purgatory, the part-time folks have endured far worse than this for decades, and the recession is going to make things even worse, but I do want to insist on distinguishing the academic lecturer from the the carnivorous realities of the theory-market. It's not just the non-interviews; I've buzzed, emailed, written, etc. tons and tons of profs, from Big Names to Small Names, and the only academics to ever respond have been Doug Kellner, who teaches history/critical theory down at UCLA, Peter Hohendahl here at Cornell, Bob Hullot-Kentor and a couple film studies profs, all very cool, extraordinarily gifted folks, doing invaluable work, but all atypical dissidents at odds with academe in their own right. My experience with the academic presses has been similar: you get the most godawful Cold War orthodoxy, hiding behind a thin veneer of rentier urbanity. Maybe I'll see something in the future to qualify this judgement, but these are the *only* responses I've ever received from *any* of the official institutions of the theory-market, to date. As some old dead German refugee put it, the ruling ideas of the epoch are those of the ruling class.
> 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.
It depends on whether the rhetoric actually delivers that complexity, which Jameson's thought never fails to do. To quote The Who, "The simple things you see/ are all complicated". We *need* theory, and theory thrives on complexity, the ability to think globally and resist globally, which requires global mediations. The dialectic between simplicity and complexity needs to be respected and carried out; clinging to either pole ends up in falsehood. DJ Freddy J brings the complexity, Boris "the K" Kagarlitsky brings the simplicity, but the two are fighting the same fight.
OK. Enough ranting, I've gone over my rant-quota for the week, so I'll be, um, West Coast mellow for awhile.
-- Dennis