> Then came identity politics! BANG!, Deconstructionism! BANG! BANG!!,
> academic professionalism! BANG!!! BANG!!! BANG!!! And before you knew it,
> the humanities became a pointless exercise in intellectual masturbation.
An improvement over its previous function, as a pointless exercise in jacking off the ruling class, no? Identity politics was a Good Thing (TM), it politicized the canon, the same way that deconstruction politicized theory. Professionalism has nothing to do with it -- thirty years of austerity, budget cutbacks, and the transformation of humanities departments into trade schools for memo-writing 101 have wrecked the place.
I have mixed feelings about our nomenklatura. On the one hand, there's the Slim Shady voice saying that these are a bunch of fuckers, who will do their damndest to prevent people like me from *ever* having a teaching job, not despite but precisely because I've written more theory in three years than the entire Yale English Dept. has in three decades. Then the Dr. Dre says, well, when things get bad enough they'll organize unions and fight academic capitalism. So far, Slim is ahead on points.
-- Dennis