[lbo-talk] One Michael Moore is worth a hundred cult-crit professors

[Dennis Redmond]

> E.P. Thompson did his greatest and most theoretically innovative work --
the > writing of The Making of the English Working Class -- during and
in the wake > of his teaching at workers' schools, not during his later
tenure at Warwick
> University.

It all depends. Adorno did his greatest and most socially committed work
at a considerable distance from practical electoral politics. Academia
didn't stop Bourdieu and Jameson from doing great things. Sure, Moore's
film may be better than a hundred other documentary films, but one text by
a cultural critic may outshine a hundred other texts.

Theorizing is ferociously hard work. One has to struggle with oneself, as
much as with the concepts and texts, as well as the historical
constellations lurking behind the texts.

-- DRR