http://www.bookforum.com/boynton.html
On the afternoon of January 31, 1998, two hundred professors and graduate students gathered at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to discuss a disturbing new movement. "A specter is haunting U.S. intellectual life," a flier announced, "the specter of Left Conservatism." With participants including Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Jonathan Arac, and Paul A. Bové, the conference was designed to address the perceived split in the mid- to late '90s between members of the so-called cultural and real Lefts.
What was the difference between the two? The conventional wisdom of the time had it that the cultural Left was composed of theory-obsessed, anti-American academic relativists who wrote obscure treatises and preferred ethnic- and gender-oriented identity politics to activism. Members of the real Left, on the other hand, were pragmatic humanists, earnest '60s types who favored coalition building (with the labor movement, for one), abhorred class inequality, and pressed for political change via elections.
While there is some truth to the caricatures, I always thought the two sides were (deliberately?) talking past each other. After all, what would it really mean for race to "trump" class, or vice versa? Who actually believes in the existence of depoliticized culture or in a politics whose cultural dimension is irrelevant? Does anyone really doubt that the difference between protesting Lawrence Summers at Harvard and protesting the invasion of Iraq in Washington, DC, is one of kind rather than degree? I would argue that the cultural and real Lefts share an anxiety that has less to do with the future of the Left than with the relevance of the intellectual. Would-be public intellectuals frequently elided the necessary tension between the terms, pretending that ideological consistency and public access can be reconciled easily. They can't, of course, and the attack on Left Conservatism was an obvious symptom of the clash.
In addition to attention-getting events like the Sokal hoax in 1996, several influential books appeared in the years leading up to the Left Conservative conference that questioned the path taken by postwar intellectuals. Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987) lamented the death of the independent critic as well as the rise of the careerist, academic professional who replaced him; Todd Gitlin's The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995) argued that intellectuals had become sidetracked by theoretical debates and satisfied to take over America's English departments while conservatives won the White House; in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), Richard Rorty advocated a form of "civic religion" in which Left intellectuals would take "pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country's principal goal." Books like these posed a challenge: Engage the realities of American life on a serious intellectual level or accept the fact that you are no more (or less) than an academic expert who has mistakenly equated professional standing with social relevance. [...] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060723/ee645b93/attachment.htm>