perhaps you mean wordy? Because I think about the way people on this list have immediate, knee-jerk reactions against anything academic: peter ward for example. academia is full of jargon -- as if that wasn't the point of academia to begin with and as if jargon is not the point of any specialized profession. i have to give presentations to the "business" -- the marketing and sales people. i am keenly aware of the jargon and the need to translate. they think they don't have a jargon. *wink*
a couple of weeks ago, the VP got really into something I was talking about and started using words I honestly can't remember because I did not know what they meant. We had joked earlier about the jargon issue -- that he'd come to my "techy" talk because he heard I would jazz it up, but it still couldn't understand how I can be so into something that sounded so boring. and the code -- it hurt his eyes. So, playing on that I said, "You know how your eyes glaze over when I say words like setter and getter, jQuery UI libraries, semantics, and the syntax of an URL build? My eyes just glazed over when you said ----- (whatever words he used). Could you tell me what you mean by those words?"
so academia is full of jargon purposefully constructed to keep people out of the university, purposefully engaged in because they are all elitist snobs who don't want to let people in, because they pose as democrats who are for the people, but their language reveals their true purpose: to be snobs in ivy-covered halls who don't really like the ordinary people -- like sales dweebs and customer service reps, who never, ever use jargon that non-insiders don't understand. and if they do, that's because they are in the corporate world, where such practices are to be expected. The university -- oh! -- what you should do in the university is completely avoid such jargon because, magically, if you are in university, you are a special snowflake who has magically escaped being shaped by the same forces that shape the marketing dweebs and customer service reps. it is entirely on you to heroicially resist such a world!
but ths author isn't engaging in any of that. he's not writing an essay -- piece of movement propaganda intended to reach out to activists and speak to their desires -- about how evil the university's are in the same way the Peter Ward's of this list do. Rather, he writes like this:
"But the 'irrelevant' departments also have their place. With their 'pure' motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context. As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical potential. And so we attend lecture after lecture about how 'discourse' produces 'subjects,' ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter. The university gladly permits precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of commodities. A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational radicalism. And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls."
I can't fathom why this is objectionable. It describes my experience at university quite well. I can remember laughing about the methodological dualism he describes: how we are learned we were effects of discourses, how we occupied subject-positions and yet, as he says, seldom considered how we, ourselves, were "produced by this discourse about discourse." Once in a while we did, but you cannot get through academia dwelling on such things. You will go mad. Just as I can have my Marxist beliefs, but I must often drop them at the revolving door to my workplace, so I can get through the day without enacting one of the 5 million ways.
And it was pretty apparent that what the university does is allow for a little radicalism because it must in order to prevent something akin to a Legitimation Crisis. I do not even think this is some large, stalking social structural phantasm that operates behind our backs. I have sat, recently, in a big board room with the CIO of our company, watching as VPs planned, openly, about how to be a more "fun" company not for the sake of "fun" but for the sake of getting more work out of us, of making us more loyal and long-term in our employment, of reducing turnover, for lower training costs, for improving retention numbers, decreasing sick days, and so forth. And of course, I knew all this long before this event: editing and typesetting books by a management consultant which were books all about how to extract more labor from the workforce by using Continuous Quality Improvement and creating amore open, democratic workplace where workers in the trenches are given more respect. Why? because in the trenches they have knowledge, and they can show how to cut costs, save money, do things better. The job of management was to open things up, give them a little freedom, and respect -- all in the interest of extracting more labor and profit.
This isn't a screed, as Doug implied, that has anything to do with some denunciation of the university based on mundane, one-dimensional concerns about jargon or elitism or antipathy to the common people. Nor is it a claim that _all_ the university does is produce death. As the author says, while it's a factory, it still produces civic life.
And universities do this as well. WBM tried to write a book about it but he failed miserably. This guy gets at it in a single paragraph that, as other reviewers have noted, WBM should have accomplished in a paragraph as well:
"We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the university's ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excluded the immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their citations. "
Bored a few months ago and unable to use my library card, I got books from the company library. I read a slim little pocket volume for managers on how to manage by artificially creating and then deftly managing by manufacutring a crisis -- by putting it to your executive team, that what they are facing is a crisis:
"Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous."
The author would read that sentence and say, "Awesome! They are following my lead on this!"
And this:
"Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution's meaning for our own lack of meaning. It's the positions we thoughtlessly enact. It's the particular nature of being owned. "
does not imply, as the Wards of the world so often do, that the university cannot be redeemed at all. IT does not suggest that the research programs and suchlike would be oppressive and harmful with their jargony jargon no matter what conditions within which they thrived.
It is a polemic asking people to get off their asses and fight. Fight to realize the ideals of the university -- for marx it would have been to fight for the ideals of real democracy, not the craptarded ones the gothat programme advanced. To stop participating in the social death, to stop managing its ugliness with ironically detached observations about how we're all effects of discourses and such a discourse about discourse is the instrument effect of social death.
I have my objections to the heroic individualism that this author seems to promulgate, but self-indulgence? If this is the definition of self-indulgence, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/self-indulgence, i don't get it. there's nothing about this piece that seems to be about the author pursuing his or her own needs above everyone's else's.
The Wards of the world remind me of a story told by a 60s era feminist from a working class background. She was at consciousness raising meetings, dealing with college graduates who would sit around and tell everyone theory was useless. They'd read it already and concluded it was useless. Therefore, no one else need be bothered with it.
The Wards of the world are like the anti-theory feminists. They go to college, find it horrible for whatever reason, and then build an anti-theory theory that instructs everyone else to skip academia, waste of time! The Wards of the world would tell you not to bother struggling to redeem the university because there's nothing to redeem, ever.
That's self-indulgent. That is an argument that holds that the universities have no potential whatsoever.
This piece? The author wouldn't ask people to fight for the university, wouldn't ask people to look and see how their identity struggles are commodified and tear them apart, keeping them from realizing solidarity, if the author thought the university had nothing to offer.
shag