[lbo-talk] postmodern as fuck

Jordan Carroll jordanscarroll at gmail.com
Tue Dec 6 12:08:19 PST 2011


"Academe as a bastion of free enquiry is a bit oversold, too. There certainly are some bold thinkers in Academe, but there's also a lot of faddism, groupthink, and parroting of conventional wisdom. And there's a fair amount of downright ideological thought-policing too; look at the persecution of Norman Finkelstein vel sim. There are courageous individuals within the Unis, but the Unis are not courageous institutions.

I'm delighted by the idea that pomo litcrit is threateningly subversive, though it might well worry the kind of people who are scared of fluoridation and convinced that Obama is a Commie. The only kind of 'interrogation' that matters much in this society is the kind that employs a waterboard." God, all those postmodernists and their lit crit! I hear they're getting into this thing called cultural studies, too. It's going to be the big intellectual trend of the 90s.

While universities are flawed institutions and there are indeed limits to free inquiry, it's hard to imagine anywhere else in America where people get paid to teach Marx. And, right now, I'm sitting in a rather sleepy ag school which is host to a tent city and an administrative building occupation organized by anti-capitalist activists. That probably wouldn't last long in a factory, prison or office building.

J



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