ACTA's Must-Reads
« Fairness is as fairness does | Main | Dartmouth's nosedive »
Lott's strife
Conservatives may be few and far between on campus, but that doesn't mean there is a smug and secure political consensus among left-of-center faculty. University of Virginia English and American studies professor Eric Lott has just published a book castigating left-wing intellectuals for not being leftist enough; in response, UCLA historian Russell Jacoby has just published a review of Lott's book in The Nation that castigates Lott for being ideologically and intellectually ridiculous. Lott's book, Jacoby writes, "is to stay-at-home tenured radicals what the television remote is to couch potatoes. Without parking hassles or library bottlenecks, you get the latest on unforgettable conferences and pathbreaking journal articles."
Jacoby focusses relentlessly on Lott's feckless assumption that radical politics is synonymous with the self-important, obfuscatory theorizing of pampered academics steeped in Marxist theory. The result is both a withering deflation of Lott's book as well as an acerbic commentary on the intellectual climate of an increasingly insular and narcissistic academy. An excerpt from Jacoby's hysterically funny and eminently readable review suggests both the substance and the style of the debate between Lott-like leftists and Jacoby-like liberals:
Lott seeks more than to guide would-be tenured radicals; he has a mission and an animus. He wants to carve out a space for radicals to the left of detestable "boomer liberals," who have seized the limelight and distorted politics. They constitute "one of the chief obstacles" to a revitalized politics. In fact, Lott's title misleads, and either of his earlier working titles, Boomer Liberalism or The Lost Intellectuals, might have been more accurate. These boomers are the opposite of "disappearing" liberals. They are omnipresent. Who are they? Lott names "a few of the most celebrated of these thinkers": Todd Gitlin, Michael Lind, Joe Klein, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Berman, Stanley Crouch, Greil Marcus, Sean Wilentz and Henry Louis Gates Jr.For Lott this "new liberal front" oozes with a "piecemeal, reformist self-satisfaction." The new reformers represent a "bone headed degeneration of the radical spirit." They have "created the political fog that obscured the left from view" and buried the "liberal alternative to hawkish conservatism." These liberals pander to state power and American nationalism. They yearn for the "old-boys' left" that was largely white and that claimed to be universal. Their work is "anti-corporate" rather than anticapitalist. (Disclosure alert: Along with Mark Crispin Miller and Thomas Frank, I am listed as suffering from this particular ailment.) They turn politics into adjuncts of the John Kerry presidential bid. They are a "secret sharer of neoconservative ideology," and they legitimate the Bush White House and its politics. They constitute an intellectual and political "disaster."
Lott, on the other hand, writes from a "radical egalitarian perspective" that celebrates "upsurge from below." Instead of liberal wishy-washiness about class and economic inequality, he squarely calls for a "full engagement with working-class hopes" that "necessarily involves a long march through the history of African-American liberation movements, radical women's uprisings, and other insurrectionary energies." The boomer liberals do not understand how "successful activist movements" of "blacks, Latinos, women, queers, and others have transformed" politics. With a self-professed "irony" and polemical zeal, Lott blasts old New Leftists in order to invigorate a new radical politics.
In an era of pallid Democrats and furtive leftists, Lott comes out shouting his revolutionary loyalties. He marches with real working people. So far, so good. Unfortunately, he marches only from the podium to the speaker's table. Sometimes he gets to the library or logs on to hiptheory.com to check out what Etienne Balibar, a French post-Marxist, has written. His radical commitments amount to promoting leftist colleagues in American studies departments and a few European Marxists. Moreover, he wildly inflates the impact of the "liberal front" he is supposedly challenging. With Lott as your guide, you'd think Todd Gitlin and Paul Berman sabotaged the left and ushered in Bush. Were it so simple.
Throughout this tract Lott charges boomer liberals with reformist politics and theoretical simplicity. Even if one grants these points, what does he offer to replace them? He claims the high political ground, but he cannot formulate a single coherent sentence about politics as seen from there. He tosses off phrases about "intersectionality" and "the praxis potential of antinormativity," but politics hardly enters this political book. One might suppose that in the midst of the war in Iraq Lott would take on its liberal supporters, such as Berman, but he never raises the issue. He feels more comfortable flaying Berman for dismissing the Black Panthers and for pining for a '60s before the women and gay "insurgencies challenged the white male hegemony of the baby-boom left." He prefers gabbing about how soft leftists have misinterpreted Clinton or African-American music to explaining how tough-as-nails radicals like him see the world today.
There's much more, and it's all worth reading. Debates about intellectual diversity in the academy tend to assume that in the absence of a significant conservative presence on faculties, academics are united in an exclusive, self-congratulatory society of the likeminded. There is certainly a broad descriptive truth to this claim. But it is true, too, that this society of the broadly likeminded is as given to internal schism as any collective, and that the fault lines drawn by these schisms can tell us a great deal about the weak spots in what has been characterized as an enormously powerful monolith.
Jacoby, who has authored an insightful historical analysis of how the academy came to be so definitively associated with the sort of couch potato leftism he condemns in Lott, is a worthy opponent for activists on both left and right. His debate with David Horowitz last summer about the academic bill of rights is well worth reading.
Posted by acta online at March 26, 2006 09:17 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/128
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Lott's strife:
» Whither O'Connor from joannejacobs.com
Erin O'Connor has been too busy to update Critical Mass, but she's posting on higher education at ACTA Online, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni blog.... [Read More]
Tracked on March 26, 2006 02:53 PM