South Atlantic Quarterly recent issues

Why Academic Freedom Doesn't Matter

Donoghue, F. — 2009-09-23

This essay questions the historical yoking together of the concepts of academic freedom and tenure, arguing that both concepts have been poorly and inconsistently defined since the AAUP's inaugural document, the "Declaration of Principles on Academic Tenure," was published in 1915. The essay charts the critique of the "Declaration" by the Association of American Colleges (AAC). The AAC, an organization of administrators rather than faculty, laid the groundwork for the tenure system as it exists today. It outlined the seven-year probationary period that would precede tenure, and it fought to restrict academic freedom to the professor's area of academic expertise. In doing so, it joined together the two otherwise unrelated concepts. The second half of the essay examines how the legal system has tried, largely without success, to sort out the relationship between academic freedom and tenure. The essay concludes by noting that the research model in the humanities—in which assistant professors are expected to produce scholarly publications in order to earn tenure—has now been grafted to the probationary period, thus compounding the problems of linking academic freedom to tenure.

Take Your Ritalin and Shut Up

Bousquet, M. — 2009-09-23

While David Horowitz's Student Bill of Rights is a false solution, is there a sense in which it grasps a real problem? While all the data shows that student intellectual freedoms aren't foreclosed from the Left, undergraduate curricular choice may be foreclosed in advance by the forces served by the political Right, in a kind of economic conscription that frames student choice within the scaffold of the business curriculum.

If faculty and student intellectual freedoms are interrelated in key ways, it is simply difficult to imagine that undergraduate intellectual freedom could be perfectly secure when the faculty's is not. As administrations struggle to supplant traditional faculty values and practices with "market-smart" and entrepreneurial arrangements, we should be exploring the senses in which the intellectual freedom of the undergraduate may be under similar attacks by similar forces.

With the active involvement of corporate partners, administrations are striving to commercialize, vocationalize, and militarize both curriculum and student culture itself. Furthermore, the role of higher education in sharply intensified exploitation means that we have to ask the same question of most students that we ask of faculty and graduate students: to what extent does the structured precariousness of their existence affect the very possibility of their exercising academic freedom irrespective of any formal guarantees?

Academic Freedom and the Composition Program

Brodkey, L., Bauer, H. — 2009-09-23

Composition programs in American colleges and universities do not enjoy the rights and privileges of other fields and disciplines. The problems have to do with the status of an academic field beset by commonsense criticism of both its curriculum and pedagogy. Subject to frequent institutional reviews, writing programs are often expected to defend their academic practices from the advice of reviewers whose commonsense understanding of writing eschews process and practice in favor of product. Drawing on several reviews of the program in which they teach, the authors argue that the propensity to allow professors from a range of departments to decide what constitutes good writing and the best ways to teach it violates the intentions on which academic freedom at their university resides. They provide examples of reviews of their program that fail to take into account the pedagogical goals of the writing program. Such reviews rely on external criteria such as commonsense understandings of grammar and style instead of considering the program's stated pedagogical goals and learning outcomes. The essay concludes that institutional reviews of writing programs should acknowledge the review guidelines set by professional organizations in writing program administration and, further, that they be conducted by peers familiar with research and scholarship in the field of composition.

Murderabilia Inc.: Where the First Amendment Fails Academic Freedom

Nelson, S. P., Prendergast, C. — 2009-09-23

The commonplace justification of academic freedom, described in terms of professional norms and practices of the professoriate, often cites advancing the public interest in knowledge creation as a key basis for academic freedom. Yet the public's role remains underspecified, its interests loosely defined, and it is increasingly imagined as opposite the professoriate in this justification. Using the example of the U.S. government's effort to control and ultimately destroy the archived papers of convicted murderer and former professor Theodore Kaczynski through a "murderabilia" auction, we explore the relationship between the public's freedom of inquiry and access to information, on the one hand, and academic freedom of the professoriate, on the other. We argue that the public's broad, yet poorly recognized freedom of inquiry under the First Amendment is in some ways analogous to the academic freedom of faculty described by application of professional norms. While we seek to clarify the boundary between these freedoms, we argue that they can be mutually reinforcing to the benefit of both academics and the broader public. We conclude that more is to be gained by such rethinking of the relationship of the public to academic freedom than by the current attempts to refine the professoriate's position in the corporate hierarchy of the university.

The Fate of Academic Freedom

Nelson, C. — 2009-09-23

Following a concise definition of academic freedom and a rejoinder to current conservative efforts to limit it by David Horowitz, the National Association of Scholars, and Stanley Fish, "The Fate of Academic Freedom" describes sixteen specific conditions emerging as major threats to the concept and the practice: (1) instrumentalization, (2) contingency, (3) authoritarian administration, (4) abuses of the national security state, (5) administration restrictions on the use of communication technology, (6) unwarranted research oversight, (7) neoliberal assaults on academic disciplines, (8) managerial ideology, (9) circumvention of shared governance, (10) globalization, (11) opposition to human rights, (12) inadequate grievance procedures, (13) religious intolerance, (14) political intolerance, (15) legal threats, and (16) claims of financial crisis. Definitions and examples of each of these trends are provided and their consequences explored. Readers are encouraged to test the list of emerging threats against their experience at their own institution(s). The essay concludes by mapping out strategies for resisting these trends.

The Corporate University, Academic Freedom, and American Exceptionalism

Cheyfitz, E. — 2009-09-23

In the first part of this essay, I sketch some of the material conditions that comprise the contemporary corporate university: a job market dominated by contingent labor (non-tenure-track positions) and increasingly by part-time labor; the cooptation of links between scholarship and activism (particularly noticeable in ethnic studies and Native American studies programs) by the traditional scholarly agenda of "disinterested" individualized research; and the force of this agenda coupled with the changing labor market to stymie collaborative progressive action within the university. I then suggest the way these conditions have operated in two cases with which I have been centrally involved: faculty governance at Cornell University, and the firing of Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the second part of the essay, in addition to the Churchill case, I survey the cases of some scholars who have found themselves under attack by their own universities either for their activism, their scholarship, or a combination of both. By looking closely at the cases of Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, and Nadia Abu El Haj, I conclude that what these cases have in common is that all these scholars have mounted critiques of Israeli and American exceptionalism. I define exceptionalism as a mode of producing history outside of history, as a way of reading history ahistorically in order to create a coherent narrative—one that appears to be without contradiction—that we call the Nation. In particular, the exceptionalist mode functions to deny the violent displacement of indigenous peoples by settler colonialism.

Civility and Academic Life

Finkelstein, N. G. — 2009-09-23

The essay focuses on whether academic freedom is compatible with prescribing a code of conduct outside the classroom. I first look at the Bertrand Russell case. Russell was denied a teaching post at City College of New York because of his expressed opinions on morality and religion. Russell maintained that insofar as he was appointed to a teaching post in logic and mathematics, his opinions on morality and religion had no relevance in assessing his academic competence. Dissenting from Russell's absolutist position, the essay argues that it is unrealistic to expect a university to hire faculty regardless of their opinions, however outrageous, on topics of general, public interest. I then scrutinize cases of allegedly outrageous political opinions. I conclude that most of the criticism directed at such opinions is hypocritical and disingenuous.

Deadwood: Academic Freedom and Smart People

Robbins, B. — 2009-09-23

"Deadwood: Academic Freedom and Smart People" offers a reading of the 2008 film Smart People as an allegory of what the humanities "do" as understood by the general public: the remembering of beloved but now distant or inaccessible things, such as the dead wife for whom the protagonist is in mourning, and using that remembrance to judge or refuse the present. The film suggests that the standpoint of the present must finally prevail, and yet that there is also a value in the characteristically crotchety (that is, critical) attitude toward the present that stems logically from this reverential attitude toward a neglected past. The question of how much value there is in the humanities' posture of perpetual critique—a posture embodied in the paradox of the "deadwood" professor who is successful precisely because of his failure—is crucial to the defense of academic freedom, the essay argues, given that academic freedom is not a constitutional right, but on the contrary depends on the public's goodwill, a goodwill that is perpetually at stake in struggles over common sense such as the struggle staged in Smart People. In other words, academics who want to defend their academic freedom need to extend their fight outside the walls of the academy, into the public sphere, and to take on the particular issues where academic opinion diverges most dramatically from ordinary opinion—for example, secularism and internationalism.

The Economics of Academic Freedom, or Plato's P & T Committee

Nealon, J. T. — 2009-09-23

Within contemporary debates about the present and future of the university, academic freedom often functions in a Neoplatonic manner—which is to say, it functions as that eternal and unfettered form that guides the mundane material practices of academic life (most obviously, tenure and its lifetime job security). Without the Platonic cover of academic freedom, the exorbitant job guarantees of tenure would, it seems, have precious little reason to exist. However, in the Platonic spirit of academic freedom, I want to propose that we jettison the entire notion of academic freedom as the primary theoretical cover for tenure and examine—dare I say affirm?—tenure as a practice in its own right, as a business practice in a particular labor situation. While most recent analysis suggests no future for tenure precisely because of its economic costs, I argue that tenure is in fact "rational and maximizing" in the present cultural-capital economy of university administration, teaching, and research. In short, this essay argues that it's the practice of tenure, rather than the idea of academic freedom, that needs to be expanded, affirmed, or saved in the context of the corporate university.

Away from Home: The Case of University Employees Overseas

Ross, A. — 2009-09-23

As Anglophone universities expand overseas, what are some of the problems facing the protection of faculty rights? The essay describes the spectrum of potential threats to academic freedom at overseas sites and describes various measures undertaken by the AAUP and others to combat them. Protection needs to take account of commercially induced self-censorship, which is less visible than the overt efforts on the part of government authorities to quash politically inconvenient speech. Offshore branches of universities may prove to be the most cost-effective way of servicing the needs of multinational knowledge capital as it roams around the globe in search of the cheapest locations and highest returns. How we think about academic freedom also needs to take account of the increasing crossover between universities and knowledge corporations as they mutate into species more adaptable to the land, sea, and air of the new geography of knowledge capitalism.

Academic Freedom/Academic Market

Watkins, E. — 2009-09-23

The principles of academic freedom as articulated in centrally influential documents such as the 1940 AAUP "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure" assume the concept of merit as basic. The protections and the responsibilities of academic freedom and tenure are granted to faculty members who over time have demonstrated meritorious work in their specific fields of expertise. The proliferation of post-tenure reviews, however, suggests another model at work: academic freedom as grounded in free market principles rather than on long-term merit. The changes marked by the transition from merit to market models affect a considerable range of people, not only faculty, but also students and the general public, whose support is crucial to higher education. I argue that the economic costs of sustaining an academic freedom market are enormous, a burden borne primarily by groups marked as exogenous to the proper operation of the market who receive little or no benefit from its operations. Combinations of merit and market models usually offer the worst of both worlds, where the exclusionary force so often a part of the history of merit practices thereby becomes available to rationalize the exclusions imposed by an academic freedom market. Thus rather than attempt a return to merit-based principles of academic freedom, I argue in conclusion that it's worth exploring the possibility of building alternative collective forms of markets that can be responsive to the needs of all citizens who have a stake in the ideals of academic freedom.

Notes on Contributors

2009-09-23

Et Nunc... Per Hoc Signum: A Meditation on Genitives in Everyday Life Stories

Mudimbe, V. Y. — 2009-06-29

Looking at texts in everyday life might seem an effort in both detachment and critical indifference. But, is it really? Texts deliver their visibility in the contrasts spelled out by a grammar in which qualities and functions depend on word orders and the intervention of prepositions. An inwardness documents their features, substantiates fragile items in comparison with a Greek or Latin declension and word-ending systems. It may detail signals, for example, the supernatural traits of an absent Momma, the virtues of a mythic figure, gendered labors, and only interpretive but systematic comparisons with different linguistic tables and memorial substantives. From the linguistic background—genetically identical with English and some twenty centuries distant—an old Greek or Latin framework transforms reading into a perpetual exercise in comparative interpretations. The main functions of the genitive might thus serve the task of a first vignette.

Thinking Afro-Futures: A Preamble to an Epistemic History

Olaniyan, T. — 2009-06-29

Africana thought within the orbit of Western discourses, from the eighteenth century to the 1970s, conceived the place of the black person in the world in essentially "political" terms. That is, it conceived it as the problematic of a dominated and disenfranchised people in a modern world it helped bring into being but whose benefits are controlled and appropriated primarily by Europe and America. This was the catalyst behind the exertions of the voice of the slave and the Pan African Congresses of the early twentieth century to the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Richard Wright, C. L. R. James, and Eric Williams, to name just a few. The "political" approach, which I exemplify here with the writings of Richard Wright, would subsequently be challenged by a preoccupation with the affirmation of "culture."

The Dead Zone: Stumbling at the Crossroads of Party Politics, Genocide, and Postracial Racism

James, J. — 2009-06-29

Examining the parameters of Africana thought with references to the 2008 presidential campaigns that led to the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States, this essay explores the relationship of black elite leadership and black mass disenfranchisement. It identifies the intersection of these two formations as a "dead zone," that is, a void in practical and theoretical politics, one that reveals central evasions in conventional discourse given its general inability or unwillingness to critique the simultaneous successes and failures of a multiracial democracy that enables antiblack racism and genocide.

Marx in the Vernacular: Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub and the Riddles of Localizing Leftist Politics in Sudanese Philosophies of Liberation

Abusharaf, R. M. — 2009-06-29

In the thought of the late secretary-general of the Sudanese Communist Party, Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub, the intricacies of culture and politics are deftly interwoven in a thorough ethnographic and philosophical critique of state and society. Mahgoub's wide-ranging writings engaging questions of liberation led him to devote his life to localizing Marxist theory in the Sudanese context. His explication of the tools of translating Marxism challenges absolutist interpretations and applications of a single idea in a cultural context unfavorable to its growth. This essay draws on Mahgoub's impressive intellectual contributions to patterns and processes through which Marxist politics can be mobilized to defy egregious state transgressions of democratic rights. Throughout his work, which is analyzed in this essay, two preoccupations figure prominently: the commitment to creating a public culture that accommodates innovation and renewal in transforming a society shredded by exploitative discriminatory practices, and the struggle for the reinforcement of a vision of liberation more expansive than the one presented in the nationalist discourse, which Mahgoub critiqued as forlorn and unable to produce a coherent vision on political transformation. "Marx in the Vernacular" traces these intellectual and political concerns in Mahgoub's thought and links their pertinence to current issues in Sudanese and African politics. Multiple relevancies of Mahgoub's legacies are elucidated alongside analysis of tradition, humanism, Marxist anthropology, and the nature of the national democratic revolution.

A Future for Africana (Post-)Analytic Philosophy

Taylor, P. C. — 2009-06-29

Recent years have brought substantial changes in the conditions that motivate and frame the work of Africana philosophy. Racist domination has largely given way to racialized hegemony; formal colonization has largely given way to neoliberal trade, aid, and debt regimes; and towering revolutionaries and reformers continue to give way to younger generations of politicians, scholars, artists, and activists. In light of these and other developments, it is important to ask about the future of Africana philosophy. More precisely, in light of the ideological, discursive, and methodological variety in the field, and the variety of issues that Africana peoples face around the world, it is important to think about some futures for Africana philosophy. I propose to think here about one, by examining some recent developments in and near Africana analytic philosophy. I will focus specifically on work by Bernard Boxill, Tommie Shelby, Cathy Cohen, and Michael Dawson.

"Our Duty to Conserve": W. E. B. Du Bois's Philosophy of History in Context

Bernasconi, R. — 2009-06-29

When restored to its historical context, W. E. B. Du Bois's "The Conservation of Races" emerges less as a contribution to the debate about the legitimacy of the concept of race, which is how it tends to be read today, and more as an intervention in the debate about the impact of so-called miscegenation on the African American population. Du Bois's contribution is situated in relation to the positions held by Frederick Douglass, Edward Blyden, and Alexander Crummell. Particular attention is paid to the way Du Bois and Kelly Miller used the inaugural meeting of the American Negro Academy to respond to Frederick Hoffman's racist study, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which in the context of social Darwinism had a dramatic impact on how mixed-race people were seen. Du Bois argued that African Americans should not divide on the basis of degrees of racial purity but unite around their common ideals and a hope for the future in the midst of continuing oppression.

"Thief's Theme"

Ralph, M. — 2009-06-29

Though voter theft is an American tradition as old as the right to vote, it has not yet become a key focus of scholarship in the field of political science. Thus, this line of inquiry might benefit from a position that is more critical and imaginative than the one professional political scientists tend to develop. This chapter uses hip-hop lyricism to measure how the concept of theft appears in the political philosophy of Malcolm X against the way this strategy for resource redistribution is discussed in the films The Departed and Scarface as a way to enrich political theory. If the concept of theft can be used to track deception in U.S. democracy, certain contemporary forms of lyrical and visual culture might enrich the academic study of politics, since they produce forms of "political distrust" that counteract the presumptions with which scholars in this disciplinary niche tend to proceed.

The looming threat of "theft" ironically reveals its own enchantment with democracy in that it suggests the U.S. system of electoral politics works perfectly well unless momentarily interrupted by rogue politicians, instead of framing duplicity as a problem that plagues this particular form of political representation at a fundamental level. Still, the idea of stolen democracy that surfaces in lyrical and visual culture illuminates a crucial challenge for political theory in its suggestion that, for the past few decades—but even more intensely during the past few elections—the U.S. government has been administered expressly, if not exclusively, by thieves and hustlers.

Untimeliness, or Negritude and the Poetics of Contramodernity

Melas, N. — 2009-06-29

This essay aims to develop the notion of untimeliness in order to complicate the often mimetic historicism that underwrites approaches to the question of colonial and postcolonial modernities and modernism. Starting from Homi Bhabha's notion of contramodernity, particularly in its response to Michel Foucault's ontology of the present, the essay reexamines the cultural ideology and poetics of négritude in light of the idea of an untimely and fractured present. At the center of the analysis is Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida are also mentioned.

Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of

Farred, G. — 2009-06-29

Using the brief (ten-week) rule of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo as an instructive instance for thinking the post-, "Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of" argues that the post- is never the time after but the moment—impossible as it is to understand—of, that is, the moment itself. Grounded in a critique of "postcommunism," this essay maps Lumumba's transition from bourgeois nationalist—the postcolonial leader—to the communist who did not name himself a communist, the anticolonialist transformed, by the force of history (the failure of the United Nations to protect the sovereignty of the newly independent Congo; the neoimperialist designs of the United States and Belgium; his struggle against the Belgian-sponsored secessionist movement in the copper-rich Katanga province), into a Lenin-like revolutionary. This essay thinks Lumumba both in relation to the African revolutionary tradition (Gamal Abdel Nasser, Julius Nyerere, and Agostinho Neto, among others) and the history of radical socialism (Lenin figures especially prominently in this regard).

Notes on Contributors

2009-06-29

Introduction: After Resignation and Against Conformity

Ganguly, K. — 2009-02-23

The introduction to this issue on intellectual labor investigates the terms on which intellectual work is conducted and theorized today. Refuting the idea that intellectual-as-immaterial labor constitutes a primary productive force in contemporary capitalism, we look instead to alternative and critical conceptions of intellectual work that have, in the present conjuncture, become dissenting accounts of value. At the same time, we note the extent to which assertions about what constitutes radical thought are consistent with the logic of corporations and the mainstream media, all of which equally endorse the creativity of the worker and deny the fundamentally social character of labor. We argue that the underlying conformism of strands of radical theory that valorize immaterial labor needs to be replaced by forms of disciplined intellection that can account for the ever-intensifying conditions of the reification of thought under the sign of capitalism.

Intellectual Labor Power, Cultural Capital, and the Value of Prestige

Shapiro, S. — 2009-02-23

What lies at the root of academic remuneration in a culture of professionalized celebrity? I take this question as an opportunity to reconsider the notion of cultural capital. Discounting the idea that "intellectual labor" exists, I argue that we need instead to discuss "intellectual labor power," the process through which thought performance, which includes teaching, is commodified on the price-setting marketplace. When viewed in this light, Pierre Bourdieu's influential definitions of cultural capital will be found wanting, as they do not account for the social differences that capitalist practices make as they reconfigure status societies into contract ones. Instead, I propose the rudiments of a theory of cultural capital grounded in the exploitation of labor power through institutions of knowledge formation, and I nominate the form through which this value appears as prestige. Prestige is the social expression of the labor value given up by subjects to institutions and their agents in return for the perceived security of (occupational) privilege; it is the collective form of charisma. In this light, iconic figures become remunerated, less for their individual work and its putative ingenuity than for how it attracts unpaid labor and its benefits for their institution to use in the congeries of bourgeois civil society.

Aestheticization of Reality

de Oliveira, P. R. — 2009-02-23

The concept of the aestheticization of reality presented in this essay is an attempt to articulate a number of contemporary cultural and political phenomena and give them critical intelligibility through their mutual interaction. This is undertaken in parallel with a discussion of the intellectual tradition of ideological critique. A notion of ideology is deployed that has more to do with adequacy to reality than with attempts to conceal it. The historical role of ideological critique is established as a function of the level of the economic, political, and technological development of capitalism. The general notion of a crisis of liberal society and the consequences it has for ideological critique are presented. At the same time, a connection is suggested between the problem of the relevance of ideological critique and the crisis of representation in modern art, and a discussion of the social and political significance of this connection is undertaken. The relationship between art and society is considered from a political and a cognitive perspective, taking into account the possible critical and affirmative functions of artworks. A distinction is drawn between attempts at critique through aesthetic content and form. A similitude is suggested between the form contemporary ideology has taken and the internal functioning of artworks. It is finally suggested that the critique of aestheticized reality implies a theory that is able to critically address itself in a way similar to what was promoted in modern art by formally aware works.

The Balkans: Radical Conservatism and Desire

Bjelic, D. I. — 2009-02-23

This essay focuses on Balkan discourse geography as a hidden contingency of the intellectual work of Slavoj Zizek and Julia Kristeva. It takes into account the extent to which their self-proclaimed cosmopolitanism and universalism reflect disidentification with their Balkan origins. This disidentification alerts one to the unacknowledged centrality of Kristeva's and Zizek's Balkan origins to their writing about the region, and it also points to the Balkanist character of their intellectual production. I emphasize the discourse geography of the Balkans—particularly Maria Todorova's articulation of "Balkanism"—as a dissonant infrastructure to the transcendent, ahistorical quality of Kristeva's and Zizek's work. Antonio Gramsci's incorporation of his origins in Sardinia into his intellectual and political praxis provides a contrapuntal reading of Kristeva's and Zizek's own psychoanalytically mediated decoupling of themselves from their Balkan origins and their own split subject positions. The empirical history of human solidarity formalized in the Marxist philosophy of class struggle and actualized in Gramsci's philosophy of praxis challenged not only Cartesian subjectivity as pure cogito but also the Cartesian elevation of abstraction over the senses. In contrast, Kristeva's and Zizek's local histories are expressed through disidentification and self-Orientalization as a constitutive gesture of subaltern intellectual labor. Instead of exploring geopolitical ambiguity for the sake of the intellectuality of human solidarity, they paradoxically reproduce in their discourse the very conditions they seek to escape.

Labor and the Logic of Abstraction: An Interview

Postone, M., Brennan, T. — 2009-02-23

In this interview, Moishe Postone, author of Time, Labor, and Social Domination, discusses the Marxian critical theory of capitalism against the background of the author's intellectual biography and central historical developments of recent decades. The interview focuses on his reinterpretation of Karl Marx's critical theory, especially on the notion of the historical specificity of the categories that purportedly grasp capitalism and its historical dynamic. It also engages the author's understandings of Georg Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and poststructuralism, while addressing issues of capitalism's historical transformations, its possible abolition, and the reconstitution of progressive politics.

Settling Accounts with the Sociology of Knowledge: The Frankfurt School, Mannheim, and the Marxian Critique of Ideology qua Mental Labor

Fischer, A. — 2009-02-23

Karl Marx's theory of ideology, as outlined in The German Ideology, was primarily a critique of idealist philosophy. When Karl Mannheim picked up the term ideology in the 1930s, he broadened its meaning to the point where it lost its function in the struggle against idealist metaphysics. Claiming to think the problem through to its logical conclusion, the sociology of knowledge went so far as to reconcile the concept of ideology with precisely the speculative thought that historical materialism was originally conceived to displace. In effect, Mannheim's notion of history as the Träger of a unified meaning and his notion of social conflict as the expression of ideal differences composing a harmonious whole contributed to a severe reduction of the critique of idealism. This provoked a drawn-out battle between the Frankfurt School and the sociology of knowledge.

The problem with the new worldview sociology, as Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno saw it, was that it diluted the message of Marx's materialist approach and veered heavily back toward traditional idealist philosophy. The significance of the intervention of the Frankfurt School lies in the fact that the attack on Mannheim repeated Marx and Friedrich Engels's attack on the Young Hegelians. Like Marx and Engels, Horkheimer and his associates managed to "uncloak [the] sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves" and settle their accounts with metaphysics in favor of a thoroughly secular understanding of social contradictions. While it stopped short of framing its critique of metaphysics in Marx's theory of the division between mental and manual labor, which was the real advance of Marx over his antagonist Max Stirner, the Frankfurt School revived the original concept of ideology while demonstrating its rejection of any depoliticization of Marxian theory as well as its deep commitment to the dialectical mode of inquiry.

"Human Rights, Anyone?" Conceptions of Intellectual Labor after Noam Chomsky

Abraham, M. — 2009-02-23

This essay argues that the reception of Noam Chomsky's political scholarship by progressive academics demonstrates that the state of theory in the humanities has reached a point of crisis; that is, Chomsky's unpopularity in certain academic circles indicates that conceptions of intellectual labor have been radically reconfigured within the academy since the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the wake of much of his political writing about 9/11, an interesting phenomenon has emerged: Chomsky repels his onetime allies within progressive circles, while attracting more and more people among the general public to his point of view, providing an extremely interesting commentary on the state of intellectual labor in the academy. Chomsky's popular base seems to have expanded while his academic base has contracted. How can we account for these opposed tendencies? Is it that Chomsky has embarrassed "elite educated opinion" in a way that some can no longer tolerate? In "Crude Wars," Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly write, "It has become fashionable for cultural critics to reject supposedly outmoded theories of political economy, to disdain the simple exposure of hidden agendas, to scoff at the likes of Noam Chomsky or Armand Mattelart on the grounds that their notions have been superseded by the ever-inventive strategies of the market." To what within current conceptions of intellectual labor can we really attribute this tendency? It is this question to which my essay turns.

Intellectual Labor

Brennan, T. — 2009-02-23

Only yesterday a discussion of economics in cultural circles was considered boring—a mere "economism"—but it is now everywhere in the arts. "Labor," while being summoned as a grand economic category, enters conversations in the humanities today in the form of a theory of the latest stage of capitalism in which precisely "intellect" is considered the key productive force. This view, which finds expression in a number of antiestablishment thinkers, not only conforms to official business and policy circles but is directly taken from their writings (often several years after the fact). Economics returns because its materialism is now immaterial: "self-making," "innovation," "creativity," and other entrepreneurial qualities of the poietic intellect (where poiesis means a making or crafting). All are extolled as the new primary forces of value and are distinguished sharply from the physical labor of plantation and maquiladora, which are seen as unrelated to the centers of profit. More is involved in this turn than the reappearance of what was once sardonically called "critical criticism." There are fully economic reasons as well. To what degree, for example, is contemporary theory a labor-saving operation? And how do we greet the valorization of complexity within theory as an unchallenged value that allows the critic to utter dissident ideas in the form of an ironic dissimulation (a form of job protection in a regime of risk)? This is about the consequences of dwelling on the sumptuousness of thought and an exploration of its situatedness.

Notes on Contributors

2009-02-23

Home

Schlunke, K. — 2008-12-08

Does "possession" produce "home"? This essay figures the claim by Captain Cook to possess Australia as an attempt to institute a single order of time and nature. But that order was and is always undercut by the reality of an enduring indigenous sovereignty. Through ideas of memory, nature, and experience, this paper proposes a different order of home making that can exist alongside indigenous sovereignty. The idea of homemaking for the nonindigenous suggested in this essay involves a recognition of productive melancholia and attempts to release the differences obscured by colonial orders of time and ways of seeing nature. This alternative notion of home recognizes the ongoing force of multiple indigenous cultures that dictated that we will encounter that particular nature and that already imaged imagining amid colonizing and nationalizing practices that include the making of national parks and the management of museum displays.

Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country, and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples

Watson, I. — 2008-12-08

The laws of first peoples are connected to our traditional lands. The colonial project dispossesses us of land, but our laws are often still carried with us. These Aboriginal laws become like us, the native peoples, disconnected from country. So how is it possible for first peoples and our laws to survive this disconnection? And what is it we survive as? We are engulfed, inside a state that maintains its claim to sovereignty over Aboriginal lands and lives. This essay will explore the continuing connections to country from a place inside the "sovereign" space of the state, a space that guarantees no power to determine law-full Aboriginal obligations to country. Is it that all we have is a claim to law and homelands, a claim that may or may not be recognized by the colonial state? How can we keep the vision of Aboriginal relationships to country alive in a space where the universal, the global, views this relationship as an antiquated concept?

Stranger Danger: Approaching Home and Ten Canoes

Henderson, I. — 2008-12-08

This essay explores the meaning of home in the 2006 film Ten Canoes. The film resulted from an extraordinary collaboration between the Ramingining Aboriginal community of northeastern Arnhem Land and Australian art-house director Rolf de Heer. It tells of Dayindi (Jamie Dayindi Gulpilil Dalaithngu), a young Yolngu man living one thousand years ago, who is in love with his elder brother's youngest wife. To correct Dayindi's "wrong feelings," his brother tells him another story that we also witness in the film, this one set tens of thousands of years in the ancient past. The essay argues that simply articulating the film's twists in the logic of Western cinematic storytelling renders it richly suggestive of traditional Yolngu law, a process that in turn reveals the Ramingining community's commentary on the complex racial politics of the contemporary Australian "homeland."

Home: The Importance of Place to the Dispossessed

Behrendt, L. — 2008-12-08

The concept of "home" is multifaceted and complex. This is especially so for Aboriginal people who are forcibly removed from their land, retain deep spiritual and cultural attachments to their traditional homes, but have been forced to create new communities. This essay looks at the concepts of home and place from a contemporary Aboriginal perspective. It looks at the way in which Aboriginal families have navigated assimilation policies such as the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and shows the impact on and legacy of such policies on Aboriginal people today. It includes personal reflections and analysis of some of the future implications for government policy relating to Aboriginal people in Australia.

Mobile Homes, Fallen Furniture, and the Dickens Cure

Ellison, D. A. — 2008-12-08

From the beginning of his career, Dickens conceived of the home and in particular the hearth as the reception point for his distinctive narrative transmissions. The relationship between writer and reader was imagined in terms of the most intimate and residentially entrenched exchanges even while Dickens contemplated the very profitable consequences of mass proliferation. In order to contextualize Dickens's entrenchment, this essay explores the means by which he fostered an aesthetic of domestic reception. Here the hearth is seen in lights both familiar and unfamiliar, as source and symbol of Victorian virtue, but also as an integral component of a discursive ensemble integrating reader, furnishings, and architecture. In novels like Dombey and Son, Dickens considers the vexing problem of domestic disquiet—the noisy and volatile insecurity of the middle classes at home—while offering a respite, a cure that briefly bound rapt readers to their chairs.

On Beauty

Kasdorf, J. S. — 2008-12-08

At Home with the Other Victorians

Marcus, S. — 2008-12-08

Homosexuality and domesticity are both considered eminently Victorian, yet both are also considered to have been mutually exclusive during the nineteenth century. Scholars have conceptualized domesticity as an ideology that made the heterosexual family normative and homosexuality as a form of sexual dissidence opposed in every way to the social forms enshrined by domestic ideology. This essay explores what comes into view if we theorize domesticity as a class privilege with no necessary relationship to heterosexual marriage. By identifying gender-neutral facets of domesticity, such as interiority, privacy, aestheticism, and sentiment, the essay makes it possible to think about the domestic attachments and longings of individuals and couples outside the heterosexual norm. The examples include novels by George Moore, Eliza Linton, and Rhoda Broughton; the anonymous pornographic work Teleny; the memoirs of John Addington Symonds; and historical figures such as Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, Michael Field, and Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park.

Domestic Phantasmagoria: The Victorian Literary Domestic and Experimental Visuality

Groth, H. — 2008-12-08

In the first section of her Autobiography, Harriet Martineau recollects the first eight years of her life as a series of traumatic events in which illusion and reality merge. One event is prompted by an encounter with a domestic magic lantern. In its dismantled state, the lantern holds no mysteries for her. She recalls seeing it cleaned by daylight, handling all its parts, and "understanding its whole structure." It was a different story at night, in a darkened room, when "my panics were really unaccountable. They were a matter of pure sensation without any intellectual justification whatever, even of the wildest kind.... such was my terror of the white circle on the wall, and of the moving slides." Using Martineau's anecdote as a starting point, this essay considers the ways in which optical devices became an integral part of the "sensory structuring of experience" in the Victorian home, cultivating an active skepticism, effectively functioning as "furniture-to-think-with," to quote Barbara Stafford. In this context, domestic space becomes integrated into an experimental process that tests the limits of the visual and introduces an element of doubt into the psychic structure of belief. This cultivated speculative mentality is both replicated and reinforced by Victorian literary narrative's structural and thematic illumination of the constructed nature of the real, down to its most banal everyday manifestations.

Home Truths: Some Notes on Radical America, 1637 to the Present

Thomson, D. K. — 2008-12-08

Faced with the looming captivity of the formal archive in the late 1930s, Sigmund Freud consigned his most important work—the story of the unconscious rise of Mosaic doctrine that underwrote the West—to a secret archive, itself a sort of unconscious. "Where do we meet with a similar phenomenon?" Freud asked. This essay answers that question. Where else but America? In the late 1630s, the story of Anne Hutchinson's orthodoxy was consigned to a secret archive as the radicals came to power. We continue to radically misread Hutchinson and our past in part because the revolution of the 1630s was so successful. America's "Puritan" lettered city was never particularly Calvinist, religious, nor conservative, but emerged as an ongoing state of exception, marked by a kind of mosaic of secular, industrializing instincts under a pretense of Calvinism. This America radicalized the world, and it's a truth that can hit home almost anywhere.

Against Schmitt: Law, Aesthetics, and Absolutism in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale

Pye, C. — 2008-12-08

Focusing on Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, the essay counters Carl Schmitt's claim that Absolutism represents an ideal conjunction of the monarch's creative and legislative acts. It argues that early modern theater conveys the problematic character of the relation between law and sovereign act—indeed, that it locates the problem of the political precisely in the aporetic character of that relation. Further, the piece suggests that the aesthetic emerges as a self-conscious and autonomous form, not, as Schmitt would have it, as a depoliticizing feature of liberalism, but specifically in response to the problem of sovereign agency in the early modern era. Such relations among sovereignty, law, and the aesthetic are a function of the equivocal transition between an organic concept of the body politic and the emergence of a bourgeois domestic sphere, the ambiguous historical moment of Absolutism. With that historical transformation—the interval of "domestic sovereignty"—the possibility of sovereign agency comes to depend on an unstable articulation between law and the aesthetic, Shakespeare's play suggests.

Compassion and Rage: The Face of the Migrant

Juffer, J. — 2008-12-08

Taking its cue from Emmanuel Levinas's notion that the "nudity" of the face creates the possibility for ethical encounters, this essay considers the face of the Latino and Latin American migrant in the United States at a seemingly contradictory moment. On the one hand, this is a time of intensified deportations, border militarization, and congressional posturing on immigration reform; the undocumented migrant is no longer the anonymous dishwasher or nanny in hiding but rather appears as the highly publicized face of the "illegal alien." On the other hand, this is a time of increased integration of Latinos—both indigenous to the United States and newly arrived; Latinos are claiming the United States as home in unprecedented numbers. In both instances—that of policing and of belonging—subjects interact intimately, face-to-face, creating the possibility of friendship, community, desire, all generated by the vulnerability of face-to-face contact. Yet vulnerability produces both compassion and rage, says Levinas, and hence the question: if the openness of the face calls one both to compassion and to rage, why compassion by some and rage by others? Hate crimes against Latinos are on the rise, for example, while at the same time, the New Sanctuary Movement has revived the 1980s' faith-based activist network that provides shelter to refugees in danger of deportation. Both compassion and rage rely on proximity to one's home, in all senses of the word: familial, local, and national. When does the face-to-face encounter produce new configurations of home: communities that are open to redefinition based less on strict boundaries between us and them and more on the dissolution of those boundaries so as to enable the face-to-face encounter? When does the encounter prompt communities to police the border of community and nation, foreclosing possibilities generated by mutual vulnerability? I argue that definitions of community/sanctuary based on the experience of economic and political suffering are more likely to sustain compassionate interactions than notions of community based on identity and familial politics.

Notes on Contributors

2008-12-08