No Revolutionary Ethos

Still tired. When are my lungs gonna be clear of this vile stuff? The doc says one last (I hope) chest x-ray next week. I wish I was 24 again, smoking a pack of Camel Wides a day and able to do 2 miles in less than ten and a half minutes. Well, not the Camel Wides thing — I’d probably be 20 pounds thinner now if I smoked, but I’m well under 200, and happy to be no longer donating five dollars a day to demon nicotine — but yes, ten years later, I wish I still ran that fast.

Anyway. The essay is finished and submitted — cross your fingers for me? — and I’ve been reading Stanley Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory, and I’m already getting a little tired of him. Here’s why: while I can agree with his left-melancholic contention that “for the last sixty years the academic system of American society has been geared to practical ends, the production of useful knowledge in the first place, and since the end of the war, supplying the vast but segmented market for intellectual labor”, I have deep problems with his subsequent assertion that “the leading research universities have little to do with their presumed primary mission, education” (38), and even deeper problems with his next assertion that “Only the leading schools would provide space for the esoteric knowledge generated by humanists; after all, even a technological civilization like the United States needed its ornaments. The main task of the public four-year and community colleges would be to transmit technical knowledge to future employees of the U.S. labor market” (39).

But why such problems? Aren’t both quotations simply more extreme versions of my own left-melancholic perception of the ways society constructs universities as serving the market? Is the image of my worst fears about American academia simply the status quo for Aronowitz?

God, I hope not. Hermetically sealed against all light, a perspective like that of Aronowitz admits no possibility for action. I read him, and part of me thinks of Alan Sokal and certain credibility problems (dammit, I keep looking for the DTWOF comic — my favorite strip in the whole world — that makes that reference, but can never find it: does anybody remember when Sydney’s writing the article and Mo comes back with the retort?), and I think: your politics have given you selective blindness, Professor Aronowitz. My politics have given me a similar selective blindness, I know, I know, and that’s why I get so angry at those on the right for their inability to see that huge inequalities and injustices still remain in American society. But Aronowitz — unlike Bok, and radically unlike Kerr — strikes me as so extreme in his position that he can see no other. Is that a bad thing for Aronowitz? What happens when one reaches such an extreme position that no other position can ever make sense?

Do revolutionaries have no sense of rhetorical ethos? (It’s a rhetorical question, and of course I know better: the collective authors of the Declaration of Independence, Jesus Christ, Dr. King. So how did I get the question wrong?)