Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 22:23:53 -0700 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: MERELY ACADEMIC? TRY DICK HOWARD How does one distinguish between vital abstract intellectual work and mere academic recycling of cultural capital of the sort Louis Proyect decries? This is a profound and subtle question. I've thought about it, but I can't get into it now. Louis is right about the overblown intellectual pretensions of much of what passes for deep thinking these days. The knowledge industry is extremely corrupt. But I don't think his criticism applies to the sort of scholarship that interests me, eg. Patrick Murray, Rob Beamish, or Paul Thomas, and sight unseen I doubt that it applies to Postone or to Tony Smith either. I have been close enough to see academic corruption at work, which is much worse in English departments than it is in many other areas. Murray and Postone don't seem to be doing the fashionable stuff wherein the compulsive recycling of cultural capital posing as profundity really matters. But here is a sterling example of pseudo-profundity at work: Howard, Dick. _The Politics of Critique_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. This particular press is especially suspect, known as it is for a huge heap of postmodern theoretical crap. However, there are real works of merit, too, such as Peter Sloterdijk's _Critique of Cynical Reason_, the definitive philosophical work for our time. (Just ignore the pomo preface that distorts the content of the work itself). I just purchased a number of books on sale from this press, most of them at $1 apiece. In some cases, I would say I overpaid for what I got. Dick Howard's book is one of these. A person who writes a book called _From Marx to Kant_ goes on my shit list automatically, but I said to myself: for $1 what have I to lose? The book is not obscurely or really badly written for an academic book. It is not senseless, pointless, or particularly obscurantist. There is some useful and interesting information in it. It is not exceptionally stupid, which itself is an extraordinary occurrence these days. I simply find it .... unproductive. Let me just quote from the back cover, since I am going to waste as little time on this as possible: "_The Politics of Critique_ starts from a paradox: criticism presupposes a standpoint from which the critic judges -- a standpoint that could be called the critic's "politics." Doing politics, on the other hand, implies criticism of the established order; but this politics must be justified intellectually in the form of an explicit critique. How are these poles to be reconciled? Usually, Howard maintains, they are not. He traces the pattern of "avoidance" inherent in this paradox -- first, by showing the inadequacies of Kantian, Marxian, Frankfurt-School Critical Theory, as well as the general notion of Revolution; then, by reconstituting these theoretical approaches to politics; then, by reconstructing these theoretical approaches to politics; and finally by attempting to integrate Marx and Kant around the challenge of a radical modernity, and by confronting two types of Revolution, the French and the American." I dread what I suspect will be a reaction of many reading this description: "Gee, this sounds really interesting to me; why is Ralph snoring so loudly?" Sorry, I just can't be bothered. I will only say that this book treats the fundamental issues, as they apply to Marxism anyway, with such a superficial schematism despite the breadth of learning and erudition summoned, that the philosophical as well as the political depth of the book is about a quarter inch deep. I can't speak for Kant, but the grasp of Marx is so shallow as to be insufferable. The most cursory examination of _The German Ideology_ is used to criticize Marx's supposed reductionism based on the base/superstructure model, and while the author cites countervailing passages from Marx to show him in a better light at times while highlighting the difficulties of Marx's negotiation of the issues, there is no analysis of any depth or substance. Howard criticizes Marx for failing to come up with a needed theory of politics, but Howard's own analysis is pretty thin. Howard contents himself to deal in general philosophical abstractions -- modernity, normativity, etc., with the conceit that he has dug to the bottom of the fundamental theoretical questions and corrected all the historical conceptual errors of Marxism. This work is quintessentially academic, and while the reader's own erudition may profit therefrom, his or her intellectual perspective is not likely to deepen significantly. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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