The box of books that I shipped from San Diego on the last day of MLA just arrived. The one I've most looked forward to having at hand to read is John McGowan's Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics (Cornell UP, 2002). In one of the essays -- written in 1987, after he go back from MLA, as it happens -- McGowan sums up a line of thought that has certainly crossed my own mind over the years:

 

"Current criticism's political content can only be assured if we believe in a 'talking cure.' The primary axiom of the whole edifice must be that the way we talk makes a difference. As someone rather attracted to both vulgar Marxism and to populism, the idealism (strictly speaking) and elitism of this position bothers me, especially since so many of its adherents believe they are Marxists. (I'm not playing St. Karl games here, just asking for truth in labeling.) To put the point vulgarly, the history of twentieth century capitalism attests to its thus far unthreatened capacity to endure all and any kinds of deviant talk without its essential economic and political structures being in the least altered. Furthermore, to bring in the populist element, highly deviant talk (as in modernist poety and various experimental novels) has proved itself of interest only to very small audiences of specialists. At the very least, I think the neo-Marxists need to formulate some theory of how deviant talk works ts political miracles if we are to accept their attachment to it.... But idealist and elitist positions have not even begun to address the fact that they need a theory of change."

 

Now, I think McGowan here underestimates the aesthetic, and maybe even the political, effects of various kinds of "highly deviant talk" on demotic culture. (And vice versa.) But in general the way he frames the question is on target.

 

Being a bit of a vulgarian myself, I suspect that part of the answer might be found in the concept of "false consciousness." To anyone with an intimate knowledge of Marxism as a political culture, it is hard to treat the claims of contemporary "socialists of the chair" (as Engels called the academic radicals of his day) as part of the same world as Jimmy Higgins. There are exceptions. But then, there are always exceptions.

 

The rule, however, is defined for all practical purposes by a comment that Irving Howe made about a dozen years ago: "Marxism has gone to the academy to die in comfort." Maybe Ponce de Leon will show up with some of that revitalizing tonic. But if it ever did get on its legs again, would a radically democratic movement have any use for (1) the miniaturized totalitarian regimes making up the organizational infrastructure of what we are obliged, by default, to call "the left"; or (2) even the most "emancipatory" version of litcrit?

 

A rhetorical question? Well, yes. But not only that. Having done my time with Allegories of Reading (back before we all grew so justifiably suspicious of De Man that, less justifiably perhaps, we pretty much stopped reading him), I know that rhetorical questions can turn back on you. And so it does here. After all, litcrit can well be a part of revolutionary praxis. Early on, in The Holy Family, Marx analyzes Sue's Mysteries of Paris. Stuck in prison, Rosa Luxemburg writes about the history of German literature. Lenin pens articles on Tolstoy. Let's not even get started on Trotsky.

 

Of course, all of them were, by current standards, rather conservative in their sense of what counted as "culture" -- a word they would have used in something like Matthew Arnold's sense. And they did their work without proper institutional/professional review. They wrote for newspapers, for heaven's sake. This is all bad. 

 

Hence it is clear that the abolition of human misery can best be advanced by a Marxist critique of a feminist appropriation of a Zizekian variant of Lacanian versions of psychoanalytic theory, as applied to Temptation Island.

Speaking of MLA....an effort to satirize it is being serialized at Critical Mass (one of several interesting conservative academoblogs). I say "effort" because it just doesn't sound right. The idea that MLA is full of sartorial peacocks strutting their stuff tends to be held by people who haven't attended it. The main character is supposed to be an old-fashioned literary humanist and aesthete. Again, not credible. Rather than viewing everything with the lofty bemusement of contempt, such a person would almost certainly recoil from the proceedings.

 

My own feeling about attending? It's part of the job. I go in hopes of finding interesting scholarship to write about for the paper (which sometimes happens) and to eavesdrop on what is going on in the profession.  A source of entertainment, a font of sustained belly-laughs, it ain't. The people-watching element is much less interesting than you might think. The body-language of exhaustion alternates with that of  grim, gray anxiety.  

 

It is a proof of David Lodge's remarkable gifts that he can turn such unpromising material into comic fiction. He makes the whole process sound more interesting than, say, a convention of retail pharmacists.

 

Chances are that the the pharmacists would be be more enjoyable to be around for several days. If you are a pharmacist, the world is your oyster. You can go to any city and get a job.  It is not a profession in which people necessarily sink all their personal, political, or creative energies. I know one pharmacist who composes synthesizer music in his spare time -- stuff that is,  to go by his descriptions, rather strenuously avant garde. There is a gap between identity and day-job.  

 

A gathering of retail pharmacists must have its moments of status anxiety. (People probably look at the nametags of the pharmacists from Wal-Mart and go, "Well, at least I'm not at Wal-Mart.") All the same, it is probably not so ambient or all-consuming as in other professions. Also, you are not likely to hear people who go around saying things like "there is no outside-the-pharmacy." If you did, someone would come around to make sure you were dispensing the drugs properly, rather than testing them out on yourself. (Insert pharmakon joke here.)