This is on the ball. As an academic in the humanities I find it tedious when authors say that they are writing "against the grain" when they are, in fact, themselves the grain. Or when, since the idea of the avant-garde is a museum relic, they write of "advanced art."
Interesting that the real meat and potatoes of the piece is relegated to a footnote:
"Nowadays, the whole episode reads like a letter from another world. It is rare in contemporary academia for scholars in the humanities to make such pointed critiques of their colleagues’ work. There is a bunker mentality, and not without reason."
The problem with "critical theory" began when what was a purely "textual" exercise in philosophy-linguistics-historiography was turned into a faux-analysis of "the real world".
Comparing the solipsistic inanities of so much of what passes for "critical theory" in contemporary academia to the work of writers like Derrida and Foucault is like putting a crayoned "My Fambly" drawing from a kindergarten class beside a Goya and saying "Discuss".
When impenetrable theoretical maundering about "gender" moves off the page into clinics where teenaged girls get "trendy" double mastectomies, you have to acknowledge that the problem is not with the "theory" but with its uses and abuses for life.
It's definitely stated in the middle of the article, but maybe soliciting a response is the very goal of your comment whose main feature reads like you entered 'David-Foster-Wallace-esque art simile' into ChatGPT. And even the point of your comment, ironically???, does exactly what the article cites as a concern: a critique that seek oversimplification.
Latour's "run out of steam" essay should have been a wakeup call to the academy. Instead it seems many took it as a dare to see how far they could prove its premise. I actually don't mind CT in moderation. It's sometimes fun reading, when you can suffer through the obfuscation and pedantry, but there are many areas where CT is now basically the entrenched status-quo, and that's an odd position for a field based on "againstness" and iconoclasm to be in.
I think responses from within the academy have varied, and it depends on field. Some have embraced a style or method of “post-critique,” for example.
The humanities, in particular, is undergoing a crisis of reproduction. The boomers aren’t retiring, and even when/where they do, the universities aren’t necessarily replacing them. So the new PhDs that are being minted write dissertations that repeat the old cliches and methods of the field, because that’s what their mentors and advisors want and know. Then the they never really get the opportunity afforded by a tenured position to develop, over many years, fresh perspectives that could reinvigorate the field.
There are many overlapping reasons for all that, foremost among them that universities are facing a crisis of purpose, and nobody in them seems to have a clear sense of mission that would meet the needs of the future.
When I look at new academic titles being published, they mostly seem unambitious and tired. Maybe there’s a small subset of Marxist-inflected academics who we could call “ambitious,” in the sense that they call for radical political change, but they seem to have totally lost touch with the empirical world. Their abstractions are matters of religious investment rather than engagement with what’s happening in the world. Which is a bit ironic, given Marx and Engels’s obsession with understanding the new factories and enterprises of the 19th century.
This is on the ball. As an academic in the humanities I find it tedious when authors say that they are writing "against the grain" when they are, in fact, themselves the grain. Or when, since the idea of the avant-garde is a museum relic, they write of "advanced art."
Interesting that the real meat and potatoes of the piece is relegated to a footnote:
"Nowadays, the whole episode reads like a letter from another world. It is rare in contemporary academia for scholars in the humanities to make such pointed critiques of their colleagues’ work. There is a bunker mentality, and not without reason."
The problem with "critical theory" began when what was a purely "textual" exercise in philosophy-linguistics-historiography was turned into a faux-analysis of "the real world".
Comparing the solipsistic inanities of so much of what passes for "critical theory" in contemporary academia to the work of writers like Derrida and Foucault is like putting a crayoned "My Fambly" drawing from a kindergarten class beside a Goya and saying "Discuss".
When impenetrable theoretical maundering about "gender" moves off the page into clinics where teenaged girls get "trendy" double mastectomies, you have to acknowledge that the problem is not with the "theory" but with its uses and abuses for life.
It's definitely stated in the middle of the article, but maybe soliciting a response is the very goal of your comment whose main feature reads like you entered 'David-Foster-Wallace-esque art simile' into ChatGPT. And even the point of your comment, ironically???, does exactly what the article cites as a concern: a critique that seek oversimplification.
Latour's "run out of steam" essay should have been a wakeup call to the academy. Instead it seems many took it as a dare to see how far they could prove its premise. I actually don't mind CT in moderation. It's sometimes fun reading, when you can suffer through the obfuscation and pedantry, but there are many areas where CT is now basically the entrenched status-quo, and that's an odd position for a field based on "againstness" and iconoclasm to be in.
I think responses from within the academy have varied, and it depends on field. Some have embraced a style or method of “post-critique,” for example.
The humanities, in particular, is undergoing a crisis of reproduction. The boomers aren’t retiring, and even when/where they do, the universities aren’t necessarily replacing them. So the new PhDs that are being minted write dissertations that repeat the old cliches and methods of the field, because that’s what their mentors and advisors want and know. Then the they never really get the opportunity afforded by a tenured position to develop, over many years, fresh perspectives that could reinvigorate the field.
There are many overlapping reasons for all that, foremost among them that universities are facing a crisis of purpose, and nobody in them seems to have a clear sense of mission that would meet the needs of the future.
When I look at new academic titles being published, they mostly seem unambitious and tired. Maybe there’s a small subset of Marxist-inflected academics who we could call “ambitious,” in the sense that they call for radical political change, but they seem to have totally lost touch with the empirical world. Their abstractions are matters of religious investment rather than engagement with what’s happening in the world. Which is a bit ironic, given Marx and Engels’s obsession with understanding the new factories and enterprises of the 19th century.