Readers who enjoyed Roger Kimball’s essay about the pretensions of Michel Foucault and his admirers may also be entertained by his musings, from 1990, on embittered Marxist, Terry Eagleton. Here’s a taste.

“There have always been elements of ironic comedy about the spectacle of Marxist academics fervently proclaiming their revolutionary message while safely ensconced in Western institutions of higher education. As the years have passed and another generation of young radicals has settled into middle age, tenure, and pension calculations, one might have hoped that these freethinkers would have had manners enough to mute their demands for the destruction of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, ‘the repressive state apparatus of late capitalism,’ etc. After all, blue jeans or no blue jeans, what these middle-class beneficiaries of capitalism have unwittingly been clamouring for is nothing less than their own destruction. But no, they continue nattering on about ‘the contradictions of capitalism,’ obviously having missed the vastly more palpable contradiction inherent in their own position as tenured radicals…

Professor Eagleton [is] … adamant about declaring his working-class sympathies: In a typical gesture, he dedicated his book on the Brontës, Myths of Power (1975; second edition 1988), to ‘Dominic and Daniel and the working-class movement of West Yorkshire.’ What the working-class movement of West Yorkshire (or anywhere else, for that matter) would have to say about a book that emphasizes the ‘notion of categorial structures as key mediations between literary form, textual ideology and social relations’ is amusing to contemplate…” 

Elsewhere, Kimball notes,

“In the end, Professor Eagleton is in the uncomfortable position of being a literary critic who doesn’t care much for literature except in so far as it is an instrument for social change. He begins Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)… with the requisite paean to Marx’s general brilliance and profound grasp of culture: Marx wrote poetry, ‘his acquaintance with literature… was staggering in scope,’ and so on. It all might have come from the Soviet Encyclopaedia circa 1930. But Professor Eagleton goes on immediately to note that one shouldn’t expect a full-fledged theory of art from Marxism because, after all, ‘Marx and Engels had rather more important tasks on their hands than the formulation of a complete aesthetic theory.’”

Like many of his peers, Eagleton uses academic theorising as an improbable and rickety vehicle for the propagation of his own political whims and prejudices. But I’ve yet to see compelling evidence that the shoehorning of outmoded Marxist claptrap or its postmodern derivatives into literary and aesthetic ponderings illuminates much that is useful or profound – beyond, that is, the theorist’s own capacity for self-absorbed misapprehension. Norman Geras, who shares some of Eagleton’s political sympathies, recently noted a similar “unwarranted intrusion of the author’s politics.” Such intrusion is hardly unknown in the humanities and it is, I think, a signature of a decline into disrepute, irrelevance and farce.

It seems odd to me that there should be so much to write about the relationships, or alleged relationships, between literature and Marxism, or literary criticism and Marxism, or art and Marxism. I marvel at how so many careers can be strung out elaborating on this rather limited theme in various, often bizarre, formulations. Yet there are countless volumes, essays and papers devoted to this supposedly profound convergence and its supposed relevance today. And an inordinate number of these titles are found on first year reading lists. The function of such material doesn’t appear to be to say anything new or particularly insightful, but rather to repeat a number of loaded assertions and recycle references to other, equally loaded, tomes, possibly to convince the authors of the validity of their own youthful preoccupations. In this respect, it’s interesting to note how ageing Marxists are so often found in academia, where fixations of this kind can persist largely unmolested.

Kimball is the author of Tenured Radicals, Revised: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education. More of Professor Eagleton’s political wisdom here and here.

Related. And. Also. Plus.

Further to my rumblings about Professor Judith Butler and her obscurantist posturing, the fine people at Obscene Desserts have devised a new party game, juxtaposing her blathering, and that of her peers, with Communist propaganda posters. It seems to me the results would make excellent flash cards, and thus one could more readily memorise such gobbets of wisdom as,

“Libidinal dependency and powerlessness is phantasmatically overcome by the installation of a boundary and, hence, a hypostacized centre which produces an idealized bodily ego; that integrity and unity is achieved through the ordering of a wayward motility or disaggregated sexuality not yet restrained by the boundaries of individuation.”

Hours of fun. Related. And. Also. 

Via Mick Hartley comes news from the University of California:

“After a group of UC Davis women faculty began circulating a petition, UC regents rescinded an invitation to Larry Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, to speak at a board dinner Wednesday night in Sacramento. Summers gained notoriety for saying that innate differences between men and women could be a reason for under-representation of women in science, math and engineering.

UCD professor Maureen Stanton, one of the petition organisers, was delighted by news of the change, saying it’s ‘a move in the right direction’. ‘UC has an enormous historical commitment to diversity within its faculty ranks, but still has a long way to go before our faculty adequately represent the diversity of our constituency, the people of California,’ said Stanton.

When Stanton heard about the initial invitation to Summers, she was ‘stunned’. ‘I was appalled that someone articulating that point of view would be invited,’ she said. ‘This is a symbolic invitation and a symbolic measure that I believe sends the wrong message about the University of California and its cultural principles.’ ‘None of us go looking for a fight,’ Stanton said. ‘We were just deeply offended.’”

Yes, diversity in all things. Except, of course, in thought. Presumably, Professor Stanton is also “stunned”, “appalled” and “deeply offended” by the over-representation of, say, gay people in the spheres of arts and drama, or of women in the caring professions, or of Indian employees in Indian restaurants. Perhaps some recalibration of those industries is also in order, to ensure suitable diversity.

Meanwhile, in Ohio:

“The Office of University Housing at Ohio State, a public university, maintains a Diversity Statement that severely restricts what students in Ohio State’s residence halls can and cannot say. Students are instructed: ‘Do not joke about differences related to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, ability, socioeconomic background, etc. When in doubt about the impact of your words and actions, simply ask.’”

It’s interesting to note that the University’s Diversity Statement aims to foster learning “from a wide array of human similarities and differences in an increasingly diverse world” and plans to achieve this blossoming of awareness by inhibiting any careless reference to those same differences. 

Related. (H/T. Stephen Hicks.)

KC Johnson has begun to wind down his outstanding Durham in Wonderland blog, which details the infamous Duke “rape” case, along with the PC prejudice and general bad faith of various “activist” faculty members. Those with an interest in tenured ideologues and hokum merchants will find plenty to entertain, and it’s worth casting an eye over this table, which prompts the following comment from a DIW reader:

“Looking at the departmental affiliations of the good guys it’s hard not to conclude that the widest gulf on campus is not the one separating black and white or the one separating men and women, but the one separating the quantitative, fact-based disciplines from what the humanities have deteriorated into. Whether universities survive as useful institutions will depend on whether the anti-rationalists can be exorcised.”

I’m not exactly sure how the culprits (and the cultural environment in which they flourish) might be “exorcised”, so I guess large swathes of academia will continue to decline, in terms of both substance and reputation. Or perhaps there will come a point at which drastic measures have to be taken in order to save the institution from the accumulation of parasites on its back. Maybe parents will no longer be willing to pay $40,000 a year for their children to be misled and stupefied at the hands of, say, Wahneema Lubiano, who labels herself a “post-structuralist teacher-critic leftist” and who sees no reason to distinguish between her role in the classroom and her bizarre political “activism”.

Related. And. (H/T. The Thin Man.)

An extract from Roger Kimball’s long, amusing essay, The Perversions of Michel Foucault, in which he casts an eye over Foucault’s pretensions, and those of his biographer, James Miller:

“In some ways, The Passion of Michel Foucault is a revival of [Miller’s] earlier book [Democracy is in the Streets], done over with a French theme and plenty of black leather. Hence it is not surprising that when Mr. Miller gets around to the student riots of 1968, his prose waxes dithyrambic as gratified nostalgia fires his imagination. It is as if he were reliving his lost – or maybe not-so-lost – childhood.

‘The disorder was intoxicating. Billboards were ripped apart, sign posts uprooted, scaffolding and barbed wire pulled down, parked cars tipped over… The mood was giddy, the atmosphere festive. ‘Everyone instantly recognized the reality of their desires,’ one participant wrote shortly afterward, summing up the prevailing spirit. ‘Never had the passion for destruction been shown to be more creative.’

Foucault himself, unfortunately, had to miss out on the first wave of riots, since he was teaching at the University of Tunis. But his lover Daniel Defert was in Paris and kept him abreast of developments by holding a transistor radio up to the telephone receiver for hours on end. Later that year, Foucault was named head of the department of philosophy at the University of Vincennes outside Paris. The forty-three-year-old professor of philosophy then got a chance to abandon himself to the intoxication. In January 1969, a group of five hundred students seized the administration building and amphitheatre, ostensibly to signal solidarity with their brave colleagues who had occupied the Sorbonne earlier that day. In fact, as Mr. Miller suggests, the real point was ‘to explore, again, the creative potential of disorder.’ Mr. Miller is very big on ‘the creative potential of disorder.’ Foucault was one of the few faculty who joined the students. When the police arrived, he followed the recalcitrant core to the roof in order to ‘resist.’ Mr. Miller reports proudly that while Foucault ‘gleefully’ hurled stones at the police, he was nonetheless ‘careful not to dirty his beautiful black velour suit.’

It was shortly after this encouraging episode that Foucault shaved his skull and emerged as a ubiquitous countercultural spokesman. His ‘politics’ were consistently foolish, a combination of solemn chatter about ‘transgression,’ power, and surveillance, leavened by an extraordinary obtuseness about the responsible exercise of power in everyday life… Foucault posed as a passionate partisan of liberty. At the same time, he never met a revolutionary piety he didn’t like. He championed various extreme forms of Marxism, including Maoism; he supported the Ayatollah Khomeini, even when the Ayatollah’s fundamentalist cadres set about murdering thousands of Iranian citizens. In 1978, looking back to the postwar period, he asked: ‘What could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s America?’ It tells us a great deal that Foucault found this question difficult to answer.”

Spot the resonance. More. Related. And. Plus. Also.