We Are All Hopelessly Out Of Touch With Society, again
by zunguzungu
That academics, particularly in English departments, are Hopelessly Out Of Touch With Society is an incredibly common sentiment these days, it seems. William Deresiewicz wrote a piece in the Nation the other day that barely even needed to mention the fact; that sentiment was the unspoken basic premise that underpinned the entire piece, but it is so take-able for granted that he just took it for granted that you understood what was prompting his interest. I though the piece was pretty bad, for multiple reasons (and you can read over here or here should you be interested in how, or links to other takedowns of the piece). But that’s not what’s interesting to me right now.
I was reading Adolph Reed’s book on DuBois and Fabianism, and in order to talk about how DuBois constitutes his vocation as an intellectual, Reed has to first talk about the context in which what it meant to be an intellectual was changing in the late nineteenth century. Noting that DuBois was born and grew up in “the early years of the development of industrial capitalism as the dominant cultural force in the United States and much of Europe,” he makes the argument (or points to other scholars making it) that the rise of managerial capitalism what it meant to be an intellectual became more and more a function of what it meant to be a manager, a person who directs and commands precisely by virtue of being set apart from the common laborers. Just as the death knell of the artisan economy and the dominance of industrial rationalization and integration means that the laborer and manager structure of industry becomes more and more central to how society is conceptualized (this is what he means by “industrial capitalism as the dominant cultural force” in the US), so too does the intellectual understand himself or herself as less and less of a representative of society, and more and more of a manager of it, a social engineer whose job (exactly because the intellectual is separate from society) is to regulate and control society.
In such a context, in other words, being “Hopelessly Out Of Touch With Society” is a virtue. Precisely because someone like DuBois is out of touch with the black community in Philadelphia, for example, he could be commissioned to write the pioneering The Philadelphia Negro, a sociological treatise on the social problems of the black population of Philadelphia’s seventh ward. He could be trusted to take a scientific (and objective) approach to such problems precisely because his job wasn’t to represent the black community, or advocate for them, but to distance himself from them and, on that basis, re-engineer their society. Being out of touch, in other words, was the very precondition for being an intellectual.
So it makes me wonder. Is the fact that being Hopelessly Out Of Touch With Society is now a bad thing–so obviously a bad thing that Deresiewicz doesn’t even need to explain why it is–a function of how the basis of authority in our current form of capitalism has shifted? In this era of late industrial capitalism and post-fordism, etc, etc, so much depends on how people regulate themselves, and things like managers and social engineers are increasingly put aside in favor of self-regulating and unregulated systems. That’s what neo-liberalism is, right? In which case, trying to find new ways to be relevant seems like a pretty hopeless endeavor and we should have all gone to business school a long time ago (that and found rich parents from which to inherit from). But I guess we already knew that anyway, too. But no obvious solution as to how we can save the intellectual really presents itself, which may account for the banal incoherence of the Deresiewicz piece: dodo birds only survive in their own most irrational dreams.
This is interesting, but I don’t know that we’ve really lost the cult of the manager (think of Vietnam or Iraq, where non-military experts with a business background are charged with running a scientific war). I think Deresiewicz and all them are complaining not because academics occupy a removed rung of society, but because academic studies don’t seem to translate into any useful prescriptions for social engineering. DuBois might not be writing as a Philadelphia Negro, but he definitely knows what to do with the Philadelphia Negro; on the other hand (as William James might ask) what’s the cash value of another damn reading of The Golden Bowl?
I’m persuaded that the cult of the manager isn’t exactly gone, but I would hold a little firmer on the idea that it has changed in some important sense, specifically with regard to how we think about authority and identification. After all, your analogy to Vietnam and Iraq is not inappropriate because both were about, in some sense, national reconstruction, a very clear kind of social engineering. But how those busiess school managers went about reconstructing the countries *are* significantly different, it would seem to me: whereas the guy who set up the Tennessee Valley Authority (the classic high modernist top-down development project) was at one point sent off to Vietnam to recreate his project on the Mekong, I think (development as a way of bringing about prosperity, and therefore peace), the failures of Iraqi reconstruction have a lot to do with an idiotic faith in the self-management and self-regulation that is seen as “naturally” occurring once the country has been liberated. That, seems to me, to be the difference between neo-liberalism and mere liberalism, and the rhetoric of entrepreneurialism in business schools (where not expertise but the quality of “thinking outside the box” is supposed to be taght) seems to be qualitatively different than the idea of sending democracy experts to teach democracy to people that don’t know about democracy (democracy as a teachable subject of expertise versus democracy as natural, needing only to be liberated)
As for The Golden Bowl, you’ve got me there; only a fool would waste his time trying to produce readings of that novel!
I think the “out of touch with society” criticism is actually a pained,defensive reaction to what academics are doing, though.
We (academics, I mean) come into contact with 18-21 year olds on a constant basis. We see what “society” is, and what it’s going to be, and who is going to make it up.
If we’re “out of touch” with “society,” it’s because we’ve seen who makes up “society,” and we’ve thrown up our hands in disgust and despair and retreated into the ivory tower rather than continue to deal with a “society” made up of snowflakes who believe they’re entitled to special treatment simply because they are who they are.
Academics aren’t out of touch with society. We’ve rejected it. And that’s what pains the critics, because they want to believe that society is worth engaging in, and academics know otherwise.
(I’m wildly generalizing, of course).
The point of the dodo bird comparison is not that intellectualism leads to extinction, but that specialization does, as Buckminster Fuller taught. But perhaps you would not have considered him an intellectual, or maybe I don’t understand what you mean by intellectual. Must one be an academic to be an intellectual? But another good example is Jack London, a productive intellectual, who went to his own business school (visit his ranch in the Valley of the Moon – and read his “Martin Eden”). If some of today’s “outsider” intellectuals were truly intellectuals, they would have no problem going to business school for an MBA. The business community awaits their decision, desperately in need of their creativity and skills – while their buddies in academia could not care less about them.
Jess,
Well, I can’t say I’ve rejected society, nor (having to interact with it on a regular basis) do I have any particular faith I’d be able to if I wanted. And anyway, people always complain about “kids nowadays,” but I don’t observe that my students are any more obnoxiously snowflakey than their elders, many of whom are much more oblivious to their own self-absorption than the younger generation.
Leoj,
I wasn’t trying to understand what *causes* extinction at all; if you want to know why academics are becoming inevitable, I think, you look to the society that is killing us off, just like specialization didn’t kill the dodos until the dutch showed up. The point of the dodo bird metaphor for me (which was really just a figure I enjoyed) was that if extinction is inevitable, the rational view of that inevitability might tend to make irrationality seem attractive. For that reason, I hypothesized, an otherwise coherant and lucid seeming writer like Deresiewicz produced an incoherant and very poorly thought through argument denying what I, here, was suggesting muight be an inevitability.
Your contrast between the TVA and neoliberalism is enlightening and persuasive. Deregulate ’em all and let God sort ’em out.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more holes I find in the contrast. Not that it doesn’t hold *some* water (I do like it as a general framework). But I’m not sure it’s airtight; a central part of the TVA’s stated mission was to empower local people, to give them the resources to do for themselves rather than remain tied to the fount of expertise. One of the reasons it worked out so crappily was that the central logic of the TVA (using electricity to link the periphery to the center as a means of empowering it, love the pun) was basically an anti-democratic system, where the center would alsways have control of the switch that turned the electricity on or off. James Scott’s wonderful book Seeing Like a State (which has a prehensile chapter on the TVA that prompted the book but got published elsewhere) has a lot to say about this. So even the TVA waws not, in theory, as top-down as they were in practice, and that distinction is something I’m still not sure what to make of.
I find levels of rudeness in students now that would have been unimaginable twenty to thirty years ago, when I was a college student. Of course, these kids don’t come from nowhere, nor, as you point out, are they more snowflakey and self-impressed than their elders. But that just gives more fuel for the academics’ retreat. When even your contemporaries are shallow, etc, and the most popular tv shows a cornucopia of loathesome moral values, isn’t a night of quiet contemplation of, I don’t know, Jameson or Braudel preferable?
That retreat into books and deep thought is, I think, a rejection of society as it is now–a retreat into the Ivory Tower in the good sense.
Jess,
I take your point in general; what you describe is probably true of many people in academia who despise their neighbors and their students. But I’m much more interested in how academics self-fashion their position vis-a-vis society as a way of interacting with society, making the ivory tower into a watch tower, or something. The important steps in defining oneself as a vanguard are first defining yourself as different (better) than the masses, and then of making that difference into a kind of politically meaningful relation. Thus, I wonder how often the “retreat from society” narrative isn’t a hermetically sealing away of the self, but a kind of government-in-exile resentment. These are manybe not the kinds of questions you and others are interested in, though; it’s very specific to the work I’m trying to do.
Also, have tv shows really become more loathesome? Pop culture in the fifties was an incredibly racist and sexist place, you know; some things have changed, bu the narrative of steady decline is one I’m very skeptical of.