[Peace-discuss] Academia & politics

[C. G. Estabrook]

A generally interesting interview with Terry Eagleton:

http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/

Here are some selections on academia & politics:

"...Most people I know in academia want to get out. Which is a pretty  
new situation. I’ve never encountered that before ... [Neo- 
managerialism] ... has effectively brought to an end hundreds of years  
- at least a two hundred-year-old tradition - of the university as a  
centre of critique, in a society where critique otherwise is pretty  
hard to come by. That is a momentous and historic development.

"...the role of public intellectual - not that everybody can be an  
Edward Said, or Habermas - but that’s what we need, and even more  
deeply and rigorously given the almost utter assimilation of academia  
into capitalism.

"...the problem has been, at least through the end of the 19th  
century, perhaps, post-Matthew Arnold, that increasingly the  
intellectuals moved into the universities. You can almost chart that  
shift in late Victorian England. In one sense that gave them a certain  
backing, and buttressing, and authority. They were no longer  
freewheeling lone voices. But it also coincided with the slow demise  
of important journals and forms where you could have a non-academic  
public intellectual culture ... One of the things that worries me is  
that in the United States even radical academics are not particularly  
concerned about this. They accept the academicisation of radical  
intellectual life very easily. That’s partly because the whole of  
academia is much more self-consciously professional than it is here  
[i.e., the UK], the home of the amateurs. But it’s a very worrying  
development.

"As I’ve said, too many times, I see the intellectual as the opposite  
of the academic, in many ways. Even if you can only launch that  
project from an academic position, which is often the case,  
nevertheless it has to be in contention with the complacency and the  
specialism and narcissism of so much academic work. But,  
realistically, again, on a materialist analysis, the possibilities of  
that are not up to the academic: they’re up to more general political  
developments..."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20120606/4d45c301/attachment.html>