Academic Labor and the Reflexive Turn in Literature and Cultural Studies

Abstract

Giroux, Henry A. and Kostas Myrsiades, eds. 2001. Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. viii + 360 pp. $72.00 hc. $26.95 sc. Williams, Jeffrey J., ed. 2002. The Institution of Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press. vii + 293 pp. $68.50 hc. "It would be fatuous to imagine that we are able to use the university without a keen sense of the way in which, in return, it uses us." (Fredric Jameson, qtd. in Giroux) Both of the books under review collect some of the more recent significant work on academic capitalism with particular relevance to practitioners of cultural studies, theory and literature. Presenting essays previously appearing in the minnesota [End Page 172] review, JAC, PMLA, and College Literature, together with previously unpublished material, they also will interest the broader readership of those devoted more generally to cultural politics, critical higher education, and the academic labor movement. Taken as a group, the essays in these collections exemplify the urgently reflexive turn of literary and cultural studies scholarship during the late 1990s. Halfway through that decade, the fantasy propagated by a quietist MLA since the mid-1980s—that "the economy" would somehow magically resolve the crisis in academic labor without any particular effort on our part—finally lost currency. The collective understanding slowly turned toward increased reflection on the material base of scholarship and pedagogy, fueled by labor militancy among the ranks of the permatemp nontenurable faculty and the super-exploited graduate student (for whom earning the Ph.D. in many cases signifies the end, not the beginning, of an arduous teaching career). Increasingly, as Jeff Williams observes, the "institution generates" the field of our scholarship. This happens in several ways: in the softer sense of tradition or custom, in the stronger sense of disciplinary organization and regulatory practices such as tenure, as well as through institutions" acceptance of the horizons represented by political and social possibility. The result is a pronounced trend toward embedding in our knowledge production, participation in the public sphere and teaching a reflexive account of how that scholarship, teaching, and social function are "inseparable from our institutional practices and locations" (Williams 2002, 3). From an intellectual-history point of view, this trend probably owes quite a bit toward the larger phenomenon Jameson dubs the "cultural turn" and to the pervasive influence of Geertzian anthropology and British cultural studies. In literature, for instance, literary scholars have moved away from new-critical and structural questions such as what a book means to questions of "book culture." They now ask questions regarding: how books are produced in a given historical moment, including how they come to be selected for publication in the first place; how books are received (read, misread, annotated, discussed, plagiarized, circulated and censored); the self-understanding of cultural producers, in roles as various as author, contributor, performer, collaborator, mystic, etc; and the role of institutions (such as governments, churches, clubs, schools and educators) in directing the uses, meaning, circulation, and persistence of texts. But the companion focus, on the institutions supporting the scholarship of literature, certainly has independent origins in the crisis of those institutions represented by the flex-labor system, the political assault on democracy and equality, and management domination of campuses and other workplaces. A case might even be made that the crisis in the institutions of literary [End Page 173] and cultural-studies scholarship is primary—that the interest in questions such as "who gets to be an author?" is fueled by the reality of such questions as "who gets to be a scholar?" in a labor system that runs primarily on a disposable faculty, and which increasingly devalues the cultural and critical work of the humanities in favor of the profitable applied research and job-training services provided to corporate capital by a technical intelligentsia. Giroux's introduction to Beyond the Corporate University surveys the political assault upon the...