Why Stop There?

The forum responders cover a lot of ground. All of us who took part in producing the book will be excited and edified by the probity of the insights presented by these four outstanding theorists and scholars. Sharon O'Dair writes that the star system favoring the theorists in the volume is an effect of neoliberal capitalism and must be deplored, opposed, and replaced. Aaron Jaffe writes that the volume is a grotesque private reunion of people who failed create a younger generation. Daniel T. O'Hara writes that irony, parody, burlesque, and satire define literary theory and that the volume does justice to theory on these terms. John Mowitt performs a full-scale, ironic deconstruction of the images and pictures in the volume. As wide as is the scope of these reactions, they form a coherent piece.

To begin with an incisive but disturbing intervention, O'Dair charges that the theory generation helped create the conditions for the exploitation of adjuncts and graduate students. She raises the political problem that the theory generation led to the exploitation of adjuncts and grad students. For O'Dair, the theorists who are sampled in the book grabbed corner offices when the new neoliberal university corporatized higher education. O'Dair writes that the business model encouraged the star system. True: theorists got high salaries—Stanley Fish was the highest-paid dean in the world—and reproduced the grotesque wage gap that separated U.S. business CEOs and CFOs from their pauperized workforce. The part-time adjunct professors and grad students, known as contingent labor or the precariat, have to buy their toothpaste tubes one at a time, commute to multiple low-paid jobs, and dread the call that tells them "sorry, your class didn't make this semester so it was canceled." They work in the shadows while the stars rotate high above them. Incensed that theorists are "still enjoying those privileges," forum contributor O'Dair concludes her piece by writing, "And neoliberal, globalized capitalism is what needs to be resisted, which is the point of this brief reflection on Veeser's volume."

But the high pay given to theorists did not cause the pauperizing of adjuncts. The causes of this horrible system are more complex. Your penny-pinching adjunct is teaching the same material as your jaguar-driving Stanley Fish or your zine-inspiring Judith Butler. The slice of real life displayed in these interviews is a graph of the seismic tremors shifting beneath a late-capitalist, post-social-welfare society of incredible cruelty and shallowness. The process was gradual: a slow-motion crash over the past 40 years that culminated in what one historian calls "the university in ruins." If you really believe in the dominance of neoliberal capitalism, why suppose that theorists alone were necessary to the academic star system?

Did the arrival of celebrities create the star system? Or was it rather the need for a star system that created the celebrities. Academic book profits, textbooks designed for those exploding numbers of boomer kids, the boaconstrictor of higher education that engorged ever-larger entering classes, the astronomical fees for academic speakers, free government cash for humanities centers, the elongation of the academic year into NEH seminars for college teachers, founding of summer boot camps like SCT and MLG summer institutes and the SCE, rising media interests in academic weirdos, journalists' attendance first at the MLA pretending to be shocked by "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" or infiltrators like Richard Bernstein who attended a conference at the University of Utah and then wrote for the New York Times "The Rising Tide of Political Correctness," thus launching the so called culture wars, high-profile international conferences. Theorists were incidental to all this. Traditional scholars would have been equally ready to seize the fees, honoraria, and stipends. Ambition drove Morris Abrams, Walter Jackson Bate, and Joan Ferrante as fiercely as it did Stanley Fish, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak: the forces at work in creating stars are more obscure than Fish's Jaguar or Judy, the zine. Attributing special powers and crimes to theorists seems hyperbolic. The interviews show that...