Elsewhere in the university, it’s notorious that the bones of Marx and Freud, are kept over in the English Department. (It won’t be long before the remains of Foucault and Derrida join them.) What for some of us is still astonishing, even after all these years, is the situation summarised by Professor Mark Edmundson in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, as so often, to Arts and Letters Daily.)
? the student who has heard the teacher unfold a Marxist reading of a work probably doesn’t get to study Marx per se. He never gets to have a potential moment of revelation reading The Manifesto or The Grundrisse. Marx too disappears from the scene, becoming part of a technological apparatus for processing other works. No one asks: “Is what Marx is saying true?” “Is Foucault onto something?” “Is what Derrida believes actually the case?”
Overstatement, maybe, but close. There’s a good reason, of course. To discuss at university level whether what Marx says is true involves actually reading Marx and his principal commentators. No time for that, so the student accepts the lecturer’s summary – as often as not itself based on secondary sources – and then they all set to work ‘applying’ the ideas, as Edmundson says, like paint.
Its intellectual squalor is not the worse aspect of such a practice. As Edmundson says, it removes from students the possibility of discovering the text for themselves and making their own kind of sense of it. Such responses to the text are said to be ‘insufficiently theorised’. Now there’s language as magic.