Sugary excerpt from Andrew Seal's review of Walter Kirn's Lost in Meritocracy:The Undereducation of an Overachiever:
In many ways, the undergraduate student is trespassing on the domain of
Theory with inevitably mixed emotions: there is a sense in which the
famous Emerson quote "What Plato has thought, he may think…" when
updated to Derrida becomes a more perilous boast, and for that peril,
more exhilarating, but also "hollow and vaguely hunted." And perhaps
the fear that one can get the Theoretical code-words wrong is similar
to the fear of being suddenly asked to leave an opulent party for not
being properly dressed.
Yet affect is not reality—though the emotions may be similar, the upshot is not: there seems to me to be very little overlap between the academic effects of one's bluff being called on Theory and the social effects of having one's class inferiority reinforced, and not even that much overlap between the social uses of Theory and the social uses of class. I haven't been involved in too many social interactions where getting Theory wrong or not getting it at all has truly detrimental consequences, most often only causing passing anxiety or frustration, whereas the effects of class distinctions are less likely to be merely ephemeral, or to derive from such immediate origins.
The indiscriminate grouping of elitisms has, I think, profound consequences in talking about higher education, among other things. The ready association of intellectual pretension with class privilege makes it far too inviting to take the former as a valid substitute when it comes to the resentment and, more seriously, when it comes to critique. Reverse snobbery toward theory, in other words, becomes a sort of fillip of objection to other, more pervasive and more detrimental structures of inequality.
Yet affect is not reality—though the emotions may be similar, the upshot is not: there seems to me to be very little overlap between the academic effects of one's bluff being called on Theory and the social effects of having one's class inferiority reinforced, and not even that much overlap between the social uses of Theory and the social uses of class. I haven't been involved in too many social interactions where getting Theory wrong or not getting it at all has truly detrimental consequences, most often only causing passing anxiety or frustration, whereas the effects of class distinctions are less likely to be merely ephemeral, or to derive from such immediate origins.
The indiscriminate grouping of elitisms has, I think, profound consequences in talking about higher education, among other things. The ready association of intellectual pretension with class privilege makes it far too inviting to take the former as a valid substitute when it comes to the resentment and, more seriously, when it comes to critique. Reverse snobbery toward theory, in other words, becomes a sort of fillip of objection to other, more pervasive and more detrimental structures of inequality.
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