Its ironic that CES plenary speakers make these wonderfully radical calls to critical thinking & action yet they are highly professionalized & successfully entrenched in the academic industrial complex, as complicit institutionally as those at whom they level critiques. Last night’s CES plenary speaker JH’s statements about tenure & academic quoting as a practice were especially hypocritical until JH relinquishes JH’s own well-paid tenured position or if you’ve ever read the footnotes in JH’s work!!! Even more insidious is the manner in which these quotes are being re-tweeted by JH’s editor of books. Sorry @wissoker I am not impressed by plenary speakers quotes or not accepting $ or the fact that CES already seems not so much intellectual discussion/action, a real critical debate & provocation, but same old incestuous self-congratulatory crowd. But I guess if @wissoker can build up the conference enough in public domain than Duke University Press and even the plenary speakers career-wise may profit from it right? The real question on the table for the plenary speakers is: Can academics ever do more than constantly incestuously reproduce themselves especially in an historical moment in which they are at great risk of being found useless? Come on CES where are the critical voices of your very own conference/professional/ journal/careerist aspirations? Where are the folks who really know how to & do live the manifesto of: Fuck the academy and its neo-liberal representatives!!! And so far as concerns the plenary lineup CES, that’s you!!!

  11:01 am  |   March 11 2011   |  41 notes