Lisa Ruddick on the antihumanist consensus:
The poststructuralist critique of the self, though associated with progressive politics, has an unobserved, conservative effect on the lived world of the profession. It protects the institutional status quo by promoting the evacuation of selves into the group. In the story behind the story, the decentered subject is the practitioner who internalizes the distaste for the inner life and loses touch with the subjective reserves that could offset his or her merger with the profession. What is correspondingly strengthened is the cohesion of the collective. For our profession, alienated in various ways from the American mainstream, needs members who will band together. One way to get members to commit to the group and its ideology is to make them feel ashamed of the varied, private intuitions and desires that might diversify their interests.
Comments