Interesting article here by Princeton English professor Raphael Allison comparing literary theorists and rock bands. There's some good stuff on the anthropology of subcultures to explain the weird ways that people talk at thea annual MLA convention, but the author's main conceit is as far as I can tell completely undermined by the radical uncoolness of professors.
Remember Colin McGinn's blog post about epatering the bourgeoisie, where he places himself as a cultural force alongside John Lennon and Kingsley Amis? It was sad in part because you realized that this deeply uncool person somehow made it that far in life with no idea how uncool he is, and also how this blithe unawareness was so central to his downfall. What is it about the ecosystem of academic stardom that makes that even remotely possible? I think this is related to my earlier post about how fame robs the famous of the moral friction that keeps the rest of us from being complete fools.
Allison kind of gets this, as he explores the tension between the radical pose of much literary theory and the deeply conventional lives of university professors filling out their TPS reports. But then Allison responds to the cognitive dissonance by arguing that this is similar to the way mods reappropriated conventional business suits and scooters as they rebelled against British society. The end result is kind of like the unconvincing speech by the ghost of Jim Morrison in Wayne's World II where Garth learns that you can do your homework during the week and party out on Friday night.
Obviously, neither Mike Myers nor Raphael Allison read Lester Bangs, whose character in Almost Famous partakes in the following bit of dialogue:
Lester Bangs: The Doors? Jim Morrison? He's a drunken buffoon posing as a poet.
Alice Wisdom: I like The Doors.
Lester Bangs: Give me The Guess Who. They got the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic.
From Bangs' writing and the entirety of his discourse in the movie, one gathers that the Platonic form of the academic conference would involve a lot of people liberated by their uncoolness to be able to serve truth and beauty with scholarship (and note how the protagonist's college professor mother in Almost Famous, not unlike Paul McCartney's uncle in A Hard Day's Night, is actually the most rock and roll character in the film). But people, even the uncool ones, are imperfect. And falling away from the ideal produces a lot of uncool people trying to convince one another that they are really cool.
In this light, all of the MLAy pseudo-chic radicalness chronicled by Allison takes on a more sinister aspect. It's not just that professors like to kvetch. Instead, when give the chance, human beings recreate in uncool form a ridiculous simulacrum of the James Dean/Marlon Brando adolescent oppositional disorder type affectation. The article's pretense that literary theorists are really like the new wave/mod band The Jam is actually an extended apology for this kind of dress up.
Here's where we really can learn from our students. They are on to us. They know that we never were and never will be cool. All we have to do is be able to discern when they are laughing at us from when they are laughing with us and we'll be able to go about our days without too much drama, filling out TPS reports and doing the odd bit of scholarship when time permits.
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