Meaghan Morris’ Heart
Back in Australia, back at uni, I slide into a second day in the desk chair and feel my re-institutionalization clicking over. I take heart from Meaghan Morris, 20 years ago in The Pirate’s Fiancée (1988, pp.8-10), a collection penned from her interstitial point between the ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ writing worlds:
“… the experience of moving between a number of different social sites of debate and discussion about cultural politics has also left me very cautious about some aspects of recent attempts to come to terms with the limitations and specificities of ‘academic’ practice.
On the one hand, Foucault’s notion of the ’specific intellectual’, for example, has been particularly useful both in allowing institutional struggles to occupy a field of ‘everyday life’ rather than being relegated to an ‘ivory tower’ divorced from a ‘real world’ and in making it possible to criticize the moment in which a theory ‘mistakes the liberal academy as the collective subject of a universally useful knowledge’ [quote from David Bennett, 1987]. Feminism has both profited from, and helped to produce, this kind of reconceptualization of academic politics. On the other hand, something slightly different seems to be happening when it becomes possible to claim, as Paul Smith does in an essay in Men in Feminism, that post-structuralist feminist theory ‘however “feminist” it may be, and howsoever “feminist” is construed - does not exist outside the academy‘ (my emphasis). Smith stresses in a note that he is referring only to what is known ‘in the academic vernacular as feminist theory (the structuralist/poststructuralist variety)’.
…
One must be passionately careful here, precisely because to state that a given activity has ‘no existence’ outside one’s own immediate sphere of operations is to accept and reinforce as absolute, rather than to challenge and transform, prevailing local conventions about the available places from which people (and in this case, feminists) can be allowed to be saying something. (…) [W]hen we begin to come to terms with this development it becomes impossible to claim that a given theoretical activity ‘does not exist outside’ the academy. This can only be true in an academy imagined as without students who do not proceed to become professors, or with students who remain untouched by their own working experiences.
Furthermore, this academy functions in a world without bookshops, without ‘amateur’ readers and writers of theoretical work, without theorizing artists, without those ambiguous ‘art-world’ figures (critics, and especially curators) who can frame artists’ work as ‘theoretical’ whether they wish it so or not, without TV chat-shows and intellectual talking-heads, without interviews, without media jokes about semiotics and poststructuralism, without private reading groups, without public forums, without young film-school graduates making both small film-essays and big blockbusters, without other than academic audiences for any of these, or anyone anywhere to go on to make something different from them: it is a world without any ‘dissemination’ of ideas, and finally without the rampant commodification of thought and feeling that makes it possible to speak of ‘Theory’ - in a vernacular sense - as a practice, as a problem, as a genre, and as a ‘zone’ of possible contestation.
…
Without worrying about the disconnections and failures of intellectual work, we cannot transform it politically. Yet one of the most important consequences of the notion of the ’specific intellectual’ is not to translate specificity as ‘confinement’, but rather to begin to accept firstly that work produced in an academic context (even the writings of Foucault, even poststructuralist feminist theory) can be used and rewritten in unpredictable ways (and various media) elsewhere: and secondly that this movement can run the other way: academic theorization can and should transform its practices by learning from the experiences, the concepts and the methodologies developed by people in broader social and political movements.”