Hello, collective,
 
I'm Douglas Reichert Powell, and a dissertator in English at Northeastern
University in Boston.  I'm also a Visiting Instructor here at Miami, which is
how I heard about this group.
 
One interest of mine, both professional and personal, is thee relationship
between universities and communities, on a broad, cultural level but also more
locally, so that makes the discussions on this list of considerable interest to
me. I grew up in a small city in southern Appalachia/ East Tennessee, the son
of a professor, and I've always been interested and directly implicated in the
 dynamics of town and
gown.  In my hometown, the university as an entity, and the individuals who
comprise it, has always represented both a source of intellectual
and ethical leadership, and an insular, snobbish clique, and of course a full
range of positions in between.  I recognize the potential for intellectual
communities to detach themselves from public life, and the institutional
pressures that enable that detachment, but I can't accept these things as
inevitable.  The reason I'm here, on the list, in grad school, etc., is because
I think the tremendous resources of higher education can be used (diverted?)
for the project of imagining and working towards a more ethical society.
 
I think that project is frustrated, however, any time we begin to picture that
there is a rupture between schooling and daily life, between book larnin' and
doing.  Even the most isolated scholar is still enmeshed in the operations of
culture if only by default, but more significantly, we as scholars have
decisions that we can make about the kinds of work we do and the audiences we
intend to address.  I don't think there's any reason, in other words, to rule
out any "theory" or body of writings as inapplicable in principle, at least
until you've considered possible contexts for its application.  Dismissing
theory out of hand risks playing right into what appears to me as one of the
dominant ideological strategies of our historical moment: oversimplification.
To me the crucial question in our current moment is how can the intellectual
work of cultural critics be made more available to political action?
 
I'm not interested, either, in using this list to sound off about my own working
conditions.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not getting paid nearly what I'm worth,
and that's just one of a whole complex of institutional slights. And to be a
leader in public ethics, educational institutions do need, I believe to hold to
a higher standard. But I lead a life of relative leisure, security, and safety
 compared to a great many
Americans, to say nothing of people world-wide.  Those privileges are exactly
the resources I believe university life offers someone interested in being a
cultural worker.  They present opportunities for action not available to
someone more directly controlled by their employers. Can we link the project of
improving the universities' cynical use of TA's and contract labor to broader
labor struggles?
 
Finally, I'm very interested in the suggestion that collegiality is
disempowering.  It seems to me that 1) intellectual work is at the present time
not very collegial, especially in the field of cultural criticism, and that 2)
this hostility is much more disempowering than collegiality.  The "difficulty"
factor of theoretical writing, for example, seems to me more often than not a
kind of gamesmanship--reading and writing as competition. The recent trend is to
 call this style "ludic" (or playful), when in practice
it is less involved with play (ludus) than it is with sport (agon).  Perhaps we
should call it "agonistic" writing instead?  Perhaps an (as yet unimagined)
convivial theoretical discourse might, without oversimplification, help build
solidarity between cultural critics and the populations on whose behalf they
intend to intervene?
 
How are doing and writing related, rather than unrelated?
 
Doug