Don't many celebrity professors openly admit that their system, the academy of the Reagan era (let's admit it), is at an endpoint? And I mean regarding the humanities, I was in that particular academy and there is literally "no love in it," especially if you like Walter Benjamin, Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer, you name it. Hal Foster, art professor at Princeton I believe, objects/asks about stagnated US art-theory at http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~variant/3texts/Hal_Foster.html where he posits a stultified aspect to the decades of anglo-US theory 1970-2000.
Max Herman
Seriously, where does Thomas Frank relate if at all, he had a book called "One Market Under God" also at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385495048/qid=1017276013/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_67_1/104-0676604-8259125
The open source movement, if I can speak of it in general terms (which I
acknowledge is as problematic as speaking of Aboriginality in unitary
terms), shares some remarkable features with Cultural Studies in the very
paradoxical way in which it can work to reinforce the very neoliberal
agendas that it supposedly opposes. Frank Hartman, in his at times gross
caricature of cultural studies in the US academy in his book One Market
Under God, and Brian Holmes, in his superb essay 'The Flexible
Personality' (posted to nettime 5/1/02), both give accounts of the ways in
which Anglo-American cultural studies in the 80s and 90s overlooked its
own modes of production - which saw an escalation in the casualisation of
labour and the rise of professors to celebrity status with matching
salaries, for instance, along with trends toward monopolisation in
academic publishing - and advocated the non-sense of political action via
consumer sovereignty and the consumption of popular culture, and displayed
no capacity to act as an oppositional force against the deregulation and
commercialisation of education. In so doing, cultural studies lent
implicit support to destructive neoliberal reforms. Similarly, the open
source movement, in its insistence on "openness", shares a common ground
with the likes of Gates, hegemonic nation-states, and TNCs that spout
rhetoric on "openness" via "friction-free capitalism" and "borderless
economies". Again, I will state my strong support of many of the
practices of open source movements. But I would maintain that there is
danger that comes with such a movement in its rhetoric and *when* it
assumes to have universal application. The world is not a software
program! Some things need protection! And there is a necessary
restriction that comes with that. And that is what my paper was
discussing in part, Kermit and Miles.