Today's Chronicle of Higher Education Online in its regular column
"MAGAZINES & JOURNALS" has the following overview of an article whose
url I provide at the end. Sometimes we are too much in the silo of our
own discipline. It is great when someone in another discipline meets us
and provides the freshness of a view of management issues through the
prism of discipline in the humanities or natural sciences. In this
spirit I share this.
From the CHE:
A glance at the January-February issue of "PMLA":
Sweatshops, intellectuals, and literature
Bruce Robbins, a visiting professor in the department of English
at Columbia University, uses a passage from David Lodge's "Nice
Work," a "New Yorker" cartoon by Roz Chast, and the philosophy
of Kant to introduce us to what he terms "the sweatshop
sublime." According to Mr. Robbins, the phrase describes a kind
of momentary revelation where one perceives the social whole,
"the outer reaches of a world economic system," which is
"accompanied by a surge of power" (although a power that gives
one no means of action), and finally a sudden return to
"everyday smallness."
For Mr. Robbins, the sweatshop sublime becomes a tool for which
"intellectuals contemplating nonintellectuals" can "calibrate
more accurately the responsibilities that do and do not attach
to working in and around the humanities." He argues that any
organized movement toward social equality will not emerge from a
sudden mass rationalization; instead the force of change will
"happen as an outgrowth of habitual desires, fears, and
anxieties, embarrassed perceptions and guilty pleasures," the
emotions that accompany the revelation.
Mr. Robbins points to the character of Dorothea in George
Eliot's "Middlemarch," along with excerpts from Eliot's critics,
to explore the concept of social action. "Like those in the
antisweatshop movement," writes Mr. Robbins, Dorothea "feels
with a jolt her place in the 'involuntary, palpitating' world of
labor around her, resolves to do something, and does."
He also closely examines and evaluates the contemporary
discussion of the division of labor, looking at the writings of
Randy Shaw, Barbara Ehrenreich, Naomi Klein, Fredric Jameson,
and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. From his analysis, he concludes
that the inescapable "sinking back into ourselves" of the
sweatshop sublime "confirms the emotional satisfaction we derive
from intellectual work in all its lonely specificity, the slow
and patient labor of filling in the steps, analytically and
politically, between the perceptual and emotional jolt and the
outlet in action that may or may not be found to suit it."
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I was intrigued and found on the web an earlier version of this
paper at:
http://140.115.95.15/graduate/The%20Sweatshop%20Sublime.rtf
Cybercollaborating,
Charles Wankel
Mg-Ed-Dv List Director