Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture

by Bruce Robbins

During the 1980s, university-based intellectuals came under heavy fire from both radicals and conservatives. They were accused by the former of betraying their public duty as general critics of society, and by the latter of promulgating radical ideologies and corrupting the young. In this work, the author counters both left and right, arguing that the professionalization of literary study was inevitable and fortuitous. Robbins undertakes close studies of such figures as Edward Said, Fredric Jameson and Raymond Williams, while considering the major trends in contemporary cultural studies and giving significant attention to relevant developments in such disciplines as ethnology and sociology. Secular Vocations ranges over materials from Britain, France and the US, knitting them together in a synthesis that places, in bold relief, many of the major controversies in contemporary intellectual life. It concludes with a plea for what Robbins calls “comparative cosmopolitanism” to displace the more militantly particularist projects that have come to dominate the human sciences.

276 pages, Paperback

First published July 17, 1993

About the author

Bruce Robbins is the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU, 1999), The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia, 1986; Duke pb 1993) and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minnesota, 1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (Minnesota, 1993) and co-edited Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000. His most recent book is Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, 2009).

Reviews

[Callum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looks like I am the first to write a review for this book!

Robbins provides an excellent slice-of-life of the peculiar tendency of academics to self-legitimize by attacking their own profession, which he chalks up to a professional strategy par-excellence. Covering cow-boy Westerns, Edward Said, feminism, English departments, and postcolonialism, Robbins shows his grasp of a wide range of material. His is a strong contribution to the literature on literary theory, the university, and the problems of the disciplines. In particular, his chapter on postmodernism is to be commended; Robbins has a lively intelligence, which allows him to twists things around when he sees fit, and I think his remarks on the "antimonies" of Hayden White are spot-on -- and troubling for university writers in general. His concern for the "rhetoric of rhetoric" underscores the way in which, "zooming-out," the language of rhetoric becomes its own rhetoric, legitimizing a new scholarly world "post-culture." Robbins's work is a great demonstration of the power of what the Situationists called "récupération," the absorption of protest by the system.

One problem in Robbins's work may be the shakiness of that other Situationist concept, "détournement," when the system really *is* turned against itself, which Robbins seems at pains to imagine.
The drawback to the book is one that Robbins himself admits: his only logical move seems to be an inversion of values: where others see attacks on the professions, he sees a new form of covert legitimizing (it's as if Robbins thinks the only problem is that "we" aren't *honest* about what we're doing when we attack the professions). This is obviously not enough for a radical publication like Verso, which needs to prefigure something (a new form of intellectual labour, maybe) which is qualitatively different from today's, and not just more honest: the fact that he wants to re-stage a conscious disciplinary legitimacy in a more open, progressive fashion seems to be left open to the same problem as Habermas's theory: a new opening-up of, a new orientation towards, the public is only radical in circumstances where, such as in Adenauer's Germany, the public does not exist; in our society, it certainly does exist, but as an ideological specter, mostly now right-wing: a new relationship is needed between scholars and *specific* groups, individuals, classes, not only towards a "public," however qualified (or reified, even if we claim Robbins does not do this).
I thought that the obvious place to target this new direction would be in an analysis of the Marxist concepts of praxis/practice v. theory, which Robbins does not raise. Surely, here, on terrain already less liberal, lies the possibility of breaking with the past (even if with the "revolutionary" past represented by these concepts, i.e. by exploding them): I am under the impression that in Robbins's imagination, the actual, literal destruction of the university is a kind of impossible joke that, if taken seriously, would result in the displacement of his theory, and so he merely hints at its absence from view. For, if Robbins banished a latent capitalist realism in his writing and imagined a real demise of the university and the scholar-public relationship in material and historical terms, it would seem less convincing that the only options are a mystified defense of the university through attacking the university (which he rightly condemns) or an orientation towards a more progressive scholarship through a passionate, self-critical acceptance of university prerogatives and statuses (which is the limit, seemingly, of his theory).
I certainly think that this will become more obvious to readers of this book in 2020 than to those who read it when it was originally published in the last century, back when university problems seemed more collegial and existential and less material.