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tached dissenter. .. nor the organic party cadres whom Lenin shaped after
the model of the 'professional revolutionary'," Ross continues, can serve
as a force of resistance to advanced capitalism. Echoing Daniel Bell, Ross
finds hope only in one place: "it has been scientific intellectuals rather
than humanists who have been at the forefront of this professional activ–
ism."
There is no reason, according to Ross, to lament the end of ideology
and, with it, the passing of what he calls "the universal intellectual." Fu–
ture contestations will be over the body, not the mind, and the new
politics of identity - especially movements organized around gays,
women, and blacks - are primarily bodily in nature. Academics, under
such conditions, are best off jettisoning their obsolete beliefs in detach–
ment and the possibilities of pristine knowledge and joining the action.
Even the vanguard party must go; indeed, as Michael Berube writes, so
will most of the elements of classic Marxism, leaving only "sugar-free,
low-cholesterol, no-fat decaffeinated Marxism lite . . ." But cultural
studies is fooling itself. Popular culture has little place for intellectuals,
even intellectuals who lionize popular culture. It was tragic of classic
Marxists to believe that they could ride the backs of the working class to
power. The notion that teachers of literature can ride the backs of cornic
book readers to power is farcical.
Conservatives will have a field day when they discover the cultural
studies boom, but I hope they recognize how profoundly conservative
cultural studies really is. Intellectuals have only one way of influencing
the direction their society takes: by using their brains to understand how
we have become the society we are. Any intellectual movement which
denigrates brains denigrates its own influence. Cultural studies announces
what has been obvious for some time: the American left, having become
quite comfortable in its resignation from responsibility, would rather join
the culture than fight it.
