technobureaucratic

Guillory employs to retrofit de Manian theory into a symptom of the marginalization of the humanities in the new technobureaucratic world are familiar; they are the cliches of the resistance to theory, animated by the skill and passion of a first-rate polemicist.

Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

That is, "the adjustment of critical practice to new socioinstitutional conditions of literary pedagogy is registered symptomatically within theory by its tendency to model the intellectual work of the theorist on the new social form of intellectual work, the technobureaucratic labor of the new professional-managerial class" (181).

Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

The empirical specificity of the historical event of theory ( "pragmatically speaking, then, we know that there has been, over the last fifteen to twenty years, a strong interest in something called literary theory" [RT,5]) may indeed be aligned, as an empirical phenomenon, with the technobureaucratic development of the university within the wider regime of late capitalism and modern technics.

Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

The seminar of the charismatic teacher, no doubt important enough in its way, is an imaginary reduction of the real technobureaucratic conditions for the propagation of theory.

Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

As Guillory summarizes near the end of his chapter, de Manian theory registers at the heart of its terminology the historical moment of the fusion of the university teacher's autonomous "professional activity" with the technobureaucratic organization of intellectual labor.

Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

Theory reinvigorates the ideology of professionalism by reasserting charismatic authority in a technobureaucratic context, which is why, Guillory claims, de Man's disciples imagine their master to be

Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

(a claim that makes clear the degree to which the sociological critique ultimately relies upon an uncritical metaphysics of reflection); it is a registering and a reading of the technobureaucratic scene of theory's production.

Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

"technobureaucratic dominion" (256); but at the same time, in and through the valorization of the technical as "rigor," it transforms the work of reading into "an unconscious mimesis of the form of bureaucratic labor."

Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005