Academic critique of cultural politics dismissed it as a substitute for practical politics

Evidence

But Berube did point to a series of criticisms that would be taken up more stridently by others in the popular press. For instance, he argued that the rising chorus of enthusiasm from young admirers who are taken with the black intellectuals’ fluency with popular culture may divert such intellectuals as Michael Dyson from listening more attentively to “the deliberations of Senate subcommittees” (Berube, 1995:79). Implicit in this criticism is the assumption that theoretical work that critically addresses popular culture is too far removed from the “real world” of politics. While Berube did not purposely suggest, and certainly does not believe, that black intellectuals who choose to write about popular culture do a disservice to the alleged “real world” of politics, his criticism can be read as a dismissal of cultural politics as a politics of bad faith serving mainly as a “compensation for practical politics” (p. 79). In many ways, Berube’s cautious critique foreshadowed a much more vicious attack on cultural politics that was to emerge in the work of Todd Gitlin, Alan Sokal, Alan Wolfe, and many others on the left (see Gitlin, 1997; Sokal and Bricmont, 1998; Wolfe, 1996). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2643

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘Sokal affair’ / science wars debates and to critiques of identity politics in left circles. — connects to: Jameson describes postmodern life but rarely calibrates the political effects of movements — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 301; Foucauldian critique offers no alternatives, potentially serving an ideological function — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1954; Laing’s subject politics severed revolutionary change from material social conditions — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 666