Technical theory jargons politicized leftist critics while pulling them away from politics

Evidence

The general political climate which attended its birth and the technological hermeticism of textuality which is deconstruction’s main concern have left their mark on the very structure of US literary theory, with the result that the younger critics who came to constitute the left wing of the US literary Establishment in the Carter and Reagan years were themselves hung, excruciatingly, between de Man and lessons of the Vietnam War. The mystique of Left professionalism, which grew alongside literary theory, was a precise expression of this self-division. If the lessons of the Vietnam War took one into politics, the technologism of theory took one deeper and deeper into mastery of the professional field, and radical literary theory, like any professional field, also developed a language and a way of referencing other signposts within it, which were inaccessible to those located outside its boundaries. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 89

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘Left professionalism’ self-division resonates with the Noise/Deep Listening material on how access systems and specialized language create insider boundaries. — connects to: Technical monologue saturated civic forums, crowding out public debate — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1413
• SEED: For the discipline, the pull of technical mastery against the pull of politics - an essay on how professionalization internalizes political impulses into careerist expertise.