Academic Law and Order

Picking up
        "PostScript: Of Pomo
Academicus" where Scapp's
            postmodernism's impact(s)
                strike at "...the stability
of academic law and order..." (120)
    tongue-in-cheekily
                he names for me
one concern I hear
         read, echoed, returned to
    throughout his and hooks'
work:
            I'm not really interested in (re)
debating Derrida's now-method
                or "complicated and rich
philosophical critique" (122)

but
        in thinking with the idea
                of an order and law
    we follow (broadly as academics
citizens people job holders on the way to
            or past tenure processes) or resist
on our way to "questioning"
                    whatever we are questioning

[Who's the sheriff in this town? (cue dusty
whistle sagebrush tumbleweedy quickdraw music)
(The Onion's recent podcast plays
the 'new sheriff in town'  motif playfully perfectly:
the current sheriff is doing a fine job and the town
doesn't need a new six-shooter...)]

an orthodoxy so difficult to resist
    so difficult to push against

(can I call that lawfaithfulness?)

        is the "they [students]
need jobs and part of our [academic
               faculty members, via curriculum
    classroom practices, institutionalization
            of ideas] job

(though some days it feels we

articulate only this)

    is to prepare students for said marketplacejobmarket..."

                       What resonates
here, now, rereading Scapp rereading
    Foucault is Foucault's
            call to the local, "specific sectors"
    where a "much more immediate and concrete awareness
of struggles" (125) becomes, maybe,
                    more visible
    tangible....

and the question of jobmarketmarketplacepreparation
            (should be?) (must?) may be (maybe a musty
dusty exercise of irrelevance to ask? I say no) un-utilized as a catch
                    all panacea explication
    of our enterprise (at a community

                college) and replaced by a serious
    looksadaisy at student articulation of
                      their skooled-enterprise

engaged
with our own
professional expertise and understanding
                    of power, discourse, knowledge
    and how they circulate --

Might this, the above that is, be

a pedagogy of hopefulness, situated?

It is the "utter
            rationality" of the call of the market
place to place students
                and circumscribe
    (and it does circumscribe the might-imagined
as alternative enterprises
        of our classroom (and disciplinary?) work)

our work. And it pisses me off.