Npb sociologist defends Remain, modern classicism and Lacan-made-simple

A new focus for npb (Academic Tendency) activists today with a piece from a self-confessed sociologist and political economist. My suspicion of confusion started right there -- how can you be both (I tried once).

The perceived attack on 'the humanities' is  a nice unifier for a moral panic weaving together fears for the BBC, modern universities, London-centric Arts, the Guardian, jolly old gut feelings, and lots more npb enthusiasms:

These various hostilities are often lumped together as symptoms of a culture war, in which the demographic and educational divisions that came to light around Brexit are amplified and exploited for political gain. But we can be more specific than that. The new conservative ideology coalesces around one theme in particular: hostility towards the modern humanities, and their elevated status in British public life.

Elevated? Objects of scorn these days I would have said, conjuring up images of puppet show versions of Hamlet, or a chorus of angry young women reading rap lyrics dressed as endangered animals.

The 20th century witnessed a distinctive model of interlocking political, educational and artistic institutions, with the humanities at their core. Public bodies such as the British Academy and the BBC...icons of mass cultural modernity as the Arts Council, BBC2, the Open University and the new redbrick universities. By the 1980s, this project had borne such fruits as the South Bank Show, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies [blimey!] and Channel 4.Threaded through all of this was the principle that there was a public interest in understanding ideas, artefacts and events.

And a clear npb focus on smug virtue-signalling instead of analysis, a swift move away from real politics into tokenism and identity politics, a move away from anything that required old-fashioned male colonialist scholarship (those traditional humanities subjects are associated with the old aristo elites as we shall see) 

the humanities play a pivotal ideological [ie negative] role for contemporary conservatism... The figure of the publicly funded humanities graduate, whose cultural privilege grants them access to the London elite, fuels a paranoid fantasy that is now central to conservative ideology....The neoliberal position is that a humanities degree is a simple waste of money...The nationalist concern is very different, and stems especially from the perceived influence of continental philosophy over the past 50 years....humanities graduates are an enemy within, a segment of the liberal elite that lacks national loyalty.

This person is a sociologist (OK and political economist, which just might be code for some kind of marxist I suppose) who has never read Bourdieu on cultural capital and the class structure, or how culture is used for social distancing and the rest. His insights are very limited as a result, barely more than npb working ideology:

Brexit has given nationalists the confidence to cast suspicions upon a wide array of independent public bodies, from universities to the Bank of England. One thing that neoliberals and nationalists can agree on is that anyone whose education and career has been spent in publicly funded liberal institutions, telling a story about “the public interest” is a fraud [so many of them are, especially if they have no idea what the public interest might be or the need to research it]. The popular appeal of Johnsonism lies in its antipathy to this elite.

The Cummings plan is for esoteric forms of rationalism [npb people do not like experts] to topple the humanities: not just data scientists but game theorists, cognitive scientists, software developers and “people who never went to university” [heaven forbid! That would bust the whole credentialist closure strategy!] should shape government thinking....The social sciences and humanities will eventually be taken over by physicists....The brief historical period, when learning about literature or, yes, Lacan, was a gift from the state, accessible to all [ha!] regardless of background, is firmly over.

I bet he has never read Lacan in his life, with its gigantic scope and spattering of classical allusions -- I have only dipped in myself. Very few of us have had the time to wrestle with it. He might have read various humanist garbled summaries in bullet point form of some of Lacan's greatest hits, which is much more common. I wonder how much CCCS stuff he has read, how many actual sermons from St Stuart Hall, or how much he knows about the neolib origins of the OU too, for that matter.

Boris Johnson is just as likely to lapse into Latin. The liberal humanities are being caught in a pincer movement, between hyper-modern futurism and pre-modern classicism [discuss the weird hybrid that must be 'modern classicism'] . Taken to extremes, the dream of wiping away modern culture in the name of some distant future and some primordial past has inspired the most hideous of rightwing regimes

Poor old npb lost in the middle, constantly having to identify only with what is 'modern'. No wonder no-one loves them. He nearly gets there right at the end:

Resentment towards cultural and political elites has clearly been brewing for decades, especially among non-Londoners and non-graduates...Too often, these elites have reflexively countered the attacks of Thatcherites and the Murdoch press by closing ranks, relying on the power of their contact books, free tickets and charm, but only deepening the sense of metropolitan luvvies doing favours for each other

Has he not noticed the appalling partisan npb activist preachy stuff that passes for the humanities these days (and some social science too, especially 'qualitative research'). He should really try some examples. His interest in defending mush must turn on his own hatreds of those above and below -- and maybe his career prospects?

Unless it is all parodic?