Enemies of Promise : Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship

Rating:
Summary: Aesthetic-political provocation of a US 'world gone wrong,'
Review: Enemies of Promise offers a prodding and lucid intervention into the glut and glamor of the over-production system and managerial model of corporate values that has taken hold in US academia and threatens to ruin creativity and block the future. As a series of polemics and reflective musings, the extended "essay" holds up very well and should have a broad and lucid impact, as parts of it already have had on the MLA and in UP circles. I liked the sustained and situated use made of Kantian 'judgment,' and the appeal to the ethical and aesthetic individual make-up of that judgment via Kierkegaard, Augustine, and Emerson. The way Enemies of Promise invokes Fish and Rorty, these anti-theory forces do look like 'covering cherubs' blocking vision and the 'new spirit' future from coming in, in the Blakean poetic and political sense. The work stays timely, and offers much good council to the young and to the over-professionalized and administered unto death, which here in the UC system say I feel strong doses of as "becoming production." Plus, the work offers some ways and tactics of value to move forward. In short, this is a real and bracing work of moral courage and aesthetic-political provocation that holds up very well as an intervention and over-view of a 'world gone wrong.'