Some quotes that illuminate last night’s (wee hours of this morning, actually) existential crisis:
“…failures to bridge the gap between a lived practice and a noncorresponding ideology…the contradiction is between a a moral sense of ‘what should be done’ and ‘what is being done’ (p. 280). The contradiction is mediated, both in the life of the individual and within the public realm, by recourse to suitable myths that gloss the incompatibilities, and thereby provide a rationalization for action. The task of a critical rhetoric is to call attention to the myth, and the manner in which it mediates between contradictory impulses to action” (McKerrow, Critical Rhetoric, in CRT, 1999, pp. 456-7, cites Abravanel (1983).
“…a specific intellectual is ‘one whose radical work of transformation, whose fight against repression is carried on at the specific institutional site where [she] finds [herself] and on the terms of [her] own expertise, on the terms inherent to [her] functioning as an intellectual'” (McKerrow, Critical Rhetoric, in CRT, 1999, p. 458, cites Lentricchia’s (1983, pp. 6-7) statement of Foucault’s notion of a specific intellectual.)