Re: further reflections

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

At 08:49 AM 6/2/99 PDT, april_biccum@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>In what work does the merciless ridiculing appear?

I can't remember and don't have an inkling, but I will dig for it, I promise.

>You don't honestly mean "primitive" do you?  You do recognize that
>the category "primitive" was constructed by the modern colonial
>project to
>justify colonizing, "civilizing" (ahem!) and otherwise enslaving
>non-European peoples.

I should have put "primitive" in scare-quotes, although "primitive" for
some is not an insult (ever read Stanley Diamond?), and in any case, the
physical conditions and hardships of existence can fairly be described as
primitive, if not the people.  Nitpick if you must.  I'm very un-PC; I
don't care whether people use the acceptable turns of phrase or not.  I
don't bother myself, and I don't find myself less sophisticated than anyone
else where it really counts.

>I suppose Canada is not even on the map in terms of this
>theoretical
>achievement and/or underdevelopment?

No offense, but Canada is not my subject, even though I'm from Buffalo and
I used to visit Toronto frequently.  I have no intention of excluding
Canada, eh?  Outside of the USA, I'm on shaky ground, and inside of it, I'm
such a Rust Belt Northeastern chauvinist, that even setting foot below the
Mason-Dixon line is a traumatic experience, letting alone having to live
here.  But don't get me started; I've offended enough people already.

>Do you think this is changing at all?  Even if someone like Angela
>Davis has
>brought her Eurpean education back to the U.S., the establishment >of her
>"history of consciousness" program would go some way to changing >this,
wouldn't it?

Something tells me you are young.  Well, the world of the late 1970s up to
today is not the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or even 60s, is it?  I was not
thinking of the contemporary situation, which is very different from the
past, esp. the intellectual landscape.  Continental theory is broadly
available and conspicuous in a way it was not.  I was never really in with
the in-crowd, I was involved with artistic and countercultural groups, but
nobody in my social  environment even heard of the Frankfurt School back in
the 70s when it was penetrating New Left and academic intellectual circles
in the theoretically challenged USA, and I didn't know bupkiss myself
outside of some Marcuse.  Believe me, we could have used some of this
stuff, but it was not part of my corner of the zeitgeist.  Do you know how
much rubbish one must endure when one hangs around artists and hippies?
Everybody was into eastern mysticism back then, man.  You think anyone
problematized essentialism?

OK, I digress.  Continental theory is now big in the USA, whether or not
anyone makes a pilgrimage to Paris or not.  My interest is all this is very
selective.  However, I've noted that in this overall intellectual
environment, which is unquestionably more sophisticated than it was 20
tears ago, questions of indigenous interest to us and new research on old
stuff has been prolific.  Of interest to me is, to take one area, is work
on indigenous American cultural modernism in the first decades of the
century, its interactions with political radicalism, the culture of the
Popular Front, and even studies of black modernism and its role and
relationships to the USA and to Europe.  There is so much more going on all
around, which can hardly be reduced to chasing after Europe either
geographically or even spiritually.  As for "home-grown" theory, not
originating from continental Europe or from British Cultural Studies, I'll
have to think some more.  There are attempts to rehabilitate pragmatism, a
project to which I'm averse.  And I can think offhand of some attempts just
to study various people in more depth, whether or not their embodied
philosophical or theoretical frameworks can be named with a known label or
not.  But one takes theory from wherever if it's useful; it's not really an
issue unless there is another agenda or social mechanism operating that
stands in need of criticism.

I can't address the impact of Angela Davis as a theoretician.  I haven't
read her book on black women and the blues, though the notion that there
was anything remotely feminist about Billie Holiday and the other two
ladies makes me laugh.  I don't know what Angela has written inspired by
critical theory.  I always had the impression that her political existence
as a CP member and her study of the Frankfurt School was an intellectually
schizoid existence.  The Communist Party is almost certain death to the
human intellect.

>That was a misspelling, my apologies.  Too much Derrida.

Just as I feared ....