Re: interdisciplinarity

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

At 05:06 PM 6/4/99 -0700, Matthew Levy wrote:
>What exactly is it that you want us all to accept about this
>rejection? That you have announced it, or that we must agree with
>it?

That it is a fundamental aspect of the basis of the substantive
disagreements that occur.  When you argue with your peers, you may disagree
on all kinds of principles, but you may well be familiar with their
assumptions.  If you are going to dispute with me, you must know in advance
that your assumptions about my assumptions, my use of language and
concepts, my fundamental orientation towards ideas and information, may not
be what you expect.  The more varied the social groups you interact with,
the more you become conscious of the problem of translating vastly
different mental universes and languages into one another.  Somehow the
apostles of de-centering are too centered to realize this.  Even Mr.
Negative Dialectic was too esconced in his own niche to appreciate the
possibilities of a less structured bildung, never having been an autodidact
but fully acclimated to the old European cultural hierarchies, even though
his NEGATIVE DIALECTICS is paradoxically both highly esoteric and
specialized and yet somehow written for everyman, written against the
division of labor!  (Here guilt works well, where the guilt of art does
not!)  But when a person migrates through real everyday life exposure (not
political organizing) to different social classes and social groups and
ways of life, one becomes acutely conscious of the the problem of
translation, because one cannot fall back on the support of institutions to
buttress a set of assumptions in communicating with the other person.

Now here is one assumption I run into all the time, one which I must refute
continually: that I criticize the ivory tower in the name of political
organizing.  I have never ever done this in all my decades on this planet.
Why would I criticize one specialized activity in favor of another?  Isn't
"activism" in the USA just one more subculture?  Activism may well be a
lifestyle or a luxury for the chosen few.  What are the rest of us supposed
to do?  How are we supposed to raise our children?  How to we teach people
to negotiate their way through the world as it actually is while also
teaching them it is their enemy?  If our subject is culture, the
development of the intellect, the development of critical thinking, the
development of self-confidence, of human dignity, etc., the all-around
development of human beings, not just as soldiers in a revolutionary
uprising, but as all-round human beings, what sort of gimmicks do you think
are possible in bridging the gap between those who programmed to think and
those to merely toil?

>I agree with you up until the last sentence.  The academic
>environment may well be morally corrupt but it is as much a part
>of the real world as any other place you choose to hang your hat
>... and based on two years of experience organizing teaching
>assistants into a viable union, I can say that while the middle
>class background and social isolation of some
>graduate students impedes their ability to grasp the meaning of
>collective action or institutional power relations, this is not
>usually the case...
>knowledge of critical perspectives, however abstracted, does
>actually
>lead to a more practically embodied political consciousness in
>many.

And all this is a sideshow to the actual basis of my viewpoint.  It is part
of the real world just as is any other bureaucracy.  It has its norms, its
social rules, its rules of interpersonal and organizational engagement.  It
has its own culture.

>Besides, your image of the archetypal apprentice academic probably
>corresponds to far less than half of the grad students I know.

Lame as my actual scenario was, it is to illustrate a point about the
relationship of what you live, what you are exposed to, and what you know.
There are a lot of good books in this world from which you can learn much
of real life, and you learn a whole lot from organizing various groups of
people, and you learn from your summer jobs and your second and third jobs.
 But all in all, how you learn to think and what you've experienced to
apply your thought to is conditioned in certain ways, and of, for all your
huffing and puffing about reflexivity, for all your excruciating
self-examination and self-consciousness, for all your guilt and burden of
political responsibility, I can point out a hundred things of which you are
totally unconscious and a thousand ways in which you've misapplied your
ideas, what does that say about your learning?  If you don't live it, it
won't come out of your horn.

The "you" of course is not necessarily you, and the "I" is not necessarily me.

>if this were all about life
>experience then "real" proletarians would always make the best >organizers,
>but they don't - because they don't often have access to the >leisure time,
>financial resources, or literacy necessary to educate themselves
>in the
>ways that the situation demands.

And what have I said about the virtues of "real" proletarians?  What did I
say about organizing?

>So academia is relevant not because it's
>a good thing in itself (it's not) but because it's one place where
>those
>who would very much like to develop the skills necessary to >practice
>Gramsci's "organic intellectualism"

I don't believe in organic intellectuals.  In the USA, such a notion is
utter nonsense.

>  ...  And anyway, you can
>disdain bourgeois radicalism all you want, but the survival of
>some form
>of leftism in the academy and in campus culture does produce a >certain
>number of committed activists from among the ranks of
>undergraduates where
>otherwise the universities would merely be training grounds for >yuppies.

And these people scare me just as much.  Imagine putting more power into
the hands of the likes of Dworkin or Mackinnon.  Do committed academic
activists think any differently than yuppies at the end of the day?  Are
their sensibilities any different from any other group of managers?

>no, it doesn't cure anything ... what it does is makes spaces
>where
>individual, motivated students and faculty can try to alleviate
>some of
>the symptoms by lessening some of the strictures of more
>established disciplines.

Surely you are pulling my leg.

What I'm out to fight is the bureaucratization of your mind, just as I'm
out to fight religion and superstition and the degradation and the numbing
of the minds of the hopeless illiterates around me.  Do you think like Dr.
van G that I'm an anti-intellectual, populist lumpen-wannabee?  That I
would raise any children under my care to be ebonics-spouting failures?
That I would discourage all the inner city parents I know who send their
children to piano teachers on Saturday mornings to learn how to play
Beethoven and Mozart?  Do you think I want to inculcate into these kids the
guilt of art?  Let me say a few things plainly.  This Simon Smith reveals
in each and every sentence that he takes no pride in himself; he has no
self-respect.  When I look at the way you bright young kids have been
intellectually defiled by the boatloads of horseshit you have been fed by
your professors, mistaking jerking off for thinking, you cannot begin to
imagine the depth of my rage.