Re: interdisciplinarity

[Matthew Levy <mlevy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Ralph Dumain wrote:

> 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.

In spite of this slightly mangled last sentence, I think I understand what
you're saying here, and it's nothing you haven't already made clear.  I
try not to take too much for granted but I occasionally fail at this ...
but I wonder if you are making unwarranted assumptions about what
assumptions I might have made about you?

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.
>

of course.  i freely admit that my social experience is fairly
circumscribed, especially racially; most people I have gotten to know well
in my life who were not white, I met through a university environment or
related circles.  This does mean that I am not particularly hip to certain
cultures or subcultures; I try to learn what I can, when I can (within my
pathetically limited little lifeworld).  But I think I know enough to
agree with you that Adorno was out of touch, and to try not to be out of
touch myself ... or do you assume from the quasi-academic writing style I
adopt here that I always talk like a pedant?  You've only seen me in Rome,
baby ...

> 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.

I didn't claim that you had.  i was questioning your picture of the
relationship between academic disciplines and political consciousness.
*I* am the one who maintains that political organizing (not the same as
activism) does matter, and I'll stick by that.

> 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.

Sounds like a Michael Moore rant I read about academic leftists being too
worried about panda bears and sandinistas and east timorese to care about
the "common man" ... As far as I am concerned, judgments of the value and
social meaning of activism have to be made on a case by case basis.  Union
organizing may not be the purest way of working for social change but it
is still damn indispensable for many workers ... and that's the point,
that workers who are organized become organizers and change their
political consciousness ... including alienated grad students who suddenly
come to understand practically (not just theoretically) what the hell
critical social theory is trying to tell them.  And aside from that, until
we are able to create a race of utterly self-actualized fully human
worker-critic-artists who live perfectly balanced and self-regarding
lives, I would rather see bored bourgeoise turning to political activism
(in the service of worthwhile causes) rather than gaybashing or snorting
coke or becoming NRA members or whatever ...

 What are the rest of us supposed
> to do?

I am not sure what the hell I am supposed to do myself, and I don't see
how my fumbling attempts to "find myself" are *keeping* y'all from doing
whatever you need to do ... unless you are suggesting that we all have to
be part of a conversation about collective change, which I am all for.
You start.

  How are we supposed to raise our children?

As far as this goes, I choose not to have children.  People keep telling
me I'll change my mind as I get older, but people tell me lots of things
that don't come true.  As far as helping raise other people's kids, I'm
very interested but have little experience (keeps coming back to that
word ...).

 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?
>

well for one thing i don't think anybody is programmed merely to toil ...
our society has never approached such a state (Skinner's paradise, Marx's
hell); instead, everyone around me (including the uneducated) has some
pretty damn complex ideas about the world, some of which are insightful, a
lot of which are crap that clouds our (including my) ability to deal with
our reality and live full, meaningfully human lives.  But I think we're
basically in agreement about this ... the trick is not to develop theories
about the social world as if it were some kind of computer simulation, but
to develop ideas about ourselves in our relationship to the world which
will help us live better lives.  I think we also could agree (at least in
principle) that this means both breaking down couterproductive ideologies
by criticism and building up practical knowledge through experience and
careful thought.  what did i say that seemed to contradict this?

> >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.
>

what does?  the university, or the ideas that are circulated within it, or
the various political trends that find solace within it or attempt to
modify it?  my argument is that the university is indeed just another
bureacracy, but one that (due to its ideological role in the division of
labor) contains the seeds of its own disruption in the form of critical
ideas ... or were you subscribed to this list because you thought
Frankfurt School theory had NOTHING to offer?  or because the Frankfurt
School theory which is taught in universities is somehow automatically
distinct from the FS theory you read, and thus valueless?  Please
enlighten me.

> >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.
>

fair enough but i wasn't going to get upset over it anyway.  do you think
i'm unaware of these things?  what do you think drives all us gen x
whippersnappers to such irony-mongering anyway?  i don't particularly need
to believe that my life has some purpose in order to live it ... but I
do need that in order to live it WELL.  and ultimately your criticisms of
guilt-laden academic responsibility and activism constitute an argument
that there is a better way to do it, and that you know what it is.  So
guess what, we're back to the Sentimental Education of the White Man ...
pretty ridiculous but that's where this has all been headed.  Or if you
can't stomach that role, you can go back to doing your thing and I'll do
my thing and maybe somewhere down the line we'll be on the same side of
something ...

oh while we're on the subject of dripping irony ... how about that scene
in Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie where the naive but sexy blonde asks
Malcolm what she can do to help "his people" and he says "Nothing" ... man
can that Denzel act, or what?

:)

 > >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?
>

you didn't.  i extrapolated.  but you still haven't given me a reason to
discount this view.

> >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.

huh?  what the hell is it that you think you are, since you obviously
don't identify with academia?  speaking of which, has anybody on this list
ever pinned you down to answering what YOUR position in the division of
labor is on a day-to-day basis?  I would be interested in hearing what
sorts of contradictions you have to face ...

 > > > ... 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?

once again you are going for the most extreme example ... Anyway I was not
speaking of activists who hang about in academia, but of the
undergraduates who develop a political consciousness (often accompanied by
a sense of aesthetic liberation) on campus and take it with them when they
leave ...  i'm going to leave your rhetorical questions alone for the
moment.

 >
> >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.

I don't know how anyone could have suspected any of the above from what
you've said.  What I do suspect is that you are not any longer, perhaps
because of your rage, capable or willing of making fine distinctions
between the various forms of activity that go on in the university, and
thus treat the whole thing as horseshit ... at the very same time that you
heap blanket condemnations on popular culture AND the people who live it,
equating ebonics with failure and illiteracy with hopelessness ... thereby
reproducing a meritocratic vision of education and success, and equating
this with dignity and self-respect.
	I am just this guy, see ... I believe that self-respect, love,
dignity, and empowerment are all part of what makes life worthwhile, and I
believe this despite my socialization into a culture that taught me to be
self-hating, alienated, rage-driven, and ineffectual (and all this despite
being pretty damn high on the social food chain, as a middle class white
boy) ... I would like to cultivate these values in others as in myself
(the love part is what explains the desire to share, as well as the
realization that individual empowerment is always self-defeating) and I
try to do so wherever and whenever I can (both in and outside of
academia).  I am not claiming I'm particularly good at this, but I don't
see how dropping out of graduate school would necessarily improve my
ability to cultivate these things.  If you can make a strong argument why
I should, I'm all ears (have been getting generally fed up with some of
the same things you've mentioned for a while now, actually).


peace,
matt