Re: interdisciplinarity

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

I accept just about all of your post without dispute, but just a few remarks:

(1) My interest in the Frankfurt School: like other incarnations of
"Western Marxism", the F-School is important because it absorbs Hegel and
the entire stream of European philosophical and high-cultural
self-consciousness in the process of using this heritage to understand the
development and complexities of bourgeois society from a left perspective.
At some point one needs this sort of expertise.  Now what one uses
specifically is another question, which I will have to ponder some more
before answering.  The odd thing about our argument here from the point L.
Spencer brought up the question of Bloch and Adorno on dance/jazz is that
it brings out what does _not_ really impress me about the F-ers:
psychoanalysis, culture industry, aesthetics of negativity, instrumental
reason, view of the Enlightenment, etc.  All this seems to me to be just
those aspects of the F-S that most serve Alienation, Inc., academic wanking
as a port in the storm.  Except for my current reading of Kracauer, the
only one of these folks I've been involved with in the past couple of years
is Adorno: he's the greatest genius of them all, for my money.  I'm
interested in his reading of Hegel, negative dialectics, his send-ups of
Spengler and Heidegger.  I need to read his book on Kierkegaard.  Adorno
gives me techniques I can use.

(2) Being hip to cool subcultures is irrelevant.

(3) Not only do I detest Spike Lee's shitty movie MALCOLM X, I despise
Spike Lee in toto.  He's a petty hustler and charlatan and nothing more.
His soul is in his sneaker commercials.  Denzel is OK.  Furthermore, I do
not participate in the cult of the real Malcolm X, who was pretty small
potatoes as a political thinker.  He stumbled onto the scene and filled a
vacuum left by McCarthyism, and had he lived longer he undoubtedly would
have amounted to something, something much more substantive than the
militant knuckleheads who followed in his wake.  Richard Wright sussed out
the black lumpenproletariat and everything after is just a footnote.

(4) I never claimed to be an organic intellectual.  I think the whole
notion is misapplied.  In Italy the concept referred to the social function
of a layer of educated people.  Here it is taken as some obligation or
ideal, because this country is full of alienated individuals looking for
someplace to belong; they are looking for a totally organic experience.
Our organic intellectuals are Siskel and Ebert--ooops the fat boy is
dead--and Oprah's self-help gurus.  Don't you think this is funny?

(5) I do value education and success, but I do not conceive of it as the
upper middle class does, nor does anyone I know.  I was made acutely
conscious of the difference two days ago.  I had to take someone to an
orientation, and I had to sit outside and wait for two hours.  So I sat on
a park bench, trying to read this dynamite Marxist book on Hegel's
class-cultural background, but these obnoxious white women from the burbs,
waiting for their spawn to return, drove me to distraction with their
insufferable conversation.  This one dweebish bourgeois blonde was talking
to another vapid middle-class blonde mother.  She went on and on about how
ambitious she and her husband are, how much sacrifice should a woman make
on the family income to spend more time at home with the kids (what, no
second car, no pool this year?), about her kids in private school, about
how you have to wear certain shoes or you couldn't work in her big-shot law
firm.  She spoke impeccable, top-notch standard English, but it was very
bureaucratic and business-like, and she yakked and yakked with consummate
complacency about her entire life as an exercise in corporate management,
under the assumption that there is nothing at all wrong with the world just
as it is.  I wanted to wring this bitch's neck, pardon my French.  My class
resentment was steaming out my ears.

The people I know in the dregs of the lower middle class, mostly black,
also have their ambitions, for their kids more for themselves.  But it's
about achievement, not corporate America, it's about trying to learn some
top-level intellectual skills to become something and make a living but not
just to get rich, and it's about creativity and respect for human
possibilities, not about social climbing and how many cars we can afford.
This was not only so when I was growing up, it's so now.  We all know how
tough the world is and how it ain't structured for our benefit, so our
values have a broader basis; we strive to do the best according to _their_
standards, while ours are in fact much higher.  And we have to co-exist,
survive, and compete in this treacherous world with these insipid
suburbanite white people: it makes my blood boil!

Enough already about me.  Let's move on, please.

At 10:06 PM 6/4/99 -0700, Matthew Levy wrote:
>.......