Re: interdisciplinarity

[Matthew Levy <mlevy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Ralph Dumain wrote:

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

agreed

 Denzel is OK.

Denzel may have some impressive screen presence, but why is he always
showing up in movies that have such reactionary racial politics?  seems to
me he's let himself get commodified into an archetype.  or maybe its just
that hollywood is so full of this shit and their are so few black actors
of his standing that it seems to have something to do with him ...

  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?
>

i just don't agree that that's the correct way to apply Gramsci's ideas
to our context.  I would say that anyone who reads critical social thought
and tries to apply it to actual life, outside of the academy, is an
organic intellectual.  Siskel and Ebert and the self-help guys are
media-produced hucksters - sure they may be who most people look to for
their "ideas" but this does not make them anything other than this.

> (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!
>
i live in Irvine, California, remember?  I know exactly what you're
talking about.  But most college students I encounter are NOT from this
background ... they are often from the lower middle class or from the
professional (as opposed to management) class, from immigrant
families, etc. and they are not yet assimilated into the management
lifestyle.  instead, they spend their time worrying about whether they are
losing their ethnic identity, whether they are living up to their parents'
dreams, whether they are living up to their "potential" ... in short, they
do have a broader sense of acheivement, or at least say they do.  They
also want to own nice cars, etc. and think that they will get these things
because they have made it into the university of california (which they
believe is a ticket to the fast track).  But all this still amounts to a
hierarchy for them ... everything is about proving and improving one's
place on a ladder of meritocratic dessert.  And the notion of thus having
any connections beyond one's social group, or of being willing to
sacrifice advantage in any sphere in order to build up others, is rare ...
the same goes for the black kids as well as the white ones, the asians,
the latinos ...

i have already admitted my ignorance about Good Will Hunting, but did you
see the movie Gattaca?  A sort of liberal eugenics fantasy about a future
where genetic superiority forms the basis of a caste system which replaces
race and class ... you are meant to identify with the main character, a
sub-standard (i.e. regular guy) who manages to slip into the upper caste,
so that he can get launched in a rocket towards jupiter (his lifelong
dream).  at the end this is supposed to represent a triumph of the human
spirit.  it made me ill.  and basically i think a lot of college kids
these days are being drawn in by movies like that, by the strange climate
of discussion about affirmative action created by ward connerly and pete
wilson, etc. ... so that they come to believe that race and ethnicity are
handicaps to be overcome in the "race" to transcend one's condition ...
this is what education and acheivement represents for them.  it's about
more than just material acquisitiveness; it's about needing to prove one's
moral worth as an individual at the expense of others.  This is why I am
suspicious of *any* narrative of bildung, even if it comes (as you say)
from a wiser time or place than my own.

matt