Re: interdisciplinarity

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

At 05:45 PM 6/5/99 PDT, George Petros wrote:
>I just want to express my appreciation for Matt and Ralph.  I'm
>learning and enjoying from their dialogue.

Thanks, George.  I'm nonetheless feeling an obligation to wrap things up or
finding a way to continue this sort of discussion elsewhere, or of tying
all of this back into a consideraton of the F-School, which is what we are
here for.

The movie interpretations are examples of what I mean by the gap between
general principles and specifc examples from the empirical world.  Whspe
interpretations are more convincing is a secondary issue; the real point is
that one should be wary of mechanical applications of gneral principles to
one's empirical material.  I don't know what other word to use, but I'm
very "inductive" when I look at stuff.  I don't want to assume certain
things in advance; I'm looking for evidence for each supposition.  Of
course no one is really inductive at the end of the day, but trying to have
some respect for what is happening concretely is important.  And it's also
vital in constructing a convincing explanation.  If you started out by
positing the Oedipus Complex or something, I wouldn't believe you.  Also,
if you try to do film criticism with kids, they have to be able to
experience what you are trying to get them to see.  And when they start to
using their brains, they're a lot smarter than adults.  The first step, for
Americans, is fighting the awesome power of the hi-tech spectacle and
getting people to understand what it is doing and why they are voluntarily
submitting themselves to it.

The lessons regarding music I suppose are painfully obvious by now.  I was
sorely tempted to output some more choice words about a person who could
love dub reggae while hating Beethoven and jazz, but I held myself back.
Perhaps one should stop torturing a helpless insect, and others have seen
through this thinking as well.  But it provides one reason why people
should be highly suspicious of people who embrace the Franks.  It's too bad
you have all not been privy to the private discussions on the nuts and
bolts of music taking place between Jukka and myself, which would
illustrate my arguments very well.  But you see the F-School is 99.99%
irrelevant to our dialogue, and that's why I hesitated here to get involved
in lengthy treatments of different forms and genres.

I'm in such a good mood today because last night I attended one of the
great memorable concerts of my life: David Murray and his Big Band Play the
Obscure Works of Ellington and Strayhorn.  It was more than a big band with
Murray's brass, there was an enormous string section added, which included
the beautiful daughters of Max Roach and Reggie Workman.  These people blew
my dog!  I've heard some good music in the past year, but I don't think
I've experienced a thrill like this since last June's commemoration (37
years to the day from the original date) of Coltrane's Africa/Brass
sessions.  There was so much real music in this concert I don't think I
could remember or describe it all.  It would take me another 15 minutes
just to describe the highlights of the first piece, "African Flower".
There just ain't nothing like the real thing.

I don't think I did justice to explicating my satirical remarks on
interdisciplinarity.  It's not a big issue, just that academic compounds
the problems it creates in the first place and creates an illusion that
something different is going to happen.  I presume you as well as I receive
all the announcements of interdisciplinary conferences forwarded by the
sponsors of this list.  Don't you find them all as stupid as I do?  And
yesterday I took a brief look at the latest edition of the online
POSTMODERN CULTURE just to check out one book review, and started gagging.
Don't you think all literature departments and cultural studies programs
should be shut down and all grad students shipped out to do hard labor on
chain gangs?  Problematize this!

Finally, in contrasting the autodidact to the intellectual bureaucrat, I
want to point out how un-naive I am about these matters.  (I wish Juan
Inigo from the old Marxism lists were here now.)  There is nothing romantic
about the situation of the autodidact; the intellectual graveyard is strewn
with the corpses of embittered crackpots.  I have a larger project
happening, something no one else has done.  The part that concerns this
discussion has to do with the meeting place of the view from above and the
view from below or sideways or somewhere in the middle.  The place you are
that allows you to learn what you know is also your prison, if you are not
careful.  I need to bring the F-stuff down to earth in the process of
raising what is down-to-earth up.

One urgent problem, which is also a matter of popular education, is
connecting the mind-set that accrues from the standpoint of everyday life
to a larger framework that explains how people came to occupy their
"subjective sense-certainty" which generally only gives them a grab-bag of
unconnected thoughts about the forces that are affecting them.  Huh?  OK,
here's an example.  A couple weeks ago I sat around a table klatching with,
well, mostly listening to  some not-young, very bright black men of my
acquaintance grousing for hours about all the things that are against them.
 I think I must have heard every conspiracy theory in the book, as well as
all kinds of half-baked causal accounts for what goes on in the world, not
to mention concerns which I find completely trivial--were the ancient
Egyptians black?--you know the story.  I get very depressed when subjected
to this kind of talk, and then I also think of how I could deal with this
without unduly offending anybody.  These are sophisticated people who are
already on to what the capitalist system is about, but then there's also
this half-baked gibberish clogging up their brains.  It's very sad.  So
somebody finally asked me: "So what do you think about all this, Ralph?"  I
answered noncommitally, "You covered an awful lot of topics."

So there needs to be a way of connecting the bird's-eye view, minus
jargon-ridden pontification (deconstructing the essentializing and
naturalizing whatchumathingie), with what people are experiencing, in a way
that their subjective experience makes more sense to themselves within a
larger framework than the everyday banale palaver would make possible.