Why is that?

[kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

Ken writes:I've been looking over the last 200 or so posts 
and have found a disturbing trend...

Each time someone introduces a concrete issue - 
whether hip-hop, banking, advertising, works of art, 
pensions, or the automotive industry - a series of posts 
dump all over it - some of the responses include 
identifying the concrete issues as elitist, meaningless, 
useless, unimportant, outmoded, missing the point, 
wrong, misunderstood, universalist, utopian, triffle, 
abstact, puzzling, escapist, undialectical, positivist, 
pseudo-issues, lumpen, unreasonable, irrational, 
ambiguous, indeterminate, regressive, ideological, 
false forms of consciousness, ignorant, exclusive, 
bullshit, masterbatory, secondary, of little concern, 
misguided, uninformed, ironic, and laughable... just to 
name a few.

Hmm.... In 1975, Mark Poster, Bob D'Amico and I did a workshop on the
Frankfurt school at the infamous Schizoculture conf at Columbia Univ where
sessions with Foucault, Laing, etc were interrupted with LaRouchites
accusing them of being CIA agents, elitist academics diverting attention
from real issues, etc. To our surprise, these same provocateurs came to
disrupt our modest FS workshop, saying that fascism was coming, economic
collapse, etc and why were we engaging in intellectual masturbation, etc.
After the quite disrupted workshop we were walking toward the West End Bar
and saw the group of disrupters who were being paid with a big wad of
bills, they saw us and went off laughing with their money.

Now it would be uncivil to accuse anyone of being a paid provocateur
disrupting our modest list, but in fact the disruptions of the sort that
Ken notes serve as the functional equivalence to the unholy sheninagans of
the agent provocateur....

SO I would urge us all NOT TO PAY ANY ATTENTION to the personal attacks,
disruption of intelligent discussion, and attempt to divert us from
discuss of important issues. Obviously, it is useless to beg uncivil
people to be civil but intelligent people do not have to respond or be
diverted. So LET'S IGNORE THE ATTEMPTS AT DISRUPTION and go on with our
dialogues and discussions.

Douglas Kellner, Dept of Philosophy, Univ of Texas, Austin, TX 78712
kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu  fax: 512 471-4806
Web sites: Postmodern theory= http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~kellner/pm/pm.html
Critical theory= http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/