Why is that?

[Ralph Dumain]

At 02:21 PM 8/7/97 +0200, david wachtfogel wrote:
>I've asked myself the same question. It seems to me to have something to
>do with the distinct disciplines the different contributors to this list
>come from. You have your philosophers, your radical economists, your
>culture students and some people from the real world (e.g. Ralph).
>Now when these different people discuss a specific subject, say Hip Hop,
>they tend to analyze it in extremely different terms.....

>The problem then is that the different contributors speak in different
>terms, different languages. Interdisciplinary dialogue is bound to turn
>into mutual  mud-slinging, for lack of understanding. As the truism goes,
>we attack what we don't understand.

David, I appreciate your sincerity, and that is why I am going to repeat
part of my latest response to Kellner:

>Multipersectivist approach?  Formalist valorization?  Disciplinary 
>perspectives?  I did read this essay by Adorno and enjoyed it in spite of
my >limited background in these matters.  This is not the kind of stuff that
you or >your friends have been writing here lately.  "Disciplinarity" and even
> "interdisciplinary" perspectives is the crux of the problem:
specialization >and the separation of thought from life.  I didn't say
political action,
> because I find that obsession (esp. on the part of intellectuals) a relatively
> trivial one.  People hate "politics"; they want their lives to change.
>There is a difference between substance -- the real thing -- and the
evasion of >same.  I have these discussions with uneducated people who know
what I am
> talking about because they are starving to death for substance in their daily
> lives, in their personal relationships, their entertainment, all the stimuli
> to which they are subjected.  They are dying for what you supposedly have to
> offer as an educated man.  Now why is it that I can have a substantive 
>discussion with them and not with you?  This is precisely what I have been
> arguing about over the last three months.

The language I speak in so-called real life is even different from the
languages far less-educated people in real life speak, not to mention
different from the preoccupations of the academy, which is yet another part
of "real life" as I'm sure someone is going to admonish me.  That difference
cannot be wished away by some stroke of fantasy, not even Jim Jaszewski's
party work can wish it way.  As a person who believes in the life of the
mind, suppose you had to answer the question every day: why does that stuff
matter to you, why should I care?  Might this not focus your attention
somewhat?  There is nothing like the creative tension that comes from making
ideas answer to life and vice versa.  Ideas become no less important, in
fact they can be more vigorously fought for, but "disciplinarity" begins to
fade as a big deal.  "Disciplinarity" is just another banal set of social
relations, neither more nor less banal than getting involved in pro
basketball or playing golf at the country club.  What have intellectuals
come to when they have been so thoroughly bureaucratized that they cannot
even see themselves or their knowledge apart from the specific social
relations in which they happen to be embedded, which was supposed to be the
intellectual's defining ability in the first place?  I'll tell you why the
pseudo-radical academics are so enamored with the notion of "context"; they
themselves have no more substance than the unspeakably trivial context in
which they live, move, and have their being.