Why is that?

[Ralph Dumain]

At 10:42 PM 8/6/97 -0500, kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu wrote:
>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.

You only discredit yourself with such demagogy, Doug.  The things that you
describe go on in Marxism lists all the time, and the phenomenon is easy to
spot, and the lasting effects on the possibility of serious discussion
become all too evident.  But you can't seriously suggest that anything of
the sort is happening here.  Or do you think you can enjoy your privileged
sinecure without being held accountable?  There is nobody on this list in
recent memory that has intervened in any discussion with any semblance of
the tactics you cite of the LaRouchies. The only person who even came close
was Jim Jaszewski, but he in fact limited himself to two or three posts,
which professional disrupters do not, and he intervened mainly to support my
contention that you academics are indeed guilty of not knowing how to
listen.  Even his tiresome rhetoric about doing party work did not reduce
his intervention to intellectual idiocy, as he made some substantive points
about the nature of intellectual work and its relationship to the mental
lives of real people.  So just who are these disrupters?  Jim?  Scott?  Me?
You make yourself look pretty bad and confirm Jim's worst suspicions about
the elitism of supposedly left academics.  Especially when you have to
resort to slander.  What's your problem?   Guilty conscience?

Here's another gem:

>Back to my point: BUT although everyone is stuck in their own subject
>position and in some cases this involves their academic discipline I think
>that the whole thrust of the FS was to transcend disciplines for a
>transdisciplinary approach (see my book CRITICAL THEORY, MARXISM and
>MODERNITY for an elaboration on this point). This is why I suggested that
>discussing something like jazz or hip hop requires a multiperspectivist
>approach and not just a one-sided formalist valorization, or "real life"
>trashing or whatever. Check out Adorno's "Lyric Poetry and Society" for an
>engagement of German lyric poetry on many levels. Ergo, we should in the
>spirit of the FS overcome one-sided disciplinary perspectives or limited
>points of view to more broadly contextualize and analyze phenomena....

Did the FS people write like this?  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.