INTELLECTUALS & THE DIVISION OF LABOR--SARTRE ET AL

[Ralph Dumain]

Thanks, Ken, for not taking my diatribe as a personal attack.  The "buddy"
bit refers to you, the reader out there, who dares to contradict me.  I felt
it necessary to make as forceful a statement as possible.  No time to pull
punches.

There remain questions of motivations, of the appeal of certain celebrated
thinkers.  And how these well-meaning left-liberals are preparing the way
for fascism.  Or how postmdoernism relates to identity politics and Bill
Clinton.  I can see I have too many tales to tell, too little time.

Malgosia's complaint reminds me of the ideological efficacy of the
fragmented, empiricist environment that shapes the (American) character,
even of people who didn't grow up with it.  Her comments remind me of an
exasperating conversation I had with my pal Hans Despain, sitting in a cafe
in the East Village, giving him the most relentless intellectual
pistol-whipping he ever had.  But how can you deny the contributions of
Foucault, Ralph?  Who else thought to write a book like _Discipline and
Punish_?  You just want to reject these people wholesale without recognizing
their contributions.  My reply: Their contributions are not my concern,
Hans.  The bits-and-pieces approach to knowledge, this tidbit here, that
morsel there, ignores the larger picture: when a person is _systematically_
wrong, when a person _systematically_ falsifies reality and harms the human
mind, that is the question.  You can digest all you can use of whatever
animal you kill, but _you're_ the one who's got to do the killing and
eating, not the other way round.

So where's the harm?  Where do I begin, and where do I stop and get back to
my real work?  Two areas of personal experience come to mind: my contact
with young grad students, and the larger cultural environment where
nationalism and irrationalism have gathered alarming momentum.  

I thank my lucky stars I am not part of hackademia, for nothing can grow in
that soil.  I have contacts with students all over the world, thanks to
e-mail, and sometimes personal contact, and I find that I, without any
credentials whatever, have become an advisor to many bright people who are
highly dissatisfied with their institutions-- and some go to some very elite
schools-- and are hungry for real, non-obscurantist, intellectual exchange
which they can't get there, but which they can only get from me.  I am
continually shocked at this.  Some students don't get any support at all
from their mentors and advisors for their projects, and can't find anyone
but me able to help them in what they are doing. So I learn vicariously how
corrupt academia is and how difficult it is for smart people to thrive in
the current environment.

Then I come across another grouping of students, also bright, but so
intimidated and brainwashed by their milieu, their own development becomes
crippled.  They are forced to write in stilted, jargon-ridden, unnecessarily
unattractive prose. They are confronted with a selective set of people they
are expected to cite and paradigms and concerns that are supposed to inform
their work.  They think they are sophisticated because they mouth off about
race and gender for their superiors, though, when you take a close look at
their own relations with the opposite sex, you will discover they are not
what they pretend to be on paper.  Of course they may throw in class to
cover their ass, but they have no grasp of Marxist theory or how to
integrate their other concerns into it.  And the young, unlike my
generation, have been brought up to hear "Enlightenment" as a dirty word.
You would never know that Enlightenment means mental freedom and
emancipation, and not racism and sexism.  This is most damaging, because
here is where the way is paved for reaction.

Segueing now to larger societal concerns, I think of the connection between
irrationalism and the rise of nationalism.  Of course there are all sorts of
nationalisms, including feminist and queer nationalisms, which are as
bourgeois as the rest, when you come down to it.  But my primary concern is
black nationalism, which does the most harm in my immediate social
environment.  You cannot believe how bad the "organic" intellectual
environment is in this red and black neck of the woods.  (And then there is
the issue of how this is abetted by white leftist enablers, e.g. the
Pacifica radio crowd.)  But, you protest, isn't this sort of nationalism
essentialist and metaphysical, exactly the opposite of what the pomos are
all about?  I answer: not so.  You white leftist assholes pave the way for
these thugs, not only with your reprehensible double standards, but
primarily by your assault on reason, universalism, progress and other
indispensable humane values.  Your attack on the Enlightenment, and the
fragmented world view you espouse, give power to these gangsters.

What!--you protest.  Are you nuts?  Do you think Louis Farrakhan reads
Jacques-Strap Derriduh?  I doubt it, but the profs do, including those
two-faced operators who have one foot in the pomo white left and one in the
nationalist camp.  I think of a current, vicious (on my part, natch) debate
I'm having with one of these mediocre black intellectuals by the name of
Lucius Outlaw, who happens to be a member of the Radical Philosophy
Association, by the way.  This character opposes on the one hand
essentialism and race-baiting while on the other, he argues for ethnic
groups and races as natural-social kinds and defends the likes of
Afrocentric crackpots like Molefi Asante and Frances Cress Welsing and the
legacy of Negritude.  Of course the white left lets him get away with this,
because for them everything black is revolutionary, Outlaw's last steaming
turd included.  Central to his intellectual strategy is the attack on the
Enlightenment, and support from such thinkers as Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty.

Then we could move on to Cornel West, another incompetent gasbag
indoctrinated by Rorty, whose philosophy is an incoherent slop of diverse
ingredients. Cornel found that DSA loved his preaching, which must have been
something new for them; and then he decided to do a duet with an even more
inflated gasbag, Michael Lerner; then he let his token Jewish friend down by
shilling for Farrakhan when the Million Man March came around.
Postmodernism paving the way for fascism.

I'm the consummate artist of vitriol, but words cannot do justice to the
contempt I actually feel.  I hope you learn something from this, and if you
don't, feel free to kiss my big smelly ass on the way out.