INTELLECTUALS & THE DIVISION OF LABOR--SARTRE ET AL

[Ralph Dumain]

So here I am, giving into temptation once again, and throwing a tantrum
instead of sticking to my original purpose, to sit back humbly and gather
information on philosophy and the division of labor.  Will I never learn?

Well, most people seem to be taking it well.  Dennis Redmond is delightful:
thanks for doing some of my work for me.

Ken is keeping up his good humor. The problem with always having to respond
to people on their turf is that you can't get your own work done, and your
agenda ends up getting hijacked to theirs.  Humanistic disciplines, unlike
the natural sciences, do not stick to an objective and commonly agreed-upon
subject matter. The object of study is the productions of culture
themselves, which means that you have a discipline whenever you have a
critical mass of texts to cite, no matter the intrinsic intellectual value
of what is going on.  When you are older and independent-minded, maybe you
can handle all this crap, but the young kids growing up in an age of
decline--this is what their professors are feeding them and telling them is
progressive, and it is quite harmful, for a mind is a terrible thing to
waste, and there is so little depth and substance beneath the superficial
complexity of the discussion.

Most of the pernicious pomo stuff I stumble into comes under the rubric of
postcolonial studies.  Just this afternoon, I glanced through a new book on
... postcolonial African philosophy, and here was everything I hate laid out
before me, including the contributions by Caucasian co-dependents such as,
get this, Sandra Harding.  And what's amazing about this anthology is what a
colossal diversion it is from any intellectual work of any substance.  It is
truly shocking.  And it is not merely an academic matter, for the approach
to thought that is being inculcated in the younger generation has much wider
social repercussions.

Malgosia is so adorable.  Ralph is so mean and sweepingly judgmental, he
gives reason a bad name, so I'll have a swig of D&G for some sanity.  Wish I
could help her out myself, but it doesn't look like I can.  The discreetly
charming naivete of the artistic avant-garde....

Doug, I believe there are already books a-plenty criticizing deconstruction,
and I'm not getting any younger.  If I spend all _my_ time reading this
stuff, how am I going to live long enough to tackle Lukacs' THE DESTRUCTION
OF REASON, which I am determined to read precisely because everybody hates
it and I think Mr. L might have attempted to do what I want to do.  Before
even getting to the current graying generation of ideologists, I want to
step back a bit earlier in time, let's say to a pivotal figure in the
evolution of this mess--Dilthey comes to mind.  Suppose we can trace the
roots of a certain approach to thought in the world and unmask its duplicity
and the harm it causes, and then see that contemporary avatars are stupid
and dishonest not in complex but in very simple and elementary ways.  What
are the social and intellectual types who find their mentors in Nietzsche
and Heidegger?

Perhaps with time you all may get a better idea of why I use words like
criminality.  But I didn't come here initially to be a teacher, but a
student.  Robert Scheetz, I'm willing to give Sartre a fair hearing, though
seeing a documentary film on Simone de Beauvoir's life starring Sartre was
enough unpleasantness to last a lifetime.

Scott Johnson's praise is curiously paradoxical.  On this business of the
emancipatory thrust of postmodernism, I'm surprise nobody tried harder to
get me on this one.  I imagine some people who read and write this stuff
think that is what they are doing.  While I don't harken back nostalgically
to mythical days of a unified class politics as I'm told people like Todd
Gitlin do, I would say that the force of postmodern politics goes no further
than what Bill Clinton was about on his better days when he was bullshitting
the public trying to get elected the first time.  Liberalism has become
purely reactive and defensive: don't feel obligated to feed me and employ me
at a living wage me because I am poor, but please don't discriminate against
me because I am black, female, or want to lick the same sort of genitals I
possess.  I grant that the pursuit of non-class-based equality in a land of
declining opportunity is still social progress, but it is paradoxical, for
it is a very limited pursuit in an age of overall decline and its
concomitant repressiveness.  Intellectual effort experiences analogous
diminishing returns.