INTELLECTUALS & THE DIVISION OF LABOR--SARTRE ET AL

[malgosia askanas]

Ralph, I think that you can probably convince me, for one, by means
of organized, rational thought, but first I would have to understand
what it is that you're trying to convince me of.  This, too, I think,
is part of the "rational thought" package. 

Do you want to convince me that all pomo writing is shit?  Well, that would 
be a harder task than either of us wants to undertake.  First, we would
have to agree on what is "pomo".  Then we would both have to read and think
about enough of it to be able to judge if it is all shit.  In the process 
of this, we might have to articulate how much allness we are referring to 
when we say "all".  Neither of us wants to do any of this; I can safely say
that we both agree this is not a project worthy of our time. 

Do you want to convince me that "the bored bourgeois intellectual
seeks to dissolve himself because he can't stand himself any longer"?
Well, if so, give it a try.  In my experience, "the" bourgeois intellectual
-- and I take this to mean a person who makes a living from an activity
involving thinking, teaching and writing -- is in exactly the same soup
as any other white collar worker under capitalism.  He's alienated from
his labor, threatened by the pressures of the job market, shaped into
catatonia by the contradictions and hypocrisies of the demands that
are placed on him by the system within which he has to function. 
He is "bored" in the same way that all workers are "bored" -- he
has a job which, the rhetoric of its job descriptions notwithstanding,
forces him to be a functionary of the establishment whose employee he
is.  I am not talking here about people like Foucault or Derrida, but
then, when push comes to shove in this discussion, neither are you.  You are 
talking about what you refer to as the American "hacademia", and so am I.
I don't know whether the bourgeois intellectual "masturbates fantasizing 
about connecting with "context"".  We all long to connect with "context",
because, in our diverse ways, we are all deprived of it in this system.  
Whether or not intellectuals masturbate while doing so would have to be
a subject of an extensive sociological poll. 

Yes, I agree that the struggling billions desperately seek to acquire 
the "bourgeois" self they never had the opportunity to squander.  So is the
role of the intellectual in academia to help people acquire this bourgeois 
self?  In some academic institutions this is a valid question, because
they cater (at least in their charter) to some small subset of these
struggling billions.  But the academics who work in these institutions
are, as you're probably well aware, faced with crippling contradictions.
What they are really supposed to do is churn out people who can pass
a set of half-baked standardized exams and thus meet the quota that will
ensure continued funding for the institution.  To insist on imparting 
to students those aspects of bourgeois rationality which you (and I would 
agree) regard as necessary equipment for "finding oneself" in the world 
requires a heroic combination of cunning, will, courage and determination 
which it is ridiculous to demand of people just by virtue of their being
in the labor category of "intellectuals".  If you demand this, you are
misticizing the denotation "intellectual" along the same lines as the people
you call "intellectual shits". 

If you want to convince me that a change is needed, you won't have to do
any convincing.  If you want to discuss by what means American intellectuals 
can start effecting this change -- what is to be done -- I will 
enthusiastically join you.  But if your diagnosis of the source of the
problem is that people read Rorty or Stanley Fish, then I think you're
putting the cart before of the horse.  Despair and cynicism do not
come from reading "pomo"; it is rather that "pomo" grows out of a despair
and cynicism whose causes are elsewhere.  This is not to say that people
_should_ read Rorty or Fish, rather than, say, Lucacs.  Or Mehring.


-m