INTELLECTUALS, reason & al.

[Ralph Dumain]

Since it appears my message has gotten across, I need not indulge
in further sanctimonious tirades, esp. given the severe
restrictions on my time that have prevailed this past week.  Had I
more time to dispose in diagnosing what I don't like, instead of
doing something productive, I would have quoted some paragraphs in
the myth/Urizen threads, esp. posts using the word "theology",
that had degenerated into nonsense, or if not strictly nonsesne,
into meanings so heavily coded that they could only appeal to
insiderist concerns.  As I indicated in my last Adorno post, I am
capable of appreciating the need for abstruse discussions and
technical terminology.  I don't think I am completely naive, nor
do I insist on remaining within the boundaries of plain-folks
common-sense.  But some of this discussion has become silly and
whiny.  For example, this crap about critical theory being male,
or was it white and male, this is all p.c. foolishness.  Most of
the people I know who are the hottest to assimilate the heritage
of critical theory are from the African diaspora.  They're not
whining about white males, so why should you?  When you have
something to acomplish and know where you are going, you're not
afraid to take a stand or worry about the inevitable
incompleteness of human understanding as an excuse for shying away
from bold declarative statements.

On another note, I finally located an article completely by
accident that hits the spot in addressing my chronically
unanswered questions on Gramsci and intellectuals, whom I have not
had time to study in detail.  The article is:

Sassoon, Anne Showstack.  "The People, Intellectuals and
Specialised Knowledge", BOUNDARY 2, vol. 14, no. 3, spring 1986,
pp. 137-168.

This article gave me a newfound respect for Gramsci, and has
finally given me a reason to want to study him.  In spite of his
posthumous celebrity in these parts of late, I was always highly
suspicious of people's concern with him here, because I always
suspected that a concern with being an "organic intellectual" in
American conditions was a load of ballocks.  But now I see that
Gramsci was profoundly engaged with the real problems of technical
specialization and the division of labor, and his concerns do not
devolve to typically American moralistic preoccupations with how
to overcome being a lonely individual crying in the wilderness
looking for a power base or somebody's ass to kiss.