INTELLECTUALS, reason & al.

[Ralph Dumain]

Kenneth Mackendrick seems bent on self-parody:

>As always your thoughts are provocative... but really - "this
crap

>about critical theory being male, or was it white and male, this

> is all p.c. foolishness..." and your disregard for possible

>theological strains in critical theory really demonstrate

>something insidious.  Despite your earlier disdain for Richard

>Rorty you seem fairly hell bent on repeating his mistakes: You

>wrote - "When you have something to accomplish 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."  Come on.
Have

> we learned nothing from Horkheimer's critique of pragmatism?
The

>critique of ideology is perhaps THE foremost
theoretical-practical

>tasks before us!!!

Do you realize that this reads very tongue-in-cheek?  Or, in this
cynical age, is it still possible that the hippest intellectuals
could still have irony-poor blood?  Something tells me you are
dead serious.  So I will proceed upon that assumption.

The hysteria and presumption that informs these passages are
priceless.  But what stands out is the inattention to the text
that marks all intellectuals who are only used to arguing with
people just like themselves.  Particularly priceless is imputing
to me entirely extraneous and unsupported affiliations and
concerns: Rorty, Horkheimer, pragmatism ....  I find myself
tragically amused by this subterfuge, but I think I am more
impressed by the tragedy than the amusement.  For people in the
academic world commonly make certain faulty assumptions about me
as an extra-academic.  Because I express myself in a common and
vulgar manner, they underestimate my dedication to intellectual
sophistication.  Because I hate academia, they must assume that I
oppose the ivory tower in the name of political activism.  Hence
your remarks about pragmatism.  Now I challenge you to examine the
archives of all the spoons lists and any other list and produce
one statement of mine of this sort.  Alternatively, you could take
my word for it that I have never made any such statement.  On the
contrary, I have always been suspicious of such statements, and am
amused to find that they are customarily the products of academics
with an uneasy conscience.

I experienced a poignant exemplification of this situation last
night, when I was part of  a  seminar on postcolonial theory
attended also by Edward Said, in which there was much bickering
over these issues, and Said himself denounced Homi Bhabha's
obscurantism on political grounds.  I sat back silently and
witnessed the spectacle, gulping down my pizza, confident that
nobody wanted to hear what I had to say.

So I think you would find it surprising that I more or less agree
with Adorno's statement recently quoted if not with Adorno's
anti-politics:

>Repressive intolerance toward a thought not immediately
accompanied by

>instructions for action is founded in fear. Thought,
enlightenment

>conscious of itself, threatens to disenchant pseudo-reality
within which

>activism moves. This activism is tolerated only because it is
viewed as

>pseudo-activity. Only thinking could offer an escape. It is the

>responsibility of thought not to accept the situation as finite.
If there

>is any chance of changing the situation, it is only through
undiminished

>insight.

Although a grouchy old fart, Adorno could say this because he had
witnessed the abandonment of reason in Weimar, not by ordinary
people, but by the INTELLECTUALS.  That is evident from Adorno's
comments on Spengler.

This curious dualism,  in which the intellectuals themselves
vacillate between imminent and political critiques of obscurantist
theories, without being able to properly link the two in a
concrete fashion, is symptomatic of something more profound than
they.  For them the universal is either autonomous theory or
political activism, and so they vacillate between these two
principles, unable to link the dead-ends of their theories to the
division of  labor within a particular configuration of late
capitalism.

Sigh.