INTELLECTUALS, reason & al.

[Dave and Deb Scully]

Ralph Dumain wrote:

> 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.

Adorno would easily agree that the demise of intellectual resistance at
the close of Weimar would be the result of such gravitation, but I have
the impression that his point had more to do with both the ubiquity of
this kind of rationality throughout a society based in identitarian
commodity thinking (division of labour and all) where inner logics end
by destroying themselves, cancelling themselves out. Is your point that
it is intellectuals that find themselves in a particularly onerous
position in such a society, or that this just happened to be what Adorno
claimed because of the perspective of his job?
   My other question, relatedly, is, do you define yourself as a
non-academic just because you're not getting paid for it, your deep
involvement in its language notwithstanding? In other words, do the
problems derive from the fact that people feel they should pay
intellectuals to think their thoughts through for them, rather than
employing the concepts of critical theory - found everywhere, and in so
many different forms, whether or not people might have even heard of the
country Germany and the fact that it had an intellectual heritage - in
whatever sphere one happens to be making a living in? Do you think that
most students are really no more than self-indulgent "pomos" (is
"pomophobia" yet a coined word?), and that graduate school, with the
institutions that support it, is little more than (as a comic I heard
recently put it) a snooze button on the alarm clock of life?
   I know you're forever trying to clarify it for us, but if you could,
could you put your finger on what it is that you really think is the
enemy to be fought? Then maybe all those beligerent comments I keep
coming across here might make sense to me.

D.

The problem with the internet, I'm coming increasingly to feel, is that
you can't have a beer through it. So much more seems to get accomplished
when groups of motivated people get together with a beer in hand. This
internet could be the next stage down from academia.