INTELLECTUALS, reason & al.

[Ralph Dumain]

To D. Scully:

Most of my remarks do not directly address Adorno's work.  I cited
somebody else's citation of Adorno as a way of illustrating that I
am not a pragmatist simpleton.  Now you are repeating
Mackendrick's typically academic flaw: the incapacity to listen,
to substitute prefab responses to points not being made.  I don't
think things were ever this bad.  What is wrong with you people?

>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?

Deep involvement?  No, there is more to getting paid or not.  The
issue is the relationship to the universe of knowledge itself, to
the social networks in which intellectual acculturation and
communication take place.  To whom do you feel you are you
accountable?  Whom must you cite and whom can you get away with
ignoring, even if your work suffers thereby?  It is easy to be a
footnote-whore, but much more difficult to be an informed person.
An example: to be a Chaucer scholar of course you must cite other
Chaucer scholars, but when you begin to cite Foucault, Gramsci,
Derrida, Freud, or Einstein, you have selectively entered a larger
world, but what are the criteria of relevance?  I am concerned
about the brainwashing of the younger generation who are being
taught that Enlightenment is a dirty word, who hate logic and
science.  I find much of the intellectual behavior among
humanities-trained people, including several people on this list,
to be infantile in the extreme.

>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 -

You may have hit on something here, though I am confused by your
formulation.  I don't think people are interested in paying
anybody to think for them or to think themselves.  I do think that
the orientation to knowledge ought to be not only a specific
scholarly historical consciousness of how ideas originally
involved in their context of origin, which is certainly important,
but the development of the ability to remove ideas from their
original context and make them productive in other contexts that
matter to the world in which one finds oneself.  As a child I was
influenced by enlightenment ideas -thank goodness! -- without
knowing squat about the actual historical Enlightenment, and it's
a good thing too!

>in whatever sphere one happens to be making a living in?

Yes, one should use ideas to apply to whatever sphere one is in.
This is not to negate the need for specialists, but it is one
thing to regurgitate the heritage of the past, certainly a
necessary occupation given the inability of any one person to
master all of knowledge; it is another thing to think creatively.

>Do you think that most students are really no more than
>self-indulgent "pomos" (is "pomophobia" yet a coined word?),

No.  I think that students are insecure and intimidated and have
lost confidence in their ability to think independently.  I never
felt this way, but I think the younger generation is in a terrible
bind.  They have no confidence in anything, least of all
themselves, and the logic of incoherence inculcated by their
elders only makes then more supine.

>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?

No, I think that grad school in the humanities is the repository
of alienated intellectual life, of people who are smart enough to
want to do that kind of work instead of the usual deadening
routine jobs but who themselves are confronted with a declining
economy and desperation not only in society at large but in their
own careers, so they live in a commodified world of ideas, unable
to make themselves whole, just like the rest of society.

>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 belligerent comments I
keep
> coming across here might make sense to me.

How have I been unclear?  I'm really amazed.  The enemy to be
fought is much larger than the intellectual world; we all know
what it is.  The task for workers in the knowledge industry-an
impossible task-is to overcome the increasingly extreme alienated
and divided world of impotent sophistication among the
intellectuals combined with stupefaction and mental regression of
the rest of society being put out to pasture in a high-tech world
of declining opportunity.  The enemy is not academia but the
institutionalized division of labor which has crippled all
segments of society.  This cannot be accomplished without a
political upheaval, but it must be done nonetheless.  For
intellectuals, the division of labor and the social segregations
of everyday life must be the point of analytical departure, not
"political activism" (demonstrating, getting arrested in front of
embassies, signing petitions, writing articles about gangsta rap,
and other tourist activities).  The universal is the development
of human beings, not social protest.