Before the New Year I wrote
"Such things as 'facts' are instantaneously suspect to sociologists who proceed to bore us rigid with the schoolboy profundity that people tend to disagree over the facts (a discovery that they think is new)."
"Before you know where you are the very word 'facts' is spat out with a precocious ironic sneer, as if one only had to say the word to ridicule the poor naive who actually believes that there might be some things on which we could agree."
I worried that I might be making it all up, but then I read this from Daniel.
In message <3.0.3.32.19990104071640.0069684c at students.uiuc.edu>, Daniel F. Vukovich <vukovich at students.uiuc.edu> writes
>Some final intellectual mumbo-jumbo for you:
>
>You are trapped in a philosophy of consciousness and in a strict
>subject/object split, imho. I cannot translate that for you. But your
>assumption seems to be that there exists this thing -- the real Malcom X,
>the real NOI, the proletariat-of-color, the IdealGroup, whatever -- around
>which we simply need to become conscious. This real History around which
>first we, and then "They" need to become conscious. And then, things will
>fall into place. Good luck.
Fair enough to say that consciousness is also part of reality, and a determining part at that, but do you really mean to say that there was no 'real' Malcolm X? or that the Nation of Islam is an effect of our discourse?
This debate begins to take on the cast of the quest for the Historical Jesus.
Would it be too much to suggest that Malcolm X did some good things and some less so? Or that, given the hand he was dealt he did some remarkable things, but that his wasn't necessarily the last word? Or do we have to go headlong into the proposition that 'each age creates its own Malcolm X'? -- Jim heartfield