Charles Brown wrote:
> >>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 10/20/99 02:36AM >>>
> Chaz,
>
> i didn't say everyone had to read kant. i did say that everyone should be
> encouraged to read as widely as possible. that is, i wouldn't exclude
> anyone you cited. and no, i wouldn't settle for anyone else's reading of
> kant or marx or derrida or weber or doug or chaz or jim -
Statements such as this are not in good faith. Not even John Quincy Adams or Northrop Frye (or Karl Marx) read everything they needed to read. There is an old story about Herbert Spencer. He was at one of those famous "Country Weekends" at some estate in England and got into a billiards game with a young man who beat him soundly. "Young man," he said, a certain amount of skill adds to the pleasure of the game, but the degree of skill you exhibit argues a misspent youth." There is no human activity, including reading, that does not have to honor, at some point, the principle that if it's not worth doing badly it's not worth doing.
This is true for bourgeois intellectuals and scholars. How much more must it be true for those who attack the idea of a Party that does the thinking for workers. Such a position must among other things work out a very circumscribed reading list that can be mastered by people who have only an hour or two a week to read -- and who read slowly to boot.
We had a collective here in the '70s in which several of the people had only a high-school education. The more complex works we studied had to be put on tape so they could listen to them. How were they to read Kant if Kant (or Plato or most of Marx or X or Y or Z) is so crucial. And if they were not to read Kant, and if those who were helping them read Marx by putting him on audio tape, didn't have the time to read Kant and put *him* on tape, of what use is Kant except to a principled centralist politcs within which there can indeed be a sensible division of intellectual labor?
"Reading as widely as possible" is a cop-out, a really misleading, even deliberately obscurantist, tautology. Of course everyone should do almost everything "as widely as possible." But when our Osco's clerk who dropped out of college after one semester sits down for the two hours a week reading time she can manage, how is she to choose from all those books which she hasn't read.
She is not supposed to let others do her reading for her? But is it any different to let others *choose* her reading for her? And if she doesn't depend on others, how is she to choose a book?
Carrol
P.S. "Osco's clerk" is not at random. It was the job of one of the people I made audio tapes for.