...the way in which academic discourse[*] tends to appropriate disparate legacies in such a way that, as a collective, it 'become\es' a--*the*--standard-bearer... not just authors, but also movements and moments...
t ----------
This isn't exactly what I meant, but close enough and better. The point was that first of all the academy is predominately the study of, the exercise of, rather than the production of humanities. In other words, the conditions and events of a time and place are the roots of the ideas, movements, moments, and mostly the authors of what is later discover in the course of a humanities education.
An example. Everybody who goes to art school learns art school art, as a style. But at some point that has to change and the way it changes is to look elsewhere--to life, to other art, to something concrete, external and Other. Art school art as a style is an amalgam of traditions turned into a teaching system. The formative dynamics of this style are the demands that it can be taught, that it can be learned. Where as the formative dynamics of any one of the styles that composes it, did not originate with the same idea.
Which gets to the another point via Derrida. The Other. The only way to distinguish form is through its difference with ----. So the Other is a means to measure difference, to engage a dialectic with ---. And the only way to do that is to constantly juxtapose, confront, and map one to the other. The usual way to say this is to use the idea of a figure and ground. But that example requires an extra compositional technique that relies on and expresses dominant and subordinate forms through a scale of magnitudes--metaphors for hierarchies and classes. These techniques did not arrive in the academy. They arrived in the mist of struggle with the stuff of the lived. And it is the absence of such struggles that has killed off the concrete meanings and expressions in the Humanities (IMO, of course). It is forgotten or suppressed that most of the ideas and expressions that compose a humanities canon were taken from, or are examples from a history, artifacts, prescriptions, pulled out of their embedding matrix.
Because academia is an institution, a formal, ritualistic and bureaucratic production system (a friggin organ of government and corporate puke), it takes on an authoritative position, and insulates itself from the insistent and direct engagement of a lived history. In my view its ossification is reciprocal to its commodification. In other words, how do you sell a process? Well, you can't, so you sell it objectification as a product instead. That doesn't have to be.
Here is a quick scene (Fall '67). I was in Feyerabend's Phil 101, north wing of (old) Wheeler and the final was an oral (and could have chocolate chip cookies--and he wasn't joking). So I prepared with an abridged presentation on Sartre. He asks, five minutes into it, "So, am I responsible for this?" and he slaps his polio atrophied legs. "Sure. Not in the sense that it was your fault, unless it was. In the sense that it, they, are part of you, so you appropriate them, are responsible for them." He smiled and stared back hard. "Look, enough systems. I don't want to hear another system." "But, I spent hours on this." "Don't worry, I give you an A, now get out of here. They are waiting outside in long lines." I thought it was a dismissal (he gave almost everybody A's). I realized later, it wasn't entirely a dismissal. He saw what he wanted to see--that I had learned how to do philosophy ad hoc, like it was originally done, on the fly, in a dialogue, as a process. The point to the oral was not about reproducing the specific product of what was studied.
Feyerabend had opened the class with some obscure shit from the pre-Socratics, that I could barely follow. After considering the brief few minutes in his office, I also saw why he opened with the Milesians, Thales and Anaximander. It was the same stuff--the stuff of a living tradition, performed--as Galileo's Dialogues were a formal re-enactment of a performance.
But at the moment I am slogging my way through Horowitz, _Radical Son_ (Bring the War Home, 191p). It is interesting to read this, and match times, places, people, ideas, and actions. His editorial and reporting position on Ramparts, his age, and his early accomplishments put him in the upper echelon. It is critical to see that those were times when it was more important to be in and of the mass, rather than above it. His remove from the street, the concrete grabbling with the stuff, whatever that was, of history laid the ground for his own alienation from its primary sources. It really had to be to lived, to be learned and understood. The intellectual view had to well out of experience, and could not be brought from elsewhere. In its evolution, Horowitz was missing at virtually all those moments when he needed to be present. He left Berkeley in '62 to go to Sweden, Norway, and finally London and didn't get back here until '68. So he missed exactly the transition that seemed so opaque to him--that of a studied radicalism to a lived process of engagement with the institutions and events that form an historical sequence.
So, to bring this together how? "if indeed the humanities as such is to occupy the Rectitudinous Chair and serve as a light unto the nations, they've bloody well been f-ing up lately--in large part through hewing to utterly needless mannerisms whose primary use, afaict, is to serve as masonic handshake."
No doubt. But where is the way out? Well, the Other of course. Exactly the unwashed masses who got into the hallowed halls and raised such a fuss so long ago. I don't mean the creamy little bourgeois with minority flavored skins. I mean the rudes, the half finished and mostly pissed off people who have been systematically eliminated--they compose the Other to the academy. And there is the other problem with the Other. The rude need to rid themselves of the idea that there is a purpose to education. It really isn't about getting a better job. It isn't about a job at all. Obviously the only jobs worth doing are those that nobody will pay you to do.
Just to push the list indulgence. Here is an even better example, that I just found out about this afternoon. The UCB depart/labs (Plant & Microbial Biology) I used to work in is part of the College of Natural Resources and to their woe they are now on the radar of the GM fanatics. Somewhere in the hierarchy, either at the dean level in CNR or below in faculty chairs, PMB was essentially sold to Novartis. Just this week, the Oxford track corn plots (opposite campus and across the street from the California Department of Public Health) were trashed by some GM fanatics--who thoughtfully left a bag of 'organic' seeds to replace the destroyed plants. It turns out that I used work at this track and the greenhouses and knew about some of the research that used to go on there five years ago. There is a corn hybrid that is pest resistant and also apparently poisons some pollenators, including the Monarch butterfly. Whether this is true or not, whether those specific plots contained work on that hybrid is irrelevant. This engineering feature brought out the rath of the GM crazies who decided that the Oxford track corn plots were responsible for a pending ecological tragedy of cosmic proportions--and that these must die.
I am sure the academy response will be security measures and a lot of huffing and puffing over vandalism.
This afternoon, when a friend relayed the story (SF Bay Guardian), my first response was that these guys (the scientists) should have taken more courses in the humanities (like Feyerabend for example). Then, they would be in a better position to understand that their science isn't a quiet, small, obscure discipline. It lays in the heart of the agri-buz beast and will be used as a power tool for US corp domination of global food resources. To become intellectually committed to this science has ethical consequences, just as doing nuclear physics once had concrete ethical consequences. I am sure it would surprise the hell out of the Profs and Post-docs I knew that they could become the next Robert Oppenheimer, selling out their colleagues and trying to weasel out of the ethical dimensions implicit in their work.
Of course nobody in PMB would know what happened to Oppenheimer and would not have read Haakon Chevalier, _Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship_, and therefore would not recognize Chevalier as Andre Malraux's US translator for Man's Fate. They would not have recalled the passage where when Malraux and Chevalier were discussing Oppenheimer; Malraux's take was that O should have refused to defend himself by saying, "I am the Atomic Bomb." Malraux was a master spin-doctor, before there was such a term. He wrote the short book on it. Like I said, scientists should take more Humanities.
But this process is exactly the kind of engagement that is necessary in order to vivify an intellectual life in either the sciences or the humanities. Ideas and technical accomplishments matter and it is essential to grasp the nature of their import. And, the most radical means to do that, is to be emersed in the roiling caldron of events.
For PMB the Other is obviously the GM fanatics who trashed their corn plots. Time to step up to the podium and square off on what it means when you sell your work to the likes of Novartis. Rest assured, none of the mealy mouthed little managers who engineered the deal in corp HQ and UCB are coming out of their cubbies in the woodwork to save the integrity of plant science from the masses. [Cut to a scene from Frankenstein: angry hordes under the light of torches march through the sleepy village under the stormy nightsky, on their way up the hill to the dark bastion where the monster and his insane creator hide (overlay, Mike Freeling, arms spread wide in defense of scared corn seedlings)--really campy stuff--this frankenfoods].
And, of course the action of the GM radicals was pathetic--they really need more education in their rank and file (where are all those unemployable PhD's when we need them?). Where are the news conferences with screaming crowds chanting insults, before the sullen looks from the panel of scientific experts? Nada. Just call security and beef up the networks with sshd.
Chuck Grimes
PS. I would advocate dismantling the Rectitudinous Chair, and erecting the Critical Chair in its place. This is under the theory that the purpose of the academy isn't to rectify society, but to illuminate its dynamics and be its most critical interlocutor. ...the way in which academic discourse[*] tends to appropriate disparate legacies in such a way that, as a collective, it 'become\es' a--*the*--standard-bearer... not just authors, but also movements and moments...
t ----------
This isn't exactly what I meant, but close enough and better. The point was that first of all the academy is predominately the study of, the exercise of, rather than the production of humanities. In other words, the conditions and events of a time and place are the roots of the ideas, movements, moments, and mostly the authors of what is later discover in the course of a humanities education.
An example. Everybody who goes to art school learns art school art, as a style. But at some point that has to change and the way it changes is to look elsewhere--to life, to other art, to something concrete, external and Other. Art school art as a style is an amalgam of traditions turned into a teaching system. The formative dynamics of this style are the demands that it can be taught, that it can be learned. Where as the formative dynamics of any one of the styles that composes it, did not originate with the same idea.
Which gets to the another point via Derrida. The Other. The only way to distinguish form is through its difference with ----. So the Other is a means to measure difference, to engage a dialectic with ---. And the only way to do that is to constantly juxtapose, confront, and map one to the other. The usual way to say this is to use the idea of a figure and ground. But that example requires an extra compositional technique that relies on and expresses dominant and subordinate forms through a scale of magnitudes--metaphors for hierarchies and classes. These techniques did not arrive in the academy. They arrived in the mist of struggle with the stuff of the lived. And it is the absence of such struggles that has killed off the concrete meanings and expressions in the Humanities (IMO, of course). It is forgotten or suppressed that most of the ideas and expressions that compose a humanities canon were taken from, or are examples from a history, artifacts, prescriptions, pulled out of their embedding matrix.
Because academia is an institution, a formal, ritualistic and bureaucratic production system (a friggin organ of government and corporate puke), it takes on an authoritative position, and insulates itself from the insistent and direct engagement of a lived history. In my view its ossification is reciprocal to its commodification. In other words, how do you sell a process? Well, you can't, so you sell it objectification as a product instead. That doesn't have to be.
Here is a quick scene (Fall '67). I was in Feyerabend's Phil 101, north wing of (old) Wheeler and the final was an oral (and could have chocolate chip cookies--and he wasn't joking). So I prepared with an abridged presentation on Sartre. He asks, five minutes into it, "So, am I responsible for this?" and he slaps his polio atrophied legs. "Sure. Not in the sense that it was your fault, unless it was. In the sense that it, they, are part of you, so you appropriate them, are responsible for them." He smiled and stared back hard. "Look, enough systems. I don't want to hear another system." "But, I spent hours on this." "Don't worry, I give you an A, now get out of here. They are waiting outside in long lines." I thought it was a dismissal (he gave almost everybody A's). I realized later, it wasn't entirely a dismissal. He saw what he wanted to see--that I had learned how to do philosophy ad hoc, like it was originally done, on the fly, in a dialogue, as a process. The point to the oral was not about reproducing the specific product of what was studied.
Feyerabend had opened the class with some obscure shit from the pre-Socratics, that I could barely follow. After considering the brief few minutes in his office, I also saw why he opened with the Milesians, Thales and Anaximander. It was the same stuff--the stuff of a living tradition, performed--as Galileo's Dialogues were a formal re-enactment of a performance.
But at the moment I am slogging my way through Horowitz, _Radical Son_ (Bring the War Home, 191p). It is interesting to read this, and match times, places, people, ideas, and actions. His editorial and reporting position on Ramparts, his age, and his early accomplishments put him in the upper echelon. It is critical to see that those were times when it was more important to be in and of the mass, rather than above it. His remove from the street, the concrete grabbling with the stuff, whatever that was, of history laid the ground for his own alienation from its primary sources. It really had to be to lived, to be learned and understood. The intellectual view had to well out of experience, and could not be brought from elsewhere. In its evolution, Horowitz was missing at virtually all those moments that he needed to be present. He left Berkeley in '62 to go to Sweden, Norway, and finally London and didn't get back here until '68. So he missed exactly the transition that seemed so opaque to him--that of a studied radicalism to a lived process of engagement with the institutions and events that form an historical sequence.
So, to bring this together how? "if indeed the humanities as such is to occupy the Rectitudinous Chair and serve as a light unto the nations, they've bloody well been f-ing up lately--in large part through hewing to utterly needless mannerisms whose primary use, afaict, is to serve as masonic handshake."
No doubt. But where is the way out? Well, the Other of course. Exactly the unwashed masses who got into the hallowed halls and raised such a fuss so long ago. I don't mean the creamy little bourgeois with minority flavored skins. I mean the rudes, the half finished and mostly pissed off people who have been systematically eliminated--they compose the Other to the academy. And there is the other problem with the Other. The rude need to rid themselves of the idea that there is a purpose to education. It really isn't about getting a better job. It isn't about a job at all. Obviously the only jobs worth doing are those that nobody will pay you to do.
Just to push the list indulgence. Here is an even better example, that I just found out about this afternoon. The UCB depart/labs (Plant & Microbial Biology) I used to work in is part of the College of Natural Resources and to their woe they are now on the radar of the GM fanatics. Somewhere in the hierarchy, either at the dean level in CNR or below in faculty chairs, PMB was essentially sold to Novartis. Just this week, the Oxford track corn plots (opposite campus and across the street from the California Department of Public Health) were trashed by some GM fanatics--who thoughtfully left a bag of 'organic' seeds to replace the destroyed plants. It turns out that I used work at this track and the greenhouses and knew about some of the research that used to go on there five years ago. There is a corn hybrid that is pest resistant and also apparently poisons some pollenators, including the Monarch butterfly. Whether this is true or not, whether those specific plots contained work on that hybrid is irrelevant. This engineering feature brought out the rath of the GM crazies who decided that the Oxford track corn plots were responsible for a pending ecological tragedy of cosmic proportions--and that these must die.
I am sure the academy response will be security measures and a lot of huffing and puffing over vandalism.
This afternoon, when a friend relayed the story (SF Bay Guardian), my first response was that these guys (the scientists) should have taken more courses in the humanities (like Feyerabend for example). Then, they would be a better position to understand that their science isn't a quiet, small, obscure discipline. It lays in the heart of the agri-buz beast and will be used as a power tool for US corp domination of global food resources. To become intellectually committed to this science has ethical consequences, just as doing nuclear physics once had concrete ethical consequences. I am sure it would surprise the hell out of the Profs and Post-docs I knew that they could become the next Robert Oppenheimer, selling out their colleagues and trying to weasel out of the ethical dimensions implicit in their work.
Of course nobody in PMB would know what happened to Oppenheimer and would not have read Haakon Chevalier, _Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship_, and therefore would not recognize Chevalier as Andre Malraux's US translator for Man's Fate. They would not have recalled the passage where when Malraux and Chevalier were discussing Oppenheimer; Malraux's take was that O should have refused to defend himself by saying, "I am the Atomic Bomb." Malraux was a master spin-doctor, before there was such a term. He wrote the short book on it. Like I said, scientists should take more Humanities.
But this process is exactly the kind of engagement that is necessary in order to vivify an intellectual life in either the sciences or the humanities. Ideas and technical accomplishments matter and it is essential to grasp the nature of their import. And, the most radical means to do that, is to be emersed in the roiling caldron of events.
For PMB the Other is obviously the GM fanatics who trashed their corn plots. Time to step up to the podium and square off on what it means when you sell your work to the likes of Novartis. Rest assured, none of the mealy mouthed little managers who engineered the deal in corp HQ and UCB are coming out of their cubbies in the woodwork to save the integrity of plant science from the masses. [Cut to a scene from Frankenstein: angry hordes under the light of torches march through the sleepy village under the stormy nightsky, on their way up the hill to the dark bastion where the monster and his insane creator hide (overlay, Mike Freeling, arms spread wide in defense of scared corn seedlings)--really campy stuff--this frankenfoods].
And, of course the action of the GM radicals was pathetic--they really need more education in their rank and file (where are all those unemployable PhD's when we need them?). Where are the news conferences with screaming crowds chanting insults, before the sullen looks from the panel of scientific experts? Nada. Just call security and beef up the networks with sshd.
Chuck Grimes
PS. I would advocate dismantling the Rectitudinous Chair, and erecting the Critical Chair in its place. This is under the theory that the purpose of the academy isn't to rectify society, but to illuminate its dynamics and be its most critical interlocutor.
...the way in which academic discourse[*] tends to appropriate disparate legacies in such a way that, as a collective, it 'become\es' a--*the*--standard-bearer... not just authors, but also movements and moments...
t ----------
This isn't exactly what I meant, but close enough and better. The point was that first of all the academy is predominately the study of, the exercise of, rather than the production of humanities. In other words, the conditions and events of a time and place are the roots of the ideas, movements, moments, and mostly the authors of what is later discover in the course of a humanities education.
An example. Everybody who goes to art school learns art school art, as a style. But at some point that has to change and the way it changes is to look elsewhere--to life, to other art, to something concrete, external and Other. Art school art as a style is an amalgam of traditions turned into a teaching system. The formative dynamics of this style are the demands that it can be taught, that it can be learned. Where as the formative dynamics of any one of the styles that composes it, did not originate with the same idea.
Which gets to the another point via Derrida. The Other. The only way to distinguish form is through its difference with ----. So the Other is a means to measure difference, to engage a dialectic with ---. And the only way to do that is to constantly juxtapose, confront, and map one to the other. The usual way to say this is to use the idea of a figure and ground. But that example requires an extra compositional technique that relies on and expresses dominant and subordinate forms through a scale of magnitudes--metaphors for hierarchies and classes. These techniques did not arrive in the academy. They arrived in the mist of struggle with the stuff of the lived. And it is the absence of such struggles that has killed off the concrete meanings and expressions in the Humanities (IMO, of course). It is forgotten or suppressed that most of the ideas and expressions that compose a humanities canon were taken from, or are examples from a history, artifacts, prescriptions, pulled out of their embedding matrix.
Because academia is an institution, a formal, ritualistic and bureaucratic production system (a friggin organ of government and corporate puke), it takes on an authoritative position, and insulates itself from the insistent and direct engagement of a lived history. In my view its ossification is reciprocal to its commodification. In other words, how do you sell a process? Well, you can't, so you sell it objectification as a product instead. That doesn't have to be.
Here is a quick scene (Fall '67). I was in Feyerabend's Phil 101, north wing of (old) Wheeler and the final was an oral (and could have chocolate chip cookies--and he wasn't joking). So I prepared with an abridged presentation on Sartre. He asks, five minutes into it, "So, am I responsible for this?" and he slaps his polio atrophied legs. "Sure. Not in the sense that it was your fault, unless it was. In the sense that it, they, are part of you, so you appropriate them, are responsible for them." He smiled and stared back hard. "Look, enough systems. I don't want to hear another system." "But, I spent hours on this." "Don't worry, I give you an A, now get out of here. They are waiting outside in long lines." I thought it was a dismissal (he gave almost everybody A's). I realized later, it wasn't entirely a dismissal. He saw what he wanted to see--that I had learned how to do philosophy ad hoc, like it was originally done, on the fly, in a dialogue, as a process. The point to the oral was not about reproducing the specific product of what was studied.
Feyerabend had opened the class with some obscure shit from the pre-Socratics, that I could barely follow. After considering the brief few minutes in his office, I also saw why he opened with the Milesians, Thales and Anaximander. It was the same stuff--the stuff of a living tradition, performed--as Galileo's Dialogues were a formal re-enactment of a performance.
But at the moment I am slogging my way through Horowitz, _Radical Son_ (Bring the War Home, 191p). It is interesting to read this, and match times, places, people, ideas, and actions. His editorial and reporting position on Ramparts, his age, and his early accomplishments put him in the upper echelon. It is critical to see that those were times when it was more important to be in and of the mass, rather than above it. His remove from the street, the concrete grabbling with the stuff, whatever that was, of history laid the ground for his own alienation from its primary sources. It really had to be to lived, to be learned and understood. The intellectual view had to well out of experience, and could not be brought from elsewhere. In its evolution, Horowitz was missing at virtually all those moments that he needed to be present. He left Berkeley in '62 to go to Sweden, Norway, and finally London and didn't get back here until '68. So he missed exactly the transition that seemed so opaque to him--that of a studied radicalism to a lived process of engagement with the institutions and events that form an historical sequence.
So, to bring this together how? "if indeed the humanities as such is to occupy the Rectitudinous Chair and serve as a light unto the nations, they've bloody well been f-ing up lately--in large part through hewing to utterly needless mannerisms whose primary use, afaict, is to serve as masonic handshake."
No doubt. But where is the way out? Well, the Other of course. Exactly the unwashed masses who got into the hallowed halls and raised such a fuss so long ago. I don't mean the creamy little bourgeois with minority flavored skins. I mean the rudes, the half finished and mostly pissed off people who have been systematically eliminated--they compose the Other to the academy. And there is the other problem with the Other. The rude need to rid themselves of the idea that there is a purpose to education. It really isn't about getting a better job. It isn't about a job at all. Obviously the only jobs worth doing are those that nobody will pay you to do.
Just to push the list indulgence. Here is an even better example, that I just found out about this afternoon. The UCB depart/labs (Plant & Microbial Biology) I used to work in is part of the College of Natural Resources and to their woe they are now on the radar of the GM fanatics. Somewhere in the hierarchy, either at the dean level in CNR or below in faculty chairs, PMB was essentially sold to Novartis. Just this week, the Oxford track corn plots (opposite campus and across the street from the California Department of Public Health) were trashed by some GM fanatics--who thoughtfully left a bag of 'organic' seeds to replace the destroyed plants. It turns out that I used work at this track and the greenhouses and knew about some of the research that used to go on there five years ago. There is a corn hybrid that is pest resistant and also apparently poisons some pollenators, including the Monarch butterfly. Whether this is true or not, whether those specific plots contained work on that hybrid is irrelevant. This engineering feature brought out the rath of the GM crazies who decided that the Oxford track corn plots were responsible for a pending ecological tragedy of cosmic proportions--and that these must die.
I am sure the academy response will be security measures and a lot of huffing and puffing over vandalism.
This afternoon, when a friend relayed the story (SF Bay Guardian), my first response was that these guys (the scientists) should have taken more courses in the humanities (like Feyerabend for example). Then, they would be a better position to understand that their science isn't a quiet, small, obscure discipline. It lays in the heart of the agri-buz beast and will be used as a power tool for US corp domination of global food resources. To become intellectually committed to this science has ethical consequences, just as doing nuclear physics once had concrete ethical consequences. I am sure it would surprise the hell out of the Profs and Post-docs I knew that they could become the next Robert Oppenheimer, selling out their colleagues and trying to weasel out of the ethical dimensions implicit in their work.
Of course nobody in PMB would know what happened to Oppenheimer and would not have read Haakon Chevalier, _Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship_, and therefore would not recognize Chevalier as Andre Malraux's US translator for Man's Fate. They would not have recalled the passage where when Malraux and Chevalier were discussing Oppenheimer; Malraux's take was that O should have refused to defend himself by saying, "I am the Atomic Bomb." Malraux was a master spin-doctor, before there was such a term. He wrote the short book on it. Like I said, scientists should take more Humanities.
But this process is exactly the kind of engagement that is necessary in order to vivify an intellectual life in either the sciences or the humanities. Ideas and technical accomplishments matter and it is essential to grasp the nature of their import. And, the most radical means to do that, is to be emersed in the roiling caldron of events.
For PMB the Other is obviously the GM fanatics who trashed their corn plots. Time to step up to the podium and square off on what it means when you sell your work to the likes of Novartis. Rest assured, none of the mealy mouthed little managers who engineered the deal in corp HQ and UCB are coming out of their cubbies in the woodwork to save the integrity of plant science from the masses. [Cut to a scene from Frankenstein: angry hordes under the light of torches march through the sleepy village under the stormy nightsky, on their way up the hill to the dark bastion where the monster and his insane creator hide (overlay, Mike Freeling, arms spread wide in defense of scared corn seedlings)--really campy stuff--this frankenfoods].
And, of course the action of the GM radicals was pathetic--they really need more education in their rank and file (where are all those unemployable PhD's when we need them?). Where are the news conferences with screaming crowds chanting insults, before the sullen looks from the panel of scientific experts? Nada. Just call security and beef up the networks with sshd.
Chuck Grimes
PS. I would advocate dismantling the Rectitudinous Chair, and erecting the Critical Chair in its place. This is under the theory that the purpose of the academy isn't to rectify society, but to illuminate its dynamics and be its most critical interlocutor.