Carl Remick wrote:
>
>
> but what bothers me most about this obscurantist school of thought is
> the contempt shown the public at large -- a stance consistent with
> that of, say, the Pharisees and Scholastics but at odds with what I
> believe the contemporary left is supposed to represent.
I have come across few texts that illustrate so vividly as this one the utter idiocy of fuss about difficulty. "Public at large," "general public," "man on the street," etc. etc. etc. are rhetorical flourishes that have no function other than pure obscurantism. The *first* task of she/he who wishes to change the world is to understand it accurately. (This does not disagree with Marx's epistemological perception that "the point is to change it" [the world], for that refers
to human knowledge as a whole, not to the tasks of an individual who finds him/herself in the midst as it were.) And that first task will always involve both complex and simple works -- but usually even the simple works will not be addressed "to the general public" or whatever. Have you read the *Grundrisse* Carl? Or Vol. II of *Capital*? Or the *Prison Notebooks*?
When "the left" comes into existence again, it will of course have to work out ways to speak (intelligibly) to larger and larger sectors of that "general public," but in the meantime the necessity is truth, not agitational effectiveness.
Carrol
Emerson is probably a lot nearer to Derrida (in content as well as style) than to Walter Winchell, the archetype of those who speak to "the general public."