Speaking of Excavation and Memory.
If few were moved to anything but derision at my celebration of Labor, then it seems likely fewer still will be thrilled by a celebration of Intellect. In my over ripe imagination Labor and Intellect form a dialectic of revolt against Capital. And yes I am personifying Capital as a collection of socio-economic interests welded together by a sensibility of utilitarian pragmatism and enervated by a barren moral rectitude. I don't think it sufficient, even if on occasion necessary, to reduce Capital to a quasi-empirical concept of class. It is such a joy to demonize it as an evil and fetid beast that I just arbitrarily and conveniently consider it as such.
One of the curiously demented and inversive notions of Capital and its domination of every form of social relation, is that beyond its eschewing of Labor as an all consuming leech and drain on its own imagined and much vaulted productivity, is its equally dismissive ignorance of its other great foundational pillar, the historical armature of western enlightenment and culture. Just as Capital takes onto itself all the concrete attributes of Labor, it maintains with equal arrogance that it has produced the entire range of intellectual and cultural achievements in western civilization, and then adorns itself in these elaborate ropes.
God did not die, rather the deity was subsumed into the great maw of Capital which now conducts Mass in its place. Since all human relations and all the products that issue from them are dominated by Capital, it is only natural that Capital should presume a deified, unitary, and originary dominion over them all.
It is within these obtuse and grandiloquent presumptions, that Capital melds as in a crucible the interests of Labor and Intellect, and then drives the potential solidarity between their concrete referents as workers and students, or in the less well understood affinities and amalgams of skilled manual labor and technical and cultural labor. In more abstract terms these products of the hand and the mind revolt at the presumed dominion and oppression of their mere economic agent.
Just as Capital conducts war on Labor by speaking in the words of Labor as if Capital did the work itself, so Capital conducts war on the Intellect. This systemic theft is most obvious in the sciences and technical disciplines, but it is no less intense in the arts and humanities. Just as there is little escape or means to resuscitate the manual skills and traditions of Labor from out of their embedding in a Capital dominated industrial production, so there is little or no means to resuscitate the skills and traditions of the Intellect from out of its embedding in Capital dominated governmental and educational institutions, and mass media.
What does this mean? A simple example is that most writers and painters find it difficult if not impossible to teach and create at the same time---within the confines and demands of the educational system. And that difficulty is getting worse and worse. Scientists and other technical disciplines have much the same difficulty. What I am referring to is not the over abundance of cloned scree that saturates academic and technical journals and publications, or the mass market and media productions, or almost any of the so-called useful and marketable work, but rather the sort of originary work that created the intellectual foundation upon which most of this production is based. For example neither Einstein nor Matisse ever taught a class.
But this view is from above, from the chair of the master. From the view of the slave, the student, presuming for the moment there is any interest or light at all, the condition is seen as the mirrored on a mental desert. If the teacher looks at the student and sees nothing there, the student looks at teacher and sees much the same. If teachers can't teach the arts of the intellect in school, then the students can't learn them there either. What is negotiated instead is something that passes as a poor replica, and this is simply teaching and learning the process of an exercise in intellectual production. While everyone is supposed to understand these are mere exercises, in fact everyone forgets. The ubiquity of the survey course, the introduction and the compendium, condotto a forza, is characteristic of a capitalist mode of production and is the standard. Such is the so called base and formation of the Intellect. The idea that it might take years, even a lifetime to simply learn to read and write is a complete anathema to Capital.
After I got out of graduate school, I realized I knew nothing at all and had to start all over again. If the idea of rediscovering and resuscitating the skills of labor upon which the visual arts are based and which they endlessly celebrate---if that seemed like a herculian task, then completely reconstructing western intellectual history, as the armature for learning the arts of the intellect was just as great a task. I was supposed to have already learned that particular master narrative. After all what is a degree in the humanities or the arts supposed to represent? But in fact, what I had learned was how to render the narrative much like rendering the outline of the human figure. The mere contour of its form was dead although it was proof I could connect the dots. Good enough for Capital work.
What I wanted was all the nuance and play of light on form that creates the illusion of life and illuminates it; the landscape with its people, its cities, its arts and sciences all together as if in a living tableau. To what purpose? None at all. What could conceivably serve such a purpose since the project could never be completed in a life time and, that was all known in advance. It was a revolt pure and simple.
And why not? What better to match days of uselessly excavating dirt, if not nights uselessly excavating memory?
Chuck Grimes