(att: Michael Perelman, see question at end of post)
``...But, added to that is the particular misery of the U.S. working class which, underneath it all, believes that its privations ARE the result of some private failing. After all, if anyone can succeed, why not them?..'' JB
Yeah, that's the sad part. In between just ludicrous bullshit conspiracy theories about the world and random riffs on causality---it seems the scientific revolution never penetrated the mire of mass consciousness--- between lay all the lies about merit, self-worth, accomplishments and rewards. You are worth what you are paid, so therefore, you are worthless...
I mean it constitutes some kind of learning disability as a proven failure is failure forever prone and therefore a failure assured feed-back loop. And this is absolutely a learned and burned in response from school experiences. I've posted before about helping this one guy through his algebra requirement at Vista. This was a fabulous case study in exactly this sort of self-defeating reaction---a reaction that was somehow completely intact from his boyhood.
Anyway, I think I am convinced these are marks of international class based oppressions, since a very similar reaction goes on with one of my other workmates who is Vietnamese. He immigrated during the 80s as an adult with his family.
(I've told this before) One day I was watching Loi try to design a deck pattern for his backyard. His problem was how to form a hexagon. He was trying all sorts of different ways to find the six equal part division of a circle. So I showed him the radius trick. His eyes lighted up for just a moment, then he ignored me for the rest of the afternoon.
This was the `I don't need your fancy white ass help, thanks...' reaction. As if I was trying to get over on him. As if knowledge was a privileged and private possession that was only for sale and any exchange would entailed great obligations later on. Or some such bullshit. I mean it was a miserly and crafty peasant-like reaction of some sort. There were definitely marks of western colonialism in there somewhere. I don't understand it, so I have to guess.
The problem of individually grabbling with real people and their struggles is a kind of exercise in hapless inadequacy. I am convinced first the whole education system is against it somehow, and second that in differently configured public education with committed people, almost all these sorts of struggles would be greatly relieved, if not erased in advance. Which brings me around to this:
``..I tell thee though, the unconsciousness of the T.V. bound working class is understandable in a way that the self-righteous unconsciousness of, say, academic intellectuals is not. For a truly nauseating exercise in denial, no one can hold a candle to them...''
That denial forming around the core ideal that they are the best and brightest because their positions prove it and they publish works that say merit proves merit works? Unfortunately, I was never allowed indoors long enough to figure it out. So you'll have to fill it in some more.
Okay, I'll guess. Academia has been structurally reduced to a primary means of oppression by certifying therefore naturalizing class partitions through the merit selection process itself. The academic system has further become a branding system that selects and arranges from the broad intellectual world, only certain knowledge, skill and performance in a hierarchy that both reflects and promulgates the capital value of such knowledge, skill and performance, privilaging those items which have the greatest potential for capital return, while denigrating all others. By such an intellectual certification and naturalization process it replicates the capital value schema and has become absolutely integral to both propagation and extension of the self-same system.
Academic denial forms around the idea that such a hierarchy is both natural and proper and of the highest merit possible. Thus it becomes the master mediator of intellectual and social value, which is of course maximal capitalist value, and thus the temple of neoliberal apologia.
At a more technical or tactical level, the learning, exploration, experimental and performance processes are specifically channeled to a commodification system that seeks to objectify, delimit, and partition a broad intellectual spectrum into individual bite sized bits, which through some further machinations can be turned into products for sale. The so-called hi-tech, bio-tech, and high flown capital theorist crap being the best examples.
Or something like that?
Speaking of which. Michael Perelman was due out with a book on all this. Hey Michael, when is it coming out? Is it already here?
Chuck Grimes