Boundaries & Disciplines Re: Deleuze & Guattari....

[joanna bujes]

At 04:43 AM 01/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>True -- we do need experts and specialists, for the simple reason
>that what is available for human understanding -- past achievements,
>present inquiries, future tasks -- is now so vast that no one person
>today, however gifted, can be an all-purpose man or woman of letters.
>Never again will we have an intellectual who would even _attempt_ to
>know the world in a way that Aristotle or Hegel did.

I disagree: boundaries and disciplines are constructed and compounded by 
jargon and various bells and whistles more than by any actual unfathomable 
"content." At the same time, any art/science at any period in human history 
required substantial time/energy to master.

Can we have another Aristotle or Hegel? It all depends on the amount of 
bullshit such an intellectual would be able to recognize and eliminate. 
Marx did ok. Cassirer did OK. Wittgenstein did OK.

Boundaries and disciplines, so far as I can see, are partly there to keep a 
potentially revolutionary class (the intelligensia) divided and powerless: 
divided from the working class and divided from one another. The utter 
waste of "specialization" was glaringly obvious to me in academia and it is 
glaringly obvious now in the private sector as well.

Joanna