>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>A piece of writing (especially the sort that is useful to
>>organizers on the left), like a piece of scientific research, may
>>seem like a product of private and individual labor, but it is a
>>fruit of social and collective labor.
>
>Sure, texts are mediated by the collective relations of labor and
>forces of production. But the collectivity isn't necessarily a good
>thing in the total system; usually it's an agent of dire repression
>and violence. One of the key individual contributions of an artist,
>writer, scientist etc. consists precisely of breaking the baleful
>spell of the bad collectivity, and permitting a potential or utopian
>collectivity to speak, as it were.
I'm talking about a more mundane fact here. Anybody who writes anything doesn't invent the language she writes in -- the language she writes in is a historical product of social labor, and so are ideas with which she works. The writer didn't grow up on her own either. Her parents took care of her, and centuries of working-class struggle had won her the right to literacy and public education. The time she spends writing, too, is a product of social labor, past and present.
Carrol wrote:
>I suppose in an ideal world all scholars are great scholars, great
>writers, great thinkers.
In an ideal world, can all public speakers be great public speakers, all basketball players great basketball players, all opera singers great opera singers, and so on? They can't be, nor should they feel compelled to be. Writing well is like speaking well, playing basketball well, singing opera well, etc. Not everyone can do it, but an inability to write well doesn't mean that the poor writer has nothing important to say, just as an inability to speak in public, play basketball, sing opera, or do anything well doesn't mean that the person cursed with it has nothing important to say. Conversely, great writers may be poor thinkers.
Scholars' job is to do research and publish it primarily for other scholars who are doing research on the same or related subjects and secondarily for educators interested in teaching them; popular writers' job is to write for segments of the educated general public interested in their respective topics. Writing well for the educated general public is a skill in its own right, and there is no reason why we should expect good scholarly researchers to be good popular writers and vice versa, although a few individuals have both the skills of doing specialized research and writing for the educated general public.
>if we want to know X in order to write about Y, and it turns out
>that most of the scholarship which describes X is poorly written &
>much of it wrongheaded or egotistical or whatever, then if we are
>able to use that to write clearly and beautifully about Y, then it
>is the case that our study of Y would not have been possible without
>all the badly written, egotistical writing on X.
A society that cannot support masses of poor scholars and writers cannot support many good scholars and writers. The base of a mountain has to be broader than its summit. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>