Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
> On 12/22/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> > But further: Those institutions make possible people like you and me.
> > Without those institutions someone like me, a bright son of a rural
> > school teacher (already at 12 showing signs of depression) would have
> > ended up in a dump heap someplace.
> >
> > We have to live in the World we are born with, and while we have to seek
> > to destroy the world you and I happened to be born in, we don't forward
> > that task by kvetching about particular people who are just themselves
> > trying to survive in it.
> >
> > Carrol
>
> In frustration Carrol, i ask, have you read what I have written?
> Where I said similar things? For instance:
>
> "Now nobody blames a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at some department
> specializing in logical positivism for producing and reproducing the
> lexicon and technical goop of her supperiors. A gal has to make a
> living after all, and in general it is a better life if you can get a
> job as a professor than it is working as a taxi driver. But don't try
> to sell me on the fact that in doing this you are striking a blow
> against hierarchy. The same goes for any other specialized lexicon,
> but especially the ones that don't provide light on their subjects.
> If you can conform to such jobs and also maintain your integrity, then
> you can divide your time between the dark and the light, the obscure
> and the clear. I know of many law professors who in their own way do
> just this."
While I haven't yet read all your posts completely and carefully (you can write faster than I can read these days), I did read and recall the paragraph I've just quoted, and it really doesn't respond to my point because I think you have misunderstood what I had in mind when I wrote, "Those institutions make possible people like you and me." I meant that we learned how to use our minds in going through those institutions. I think no better of logical positivism, on the whole, than you do (though there is a great deal to admire _personally_ in the life story of Rudolph Carnap* as there is in the life story of Derrida -- look up the issue of CI in which Derrida explodes at a a pair of writers who had dared to apologize even indirectly for apartheid: the most savage indictment of apartheid and its supporter I had ever read by anyone not native to South Africa).
*I can't remember the exact suggestions the Dept. Head at Chicago made to Carnap, but it went something like the following, when Carnap first arrived there:
DeptHead: Do you want to teach Kant? C: No. DH: Do you want to teach Hume? C: No. DH: Do you want to teach Plato? C. No. DH (in frustration): Well, what _do_ you want to teach? C: Ze Trut.
By focusing on style you seem to be looking for a sort of magic litmus test by which one can distinguish falsity from truth. Barbara Lewalski of Harvard (she got from Brown to Harvard after writing a scathing article in opposition to a feminist critique of Milton) tried to argue that the great poets are usually right about the most important things. The implicit equation is that we can know they tell the truth because they are great poets and we know that they are great poets because they tell the truth (and that truths coincides with what _we_ think is the truth). I maintain that there is a hell of a lot of important knowledge, even profound truths, buried in bad prose and there is a hell of a lot of horseshit expressed in great prose (or verse).
Moreover, not only can a sincere and intelligent woman "produc[e] and reproduc[e] the lexicon and technical goop of her superiors" _because she thinks it is true_, not just to get a job, but the premise for critiquing that goop must be that the superiors ALSO produce it because they think it is true. I believed in what I wrote in my dissertation, and it would be simple lunacy to think that Austin Warren & Arthur Eastman (members of my committee) didn't really believe what they taught and wrote. (Neoclassical Economics may be an exception, but even here we should perhaps have the same sort of perspective that we have on the mafia in HBO's The Sopranos.) In intellectual judgment as in the courtroom I really believe in the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty.
> And I added later, that with privilege comes an obligation especially
> for those of us who favor more democracy to try to make ourselves
> comprehensible to others and try to work for openness of the
> institutions that we are in.
I agree -- except I don't accept the implied argument in your phrase, "comprehensible to others." I assume that Rajan, for example, is trying her best to make herself comprehensible to to others. She may be right or wrong about Shelley; my knowledge of his work is too slight for me to judge. And I'm not apt, at the age of 76 years and 5 months to ever know enough about him, though I'm spending some time now, thanks to Rajan, to giving Shelley more of a reading than I ever did before.** Professors & scholars to be great professors or scholars don't have to be right; they don't have to be comprehensible; they merely have to trigger some thought in their classes or their readers. Carnap did that for many. Rajan has done that for me re Colderidge, Wordsworth, & Shelley. Take Johnson on the metaphysical poets as a guide. He was wary of them, but (from memory) he concluded his discussion by noting that no one could write as they did without having some real knowledge. I quoted Rajan's essay because that paragraph might be clumsy and it might be wrong on Shelley, but it quite clearly is an instance of deconstruction which doesn't fit any of the slick phrases thrown about in the current discussion.
>
> That these institutions have existed in these forms since the rise of
> class society I have been arguing all along.
>
> Frankly, I don't understand why you need to tell me this? I am sure
> we agree on the basic point, and even my amendments, here to the basic
> point.
Probably, except for what I think is the fatal ambiguity of "comprehensible to others." I assume all writers are trying to be comprehensible to their intended audience. And I don't think there can be any general rules or even any general discussion of how writers choose their audience. Only after the fact, and in discussion of specific texts, can one argue about the audience. It's clear, for example, that the intended audience of one my favorite books, _Tale of a Tub_, were a bunch of scoundrels. It is a sweeping attack on anyone who in 1690 had the least curiosity about the world. But many of us in its unintended audience have gotten a good deal from it. One can spend years in the intense pleasure of unwinding one more wrapping of the irony without ever reaching the empty core. (And the core is empty! As much as I dislike C.S. Lewis, he was right on Swift's anti-intellectualism and fear of curiosity.)
> Since we agree, and I am pretty sure you know we agree, why not engage
> the issues where we don't agree?
I think it may take a few more rounds (perhaps only after my right elbow heals) to decide precisely where we agree and where we don't It's a nice ride though, isn't it?
Carrol
**Here I'm referring not to the essay I quoted but to her book, _The
Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and
Practice_, Cornell UP, 1990.
>
> Jerry Moanco
>