I'll start in no particular order. PM work was important to me, because most of the writers came out of the same era of intellectual and political battles that I did. I didn't get hung up on their formal truth value or any of that. I am interested in seeing them as art work and their link to the times, what they represent of those times. What I see are many issues that are important to follow and write about, but I rarely find satisfaction in their way of going about it. Essentially I pick up bits and dabs of thought and method that I think are useful for understanding this or that issue.
On the other hand, after reading a few things, they did open my mind in some indefinable way. Look at the human world with say a deconstruction mind set borrowed from Derrida, a slightly different kind of critical eye. Or with Foucault, I learned a little bit about how to do a social history trace. That's a little of what I used to write the i carcere post. So I definitely learned something from Foucault.
And I certainly agree it was very frustrating to encounter disciplinary boundaries of thought and study. One hilarious example is that you can not write an art history paper from the point of view of art practice. Back then, the art history crowd didn't approve of the social history of say mid 19thC France with its political struggles. The consequence was that Baudelaire and Courbet have no meaning beyond their art. You can't see them, until you know the social milieu, which nobody talks about in art history.
The point really was disappointment, rather than pulling the lever.
We were trying to reform the academy on many different fronts. Integration of course, but also install new and more human, more socially and politically aware study fields. Some battles were won. Angela Davis and others were successful in getting and keeping their jobs and developing work, studies, ideas, and so forth within the academy.
A lot of these academic reforms were stalled out in battles to name a specific department. The way the academic senate and administration dealt with it was to create a series of majors without a formal department name. And of course no building, no library, no space, no facilities, no commitment, no expense. So you could get a degree in some field of study, that had no department. This of course completely undercuts the academic value of the degree and the knowledge, skill, etc. And if the major on paper becomes a hot bed, then you disappear it with the stroke of a pen.
There is a Disability Studies degree, but it has no formal department. (This battle lasted fifteen years, just to get the name as a major) The faculty is ad hoc drawn from the credentialed second or third generation of activists. But it is having a hard time producing graduates in the field. From my limited contact with them, I hate to say it, but they haven't done the reading that might apply like Foucault, other PM, the Frankfurters, the sociology, psychology, social welfare...and more recent work as well particular in feminists and black history ... the traces you followed to develop feminist theory and practice. The folks I've met are certainly not Marxist. At the moment, what they present reads more like ethnic field studies in anthro and sociology, and follows the oral history tradition. It's fine as a starting point, to make students aware of what its like to live, grow up, and deal with this society as a disabled person, but it doesn't go into the political and economic end---limited to civil rights only. And nobody is doing what might be called radical social philosophy. I wrote down Marta Russell's name and her book Beyond Ramps for one woman I met on the faculty, while we were talking about all this (wheelchair repair service delivery call....). She understood all these problems, but she barely had time to do anything but teach. And of course she was on a non-tenture track position--- too busy to think, write, .. get concretely involved with community activists.
To me these represent concrete gains. But the battles are still going on. The academy as a mind set is just implacable. What's humorous is that what is going on in the conceptual realm of the academy as a conceptual structure of the mind, is a battle over the Kantian division of knowledge and divisions of truth schematics. So, then what women, minorities, the disabled study, write and know, is not real truth. Therefore it has no intellectual and social value.
So then, getting back to PM. Many of the works are trying to break down this Kantian division of knowledge and its value schemes. But most work is so difficult to read and understand what they are trying to, that the fundamental point is lost. In nutshell, if you can break Kant, you can break the academy. The point isn't really intellectual, but political, economic and social.
In practical terms, (before I ever figured this out) what I was hoping was if we could really integrate the academy, students, faculties, administrators, and fields of work, we could get some social change. I was also hoping that what we knew from our lives as outcasts could be used as knowledge to change the society in some kind of feed back loop of perpetual ... reform-revolution.
So my disappointment is two fold. First of course all the battles in the social and political economy didn't accomplish much and most are still going on. And then second the intellectual battles just got folded into what appears to be nonsense by most academics. There was a form of radicalizing knowledge there, but the styles, composition, themes and motifs used to present that knowledge just obscured it--- like a Picasso portrait that appears to screw up the subject's face.
Anyway, the PM crowd stylized their work on a similar premise. The trouble is most people don't see these works as a form of protest art. Everybody tries to read them as empirical reports, and hence they appear as nonsense.
``... this thinker wasn't anyone my dissertation advisor had me read and so I never felt it important. I find certain thinkers really influential to me. I read around at what all the cool kids are studying -- e.g., Badiou comes up a lot -- and I think, hmmm should probably read but there are 100 books on my list before Badiou.''
The way I got around the problem of who to read and when was just to get the book and put it on the shelf. When the need arises, there it is. For example, I bought Marcuse One-Dimensional Man, back in the 60s because he was popular in the student culture and we knew Davis had studied under him. I read it back then and it didn't mean much to me. During the Angela D threads, I pulled it out and glanced at a few paragraphs ... I thought to myself. Now I see why she worked under Marcuse. Now it means something to me. Maybe I'll re-read it, now that I have a better background in thought and life.
I guess the reason it sounded like I thought history was over, is just weariness with fighting the same damned battles over and over. Take the constant fight over women's reproductive rights or Darwin, as an examples. I might qualify this by saying that every battle is a form of learning, so I've learned more and more about the terrain and combatants with each round.
CG