``the effect of arguments that at least claim to appeal to this line of thinking, whether or not it did, because as a science undergrad around 1990 with an interest in social issues I got exposed to the fallout, and later found plenty of others with similar experiences, among them Alan Sokal and Barbara Ehrenreich. There were many humanities and particularly social science students who did indeed take the "project to undermine Western rationality", however that was intended, to mean that science and its attendant appeals to math, evidence and careful reasoning were bunk.''
Andy
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(This post is something of a personal background. I am going to post another video link. It is an hour with John Searle at UCB)
That is why I tried to indicate:
``What I think what has happened to deconstruction historically in the US is a pretty terrible rendition, and some of it is outright wrong...'' (CG)
``I'll get to the video once I get a home computer that post-dates YouTube.'' (Andy)
You can always just go over to a friend's place, or some cyber-coffee place. In a public place, you might need to bring a pair of ear phones.
Anyway. Michaels was heavily influenced by Derrida and de Man as a grad student and then in his early career. He talks about this in the interview I posted. His thinking is still very much within that American deconstruction branded orbit.
Michaels is about six or seven years younger than me, and this is an important fact or divide. The other important divide is our socio-economic backgrounds which is translated into our different views of life and what we expected to get out of the university. It also means that I went into school just as the existentialists and structuralists were being read by students and some professors. When Michaels entered grad school, the post-structuralist like Derrida were just beginning to be read.
The important part is the vast difference of understanding what a cultural production like art, literature, film is and how these productions fit and function in our society.
My problem is that I haven't read much literary or art criticism in a long time. And of course next to nothing in the academic level of the social sciences. So I don't have a very good understanding of these fields and their current state of affairs.
In any event, I want to describe my student impression of taking a few courses in philosophy. I started with an intro that followed the straight Anglo-American line. The text organized and edited by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap. The first few sectional titles were: A Priori Knowledge, Scepticism and the Problem of the Induction, Perception and the Physical World, Body Mind and Death, Determinism Freedom and Moral Responsibility...
It was fun to delve into the general problems and read the classical sources, then the various more modern ones like Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Russell, etc. But I noticed immediately that nobody was talking about art or literature or what they did mention seemed irrelevant to the actual practice or wrong headed in some deep way. I got an A, so I proudly enrolled in the next course of the undergrad sequence which was Inductive Logic. I was lucky to get out that one alive with C. Strangely, because of its underlying math of sets and of say Venn diagrams and so forth, it seemed to have some uses in art. I played around a lot with Venn diagrams and thinking about the set operators in relation to art. There was something physical about them, especially when used with geometric abstraction.
Meanwhile, I took a wild course in Anthropology and was introduced to Levi-Strauss, Jean Piaget, Marshal McCluen, and Ernst Cassirer. That class was so wildly exciting to me and my roommate, we used to get of class, go immediately to cafeteria and talk about what Carpenter had just said. We did the same from a different perspective with Joan Rayfield
Outside of school in the student life, the existentialists were floating around like Sartre, Camus, Malraux. It was hard to imagine them as philosophy since they were so different from the above introductions mentioned. Then I took the Continental Philosophy course that started with selections of Kant, Hegel, Kierkgaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and ended with Sartre I think. I went nuts with excitement. They were talking philosophy about life as it is lived, and not just abstract problems of thought. This course was very well arranged because it followed the historical flows of the 19thC through mid-20thC. It had some European history injected to make sense out of the developments. This was heady stuff. I was living in a storefront, painting and reading and drinking huge amounts of instant coffee---which was all I could afford.
The last philosophy class I took was from Paul Feyerabend, who was mostly teaching his own views in Science in a Free Society, Against Method and Problems with Empiricism. These are all deeply subversive of the postivist and Anglo-American versions of empiricism, social sciences, and the vast array of social institutions that are built on a scientific technocracy. He was teaching this stuff right in the middle of the height of student revolt at Berkeley.
I had asked around who to take and two names back then were John Searle or Paul Feyerabend. As I later found out these were vastly different philosophers.
The reason for detailing out the names of people read is to set up the intellectual milieu of my time in school. There were lots of stirings about rationalism both in thought, and in institutional practice, and the society at large. I mean Vietnam made absolutely no rational sense, etc.
CG