Which might mean something in philosophy. It's a stretch to apply this to a polemic which is intended to be aggressively hostile to the position it's attacking. Michaels is writing for the purpose of inciting social change. In his talk at Harvard, his describes the world he hopes his book will usher in:
"The fundamental inequality today being presented by universities has nothing whatsoever to do with race and sex despite what .... is he still the President of Harvard? I can't remember where Larry Summers is in all this... But those aren't the problems that confront our universities today. ***It would be a very different world if our faculty, instead of getting up in arms about foolish and inappropriate things said about race and sex, if they would instead get up in arms when it occurred to them that they are turning themselves into finishing schools for rich kids of the u.s.*** (my emphasis) That's a social issue of some magnitude. The trouble with diversity is that it's played a fundamental role in enabling us to ignore that social issue. And that's the fundamental argument of the book."
http://forum-network.org/lecture/celebrating-difference-trouble-diversity
Michaels also says after his talk that, to paraphrase, "the fun part is hearing what people have to say about his argument."
I'm taking him at his word that he actually wants people to engage his work.
And I don't know about anyone else here, but I don't crawl out of my hole, write a polemic, and then drop back into my hole, uninterested in actually doing battle with the people who advocate the ideas I'm attacking.
One of the things that has always amazed me about some bloggers are the once who think of themselves primarily as writers. Some describe themselves as driven to write. They get upset when no one reads them. They get upset when people misinterpret and so forth. And yet, they frequently refuse to actually engage the work of *others*; they refuse to give others the respect they think is due them.
I don't care if anyone else wants to read books and articles, but it's not clear to me why people feel compelled to ramble on about books they've never read and don't intend to. It's one of the things that drove me batshit during my first semester in grad school. After that, I just found it amusing that the entire purpose of academia and its allied institutions is pumping out people who confidently speak to texts they have never read. Once you figured that out, you never had to wonder what the fuck was going on at any gathering of academics, whether it was a committee meeting or the grand master association meeting held once yearly.
>--One more thing: as Carrol has pointed out repeatedly, there's no way to
>read and critique everything. Sometimes the best response to a text is
>to--leave it aside and read something more interesting.
exactly. That goes for all texts, including posts to this list. If y'arn't interested, there's a filter file and/or the delete key.
If y'arn't interested, there's a filter file and/or the delete key. Otherwise, what most of this comes off as is just another version of this:
"discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment"
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
shag