Learning [by use], I guess? And that’s why they want you to do the teach-in. I am not an OWS participant, but it is possible that they have the same attitude as me. I don’t care (yet?) about Leninism, or Marx, or paleo[XYZ], Foucault, or ‘in' terminology. I want to learn the facts and hear an intelligent analysis of them. So I pay a lot of attention to the first ten minutes of BTN, or when Doug Henwood and Yannis Varoufakis talk Euro-economics. I skip the “opinion" guests (e.g: I did the 2x on Corey Robin [sp?] on the drive to work this morning :-)) - opinion is probably the wrong word. What I mean is that they say things that use terminology that I don’t understand or are so patently wrong to my mind that I cannot get a coherent idea out of them (cognitive dissonance, and all that). Much better not to care about this stuff until I can work things out at my own pace.
If I understand your question right, the premise of your point is that Jodi Dean is the equivalent of a top scientist of a mature science. How can you mess with genetics without paying attention to Watson and Crick, you seem to be asking (again, if I understand you right). If so, there are some holes in this thinking. Perhaps political science is not a science at all, or at least not a mature science. Or perhaps Jodi Dean is pushing a scientifically discredited theory - people do mess with genetics today without paying attention to Lamarck (though Lamarckism might, it turns out, have something to say after all). Or perhaps as in the case of Lysenko or Pinker, it is impossible to separate the non-scientific commitments of the person from their science.
—ravi