The interesting thing about Carrol's comment that anti-intellectualism is a belief that truth comes from experience is that wouldn't that be a way to describe the empiricism embraced by Enlightenment (and what is, in sociology, a source of the tension Sean is hinting at in Cultural Studies: an opposition to theory and an insistence on only ever engaging in hands-on research. It was alive and well in my department and I was caught in the middle of it as the empiricists pushed out the Grand Theoreticisns who'd dominated the department for decades.)
At 12:10 AM 7/22/2012, Sean Andrews wrote:
> >
> >
> >
>i haven't heard this week's episode either, and haven't heard what it's on,
>but as I mentioned last week, I've been reading a book about this by a
>previous guest, Catherine Liu. She draws heavily on Hofstader's critique
>and elaborates a fairly complex matrix of elements that seem to be
>associated with a particularly virulent kind of anti-intellectualism in the
>United States. I use virulent here intentionally because the way she
>tracks it is almost like an epidemiologist would, watching a plague work
>its way through various sectors of the society over time. I wouldn't say
>she ever quite articulates a coherent, single statement that sums up what
>this anti-intellectual strain is, and it is true that she doesn't provide a
>third order production of it in a theoretical dimension. But she draws
>significantly on works by Adorno - first his Authoritarian Personality,
>which he was only co-author, and then several of his and Benjamin's essays
>that are at least tangentially related to the topic. I don't have the book
>in front of me and am deep in the final chapters, trying to finish it in
>between other obligations; otherwise, I might try to find some pointed
>examples.
>
>It is sloppy in some places, polemical in many and occasionally slips into
>tangent recesses that seem only dimly lit by the same flame. but overall,
>it gives a glaring picture of some of the most elemental features of
>anti-intellectualism qua anti-elitism. The latter is probably the most
>obvious features of our own preoccupations and political frameworks today:
>e.g. the Eggheads Rush Limbaugh calls out. As with most of the
>characteristics she mentions, it is easist to see in relation to a binary:
>anti-elitism is a kind of populism. This populism infuses education by
>supposedly making it a meritocracy, largely through the magic of testing,
>which was meant to be more objective than elitist notions of culture and
>privilege. But as we could predict, once it is adopted as a technology of
>assessment, testing is effectively rigged to reward those same notions in
>similar proportion using a differnent, supposedly more liberal and
>scientific method. I can't do justice to her argument here as there are
>many supporting pieces of evidence here, such as the discourse of the
>people inventing and deploying the tests in their pseudoscientific fashion.
> In any case, she provides an updated vision of this idea which both
>employs and goes beyond other dichotomies - like rural vs. urban, theory
>vs. experience, etc. - that are far more familiar as guideposts in the
>discussion of this idea. In places, there are noisy parts, which don't
>really fit into the point she is making, but are certainly on the hazy
>outskirts of the abstraction she's trying to build. I don't know if she's
>planning a follow up, but it would likely be a place for her to go one
>further step in providing a more theoretical approach to the concept.
>
>Right now my feeling is that, as interesting as it is, she is missing a
>huge piece of this puzzle. As I said last week, (and apologies for missing
>much of the discourse on the list during the week - my time is now very
>limited and I can only rarely scrape some time for interaction) her
>argument will probably find some sympathy on this list as one of her
>arguments is that there was a flimsy sort of "activistism" to much of the
>Left (sic) which was infused by a contention that experts were too powerful
>in post war society, all knowledge should be questioned, and there is a
>limit that should be placed on the power of intellectuals. Her argument is
>that this led, if through a circuitous route, to the thorough absence of
>intellectual power in early 21st century society, a populist celebration of
>ignorance, an education system that produces it and reproduces it on a
>grand scale and so to the mandarins who are now running the show.
>
>On the one hand what she seems to miss are the very intellectual jargon in
>which most of this discussion took place - so much so that it would find
>completely foreign the conversations we've had on this list about the use
>of jargon and theory in general, i.e. that its a snooty thing for leftists
>to do if they want to inspire the masses to revolt, even though many of
>those on the left have done it almost since the beginning, e.g. Marx, etc.
>In her account, these two sides are uncomfortably pasted into one, as if
>there is no tension between them. THis is largely because the field she
>draws upon to make this point - Cultural Studies - has had these two
>tensions alive in its work since it was established as a field at
>Birmingham. On one side there was the more experience, anti-jargon, almost
>anti-intellectual, but certainly populist in a more direct way, often
>employing ethnographic methods, but even histories such as Thompson's
>Making of the English Working class is proudly untheoretical - long before
>Thompson wrote his screed against the other side, represented for him by
>the high structuralist theory of Althusser. In any case, there is
>something of a moving target on this front (again justifying Comrade Cox's
>insistence that the article "the" not precede the noun/adjective "Left.")
> Again, I'm getting to the end, and this final chapter on Cultral Studies
>promises to be illuminating in the positions she's staked out, but this
>seems a reasonable assessment so far.
>
>More problematically, I am sort of stunned by her leaving to one side the
>rather swift business the right made of setting up their own "counter
>establishment." This seems to be one of the crucial features of the 1960s
>onward, one charted by many intellectual historians. Now maybe it is true
>that some of this "counter establishment" is or has become less
>intellectual in its diction or jargon, but they are no less powerful than
>that class as it was in the 19th century. I.e. The Heritage foundation,
>paid for with bloody capitalist lucre, is one of the premier authorities on
>capital hill. Add to them the AEI, Cato, the folks at George Mason and all
>the other right wing fanatics that find such welcome homes in the houses of
>power they denounce as illegitimate. Their rise might owe something to the
>lack of a confident, vociferous, monologue from the Left, but it was also a
>calculated effort to redefine what intellectuals were meant to do - the
>answer being that they are supposed to serve the interests of power.
>
>In any case, I agree that the terms should be clearly defined, but I also
>think it is worth having a general conversation about something that
>appears to exist in order to create a clearer image - rather than
>denouncing anyone for using the term unless they've written or can cite the
>appropriate dissertation written on it. This is, after all, a list serve
>where the purpose is discussion not publication
>
>Now I'll have to go read Chuck's question closer...
>
>Now I'Now I
>
> >
> >
> > ---------- Original Message ----------
> > From: 123hop at comcast.net <javascript:;>
> > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org <javascript:;>
> > Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Some thoughts on BTN
> > Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2012 01:33:42 +0000 (UTC)
> >
> > Hofstader?
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > I don't think it true that the u.s. can be characterized as an
> > anti-intellectualist society. The label seems a mere kneejerk grounded in
> > random evidence. No one, in fact, has ever attempted a _theoretical_
> > analysis of what "anti-intellectualism" even means. It is a pretty empty
> > swear word, avoiding matters of substance.
> >
> > Carrol
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
> >
> >
> > ____________________________________________________________
> > Fast, Secure, NetZero 4G Mobile Broadband. Try it.
> > http://www.netzero.net/?refcd=NZINTISP0512T4GOUT2
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)