Re: writ large

Responses below...

L. Manning Vines wrote:

>I don't have the article in front of me now, but I remember at the time
>thinking (rightly or wrongly) that the author was not reinforcing the
>irrelevance of intellectuals. The way she chose to close the article was
>with a quote claiming, as I remember it, that the claims at the conference
>could be accounted for by the fact that these particular intellectuals are
>mortified of being politically irrelevant.
>
Yep, you remember correctly. I need the article in front of me too, but
it seemed the closing lines were ironic -- as if intellectuals' own
fields of study were so completely irrelevant that they needed to run to
political commentary to say anything meaningful at all. As a result,
the fear of political irrelevance was testimony to their irrelevance in
all other areas.

That's how I remember it, though. Again, I don't have the article in
front of me either.

>I remember thinking that the article, if it betrayed any substantial bias,
>was critical of their claims -- or at least amused by them while not taking
>them seriously. The title, even, was something like "The Latest Theory is
>that Theory is Irrelevant." I doubt very much that the author was blind to
>the irony.
>
>
I think the irony consists in the fact that theory itself is asserting
what everyone else, in the mind of the author, knew all along.

>I'm not sure I understand or agree with the wideness of the claim that
>consumer culture is THE source of burden.
>
Neither would I. I didn't mean to identify it as a sole cause, though
my language did imply that. It's certainly *a* cause, in my thinking,
though.

>By the anthropocizing of the intellectual, I meant something like the
>inverse of the intellectualizing of the people.
>
>Many of the problems you see ("A uniformity of attributes acribed to all
>'intellectuals' -- as if they all wrote and spoke the same, and held to the
>same positions.") might just as well be seen on the other side of the coin.
>Just as we might benefit from a mass intellectualizing of hoi polloi -- not
>speaking of particulars, but only of the generality -- so also we might
>benefit from a change that is similar, proportional, though perhaps
>different in character, in the intellectual elite -- though, again, not
>speaking of particulars, but only of the generality.
>
>To borrow from Aristophanes (whom I mentioned instead of Swift quite
>deliberately -- though Swift, too, is as you say), getting one's head out of
>the clouds must be as important as opening one's eyes. It seems probable
>that the two are fundamentally similar in effect, and perhaps even in
>nature.
>
>-robbie
>

Depends on who you're talking about. Of course, whenever we talk about
groups, we need to be careful. Most people, I think, are not prone to
abstraction or analysis. This seems to be supported even by tests like
the Myer-Briggs. The "intellectualizing" of the people (and I mean US
people, not people worldwide), then, would just take the form of a
little bit more attention paid to ideas and the willingness to identify
and challenge assumptions. When you talk about intellectuals with their
heads in the clouds, I tend to think that can only be determined on a
case by case basis. Does Stanley Fish have his head in the clouds when
he says philosophy is irrelevant? No, I think he's making a good
observation of the actual role philosophy plays in most people's lives.
 The only real differences I see are between good intellectualizing and
bad. Good analysis is always relevant.

Jim

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Received on Fri Apr 25 11:06:18 2003