What in the hell …

I had a brief email exchange with a friend about, among other things, cultural politics. I’ve heard that phrase a lot and to be totally honest it’s one of those terms where I don’t have much at all of a clear idea of what it means, but I still use it once in a while because I’ve heard other people use it. If pressed, and trying to press myself here to get clear, I take the term to refer to various things. (more…)

And what in the hell are they anyway? Been a long standing interest of mine, mostly as something I get annoyed about, and it took me way too long to make the distinction between intellectuals and academics. Some recent blog posts on the subject that you good people (both of you) might want to read. First, Duncan’s typology of the role of left intellectuals. Second, these three posts about, in a sense, the degree to which it makes to sense to call some recent academic theoretical and literary writing “left” in a meaningful sense (as opposed, perhaps, to calling it ‘fellow traveler’ writing). Aside from my agreement with the gist of the posts (in all fairness I’ve not read the books in question so I should reserve final judgment, but the spirit of the posts seems to me in line with what Jasper in the discussion here called my vigorous skepticism - perhaps my own version of the despair discussed in the above posts? - on these matters), I think these posts are worth reading for the writing alone.

I stumbled onto this and the quoted bit really spoke to my experiences: (more…)

The same as my line on more or less everything - a rigorously Marxist one.

The English write Jeremy Bentham used the phrase once (I believe he actually said “upon” and not “on” but whatever). He wasn’t talking about The Coming Insurrection but he could have been. That’s the title of a whack job piece of what I recently heard aptly described as lifestyle communism - little different from lifestyle anarchism except in the resources it (ab)uses, calling to mind Paul Mattick’s suggestion that Marxism might be the last refuge of the bourgeoisie (most notably the petit bourgeoisie, or upper strata cultural producers who aspire to petit bourgeois [qua celebrity] status). Here’s a good review of why the book is crap. (more…)

Funding-wise I mean. This was implied in some of my remarks in the discussion on research funding in the comments on this earlier post. I wonder, are there any major differences between substantive arguments and values that add up to something along the lines of “fund the National Endowment for the Arts” and “fund research by academics in the humanities”? I mean with the NEA parallel specifically funding for artists and artistic production, and by the humanities I mean to exclude things like medical advances, faster microchips, cleaner technology, and social stuff like improved counseling practice for trauma survivors, more effective teaching of reading, and so on - stuff with a clear and relatively short term and obvious economic or social welfare impact.

Hmm. A wrinkle… I realize that I’m assuming that there is no difference between some scholarly research and artistic products. I don’t mean to argue here that this is true for *all* scholarly research (though that’s my inclination, or close to it); I think it’s clear that *some* scholarly research is not different from art in important ways. I suppose then I’ve probably answered my own question: for that work in the humanities that is not different in important ways from art then there could be no real and honest important difference in the justification for that work in the humanities. So I have to extend my claim further. Assuming that some work in the humanities is different from art, what (or when?) is different about justification for funding that work and funding artistic production?

That’s another term I was excited about when I started this blog. I mention the term here and there but haven’t posted on it. One of my posts (on Agamben and Multitude) is from a badly written old paper that had a discusison of specific intellectuals in it. I’ll have to see if I still have a copy of the whole thing, I’ve changed computers a few time I may have lost it. In any case, Massimo has a post on Foucault and specific intellectuals that’s quite good here, that’s what made me think of this.

(Note to self, might be a bit more notes worth reviewing in the old journal pre-WITH.)

Via Angela, I found edu-factory.org, which contains the following statement (more…)