Intellectuality

My thoughts to one [jungesam] from my GrinnellPlan about a quote by Chomsky, in reverse chronological order, seperated by my addressing him. Achieved here for my convenience.


[jungesam] I like what you said. I think this conversation, in comparison to the typical plan "political" discussions, is "progressing" very nicely (heh heh).

First, I agree with what you described as the opposition between the object of texts as discursive objects and objects as "ts existence as real set of dynamics and problems operating in the material world". But, I'm not sure that Chomsky is speaking with this distinction in mind. He seems to be more concerned with the form of the theories as understandable, and thereby, useful, which is not totally unrelated, yet not taking up the exact point that you are. Most importantly, (I can't check at the moment because the site is down) I don't think he ever used the word "political", which you have used as the core of your point and that I believe is key to the actual problem (not Chomsky's issue, I'll try and distinguish between the two).

Second, just because this is irking me although it may not be very important, the whole "French School" thing is a little hard to follow. Chomsky (and us by extension) have included Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan, and Sartre in the same "school" although the only thing they all have in common is that they are French, and perhaps that Americans all "look to the east" in the same direction. I think Chomsky is thinking about all of them together, but now that we are talking about "politics" I don't think that we are. This is part of the reason I think you and Chomsky are making different points. I don't think we have to argue that Lacan is a-political, and I think Sartre's political contradictions are pretty obvious. So from now on I'm going to try to use the names of who I am actually referring to, because I'm going to try and think about the actual connections between writing and politics, which we've already said occurs fairly close to the personal level, and not on the level of philosophical nationality.

Now, about politics and academics. Certainly it seems that at face value, the actual realm of politics is divorced from academics. In your example (whether historical or not), the intellectuals bicker about minor points of the theoretical background, while the real politics is going down in the streets. This is certainly a problem, especially once the movement ends, and then workers end up without jobs or dead and the academics get to have nice careers "analyzing" what went wrong. Certainly there is no class consciousness in that relationship, we can see that right off.

The problem, as I see it, is the problem itself. When we start talking about who/what is political and who/what isn't (as anyone who is concerned with actually having political "consequence" will undoubtably start to talk or think about) being "political" has become, in a manner of speaking, academic. This is part of the reason I posted those graffittos from 1968. I personally like the Situationists (and I think you do too) because they understand some of the inherent contradictions in human life, and embrace them. "Culture is the inversion of life," "It is forbidden to forbid," "Read less, live more," (ironically, written) and couldn't we add "I don't respect the idea of respect?" Haha. Part of the "intellectual" struggle of '68 is trying to figure out "what" exactly was the politics behind the movement, but it is near impossible. I don't want to overly romanticize it, but is this real politics then, that which cannot be pinned down as politics? If it is, then real politics failed. If it wasn't, does that mean that real politics won? Or have we yet to see "real politics"? Will we know it when we do? How will we know? Will we read about it in book? on walls?

While trying to figure out exactly how to assert ourselves in this crazy world, and try to make things better for ourselves and for everyone we know and for everyone we don't, I feel like we just have to get along as best as we can. I really liked what [glynnsea] said, and I don't think he is going about it all wrong. I think Sean is going about it as well as anyone can. He's doing something he thinks is important, and something that is challenging, and along the way he gathers inspiration from many things, one among them being books. I'm getting a degree in philosophy, not because I want the degree, but because I hope that it will help me help others in the same way I was helped by others. Hopefully by teaching or by generally working to make philosophy (more) accessible to others, someone can become awakened to the issue of the world in the same way I was.

But the philosophy is the point, not my own personal motivation. So, if we can't figure out what is political without some academic discussion, how could we decide whether or not academic discussion is political without academic discussion From this I would conclude that as contradictory as it sounds sometimes, politics is inherently intellectual. Of course the situationists would disagree, and I love them for it, but even a rejection of academics is academic. The only thing that could be completely unacademic would be alogical. Which is possible, and I think plausible, but I can only imagine that happening during acts of sheer anger, love, violence, sex, or other sorts of "affective" "unconscious" experience like drug use, etc. Again, that situationist sort of theme. But when we are not doing those things, all we have is "acadmeics," or logic and discourse.

All of this, by the way, I am grabbing from post-structural philosophy (especially Deleuze and Foucault) and my own musings thereupon. Hence I think that at least these thoughts that I am thinking now have some sort of relevance towards the "political" at least in the process of definition.

Not that my use of philosophy (specifically these authors) in anyway excuses them outright from their political failings. "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" has not solved the problem of capitalism or of schizophrenia, and many people have written about why. In addition, there may be issues that the text doesn't address fully, like the sexual issues that Braidotti brings up in her work. But does this mean that there is something wrong with academics, or these academics in particular? I don't really think so, other then the fact that they are not as perfect as some other "disciples" of them would like to believe. All it means to me is that we have to continue to use our powers of philosophy (the fundamentals that people like Foucualt and Deleuze teach us) in order to continue to refine our notion of the political and the actual political, "real set of dynamics and problems operating in the material world," so that whatever we are doing, we are doing it as best as we can.

Now, if Chomsky or anyone else thinks that certain authors some how fundamentally fail in this ability, it seems to me that either: 1) the person has read and understood the text and has disagreements with it that can be dealt with in discourse and action the way we deal with any other disagreements in the world 2) the person has not understood the text and is rejecting it superficially on that basis. This is the same sort of logic that sounds to me alot like when someone says, "I don't get ____ culture, it just seems so different from my own, it must be useless" (e.g. "I think rap music is stupid and incomprehensible and violent"), in other words, using a superficial disagreement as grounds for full dismissal and proof of cultural superiority. I think that you, [jungesam], are the first case, and that's why we're having a good conversation about it. On the other hand, I don't think Chomsky is willing or able to have a conversation about it, and that is why he fits into the latter case.






Because I have been discussing politics and academics, and because it is close to May, and mostly because the French youth won on the labor law, I am posting my favorites from an archive of graffitti compiled during May 1968. I stole it from the wikipedia article about May '68.

Lisez moins, vivez plus.
Read less, live more.

L'ennui est contre-r�volutionnaire.
Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

Pas de repl�trage, la structure est pourrie.
No replastering, the structure is rotten.

Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde o� la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'�change contre le risque de mourir d'ennui.
We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom.

Ceux qui font les r�volutions � moiti� ne font que se creuser un tombeau.
Those who make revolutions by halves do but dig themselves a grave.

On ne revendiquera rien, on ne demandera rien. On prendra, on occupera.
We will claim nothing, we will ask for nothing. We will take, we will occupy.

Plebiscite : qu'on dise oui qu'on dise non il fait de nous des cons.
Plebiscite: Whether we say yes or no, it makes chumps of us.

Depuis 1936 j'ai lutt� pour les augmentations de salaire. Mon p�re avant moi a lutt� pour les augmentations de salaire. Maintenant j'ai une t�l�, un frigo, une VW. Et cependant j'ai v�cu toujours la vie d'un con. Ne n�gociez pas avec les patrons. Abolissez-les.
Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life I've been a chump. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.

Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui.
The boss needs you, you don't need him.

Travailleur: Tu as 25 ans mais ton syndicat est de l'autre si�cle.
Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century.

Veuillez laisser le Parti communiste aussi net en en sortant que vous voudriez le trouver en y entrant.
Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving as you would like to find it on entering.

Je suis marxiste tendance Groucho.
I am a Marxist of the Groucho tendency.

Soyez r�alistes, demandez l'impossible.
Be realistic, ask for the impossible.

On ach�te ton bonheur. Vole-le.
Your happiness is being bought. Steal it.

Sous les pav�s, la plage !
Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!

Ni Dieu ni ma�tre !
Neither God nor master!

Soyons cruels !
Let us be cruel!

� bas la charogne stalinienne ! � bas les groupuscules r�cup�rateurs !
Down with the Stalinist carcass! Down with the recuperator cells!

Vivre sans temps mort - jouir sans entraves
Live without dead time [ie. time of boredom, time at work] - enjoy without chains.

Il est interdit d'interdire.
It is forbidden to forbid.

Et cependant tout le monde veut respirer et personne ne peut respirer et beaucoup disent " nous respirerons plus tard. " Et la plupart ne meurent pas car ils sont d�j� morts.
Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can breathe and many say, "We will breathe later." And most of them don't die because they are already dead.

Dans une soci�t� qui a aboli toute aventure, la seule aventure qui reste est celle d�abolir la soci�t�.
In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society.

L��mancipation de l�homme sera totale ou ne sera pas.
The liberation of humanity will be total or it will not be.

La r�volution est incroyable parce que vraie.
The revolution is incredible because it�s real.

Je suis venu. J�ai vu. J�ai cru.
I came. I saw. I believed.

Cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derri�re toi !
Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!

Il est douloureux de subir les chefs, il est encore plus b�te de les choisir.
It�s painful to submit to our bosses; it�s even stupider to pick them.

Un seul week-end non r�volutionnaire est infiniment plus sanglant qu�un mois de r�volution permanente.
A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of permanent revolution.

Le bonheur est une id�e neuve.
Happiness is a new idea.

La culture est l�inversion de la vie.
Culture is the inversion of life.

La po�sie est dans la rue.
Poetry is in the street.

L�art est mort, ne consommez pas son cadavre.
Art is dead, don�t consume its corpse.

L�alcool tue. Prenez du L.S.D.
Alcohol kills. Take LSD.

Debout les damn�s de l�Universit�.
Arise, wretched of the University.

Je t�aime! Oh! dites-le avec des pav�s!
I love you! Oh, say it with cobblestones!

Camarades, l�amour se fait aussi en Sc. Po, pas seulement aux champs.
Comrades, love is being made in the Sciences Po [a prestigious academic institution] too, not just in the fields.

Travailleurs de tous les pays, amusez-vous!
Workers of the world, have fun!

Pouvoir � l'Imagination
Power to imagination.


[jungesam] In addition to the above and below, I learned today that Foucault joined students in throwing rocks at police during the student occupations in 68.


[jungesam] The full text of it is here. Its not incredibly interesting, the few paragraphs I had posted were pretty representative.

[jungesam] No big diagreement on my part, just a few things to clear up. First, I think the whole issue is overshadowed by the reification in Chomsky's words (and the general academic discourse) of this whole "author", "text", "theory" thing. How can someone say that a "theory" refuses to step into the political realm? A theory is nothing but an abstraction of discourse: an object with an ideal reflection within subjects. Of course discourse is going to consist of people sitting around and talking and writing, that's what discourse is. Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Merleau-Ponty were all fairly political as people in 60s and 70s France (the end result of those politics is debatable, but they were at least doing something. Lacan is obviously another story, and a quite interesting one is his own overtly non-political and reactionary way.) Now their philosophy has been taken as "theory" by other persons who are not in the least interested in doing anything political other than a "political" discourse. So to blame a book or a theory is just reifying the idea that somehow politics can be attributed to an object, which is precisely the opposite of what I take the "real" politics that most people talk about to be. You can blame Brian Massumi for not using Deleuze's books in a political way, or blame Zizek for creating a false politics by way of Lacan, but any such thing as "theory" cannot be "politics" by definiton. Whether or not a writer can be political by writing is another question, both for theory and politics. Do you see what I mean? I think this is a real problem for any sort of "material" politics, because it is so easy slip into idealism while trying to simultaneously keeping track of the material and ideal (in this sense I mean in the realm of ideas) factors of life. Is politics supposed to be of ideas, or objects? It seems like Chomsky wants text to be pieces of writing, or objects, and also be have within them ideals capable of the activities of subjects, without considering the intermediary contexts and discourses of multiple people, texts, etc. that really form the strata between object and subjective action.

Second, which I think follows directly from this, it is some sort of strange magical (a fetish?) process which allows a subject to represent an object (in this case, a text) to his/herself and somehow find a causal chain of "success" that becomes a positive consequence. What I mean is any sort of logic that would let us judge that a "text" has or has not somehow become "successful in the face of real world problems". Like you wisely noted, most actually political movements' "philosophy" comes from "the spontaneous philosophy of the participants". (Which I think Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard discovered in their own experience, and incorporated into their work. Whether this makes their work poltical or not is another story...) So if "grand narratives" are no longer revelant to politics or never were, then why are we castigating books for being books or for being all-too-human? What does Chomsky expect books to be such that certain books are failing his standard? How can he treat a book as both an object which people interact with and as a ideal that should be held against standards of judgment? It seems silly to expect the corpus of "theory" surrounding the name of Derrida, which finds itself largely synonymous with "literary theory" to somehow "get out of the text." So why would we expect any other book to get up and march to the picket line of its own volition, let alone rally together the students or workers or whoever and make them "political". Who can make another human be "political"? Who can tell someone what a book "means"? Isn't that one's own responsibility?

After going through these arugments in my mind, I can only think of two possible conclusions that Chomsky could be accomplishing in this strange circular reasoning. Since a book or theory cannot be political, or have "consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies," his criticism could be that the certain people who tend to be involved with certain areas of study, certain texts, and certain discourses founded in dead authors names are ineffectual and wasting their time and pursuits. The other possible criticism I could read here is that the texts, discourse, and people involved are of such poor quality or substance as to make effectual and good use of intellectual time impossible. While the first is certainly possible, yet sort of progressive empty (he chooses to ignore rather than engage the current intellectuals by critiquing only people who are dead) the second seems to be either unreasonably cruel and heavy-handed for someone who also claims to not understand what he the theory he is dealing with, or simply a judgment call on theory as theory. If he is simply saying that these theories are not good theories because of their poor quality as theory, then he is just saying, "I don't like that author, instead I like these authors." Which, yeah, we all say and is fine (I don't read linguistics) but I hardly think that this is a relevant critique because he is not meeting the theory on its own terms.

I'm going to stop here. I just think he doesn't really bring anything to the table because it begins with a sort of screwy premise (a contradictory theoretical relationship between authors, texts, discourse, and effectiveness), conducts itself through a sketchy argument (something is unsuccessful because it lacks clear standards of success that I have already created, and it has no clear standards because it is unsuccessful) and ends up at a substance-less conclusion (the "theory" is deemed unsuccessful as he is unable to engage it in a clear way, all because he has defined theory in a contradictory way that is unable to be clearly engaged). Furthermore, one could agree with this end conclusion, no matter how specious it is, but what does one do in response? Stop reading French people and read Chomsky or his friends? Stop reading all together? Or just continue trying to read in a critical and thoughtful manner, considering an idea to be only an idea and a book to be only a book, like I was doing before I read that Chomsky statement?

I think what you said about the revolutionary/political content of current French thought is interesting and a good point that people involved with the discourse rarely think about. However, one would have to have read and understood those texts for what they are (only texts) before one could start talking about that issue. I don't think Chomsky even makes it out of the gate.

[jungesam][campbel2] I think what Chomsky said is something that has to be said, but thus being said it is not all that more interesting than anything that has been said to which he is saying it.

Over-complicated? Yeah.

Elitism is certainly an issue. But the counter issue is qualification. This is something I've gone back and forth about during my almost complete first year of graduate education. I still support the idea of higher education and degree status because of people like Gene Ray. There needs to be a way to figure out if people are presenting themselves and their opinions in a helpful manner at all, and to seperate the wheat from the chaff. But this seems to have a unfortunate consequence of becoming a club rather than a specialized discipline.

But I disagree about what Chomsky says about having things explained in an easy way. I think that is pretty much bullshit, and a problem of our consumer culture that wants everything packaged for consumption. If you want ideas that are packaged for mass use, then become an evangelical Christian or a marketing specialist, because that is the current paramount of ideas constructed for easy understanding and "viral" dissemination. The wonders of "language" do not give us the ability to make things equivicably simple and understandable. I don't know if that idea itself could be any simpler and understandable. If Chomsky doesn't expect to understand Neutrino physics, why does he think that the functioning of the unconscious or society or politics could be any simpler?

Of course, if you are going to speak about something obscure, and to do so you find it necessary to speak in an obscure manner, you should be prepared for most people to ignore you or misunderstand you. As well, you should be held to a higher standard, of either research or results of such research and so-called "theories", and not be given a free reign to word-vomit your way to 3 published books a year. This is why I find Zizek obnoxious.

I have found that the understanding of a text is quite a process in itself, fairly divorced from the writing of a text. So if one is going to dive into something quite difficult, say Deleuze, Lacan, or Derrida, the process by which one understands the text and what they end up with it is probably going to be fairly different than what the author intended. It will most likely be a mixture of what the reader wanted to extract from the text and the current discourse surround that "author" (when the author is dead the persona of the author ends up becoming a characterization or a genre rather than an actual person, Lacan is a excellent example, and Deleuze is quickly becoming similar). That being said, when one picks up a text of, say, Derrida for the first time, they are probably going to have to rely on other secondary-work by others to "get into" the flow of the terms, ideas, etc. If the text is somewhat like Derrida, that means that alot of the secondary texts that add to the general philosophical "persona" or characterization of Derrida's thought, forming a general "theory" that one will have to be accustom to. If the secondary work, like that of Derrida, is fairly incomprenhisble in an attempt to be "deep" then the reading that one will take is that this "theory" is stupid, pretensious, and ultimately not worth the trouble. At this point, it might not be worth it.

But one has to remember is that it is just a book, filled with sentences, made up of words. I think this what Chomsky (and alot of other people) miss. There is no "theory" unless one is picking up the book with that in mind. This is why I am glad I first started reading Deleuze with no "formal" introduction to his work, and very few encounters with other texts. This way, I was able to find the great parts that I could interpret myself, and when I finally got around to seeing what the "theory" of Deleuze was known to be, I was disgusted with the ease that people made light of his work.

A "theory" is not complicated, it is bullshit. Much like both the "theory" of evolution and intelligent design. Both are vague abstractions of an entire wealth of wisdom that are not alternatives to each other at all. The are both very diverse and have had much evolution over the course of their history that have actually very little to do with either Darwin or the Bible (the supposed canonical "texts" which provide the "truth" of the theories), and to think of them as alternative "theories" is to fall into a sort of bullshit politics that is substantiated by soundbytes and headlines.

Where I think that this leaves us is that what you get out of any "text", "theory", or "idea" is fairly contingent on what you put into it. I have ranted before about how Lacan is almost incomprehensible. I think what I said was something like "he is so obscure as to make his thought mean just about anything one wants". Which is fairly true, yet no reason to dispose of him. This is precisely the same as "history", language, or anything else. There are rought indicators which you can use to direct your argumentation in a certain direction or form, but in the end one's creativity will largely determine what the "conclusions" are.

So complicated ideas are complicated, unless you drastically simplify them, and then they will be simple ideas. Haven't we all figured this out before? I feel like this is one of the lagging lessons of post-modernism that people just can't seem to except, and thus why we haven't left post-modernism behind. Ideas are just ideas, no more no less. Texts are text, theories are ideas lined upon in points, axes, or fields. A narrative is story with characters and action and a timeline. Truth is what we say it is. Success is dependent upon the conditions of "success". Why does Chomsky have such a hard time with this? Why do any of us? It doesn't stymie thought unless one needs thought to be dependent on texts being "works," theories being "movements," narratives being "history," and truth being True.

The reason that I read the "elite, cult of postmodernism" is because I can get stuff out of it and apply it in ways I find useful. If I didn't, I wouldn't read it. If you want it explained to you I would love to help, but you are going to have to do the comprehension on your own. I can't and won't make difficult things hard for someone's own gradification, just so they can say they "get it". This is why there are different "theories" in philosophy and "disciplines" in academics, because first of all, there are way too many of us doing this for any one of us to read and understand it all, and second because if there was a unified theory, we would all be saying precisely the same thing, and that would be useless, never mind impossible.