Tuesday, February 08, 2005
(3:52 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Institutionalization of Knowledge
As an initial aside, I wish that I were a tenured professor of Middle Eastern Studies and an oracle for the blogosphere, so that I could waste my fucking time picking a fight with Jonah Fucking Goldberg. The guy's a douche-fuck, Dr. Cole -- let's get back to the Kurds and Shiites. [I'd also like to add, at the beginning of my proof-reading run -- damn, this is long.]My main point regards Adam Robinson's latest post for the Blog Formerly Known as Chief Jason. (Normally people would resent one of their writers moonlighting for another site, but personally, I'm glad that he wrote the post over there, so that I don't feel like an asshole commenting on it at length. Plus, we here at The Weblog are radical critics of the regime of property and all its associated mental apparatus, especially the idea that Adam is "my" writer, writing for "my" site. Such patriarchal notions must be rigorously expelled in building a truly open community of mutual love.) Here are the first two paragraphs:
I love the way Frankenstein depicts intellectual life. Victor is an ambitious and talented student who seems to spend his time toting a stack of books around and taking in a few lectures anytime they’d strike his fancy. “Oh,” he’d say to himself as he passed a bulletin board in the quad, “Professor Paddlebottom is speaking on neuroscience at noon. I’ll have just enough time to sit in before we discuss that new Hegel pamphlet at tea.”You should, of course, read the whole thing, but if you don't like the inconvenience of following links, Adam basically feels anti-intellectual -- both inadequately educated and inadequately motivated to do anything about it -- and isn't taking advantage of the opportunities afforded him in Milwaukee. I'd like to follow up on his point about universities without structure, however. (I will not speak of The University Without Condition. We had a few good sessions, particularly the ones on Benjamin and Derrida, and it produced arguably one of my best posts ever. But it eventually died. I'm not here to discuss the reasons or to propose that we create it anew -- although in a way, The Weblog's new more-open structure and such events as St. Paul Week have shown tremendous potential to develop into something like what we originally envisioned the University to be.)
Is that how school used to be? Nowadays it seems my grad school chums keep busy reading dense books and then going to class twice a week, a routine that isn’t nearly as enticing as Victor’s. They’re reading enviably alright, and certainly having lively conversations in the taverns, but how much livelier would the intellectual climate be if universities were completely without structure?
I'd imagine that in Milwaukee there are many "failed" academics -- people who are either ABD and trailing off or else finished with their PhD and unable to find suitable employment. Yes, the hierarchies of privileged knowledge are inherently oppressive, but let's say, tentatively, that these people know stuff. They know stuff that people in general (for instance, them) are interested in on a not-for-profit basis, for reasons of passion, obsession, etc. They hoped to find a job at the end of it, and were made to feel like failures because they didn't do so. Many of them are likely embittered by their experience and want to turn their back on the whole affair -- thus their knowledge goes to waste.
My question, though, is why these people can't be giving public lectures in their living rooms. Why can't they run informal seminars at the local Denny's? Imagine it: someone with a freshly minted PhD from Duke, sitting in the big corner table in the smoking section, passing out a reading list for a seminar on Friendship, or on Franz Kafka, or on Messianism, or on Smoking. I mean, why not? I've spent some time watching TV lately, and I assure you: people can definitely afford to cut into any time they're spending on TV. That's a few hours a week up front, more than enough time to read one of Montaigne's essays and then go talk about it for a few hours.
It's a free country; people can do stuff like that, right? Yeah, but they never do, not that I've ever heard of -- because all knowledge has been institutionalized. I mean that in both senses: locked away and declared to be insane. There's a reason that the MLA, the "craziest" sector of academia, is always made to stand in for the whole. And everyone's clamoring to get in, even though they know deep in their heart that they're more than likely barely going to be able to find enough work to live on. So why not just take subsistence-level work and spend the rest of your time producing knowledge and hanging out with others doing the same? After all, it's always been somewhat scandalous that the radical critics of bourgeois society have nice, tenured middle-class jobs (or sometimes better than that). Why not -- again, I don't know, I'm not an expert on such matters -- actually live a counter-cultural lifestyle while spreading your counter-cultural ideas? "Practice what you preach?"
It's called downward social mobility, folks, and if we really, really believe that the world is headed for disaster and that our society is morally bankrupt and that everything about the West is subject to radical critique -- then let's do something, right? I mean, sure, if you can play the system and get them to pay for you to study for five years or so, that's great. But after that -- you're not going to get a job anyway! Seriously. And half the time, if you get one, you're going to be stuck in the machine that churns out the kind of unimaginative people who ask, "When am I going to use this?"
Yes, oppressed minority people need education to get ahead and pull their communities out of poverty -- but there are more than enough people who can do that. You, my child, you could be doing something different. Get your PhD in comparative literature, get your stupidly long CV under your belt -- and squander it on purpose. Move in, I don't know, with a married couple. Or a mixed-gender collective. Share your bananas and your orange juice and your toilet paper. If you want, come up with some kind of radical free love thing -- that kind of shit personally scares me to death, but to each his own. In any case, you have your house, and maybe you have a group of people who meets periodically to discuss the matters that matter -- friendship, smoking, the phenomenology of tattoos, what it means that all that shit went down in the 60s or that Cantor came up with set theory, or you could also talk about who keeps taking all the bananas or who doesn't change the toilet paper roll or how the "all-organic" people can get along with the "gas station hot dog" people.
And when the terrorists came and killed us all, when the nuclear bombs started going off in every major metro area, you and your little group of failures would be irrefutable evidence that a different way of living was possible. Not easy, not always smooth, but possible. A life of the mind, a life of mutual sharing, a life filled with intense self-chosen relationships, a life of simplicity -- don't we all feel like that's the life worth living? And instead a bunch of people got together and created capitalism, and created nuclear bombs, and created the prison system. "They are without excuse."
Yes, of course, the thought of actually doing that stuff scares me to death too. But it's possible to do, if you can get a good core group together, ten to twenty people, and maybe rotate out now and then. In fact, I've arguably seen it done, or start to be done, in the unlikeliest of places: Bradley, Illinois. I've also seen something like that happening or starting to happen in Milwaukee. If Olivet hadn't bought my damn house, I think it could have started to happen in Bourbonnais, a block away from what, for many of my readers, remains a potent symbol of everything that is wrong with our society. It's not impossible. It's certainly less secure than the normal middle class lifestyle, but we all think that Bush is trying to make middle-classhood impossible anyway. Even in shitty Kankakee County, where everyone is so bored and so sure that "there's nothing there," there is still, to this very day, a huge untapped potential.
Anthony, what was that about starting a reading group?
