Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 12:14:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Alexander Glage <glage-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: RE: academia








Well it certainly seems that we are having a hard time understanding
each other, Liano!  You seem to find my views slavish and
narrow-minded, I find yours often pompous and bratty (though of course
you find this to be a shallow misreading on my part--but then who
would ever admit to being either slavish or bratty!).  But in any
case, I still have a hard time understanding just what it is that you
are indignant about.  You basically say you just cannot bear being
told what to do, ever.  So when your professors expect you to learn
certain books and complete a certain amount of work *even when you
don't feel like it*, you become defiant. When you are asked to be able
to explain certain ideas/texts even though they might not bear
directly upon your own personal pursuits, you become offended.  I for
one do not find this to be something worth getting so upset about
(unless, of course, you really do have some jerk-off telling you that
no one who hasn't read Althusser should receive a Ph.D.).  If
anything, by being compelled to learn a tradition that doesn't seem to
chime with your own beliefs/work, yet which is "practiced" by
thousands of other people, you are simply put in a better position to
say *why* that tradition is problematic, and to communicate with those
thousands of others.  Learning the tradition of your professors (and
yes, actually doing what they ask of you--oh, unspeakable fate!) can't
hurt, I think; indeed, it will only help you in your quest to explain
just what it is about that tradition that you don't like.  Indeed, I
would definitely say that traditions are best transformed from
*within*, which is why writers like Blanchot, Levinas, Foucault,
Kristeva, Deleuze, Serres, Derrida, Irigaray, are so effective--not
because they ingore the tradition, but because they participate
directly within it (and I would say that there is definitely something
to the Derridean notion that those who believe they are really
"outside" the tradition are just sadly kidding themselves).  Moreover,
such participation will enable you to communicate with that many more
people (i.e., to participate in ever more shared intellectual
practices).  For those of us with this kind of goal--i.e., to
communicate with as many others as possible--there is not any great
tragedy about being compelled to read this book *now* as opposed to
later, or otherwise being called upon to exercise what we've learned,
since such practices do not discourage creative work, but simply put
us in a position to join a conversation that is much larger than us,
and hopefully to change it from within.  I agree with what M.A. King
said earlier, since I too do not know what a class or program would be
like that didn't place any such requirements on its students.  Yet
maybe Liano does?  I'm all ears.

I suppose I *would* say that the university is not, and probably never
will be, a place for *any* kind of learning whatsoever.  If ever I get
to a point where I no longer believe in a certain kind of scholarship
or in "jumping through hoops" (i.e., in actually complying with the
requirements of my department), but instead believed that, say, the
*only* true way to liberated thinking was by taking hallucinatory
drugs and reading Bataille and writing fragmentary and aphoristic
texts (and don't think I haven't contemplated that kind of
possibility), then I would have no more need of the university. 
*That* kind of learning, I think, is something better done in
expressly non-institutional communities, in communities of friends and
lovers, of wholly unregulated thought and the absence of any need to
care about public practices.  But that's not going to work in a
university--or in any institution.  (And indeed, throughout history
there have been groups formed which began to die the moment they
became too institution-like--look at the surrealist movement.)  I
guess I think that Liano needs to take a bit more of a pragmatic
view--it seems to me that for what he/she wants to do, there is not
only no need for classrooms or professors or degrees (i.e., for the
university), but there is a definite need to be *outside* those
things.  Everything Liano seems to want (e.g., not *ever* being told
to write or read anything) can be achieved and can flourish only
within non-institutional settings (i.e., in an environment without
*any* regulation whatsoever).  

I for one am happy with some regulation, because I am not afraid of
it, I do not think it will leave me brainwashed or unable to think
critically or creatively, because I am eager to learn about what other
people have found worthwhile, because I want to communicate with those
people, and because I genuniely *love* the kinds of things I am
typically called upon to learn.  If you haven't been able to love the
books you have been asked to read in the university, I am tempted to
say, then so much the worse for you.  Again, I sort of feel that my
perhaps naive contentment with the university is just the proper
desire of the student: that is, that you should want to read
*everything*, and that it hardly matters in which order you read it
(since you're going to read it all again and again anyway).  If
someone I admire puts a book in front of my face, and says "you've got
to read this, it's really worthwhile", I'd certainly do my best to
read it.  And in almost every instance, I think, I would learn a lot
from it.  And if in fact I disagree with it, then usually I've still
learned a lot, and would try my best to explain why.  Is this not what
the university is about?  After all, reading the books that are put
under our faces because we believe, prima facie, that they might teach
us something (since they seem to have taught millions of others
something) does not imply that we are bound to be brainwashed by them,
or that we will be rendered incapable of thinking critically about
them.  In fact, it's just the opposite.  By learning them, we can say
*exactly* what it is that we don't like.  And this is why we *want* to
read them, learn them.  That desire is no more problematic than the
prima facie desire to think "outside" the tradition.

Alexander









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