Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 18:37:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: "M.A. King" <kingma-AT-mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca>
Subject: Bashing academia


On Sun, 14 Jun 1998, Richard Scott wrote:

> you wrote:
> Spending too
> > much time
> > vaguely thinking, or writing a 'thesis' or whatever, that isn't
> > joyful, is a
> > killer - it's bad for the soul. It's a pathological state. 

Everything that isn't joyful is bad for the soul?  I'm finishing up my
M.A. thesis these days ... there haven't been many moments along the way
that I would call "joyful", but I hardly think that it's been
"pathological", either.  I like what Foucault has to say on this topic:
"The 'essay'--which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in
the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not [and this is the hard
part, the part which, I readily concede, is made extraordinarily
difficult by the way universities work] as the simplistic appropriation of
others for the purpose of communication--is the living substance of
philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in
times past, i.e., an 'ascesis,' *askesis*, an exercise of oneself in the
activity of thought" (_The Use of Pleasure_).

> I've said this several times
> before on the list in different ways - but it seems to me the focus here is
> often too much bound up with the academic language of philosophy. By
> contrast this Feldenkrais/acupuncture/castanada line is a blast of fresh air

Chacun a son gout, non?  Anyway, bashing academia on this list is about as
interesting as bashing capitalism in alt.politics.socialism.trotsky.
Every once in a while, someone feels the need to make a pledge of
allegiance ... or non-allegiance, as the case may be.

> Lets face it most PhD students are fucking nutcases - frowning  thinkers
> driven more by fear than love it seems to me. (and I was just the same when
> I was one.) After years out of the system I've been working in a University
> again for a couple of years and I find the state of people kind of
> shocking - especially the professors who've been there for 20/30 years;
> faces and bodies formed from sadness, tensions and unfulfillment. is that
> thinking? is that knowledge. Its certainly not what D&G are about to me.
> Lets get out of the Library - get some fresh air, feel the body tingling
> with life - now that's thinking!

You know, I'm used to hearing this kind of thing from neocons who would
like to make everyone, including us academics, do something *useful* with
our lives.... But it's not very D/Gian, is it?  One of the phrases that
sticks in my mind from dealing with _AO_ is:  "Yes, and that too."
Always affirmation, never negation.  Lose the little fascisms in our
heads ... don't suppose that everyone can be made as well-adjusted as you,
or that it's a good idea to try to make everyone so well-adjusted.  

And by the way, through two universities, I've never met any of these
crumpled, pathetic old tenurees that I keep hearing about.  That seems to
me one of those anti-academic myths--along with the myth of the "dead
wood" tenuree--which it has become all too easy to repeat....

----Matthew A. King------Department of Philosophy------McMaster University----
     "The border is often narrow between a permanent temptation to commit
     suicide and the birth of a certain form of political consciousness."
-----------------------------(Michel Foucault)--------------------------------