From: "Alexander Patterson" <nou-AT-clnet.cz>
Subject: PKF: PKF in 1994 on a wakeup call for intellectuals
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 10:00:01 +0200


>From Paul K. Feyerabend in a call for papers in 1994 for the Journal Common
Knowledge:

*Reading articles about deconstruction, correlations in quantum mechanics,
or the terrible curse of irrationalism, I frequently ask myself: "What has
this got to do with what I just saw or heard about people dying from
government-imposed sickness in the Sudan, cholera in Peru, suppression in
Iraq and Israel, and unkindness to refugees in Austria, Switzerland, and
other 'civilized' countries? And would it not be excellent to remind these
sublime minds from time to time of the really unpleasant future of the
world in which they live and about which they claim to have knowledge?"

*Asking this question does does not mean giving up intellectualism; Fanon
did not. What it means is a sign in every issue of Common Knowledge
that ---over ideas, over narrow intellectual issues---our fellow human
beings have not been forgotten. Words are weak in this respect; human
concern too often evaporates in "humanitarianism," in humanitarian
intellectualism. I call for photographs and other pictorial work that
remind intellectuals of disease, starvation, the ravages of war, and the
ruthless exploitation of the environment for the sake of luxury and
"progress."*

PKF added that we need a constant wake up call.

PKF is right. And people should make notational sentences -  in diaries or
journals or on matchboxes or whatever - just so long as they store them
away safely someplace - of
every such injustice they hear about or see or read (within practical
limits), on television or
anywhere else. As: "The UNHCR´s hypocritical dealing with the Vietnamese
refugees in Hong Kong. Month x, 1997." But is intellectualism really not
dead as a result? It could be, and the only fully justified acts of
creation and observation and thesis etc would be in the areas of fable
writing, and of legal-bound document writing, of documents which strive for
a conscious and irrefutable base in the human legal system. These may be
the only honest options. I would like to quote here from the first
paragraph of the Forward, by John, Patrick, and Gregory Hemingway,  to The
Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - The Finca Vigía Edition: "When
Papa and Marty first rented in 1940 the Finca Vigía which was to be his
home for the next twenty-two years until his death, there was still a
country on the south side. This country no longer exists. It was not done
in by the middle-class real estate developers like Chekhov´s cherry
orchard, which might have been its fate in Puerto Rico and Cuba without the
Castro revolution, but by the startling growth of the population of poor
people and their shack housing which is such a feature of all the Greater
Antilles, no matter what their political persuasion."

Feyerabends appeal to "intellectuals" in his call for papers and the first
paragraph of the
Forward, by John, Patrick, and Gregory Hemingway,  to The
Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - The Finca Vigía Edition, have
something in common: They do not abuse language, in fact they treat it well
and use it with the a simplue use of a complex and rich vocabulary and the
emphases which are
common to it. That is probably just as great an appeal to certain
intellectuals, and does more good for the oppressed than abuses of language
which have content-claims to be supporting the oppressed.
What caught my eye was the in the Forward by the Hemingway brothers was the
"no matter what their political persuasion." This is subtlety which is
worth its weight in gold.















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