Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 10:17:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: M-I: Lingua Franca kicks ass Does anybody not have a subscription to Lingua Franca? Shame on you. Get one right now--you don't know what you are missing. In the latest issue, you will be both entertained and amused by: 1) An account of how a student revolt at the New School Graduate Faculty sought to win tenure for a popular black female professor from the Caribbean as a step toward affirmative action. This was resisted by the faculty and administration who thought her credentials somewhat lacking. What makes this story unlike the usual incident is that a number of the opposing camp were socialists while the professor and her most ardent supporters were post-Marxists who adopted a belligerent stance not unlike our recent Wild Buffalo visitation. 2) A critique of an article that appeared in Social Text some years back that made the case that the Museum of Natural History was a bastion of white, racist, capitalist values. This argument extrapolated from the personal and political history of the creator of the African pavilion, who did have a career as a big game hunter in Africa. What the Social Text article left out was the fact that Museum also contributed much to the attack on the eugenics-based racism of the early part of the century. Franz Boas, who worked for the Museum, was largely responsible for fostering a more intelligent attitude toward race. The Lingua Franca article makes the point that the Social Text article is a product of a cultural studies methodology that puts society into the background. Instead of examining American society, it is content to study the "language" of the museum triptychs. Cultural studies can be influenced by the society-based paradigm of EP Thompson or Raymond Williams but it often owes more to the French poststructuralist approach which dwells on texts rather than the experiences of humanity. 3) A study of the "new historians" in Israel. These are people like Benny Morris who wrote an important book that showed that Palestinians were driven from the country in 1948 by the Zionist army rather than persuaded to leave by their leaders. These new historians are the first important challenge to the intellectual roots of Zionism. They are in some ways analogous to our own "revisionists" who emerged out of the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s and 60s under the tutelage of William Appleman Williams and others. 4) An article by our own Scott McLemee on Cornelius Castoriadis, a French socialist intellectual of Greek heritage who was the editor of the legendary "Socialism or Barbarism" journal that Lyotard was associated with at one time. This journal was influential on many of the young leaders of the 1968 student revolt, including Cohn-Bendit who cited Castoriadis's writings as his main intellectual influence. Castoriadis, besides being an important Marxist intellectual, was also a professional economist for bourgeois financial institutions who had a phenomenal gift for number-crunching. Among Castoriadis legion of admirers is the avant-garde jazz musician Ornette Coleman whose painting adorns the latest publication of Castoriadis's collected articles. This fact is a mind-blower and makes me want to read a biography of Ornette Coleman himself, an extraordinary musician who I heard perform at the Fillmore East in 1967 in a twin bill featuring John Coltrane as well. Coleman wore a lavender suit that night and tore the house down. After he finished, Coltrane tore it down again. Something else. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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