File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 108


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





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