Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 13:24:42 -0400
Subject: Re: Fem what? -Reply


1. Somehow I never got Lisa's original post, and I seem to be missing parts
of her exchanges on the anthro thread. Do we have a system glitch?

2. My original reference was to one of those (very recent) obligatory list
attacks on post-modernism which went on about MLA papers on the feminine (or
was it the lesbian) phallus. I agree entirely with Lisa that there are real
issues, within the terms of gender relations and informed by psychoanalysis
and semiotics, that such papers could address. My point was that we tend to
be inflicted with the academic equivalent of ethnocentrism, in which we
assume that the most specialized and obtruse analysis within our own fields
is of relevance (precisely because we know that field in enough depth to
understand its significance), but that the parallel work in other fields
(which is always easy to ridicule precisely because it is only intelligible
within the terms of highly specialized knowledge) is held up to scorn. My
point was that highly specialized work on logic in academic philosophy had as
obscure an utility as analyses of the feminine phallus.

3. One of the things I have always valued about the best of the Marxian
tradition is its refusal to boxed into narrow academic disciplines, and its
broad, interdisciplinary swath. My prejudice is that the best thinking comes
>from a widely read, widely educated mind which refuses to be confined within
narrow parameters of a particular academic discipline. This is not an easy
enterprise, however, because the broader one's swath, the more difficult it
is to go into many subjects in the depth one wants. I have never read
Wittgenstein, and not because I don't think he is important, but because
there is a finite limit on what one can intellectually consume, and one tends
to read with some sense of utility. Too often the culture of the Marxism
lists replicates the culture of academia, and rather than encouraging each
other to step across the disciplinary lines, we lie in wait for ambush
waiting for the first sign of a misstep on our terrain.

4. Teaching high school has imposed a focus which forces me onto an
interdisciplinary terrain, and keeps me from giving free rein to specialized
studies within political theory. When I think of logic, I think of teaching a
young person that the assertion "Shelby Steele is a Uncle Tom", however
self-evident it may appear to her, is not a logical or convincing argument,
and helping them to develop the skills of developed reasoned, logical
arguments with supporting evidence to express their view of Shelby Steele.
That may be a far distance from the predicate calculus, but it seems a
helluva lot more important to me, especially given the level of political
discourse in this society. And it has forced me to be a great deal more
self-conscious about the form of my own arguments. If I took the time and
effort to go into the specialized academic work on philosophy, its relevance
would be a lot clearer to me.

5. Too much of the au courant attacks on post-modernism that have been made
on the Marxism lists strike me as indistinguishable from the Richard
Bernstein attacks on political correctness which populate the New York Times
Sunday Magazine -- he loves, too, to pick on MLA paper titles. I still find
myself surprised by the extent to which I am superfacially categorized as
post-modernist, anti-scientific, anti-rational, etc. in these discussions,
despite my many criticisms of the work which would be considered
post-modernist, simply because I chose to take it seriously and engage it.

Leo



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