Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 16:24:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Rita Raley <raley-AT-humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Re: academic responsibility



Timothy Burke writes:
> 
> But slap my head and call me Habermas, I actually still believe that not
> all knowledges are created equal and not all knowledges are equivalent.
> There are times--many times--when academic forms of knowledge produce
> something approximately *true*, discover something that other "situated
> knowledges" not only don't know, but can't know. There are times where
> there should be hierarchies of knowledge, because one of them is accurate
> and the others aren't. I think we absolutely musn't reduce knowledge to
> purely a side effect of one's situation or one's perspective. Otherwise,
> why isn't the knowledge of some creepozoid World Banker as good as anyone
> else's?

OK-Habermas. (feels like an insult somehow :) )  Well I feel compelled to 
respond to this because it's along the lines of what I've been thinking 
about lately--academia and academics maintaining a kind of "cultural 
capital," as John Guillory would use the term, access to which is 
necessarily limited.  In terms of the canon, which is his focus, Guillory 
would say that all thsi talk of "opening up" means nothing if all of 
these underrepresented "groups" do not have the same kind of access to 
the forms and means of cultural production.  I think this may easily be 
applied to the academy in the same terms, but what it may lead to 
answering Timothy's question ("What good are we exactly?") by saying, "well, 
not much exactly."  Let me quote a few passages from Gramsci's "The 
Intellectuals" (from the _Prison Notebooks_) to address this problem in 
slightly different terms:  

"All men are intellectuals, one could therefore, say: but not all men have
in society the function of intellectuals...There is no human activity from
which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber
cannot be separated from homo sapiens." (p. 9)

Of course, then one could talk about the role and function of "organic 
intellectuals," as Spivak does in her introduction to Mahasweta Devi's 
_Imaginary Maps_ and then we could retain the notion of guardians I 
suppose.  
Well, there is more to be said about this obviously--just trying to 
reinstate the power of the critique of "vanguardism."

Rita R.





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