Thank you! I mainly know Gouldner through Staloff—his books are out print and expensive, I don't currently have access to a proper research library, and I'm good at downloading but bad at reading pirated pdfs—but if he is as free with the term "Oriental despotism" as Staloff is, that might be one reason.
Ha. I don’t recall what Gouldner makes of the supposed “Asiatic mode” of production (if that’s what Staloff is referring to). The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class is very good and very pirateable (and compliments PMC-centric critiques like Lasch’s). In moments it almost feels Kaczynski-lite in its fixation on the psychological drives of humanities professors (hence why I think the “dissident right” or whatever should be salivating over Gouldner, coming as he does from inside the Cathedral). His notion of the “culture of critical discourse” rhymes with more contemporary critiques of “trust the science” types. I guess it may be that many of Gouldner’s insights seem more axiomatic now, that could explain his relative obscurity. Anyway he certainly clarified a lot of what I was grappling with in undergoing a kind of recovery from academic Marxism while still employed in academia.
Yes, I have the pdf, I just haven't done more than skim. When I was in grad school, I was really turned off by that type of analysis because sociology-of-literature types, prominent in my department, one of them my own advisor, used such theories to demystify literature itself as class domination, an argument I never bought, at least not as applied to America as opposed, say, to France (Bourdieu was the main theorist for these critics, but my advisor also cited Gouldner). Once I clarified for myself art's different (out-caste) role in the polis from expertise in the strict sense, I became more open to this critique of the intellectuals, and even open to my advisor's provocative characterization of modernism as a lower-middle-class phenomenon, once I revalued the lower middle class as being always in revolt for better and for worse against high rationalism. I prefer the implied solution here—the expert class's universal will-to-power, an inevitable driving force of modernity-postmodernity-hypermodernity, leavened by aesthetics (affect, mysticism, etc.)—to Girard's, since what is he recommending against the new clerisy but the old one?
This is the sentence that sings to me: "In translating art into theory, you may catch the ideas in all their murderous purity but miss the emotion in all its impure sympathies, the symbols in all their proliferating significance, the form in its uncanny vitality." I think it's a tragedy that so many of today's poets (70...80...90%?) are also professors.
Thank you! I agree with you, while recognizing my own academicized complicity in the problem (though nowadays I only teach at an art school, which, atmospherically, isn't really "academe"). I don't know whether this is a good or a bad occasion to tell you that when I used to teach from Rita Dove's Twentieth-Century American Poetry anthology in an English department I always taught your own "Powwow at the End of the World."
I helped start an MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts so I'm complicit, as well! I'm no longer associated with it but I was in the birth room.
I think the question I always run into with the intellectuals is why the last 10 years? Was it just the Internet interacting with ideas that had been in circulation within the academic left for many decades? An intellectual airborne toxic event within the genteel malaise of Obama’s second term? Also, I concurr that Plato is probably better read as a poet – something like a more philosophically inclined Athenian Shakespeare, or indeed as the Neoplatonists did, as a theologian proposing between the lines of his dialogues a kind of (more or less) monotheistic philosophic religion.
I think online living + increased academic precarity + the rise of the populist right is enough to explain it, though the tendency was always there. Agreed on Plato: as I see it, irony is built into the form of the dialogue, rendering it intrinsically literary, which doesn't conflict with monotheism as I think we discussed last week re: Chaucer.
I keep waiting for Gouldner to have the fashionable moment that, say, Girard has enjoyed. Looking forward to the next installment of the novel.
Thank you! I mainly know Gouldner through Staloff—his books are out print and expensive, I don't currently have access to a proper research library, and I'm good at downloading but bad at reading pirated pdfs—but if he is as free with the term "Oriental despotism" as Staloff is, that might be one reason.
Ha. I don’t recall what Gouldner makes of the supposed “Asiatic mode” of production (if that’s what Staloff is referring to). The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class is very good and very pirateable (and compliments PMC-centric critiques like Lasch’s). In moments it almost feels Kaczynski-lite in its fixation on the psychological drives of humanities professors (hence why I think the “dissident right” or whatever should be salivating over Gouldner, coming as he does from inside the Cathedral). His notion of the “culture of critical discourse” rhymes with more contemporary critiques of “trust the science” types. I guess it may be that many of Gouldner’s insights seem more axiomatic now, that could explain his relative obscurity. Anyway he certainly clarified a lot of what I was grappling with in undergoing a kind of recovery from academic Marxism while still employed in academia.
Yes, I have the pdf, I just haven't done more than skim. When I was in grad school, I was really turned off by that type of analysis because sociology-of-literature types, prominent in my department, one of them my own advisor, used such theories to demystify literature itself as class domination, an argument I never bought, at least not as applied to America as opposed, say, to France (Bourdieu was the main theorist for these critics, but my advisor also cited Gouldner). Once I clarified for myself art's different (out-caste) role in the polis from expertise in the strict sense, I became more open to this critique of the intellectuals, and even open to my advisor's provocative characterization of modernism as a lower-middle-class phenomenon, once I revalued the lower middle class as being always in revolt for better and for worse against high rationalism. I prefer the implied solution here—the expert class's universal will-to-power, an inevitable driving force of modernity-postmodernity-hypermodernity, leavened by aesthetics (affect, mysticism, etc.)—to Girard's, since what is he recommending against the new clerisy but the old one?
Oh, I think we’re on the same page.
This is the sentence that sings to me: "In translating art into theory, you may catch the ideas in all their murderous purity but miss the emotion in all its impure sympathies, the symbols in all their proliferating significance, the form in its uncanny vitality." I think it's a tragedy that so many of today's poets (70...80...90%?) are also professors.
Thank you! I agree with you, while recognizing my own academicized complicity in the problem (though nowadays I only teach at an art school, which, atmospherically, isn't really "academe"). I don't know whether this is a good or a bad occasion to tell you that when I used to teach from Rita Dove's Twentieth-Century American Poetry anthology in an English department I always taught your own "Powwow at the End of the World."
I helped start an MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts so I'm complicit, as well! I'm no longer associated with it but I was in the birth room.
Hey, that's so cool that you taught that one!
I think the question I always run into with the intellectuals is why the last 10 years? Was it just the Internet interacting with ideas that had been in circulation within the academic left for many decades? An intellectual airborne toxic event within the genteel malaise of Obama’s second term? Also, I concurr that Plato is probably better read as a poet – something like a more philosophically inclined Athenian Shakespeare, or indeed as the Neoplatonists did, as a theologian proposing between the lines of his dialogues a kind of (more or less) monotheistic philosophic religion.
I think online living + increased academic precarity + the rise of the populist right is enough to explain it, though the tendency was always there. Agreed on Plato: as I see it, irony is built into the form of the dialogue, rendering it intrinsically literary, which doesn't conflict with monotheism as I think we discussed last week re: Chaucer.