jools posted:

eggplants posted:

the same way that porn ruins us for emotional fidelity, higher education ruins us for truth. the joyful manipulation of ideas (the study of the humanities) debases truth in terms of pleasure, as though exotic rhetoric were a sustaining alternative to discipline and love. ideas no longer demand intellectual commitment, let alone action in the world; to think seriously about something is only to play with and profane it. from this, the fear of thoughts of God.

like i think this is really sharp, everything ive encountered of supposedly radical academics indicates that you will at best be laughed at for having the temerity to apply theories and ideas to situations relevant to you rather than to some remote situation. why are barely any people studying patterns of underdevelopment and urban architectures of control or whatever in the countries that they themselves are working in. it's always, "why not look at this third world city", or "hey this ngo in ramallah would be really interested in this" and so on.

additionally with regard to the discipline, if you attempt to create an actually coherent analysis that clearly indicates some kind of course of action then you are writing too narrowly without considering all the possibilities. and of course there's the slavishness to academic trends as we have now, where people who are far better educated than i and should know better are going on about finance and debt still like some petit-bourgeois german in the 1930s.

look at the soi-disant leaders of occupy. the rash of radical blogs and journals that have sprung up over the past year. this obviously indicates a change in the air, that this stuff is acceptable to talk about now, but for too long these people have been fed on a diet of theoretical pornography, seduced by melodramatic italians with anarcho-wildean turns of phrase. you get stuff happening like malcolm harris of the new inquiry trying to charge 5000 dollars through a public speaker agency to some local occupy group, then defending this by claiming the agency wouldn't let him charge less. the agent representing him happens to be the founder of the new inquiry.

these people aren't serious, they are playing roles that have been opened up by this ill-defined status quo change because they really want consultancies or book deals or whatever. it's disgusting and degenerate, and we honestly need some kind of auto-da-fe.

this seems like an insane confusion of causes though. i'm All For anti intellectualism and hatred of the academy but it's not as if the universities are taking unformed puddy-like people-shaped masses and transforming them into weak truth-averse monsters; rather the university is a habitat for people who are already monstrous in exactly the way described. And In Any Case i'm not even sure this criticism is true, how do you explain an essay like this: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-1111103-101742/unrestricted/Watts_thesis.pdf this essay is fucking terrible but it doesnt even take thirty seconds of googling to find really good Academic Essays about cool & important shit. if we're talking about niall ferguson's islam class or whatever, or some radical peace of shit writing for new inquiry, then there has to be a question of why anyone is taking them seriously in the first place

when we're talking about ridiculous things like Discipline and Love we necessarily are Strawmanning to a Ridiculous Degree

getfiscal posted:

i went looking for some dorothy day today but i couldn't find any in the bookstores here.

Pillow Talk is pretty good.

jools posted:

its not anti-intellectualism at all though, its that objectively these people actually are anti-intellectual

right, yeah i agree with that. but the academy is clearly only tangentially invested in fostering intellectualism. nobody who is interested in intellectualism will be corrupted by the university

jools posted:

anyway whats wrong with love and especially & particularly discipline, if you want to actually mount a challenge occupy wall street or whatever should have got dressed up in some sharpass military shit and marched in silence through new york. put up their tents in perfect rows and columns. got up at 6am every day to prepare whatever soup kitchen shit for the homeless, and then spend two hours drilling before lunch.... isnt this basically what your true hero limonov calls for?

there's no problem with discipline nigga but the op aint know nothin about it nigga

Impper posted:

jools posted:

anyway whats wrong with love and especially & particularly discipline, if you want to actually mount a challenge occupy wall street or whatever should have got dressed up in some sharpass military shit and marched in silence through new york. put up their tents in perfect rows and columns. got up at 6am every day to prepare whatever soup kitchen shit for the homeless, and then spend two hours drilling before lunch.... isnt this basically what your true hero limonov calls for?

there's no problem with discipline nigga but the op aint know nothin about it nigga

whats more discipline than not jerking your meat to pornography, intellectually or otherwise

jools posted:

well then either discuss and define, or do what i did and seize your own definition and enforce it throughout the thread. thats fair though, like its possibly doing what it criticises in that sense?

jouissance is when your brain cums over baudrillard etc

i guess in a sense it maybe is doing what it criticizes. i'm not sure about that, or if my problem with it necessarily leads to the Truth Being Inaccessible for somebody who writes like this. there is this amazing level of ontological confidence & vastness that it cannot help but be Ridiculous. to talk about Porn and Academy and relate it to Sex is already a gigantic topic that can't be talked about w. gay sweeping grandiloquence, and when you introduce Truth Love Discipline Gaey to it the piece is a bad extended joke.

i understand seizing your own definitions about something and that can make it a 'discussion' but that doesn't change the fact of terrible shit being said

Edited by Impper (Sept. 18, 2012 21:17:15)

kinch posted:

the poverty of vitalism by baby benjamin noys

http://chi.academia.edu/BenjaminNoys/Papers/702944/The_Poverty_of_Vitalism_and_the_Vitalism_of_Poverty_

haha this is excellent

jools posted:

Impper posted:

jools posted:

and they do actually produce monstrous puddings because you will get told that you shouldnt do your masters thesis or phd on x you should do it on y which is exactly the same thing but 2000 miles away and everyones skin is brown, and youre already busy as shit and just want to get on so you dont really bother fighting.

before you know it youre one of Them

i guess this is what i disagree with? if someone is interested in Some Real Shit this will not get them down any more than working in a shitty office will get them down

i missed this but really? i mean youre there because you want to work with the people who come up with the god damn ideas, why should you be hamstrung like that

because Shits Gaey? LoL. u can surround yourself with smart intelligent people and that is fine, Higher Education doesn't prevent you from doing so even as it doesn't necessarily help you out. things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Exagmination_Round_His_Factification_for_Incamination_of_Work_in_Progress

are not really produced anymore. but nothing in this thread addresses that Issue at all. thinking about a rich intellectual environment has nothing to do with such a dumb OP

Impper posted:

jools posted:

Impper posted:

jools posted:

and they do actually produce monstrous puddings because you will get told that you shouldnt do your masters thesis or phd on x you should do it on y which is exactly the same thing but 2000 miles away and everyones skin is brown, and youre already busy as shit and just want to get on so you dont really bother fighting.

before you know it youre one of Them

i guess this is what i disagree with? if someone is interested in Some Real Shit this will not get them down any more than working in a shitty office will get them down

i missed this but really? i mean youre there because you want to work with the people who come up with the god damn ideas, why should you be hamstrung like that

because Shits Gaey? LoL. u can surround yourself with smart intelligent people and that is fine, Higher Education doesn't prevent you from doing so even as it doesn't necessarily help you out. things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Exagmination_Round_His_Factification_for_Incamination_of_Work_in_Progress

are not really produced anymore. but nothing in this thread addresses that Issue at all. thinking about a rich intellectual environment has nothing to do with such a dumb OP

lol why would we want stuff like that produced now, what does that solve

MadMedico posted:

Great statesmen like lincoln would never desecrate their body with plastic surgery.

lol in the new spielberg biopic he gets breast implants

Impper posted:

jools posted:

and they do actually produce monstrous puddings because you will get told that you shouldnt do your masters thesis or phd on x you should do it on y which is exactly the same thing but 2000 miles away and everyones skin is brown, and youre already busy as shit and just want to get on so you dont really bother fighting.

before you know it youre one of Them

i guess this is what i disagree with? if someone is interested in Some Real Shit this will not get them down any more than working in a shitty office will get them down

crucial here isn't so much the actual topic of the thesis or research but what arguments and concepts it engages with. my own disciple and former institute was full of people who had identified certain phenomena or subjects they wished to study but were pushed back into certain conceptual work. you're constantly pushed to engage with popular contemporary work which probably has very little to do with your actual interest (and remember that in a lot of counties research funding is tied to a nationally funded body)

you'll constantly be pushed to have 'impact' and publication references. you're letting the institute down if you don't. how do you do this? by writing and publishing papers that engage with the most pedantic of debates or trends in journals.

when you're doing work which is more social science than humanities the journals are full of work that reflects whatever nonsense the government is interested in these days. late 90s and early 00s? social capital. today? nudge theory/"libertarian paternalism". if you want to write about agriculture in some country you better be prepared to pay lip service to neoliberalism.

the result of all this is demotivating and you're left with universities full of horrible people who play these shitty games.

Impper posted:

unformed puddy-like people-shaped masses