From: gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch)
Subject: Re: Newsgroup Vandalism (was: Re: alt.cascade anyone? (was Re: Aaaaa
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 21:40:13 GMT
Organization: mydog in exile

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
[ Questions about the locale of the cascades ]

rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
| The questions you raise are interesting at several levels.  Why
| has American pop culture generally seen phenomenological thought,
| in particular existentialism and deconstruction, as silly, and
| then gone on to portray its practitioners as pseudo-intellectuals?
|           ... I predict the [deconstructionist] will also be a
| phoney in a turtleneck and the girl will go back to her hundred
| percent American, rock and roll, Wall Street boyfriend before the
| movie ends.

This would assume that there would be a discernable difference
between a deconstructionist/existentialist in a turtleneck and
a one-hundred-percent etcetera.  But "America" doesn't really
mean "white folks" any more -- rock'n'roll includes music which
would make Stravinsky, Varese, nay, John Cage gasp in wonder
and admiration (I'm talking about tuned chainsaws cutting up 55-
gallon drums) -- and Wall Street is one of the major drug- 
trading and -consuming areas of the world.  In other words,
being an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual is just one more
thing people do, like breeding dogs or painting vans.  That's 
what makes our friend's portrayal of me (a person with no 
degrees who hasn't been near an academic institution in 30 
years) as an English Professor type, so quaint.  You know, if
it writes English with subordinate clauses and semicolons, it 
must be Edward Gibbon...  But I digress.

Historically the acceptance of intellectuality as just one 
more thing people do has been rare, as we learned from (I 
think it was) Hofstadter's _Anti-Intellectualism_in_
_American_Life_ back in the 1950s.  Hofstadter found a strong 
current of anti-intellectualism going back to the Know-
Nothings and before.  Certainly, in the 1950s, it might have
cost me my teen-age life to have let it be known, in certain
quarters, that I composed poetry.  I think the reason for
this hostility is simple: intellectuals, (who did have a
certain separate existence in those and previous departed
days) despised popular American culture, and looked mostly
to Europe for inspiration.  At least, I perceive a lot of
that in the 19th-century material I've read, and in the 1920s 
we have the Lost Generation -- a whole bunch of literary 
types who found the America of their times just too, too 
awful to bear.  The American masses returned the uncompliment 
-- and then there was also the matter of preserving their 
scum-of-the-earth culture of greed, criminality, and 
religious fanaticism, which the intellectuals quite 
reasonably disdained.

Underlying this conflict, I think, has been the uneasy
role of the bourgeoisie in America, essentially a lower-
middle-class country.  The role of the intellectual has 
traditionally been derived from the power of the ruling 
class, the bourgeoisie in a capitalist polity.  The 
European bourgeoisie was of a piece with its environment, 
a class system with pretty rigid boundaries, where the 
lower orders recognized their betters as such, even if 
they resented them.  Thus, when a French artist speaks of 
his desire to "_epater_les_bourgeois_" we are not seeing 
real hostility but a kind of affectionate horseplay; by 
and large, the bourgeoisie supported their painters just 
as they supported their intellectuals and other, ahem,
"cultural workers."  Somewhere I have a quotation from
Picasso in which he claims that his audience -- the
collectors who bought his work -- _drove_ him into
producing scandalous things.  Shock was their desire and
of course he complied.

In America, however, where anyone might go into business 
and make a bundle, the role of the bourgeoisie and its
hangers-on has always been suspect -- contested territory.
Among artists, this seems to have created a large amount of
pseudo-cornballism, with people like Robert Frost and Carl
Sandburg in the fore, with lots of harking back to Walt
and Ralph and Henry and all.  You know the line: "Hey, we
really Americans even though we think and write stuff."
The folk bought some of this -- Robert there in particular 
-- but generally they seem to have spurned the advance.
"Love me, love my Tupperware" was their answer.  The
American bourgeoisie was connected by financial, cultural,
and familial ties to Europe, but rest of the population
was involved with its American self, and its own rigid
structure of cultural self-preservation -- part of which
required rejection of European values and, with them,
intellectuals and artists.

However, when the bourgeoisie started to fall apart in 
the 1960s, intellectualism was turned loose in the streets.  
Now, anybody can be an intellectual, whether slumdweller,
suburban punk, or preppie.  Sure, it's a lot of work, but
so is recreational auto mechanics.  And, as it's just one
more thing, there's no reason to be hostile to it.  A movie
portraying intellectuals as villains would have to be 
aimed at the 50-and-older set to be intelligible to its
audience, and most of those people don't go to the movies.  
Although it might be saleable as cult thing, something that 
would make it on VCR sales....

As for alt.postmodern being a _particular_ victim, it
isn't.  I doubt if most of the cascaders have any idea
of its (non-cascade) contents, it's the _name_ that
attracts them.  Gee, how can something be _post_ 
modern, har har.  That sort of thing.  It's right up
there in this thread.  Hostility to phenomenological
thought?  Phe, phe, phe-whooie!  Boy, don't those English
professors know you should never try to spell anything
bigger than your head?

| Btw, I tried to answer your e-mail message but some mailer daemon
| somewhere turned it back.  Do you got through attmail?  Look at
| this header on the returned mail(!): ... [ elaborate headers ] ....

These demonstrate that cascading can be automated.  Were it 
not for cascading's lengthy history among the Gaels and the 
Japanese, I would even go so far as to theorize that 
cascading was invented by machines.  But I've done enough
theorizing for one day.
-- 
* Gordon Fitch    |    gcf@panix.com 
Xref: sparky alt.postmodern:1295 alt.religion.kibology:1662