From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Anti-pseudo-intellectualism
Date: 16 Apr 92 14:35:42 GMT

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
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.

I think you are overly optimistic.  I think intellectuals have
simultaneously been increasingly accepted and increasingly
rejected.  Up until 1973 (the Arab oil embargo), the American
economy was expanding so rapidly that almost anybody could make a
good living and real economic success was probably more associated
with assertiveness and aggressiveness than with intellect, or a
least high intellect.  (The old Lewis Terman study of persons with
high IQs that began in the 1920s found that children with IQs in
the 120 to 140 range were bigger and more socially and
athletically successful than their "average" peers. In fact the
image we had of the "typical" American child or adolescent from
Tom Sawyer to Henry Aldridge -- or maybe even past that through
Chip Anderson in the 50s  -- was actually not a statistically
average kid but one of these moderately high IQ types.)  But with
the decline in the economy skills became more economically
valuable and the intellectual capacity to develop skills became
increasingly something to be valued.  That's why the image of the
"typical teenager" became more confused and fragmented in the 80s.
You had intellectuals like Alex Keaton and the students in Howard
Hesseman's advanced history class as the new models, although most
of the kids I see in therapy can hardly see a difference between
the Alex Keaton character, who seems to be clearly identified as
"smart," and the Mike Seaver and Theo Huxtable characters who are
just as clearly identified as "dumb."

The question of whether that old James Garner movie where his
son's girlfriend fell for the existentialist -- I forget what he
was labeled in the movie, some silly name for his philosophical
doctrine -- could be made today is not as closed a question as you
seem to think.  The reasonably intelligent person who is still a
"regular guy" (like Robert Frost or Carl Sandberg), and who values
"practical" things like making money, is still the ideal -- an
updated version of Henry Aldridge.  In _Defending Your Life_ and
_Broadcast News_, Albert Brooks plays an intelligent nerd -- both
movies show him getting beat up as a child -- but with "practical"
interests and a kind of smart-aleck persona.  In fact I can't even
think of a movie or TV show that _has_ an existentialist type
intellectual in it.  Christopher Lloyd is a superscientist in the
_Back to the Future_ trilogy but at no time in any of those films
does he say an intellectual or cultured thing.  We don't even hear
him make objections to Michael J. Fox's love of rock and roll.

The situation you describe, with the greater latitude for personal
expression, seems to me to be limited to elements of an upper
middle class stratum which was always fairly tolerant anyway.

--
Richard Carlson
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