I come home tonight with a renewed resolve to persevere on the mission to walk the line between scholarship and activism - to be an ambiguous mystic, straddling those two words, refusing to be confined by either one. Unfortunately I'm learning the system is configured to prevent exactly that. Fellow academics: Postmodern thought is a tool to be wielded very carefully, for as John Zerzan warns, after the human subject is completely obliterated and designated as a product of history, “who or what is left to achieve a liberation, or is that just one more pipe dream?” No, it’s not a pipe dream.
Us queers and freeqs within the academy shall not let postmodern rhetoric get out of hand. It shall not replicate like a virus, colonizing all of our thoughts, even our thoughts about ourSELVES. That’s what the corporate powers that fund university research are hoping will happen to the humanities — weakening them even more than they already have been. Rein it in. Postmodern thought has allowed many great insights to be established within the great Conversation: And yes, there are many truths, and yes, everything should be examined in context, and per its situadedness - but ecology and its related fields are just as good a framework for that ethic.
Just don’t take it to the point where YOU are the “subject” that is destroyed.
Don’t let universities work for the corporate state — recognize that many of them already are and consciously make the choice to resist — don’t be afraid of living in this world and advocating for social change.
To paraphrase part of Ghandi's philosophy: Knowledge without character, and science (including social science) without humanity... are some of the greatest dangers to human virtue.
1 comment:
As a support of the middle class I applaud your protest
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