[Reader-list] Stupid Intellectual Fads.

[Nazneen Anand Shamsi]

Dear Partha,

Thank you for sharing with us how you judge people. I agree with your
underlying assumptions. But at the same time don't you feel that 'judging
people' is a far more complex exercise than a mere signification of their
likes or dislikes or indifference as a forwarded post perhaps suggests.

The poet comments- 'Insaan ki parakh main hay sau bhul ka andesha'.

Warm regards

Nazo




On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Partha Dasgupta <parthaekka at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Nazneen,
>
> Don't know about you, but I certainly judge people by what they post.
> That is based on the hope that the person has a) read what they are
> posting; and b) they are posting the information as they either agree
> or disagree or at least have some point to make about it.
>
> Rgds, Partha
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 7:49 PM, Nazneen Anand Shamsi <
> nazoshmasi at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear Aarti,
>>
>> 1. Thank you for your response. I think it would do both of us and
>> everyone
>> else on this list a lot of good, if we stop assuming notions about each
>> other. It is no one's case if we keeping on judging everyone else by what
>> they forward on this list. I hold you in high regard, because and only
>> because of your thoughts. Your clarity in argumentation. Your conceptual
>> understanding. Your dogged persistence to engage and talk especially with
>> whom you disagree. I am not bothered whether you sleep with a marx or
>> mills
>> and boons under your pillow. Insofar as I am concerned, I think both marx
>> and mills are important pieces of literature. You know I could have
>> responded hypothetically to your mail, by calling you a self styled pseudo
>> post colonialist, post modernist, post feminist, hyper textual diva or an
>> out of work, bored, net slave, or an arrogant propertied vermin whose
>> understainding of marx is restriced to a summary reading of few essays one
>> reads in political science 101, but I will not and will never do that
>> because no matter who you are, I still want to engage with you and respect
>> your word, read carefully and find time to respond with concern but please
>> tell me do calling names serve any purpose?
>>
>> Is it not the logic or rather the magic of the state to engage with each
>> other like this. First create abstractions, then push people into
>> abstractions and then talk to them as if one is talking to an abstraction.
>> Everything else goes for a toss. So in the end one feels comfortable
>> because
>> one is not talking to a human being anymore. One is engaging with a ST,
>> SC,
>> Hindu, Muslim, Naxal, Maoists, terrorist, KP etc. In your case could I
>> assume, that from now onwards, every time you will address me or talk to
>> me
>> or respond to my mails- my subjectivity will be viewed through just as a
>> 'faux ayyar persona', or 'the agent provocateur'? I am glad that you
>> tagged
>> me as such Aarti, but then again, I think I am not worthy for these most
>> honourable appellations. Just Nazneen is more than enough.
>>
>> 2. I want to take issue with you for your, ' being earnest is really too
>> boring ' remark. Please tell me what do you mean by this? Do you find all
>> earnest work boring all the times or some earnest working boring most of
>> the
>> times or most earnest work boring some of the times or some earnest work
>> boring some of the times. I could not understand your positioning on this
>> or
>> why should any gives a dime's worth what you in your individual capacity
>> find boring?
>>
>> 3. Please do not suspect anything about my writings, 'I suspect you posted
>> this hoping that the "marx-vadis" on the list would immediately jump up
>> and
>> down'. If you 'suspect' anything about my word the please ASK. No, I don't
>> think marx-vadis are monkeys with an inherent tendency to 'jump up and
>> down'. I regard them as highly articulate people, one feels sad, though at
>> times, to see them still struggling with that same old ideology.
>>
>> 4. 'Regardless, when you actually wish to have an engaged discussion on
>> the
>> history of ideas I'm sure many of us will be more than willing'. (Thank
>> you
>> for your condescension Aarti, but no thanks!)
>>
>> By the way, could you please tell me, who are these 'us' on this list
>> Aarti?
>> Does that make me, Pawan, Aditya, Kshemendra 'them'? So, could I assume,
>> you
>> are, in any way implying that all this recent talk of sarai reader list
>> being public list is hogwash, that Shuddha is rank hypocrite and Iram a
>> liar
>> when these people were waxing eloquent about this list  being a shared
>> public space where people from different persuasions can come and engage?
>> Do
>> you in any way want me to gather from your response that reader list or
>> many
>> of all those who are  'us' on the reader list only welcome certain
>> preordained ideas and those who question this status quo will be
>> arrogantly
>> snubbed by 'I will not respond to your mail' because 'you' have
>> demonstrated
>> 'unlimited energy' (now writing long mails is also a crime, I suppose!) or
>> engaged by occassional kind benevolence of informed souls, such as your
>> respected self but only as 'them'?
>>
>>  I am absolutely earnest in my belief that reader list is a shared public
>> space and I would like to believe in what Shuddha and Iram had to say, and
>> no I don't find that boring. And I would like to hear more about 'us' from
>> you.
>>
>> 5. ' gibberish about marx '
>>
>> Please do not manipulate other people's words to suit your agenda Aarti.
>> Please! Please abstain from casually quoting so as to harm or impugn the
>> intent of a person's written word. It's uncalled for. I do not expect this
>> sort of a conduct from you. Please do not let me down.
>>
>> What did I write? I wrote, 'professors infect students with their
>> gibberish
>> about marx' and I stand by this. And I think if one just takes just '
>> gibberish about marx ' from this sentence, one changes the import, the
>> meaning and the intended message. Which was this- institutionalized
>> pedagogy
>> often produces rarefied form of knowledge which is perhaps alienating.
>>
>> Marx's thought was brillaint! Even if one do not believe in his ideas
>> still
>> one reads for its eloquence and earnestness and for its irreverence and
>> breadth and for its composition and style and for its poetry and language.
>> While writing that book he dug a deep conceptual well but with a needle of
>> hard work and perseverance.  And this thought still sells, there's a
>> market
>> for this thought. Many people love it and if they don't then many
>> begrudgingly acknowldege it, like popper did, for instance.
>>
>> But sadly there exists no mass market for often, half processed ideas that
>> many university poffessors churn out as 'critical thought', which is often
>> peddled as course books with a certain two penny sales from students who
>> want to charm institutional power for a career. I often find many such
>> 'marxist' ideas not earnest enough and hence deeply alienating.
>>
>> 6. 'Keep posting'
>>
>> I would like to extend the same invitation to you. As always, it was a
>> pleasure writing to you Aarti.
>>
>> Will eagerly look forward for your response.
>>
>> In all ' earnestness ' ofcourse!
>>
>> Warm regards
>>
>> Nazo
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 12:45 PM, Aarti Sethi <aarti.sethi at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Dear Nazneen,
>> >
>> > I liked the article but I think we would disagree on why we both liked
>> it.
>> > I read it as a tongue-in-cheek assessment of how certain ideas propel a
>> > generation or have a valance at a certain point of time and then when
>> the
>> > world changes, their location at the center of knowledge gets
>> destabilized.
>> > I don't take these things too seriously in the first place and being
>> earnest
>> > is really too boring But I suspect you posted this hoping that the
>> > "marx-vadis" on the list would immediately jump up and down waving
>> flags,
>> > and loudly lamenting the "end of history" as Fukuyama so eloquently put
>> it.
>> > This would square well with the persona of the agent provocateur you've
>> > assogined yourself.
>> >
>> > Regardless, when you actually wish to have an engaged discussion on the
>> > history of ideas I'm sure many of us will be more than willing. Till
>> then we
>> > will have to consider comments such as -
>> >
>> >  Here's an article I read about stupid intellectual fads. How university
>> >> professors infect students with their gibberish about marx etc which in
>> >> turn
>> >> results in years of theorizing, conferencing, journal publishing (many
>> >> friends, by the way mockingly argue that, journals articles are read
>> just
>> >> two and a half people, the writer, the editor of the journal and that
>> >> reader
>> >> who starts and leaves midway) and a yapping career marked up
>> networking,
>> >> networking, networking with an occasional book or two thrown in and
>> that
>> >> elusive tenure!
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> > - where you hope to get a raise out of us by summarily characterizing
>> the
>> > sweep, breadth and history of 200 years of philosophy and praxis as
>> > "gibberish about marx' and "stupid intellectual fads" as part of the
>> faux
>> > ayyar persona you have made your own.
>> >
>> > I really liked the text. Do keep posting :)
>> > Warmly
>> >
>> > Aarti
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> The essay is called: Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and
>> >> other stupid academic fads, I could not copy graphs because of
>> formatting
>> >> issues on the readerlist. But please check them out at,
>> >>
>> >> http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/09/graphs-on-death-of-marxism.php
>> >>
>> >> ******************************
>> >>
>> >> http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/09/graphs-on-death-of-marxism.php
>> >>
>> >> Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid
>> academic
>> >> fads
>> >>
>> >> [*Note*: I'm rushing this out before the school week starts, as I need
>> >> sleep, so if it seems unedited, that's why.]
>> >>
>> >> We are living in very exciting times -- at long last, we've broken the
>> >> stranglehold that a variety of silly Blank Slate theories have held on
>> the
>> >> arts, humanities, and social sciences. To some, this may sound strange,
>> >> but
>> >> things have decisively changed within the past 10 years, and these
>> >> so-called
>> >> theories are now moribund. To let those out-of-the-loop in on the news,
>> >> and
>> >> to quantify what insiders have already suspected, I've drawn graphs of
>> the
>> >> rise and fall of these fashions.
>> >>
>> >> I searched the archives of JSTOR, which houses a cornucopia of academic
>> >> journals, for certain keywords that appear in the full text of an
>> article
>> >> or
>> >> review (since sometimes the big ideas appear in books rather than
>> >> journals).
>> >> This provides an estimate of how popular the idea is -- not only the
>> true
>> >> believers, but their opponents too, will use the term. Once no one
>> >> believes
>> >> it anymore, then the adherents, opponents, and neutral spectators will
>> >> have
>> >> less occasion to use the term. I excluded data from 2003 onward because
>> >> most
>> >> JSTOR journals don't deposit their articles in JSTOR until 3 to 5 years
>> >> after the original publication. Still, most of the declines are visible
>> >> even
>> >> as of 2002.
>> >>
>> >> Admittedly, a better estimate would be to measure the number of
>> articles
>> >> with the term in a given year, divided by the total number of articles
>> >> that
>> >> JSTOR has for that year, to yield a frequency. But I don't have the
>> data
>> >> on
>> >> total articles. However, on time-scales when we don't expect a huge
>> change
>> >> in the total number of articles published -- say, over a few decades --
>> >> then
>> >> we can take the total to be approximately constant and use only the raw
>> >> counts of articles with the keyword. Crucially, although this may warp
>> our
>> >> view of an increasing trend -- which could be due to more articles
>> being
>> >> written in total, while the frequency of those of interest stays the
>> same
>> >> --
>> >> a sustained decline must be real.
>> >>
>> >> Some thoughts:
>> >>
>> >> First, there are two exceptions to the overall pattern of decline --
>> >> orientalism and post-colonialism. The former may be declining, but it's
>> >> hard
>> >> to say one way or the other. The latter, though, was holding steady in
>> >> 2002,
>> >> although its growth rate had clearly slowed down, so its demise seems
>> to
>> >> be
>> >> only a matter of time -- by 2010 at the latest, it should show a
>> >> down-turn.
>> >>
>> >> Second, aside from Marxism, which peaked in 1988, and social
>> >> constructionism, which declined starting in 2002 *, the others began to
>> >> fall
>> >> from roughly 1993 to 1998. It is astonishing that such a narrow time
>> frame
>> >> saw the fall of fashions that varied so much in when they were founded.
>> >> Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism are very old compared to
>> >> deconstruction or postmodernism, yet it was as though during the 1990s
>> an
>> >> academia-wide clean-up swept away all the bullshit, no matter how long
>> it
>> >> had been festering there.
>> >>
>> >> If we wanted to model this, we would probably use an S-I-R type model
>> for
>> >> the spread of infectious diseases. But we'd have to include an
>> exogenous
>> >> shock sometime during the 1990s since it's unlikely that epidemics that
>> >> had
>> >> begun 100 years apart would, of their own inner workings, decline at
>> the
>> >> same time. It's as if we started to live in sparser population
>> densities,
>> >> where diseases old and new could not spread so easily, or if we
>> wandered
>> >> onto an antibiotic that cured of us diseases, some of which had plagued
>> us
>> >> for much longer than others.
>> >>
>> >> Third, notice how simple most of the curves look -- few show lots of
>> >> noise,
>> >> or the presence of smaller-scale cycles. That's despite the
>> vicissitudes
>> >> of
>> >> politics, economics, and other social changes -- hardly any of it made
>> an
>> >> impact on the world of ideas. I guess they don't call it the Ivory
>> Tower
>> >> for
>> >> nothing. About the only case you could make is for McCarthyism halting
>> the
>> >> growth of Marxist ideas during most of the 1950s. The fall of the
>> Berlin
>> >> Wall does not explain why Marxism declined then -- its growth rate was
>> >> already grinding to a halt for the previous decade, compared to its
>> >> explosion during the 1960s and '70s.
>> >>
>> >> Still, it could be that there was a general anti-communist zeitgeist in
>> >> the
>> >> 1950s, so that academics would have cooled off to Marxism of their own
>> >> accord, not because they were afraid of McCarthy or whoever else.
>> >> Importantly, that's only one plausible link -- there are a billion
>> others
>> >> that don't pan out, so it may be that our plausible link happened due
>> to
>> >> chance: when you test 1000 correlations, 5 of them will be significant
>> at
>> >> the 0.005 level, even though they're only the result of chance.
>> >>
>> >> This suggests that a "great man theory" of intellectual history is
>> wrong.
>> >> Surely someone needs to invent the theory, and it may be complex enough
>> >> that
>> >> if that person hadn't existed, the theory wouldn't have existed (contra
>> >> the
>> >> view that somebody or other would've invented Marxism). After that,
>> >> though,
>> >> we write a system of differential equations to model the dynamics of
>> the
>> >> classes of individuals involved -- perhaps just two, believers and
>> >> non-believers -- and these interactions between individuals are all
>> that
>> >> matter. How many persuasive tracts were there against postmodernism or
>> >> Marxism, for example? And yet none of those convinced the believers
>> since
>> >> the time wasn't right. Postmodernism was already growing at a slower
>> rate
>> >> in
>> >> 1995 when the Sokal Affair put its silliness in the spotlight, and even
>> >> then
>> >> its growth rate didn't decline even faster as a result. Kind of
>> depressing
>> >> for iconoclasts -- but at least you can rest assured that at some
>> point,
>> >> the
>> >> fuckers will get theirs.
>> >>
>> >> Fourth, the sudden decline of all the big-shot theories you'd study in
>> a
>> >> literary theory or critical theory class is certainly behind the recent
>> >> angst of arts and humanities grad students. Without a big theory, you
>> >> can't
>> >> pretend you have specialized training and shouldn't be treated as such
>> --
>> >> high school English teachers may be fine with that, but if you're in
>> grad
>> >> school, that's admitting you failed as an academic. You want a good
>> >> reputation. Isn't it strange, though, that no replacement theories have
>> >> filled the void? That's because everyone now understands that the whole
>> >> thing was a big joke, and aren't going to be suckered again anytime
>> soon.
>> >> Now the generalizing and biological approaches to the humanities and
>> >> social
>> >> sciences are dominant -- but that's for another post.
>> >>
>> >> Also, as you sense all of the big theories are dying, you must realize
>> >> that
>> >> you have no future: you'll be increasingly unable to publish articles
>> --
>> >> or
>> >> have others cite you -- and even if you became a professor, you
>> wouldn't
>> >> be
>> >> able to recruit grad students into your pyramid scheme, or enroll
>> students
>> >> in your classes, since their interest would be even lower than among
>> >> current
>> >> students. Someone who knows more about intellectual history should
>> compare
>> >> arts and humanities grad students today to the priestly caste that was
>> >> becoming obsolete as Europe became more rational and secular. I'm sure
>> >> they
>> >> rationalized their angst as a spiritual or intellectual crisis, just
>> like
>> >> today's grad students might say that they had an epiphany -- but in
>> >> reality,
>> >> they're just recognizing how bleak their economic prospects are and are
>> >> opting for greener pastures.
>> >>
>> >> Fifth and last, I don't know about the rest of you, but I find young
>> >> people
>> >> today very refreshing. Let's look at 18 year-olds -- the impressionable
>> >> college freshmen, who could be infected by their dopey professors. If
>> they
>> >> begin freshman year just 1 year after the theory's peak, the idea is
>> still
>> >> very popular, so they'll get infected. If we allow, say 5 years of
>> cooling
>> >> off and decay, professors won't talk about it so much, or will be use a
>> >> less
>> >> strident tone of voice, so that only the students who were destined to
>> >> latch
>> >> on to some stupid theory will get infected. Depending on the trend,
>> this
>> >> makes the safe cohort born in 1975 at the oldest (for Marxism), or 1989
>> at
>> >> the youngest (for social constructionism). And obviously even among
>> safe
>> >> cohorts, some are safer than others -- people my age (27) may not go in
>> >> for
>> >> Marxism much, but have heard of it or taken it seriously at some point
>> >> (even
>> >> if to argue against it intellectually). But 18 year-olds today weren't
>> >> even
>> >> born when Marxism had already started to die.
>> >>
>> >> It's easy to fossilize your picture of the world from your formative
>> years
>> >> of 15 to 24, but things change. If you turned off the radio in the
>> >> mid-late
>> >> '90s, you missed four years of great rock and rap music that came out
>> from
>> >> 2003 to 2006 (although now you can keep it off again). If you write off
>> >> dating a 21 year-old grad student on the assumption that they're mostly
>> >> angry feminist hags, you're missing out. And if you'd rather socialize
>> >> with
>> >> people your own age because younger people are too immature to have an
>> >> intelligent discussion -- ask yourself when the last time was that you
>> >> didn't have to dance around all kinds of topics with Gen-X or Baby
>> Boomer
>> >> peers because of the moronic beliefs they've been infected with since
>> >> their
>> >> young adult years? Try talking to a college student about human
>> evolution
>> >> --
>> >> they're pretty open-minded. My almost-30 housemate, by comparison, was
>> >> eager
>> >> to hear that what I'm studying would show that there's no master race
>> >> after
>> >> all. What a loser.
>> >>
>> >> * I started the graph of social constructionism at 1960, even though it
>> >> extends back to 1876, since it was always at a very low level before
>> then
>> >> (less than 5 per year, often 0). Including these points didn't make the
>> >> recent decline so apparent in the graph, so out they went.
>> >> _________________________________________
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>> >
>> >
>> >
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>
>
>
> --
> Partha Dasgupta
> +919811047132
>