Recently I've been wrestling with being an unorthodox intellectual. Since moving to Durham I've met all these amazing people who know all these incredible things. Some folks know how to raise animals and grow food. Other people know woodworking and mechanical engineering. Still others are academic intellectuals with impressive command of ideas and language or local history and culture. I've been learning a lot from all these folks.
The trouble is that I often find it hard to see what it is that I have to contribute. For one thing, many of the people I've surrounded myself with focus more on working with their hands and the ideas related to this work. For example, the agrarian people I'm working with do intellectual work around both the technical aspects of farming and the social, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of farming. This is amazing stuff, but it's often hard to find a place where my work-- economics, epistemology, and historical sociology--connects and makes sense.
Writing it down this problem appears superficial and foolish. Obviously the issue are connected. The real difficulty I face is that the "high theory" work that I've been engrossed in for two or more years isn't something that most people feel is relevant to their interests. Why should folks be interested in Hegel's critique of causation and empiricism? Why should people be interested in the conflicts between feminists, Black radicals, anti-imperialists, and marxists over the labor theory of value? In activist and many other spaces I find myself in "abstract" theory is looked down upon or, at the very least, shunned.
Most often the reason is because abstract theory is often alienating and jargon-laden. But then, as I learned from my neighbor how to rebuild a bicycle I realized that there is jargon and technical knowledge associated with those things as well. When he asked me to hand him the crescent-wrench I froze. Which one was the crescent? Which was the allen? If I didn't know what would he think of me? Obviously he expected me to know. I felt stupid, as if something was wrong with me or as if I lacked a proper (male) upbringing which would have taught me which wrench was which. And that was just a bike. Learning to drive, how to use power tools, how to slaughter a chicken. All these things have jargon, skills, and knowledges that must be learned and not knowing them can be frightening and intimidating. Those who command these things have power.
The difference, perhaps, between the knowledge/work of abstract theory and the knowledge/work of so-called "manual labor" is that one is often connected to greater social privilege. The concepts and theories of so-called "mental labor" are often kept away from the vast majority of people and used to organize and govern society hierarchically. I think there is a certain resentment and anti-intellectual sentiment in many activist and anti-authoritarian/communal spaces because intense intellectual work is associated with power over others, privilege (higher income, better standard of living, etc), and leisure time.
But here I am trying to live my life as an intellectual against all of that (which is not to say I do not have privileges, because I have a great many). I believe that the theoretical and philosophical work I'm doing is important and relevant to the people I am working with but they often show very little interest in that work. This often makes me question myself. I sit in my house looking at all the books I've collected and loved and struggled with and I wonder sometimes if all that work was wasted. If I am an abstract theorist drifting in a vacuum of detached ideas and petty scholastic debates. Isn't the value theory debate the modern version of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
But then something happens that makes me remember why I do this work. The latest experience was talking with a friend, Nathaniel, who's been struggling with his relationship to "the other side of the tracks". Nathaniel is a bi-racial brother who's dating this middle-class white woman and is basically living in the social circles of non-profit, yuppie, white folks as the token person of color and token working-class person. We got coffee the other night and talked about what it's like to live in a city as segregated as Durham (someone once said that capitalism is "class apartheid"). Our conversation ranged all over the place and we touched on tons of subjects.
Somewhere in the middle of the conversation (before talking about Queer politics and after talking about Frantz Fanon, gentrification, and yuppie settler colonies), I realized that my very ability to think and respond to his questions and struggles was a product of my theoretical work. My ability to connect issues, to provide advice, to listen and to re-present issues in ways that helped people see the world differently, and to offer critical yet affirming analyses is a direct result of my work.
It's like learning dance. When you are learning a complicated step and you are counting the beats and repeating the motions it seems so different from dancing. When you are doing your conditioning exercises and your stretches it seems so abstract. The "moment" of dancing, when your body "spontaneously" responds to the music and feels as if it's moving almost by itself, however, is not a "natural" or purely "instinctual" phenomenon (no matter how much the white hippie exoticists might want you to be a native more in touch with nature). Muscle memory and spontaneity are the result of a learning process. We teach ourselves to be natural.
My friend Justyna says that re-wiring our minds is hard work, and it's the truth. The work I'm doing, learning to re-wire the ways that I think about knowledge, about spirituality, about economics and social life--all of this is expressed by the way that I live and speak. And that has real worth. It can be as much about living as anything else. The fact that it is abstract needs to stop being a reason to discount it.
We need to stop being so utilitarian about knowledge and intellectual work and recognize that all of our work is an expression of questions we are working out; questions about how to live. We need to learn to pay attention to all the ways that people ask these questions and support the ways that they go about living their way into the solutions.
For my part I'm glad I'm learning new questions and new solutions to living from new folks. What I'm no longer interested in is proving to others why my ideas are relevant or valid, trying to make my life and questions meaningful on someone else's terms. Rather, I want to demonstrate, through living the contradiction and synthesis of intellectual and manual work, the ways that our various ways of living are connected, how they are limited and set into antagonisms by the system we live under, and how we can begin living our way into some new ways of living...together.
pondering the far side of the moon because it means something to me and my soul mate,
Don Petro
Southern Liberation Front
The trouble is that I often find it hard to see what it is that I have to contribute. For one thing, many of the people I've surrounded myself with focus more on working with their hands and the ideas related to this work. For example, the agrarian people I'm working with do intellectual work around both the technical aspects of farming and the social, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of farming. This is amazing stuff, but it's often hard to find a place where my work-- economics, epistemology, and historical sociology--connects and makes sense.
Writing it down this problem appears superficial and foolish. Obviously the issue are connected. The real difficulty I face is that the "high theory" work that I've been engrossed in for two or more years isn't something that most people feel is relevant to their interests. Why should folks be interested in Hegel's critique of causation and empiricism? Why should people be interested in the conflicts between feminists, Black radicals, anti-imperialists, and marxists over the labor theory of value? In activist and many other spaces I find myself in "abstract" theory is looked down upon or, at the very least, shunned.
Most often the reason is because abstract theory is often alienating and jargon-laden. But then, as I learned from my neighbor how to rebuild a bicycle I realized that there is jargon and technical knowledge associated with those things as well. When he asked me to hand him the crescent-wrench I froze. Which one was the crescent? Which was the allen? If I didn't know what would he think of me? Obviously he expected me to know. I felt stupid, as if something was wrong with me or as if I lacked a proper (male) upbringing which would have taught me which wrench was which. And that was just a bike. Learning to drive, how to use power tools, how to slaughter a chicken. All these things have jargon, skills, and knowledges that must be learned and not knowing them can be frightening and intimidating. Those who command these things have power.
The difference, perhaps, between the knowledge/work of abstract theory and the knowledge/work of so-called "manual labor" is that one is often connected to greater social privilege. The concepts and theories of so-called "mental labor" are often kept away from the vast majority of people and used to organize and govern society hierarchically. I think there is a certain resentment and anti-intellectual sentiment in many activist and anti-authoritarian/communal spaces because intense intellectual work is associated with power over others, privilege (higher income, better standard of living, etc), and leisure time.
But here I am trying to live my life as an intellectual against all of that (which is not to say I do not have privileges, because I have a great many). I believe that the theoretical and philosophical work I'm doing is important and relevant to the people I am working with but they often show very little interest in that work. This often makes me question myself. I sit in my house looking at all the books I've collected and loved and struggled with and I wonder sometimes if all that work was wasted. If I am an abstract theorist drifting in a vacuum of detached ideas and petty scholastic debates. Isn't the value theory debate the modern version of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
But then something happens that makes me remember why I do this work. The latest experience was talking with a friend, Nathaniel, who's been struggling with his relationship to "the other side of the tracks". Nathaniel is a bi-racial brother who's dating this middle-class white woman and is basically living in the social circles of non-profit, yuppie, white folks as the token person of color and token working-class person. We got coffee the other night and talked about what it's like to live in a city as segregated as Durham (someone once said that capitalism is "class apartheid"). Our conversation ranged all over the place and we touched on tons of subjects.
Somewhere in the middle of the conversation (before talking about Queer politics and after talking about Frantz Fanon, gentrification, and yuppie settler colonies), I realized that my very ability to think and respond to his questions and struggles was a product of my theoretical work. My ability to connect issues, to provide advice, to listen and to re-present issues in ways that helped people see the world differently, and to offer critical yet affirming analyses is a direct result of my work.
It's like learning dance. When you are learning a complicated step and you are counting the beats and repeating the motions it seems so different from dancing. When you are doing your conditioning exercises and your stretches it seems so abstract. The "moment" of dancing, when your body "spontaneously" responds to the music and feels as if it's moving almost by itself, however, is not a "natural" or purely "instinctual" phenomenon (no matter how much the white hippie exoticists might want you to be a native more in touch with nature). Muscle memory and spontaneity are the result of a learning process. We teach ourselves to be natural.
My friend Justyna says that re-wiring our minds is hard work, and it's the truth. The work I'm doing, learning to re-wire the ways that I think about knowledge, about spirituality, about economics and social life--all of this is expressed by the way that I live and speak. And that has real worth. It can be as much about living as anything else. The fact that it is abstract needs to stop being a reason to discount it.
We need to stop being so utilitarian about knowledge and intellectual work and recognize that all of our work is an expression of questions we are working out; questions about how to live. We need to learn to pay attention to all the ways that people ask these questions and support the ways that they go about living their way into the solutions.
For my part I'm glad I'm learning new questions and new solutions to living from new folks. What I'm no longer interested in is proving to others why my ideas are relevant or valid, trying to make my life and questions meaningful on someone else's terms. Rather, I want to demonstrate, through living the contradiction and synthesis of intellectual and manual work, the ways that our various ways of living are connected, how they are limited and set into antagonisms by the system we live under, and how we can begin living our way into some new ways of living...together.
pondering the far side of the moon because it means something to me and my soul mate,
Don Petro
Southern Liberation Front
1 comment:
holy
fucking
shit.
excuse me, but seriously.
not only was this so fucking relevant to me just now (i.e. i could have written parts of it myself if my brain translated to my hand as well as you)
but i also had one of those moments last night where it all made sense for a second...
man sendolo!!
(besides the fact that the first sentence of the second paragraph had me choking since you know i think you're the most brilliant, articulate, gifted-idea-synthesizer-and-clarity-giver i have come into contact with!!!!)
elizabeth
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