Listics

A Talent for Bricolage…

File under rageboy, bricolage, alexa, and burma shave…

I woke up this morning with the sense that - far from mere bricolage - a lot of what goes into blog publishing is intentional, elaborate, and complex.  There’s an emerging quasi-journalistic, epistolary genre the importance of which is amplified by its collaborative nature.  And as the genius bloggers like Turner and Golby or Weinberger and Professor Adam riff off each other, their creations exist in a fragile network bounded by technology… if the material is being preserved future afficionados might get off on re-playing some of the sequential consequent prosodic interactions that we call blog postings, but like jazz musicians jamming, the recording will undoubtedly lose some of the spirit of the live rendition.

Well, I googled the terms “intentional elaborate complex bricolage” and what should pop out but this sweet Joshua Knobe interview with Richard Rorty, excerpted below (added links are my own):

Rorty: I think that the academic left has made sort of an ass of itself and has given easy targets for the conservatives, but basically I think that the conservatives are just either jealous of the soft life that we professors have or else working for the Republicans and trying to underm~ne the universities the same way they undermined the trade unions. I mean that the universities and colleges are bastions of the left in America, and the closest thing we have to the left is roughly the left wing of the Democratic Party, and if you look at the statistics on what kind of professor votes for what, the humanities and the social science professors always vote overwhelmingly democratic, and obviously the youth that is exposed to courses in social sciences and humanities is going to be gently nudged in a leftward direction. The Republicans are quite aware of this fact, and they would like to stop it from happening. Any club that will beat the universities is going to look good to them. The more the English depanments make fools of themselves by being politically correct, the easier a target the Republicans are going to have.

Int: Is that what you meant by “making asses of themselves”?

Rorty: I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There’s a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that’s been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It’s sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside. It permits people like Roger Kimball and D’Souza to say these people aren’t really scholars, which is true. I think that the use made of Foucault and Derrida in American departments of literature had been, on the whole, unfortunate, but it’s not their fault. Nobody’s responsible for their followers.