Ben Tucker Off the Deep End

the argument is the same as the one about progress; i’m not saying that people mastering scientific knowledge serves no purpose, i’m saying that the value of scientific progress must be weighed against other goods. my opposition is more towards the idea that progress is truly valuable than to the practice of science. medicine is something that i think people really value, and scientific progress is important to medicine, but it isn’t the whole of it. part of what people value about medicine is the fact of being cared for by someone who knows how to properly administer the things he thinks he’s administering. the care is of social value especially when it’s believable, and insofar as scientific progress helps it remain believable, it’s valuable. but hinging the value of care on belief in progress seems unnecessary, despite the fact that it’s a part of how we currently value medical care. 

what’s necessary and what furthers a particular understanding of the world are different things. there are plenty of goat herders in the world who feel like they understand the world, they grow old, and then they die. there are plenty of biologists who feel like they understand the world, they grow old, and then they die.

whatever, glad to see that the alumni of the brown philosophy department have my back

the scientists face the same criticisms because they could go be scientist elsewhere. sure, they wouldn’t have the same facilities/funding, but i’m not sure we need science. 

http://homepage.mac.com/allanmcnyc/textpdfs/levistrauss.pdf 

i refuse to throw up my hands and accept nihilism/relativism. i think a lot of my complaints can be applied to any institution, and so i’m going to try and live more of my life in non-institutionalized ways. i think there’s a difference between a potentially superior path that coercively expands/institutionalizes/materializes one’s will and a potentially superior path that separates culture from material well-being and makes relationships more personal than institutional. the connection’s maybe a little oblique and it’s overly decontextualized, but here’s a david harvey quote: “The language game of a cabal of international bankers may be impenetrable to us, but that does not put it on a par with the equally impenetrable language of inner-city blacks from the stand­point of power relations.”

 i think i’ll fight at the front lines of consumption to try and show americans that when they buy things that were made by people with shitty jobs, there won’t be many non-shitty jobs that involve actually making things.

t.j. clark, a former situationist and one of my intellectual heroes, taught art history at berkeley for decades. i’m not sure how they justified taking these positions to themselves. maybe they felt that there was still crucial intellectual work to be done and felt that they could freely do it if they had a university job. maybe even smart people sell out. maybe they thought they would never be heard without an institutionalized voice. in any case, at the moment i’m not convinced that we need further research, and certainly not convinced that it needs to be done with the ivy league brand; a lot of the crucial realizations about power have been academic commonplaces for decades; we still start interdisciplinary seminars by reading foucault. the next step isn’t to keep running him into lacan for 2.5 hours a week, it’s to change our behavior, principally our economic behavior.

i believed in the exploitation of labor when i didn’t close the loop between my desires and their consequences. i believed in the exploitation of labor when i sent sam adler-bell an angry email saying that it’s ridiculous to think that library workers should be immune to lay-offs at a time when the rising cost of tuition makes college an increasingly outsized burden. now i realize that yes, treating labor properly makes going to brown a large burden, but that’s ok because it’s a stupid thing to do. if brown ends up exposed as a bastion of class differentiation more than a welcoming educational institution, that’s actually a good thing, and maybe more smart kids will pick state schools and undermine ivy league dominance. i don’t think state schools are immune to these critiques either, but with them students can avail themselves of governance structures beyond the market to change conditions.