Monday, July 12, 2010

Epistemology: fools, nobodies, and more nobodies


There is a bar in this city that every fool who is a somebody and all the nobodies who wanna become a somebody go to. I, a nobody who is much happier being a fool than a wanna-be, frequent the joint. Its about 2 blocks from the place I’m staying and good friends of mine, intellectuals sin pretenciones, go from time to time. About a week ago I had a conversation that has stayed with me since and is worth giving some thought to. A good friend brought some US Latino who is a free-lance writer. After the usual chitchat and the question of why and who we write for emerged the US Latino unapologetically and confidently proclaimed he writes about the African-American and Latino community for white people. When pressed he explained that he wants his work to be published and thus needs to write for white folk. Yet, the more we pushed, the more it seemed that the somebody really viewed himself as some sort of interlocutor between people of color and white folk.

 

Several of us tried to explain that there are few journalist of color and even fewer that present critical perspectives. We told the US Latino that we write for our primos, our friends from high school who never went to college, our tio/tias who don’t have BA but know as much if not more than many kids with degrees about Los Angles, race, discrimination, migration, etc. He wasn’t convinced. We continued to drink. We eventually left. Days have passed and I’m still thinking about the US Latino writer…and here is why:

 

While I would one day like to be a fool who is read by nobodies and a somebody or two I think we are all in the position of this US Latino, especially graduate students. We have no say in the language we use. Our language resembles middle-class educated Americans more than the subjects we write about. While most of us are no doubt far from Spivack’s move in “Can the Subaltern Speak,” I fear we are closer than we imagine: writing for professors and academics in language that would put to sleep the nobodies we claim to be inspired by and writing for. How do we shift the way knowledge is acquired and disseminated? Should we all become Carlos Monsivais?

9 comments:

  1. To me this feels sort of like a person who works as a technical writer for Sony worrying that only people with DVD players will read her work. In academia, this is basically the name of the game. Historians write mostly for other historians; physicists write almost entirely for other physicists. If one wants to have an academic career, then publishing in journals that almost no one in the world reads is necessary.

    That being said, the burden is on us to make our work as accessible as possible. I try to be as straightforward as I can in my writing, and avoid needlessly pretentious and obtuse language ("spatialize," "stimmung," "imaginary" as a noun). My working-class fam seems to have little trouble understanding the language of my work, though they might not be all that interested in it most of the time. It's also possible to fulfill the requirements of the scholarly-journal/monograph thing and still write for a broader audience in newspapers, magazines, blogs, political and community forums, and so on. The best thing I think is to follow a great old critic's advice: mean what you say, say what you mean, and don't say what you don't mean. The rest will work itself out...

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  2. I agree with blackpepper's comments, except we are still confined by the language/form we use.

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  3. I think if you are writing objectively you will probably not sound like the subject you are talking about for a few reasons. Objective writing means you are discussing, examining, dissecting the topic from the outside. This is the nature of history, science, social science. When one begins to write subjectively it falls into the category of art, the humanities, spoken word, you get the point. My favorite type of academia is when objective and subjective meet to create a good play, novel, or film.

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  4. No one's likely to read my dissertation except a few academics who study the same thing I do. So be it. I write for the opportunity to stand in front of a room full of 18-22 year olds and tell them what I think, and what I think they should read, with minimal legal and political encumbrance. If narrow, rarefied prose is the cost of doing that, I think it's worth it...for the first book anyway. Book two will blow your mind... ;) - EF

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  5. hahaha. and book 3?

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  6. EF-as you can see you are missing out. buy a jet or some shit and come kick it Fri/Sat...

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  7. Ha, maybe i should man but I have guests...gotta be responsible. You know nobody gives the NYC tour (broadway from 112th to 116th) like I do! -EF

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  8. jajajajaj---Except dude, come'on porton is 125th?! Saint Nick yo, 147th man...but yes you know that area CU pretty well!!!

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  9. Doesn't monsi look sad? dissapointed in los letrados

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