I wish, in many ways, that I was still footling about with lasers in a laboratory, only having to give any concern to public argument over delayed trains and the continued failure of my rugby league team. One can do something rather similar in my subject, which is broadly about how organisation comes about and develops, ending up in esoteric arguments in 'good sense' whilst despising 'common sense' (these are Gramscian terms). Science has no truck with common sense and academe in general regards it as a theatre of the absurd. One can reverse the gaze, and we often hear phrases like, 'he's bright, but has no common sense'. Some way into academic views, one can find the notion of 'paradigm', that knowledge is always expressed in generic terms of reference and one must understand the root metaphors or ways of life involved. Science can be viewed as just such a form of life. People doing this neglect many of the difficult questions this raises, such as whether you'd ask a bunch of physicists to produce a Bose-Einstein condensate, or a grannies' knitting club. Complex ideas of human understanding are involved here, but it is too easy to lapse into a form of knowledge deconstruction that denies evidence entirely.
Philosophy can seem to quickly unhinge everything, but this is generally a case of a little knowledge being a very dangerous thing. Absurdity might be a place to understand how weak our arguments often are. How did the Chinese rationalise 'foot-binding', the British 'witch-burning' (we hung most of them really) and so on? Currently, in the UK we hear our politicians saying we must find ways to encourage the best people into politics, the absurdity being that these politicians are clearly not the best people at all, looking like a bunch of money-grubbing scum to many of us. My thesis is that argument is dangerous to power, and that as power cannot do away with argument (as it uses a form of it), it ensures control of it. We are encouraged to forget this through control measures that are 'hidden' as manners. The abstract argument from here is very complex, but there are some practical events in history that can help to make them specific. Even these take considerable space to detail. At bottom in this, power clearly hides evidence from us to prevent proper argumentation. Theory aside (plenty is written if anyone wants to venture into the field), I wonder what role our more emotional appreciation might play in changing current politics? I, for instance, would rather watch a Sartre play (an agony) than our current mainstream current affairs and news - at least Sartre had some ludic intent to provoke, the latter now merely soap opera of 'happy shiny news for happy shiny people'. Even satire programmes are almost unwatchable because we know the jokes are the same as ever and part of business-as-usual. Everything, in some sense, becomes a niche-industry, including protest. Even 'The Graduate' has become true, with a real life 'Mrs. Robinson', perhaps even more added irony in that it has taken place in Northern Ireland, a last bastion in bigoted morality. Many radical studies of Soviet Paradise noted the theatre of the absurd, not just in show-trials, but in a gloying kitsch; Arendt noted the banality of Nazi evil. I partly read Bellow's 'The Dean's December' in Bucharest before the wall came down - his point being that the moral climate was freezing in East and West. I didn't agree then - we were free of some of the brutalities here. Now I believe we are going backwards, and faster than we know. Politics as we have it is absurd - they like it that way and much as in the soviets this may be how they maintain their terror. One classic move in the media is to stick a microphone in front of Joe Public, which seems to me to resemble monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare. He gets 15 seconds of fame saying something bland, and they claim balance as the rest of the air-time is given to the very people who have been failing us for 20 years and more.
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