Intellectual Sense Research Articles

Imaginative Science

SummaryThis article traces the interactions between the philologist and applied linguist Henry Sweet (1845–1912) and the anthropologist and evolutionist E. B. Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor was impressed by Sweet’s uniformitarian views on phonetic synthesis and word-division: that phonetic and grammatical processes observable in the present could be used to explain grammatical formation and inflection in the past. Conversely, Sweet’s views on language and its origins owe much to Tylor’sintellectualismand hisdoctrine of survivals. According to Tylor, ‘primitive man’ employed rational thought in his attempts to make intellectual sense of the world and its phenomena. In expressions such as ‘the sun rises’, vestiges of this primitive thought and animism then survive in the lexis and syntax of later, modern languages. Sweet used Tylorian material in his language textbooks, and the intellectualist theory was taken up by literary critics in the 1880s, e.g., in the Shelley Society — of which Sweet was a founding member, in order to explore the roots of poetic metaphor and figurative language as used in modern English poetry.

Anti-Modernism and Anti-Semitism in Hans Urs von Balthasar's Apokalypse der deutschen Seele

This article analyzes Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of the rise of modernism in his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1937 –39). Balthasar's narration of the history of eschatology and the rise of the modern age is critical preparation for his rejection of modernism. It is also a forerunner for his definition of German culture through anti-Semitic adversary-markers. According to Balthasar, in the 18th century there was a fall from a romantic age when German culture was Christian. In the 19th and 20th century Balthasar sees a dramatic deterioration of religious and intellectual sensibilities and an alienation from these earlier foundations. Balthasar presents “the Jewish” (das Jüdische) as an adversary of these foundations. Balthasar's claims are here presented and critiqued.

Imaginative Science<BR> The interactions of Henry Sweet's linguistic thought and E. B. Tylor's anthropology

This article traces the interactions between the philologist and applied linguist Henry Sweet (1845–1912) and the anthropologist and evolutionist E. B. Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor was impressed by Sweet’s uniformitarian views on phonetic synthesis and word-division: that phonetic and grammatical processes observable in the present could be used to explain grammatical formation and inflection in the past. Conversely, Sweet’s views on language and its origins owe much to Tylor’s intellectualism and his doctrine of survivals. According to Tylor, ‘primitive man’ employed rational thought in his attempts to make intellectual sense of the world and its phenomena. In expressions such as ‘the sun rises’, vestiges of this primitive thought and animism then survive in the lexis and syntax of later, modern languages. Sweet used Tylorian material in his language textbooks, and the intellectualist theory was taken up by literary critics in the 1880s, e.g., in the Shelley Society — of which Sweet was a founding member, in order to explore the roots of poetic metaphor and figurative language as used in modern English poetry.

John Kitsuse: A Sociologist in Everyday Life

As I try to pinpoint how John Kitsuse became an unending inspiration, I keep reflecting my sense that John seemed to find the sociological career, not so much as something to become but as a vehicle for expressing who he was. He was a careful, sensitive man, and, while his publications mounted up to an impressive body of work, he was the rare sociologist whose contributions were significant in quality far more than what they measured in quantity. I don't recall any fluff in my reading of his work, and everything I absorbed from John, both from his writings and from the times I shared with him, penetrated deeply. Even his sense of humor was sociological. If Goffman wrote about the dramaturgy of social life, John Kitsuse enacted it. People were always laying identities on others, a matter he noted with gestures and prosody that readily put people's expres sions in 'scare' quotation marks. No doubt this came from disturbing experiences of finding himself to be taken to be a kind of person he did not recognize or embrace. I never pushed to find out what those experiences were; I assumed some were results of the racism he lived in his early years while others were more idiosyncratic. Maybe, were he not my senior, I would have asked him about the relationship between his intellectual sensibility and his biography, but I don't think so. I loved the delicate balance of his personality and would have hated to do anything to risk upsetting it even slightly. Some memory flashes:

Believing, Doubting, Deciding, Acting

A director of a composition program at a small regional university, I had the habit of piloting first-year writing curricula that addressed new problems we saw with existing courses, new needs we perceived among students, or new conditions in the program or at the school. For example, when we received five computer classrooms for our exclusive use and decided to schedule all our sections to spend half their days in the classrooms, I created a computer-based curriculum and taught it for several quarters before passing the syllabus on to the rest of the teaching staff. When we decided that special sections for prospective education majors weren’t helping them produce better writing, I partnered with several local schools and created a curriculum of readings and writing assignments that required students to engage with the real problems faced by teachers and administrators in the area, then gave the syllabus to the teachers who took over the course. When we wanted to find ways to encourage our students to do better critical reading and critical thinking, I considered and rejected many approaches before I reread several of Peter Elbow’s classic pieces on the doubting and believing games. I decided that his theory gave our students what they needed to become not only better readers, thinkers, and writers, but also better participants in conversations that mattered both in and out of college—in short, better citizens. I set about creating a curriculum based on playing the believing and doubting games with difficult and problematic texts, as well as the additional games of “deciding” and “acting”; that is, the game of extending insights gained from reading texts into “real life” to help us make a decision, and the game of planning action based on those insights. Teaching the curriculum several times taught me the difficulty of changing my students ingrained ways of thinking within the doubting culture we inhabit. As Elbow says in the earliest published iteration of his idea in 1973, “the doubting game has gained a monopoly on legitimacy in our culture” (“Appendix”). We are, generally in our public discourse and specifically in academic discourse, too quick to leap to critical judgments that may be poorly informed, poorly reasoned, poorly constructed—that are, basically, knee-jerk negativity. Such negativity invites not real argument in the intellectual sense, but mere contradicting, as in the old Monty Python comedy routine where a man goes to an “argument clinic” and pays to have an argument with a professional arguer. He is directed to a door down the hall, and the following conversation ensues:

Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics

Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. xi., 419.This important volume recounts a meeting of some the best minds in political science, but, in the end, it is a meeting in the physical sense (as the volume comes out of a conference held at Yale in 2002) and not really in any intellectual sense. The ostensible goal of the volume is to proffer answers to what the editors call “a fundamental question about the proper place of problems and methods in the study of politics…. Which should political scientists chose first, a problem or a method?” (1). Unfortunately, a good many of the contributors to the volume ask whether this is a question at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of those who reject the question do not have objections to the increased technical and mathematical nature of modern political science. And, equally unsurprising, those who suggest that method has too often come before problem are those who have earlier, and often eloquently, bemoaned the rise of rational choice theory and econometric applications. As an intellectual rapprochement, the work fails. It rather resembles a dinner of extended family, where long-held differences and grievances are kept just under the breath, but as a collection of essays by leading scholars which consider the methodologies and epistemologies of political science, the volume is a smashing success.

Joseph V. Smith 1928-2007

Joseph V. Smith was born on the 30th of July 1928, in Derbyshire, England. He married Brenda Wallis at Crich, Derbyshire, on the 31st of August, 1951, moved to the USA, and their family grew with two daughters, Virginia and Susan. He retired in September 2005 as the Louis Block Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences and the College at the University of Chicago. On Friday the 6th of April, 2007, at age 78, he died of pneumonia at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Parkinson’s disease had begun to take its cruel toll about five years earlier. He and his wife Brenda moved to Brookline in 2005 to be near their daughter, Virginia, and family, where he suffered a broken hip and several heart attacks before the final event. In the meantime, he continued to write an autobiographical book Living Safely which dealt with local and global problems facing our species. As Brenda said: “He was very strong and very stoic. He handled any difficulties in life the way he handled his illness.” In early April, a reporter from the Boston Globe asked me, by phone, for information about Professor Smith. From my troubled, garbled conversation the reporter recovered the following quotation: “Joe was one of the great mineralogists of his time, both in an intellectual sense and a practical sense. He did first-rate science that was always at the forefront. And he pursued practical applications in a very powerful way. He was also always looking for the next, best way of studying minerals.” His many honours support these statements. These include election as Fellow of the Royal Society of London and member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and award of the Murchison Medal (Geological Society of London), the MSA Award (young scientist award …

Rawls and the Kantian Ethos

John Rawls had a life-long interest in Kant. To provide a new perspective on Rawls's political thinking, to illuminate Kant's legacy for political theory, and to contribute to current debates about the Enlightenment, I track how Rawls interprets and transforms Kant's legacy. In this essay, I show how Rawls reconceptualizes four key Kantian activities: the identification of the problem, the engagement with common sense, the construction of principles, and the authentication of principles. I defend Rawls from the charge—made by Allan Bloom, Michael Sandel, and Allen Wood, among others—that Rawls fundamentally misunderstands or misuses Kant. The basis of my defense is that Rawls considers a critical intellectual sensibility (or ethos), rather than a specific doctrine (e.g., the categorical imperative), as the most valuable component of Kant's legacy.

Globalization, Democracy and the Aesthetic Ecology of Emergent Publics for a Sustainable World: Working from John Dewey

AbstractThe global justice movement reveals a diverse array of emergent publics striving politically for a sustainable world. Working partly from John Dewey, we try to illuminate democratic grounds for knowledge and action in these endeavors. We begin by situating Dewey's ideas in the politics of American history, especially historian John Diggins' countervailing approach to issues of authority, knowledge and opinion. Diggins, against Robert Westbrook and others, contends that Dewey's philosophy of politics chased radical democratic illusions, whereas he might have learned from Charles S. Peirce to uphold the boundary between professional communities and other entities including democratic publics. Dewey saw no democratic alternative to harness the political energy of ordinary people. We argue that Dewey had come to understand that a corporate state system of political economy had come to engulf both the liberal democratic polity and the professions. Dewey's political challenge to the professions and his illumination of the aesthetic ecology of democratic publics prefigure a democratic republican alternative that opens up a new basis for participation in the global justice movement confronting, among other obstacles, a transnational corporate state based in the USA.A Marxist-progressivist notion of the ongoing socialization of markets by corporate capitalism too often reinforces an anti-Populist intellectual sensibility that is coupled with, whether wittingly or not, either a social-democratic elitism or a revolutionary vanguardism. Globalization struggles need, on the contrary, a pragmatic vision of democratic publics instituting a true diversity of policies assuring a world-in-common. The fight for public spaces in the treacherous politics of civil society and global consumerism is a struggle against subjectivization. The fact that corporate state elitism, in the U.S. context, feeds on a rightist version of nationalism does not mean we can junk the history of democratic struggle for a republican alternative to imperialism. By and large, neo-liberal policies "from above" have aggravated various types of inequality and the militaristic turn pursued by some elites compounds not only negative side effects but critical opportunities. Democratic action in and from the United States has to be clear about both place-based forms of life and expanding forms of solidarity in global struggles for democracy and the commons.Our reading of Dewey is strengthened by research that highlights his ecological ontology and its key role in his democratic theory. We argue that globalizing knowledge regimes and their products, such as deforestation, re-institute destructive dualisms that would be transformed by a Deweyan approach that energizes democratic forms of agency and policy. Dewey's essay on "Time and Individuality" is explicated to disclose the radical democratic implications of Deweyan science. We show further that this approach, as a field science and ecological stewardship, provides public alternatives to violence, whether primarily "social" or "environmental". A Deweyan logic of particularity casts in contrasting relief our historical epoch's dominant logic of fungibility, the fetishization of global economic space, and its looming costs. The reclamation and reconstruction of democratic publics are long overdue and requires new regimes of participatory and place-based knowledge opening on the global commons for sustainable life.

Responses to Cohn's Discussion on the Zinkernagel-Hengartner 'Credo 2004'

Responses to Cohn's Discussion on the Zinkernagel-Hengartner 'Credo 2004'

Postmodernism and Historical Inquiry: Spoiled For Choice?

I O Historically Speaking · January/February 2005 the form theycan take. These questions provide the standard ofadequacy against which the histories can be measured. Postmodernists, by drawing attention to the subjective and cultural sources ofhistorical knowledge, have concluded that such knowledge is nothingbut a personal and cultural construction, providinguswithno reliable information aboutthe past. In facthistorians often provide credible narratives and interpretations ofthe past, and give plausible analyses ofwhathappened in response to the questions people ask about past events. C. Behan McCullagh ¿ra readerandassociateprofessor inphilosophy at La Trobe University . His most recent book isThe Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (Routledge, 2004). 1 ER. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic:A SemanticAnalysis ofthe Historians Language (Martinus Nijhoff, 1983); Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism in History : Fear or Freedom? (Routledge, 2003); Alun Munslow, The New History (Pearson Education, 2003); Robert E. BerkhoferJr., Beyond the Great Story: History as TextandDiscourse (Harvard University Press, 1995); and KeithJenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (Routledge, 2003). 2 This I have attempted to do, most succinctly in my recent book The Logic ofHistory (Routledge, 2004). 3 Munslow, The New History, 166. 4 Ankersmit, NarrativeLogic. He sometimes wavers from this view slightly: see C. Behan McCullagh, "Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation," History and Theory 39 (2000): 58. 5 Hayden White, Metahistory: The HistoricalImagination in 19th-century Europe (TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1975). 6 1 have analyzed and illustrated common forms of these patterns of interpretation in The Truth of History (Routledge, 1998). 7 Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings ofFrance: Monarchy and Nation, 987-1328, trans. L. Butler and RJ. Adam (Macmillan, 1964), ch. 12. Postmodernism and Historical Inquiry: Spoiled for Choice? Beverley Southgate For me, postmodernism definitively arrived on December 12, 1997. On that day the London Timesreported that Prime Minister Tony Blair had gone beyond the bounds of conventional diplomatic generosityby offering the Irish negotiator Gerry Adams nothingless than "a choice ofhistory." For a mere mortal to claim to have such dispensations in his gift may sound extraordinarily hubristic to historians brought up to assert their own unique rights over a past, the nature ofwhich itwas for them, and onlythem, to determine. But for those attempting to assess the implications of postmodernism for historical inquiry, Blair's offer does at least make a start. And as we grope ourway through something of a conceptual fog, the key word "choice" does provide one useful beacon. What Blair implied with his offer ofhistorical choicewas that, while the events ofthe past (with all their anger and frustration and violence) are undoubtedly there—or rather here, in our present—what actually matters is not their existence, their presenceperse, but rather our responses to them. We can look at them, respond to them, remember them, either in such a way as will lead to further disruption or one that will facilitate reconciliation . What Adams had, and what historians have, is a choice ofnarrative—a choice ofthe wayto "emplot" those past events or put them in a story that leads from them, through our present, and forward to the future. That seems to me to get to the heart of what postmodernism implies for historical inquiry—wherepostmodernism represents an attempt to theorize, and make some intellectual sense of, our actual situation in postmodernity ; and postmodernity I take to be simply a chronological category, with disputable boundaries like any other, but one that enables us at least provisionally to locate ourselves in the ever-rolling stream of time. Thus tentatively located, our condition seems to me to display a number ofinterlocking features, which can themselves be seen as the culmination ofhistorical trends. And the narrative net that I cast over that past catches at least the following in its mesh: first, a postCopernican decentering—an enforced realization that I personally am neither static nor the center of the universe, and that indeed there is no single or static center from which either nature or the past can be definitively viewed, assessed, described, and re-presented; second, that a skeptical philosophy, originating in classical antiquity, revived as a central ingredient of early modern thought, and newly regenerated, reminds us of humans' inherent inadequacy—physical and intellectual —in any pursuit of"truth," whether scientific or...

Thinking and the Art of Furniture

This article argues that furniture has been a source of ontological curiosity and an object of epistemological significance for some of the most important and formative modern intellectual traditions. Drawing on J. J. Gibson’s theory of affordances, the article shows how furniture has afforded a variety of intellectual meanings and can be seen as something of a worldly context giving shape and sense to what many modern intellectuals have understood by “the world.” Drawing on analyses of the way in which modern empiricism, rationalism, experimental science, and contemporary discursive psychology have “wondered” about the nature and significance of furniture, the article suggests that these intellectual endeavors have taken furniture as the primary disavowed object of their inquiries, and in so doing they have been tacitly complicit in confining modern intellectual life to the indoor realm. The article also discusses the extent to which the increasingly technoscientific nature of contemporary furniture poses some profound—and possibly unanswerable—questions as to how the modern philosopher can make intellectual sense of this indoor world. The article goes on to argue that popular science and science fiction writing are superior to philosophy in this respect and can be usefully seen as potential heirs to the modern philosophical tradition, and that if philosophy is to remain interesting and relevant in the present time, it must return to its ancient “outdoor” peripatetic roots.

Genetics: still a discipline?

In the institutional sense of the term "discipline" (laboratories, societies, congresses, curricula, etc.), genetics remains a discipline. In the intellectual sense of the term (consensus on a definite array of concepts, methods and theoretical purposes), it is doubtful that genetics is still a discipline. At first, molecular biology seemed to have introduced an unequivocal structural (or molecular) definition of the gene: a definite sequence of nucleotides that code for a protein. In fact, as it appears in retrospect, this was not the case. Even in 1961, when Jacob and Monod proposed their first model of genetic regulation in bacteria, there was no possibility of constructing a non equivocal concept of the gene. More recent developments in molecular genetics have made this situation worse. There is no possible definition of the gene as a general category. The reasons why biologists keep the word are pragmatic rather than theoretical: communication among scientists, economic interests and ideology.

The poverty of postmodern human services

Postmodernism cannot or will not tell the difference between truth and falsehood, reality and simulacra, principle and dogma, or right and wrong. As a corollary, it is unable or unwilling to make any ‘veritable‘ difference to the nature or order of things. Indeed, there is no escape from, nor anything outside of, the ’panopticon of language’. Accordingly, there is no significant probative difference between the practice and experience of genocide, and talking or writing about it. All one can do is be sceptical about discourses, even those concerned with ethnic cleansing and the like. As ludicrous as this sounds, it has not prevented postmodernism from monopolising discourses about significant aesthetic, cultural, economic, intellectual, political and social practices and sensibilities. Postmodernism manifests itself in a host of disciplines, and its presence is being increasingly felt in human services education and practice. If, as I shall argue, postmodernism is such a thoroughly baseless, reductive and inert doctrine, then why persist with it? The poverty of postmodernism prompts a timely return to the rich legacy of Marxism.

Writing the Asian American Artist: Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Maxine Hong Kingston's genre crossing between autobiography, memoir, and fiction in The Woman Warrior: A Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts generated a rethinking of traditional expectations of autobiography as a truthful representation of a writer's life, problematized constructed nature of identity, and brought attention to existence of collective literary protagonists and multiple points of view, thus raising questions about need for revision of genres that were often androcentric and Eurocentric in nature.(1) In Tripmaster Monkey: Fake Book, Kingston forces a similar re-viewing of traditional Kunstlerroman, novel about growth and maturation of an artist, as she tells story of a fifth-generation native Californian Chinese-American, Wittman Ah Sing. Set in sixties, this multi-layered, densely textured novel, with its multiplicity of interpretation and fluidity of meaning, challenges reader into using his/her wit--to become a `wit man/woman'--in order to make sense of seemingly rambling narrative.(2) The traditional Kunstlerroman highlights marginality of artist in its portrayal of typical image of a sensitive alienated soul at odds with a hostile world (see Beebe). More often than not, it is artist's unique artistic and intellectual sensibility that leads to this alienation from society. However, in most Kunstlerromane by American writers of color, not only are artists estranged from society because of that artistic sensibility, but they also suffer extreme marginalization as a result of race, gender, and/or class. Significantly, racially, ethnically, and/or sexually marginalized artist-protagonists in these Kunstlerromane want to move from margin to center or to help change existing meaning of margin and make it a site of agency and empowerment. Instead of retiring to an ivory tower or separating from society, as does protagonist in traditional Kunstlerroman, artist-protagonists work establishing identities as artists and Americans within society, not as outsiders, but as involved members of that society. Further, American artists of color seek equal participation in dominant American society not only for themselves but also for entire group and use their art to help realize this communal vision. Most importantly, they want to achieve this goal without compromising their ethnic, racial, and/or gender identity(ies). While this is not an essentialized paradigm for all Kunstlerromane by American writers of color, and it is necessary to take inter-minority and intraminority differences into account, many of show these characteristics.(3) In his discussion of revision or parodying of traditional forms or genres by writers, Henry Louis Gates Jr. asserts that it is an act of rhetorical (294). Kingston's redefinition of traditional Kunstlerroman in Tripmaster Monkey reflects such a purpose as she subverts and resists dominant discourse while envisioning new, non-stereotypical images of men and women, races and ethnic groups, believing that if we can imagine them, then we can work toward building and becoming them (Kingston, Interview 783). I His province is America. America, his province. Armed with a wild imagination, a caustic tongue, and intense fervor, Wittman Ah Sing, artist-protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey, is on a mission of self-definition and is out to subvert dominant society's attempts to stereotype him and his ethnic community. It is not, however, an easy task, and he is constantly in conflict with dominant society that spurs in him feelings of anger and frustration, alienation and despair. Not just a typical alienated artist, Wittman is a person who has never had a viable sense of self since he has lived in margins all his life. Suffering from social and psychological isolation, he even entertain[s] idea of suicide, though in next instant dismisses it as only a fantasy, saying it was just the run of his mind. …

Identity Development of High‐Ability Black Collegians

AbstractStereotypes and racism hinder high‐ability black collegians' integration of their intellectual competence and sense of self. Students' stories in this chapter show how a strong peer community and positive student‐faculty interactions can overcome these obstacles and promote healthy identity development.

The politics of PACS in a transatlantic mirror: Same‐sex unions and sexual difference in France today

1989 was not only the year the Berlin Wall finally collapsed. In France, 1989 was primarily the year of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution—that is, at long last, the Revolution was over (at least, according to Francois Furet1). This meant that, henceforth, instead of opposing 1776 to 1789, a (good) liberal Revolution to a (bad) radical Revolution, French “neo-liberals” could invoke de Tocqueville to denounce the perils of democracy in America—thus turning around the transatlantic mirror: in contrast to a French tradition of civility fortunately inherited from a happy combination of the Old and New Regimes merging in the “Republique,” “democratic passions” (meaning the immoderate love of equality) jeopardized the American nation. This became intellectual common sense in Parisian circles in the following years, in response to American (so-called) political correctness, and shortly thereafter, to (so-called) sexual correctness. In France, 1989 was also the year of the affaire du foulard: should young Muslim women be allowed to wear a veil in public schools? The political choice was generally presented as an alternative between the principle of laicite (secularism) and a (somewhat unprincipled) cultivation of cultural difference. Language notwithstanding, this debate was not so much about religion: in fact, it reflected a growing concern about the “integration” of immigrants, or rather, second-generation immigrants, in French society. The defense of a national model against the perils of ethnic fragmentation was elaborated by public intellectuals such as Elisabeth Badinter, Regis Debray, and Alain Finkielkraut—in the name of the “Republique.” Resisting ghettoisation, they identified the French nation with what they defined as a universalist model of individual integration. In the process, they too drew on a transatlantic contrast: American differentialism (that is, the communautarisme of identity politics) was the mirror image of French universalism (that is, the individualisme of Republican politics).

Culture de la nature au XVIIIe siècle : le sens dans le jardin

The art of gardening stems from an ontological paradox whereby man as creature turns into a creator using nature for his own ends and perfecting it. In this sense the development of landscape gardening in the XVIIIth century signals the advent of man as master of nature. The paradox is tentatively solved when another sort of nature is put forward by idealist thinkers who try to promote intellectualist aesthetics to explain how nature can be naturalised, i.e. rendered more natural through the application of intellectual archetypes to the raw materials of landscape. The gardener of the late XVIIth and early XVIIIth centuries thus becomes the agent whose role is to bring nature to perfection through the application of culture. This first paradox is complemented and inverted by a second owing to the success of sensualist aesthetics in the age of the Enlightenment. The development of Locke's epistemology is characterised by the emergence of sentiment as a faculty of judgment whose decisions supersede reason in when they are seen as the expression of the voice of a nature now conceived of as predominantly interior. From Shaftesbury to Gilpin's or Price's picturesque gardens, an interior landscape appears which shows the mastery of the master of nature effected by this new interior nature. Eventually, nature wins as, following the winding path that leads from intellectual sense to sensualist sentiment, it invades the representations and the very nature of the gardener.

Before Braverman: Harry Frankel and the American Workers' Movement

What was so great about Harry Braverman? The question, obviously rhetorical, elicits a predictable response in academic circles, where the author of Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) is deservedly praised for a text that literally christened the emerging field of labor process studies. Braverman's book was rigorous in its conceptualizations, sufficiently abstract to present an argument that reached beyond particularities into generalized, universal experience, and historical and empirical enough to sustain an analysis meant to be received across disciplinary boundaries. Moreover, it bridged the academic and activist worlds of left scholarship and practice, a breeze of fresh, interpretive air that reinvigorated intellectual sensibilities and revived the study of the work process in fields such as history, sociology, economics, political science, and human geography. One of the fifty or so most important studies produced in the third quarter of the twentieth century, Labor and Monopoly Capital earned its author a remarkable reputation that, sadly, he never lived to enjoy.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine

Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine Odile Passot (bio) Translated by Paul Lafarge Quel besoin a-t-on de "faire un portrait" de moi? N'ai-je pas fait moi-même, dans mes écrits, le meilleur portrait que l'on pourra jamais en faire, si le portrait en question pouvait avoir la plus petite nécessité? Guy Debord, "Cette mauvaise réputation..." The Man Behind the Mask With the publication of his Memoirs in 1959, Guy Debord began, insistently, to paint his own portrait, which he retouched again and again in the years that followed. Debord gave much of his work an autobiographical dimension, intermingling in this way objectivity and subjectivity, theory and practice. Despite his desire for transparency, however, Debord composed his texts according to a secret code, which must be broken in order to understand what he really means. He cares little whether the common reader understands: "Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential," he writes in Commentary on the Society of the Spectacle, "I obviously cannot speak in complete freedom. Above all, I must take care not to give too much information to just anybody"(1). Debord has, in fact, covered his tracks, so that only those who take the trouble to crack the code will understand his work. Despite the familiar faces in his films, his winks and private jokes, Debord gives little of himself away. He proceeds by allusions, while his real life remains hidden, obscure. In In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, he lingers on the great episodes of his life (the Lettrist epic, May '68, etc.), but it is not always possible to reconstitute the chain of events without the key to his particular codes.1 Unless done by one who knew him personally, any portrait of Debord that goes beyond what he himself made public will be at best speculation, and at worst sleight-of-hand. [End Page 71] To understand the multiple self-portraits he left behind, we must turn to those who knew Debord, and recorded their own images of him. During his lifetime, Debord was the subject of numerous accounts. Gérard Guégan depicted him in his 1975 novel The Irregulars as a character named Antoine Peyrot. Guégan had little love for Debord, and used Peyrot to settle the score between them.2 Maurice Rajsfus dedicated the eighth chapter of his memoirs to a description of Saint-Germain-des-Prés between 1950 and 1954, just at the time of the Lettrist International. He met Debord there, and provides invaluable information not only on the revolutionary youth of the era, but on the screening of the first Lettrist films, including the famous showing of Hurlements en faveur de Sade on October 13, 1952 (Rajsfus 1992). Since Debord's death, tongues have loosened, and accounts of Debord have become more frequent. Gérard Berréby conducted a series of interviews with Jean-Michel Mension, who took part in the Lettrists' escapades around 1953. The interviews give us a better understanding of the importance of the Lettrist movement in the development of Debord's ideas (Mension 1998). No doubt other accounts will appear in the near future. To these various eyewitnesses must be added Debord's two wives, Michèle Bernstein and, later, Alice Becker-Ho. The latter has, for the moment, published only a short collection of poems, in which she mourns the suicide of her husband (Becker-Ho 1998). Bernstein, on the other hand, published two novels, Tous les chevaux du roi in 1960 and La Nuit in 1961, which are romans à clef of her life with Debord. I would like to study these two texts for the light they shed on Debord's life and intellectual sensibility. Of course, we must proceed cautiously, not only because they present themselves as works of fiction, but also because their author herself tends to minimize their importance. For several reasons, however, they deserve an attentive reading, which they have not yet received. Rather than taking the novels as works purely of the imagination, I consider them as "autofictions." This term, coined by Serge Doubrovsky, refers to a genre...