In response to Jay's last line:
In what ways does a life validate or subvert the value of someone's
opinions? In what ways does it shape what are possible truths for us?
JAY.
I suspect it depends on WHOSE life, and where WE stand in relation to
what THEY stand for. For example, Hitler or Louis Braille or Helen
Keller etc.
Regards from Down Under
Kim Cooney
----Original Message Follows----
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 1998 01:21:33 -0400
To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
From: Jay Lemke <jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu>
Subject: Re: the autobiographical impulse
Reply-To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
I hope people on the list realise that I was quite pleased by Bill's
follow-up in the the "self-indulgent" autobiographical genre ... his
good
humor and honest humility (as I read him), and his long record of
thoughtful contributions here gave me a sense of wanting to know him
better
and more personally in the way his and my message may have allowed. I
certainly smiled a lot as I read that message.
As Eva somewhat obliquely suggests, there is an issue in academic
culture
about whether or not being personal about one's life is legitimate or
not,
self-indulgent or not, a claim of special and high status or not, etc. I
have often been told by Europeans that they find American inclinations
to
indulge in personal anecdotes on formal occasions a bit self-indulgent
and
out of place by their own customs of what is appropriate to the setting.
I
know well that the positivist tradition in our fields enforces its claim
that knowledge is objective truth by dismissing any offer of personal
information about the inventors of truth came to see things as they did
as
superfluous and in a way degrading the objective value of the truth. How
many times I have wanted to know something about the social class
background, the politics, the early life experiences, the sexual
orientation, the race/ethnicity ... and many other matters
classificatory
and phenomenological about the authors whose views I was reading. Those
who
have read the little section "Ideology and Me" in _Textual Politics_ can
guess with what trepidation I broke the taboo against making science
personal.
I will also thank, anonymously, a couple of people who sent me private
emails in response to my indulgence cheering me on!
Eva also reminds us that we have been through much of this before. I
recall
a wonderful discussion around the time that Yrjo shared a paper with us
that used fiction as data for an analysis on the whole set of issues
around
what can count as data about our meaning-lives (fictions, dreams,
introspections, autobiographies, etc.), and there would be many here
better
qualified than I am to talk about the history of how certain disciplines
have excessively narrowed what counts as valid data about what. (At one
time Chomsky succeeded in convincing many linguists that "empirical"
data
about language was invalid in comparison to intuitions about
grammaticality, and that data you made up for your purpose and point was
superior to corpora of naturally occurring texts -- many linguists are
waking up from that Svengali trance today, but Chomsky had made a
fascinating move in the direction of anti-empirical science and the
restoration of introspection as valid data for psychology ... remember
that
for him linguistics is presumably a branch of Cartesian psychology.)
How can we best use autobiographical accounts as "data" ? (and what are
"data" anyway?) and how else can they contribute to the work of our
community? by restoring the personal dimension to our inter-subjective
accounts of the meaning-world? by helping us position ourselves along
the
more delicate dimensions of difference that meaningfully define who we
are
in relation to others? by giving us a chance to feel less alone? and
more
unique? by saying to all the world that who I am does matter to what I
say
and to the worth of what I say for others? by opening the door once
again
to legitimate ad hominem critique? by therefore also forcing us to
decide
what kinds of ad hominem critique are indeed legitimate for what
purposes?
In what ways does a life validate or subvert the value of someone's
opinions? In what ways does it shape what are possible truths for us?
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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