Skip to main content

Week 10 - Uncut Funk - Robert

In my undergraduate work, I accidentally took a graduate philosophy class over Plato’s Theaetetus—a dialogue that examines the nature of knowing. The entire, semester-long course was dedicated to a line-by-line examination of the text to understand Plato’s theory of knowledge.


As I was reading Uncut Funk, I experienced nostalgia for that Plato course. Hall and hooks discuss the pedagogy and method of conversation early on in the dialogue, and I found profound connections between their dialogue and Plato’s philosophical dialogues. What I remember most from the course was the intellectual pleasure we got as a class in uncovering truth and understanding in our close reading. Uncut Funk deserves such an analysis, and I can envision graduate seminars of the future taking a line-by-line approach to hooks and Hall.


My question/s focus/es on the method of dialogue and public discourse as pedagogy:

1) In what public spaces (if any) do meaningful dialogues like this happen outside of Universities? Politicians and pundits would probably like to believe they have meaningful discourse, but they don’t.

2) How does technology expand or limit the possibilities of sitting down to tea and discussing the ins and outs of experience and philosophy? Has there or will there ever be a technological alternative to sitting down for a conversation that captures all of the subtleties and nuance of in-person dialogue? My gut says no.

3) What role does “good old-fashioned” dialogue have for the future of public discourse and pedagogy?

I ask these questions somewhat ironically, considering in Plato’s day, Socrates lamented the use of writing as an inferior form of human dialogue and intellectual exploration, and Plato turned around and wrote his words down; although, there is considerable debate about the faithfulness of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. The scientific and intellectual achievements of the past couple of millennia seem to debunk Socrates’s fear, but conversations have not disappeared from spaces where intellectual achievement happens. Perhaps, I am simply a curmudgeon, holding on to physical conversation as a final vestige of our digital evolution. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 6 Discussion Qs

 Hall brings up the concept of interpellation as applied to social formations. (p 335) How is interpellation related to articulation? How are the two different, if at all? Must the two be discussed together? I have more difficulty conceptualizing interpellation than I do articulation. If we are to take up Hall's warning not to study racism as a set of "historically specific racisms" (336) nor as something with a "universal structure" (337). What balance can we strike today between these two approaches in our current historical moment? Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has written that certain forms of modern racism have been impacted by the prevalent ideology of "colorblindness." Are we still in this moment or are new specificities arising?
Post a Comment
Read more

Corrine's Op Ed

       Although the Grammy’s “rebranded” their “urban” music award in 2020 after being taken to task by Tyler, the Creator for using the term to cover all black artists, regardless of their chosen genre, its lingering presence can still be felt in the new “Progressive R&B” award that has taken its place. Where Tyler, the Creator and other artists argued for more diverse genres that allow for broader categorizations for “people who look like [him],” the Grammy’s simply tucked one category into the other, reflecting how “urban” and R&B are both intrinsically linked and coded to the Grammy’s board as “black music.” This neat folding away of urban back into R&B seems to be unhelpful at best and reductive at worst, and has serious repercussions for us all, artist or otherwise: the pigeonholing of black art/ ists into essentialized categories allows for only a few forms of blackness to be legitimated through the Grammy system, but it also reflects the rigid bo...
Post a Comment
Read more