“But the academic is brought closer to lower-class culture because of his very distance from it. Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly.”
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
Context: Courses were offered in such fields as nineteenth-century black history and Hispanic-American folk art. The activists made a peculiar claim for these classes. They insisted that the courses would alleviate the cultural anxiety of nonwhite students by permitting them to stay in touch with their home culture. The perspective gained in the classroom or the library does indeed permit an academic to draw nearer to and understand better the culture of the alien poor. But the academic is brought closer to lower-class culture because of his very distance from it. Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly.
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Richard Rodríguez 127
American journalist and essayist 1944Related quotes
Women and Madness (2005), p. 346, and see Women and Madness (1972), p. 298 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)
Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 36
Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 26 quoted in: Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations - Volume 1 (1999). p. 159
"A note about this book, February 12, 2004"
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: I released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily.
When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.
It wasn't foolish.
Source: * The New York Exhibition of Independent Artists ** The Craftsman ** 1910 ** https://books.google.com/books?id=Af84fBmzmVYC&pg=PA423&lpg=PA423&dq=Art+cannot+be+separated+from+life.#v=onepage&q=Art%20cannot%20be%20separated%20from%20life.&f=false.
“Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 7
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews
"Cornel West interviewed by bell hooks" in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991)
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)
Context: If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems). What can be known about life only through the process of living — and so is part of even the humblest organisms — must be added to all the other aspects that can be observed, abstracted, measured. … Once an organic world picture is in the ascendant, the working aim of an economy of plenitude will be not to feed more human functions into the machine, but to develop further man's incalculable potentialities for self-actualization and self-transendence, taking back into himself deliberately many of the activities he has too supinely surrendered into the mechanical system. <!-- p. 395