| neither overdrive nor authoritative precision...the next-to-ness of joculumarity |
[Jun. 13th, 2009|09:51 am] |
The Man B-Side, or on Being an Adjacent Intellectual
Utopyr a.k.a. Grady Harris coined the descriptive term for someone neither an insider nor an outsider: a “besider,” or “B-sider,” as in the B-side of two-sided, two-song 45 rpm vinyl records, the song that wasn’t the A-side song intended for radio airplay, the song that was a simple extra even if it sometimes turned out to be the more interesting of the two (but other times turned out to be exactly the throwaway place-filler it was meant to be).
Imagine my delight, reading Paul Rabinow’s provocative 2008 book Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, to find the distinguished anthropologist taking the position of besiderdom with regard to Michel Foucault’s notion of specialist “specific intellectuals” and vastly synthesizing “universal intellectuals.”
Rabinow writes (pp 39-40): “Where am I situated within this political spectrum? Neither as a specific intellectual nor as a universal intellectual. I am adjacent to both. ‘Adjacent: in close proximity. May or may not imply contact but always implies the absence of anything of the same kind in between.’ Neither the overdrive of the universal intellectual nor the authoritative precision of the specific. Rather: a space of problems. Of questions. Of being behind or ahead. Belated or anticipatory. Out of synch. Too fast or too slow. Reluctant. Audacious. Annoying.”
I had never read Rabinow before, a characteristic case of my not knowing the literature that would have at least lent a sense of contemporary gravitas to my speculations (ideas which, again, I did not invent but got by way of some of the same people with or against whom Rabinow has struggled—his old professor Clifford Geertz being one).
As with most of his inspired jokes, utopyr made up a category that described a condition that actually existed, and contributed a word (like “utopyr” in Czech) that did not exist but should have existed.
It would be too self-congratulatory to link myself to Rabinow. Rather to a personality type, usually less productive overall than Rabinow seems to be. |
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