Having spent the last six hours attempting to get OneSearch citations to download into my Endnote database, I can officially say I have wasted the entire morning. I'm going to spend the next six hours retyping each one. Academia feels like a tedious, technologically-impossible suckfest today, so I'm going to take a moment to meditate on one of my favorite quotes from my readings yesterday:
"There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives. The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community. This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary one, consisting perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from history or fiction or both. The second way is to describe themselves as standing in an immediate relation to a non-human reality. This relationship is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe, or their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity." -- Richard Rorty
Though I don't agree with Rorty on everything, and though we could always problematize the project of binaries, this speaks with nice clarity to a powerful (constructed or not) division. Since I've alternated between spending my life with revolutionaries, then law students -- or with activists, then academics -- I'm always wishing for a way to break down what feels like a very real barricade between these conceptions. Solidarity!
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3 comments:
I don't know about how to best realize solidarity, but I do know that I wouldn't trust my data to proprietary software if I thought I'd need to be able to get at it a few years down the road...
But, then, now I'm a technophobe.
Ahhhh...Richard Rorty...brings back fond memories of my philosophy classes in undegrad! :)
I'm a wee technophobic as well, but unfortunately the professor I'm researching for wants it in this format. Grrr!
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