classroom vignette, election season

I've been sticking to my vow not to write here about domestic politics--others say it all it better than I could, and in any case I'm getting a little tired of how thoroughly the subject dominates so many of my conversations these days. But to tell it slant--during last week's session of the Gramsci/Foucault seminar, we read this passage from the Prison Notebooks, and while not a word was said about lipstick or pigs, the subtext was palpable.

Imagine the intellectual position of the man of the people: he has formed his own opinions, convictions, criteria of discrimination, standards of conduct. Anyone with a superior intellectual formation with a point of view opposed to his can put forward arguments better than he and really tear him to pieces logically and so on. But should the man of the people change his opinions just because of this? just because he cannot impose himself in a bout of argument? In that case he might find himself having to change every day, or every time he meets an ideological adversary who is his intellectual superior. On what elements, therefore, can his philosophy be founded? and in particular his philosophy in the form which has the greatest importance for his standards of conduct?

The most important element is undoubtedly one whose character is determined not by reason but by faith. But faith in whom, or in what? In particular in the social group to which he belongs, in so far as in a diffuse way it thinks as he does. The man of the people thinks that so many like-thinking people can’t be wrong, not so radically, as the man he is arguing against would like him to believe; he thinks that, while he himself, admittedly, is not able to uphold and develop his arguments as well as the opponent, in his group there is someone who could do this and could certainly argue better than the particular man he has against him; and he remembers, indeed, hearing expounded, discursively, coherently, in a way that left him convinced, the reasons behind his faith. He has no concrete memory of the reasons and could not repeat them, but he knows that reasons exist, because he has heard them expounded, and was convinced by them. The fact of having once suddenly seen the light and been convinced is the permanent reason for his reasons persisting, even if the arguments in its favour cannot be readily produced.

-Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Hoare & Smith.

So, time for some praxis, y'all: anyone want to come along with me to register voters in Pennsylvania the weekend after next? I am trying to organize a posse and maybe even an actual carpool, though that is complicated by my lack of a) a driver's license; b) a car. There's always the Chinatown bus, though.