So, Mark, where do you place you and me in this?

[koganbot]

dubdobdee over on the poptimists answer record/fanfic thread:

some of the prob with "theory-dependent" crit -- not just music crit either -- is that there's a deferred fandom going on: viz yr "allowed" to be critical of tarantino but you have to treat eg foucault [but basically insrt guru of choice]* as if it's a different level of thinking; there's a very hierarchical and reverential (and frankly religious) attitude towards the "texts" you are using to interpret, at the expense of the texts you being "critically" interpeting... it's all so relentlessly one-way

i once said to one of the dullards-in-question that i was frankly more interested in interpreting kierkegaard in the light of crazy frog than vice versa: result = a nervous larf, and mark's "joke" filed under "contrarian anti-intellectual populism" i expect

*of course within "theory" you get to cast your chosen anti-gurus as strawmen-to-pitch-into, which is then confused with being "critical" of theory -- but the relationship of desire and fascination among thinkers really can be explored by treating it as a (very unself-aware) species of fanboyism, in which ilxish laundrylists of facts are wheeled out to smother unbeleivers in jargonised scorn...

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I don't think either of y'all actually split into hallway/classroom very easily yourselves, from what I've read. But it does seem like, milieu-wise (whether you like it or not, usually not) Mark seems to be most agitated with clasroom-thinkers who are pretending they're in the hallway, and Frank seems to be most agitated (or rather, stuck with) hallway-thinkers who are pretending they're in the classroom. Reductively the difference between the crippling (boring) pseudo(?)-academic deference of big-T theory guys while pretending it's in the interest of PHUN and the dabblers who organize themselves into conceptual classroom hierarchies (most of the rockcrit world). In both cases you have a worst of both worlds scenario with no attempt to actually break down or transcend the split itself, just sort of superficially invert the properties while keeping the deeper structures of hallway (no real intellectual engagement) or classroom (deference, reverence, visibly demonstrable "hard work" in the form of jargon, etc.).

[koganbot]

For the benefit of lurkers: the way I divide up "hallway"-"classroom" is (a) in the "hallway" we talk to and about each other (incl. flirting, fighting, gossiping, joking) while (b) in the "classroom" we talk about some third thing, the subject matter. And I was saying that we rock critics (i.e., the good ones) refuse this division, refuse to allot one area of our lives to hallway behavior at the expense of classroom and another area for classroom behavior at the expense of the hallway. I see the crime of hallway thinkers and of classroom thinkers as their doing one at the expense of the other or, even worse, their making not doing one the symbol of doing the other. So being dry, impersonal, and boring can be the symbol for dealing with a subject matter, even if one doesn't actually have anything worth saying about the subject, and being snarky, full of invective, and emotional can be the symbol of living a life, even if one actually avoids being interesting or engaging with the world beyond one's own armpit.

Dave, can you give examples of the sort of classroom thinkers pretending to be hallway who agitate Mark and the hallway thinkers who pretend to be classroom who agitate me? It seems to me that Chaki attacking Rolling Teenpop and Simon Reynolds/Mark K-Punk attacking our contributions to the Paris Hilton wars were fundamentally doing the same thing, despite their different demeanors: assigning motives to us rather than dealing with (or trying to understand, or even noticing) our ideas. So all three were being hallway, and Chaki - a third-rate bully - wasn't pretending to be anything but, while K-Punk was in a lot of pain and wielded intellectual buzz words and pretensions, while Simon may genuinely have been interested, or thought he was being interested, in understanding the world, but he didn't have the intellectual tenacity to do so in regard to Paris or us.

Whom do you have in mind as the dabblers who organize themselves into conceptual classroom hierarchies?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Actually, the way you've put this, I think my own formulation is backwards; in your examples above, Reynolds/K-Punk can often bring classroom terminology, a sense of "I've done my homework already, so I don't need to examine this particular problem even if my homework doesn't apply," to do pure hallway bullying and/or dismissal (usually the latter; if they're bullies, they're not very good at actually getting under skin the way true bullies do).

What I mean by the opposite formulation, the classroom hierarchy of rockcrit, is something I actually just kind of floated for the first time in the comment there, but I guess what I think it means is that there is a sense of Importance imparted to the enterprise of music criticism that strikes me as a kind of "take your medicine" mode of engagement: Carl Wilson's Celine book can dip into this, though it doesn't primarily reside here, and I see it as an integral part of the evolution of Pitchfork's house tone. Roughly it's a kind of studious examination that rarely actually has much of a pulse but is also lacking in, e.g., the most basic academic discipline that, dry as it may be, at least has stuff like a methodology, a process of inquiry, etc. So it's a deadness that's distinctively classroom, but the problem is that there are unanswered questions, the key one being "why is this important" (so what). That can often be an intellectual exercise that requires some outside-the-classroom thought, the classrooms for rockcrit being borrowed from all over the place, be it codified assumptions about what kind of music gets to convey what kind of information (this music is for the head, this music is for the body) or more direct influences from academia and cultural studies ("we must examine this because it really is a thing that ought to be examined"). I still haven't worked all of this out in my head yet, though.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

my initial claim -- insofar as it has life beyond a drunken and regrettable and self-hating gag -- is that i think frank, by temperament and intent, does skew much more toward teaching and the teacherly than me (he has a goal in mind; an approach to thinking and exploration he would like to impart - and perhaps as much a whole bunch of approaches he would like to DEpart); whereas i, by temperament and approach, skew more towards "doing the show here now, improvising its form out of the material to hand"

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Reading over this again, I'm not sure what I mean to say here. Except to say that I do think something about rock criticism in my own critical lifespan has become strikingly fuddy-duddy, often a condescending exercise in understanding that seems to require a lot of hand-holding through the dangerous terrain of cultural difference, or something. When it's cultural difference that makes rock criticism exciting; not just obvious cultural differences, sanctioned ones, but unsanctioned ones, between Frank's common high school archetypes, between social organizations that exist conceptually or disparately rather than concretely (conceptually instead of geographically, maybe?). I raised the idea of Culture Lube, a kind of lameness that can be used to alleviate friction between two seemingly opposed groups (in the coinage I was distinguishing Christian/evangelical-mainstream from non-Christian/evangelical mainstream). In that case, it was for a specific purposes -- there are rifts in understanding that express themselves in political and cultural organization even though "us" and "them" are perhaps closer (in their cultures -- music f'rinstance) than they like to admit being or are willing to admit being.

But this tendency, when applied to rockcrit, seems to deflate the fun entirely, and by fun I don't just mean it in a frivolous-fun sort of way. What I mean is it seems to get rid of the very stakes of engagement, tries to turn passion into reasoned mush. This is the academia drive; the difference is that the mush isn't even particularly well-reasoned, which is to say it takes the worst tendencies of academia (dispassion, occasional condescension) and throws out the kind of legwork, peer review, etc. that makes much of academia's existence so valuable. Again I'm not sure what relation this has to what we're talking about, these are just demons that keep swirling in my head, and I'm not sure if their persistence is a personal issue that I have -- in articulating my points, in working it out conceptually -- or if it's really out there.

[koganbot]

My reading of rock criticism is even more scattershot than it used to be, and in the past I barely ever read Pitchfork anyway, except when someone would link it, e.g., you to one of your own reviews, Tom, to his column, etc. But is Pitchfork any more representative of rock criticism than, say, Idolator? It might help me if you were to link an example of the new fuddy-duddiness. (In the past I'd have said that the "classroom" that afflicts rock criticism is "journalism" more than it is "academia.")