Department of Dilettante Research, Part 1

[koganbot]

I've vowed to myself to post at least three or four times a week on a dream I have that I humorously but absolutely seriously call "The Department Of Dilettante Research." Basically, these posts will be a cry for help and a call for ideas and allies. I'm at an impasse, in fact have been at an impasse for the twenty-one years since I committed myself to writing. What I want to do is:

(1) create an intellectual conversation (defining "intellectual" far more broadly than most "intellectuals" do) that

(2) doesn't close itself off from the world in the way that academia and journalism do (because in closing themselves off from the world, academia and journalism close themselves off from too much of the intellect), that

(3) discusses stuff I care about (social analysis of the life that underlies music being one thing but hardly the only thing), and that

(4) makes it possible for me to earn a living writing the things I want to write.

To do this I need colleagues, I need good formats, and I need a way for it to bring in money. Formats aren't a problem, actually, in that I invented a good format in the first incarnation of Why Music Sucks, and Tom Ewing essentially invented the same format a decade and a half later for I Love Music (only dif being mine was on paper and his was online): people ask questions, bunch of other people answer, and discussions, brawls, come-ons, and parties ensue. And there's no reason the discussion can't spill into articles, books, reviews, blogs, etc.

But so far the discussion has sputtered and misfired, doesn't know how to sustain itself, how to move intellectually. As I wrote in a Cure For Bedbugs comments box, I discovered early on that no one really wanted to fly with me. That's only a slight exaggeration. I won't go into all my complaints, just say that I'm desperate to do two things: (i) light a fire under the colleagues I've got so that they actually respond to my ideas and don't fumble away their own, and (ii) find more colleagues, probably by reaching into academia, though I have no idea how to do so.

Or how to find a way that someone will pay us. "Department of Dilettante Research" is not a joke. Maybe someone somewhere will be willing to fund a "department" - not just a message board or a magazine - that acts as a gathering place for a lot of interesting people. But also, if we think of the "department" as also free-floating from fanzines to blogs to message boards to e-zines to magazines, I need someone who's fucking willing to pay me to write the stuff I want to write. After I put out the first issue of Why Music Sucks, it was like, "I really love your zine, therefore why don't you come and write record reviews for us?" - as opposed to, "come and do the sort of thing for us that you're doing in your zine."

Next post will be: More on my vision. Why I use the word "dilettante." But for now I'm down to:

--I need colleagues.

--I need money.

Comments

cons...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think there would be real difficulties in connecting something like The DDR (if we can call it that? Too late, I just did) with the academic world, certainly in Britain, and I guess that some of the same problems apply in the US.

1) The basic one is the pressure on academics to produce work which conforms to certain protocols, which even if they were not specifically designed to isolate them within disciplines, and to set them off from the outside world, might as well have been, since that's the effect they have. This pressure is I think worse now than it was ten years ago: if publishing more peer-reviewed journal articles aimed at other specialists is what it takes to get promotion in a very competitive environment, time spent doing something different is time wasted. Obviously this isn't true of everybody, and there are academics who reach a level of fluency in their writing so that turning out a book review, or a newspaper article, or a blog post, isn't too great a burden.

2) As other people have commented, interdisciplinary is really only a buzz word for marketing certain types of research to funders: I could consider myself an 'interdisciplinary' researcher, since I have published on political theory, philosophy, the visual arts, literature and literary theory. But in reality, very little of what I've published would be recognised as a contribution to 'philosophy' or 'political theory' by the people who work in those disciplines full time. In pessimistic moods I worry that academic disciplines are concerned primarily with perpetuating themselves through time , and that this primarily means producing young researchers who are sufficiently like the older ones. I have excellent qualifications, and it took me a long time to get the equivalent of a tenured job: it took several people whose opinions I trusted to persuade me that this was partly because my work wasn't obviously central to the way people saw the discipline i.e. my profile looked funny, so when it came to hiring, people were suspicious of you. In the end, I had to change not just the way I presented what I did, but what I did.

3) The kind of 'outcomes' (academic research jargon: i.e. what you want the DDR to DO) that I suspect you're interested in, Frank, (make people think harder, connect people together, open paths) could only ever be of secondary or concomitant interest from an academic point of view. The worst thing about the system in which I work is that there are no institutional incentives for the things most people who go into the profession care about, and specifically for teaching undergraduates! We are assessed, judged and evaluated largely on the research papers which go to other professionals in our disciplines -- time spent caring about anything else simply isn't recognised. Even when individuals overcome this (which certainly as far as teaching goes, they do quite a lot in my experience, since it brings its own rewards) I can't see an HE institution (in the UK, anyway) recognising something like the DDR as an asset, because it would be aiming for things which can't be easily measured (either in terms of research papers produced, or more commonly these days, in terms of other money raised). Interdisciplinary research units tend to be set up either to attract postgraduates paying high fees, or because the criteria set by research funding bodies happen to specify interdisciplinarity. Follow the money: because of the squeeze on HE funding in the UK, universities are only interested in spending money on things which will attract more money.

Re: cons...

[koganbot]

A couple of facts that might counter this pessimism a little: The University Of Georgia Press was incredibly eager to do my book, and people there kept telling me that they thought it was one of the best things they were publishing, and so forth. (Of course we'll see if anyone in academia actually reviews the thing, and what they say about it; or whether any professors will assign it to their classes.) The second fact, which I can't vouch for myself since I haven't been there, is that the EMP Conference draws a lot of attention and draws at least some participants from academia. Since I haven't attended I can't say how good it is, or how similar it is to my own idea, but there must be something of a family resemblance. And lots of attendees speak highly of it.

Re: cons...

[koganbot]

Ach! I have finally succumbed to the "anyone... they" construction.

Re: cons...

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i am already scheming on a koganized aesthetics syllabus

review, that will take longer