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

[koganbot]

My own dad project for the weekend could be to call Dad and ask him why he discontinued the Center For Italian Studies at the University of Connecticut. My dad was a political scientist whose general field was a combination of international relations, government, and history, and his specialty was Italian politics. Since his own work tended to jump boundaries - he wrote a book about how the internal politics of Italy affected (beyond "affected," actually: "trumped" and "discombobulated" would be more accurate) Italy's foreign policy; he wrote a book about the structure of Italian government; he wrote several histories of Italian politics in the postwar era - it was natural to have an Italian Center that would look more broadly at the whole works: not just politics, but sociology, art, literature, history, and so on. (This was also something that appealed to the state legislature, as there are a lot of Italo-Americans in Connecticut.) But my father eventually decided that the Italian Center wasn't a good idea, that the various scholars were doing fine in their own disciplines but that there wasn't much gained from their interplay with people in other fields.

I think this has been a lot of people's experience, that interdisciplinary projects sound good in theory but often don't amount to much. I remember reading Thomas Kuhn saying that when various sciences and subsciences got together, they rarely produced fertile offspring, as each tended to be working off different paradigms from the other. Anyway, what I have in mind goes way beyond the "interdisciplinary." "Interplanetary" would be more like it, or at least cross-cultural. My thought here is that outside science you don't get incompatible paradigms in the Kuhnian sense, but you get different cultures that maybe don't want to get along - various fields and subfields and departments and subdepartments acting as somewhat separate "societies." One reason I want to plump for a Department Of Dilettante Studies rather than, say, a Department Of New Cultural Studies is that I don't like the culture of Cultural Studies, and my idea of the dilettante isn't just that he's going to flit from subject matter to subject matter but that he'll also be willing to flit from culture to culture and engage the people he finds there. So the dept. would include people willing to engage and willing to be engaged. And by "cross-cultural" I obviously mean more than just from department to department, given how few of us are actually in a department.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Well I think it works if you pretend it's not interdisciplinary, right? All the new departments like African-American Studies are essentially cross-disciplinary, since they incorporate history and sociology and literature, but they call themselves this new thing that's constituted of these pre-existing things but eventually synthesizes them and moves beyond. American Studies was originally explicitly an interdisciplinary field, before it got taken over by multiculturalism, wasn't it? I know I read an article about it somewhere.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

But those tend to form around or possibly form a particular way of thinking about their territories, a particular set of paradigms and modes. I'm all for these special-perspective groupings, but they tend to have no more range of ways of thinking than your average cultural studies department, I think - just a somewhat shifted range.

I thought of the Kuhn thread as soon as I started reading this post. I was enjoying that and taking part (possibly not to any useful purpose to anyone but me), but it did shift into academic reference and context after a bit. It's hard to avoid that, I guess - someone like Alex is obviously far better equipped than me in every way to discuss such issues, but also he inevitably assumes a certain level of background knowledge (as we all do in our own specialities), and I get left behind. (This might happen to him when I talk about comic books, say, if he doesn't know the significance of references to Kirby/Herriman/Tezuka or whoever.)

I don't know how you are going to make money from any of this. I would buy a magazine built on lines such as yours, and enthusiastically, but it would be a hard job to turn it into a commercial proposition. I'd participate in online discussions, if I could, but that doesn't make you a living. I very much think universities should resource more general thinking and research, but it isn't going to happen, I think.

[koganbot]

Yeah, any grouping will develop its own culture, of course. But what's on my mind is what if the people in my "department" were encouraged to understand each other's ideas? To become each other's students, as it were? (I'll write more on this in several days, I hope.)

[koganbot]

I was actually an American Studies major, so I should know something about this but I don't. I can't even remember if Yale had an American Studies department or just an American Studies program. In fact, I may not have known at the time, either. But my guess is the latter: that there was a program, and maybe even someone who drew part of his salary for running the program, but as far as I can remember my teachers were all affiliated with other departments: Kai Erikson was in sociology, Bryan Wolf was in English (though seemed just as interested in art), David Brion Davis was in history.