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

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

No time yet to respond at length but -

You actually invented I Love Music too, indirectly, in that my model for it was what I imagined WMS to be like based on Mark Sinker's reviews of it in the Wire. (The other immediate model was the "Question Of The Month" on the Marvel Comics editorial pages in the mid-80s)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

am away for weekend having just spent two days completing waste-of-time n3sta proposal -- see F0-post below -- and now kicking self for not adverting to this project in it also, given its actual-real urgency GRRRR

still, the planets seem to be moving into a bold new shape at the moment -- he said meaninglessly -- so will think on during dad's birthday, after which i have 1 x WHOLE FORTNIGHT FREE TO RESHAPE THE FUTURE OF THE UNIVERSE

next week is another week! as rhett butler would say

[koganbot]

Was Scarlett who said it, actually. Rhett no longer gave a damn.

[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]

Messageboards like ILM remind me of APAs (amateur press associations) too, which I know you'd been in long before ILM. My feelings on ILX for four years or so were much like my experiences in BAPA (British...) from about 1983 or so.

[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.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

A few things: (1) I hope you consider me a colleague/follower and will keep me in mind through this process, esp. for support in whatever academic/filmic/etc. venue I end up (Skye and I/Imaginary Superstars being part one of a dream to cross-platform my own ideas and also support the artists I've been paying attention to in any small way I can) BUT (2) I'm not totally clear on what the process/idea here is.

Are you suggesting the creation of an institution to support your and others' ideas, or are you suggesting the support from an existing institution to carry on the WMS torch? Essentially being paid to be editor-in-chief of a neo-WMS? Or is this position more like Frank-in-chief, where you'll organize, galvanize, etc. intellectuals to infiltrate whatever institutions/departments they can? (Setting up a home office, managing the finances from whencever they came, etc.?)

As for the latter, it will be tough going, even though it would be wonderful for something like this to exist, and I can only imagine it being funded either entrepreneurially or via academia. As for the former, it will also be tough going, but there are existing venues (e.g. Paper Thin Walls) that could and maybe should pay you an editoresque salary to maintain your own little corner of the interweb. (Like a Village Voice blog, before that went kablooie.) I imagine if PTW ever gets the online store (if this is still happening) off the ground, they'll need mucho content, and this would be perfect.

(Or am I kind of missing the point here?)

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm still young enough that I'm ok with subsidizing what I want to do, by working on stuff I care less about. I also need less money (we're basically living beneath the poverty line, which, it turns out, ain't that awful when they send free CDs in the mail). But I can see a point where that would get impossible.

Anyway, what I guess I'm trying to say is: I don't have any ideas, but I want to be around when they're told.

[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.

[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]

What potential forms it would take would be something for us to work out. In other words I'm not clear on the concept either (though I think somewhere on my computer would be an old email conversation between me and Mark on the subject). But we can always try to combine modes: let's say, for instance, a wealthy old bat dies and leaves a shitload of her money to the university at which her niece is a professor/administrator, and the niece, who turns out to be even more batty than dear old Aunt Mildred, sets up an endowment for a Department Of Dilettante Research to be headed by me. The department could have faculty itself, or could just have programs and activities in which it pays other people (not limited to academics) to participate. Maybe one requirement or strong suggestion would be that "members" of the "department" start threads on ilX and post on each other's threads. Or the "department" could try to start a message board of its own that's as wide open as ilX was in its salad days (though it'd be awfully hard to draw people into a new board, with so many boards established now).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

What's funny is that in my (limited) experience with interdisciplinary-friendly (and, in theory, interplanetary-friendly...y'know, the kind of people who coin phrases like POST-CONCEPTUAL <--!!!!!!!) academics, they're all for these kinds of ideas but they can't or won't do anything about it -- so you'll have media classes with post-structuralist theory and new media and batshit crazy documentarians in Iraq dropping by in their van etc. etc. etc., like intellectual party time...but when you get to the nuts and bolts of THIS IS COOL HAHAHA BUT HOW DO WE DO THIS AND CONTINUE TO EAT you (er, I) get responses like "well if you want [i]money[/i], try copyright law." Or, obv., remain in academia and hope you win the lottery and/or get tenured (about the same odds). (And the bureaucracy supporting said interplanetarians absolutely won't budge as far as funding any of this stuff.)

So fuck it, if I make a movie and it sells and I get rich, or if some academic institution continues to be fooled by my "brilliance" and throws some cash my way, I'll open the department myself and pay for it out of pocket. AND I'll make it seem like I pulled miself up from my bootstraps, too. (And hey, maybe I can find a crazy rich old bat somewheres, too.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

grrr, MONEY damn you nuILX. MONEY MONEY WOO.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

(Should note w/ irony that new adjunct prof pals at the very school I'm about to attend myself are in a worse position financially and benefitwise than I am working at a boring-ass flunky job where I post to the teenpop thread, goof around, etc. about 3 out of 8 hrs in my day.)

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

Heh, speaking of subsidizing, I spend almost as much time thinking about and writing about and listening to music as I do at my actual job and I get paid not one cent for it. And nobody reads what I write. But as a true intellectual I forge on!

Look forward to future posts where you maybe clarify a bit more what you are getting at here, Frank. I think format isn't a problem at all. If you are able to get together an open minded, intelligent base of critics together, I think something good will come of it, regardless of the form.

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

frank, you want to be socrates, only not

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.

...and pros

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think my fundamental feeling is that academia is just too closed, or too prone to closing in on itself, to provide a home for the DDR (as a partner in dialogue with it is a whole different story, of course). I'm sad that academia is like this, and it's the main reason why I have a profound ambivalence about it. But I don't think it's the only part of the world which has this tendency, so I don't beat myself up too much about it -- and I think the difficulty of something like the DDR is exactly what would make it such a great thing, potentially, i.e. because almost all conversations tend to evolve their own languages and protocols over time, and so to exclude outsiders, however well-intentioned the people who started the conversation were, a quasi-institution which sought to constantly renew and challenge itself in order to maintain some degree of openness would be a valuable and rewarding entity.

I think it's a terrific idea, and I wish I could see a way to make it work. I wonder if a better model would be that of a small militant group. In effect, there would be a core of people sworn to uphold the values of the group, or whatever (which given this is something like a commitment to pluralism, and to trying to keep things open, and to challenging themselves, wouldn't be as naff as it sounds); they would be required to act as ambassadors, i.e. recruiting people into the group's projects, making connections on behalf of the group (on as many continents as possible, I guess), and promoting the group as part of whatever else they do. They would produce some kind of newsletter (I'm assuming online for practical reasons if nothing else) regularly as a focus, but with the understanding that this wasn't their primary aim, which is something more like a combination of insurgency in other people's conversations, and hosting a range of different conversations/projects of varying anticipated lengths (i.e. not necessarily open-ended). I think the idea of presenting itself as a quasi-institution, i.e. using the trappings and structures of other research organisations (specifically the think tank world) would make it recognisable enough for other people (i.e. editors, possible funders, journalists, academics) to be amenable to dealing with it. So I can imagine the DDR at work; I can imagine some of its activities...

...but, the big 'but', is that I can't see where any money would come from, short of philanthropy.

[koganbot]

Ha! Whether this is true, you've actually come close to nailing my source. I want to be Socrates but not Plato. (Except to some extent Socrates is an invention of Plato.)

Re: ...and pros

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Recruiting a trust fund kid would be a brilliant start! Anyone know any?

Re: ...and pros

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Ha, I think you've just described the Onion...

Re: ...and pros

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

(And if this were an Onionesque venture, it could work if it could attract (1) an audience and (2) advertisers. The real question is the start-up costs, which is the real problem at hand here, I think. Hey, I know, get the Onion's ad guy on board! That's what Pfork did to double/triple ad revenue.)

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

socrates would not have founded or started anything. but 'everyone who bought it started a band'.

this is one of the many irritating things about taking socrates as a model.

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

a colleague (ahem) and i have talked recently about the difficulty of determining how exactly socrates got by (and more importantly, how his wife and children did), let alone how he participated in athens' civic life at all (which he did, before the time depicted in the latest dialogues). the speculation would seem to involve a lot of information about economic life at the time, but any way it goes, it's hard not to conclude that socrates seems to have been an exceptional case.

but as for colleagues, socrates (a) made them, or (b) didn't need them.

Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness

[koganbot]

Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness

NEW YORK - Millions of eyewitnesses watched in stunned horror Tuesday as light emptied from the sky, plunging the U.S. and neighboring countries into darkness. As the hours progressed, conditions only worsened.

At approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, the sun began to lower from its position in the sky in a westward trajectory, eventually disappearing below the horizon. Reports of this global emergency continued to file in from across the continent until 5:46 p.m. PST, when the entire North American mainland was officially declared dark.

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

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

On further thought, I think this kind of thing works best in some kind of organized print - more like WMS than ILX. Not because ILX isn't great, but because organization implies something exclusive about what you're writing - like, it's worthy of being arranged into a table of contents. While ILX is more freeform - also, being freeform means that you'll alienate people that want something easier to read.

So if U of M loved the book (as they should - it's amazing), why don't you pitch to them a Magazine of Pop Culture review. Just put a glossy cover on it, and an artist every issue, and sell it at B&N.

Thinking Aloud About Funding

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that the funding qn boils down to "Who is going to pay me/us to think?". And then a sensible follow on question is "How do other people get paid to think?" - or more directly "Who pays other people to think?"

Academia is one obvious answer, but it isn't the only one.

Consumers and advertisers are another answer, in terms of the 'literary magazine' model (the "LRB of music" that keeps getting mooted on ILX and on UK music press threads) but also magazines like The Believer and McKinsey's, I guess. The problem is that launching that kind of publication isn't a way to make a living - it's funding to keep the project going, rather than to put shoes on the feet of the people doing it.

Political/economic think tanks - who funds them? We used to put "Pop Culture Think Tank" as the strapline of Freaky Trigger - it wasn't (or I didn't manage make it such) but I liked the phrase and the concept: that's another model. I guess philanthropists fund some of them, interested parties another. Who would be the DDR's interested parties? Who benefits from the work you/we/it would do?

Finally, business also pays people to think - consultants, futurologists, trend spotters, analysts. They pay people really quite a lot of money, though they tend to be proprietary about the ideas that result. Could the DDR pitch itself in any of those terms - could it produce saleable ideas that would be in dialogue with its more public or freeform output? It's possible that commercial pressure, somewhat like a good editor, would actually encourage the completion and development of ideas.

[koganbot]

I don't think the UGA Press itself (not U of M; it's mooxyjoo who's at U of M) puts out magazines, though I could check. There may well be magazines put out by the University of Georgia.

[koganbot]

I still owe you an email about available back issues, don't I?

Re: Thinking Aloud About Funding

[koganbot]

One description I've given of a potential magazine I would like to read (as of right now there are no magazines I like to read) is "a cross between the New York Review Of Books and Smash Hits, but with a message board attached." I doubt that there's a market, though. Smash Hits is defunct, and Luc Sante tells me that he and Geoffrey O'Brien - both in their 50s - constitute the New York Review's youth movement.

Hmmm. My brother works for a political think tank. I've never thought to ask him where the money comes from.

Re: Thinking Aloud About Funding

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

'who is going to pay me to think?' is often abandoned in favor of the more practical 'who is going to pay me to do something else while tolerating the fact that i will also think, and possibly throw a little extra my way for it?', since the latter better expresses the conditions under which anyone will pay.