Department Of Dilettante Research, Part 2: Depart Harder

[koganbot]

Here are some excerpts from my book:

From chapter 18, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:

Among other things, I'm arguing that (i) presentation of self - creating, maintaining, or modifying one's hairstyle, as it were - is a way of thinking, but (ii) given a choice between maintaining one's hairstyle and thinking about it, my profession as a whole will choose hairstyle over thought. And the reader/editor/colleague will crack down on my thought, too, if it threatens his hairstyle (at least, he'll crack down collectively, institutionally, on behalf of the collective/institutional hairstyle, even if he'd rather not). In effect, to freeze one's hairstyle is to freeze a part of one's brain.

[By "my profession" I mean academia as well as journalism, even though I've never had a job in academia.]

Later in the same chapter:

the drive towards academic diversity tends to run aground not on the question whether intellectuals can appreciate an Elvis, but on whether an Elvis can make it into the social group "Intellectual" - while still remaining Elvis. In the average white high school, over the last fifty years, the refusal groups are - depending on time and place - rocks, greaseballs, hoods, greasers, grits, rednecks, farmers, burnouts, stoners, jells, dirts, dirtbags, skaters. And if greasers etc. want to join the Intellectual Gang, they have to stop acting like greasers. It's a vicious circle: The greasers are anti-intellectual because they've been excluded from the "Intellectual" group, and the "Intellectuals" exclude the greasers because the greasers are anti-intellectual. But excluding the greasers is itself anti-intellectual.

From the Acknowledgements, Explanations, and Thank Yous at the end of the book:

Chapters 3 and 4 of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature are important not merely for his demolition of philosophy, but for the never-quite-articulated question, "So why do these guys care?" I like Rorty's vision later in the book of the postphilosopher: "the informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermediary between various discourses. In his salon, so to speak, hermetic thinkers are charmed out of their self-enclosed practices. Disagreements between disciplines and discourses are compromised or transcended in the course of the conversation."* (My mission once this book is published is to get someone to back me financially on starting a Department of Dilettante Research somewhere, sort of the Son of WMS, maybe, or an ILX that pays.) I've been disappointed by Rorty's follow-through: The time wrangling with Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, et al. would have been better spent finding a way to re-engage the creeps who beat him up in high school. I've long had a dream of forcing Rorty at gunpoint into a room with Richard Meltzer, allowing neither to leave until each is convinced that the other understands him. The hope is that Rorty strips Meltzer of what's left of his philosophical façade, and then, with façade stripped, Meltzer (who's never stopped being a junior-high-school creep) shocks Rorty out of his vague and cheerful blah blah blah. (Sorry about the gun. I guess I was a charm-school dropout; but do you know of any other way to get these guys together?) Not that I expect the Rorty types to read this book, but in the event one of them does, I'm doing my job if I get him to pause before writing inexplicably retarded things like (from Mirror, a couple pages beyond the dilettante vision):

"Normal discourse is that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it. Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of those conventions or who sets them aside."

The problem is that Rorty's concept "normal discourse" has little to do with actual normal human discourse, most of which falls outside both "normal" and "abnormal" as Rorty's defined them. Would he claim that the kids who beat him up were ignorant of the conventions of high-school discourse, were setting them aside? Or conversely that in hitting him they were following agreed-upon conventions as to what counts as a relevant contribution? Agreed-upon by whom? Rorty is trying to generalize Kuhn's distinction between "normal" and "revolutionary" science, but the distinction won't carry beyond the hard sciences (except maybe to organized sports), since normal nonscience doesn't act like normal science. For instance, in normal music discourse Patty can say, "The Smiths are godlike, but XTC sucks shit in the mud," and John can retort with "XTC is fabulous." No convention has been set aside here, but no one is agreeing on what counts as "answering a question" either. Someone who thinks otherwise would himself be ignorant of the conventions.

I'll paste into the comments thread further thoughts on why I want Meltzer and Rorty to get together, and why people like Rorty need us and why we need people like him.

"...allowing neither to leave until each is convinced that the other understands him." Now this is something that very few people are willing to do, to sustain the conversation until all the participants understand one another. Most ilxors and most poptimists won't do it. And if I required this of all participants in my "department" all the time, the department would end up rarefied and isolated in just the way I don't want. So my vision would be that some people would be doing this - trying to truly understand each other's ideas, and trying to express and think through their own - while a bunch of other people would be looking on and kibitzing and adding side comments and joking and flirting and gossiping and sneering and even attempting to disrupt the convo (in other words this would be something like an ilX thread); and then on another day different people would be making the attempt at mutual comprehension, and so on. And my hope would be that the people in the department would be embedded in broader activities such as poptimist polls and so on, since it's through such activities that culture is subliminally spread. You learn styles and cross-references, learn the point of certain jokes - jauntyalan saying "Supertramp were JUST A BAND" (that had me laughing for a full minute); also the etymology of "grebt." Just be able to draw on the basic richness of life.

[*Rorty's defining this against "The second role is that of the cultural overseer who knows everyone's common ground - the Platonic philosopher-king who knows what everybody else is doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context (the Forms, the Mind, Language) within which they are doing it."]

Comments

[cis.livejournal.com]

In the average white high school, over the last fifty years, the refusal groups are - depending on time and place - rocks, greaseballs, hoods, greasers, grits, rednecks, farmers, burnouts, stoners, jells, dirts, dirtbags, skaters.

hah, in my high school, the 'skaters' - the term we used was 'freaks', but it basically meant 'the kids who were into metal and punk and wore weird clothes' - were the intellectuals. I believed for the longest time that there was some kind of correlation between 'alternative' music, 'outsider' social status, and intelligence: believed it against all evidence, too. But, within my year, we might not have been the most clever but we were the least ashamed to read and be public about it, to talk about Lenin and Rimbaud and politics and gender relations, and be seen to care. anti-intellectualism was for the popular kids: intellectualism was for us.

I don't understand yr problem with that Rorty quote at all, I have to say: for one thing, being bullied in high school is surely one of the most conventional conventions of high-school discourse! It is almost as if people sat down beforehand and said 'here's what's going to happen in high school, the popular kids are going to pick on the less popular kids', and everyone agreed, said 'yeah, that's a good plan' -- it's more than a cliché, it's expected, if it doesn't happen we think something's up. I don't even mean 'we all agree to bullying by not stamping it out': we all agree to the importance of the bullied-in-high-school meme, whatever moral spin we put upon it. Beating up some smaller kid for their lunch money is universally accepted as a relevant contribution to everyone's high school experience - that of the bully, of the bullied, the kid who happens to see it happen, people who aren't even at that school who just hear about it. If it doesn't happen in your school, you might have to pretend it did, just so everyone will believe you had a normal education.

[cis.livejournal.com]

And again, with Patty and John, John's response absolutely works: it fits the conventions of music-fan discussion which I have in my head, and you have in your head, and which we see on ILM every day! "no, you're wrong." is one of the most basic answers available: Patty may think John's wrong about XTC's fabulousness, but she'll still recognise it as a valid response (a response which is not unexpected, perhaps). It just happens to be short and not very explicit.

I suppose the question is then 'what would count as abnormal?' - whether nothing but an out-of-the-blue surreal response will do.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

One of the things that's happened on ILM is that all the out-of-the-blue responses have become entirely normalised, so you now get people saying "Oh can Scott Seward come and image bomb this thread please?"

[koganbot]

No, you're not getting Rorty's distinction, which I could have gone into in more detail: For this to be "normal" discourse by his def'n, there would have to be agreed-upon conventions for deciding whether or not XTC is shit in the mud, and both Patty and John would adhere to those conventions and would assume that using normal procedures they could answer the question. The reason that John's response works (and doesn't violate any conventions) is that there are no agreed-upon conventions for deciding whether XTC is shit in the mud, and no assumption that the question will be answered, and someone who thought otherwise would himself be ignorant of the conventions. This is why Rorty's distinction doesn't apply to music arguments. What Rorty's taking over from Kuhn is the idea that there can be periods of nonnormal - that is, revolutionary - science, where indeed there isn't clear agreement as to what counts as answering a question, or even what the questions are, or agreement as to what the basic terms mean or even which ones are basic. E.g., in the period between Copernicus and Newton, there's no agreement as to what a planet is and what motion is. Of course, you can say that during the 150 years of the Copernican Revolution it was normal not to agree on the basic terms of physics and astronomy, and I would agree, but that "normal" is not Rorty's "normal," in fact gets rid of the very distinction that Rorty is trying to make. And to give a quick music example, it's normal in music arguments for some people to praise or criticize performers for their hairstyle and clothing and for other people to say that such criteria are irrelevant (and these same other people may well then go and criticize boybands for being about hair rather than music, and therefore dismiss the music rather than try to understand it; this is hypocritical, but whatever). Which is to say that in music arguments it's normal to argue over what counts as a relevant contribution. Whereas by Rorty's def'n, that would be abnormal discourse.

As for beating kids up, that's against the school rules (also against the law), and there's most certainly no general agreement as to whether beating people up is a legitimate part of the discourse. Even if there's general agreement that it happens. In biology there's general agreement that some scientists cheat with their data; but there's also agreement that cheating is illegitimate and makes the data worthless. There's no such agreement in regard to whether people should beat other people up. There really isn't.

I have no problem with the idea of saying what counts as normal or abnormal discourse; just that Rorty's scheme doesn't apply to most normal discourse.

By the way, what Rorty is plumping for in Socrates' salon is for a kind of discourse (by his def'n) where people put into question what they'd normally have counted as relevant, answering a question, and so on. Just because his way of setting the normal-abnormal distinction doesn't work doesn't mean that this isn't a good idea, to talk about what tends to be normal in music discourse and wonder what it would be like to do it differently.

[koganbot]

Cis, I was hoping you'd take part in this conversation. I'm sure it varied from school to school, but my guess is where the term is "skater" then there are fewer intellectuals in the group, where it's "freaks" or "punks" there are more intellectuals in the group (also more middle-class kids, though that doesn't meant that only the middle-class kids were intellectual). Anyway, this should take a whole other thread. But here's a brief model: Where a high school's social structure is stable, there are two main popular groups - names will vary from place to place and time to time, but let's call them "Preps" and "Hoods." There are other groups and subgroups, and most people are neither Prep nor Hood but in-between, as are the smaller groups, and everyone is leaning one way or another. The major social difference between the two groups is that the Preps are involved in school extracurricular activities for a good deal of their social lives, while the Hoods won't touch the extracurricular stuff with a 10-foot pole, and they're more likely to smoke and take after school jobs and do other "real-life" nonschool-based things. But both groups are essentially "conservative" in that neither challenges the social structure, which is Prep vs. Hood. But there's a wild card, whom we can call the "artsy-fartsies" or the "beatniks" or the "freaks." And when they're sufficiently strong in numbers they challenge the legitimacy of the Hoods as the main refusal group and the Preps as the main source of respectability and legitimacy, 'cause the Freaks won't totally turn their back on the school's social life but rather might challenge the way the school's run and challenge the Prep's social status straightup, claiming they've got an alternative mode of status and intellect etc. etc. (whereas Hoods had been content to play dumb). And basically what happens is that the Preps and the Hoods start to take on Freak characteristics. Which means that the whole system might restabilize with fewer true Freaks (but more Prep types willing to call themselves Freaks), but the whole culture has become more bohemianized. (And the name shifts tend to follow this bohemianizing, so you end up with Burnouts and Stoners and skaters where previously you'd had Hoods and Greasers.) I have a feeling that Skater is a borderline name, can lean either towards Freak or towards Hood. [In some times and places Jock will be the word instead of Prep and will be only tangentially related to whether someone participates in sports. Ditto for whether Skaters actually skate. About two-thirds of the Preps will have parents who are middle-class and one-third who are working-class; Hoods will reverse this; and the Freaks will tend towards middle-class, too.]

I got a lot of these ideas from reading Penelope Eckert's Jocks and Burnouts. She was dealing with suburban schools in the '80s, the Detroit suburbs, and where race is a huge factor I'm sure things get more complicated. Anyway, how good is the model I've just given? I don't know. In my high school the Freaks were so powerful that the social map kept changing every year.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i think there's definitely a UK/US thing too. UK schools (certainly in the late 80s) had virtually none of what i understand (from the movies of john hughes, obv) to be the extra-curricula school-based activities, eg no british school had a prom 'til like ten years ago maximum, there is no school sports team that has the hopes of the town riding on it, so i think cis' description matches my school too. also the leaving age being 16, but a lot of schools having a smaller number of 16-18 year olds doing A-Levels kind of changes the demographic. the bad lads weren't counter-cultural, they were the (working-class) prevailing culture and us middle-class/academically-minded (and there wasn't much of a gap in the venn diagram between the two) kids were the freaks (metallers mainly in my case).

to continue the hughes analogy, where are the brians (michael anthony hall in breakfast club) in yr schema? you've got the freaks and the drop outs on one side and the preps and jocks on the other (to simplify WILDLY), but where are the geeks/maths club types?

[koganbot]

If by "brain" you mean people who get good grades, they could be a number of places on the social map, but the short answer is that the ones with a lot of friends are probably preps/jocks, with their activities probably running more to student govt. and debate society etc. than to the prom committee - or some of them may be freaks, though they might be subject to peer pressure from their fellow freaks not to seem to study too hard. And then the ones without that many friends will be in-betweeners and loners and misfits. (But you don't have to get good grades to be an in-betweener, loner, or misfit, obviously.) It would be interesting to track the words "nerd" or "geek" over time, since originally they probably just meant "social misfit," i.e., kids who just don't get it; but once "nerds" are starting to clump together under that name, then they're not really misfits. But I'd think these would probably lean towards the preps, and some towards the freaks. Whether they veer towards the drama club as opposed to the math club could be significant. (Of course, I'm just guessing. When I did a bit of reading on the subject about ten to fifteen years ago I was amazed at how few studies there were; and most would focus on the refusal groups rather than try to map the whole landscape. There are some British books - Paul Willis's Learning To Labour, for instance, but again, it focused on the hood types rather than taking in the whole scene.)

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

hehe, sorry. Brian is the geek character (and math club member) in The Breakfast Club, sent to detention for bringing a flare gun to school.

the bit in the script goes:

(Bender (Judd Nelson) is the Hood, Claire (Molly Ringwald) is the Prom Queen)

BENDER Hey...Cherry...do you belong to the
physics club?
CLAIRE That's an academic club...
BENDER So?
CLAIRE So...academic clubs aren't the same
as other kinds of clubs.
BENDER Oh, but to dorks like him...
Bender points at Brian.
BENDER ...they are.
(to Brian)
What do you guys do in your club?
BRIAN In physics, um, we ah, we talk about
physics...about properties of physics.
BENDER So it's sorta social...demented and
sad, but social. Right?

this was my thinking behind seeing "them" (haha, "me") as a third group, shunned by the others...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm going to nick that Rorty distinction for work - I'd forgotten about it and it's very germane.

[koganbot]

As promised, I'm pasting in further ideas. Some passages in my book were filched from several emails I wrote to Josh Kortbein in 2002. Here are excerpts from one of those emails:

But why would you choose a philosopher to be the one to engage as an intermediary between discourses? Wouldn't you expect a diplomat, trader, anthropologist, or sociologist to do it better? Someone who's actually done it before? Or just someone within any discourse who happens to have informed himself of neighboring discourses (perhaps because - being a human being - he engages in more than one discourse himself)?

...

It'd be called the Department of Dilettante Research, and might include scientists and people who know something about cookery, for instance, not just the usual cult. studies types. Maybe it would include an indie rocker, and a stand-up comedian. Smart people, willing to engage, who know something I might want to know, basically. But do we need a special type of person ("philosopher") to act as intermediary? Why do we need an intermediary at all? Can't you just get a bunch of people together who want to discuss things, and who are willing not to take their own ways of discoursing to be the only ones possible? Can't everyone in the room be Socrates, without special training? We'd be missing the point (which is that in different discourses people discourse differently) to think that there's a special all-purpose method for charming people out of their self-enclosed practices. The method would depend on the practice, right?

[koganbot]

Half a page on from talking about the two philosophical roles, Rorty says: "For epistemology, conversation is implicit inquiry. For hermeneutics, inquiry is routine conversation. Epistemology views the participants as united in what Oakeshott calls a universitas - a group united by mutual interests in achieving a common end. Hermeneutics views them as united in what he calls a societas - persons whose paths through life have fallen together, united by civility rather than a common goal, much less a common ground." I think it's relevant to point out that the man from the glass shop is replacing my downstairs neighbor's windows right now because last night the neighbor's ex-boyfriend came over, drunk, with the intention of getting back together with her, she sent him away, he came back a couple hours later, even drunker, she wouldn't let him in, and he smashed all her windows. And, by lucky coincidence, the glass man is also replacing a window in the apartment next to mine, because the woman who was babysitting got mad at the baby's father and threw a pan at him, which missed the guy but crashed right through the window pane. Now, I am certain that my neighbors and their friends not only belong to the same societas, but that they also engage each other in conversation - using pans and panes as conversational aids - and that they're united (or whatever) by the fact that their paths through life have fallen together.

Rorty, a page and a half further, recommends that we "construe the lines between discourses which can be rendered commensurable and those which cannot as merely that between 'normal' and 'abnormal' discourse - a distinction which generalizes Kuhn's distinction between 'normal' and 'revolutionary' science. 'Normal' science is the practice of solving problems against the background of consensus about what counts as a good explanation of the phenomena and about what it would take for a problem to be solved. 'Revolutionary' science is the introduction of a new 'paradigm' of explanation and thus a new set of problems.... More generally, normal discourse is that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it. Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of those conventions or who sets them aside." The trouble is that most normal human discourse falls outside both "normal" and "abnormal" as Rorty's defined them, and that Kuhn's distinction between "normal" and "revolutionary" science doesn't generalize to the nonsciences, because normal science doesn't act like normal nonscience. For instance, in normal music discourse my friend Patty can say "The Smiths are godlike, but XTC sucks shit in the mud," and my friend John can retort that XTC is fabulous. No convention has been set aside here, but no one is agreeing on what counts as "answering a question" either. Someone who thinks otherwise would himself be ignorant of the conventions. [Same passage I'd put in my book, but with the part about Kuhn in, it's clearer, and clearer why I don't think it applies to music criticism.]

And the question of what is relevant has been a pitched battle in rock criticism for as long as there's been rock criticism.

A "revolutionary" change in conversations about music might introduce a new set of conflicts but wouldn't introduce a new "paradigm for problem-solving," since no such paradigm exists anyway, or seems to be needed. Agreement itself is often not the goal. For instance, if your opinions help to define you (your individuality, your social group), then the opinions must differ from at least some other people's. To bring up again those girls from the Smash Hits penpal page - "Calling all gorgeous guys on Earth who are 14 or older. We are two 15 year old chicks who are absolutely in love with Guns N' Roses, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Poison, and stax more! Interested?" - if everyone agreed on the value of Guns N' Roses et al., this call would be worthless.

[koganbot]

Rorty, one page later: "We can get epistemological commensuration only where we already have agreed-upon practices of inquiry (or, more generally, of discourse) - as easily in 'academic' art, 'scholastic' philosophy, or 'parliamentary' politics as in normal science." I don't see how Rorty can possibly back up this statement, or even make it intelligible. I agree with his assumption that there's no principle that prevents the art academies and the parliaments and philosophical schools from attaining "epistemological" commensuration, any more than that there's a "scientific method" to ensure that normal science does attain it. But there's the raw social fact that the parliaments etc. don't attain such commensuration ever, while managing to go onward nonetheless. There's a huge difference between, on the one hand, going along with the Supreme Court's decision on the Bush-Gore election even though you think it's wrong and, on the other, the whole community of physicists coming to believe that atomic theory is right. The first simply isn't "commensuration." The difference between science and parliaments is that science has Kuhnian paradigms and parliaments don't. You can call parliament a paradigm (which is to say that the British parliament can be a model that other parliamentary systems more or less base themselves on), but it's not a Kuhnian paradigm: it doesn't provide (or require) agreement on what it would take for a problem to be solved. It merely provides a framework in which people agree to disagree. Rorty, half a page later: "There is no difficulty getting commensuration in theology or morals or literary criticism when these areas of culture are 'normal.'" Perhaps "areas of culture" was a typo, and he'd intended to put "areas of Mars." But if Rorty wants to use the word "normal," he's got to look at actual norms of behavior and has to detach his notion of "normal" from that of "commensuration," since "commensuration" is rarely the norm, and often isn't a goal.

I love the section of Mirror that I'm quoting from, but Rorty seems at cross-purposes from himself. He's trying to get discourses to converse with each other, but he's using normal science as his model of all normality, which means that he's already prejudged what a particular discourse does, without his having joined the discourse. The thing is, if this guy wants to charm us out of our self-enclosed practices, he's got to learn something about the practices. In particular, he's got to get rid of the assumption that all discourses treat conflicts and disagreements as problems in need of solution.

Josh, I think I'll leave this off here, though I haven't gotten to why I'm interested in engaging Rorty in the first place, and why I think he'll do Meltzer and me some good. Rorty has correctly accused the theory people on campus of only playing pretend with class politics, of not actually engaging genuine class issues, class oppression. And Meltzer the Great Pretender has himself pretty much reduced his own social ideas to one-man identity-politics whining, and needs someone like Rorty to get him real. But Rorty himself needs to get real, needs to face up to the role that class conflict plays in ensuring that people like me and Meltzer get thrown out on our butts, and that people like him therefore don't have to deal with us, don't have to learn our discourse.

[koganbot]

Another email to Josh, also from 2002:

Multiculturalism doesn't mean "all cultures," it means "many cultures," and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to like everything that you're trying to understand, or that you always have to allow the things that you dislike to go into full effect (human sacrifice, for instance)... For me, the problem isn't so much that, though Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, there's - tsk tsk tsk - no Indonesian Studies here. It's that a lot of the life that's right under one's nose is forbidden play in the university; hence there are no rednecks, hillbillies, farmers (in the high-school sense not the agricultural sense), greasers, grits, burnouts, skaters, and niggas on the faculty. And so you get a spurious "multiculturalism" while sidestepping the basic issues of class. And the point isn't that "liberal arts" values such as freedom of speech and civil rights shouldn't be enforced in these people's disciplines (whatever those may turn out to be), or even that these people shouldn't be required to master some of the standard liberal arts curriculum - in other words, I'm not saying that we can't demand that people submit somewhat to academic culture - but that academia is ridiculously narrow about what it allows in, what counts as its culture, narrow well beyond the needs of a liberal university to retain itself as liberal (in the liberal arts sense, not [necessarily] the political sense). If we include only the people who know what we know while excluding the people who know what we don't know, what liberal value are we serving? It seems like pure class self-interest and nothing but. (Of course, a lot of my argument may well be moot, given that most burnouts-skaters-niggas etc. won't want in, since letting them in threatens burnoutism etc. as much as it threatens academic elitism.) But the issue isn't only "fairness" (which of course will run us into conflicts and contradictions, since if I had my way I'd allow the words "bitch" and "fag" into the academic discourse too, my assumption being that the liberal arts culture is strong enough to handle it, just as ILx is, and that if you're going to allow the niggas and burnouts and skaters in you've got to allow them to put their culture into at least some effect) but curiosity and knowledge. How can you deal with someone if you're not willing to get to know him?

[koganbot]

Music is a great way into multiculturalism, to test the boundaries and also to note just where the boundaries are, because as you say music gives a (false?) appearance of safety (we're just appreciating their music, not their sexist social practices), but also because it's where academia is absolutely most vulnerable. Simply put, "classical" music hasn't just lost the masses, it's lost the intellectuals too. And this is interesting, because here's where what academia teaches is most out of touch with the related popular culture: that is, at least some of the literature that academia teaches bears some resemblance to the romance novels, psychopath hunts, etc. that dominate the neighborhood lending libraries and the supermarket book racks, and some of the Euro-art in the museums and the classroom bears a resemblance to the cheap paintings you see in your motel room. But classical music and pop music are almost different species. Yeah, there's some melodic and harmonic overlap, but the forms are fundamentally different, not just the "musical" forms but the behavioral forms, what counts as part of the music (or even whether "music" is too narrow a term for forms like hip-hop and gospel and pop), how one participates in the music. So academic music departments have practically abandoned the field of battle, with English departments and cultural studies departments tentatively stepping in - which means that the question for a lot of intellectuals won't be "shall we let them in?" but "will they finally let *us* in?" And for the intellectuals who feel like challenging the classroom-hallway split, the question will be "and will they let us in whole?" And people in this constituency, once in, having been recently excluded, will at least be open to other excluded constituencies, even if they don't like the teen pop, heavy metal, adult contemporary, etc. that the guy in the other constituency listens to.

[koganbot]

Added thought, 2007:

I've been running together the idea that if you exclude classes of people you exclude some people who know something that you need to know and that if you exclude conflict and prevent people from acting like creeps you exclude some people who know something that you need to know, and you prevent other people from telling you things you need to know. But you can find creeps and bullies in all social groups, in academia as well as in street gangs. My thought is that by prohibiting conflict and creepiness academia manages to excluding whole classes of people; but obviously some academics are creeps, and academia certainly has subterranean (and not-so-subterranean) conflict. But academia's way of lessening the conflict is to have everyone - or at least everyone within a particular discipline - adopt the same social styles. And this excludes all sorts of people who won't or can't adopt the style. The way I put it in my book was "In order to protect the intellect from terror and social division, academia excludes too much of life and, in doing so, itself becomes an agent of social terror and social stratification. It may have no alternative, but it feels at odds with itself anyway, contaminated by a self-imposed provincialism that runs counter to its own principles." (And I'm realizing that academia isn't a monolith here, and what gets included and excluded can vary from dept. to dept. and professor to professor.)

[koganbot]

The actual conversation went like this:

We're sitting around the kitchen table and I hear, barely, a record playing real soft in the bedroom:

"What is that crap?" I ask, "The Smiths?"

"No, it's XTC," says Leslie.

"There's no real difference!" I say maliciously.

Patty looks at me and says, "There is a difference. The Smiths are Godlike and XTC sucks shit in the mud."

(I forget if John was there. It was his XTC record, and he might have said "No, XTC is fabulous." Or maybe I just made that up for the purposes of my example.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I had a really horrible time wrestling with Rorty in university and haven't used my brain for academic purposes since :(

[(Anonymous)]

Citing Rorty (love Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) and Goffman in one post about music? Frank, if you didn't already know it, you're my hero. I'm doing a paper right now using Goffman's Stigma to analyze legitimacy in pop music.

Anyway: Isn't the problem with having people disrupt the conversation that the conversation gets disrupted? And, knowing your highschool classroom/hallway dichotomy, isn't it favorable to keep some kind of conversation going? Think about ILX threads where something really interesting in happening, and it gets sidetracked by an image bomb.

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Citing Rorty (love Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) and Goffman in one post about music? Frank, if you didn't already know it, you're my hero. I'm doing a paper right now using Goffman's Stigma to analyze legitimacy in pop music.

Anyway: Isn't the problem with having people disrupt the conversation that the conversation gets disrupted? And, knowing your highschool classroom/hallway dichotomy, isn't it favorable to keep some kind of conversation going? Think about ILX threads where something really interesting in happening, and it gets sidetracked by an image bomb.

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Posted twice for emphasis!

Also, because I fucked up posting the comment. Oops!

[koganbot]

Good question. My quick response is there's a difference between a conversation being disrupted and a conversation being ended, but a community has to learn how to deal with disruptions in ways that don't end the conversation and - this is where my "department" may be dissimilar to many other departments, but will have things in common with ilX - don't drive away interesting people that you want to include; e.g. anti-intellectuals with something intellectual to offer.

You might want to go to this Meltzer thread, where I raise some of these issues. Search "Dewey" and "impolite discourse".

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure everyone in school would agree that bullying is within the ordinary discourse of school. Not just the parents and teachers and social workers who (presumably) want to keep school discourse "humane" and "normalized" but I think some bullies will pathologize their own behavior and say that bullying -- including the bullying they're doing -- is wrong, unacceptable, not-accepted, not-ordinary (even if commonplace, like crime). Many of the bullies I encountered, when asked by both peers and authorities to give reasons for this disconnect ("why do you bully when you *know* it's wrong?" "why do you bully when even your friends think you're being retarded?") would just shrug.

Do we say something is within ordinary discourse simply because it happens all the time?

[koganbot]

The point isn't that bullying is or is not a part of normal discourse, but that its status (is it or is it not a part of normal discourse? we've already gotten three different opinions no this thread!) as to whether or not it is within or violates the conventions is uncertain, which means that "school discourse" is neither normal nor abnormal by Rorty's definitions, which means he's got a problem with his definitions. And my underlying purpose in bringing this up in relation to The Department Of Dilettante Research is that it's a place where - for instance - someone would ask a Rorty type, it the Rorty type were to participate and try to propose such definitions, to help us formulate defintions that are more in accord with our experience and his own. In other words, the Rorty types need people like us.

(How to deal with bullies does seem to be a background concern for Rorty - as a teen he'd decided that you needed absolutes if you wanted to say that the bullies were wrong, and later he changed his mind about the need for absolutes. But his writing doesn't have much to say about how to deal with actual bullies, hands-on, as it were.)

[koganbot]

three different opinions ON this thread

IF the Rorty type were to participate

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

One time I somersault-kicked a bully and tripped him up pretty good. He didn't retaliate because it was time to come in from recess.

Another time I kicked a bully's bike while he was chasing after me (on his bike). He took a spill and as far as I can remember I never saw him again.

So basically, when bullies come at you, take the cheap shot, and kick them so they won't get up before you can get away with it.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

(Which is to say this is an issue of FEET-on, not hands. One problem I have with the bully discourse in general is that hands are privileged instead of brains and legs.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*I mean to say we were both on our bikes.