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Department Of Dilettante Research, Part 2: Depart Harder
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 -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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."]
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."]
no subject
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?