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.

[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.

[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?