Department Of Dilettante Research, Part 3: The Dilettantists

[koganbot]

Last week Mark made yet another Department Of Dilettante Research post on poptimists. And here are some additional thoughts of my own.

A crucial component (the centering component, perhaps) of the Department Of Dilettante Research is conversations among several people - surrounded by kibitzers, onlookers, revelers, brawlers, etc. - where no one leaves the conversation until everyone is satisfied that the others understand him or her. Different conversations may have different central characters (though my guess is that the same characters will keep turning up time and time again), and "central" might just mean "central to me"; that is, there may be other conversations with as many or more participants and onlookers than the ones I'm calling "central." But the conversations I'm calling "central" will be the ones where no one leaves the conversation until everyone is satisfied that the others understand him or her. Without those conversations, there's no department.

I want these conversations to occur in a fundamentally open space, hence the revelers, kibitzers, etc. (how open will be a matter for experience to teach us). This is to lessen the chance of our becoming social retards.

I will have trouble finding people able to take a central role. Most people who show up are going to bring their tastes, their perceptions, their particular insights and accumulation of knowledge, their special enthusiasms, their sociability. But few of them will have the desire to get into someone else's head, the willingness to work to make their ideas comprehensible to others, the drive to face the tensions and inadequacies of their own ideas, or the desire to test those ideas. Way fewer. The conversation a couple of threads ago between me and cis about "normal" and "abnormal" discourse is a case in point. I said that Rorty's definition of normal discourse was inexplicably retarded because it demanded something that's actually absent from most normal discourse: near unanimity as to what is considered relevant and what counts as answering a question. cis disagreed, but to my mind didn't understand why I thought such consensus was so rare. I elaborated. cis disappeared into the night. And it's always this way. Of course, people have their priorities, and not everyone is going to try and finish every thought; but what's causes conversations to abort in ilX and poptimists comes from some deeper problem: a mental block of some sort, or an inner fire that's missing. (Too early for me to tell if cis has the fire or not.)

To repeat something I posted on Mark's poptimists thread, there's a tension in the word "dilettante." It is pulled between two meanings:

1st meaning: A dilettante flits from subject to subject and project to project, alighting on one, taking shallow sips, and then heading for the next, without really concentrating his efforts on anything. (Most crucial defect: the dilettante leaves off from an inquiry before the subject matter can work any changes on him. In fact, his being this sort of dilettante may be due to his aversion to being changed.)

2nd meaning: A dilettante is someone who is endlessly curious and follows questions and connections wherever they lead. ("Dilettante" derives from the Latin verb that means "to delight.")

The second meaning describes a very ambitious dilettantism, since I'm including in it my idea that we won't allow ourselves to break off a conversation until each is convinced that the others understand him or her; it is suggesting that in one's journeys one tries to master other people's ideas.

But the flitters may themselves play a crucial role in keeping the department open to the world, given that you don't know what interesting place they might land or whom they'll meet and whom they'll introduce the more "central" characters to. They can provide a broader view of the landscape. Even if the view is terribly inaccurate, it's better than no view.

Also, there may be people, flitters or not, who can't analyze their way out of a bathtub but who are skilled at getting to know the character of someone or something.

Comments

Re: various hurried points

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ok
iv. martin's point i honestly don't understand -- i can grasp the problem of not being on in a discussion of the difficult jargony content of sych-and-such a thinker when you haven't read same (and are daunted by their opaque style); but Frank and Tom are not opaque AT ALL, and while I accept that haha i very often am a bit um compact in expressive delivery, i have always made myself open to attempts to clarify what i'm getting at (when i understand it myself)
v. nor do i think that any of our ideas are "difficult" in the sense that i feel some of derrida's ideas are a bit hard to grasp (and i feel that bcz i am not sure i grasp them, and i feel i don't grasp them bcz i am not sure i can explain them well in my own words, and i feel THAT bcz when i have tried -- eg to frank -- i have felt a huge gulf between what i vaguely sense i am trying to say and how he is understanding them; consequence, i have plunged back into the book which contains the ideas i am trying to restate-explain, and -- probably -- been interrupted by other lifestuff before i got all the way... this def happened w.of grammatology, which was interrupted by my mum's illness and death, and so the "reply" bit of the conversation becomes bigger and bigger and broodingly shelved latent and stalls more and more, and becomes a semi-depressive symptom where the only way out is a kind of FUCK IT refusal to be tied to the dutiful longform version of the response
vi. anyway i think martin has plenty to contribute to such a discussion, and should not be put off by something which is not as much there as he thinks