The elephant in the classroom

[koganbot]

Dave over on his Tumblr:

I worry that people who are interested (and provocative, and good writers) in "other avenues" online tend to be exceedingly poor at transferring those skills to discussing music. I like several progressive writers in the political blogosphere, but in nearly all cases their ability to talk about music is fucked, because, perhaps by nature of what they "do," they don't take music very seriously. It's a "break" from the hard work of writing about politics and policy, and it's their only chance to be intellectually lax (or flat-out stupid). The only field in which I've seen any potential for overlap is education and pedagogy theory, where much of the more enlightened theory on media literacy seems to take up many of the things I'm most interested in in music criticism — especially how personal likes and dislikes interact with our ability to learn. Music can galvanize learners in both directions — engagement and disengagement — and bringing matters of personal taste into the classroom is a minefield.

. . .

A good internet convo or community, like a good classroom, is a site for questioning, accepts reasoned analysis, and actively discourages intellectual stasis and a reliance on unfounded assumptions. Also like a good classroom it includes all of the messy stuff, too — temper tantrums, joking, going off-topic, failed experimentation — and makes it part of the learning experience. The question I have is whether or not the elephant in the room in this comparison — the role of the teacher — is by and large what's missing from internet discourse. I want to say no (when you tell a group of adults that they need a teacher, you're on the express train to condescension-ville) but I do see an occasional need for a larger force that could more strongly redirect conversations when they begin to derail (derailing is not the same as going off-topic).

(There's plenty more, so click the link.)

Comments

[koganbot]

And my response to Dave was:

I'd say it's even more condescending not to tell them they need a teacher.

The only way one gets to be intelligent is to be willing to climb other people's mountains. As a teen I climbed Dylan's mountain, and Jagger's. That's what reading and listening are, to at least some extent: handing yourself to the hands of another and then embarking on their journeys, on the way to your own. I'm not sure what to do with people who seem to be smart but won't do that. But a good teacher can be a huge help, in motivating us but also in giving us footholds and directions, while still leaving the climbing to us.

[(Anonymous)]

Was a bit unclear -- I think what I meant to say was that you will be perceived as condescending, even though that's not what you're doing (it's an honest problem). I'm basing it on experiences at ILM of being called condescending for essentially bringing some Kogan concepts into defense of the teenpop thread. I don't believe I was being condescending at all, was merely pointing out a failure of the attackers to engage with what we were actually writing about on the thread. But I don't really want to bring up that convo again specifically, since for the most part it was pretty dysfunctional (what I remember most is that when I actually excerpted parts of the thread that I thought were exemplary, no one had any criticism whatsoever of the content).

Woops

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

That was me

Re: Woops

[koganbot]

People - lots of people, including me, enough of the time... people take correction as criticism and they don't hear criticism. But the real dysfunction is what comes after. Which is to say that the corrected/criticized person either is too tangled in his wiring to ever regroup and rethink, or, even if he's not, he simply doesn't, and he has no friend or ally - someone whom he perceives is on his side but sees the truth of the correction - to help him think and regroup. So where the dysfunction is most destructive isn't in the individual but in the larger conversations.

Re: Woops

[koganbot]

By the way, which lefty bloggers did you have in mind, and is it worth the effort for us to force our instruction on them?

Re: Woops

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Matthew Yglesias is great with politics and terrible with pop culture -- I know of a few "lower level" lefty contributors with whom I've gotten into really frustrating fights about music; our political alignment just didn't extend to music. Elsewhere I see a lot of your basic thumbs up/down mentioning with no intention of discussion, which I don't begrudge anyone. But it's frustrating that they don't view music generally as an intellectual pursuit.

Re: Woops

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I hopped into a comments section at Yglesiad's blog over what I thought was a snide evaluation of "Summer Girls" and was basically told not to take it so seriously, that it was all in good fun (this was by other commenters -- Matt tends not to comment in the threads).

Re: Woops

[koganbot]

Well, what would you say is at stake here? What should we try to achieve, and how can we go about doing it?

Re: Woops

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I still think our best bet is to pull people into broader social conversations that happen to feature music, the music being the means to the social-convo ends rather than vice versa. The politicos actually aren't all that interested in sociology (they tend to be bad at that as well -- they're good at identifying issues and calling bullshit, but not as good at determining, or even caring, why someone might believe certain things or act certain ways. Nor do I think it's in their best interest necessarily to try to understand, since what they want to influence is policy change by galvanizing friendly readers).

The other alternative, finding everyone in other fields to who happens to enjoy talking about music, will (1) limit the applicant pool significantly and (I'm guessing) (2) tend to attract people based on their tastes rather than their ideas. To have a good conversation about Taylor Swift, I think we need to put Taylor Swift at the center of a broader conversation worth having -- our terms are, if you want to talk about Social Thing X, you have to do it in the context of Taylor.

Re: Woops

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Your column was instructive here -- misrepresentations of it often stemmed from the fact that the misrepresenters were so hung up on the artists and songs being mentioned (Backstreet Boys! Paris Hilton!) that they weren't paying attention to the ideas, but the ideas weren't dependent on the performers or songs; those things were an important jumping off point (and important evidence) within a much broader framework which benefited from your examples but didn't need them.

Re: Woops

[koganbot]

I don't know. The hang-up on particular performers is one of the very things most worth exploring, that people can't have a sane conversation about Paris Hilton or Ashlee Simpson because, you know, it's Paris Hilton or Ashlee Simpson. But, at least in regard to my column, people like Simon Reynolds and Mark K-Punk and Anwyn Crawford were into winning arguments rather than understanding the world, so projecting stupid ideas and then stomping on the ideas they'd projected and imagining themselves victorious is what they were going to do no matter what. Which isn't to say that they're like that 24/7, and as you know I'd had some friendly convos with Reynolds back in '99 and '00, though he tended not to have much follow-through even then. The deeper problem with the bliss crew - at least this is what I'm speculating from their near-psychotic behavior towards me - is that they've convinced themselves they have a working critical apparatus, that they have a set of tools and an overall framework, and they actually don't: their basic strategy seems to be to assign motives to people that the people don't actually have. But for Reynolds et al. to relinquish their poor tools and start anew would come at too high an emotional price for them. (Now I'm assigning motives to them, but they certainly didn't come at me with ideas.)

Nor do I think it's in their best interest necessarily to try to understand, since what they want to influence is policy change by galvanizing friendly readers

Well, yeah, maybe in the short run this is how one wins elections and gets people to write letters, but in the long run it promotes bigotry and ignorance among one's own and drives away potential allies and coalition partners who don't identify with one's particular lifestyle markers. And it makes one narrow and stupid. If this is what Yglesias is doing in regard to popular culture (I haven't read him much, but I've tended to like what I've read, which hasn't been about culture), he most certainly can and should do better.

Re: Woops

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, right -- the discussion of how and why specific performers are being misrepresented is exactly the kind of place where we might draw in writers and thinkers who have no personal interest in these performers' music necessarily, since this is something that doesn't just apply to one performer but instead indicates a set of behaviors on the part of the people doing the misrepresenting.

I think "narrow" is a good word for Yglesias's takes on pop culture (my argument in the "Summer Girls" thing was basically "why are you treating this differently than you treat other 'more important' stuff; why don't the intellectual processes for one thing seem to hold for another thing?" -- especially given the fact that he seems to be a pretty good & reasonably intellectual sports writer, another leisure activity), but this sense of narrowness really doesn't transfer to his political writing at all, which is quite evenhanded and rational. I also don't mean to conflate him with the more coalition/tribal-identification-hungry sites I read with far more ambivalence -- Huffington Post and the like, often including ThinkProgress, whose webspace he shares.

Re: Woops

[koganbot]

Hmmm. I called some people's behavior "near psychotic," when actually it was only ignorant and dysfunctional. So "near psychotic" wasn't the sanest way I could have characterized it, is it?

I do know several people irl who are actually psychotic, and in a lot of pain, and trying hard not to be destructive because it's not their nature. And a good friend who succumbed to schizophrenia and killed himself when I was in my early thirties.

Anyway, those are two different categories, the garden-variety sneering and incompetence of the bliss crew, on the one hand, and actual mental illness, on the other.