I wasn't in particular asking how can we make schools better

[koganbot]

Dave wrote in a comment back here:

I feel like I can slip in the door and really contribute important ideas that, e.g., you (and your friends and our mutual friends, etc.) have internalized but haven't made their way into broader understanding yet. That is, your articulation of the hallway/school split, and its significance, hasn't quite exploded in actual schools, or academic theory about actual schools.

Well, what I was trying to do in my attack on the hallway-classroom split (originally back in '90-'91 in WMS,* then in that '01 essay for the Xgau festschrift) was to make sense of the rock-critic psyche and the behavior of a lot of contributers to my fanzine ("why doesn't Frank Kogan shut up and play his guitar?" and "I think visceral response is the most important" were two comments that I especially treasure). So to a big extent my subject was writing. Also, I was trying to come up with a better - more relevant - dichotomy to target than the ones that Christgau had chosen: his tendency would be to draw the line between intellectualizing versus partying or significance versus pleasure or some such, and then question those dichotomies without altogether abandoning them. (E.g., he thought that in P&J voters' were voting for significance when voting for albums but for pleasure when voting for singles, and then he'd say but we have to do right by the significance of singles etc.) I was talking about the psyche but I wanted to speak in social terms, about behavioral conventions and where and how they arose. The social spaces became my metaphorical categorization for a tension that I think underlies a lot of clichés (thinking versus feeling, intellectualizing versus living) and a lot of acting out.

But I wasn't in particular thinking about "What is going on in schools, and how they can be made better." The progressive education movement of the first half of the last century embraced John Dewey's attacks on the theory-practice split and on what he derided as the spectator theory of knowledge, but he never had much of an explanation for the hold that such a split continued to have on us a hundred years ago or now. His dime-store psychologizing laid the blame on the ancients' having little technological control over a dangerous and unpredictable physical world; my dime-store psychologizing puts the focus on fear of personal and social conflict, and I think I've got a better dime store. Such conflicts really can rip up a classroom and paralyze teaching, and people do need a rational response to that threat.

Dave (and whoever), I recommend that you ctrl-F my comments on this old ilX Meltzer thread, where I not only ask a question about Richard Meltzer's nastiness that I've never seen asked, or answered ("What is the intellectual value of Meltzer's nastiness? And I don't mean just that while angry he makes a lot of brilliant points in brilliant ways, which for sure he does. Do the anger and cruelty themselves make a point? What do we learn from them?" Luc gave an answer that sidestepped the question), but also wrote about Dewey choking on his contradictions: I quoted Dewey, "Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth, or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life...." and I said that this passage was brimming with tension; Dewey puts his finger right there on a trouble spot that he's then altogether incapable of addressing in his philosophy.**

*Unfortunately I've run out of those two issues (6 and 7), though some year I'll make it to a photocopy shop, I hope.

**As far as I know. He wrote scads of books and articles, of which I've read very few.

Comments

[koganbot]

Don't think I was suggesting that Meltzer's nastiness was what allowed him to do most of what he did (and even if it did, that doesn't necessarily mean that the nastiness has intellectual value for those of us who read it). Also, I was willing to accept "no intellectual value" as an answer from someone who was genuinely willing to at least consider that there was intellectual value in the nastiness, and therefore would give reasons for saying "no value" rather than simply take for granted that there was no value.

Also, don't know if my answers would be "yes and yes" today. But if I were to go with the "yeses" I'd probably argue along the lines I took when - correctly - explaining the intellectual value of and justifying Scott Seward's quoting Patti Smith to the effect that she never listens to performers she wouldn't want to sleep with, Scott then saying "I'm guessing electronic classical music isn't her bag, what with most of the form's gurus looking like unpopular physics professors." (See pp 196-197 in my book.) What I wrote was, "not only is Scott revealing this social fact [that the Ohm electronic guys have place themselves in the 'serious art music' rather than the 'sexual come-on' category] about the musicians and the music (and if the music has a penis in it, it's in the guise of a pointy-headed pseudosexlessness), he is also drawing the music back into our world of flirting and fighting - he is revealing that the music is part of that world whether it wants to be or not. And Scott is also revealing something about his own social role." And a paragraph later I write, "Scott's way of making points is appropriate because his subject matter isn't just 'the social relationship between electronic musicians and the world' or even 'the social relationship between electronic musicians and Scott Seward,' it's 'the social relationship among electronic musicians, Scott Seward, and you, the reader.' The more visceral the prose - and the more visceral the reader's response - the more pedagogically effective the piece is. This is because an effective way to get you to think about social relations isn't to merely state the relations but to put the relations into question by putting your social relations into question. Of course the writer can do both; but if he excludes the latter, you, the reader, may well shield yourself from his point, which is that by social relations he means you."

It doesn't follow that to recognize and engage in a culture war you have to be warlike or else people won't understand you (and anyway there are plenty of people engaging in culture clashes all over the place not really because there are substantive cultural disagreements - even if there are - but because they like hurting people). So by no means am I saying that Meltzerian meanness is a requirement, or even that it's necessarily ever justified - there can be ways of making the point without being mean - but that nonetheless in certain circumstances meanness gets the job done.

(Btw, Scott wasn't being particularly mean in the passage I quoted, even if he might have hurt the Ohm-guys feelings. My passage might have heart the Ohm guys feelings too, except that I doubt anyone of them would ever see it, and probably most of them didn't see Scott's. Also, I don't know if I'm right about the music presenting itself in the guise of pointy-headed pseudosexlessness. I've got the Ohm CD but it's never clicked for me, and I haven't delved into it much.)

I wouldn't say I've truly grappled with my own question here.

[koganbot]

the Ohm electronic guys have placed themselves...

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to push against where (and when) anger is necessary in part because I instinctively believe that it is sometimes necessary myself -- when I think of (non-Meltzer) examples, I find plenty of places where antagonism of some kind would hugely benefit a conversation. The key one might be the super-polite year-end Slate exchanges, which without Christgau (though even he seems too polite in those) are interminably delicate.

Similarly, my anger during the Paris Hilton debate, say, did move conversations forward in a way that pleasant but disapproving acknowledgment of stupid ideas wouldn't. Calling stupid stupid, and feeling comfortable in re-framing a shitty dialogue to try to make future ones less shitty, is an important technique.

But to bring things back to authority a bit, one thing that Meltzer seems to be doing is saying, in effect, "I'm doing this the way it needs to be done; people who don't do it this way are a buncha douchebags." And you feel both the first part and the second part in the force of his prose, the feeling not just that he's doing something right, but that you're doing something wrong. That's one thing that aggression, meanness, hardness, and nastiness can get you -- the second part of that equation. But to be comfortable modeling what's right, we also have to be comfortable modeling (by naming it or by omitting it) what's wrong.

I think Chuck has a great few moments at the end of Accidental Evolution where he tackles what he thinks is wrong in a bigger conversation, but the thing that sticks with me in that book is what isn't in it; how such an impressionistic (according to accepted canon-making form) historiography of rock can feel so right. Chuck reserves his anger directed at a specific target for his conclusion, and is remarkably brief: "Since the ideas contained herein tend to be presented as 'Fucking Around' instead of as 'Journalism' or 'Aesthetic Discourse,' people who think it's impossible to think and fuck around at the same time will doubtlessly pretend my ideas never existed." Now, if you've held with it to that point, there's no way you're not going to figure out on what side of that line you stand, and the first thing you have to ask yourself is "well, what are Chuck's ideas?" But Chuck's taken on the authority of actually putting that line down in a way that forces you to engage with it, and with his ideas, because he knows that his ideas are worth thinking about (and just as importantly "yours," depending on what side your on, are NOT -- or to be softer about it, not with as much effort as they tend to be thought about).

One thing I've tried to impress upon the new teachers for this summer program is that what you bring in and leave out of the classroom makes a huge difference, and there's sociopoliticowhatever POWER in leaving stuff out of the classroom. E.g., you can't explicitly teach kids how to feel about gender, sexuality, etc., but you can certainly draw the line on what's not OK to say. But you have to be able to control a discourse with a certain force, and just as there are certain ways of viscerally putting forward a sense of authority in the classroom ("you don't have to like me but you do have to listen"), so it goes in writing, too.

The problem with most educational theory is that the force of its ideas is mixed with a timid prose that doesn't hit you in the gut with its ideas -- that's what music writing has that I've always loved in it. But one reason for this is that the "gut experiences" in education don't tend to happen on the page, they tend to happen in the classroom. In music writing, we're almost always talking about, and on, the page of some kind -- or if in person we're still working it out with words. The people who primarily don't translate their music into words (dancers, musicians, air guitarists, dads, my neighbors, etc.) probably have a lot to say, but they won't be able to talk to the word-people until they want to use words themselves. (There's plenty of crossover, and obviously writing and using in non-verbal or -written ways isn't mutually exclusive, but it often feels that way in music conversations.)

[koganbot]

My passage might have heart the Ohm guys feelings too

My spelling sure starts hearting after midnight.