The Authority To Teach (Department Of Dilettante Research)

[koganbot]

Returning to the subject of the Department Of Dilettante Research - summarizing it in one sentence:

Everybody takes each other's course.
(1) I don't mean this literally, since I'm hoping for scores of participants, while "everybody takes each other's course" is only feasible for a dept. of five or six max. But "everybody takes each other's course" conveys the SPIRIT of the enterprise.

(2) For this to work, people will have to create the authority within themselves to teach and must simply not let up on their urge to understand. A reason that departments of dilettante research didn't spontaneously emerge within Why Music Sucks, ilX, Poptimists, etc. was people's ultimate refusal to teach.

(3) So we'll make demands on each other. Would it help to institutionalize such demands? They may be up to the teacher. Pressure, force, rewards, structure, deadlines? Partially applied onerous requirements (PAOR): "State ideas rather than alluding to them." "You don't get to leave the room until I'm convinced I understand you and that you understand me."

(4) One goal here is to reach across space - social space, cultural space. So not just interdisciplinary but "intergalactic." This means we often start from misunderstandings.

(5) So I want this to take place in an open space. Is the department merely in an open space or is the department an open space? But the space would include outsiders and kibitzers and naysayers and those who don't "get" the requirements. I'm looking for people who are willing to fly with me, but my instinct here is that I also need to be in sight of those who won't fly and those who fly elsewhere.

(6) I don't know if this is relevant, but the think tank my brother is in (cbpp) was one of the "high-impact nonprofits" discussed in the book Forces For Good: the book's summary includes this sentence: "high-impact nonprofits work with and through organizations and individuals outside themselves to create more impact than they ever could have achieved alone." I'm seeking colleagues, not necessarily world changers, but an eye and a hand to fellow spirits may be wise. Are there any fellow spirits?

Links:

The original post for Department Of Dilettante Research

Other koganbot threads on the Department Of Dilettante Research, in reverse order

Poptimists threads on the Department Of Dilettante Research, in reverse order

Several hours after I made the first Department Of Dilettante Research post I got my column at the Las Vegas Weekly, which is one reason I didn't keep posting regularly about the department. Now I no longer have the job, so perhaps I'll make time for more of these posts.

Comments

[koganbot]

"everyone takes each other's course or class"

"Course" as in "I follow along his road for a bit"; "class" as in "I imagine myself into her sensibility and social class."

Endorsement of "Of"

[koganbot]

The name "Department Of Dilettante Research" is a deliberate problem: "dilettante" will be a problem for the academy, which is all about specializing and knowing your subject matter; "department will be a problem for anti-academics who don't like the structure and conventions of academia and who hate the idea of requirements. The moniker is equally a problem for me, since I hate barstool bullshitters and get bored to suicide by most dabblers, but also I found academia the wrong home for my prose and ideas, too many arbitrary conventions and expectations that hurt my writing and too much dead conversation, too much fear of language, fear of flirting, of fighting, of gossip and jokes. But then back to my fear of human beings, and the fucked-up things that happened on ilX because of too much flirting and fighting and the continual refusal to think, so... well, "research" is a problem for me too, since it sometimes involves what people in sales call "cold calling" and what people in psychology call "playing with others." "The." Not so sure I'm at ease with that word either. Like, there is no other department of dilettante research? Well, that's the truth, but it is a desolating truth. And "of"? What's this "of"? Department Of Dilettante Research. Is it a department composed of or made from dilettante research and dilettante researchers? Is it centering on or directed towards dilettante research? Is it set aside for or taken up with dilettante research? Actually, I like all of these, so I'm fine with the "of."

Re: Endorsement of "Of"

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Love to be a better dabbler and bullshitter, actually.

Re: Endorsement of "Of"

[koganbot]

It's an important art, when done well.

[koganbot]

More from that article on high-impact nonprofits:

"The secret to their success lies in how high-impact nonprofits mobilize every sector of society - government, business, nonprofits, and the public - to be a force for good. In other words, greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than with how they manage their own internal operations."

"They share financial resources and help other nonprofits succeed at fundraising. They give away their model and proprietary information in an open-source approach. They cultivate leadership and talent for their larger network, rather than hoarding the best people. And they work in coalitions to influence legislation or conduct grassroots advocacy campaigns, without worrying too much about which organization gets the credit."

[Of course, this sentence jumped out at me: "Self-Help also followed this path, creating a secondary loan market and expanding its innovative lending models through mainstream financial players such as Wachovia and Fannie Mae, thereby changing the industry's practices and helping large companies reach historically underserved markets."]

PAOR

[koganbot]

This might need a thread of its own. Without partially applied onerous requirements (PAOR) the thing is not going to happen. "State ideas rather than alluding or referring to them or just summarizing them." "You don't get to leave the room until I'm convinced I understand you and that you understand me." Quick definition as to when you've stated an idea: when someone can understand your statement. Sometimes that person may not be me. Sometimes that person may not yet be alive. But I wouldn't bet on either.

Maybe you either have these requirements within you or you don't, as a feature of your character. If you have it you probably also have a basic intuition about when to put these requirements into effect and when not to. You wouldn't want them always in effect since sometimes you want students/readers/colleagues to figure things out for themselves, sometimes your whole point is the varied and slippery nature of the terms you're using, sometimes a good new idea is full of problems (I'd say that almost any good new idea will be full of problems, contradictions, half-thought metaphors, uncertain possibilities) and can't be well-stated but should be put forth anyway. My Department Of Dilettante Research ideas are hardly stated in full. The point is, when someone calls PAOR on you, and you can't elaborate, or won't, it's a good indication that you're talking out your ass.

calls PAOR on you

Can be pronounced "pears" or "pares," or "pours" or "pores," depending on your mood and purposes.

(Of course, my insistence that the department be (in) an open space is based on the assumption that people who are incapable of doing the PAOR (PAORing?) can and sometimes will be crucial to the proceedings.)

As for understanding - I still like Thomas Kuhn's exhortation:

When reading the works of an important thinker look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer..., when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I am not the kind of thinker to run a course, or even to contribute much, but I am very good at exams, so let me know when you have formal qualifications to offer...

[koganbot]

Well, I've always wished you had more confidence in yourself...

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I think I have a realistic idea of my mind. It's absolutely exceptional in some ways, which is why (in order of importance) I am a second outside the world record at Minesweeper and have scored a world-record matching 210 on an IQ test and could get A+ on every exam at uni without having to try much and why I can produce quality software at ten times the speed of anyone else in my workplace. That's about a good memory and very efficient processing, especially anything at all mathematical. I'm a reasonable critic, but uninspired. I occasionally have a fresh idea that is not worthless, but always small-time stuff. I lack brilliance and creativity, or the kind of insight that better critics (whether in the arts or other ways) bring. I'm smart enough to just about follow conversations between (say) you and Mark, but nowhere near smart enough to contribute usefully very often, if at all.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

To think practically about a sustainable DDR for a second (note the fudging of "the"), have you thought about creating this as a cultural space within a larger (funded) online journalism/opinion site? Like a message board via a sympathetic site that just doesn't deal in pop, culture, or pop culture? I'm thinking of the vast network of leftish blogs that, when they do foray into pop culture, are either gossipy (Huffington Post) or...y'know, boring (everyone else who does it). You'd basically be paid as moderator/columnist/gadfly with the task of pulling people in. I could imagine something like this working as best as it could while actually seeming financially sustainable on a Slate or Salon-type site, if this can in fact be an offshoot of a bigger, different base website. (Otherwise you'd need to build from scratch.)

[koganbot]

Well, my main thought here is that my first priority should be to find colleagues and that if I can do that the rest (money, subject matter) will follow from there. But as for Huffington, Slate, Salon (and of those last two I still forget which is which), what jumps to mind in regard to them - unfortunately - is the feeling "My writing will freeze in that context." That may or may not be true. "Pulling people in." Hmmm. It seems to me that someone like Andrew Sullivan was really good at "pulling me in" during the runup to the election. He's very entertaining, and basically he does links and passionate commentary. But he doesn't seem to be a deep thinker, and what he isn't any kind of center or fulcrum for is sustained and tenacious intellectual discussion. And if it were, I doubt that it would be anything like the draw that it is. On my end of things, I can't see how, on the one hand, I'm going to be trying to promote a discussion on, say, why musical taste tends to cluster along class lines and how it is that individual visceral responses align - or realign - so that members of the same social group respond similarly to music (and a further discussion about how we revamp our ideas of social class so that we can try to answer my question) while at the same time trolling the Net for an ongoing pitter patter of interesting pop culture topics. And nothing about the attention paid/not paid to Rules Of The Game or to koganbot makes me think I'd be the kind of draw that these people would want. But then, I don't know "these people" or what they want particularly well. An advantage of going to one of "these places" might be that I'd come to the attention of someone who knows a lot about, say, cumulative advantage or behavioral economics and I could get that person talking about the social butterfly effect, and maybe that person would be interested in knowing that Britney and Ashlee and Paris can be really good and I can get that person to help us talk about the social clustering of attitudes in the blogosphere. But remember, one of the reasons I want a Department Of Dilettante Research is that from what I can see rock critics don't know how to maintain an intellectual conversation (even if some of them produce interesting ideas), and I suspect that this is true of pop culture critics as a whole. Now, if I went to one of these sites and told them what I just said here, and said, "I'm here to help create/corral an intellectual conversation that knows how to sustain itself among diverse people, a focus possibly being on the question 'Where does taste come from and why, given that people respond to music viscerally, does taste tend to cluster by social class, and what the hell do we or should we mean by class anyway?'" would the site say yes? Another question would be that if I couldn't get that conversation to sustain itself in our livejournal neighborhood or on ilX, why would I think I'd be able to get it to sustain itself at Huffington or Slate or Daily Kos?

None of this means that it shouldn't be tried, but - I hate that I'm prejudiced about it - I'm really skeptical that such sites would draw a crowd that's even half as interesting as ilX or poptimists. (Crowded Timber and Obsidian Wings might be worth exploring, but I doubt that anyone who posts gets paid for it.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

crooked t and ob wings are the "thing itself", rather than an add-on to the thing: both provoke occasionally excellent contributions, but few if any good conversations (they are both also spavined somewhat, IMO, by being so self-consciously the "place where brains of left and right get to talk civilly")

i suspect dave is right, that this project will blossom best if initially hooked into something (the right thing) which people come to anyway --being an add-on will provide a steady supply of at best semi-dedicated kibitzers, which is the element that seems highly important as well as hardest directly and reliably to organise

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

sorry, that was a spectacularly poor way of putting what i was trying to say: almost exactly backwards

huffington is much less parasitic than obwi or CT; it's made itself the centre of the discussion as well as its own spin-off; where as timber and wings are basically always responding to things elsewhere -- so they're already the conversation hanging off the thing (hence you would have to be the conversation hanging off the conversation)

(is that any clearer? don't think it is...)

anyway, seems to me the key is a regular energy influx from uncommited randoms -- enough that unexpected newbies stay... but yes, the question is, what would have to be the honeypot?

my sense of it -- formally -- ius that the honeypot is something lots of different kinds of people can buzz round, and some of those people can drift in and out of the DDR, but when they take a holiday from your regime, they don't go far (just back to the honeypot); and can return when they've had a rest and a think

the prob. w.ilx and LJ is that there's nowhere "go for a rest" which reminds them to redirect back to you after a whle -- it's more all or nothing

(OK i feel like brane is glue today)

[koganbot]

Well, for one thing I think you and Dave are way jumping the gun. Why are you talking about the where? I'm trying to talk about the what. I don't see how a dep't of dil research can develop by giving me a blog at Huffington though maybe we could put it there once it already exists - though why would I want to choose that place? I don't know it very well, so maybe you can say why. But it's basically a political news and commentary site, and the idea of "news" and "everybody takes each other's course or class" don't go together well for all the zillions of reasons I put in my book. ("How it is that individual visceral responses align - or realign - so that members of the same social group respond similarly to music?" That's not generally considered news, and from the little I've skimmed of the Huffington Post I don't see how, "OK, this is the place where we do what no one else as far as we know is doing and try to think through this question of the alignment of visceral response and where we rework the notion of social class" is the sort of thing that the Huffington Post tries to do on any topic.*) Anyway, I'd say the center of the discussion is Hank Paulson and General Motors, not Huffington Post, and calling Huffington Post the center of discussion is like saying that Idolator is the center of the discussion or that in the '70s Rolling Stone was the center of the discussion, to which my reply would be "So what?" We had a better discussion at Why Music Sucks than those places ever did. (I shouldn't say that, since I've barely explored those places enough to even say that I've taken a significant sample of their writing. But I'm going to say it anyway. We had a way way way better discussion at Why Music Sucks than those places ever did. Not that those places never did interesting things that WMS couldn't.) Also, political sites attract people who say ferocious but simple-minded reductive/destructive things that they wouldn't allow themselves to say elsewhere.

OK, let's do a comparison:

Discussion on today's Huffington Post started by an economist who seems to know his shit.

A much better discussion on ILE, started by me, the limitations of the discussion being one of many things that made me realize that I would need a Department Of Dilettante Research if I wanted to find people who would genuinely carry out the discussion I wanted, since I was fundamentally alone on that thread. (Not that I didn't get a lot from the presence of others; but no one was willing to take my course or to teach his own.)

So, how would having had the second discussion at the Huffington Post have made it a better discussion?

*Whereas I could see the slight possibility of such a sustained exploration taking place at Obsidian Wings. Not that I would say, "I've got this idea for a dep't of dil research, let's go to Obsidian Wings." Just that when Dave suggested Huffington Post I was thinking, "I don't see it happening there in a million years, whereas maybe at Obsidian Wings it could happen in a thousand."

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. Well HuffPost is really more of an (unlikely to be a reality anyway, thus a somewhat moot point) example of where the goings-on of the newsies would be LESS likely to have an impact on you, provided you had a space of your "own," meaning a space with its own established rules.

Again, the lefty news blogs aren't the only example of this happening online, they're just the ones that come readily to mind.

The reason I keep jumping the gun in this way is that it seems to me that to pull people into your department, you have to have a place for people to get to know you first. I suppose you could strike up individual correspondences and push them to post in various places you currently put your thoughts. But a central location on a prominent site not usually known for any particular "voice" on pop culture would (1) allow you to set the rules, tone, and voice to some extent and (2) would draw in both regulars you already know through regular online community outreach (poptimists, former and current ilxors, other rock critics, etc.) AND lots of outsiders with widely differing backgrounds, most of whom will not have a fully formed, insider, or even particularly strong set of feelings and beliefs about what you'd be talking about.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

What many of these bigger politics-oriented sites have going for them is that there are people there that take pop culture seriously (Daniel Radosh over at Radosh.net is one example; he's a freelance journalist who has written in a bunch of these outlets) but don't really have the chance to think and write about it so much. Radosh is an exception because he started a blog specifically to create an intersection of his political and pop cultural interests, but I imagine that people would be interested in a project like this if it actually existed somewhere.

But again, for a department like this to be a reality -- meaning a place where you would be employed as well as participating, and could offer sufficient gathering room that isn't beholden to the limits of LJ or a less formal blog network -- I do think that it needs to exist somewhere from which it isn't the main attraction (kind of applying the Disney music model to it, financially, the hook being: why would a place not interested in pop culture all of a sudden GET interested? The answer being there just aren't very many outlets to even attempt what you're suggesting here. The closest I've seen are sort of higher-end blogger groups with biggish-name critics, like Xgau at NAJP, or maybe the bloggers at Rhapsody and AMG and formerly URGE and a few other sites).

[koganbot]

I do think that it needs to exist somewhere from which it isn't the main attraction

Maybe, but I'm not seeing it in the Huffington Post at all. Again, look above at what I'm saying about DDR: Everybody takes each other's course. State your ideas rather than merely alluding to them. You don't get to leave the room until I'm convinced you understand me and that I understand you. Potential topics for me to "teach": Thomas Kuhn, Relativism So What?, How Is It That Our Visceral Responses To Music Fall Along Class Lines?, How Do We Go About Rethinking Our Concept Of Social Class? --Think of courses I might be taking: Cumulative Advantage (from an economist or a sociologist), Contemporary Christian Music, Astrophysics, Pro Wrestling, Bureaucracies, Street Gangs (if people who know about such things are willing to put themselves out for my course, I'd be interested in doing the same for theirs). And if we run the full course, that might mean four weeks on a topic or four months or four years.

(This doesn't mean that I or someone else doing something interesting about popular and semipopular music at Huffington or someplace wouldn't be a good idea, but I don't see how a Department Of Dilettante Research takes place there. I don't even see how a rolling teenpop or rolling country would. Maybe I'm just not being imaginative, but I don't get this.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll retract HuffPost specifically (in part because tbh I hate it!), and focus instead on your classes: how many students per teacher? Assuming the structure is that all students are teachers, except for the ones that aren't. (Meaning there's a very liberal class-auditing or sit-in policy or something.) Fewer student/teachers means fewer resources necessary to make it happen -- honestly it sounds like something that'd work best as a kind of online book club, but I don't think that's at all what you're describing.

I guess I'm starting to understand how far from (just) the pop-cultural this goes, but it also seems to me that a pop-cultural foundation or "base" (like in a children's game) might be the best bet for making something like this happen on a much larger scale. It's a blind spot within academia (unlike whole disciplines that probably believe they're perfectly within their rights to exist as part of an academic institution). And by starting in the blind spot, you can draw attention to your process, which holds true for Kuhn or class or discussion of the new Britney album, which might encompass a bunch of these things. And it's the process that separates you from academia, too. But wrangling people in is something that I think invariably boils down to venue and subject matter first, since you can only determine and discover the process by participating to begin with. (I hope I'm being at least somewhat helpful in asking questions from angles that may seem to be too many steps ahead...)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I see how giving or taking 'the authority to teach' might address the frustration you've felt with conversations running out of steam, and I can see that 'everyone takes each other's course' moderates the hierarchy required by the notion of authority by placing it on a basis of equality. So I can see here an effective basis for something like a set of discussion protocols to which participants might commit themselves. I can relate it to my experience of good discussion among academics (relatively few and far between - most of the time comments in response to papers are either about status or are rote responses based on long-standing disagreements which for the sake of existing as a community everyone chooses to see as secondary to membership of the community). The situations in which i've experienced 'good' discussion tend to be in a workshop format - extended over a few days, a core set of participants each of whom tables a paper relating to the stated topic, one or more people respond, then general discussion follows, other people may drop in and out. This works well when each participant accepts the authority of the others in relation to specific aspects of what is being discussed, but everyone has in effect consented to explore common ground and therefore to work together (even if that means clarifying differences). Now this happens very rarely, since it involves finding the money to get people into the same place, all of whom have had to carve out time from their usual work to prepare the paper, read through the others, and prepare comments in response. It also helps to go out in the evening for dinner etc. as stuff gets reworked in a different key. (Have you read Feyerabend's autobiography? (I guess you have) This is what I imagine the summer schools he went to early in his career (in Switzerland?, my memory is hazy) would have been like.)

But I don't think it's coincidence that these are exceptional events - academics are being paid for teaching, most of the time, in contexts where the 'authority' is not bestowed by consent among the participants, but by the institution, and the incentive for 'understanding' is passing the course. I also think that things need to be time-delimited, i.e. anything with 'mutual understanding' as the goal rather than 'seek to understand each other for X hours', will rapidly feel oppressive if conversation hits a block. I don't think this affects the core of what you're saying, which seems to me to be that to make something productive out of online discussion might require contravention of the social protocols which govern most online discussion - i.e. if there's a reason why Ilx and poptimists aren't delivering, change the ground rules. And practically: I think the workshop model has a significant difference from the seminar course - because it takes participants out of 'everyday' life and allows them to focus on the topic, concentration can be maintained (for a short while). I don't see how that energy can be kept up on an ongoing basis. I know discussion forums or message boards are used extensively in distance teaching now - but usually led by assessment, i.e. participation is stimulated by the formal requirement to post something substantive X times a week. A reading group might be a better model for what you're interested in since participation is kind of combined with assessment in the sense that we could take as implicit the agreement to 'understand' a chapter a week, or 'understand' each others responses to that chapter.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Two minor follow-ups - introducing the notion of 'teaching' to the department of dilettante *research* is striking to me because the mantra of the UK university system regulation is the aspiration to 'research-led teaching', but in my experience these rarely coincide, and teaching can in some cases be more effective if not (directly) led by research. It can be (need not be) the case that the expert finds it hard to judge the distance between his own knowledge and that of the novice, and therefore is less able to help the other over the gap. The other point is that there are practical reasons why academic disciplines exist for the most part as conversations which don't either go back to first principles all the time (emphasis is on moving 'forward' although going 'back to basics' is a permissible intellectual move) or interact with other disciplines directly. If they define themselves by the production of useful results, i.e. as forms of technological knowledge, rather than of 'truth', these conversations have to police the level of introspection and reflection, and the inability to bridge disciplines, or to talk directly to a general audience, might be seen as necessary failures, subordinate to their chosen end. The danger is obviously that the conversation goes up a blind alley and no-one can bring it back; and it would also be dangerous to think that what might suit engineering or pure maths would suit the more humanistic disciplines (this is the argument over what model applies for economics I guess).

[koganbot]

What if you didn't have to think yet about what would work practically - e.g., let's say you can shanghai the thinkers you want for several years, and benefactors are shoveling wads of money at you to be as organizationally creative as you can. So you can play around with ideas of, perhaps, trying to keep a workshop going on a particular topic, or creating on and off workshops on related topics while other activities go on about them. Or you can force people to take your class - that is, force them to give you feedback on your ideas and in return you take their classes, so you're giving them feedback on their topics. So you've got an idea and here are people you'd expect would be able to contribute to it - that's why you've chosen them. But also, for your own sake and theirs, you're willing to enter the world of their ideas.

Or another path might be to assemble a set of interesting people with no unifying topic, though of course we each start teaching on the basis of our own preoccupations - but people aren't chosen specifically because I have an idea in advance of what sort of thing they'd be likely to contribute.

[koganbot]

There is an implied time limit which would be the length of the "course." There can be follow-up courses, but obviously not everyone will want to or be able to follow up on everything. (My frustration is the inability to follow-up on anything. I'd say I have this problem less than most other people do, but I still have it. If I don't get some sort of immediate gratification/immediate response, or some sort of structure forcing me to produce and continually elaborate on ideas of my own, my own thinking drifts.)

[(Anonymous)]

frank,

i think the formula you started your post with gets right at and would correct a flaw in academia's standard operating procedure, which perhaps means that the formula also aims at what the d.d.r. should be aiming at. i often find myself wishing that academics would take each other's courses. even within a department of moderate-plus size, it's all too easy for them to be ignorant of anything of their colleagues' work except the name of the topic - maybe the position taken relative to other work in the field. and they are woefully ignorant of anything their colleagues might do in the classroom with students, which at least in a field like philosophy seems like a uniquely source of revelation into how a person thinks.

i have heard that faculty members at elite schools do not disdain attending courses by their colleagues. but perhaps those are often lecture courses.


-j

[(Anonymous)]

two unrelated thoughts:

(1) last year, wanting to get some more practice teaching, wanting to step up and actually put something behind my belief that higher education ought not be confined to the academy, and maybe wanting a little bit of a chance to teach things i would normally feel discouraged from teaching, i considered offering a course at the twin cities experimental college, (http://excotc.org/) a free-form open university sort of thing. but once i sat down to plan out courses i was utterly confounded by the fact that the course i taught would lack the institutional context i was used to, in particular, the unexamined assumption that i had the authority to make all the decisions and tell people what to do. in a 'real' course you can set a large amount of work because there is a framework in which students will tolerate and can at least be gotten to do the work without undue coercion. it seems hard to exact that level of dedication from students with much less material or institutional commitment to a course - and without it, how can you read any philosophy if you're only going to read a little bit? moreover, even though i thought it that in principle it would was good and right to assign material that was in some way not typical of an institutional course, i felt most comfortable assigning certain canonical texts - but then it seemed my main justification for assigning them in an exco course was just 'people think these are important', even if i didn't especially think so. (i know there's a lot wrong with this - it's just an anecdote.)

(2) a big problem occurs to me, which seems to directly confict with your perfectionist goals for the kind of conversations that you want to happen in the d.d.r. it seems to apply especially to humane study, but who knows, maybe to sciences and the applied arts. the way most people seem to improve their understanding of cultural objects - art, philosophy, history - is incrementally, doing enough reading or listening or looking or watching to work up enough to say about it that they feel it expresses what they got from it; and then they put their take on the work up against those of others, and react accordingly. it seems like it's because of this that a large part of what anyone says about what they've experienced is severely limited, and readily dissolves under scrutiny. more experienced readers easily draw the conclusion from this that if they could just get others to go slowly, pour over every word, in sequence, from the beginning, they could get to the ideal reading without having to pass through the intermediate stages. but this seems like it might give short shrift to the large part that sheer mimicry plays in the process of coming to understand something. people like it - and when you take it away from them, they're not sure what to say anymore. along those lines, if you try to take someone through a reading slowly, forcing them to always explain their ideas about what they've read, they find it deadly boring, tedious. to keep them involved, you have to let them get a little ahead of themselves for a while.

-j