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

[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...)