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]

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...)