Discipline and interdisciplinarity

Again on Easily Distracted, there’s a terrific analysis of interdisciplinary programs. ED looks at the College of the Atlantic, which is an inspiring exemplar. Links are there.

I should say first by way of context or confession that I am barely disciplined. Although my doctorate is in modern European history, for the first four years after graduate school I taught philosophy, sociology, and human development but almost no history. (I am tenured in a nice little history department now and teach history exclusively, or at least that’s what it says in the course catalog.) My undergraduate degree was similarly eclectic, and while I was in grad school I identified and studiously avoided or resisted (which I now regret) the professors who made it their mission to discipline the younguns.

Much of my indiscipline I would now call preconscious. While I was teaching all that whatsis and looking for a permanent job, I got more conscious and thought a whole lot about discipline, indiscipline and interdisciplinarity. I also worked for several years in an interdisciplinary human development program, one of the great experiences of my life, and interviewed at a couple of interdisciplinary institutions. This does not make me an expert, just an interested commenter.

The concept of interdisciplinarity takes disciplines for granted. This is realistic. Knowledge systems are organized into disciplines as a matter of fact. There are accordingly two ways to accomplish interdisciplinarity. The first is to bring people with different disciplines together. I call this serial disciplinarity. The second is to expect individuals to become multiply disciplined, that is, actually conversant with and practiced in not just the material of different disciplines but their codes, practices, assumptions, debates, sacred texts. I’ll need to talk about this more in a second, but here I’ll just say that this is really exceptional. The third option, to train people outside of established disciplines, is what interdisciplinary programs usually shoot for. But the products of these programs are not interdisciplinary properly speaking. They are undisciplined.

The temptation is to think of disciplines as just databases or at most, bodies of knowledge. If I read “Gravity’s Rainbow” and use it as a source on receptions of WWII in popular culture, I am interdisciplinarily doing literature, right? Well, um, no. The discipline of literature is not defined by its materials, but by its habitus. Literature is a way of seeing, thinking and judging, not a thing to see, think about and judge. People disciplined to literature are disposed to see the whole world as a text, not just books. The purpose of literature departments is in part to organize the investigations and knowledge produced by the practices of the literature habitus, in part to reproduce themselves by passing on the dispositions of seeing, thinking and judging that define the field to new generations.

Historians have a habitus (which includes the various internal contestations of it, of course; all of those contesters are historians) and are disposed to examine everything historically, including texts. Philosophers also have a habitus, and so on. All of the disciplines of the humanities fantasize that they are the master discipline that encompasses all the others. This is self-evidently false, if we think about what disciplining means. When Lit types dabble in context they are not practicing historical interdisciplinarity, they are taking snapshots like intellectual tourists. And I just have to laugh when philosophers tell me things like they are Wittgensteinian/Hegelians, in that order. Well, you can be that in philosophy.

Getting back to habitus, becoming disciplined is a way to narrow, direct and focus one’s attention while providing a sense of purpose and belonging in a meaningful community of like-minded folks. Disciplines enable some conversations and disable others by foreclosing tangents and digressions, by specifying right and wrong questions and adjudicating right and wrong answers, by categorizing, and by providing shared vocabularies. The enabling is just as important to notice as the disabling. Taken as wholes, disciplines offer their disciples a morally ordered universe and a firm sense of ratified adult identity. This is why disciplined people forced into interdisciplinary contact with other disciplined people often end up feeling existentially angsty and deciding that the ‘others’ are immoral, as I have repeatedly seen.

ED points to this when he concludes “[i]n the end, for all of us who chafe at excessive departmentalization and balkanization in academia, this is a problem of culture, attitude, practice and orientation. Cultures change slowly and organically, and you can’t rush those kinds of transformations even by the radical redesign of underlying structures.” I agree completely, except - is it a problem? Why? He also admires generalists who have a conceptual map of the disciplines and thinks they’re a rare breed. Thanks! We know how to think outside of the box, play different games, speak different languages, pick your metaphor.

However, the role of the generalist is necessarily a limited one. Disciplines are ways of getting things done, after first defining what needs doing. Like any sort of groupthink they encourage narrowmindedness and arrogance if left unchecked; anxiety and defensiveness when challenged. I certainly saw both dynamics in play at the interdisciplinary programs in my experience. But disciplines are also a way to get grounded, to build leverage. We generalists tend to be a wifty lot. We’re good at playing with boundaries, but like Socrates or two-year-olds who keep asking whywhywhy we can get irritating to serious people fast. At a certain point you’ve just got to plant your feet somewhere and do stuff in a disciplined way.

The best role for the undisciplined generalist is probably translation. We don’t really have the chops that a lifetime of focused devotion to one discipline can bring, so we’re never the cutting edge. We can point to stuff that’s going on from field to field where intersections could happen. We can try to unpack disciplined information so that it’s usable in an undisciplined way. We can be oddly comfortable with our interstitial identities and remind people that boundaries are often arbitrary. There should always be some of us around. But I’m not sure we’re what a whole program should be built out of.

I notice I started in one place and ended up in another here. I don’t have a train of thought about this stuff so much as a pile of boxcars. This is another problem with indiscipline, of course.

Postmodernism?

On Easily Distracted there are a series of fascinating posts loosely occasioned by a couple of recent flaps in academe. ED wraps up for the moment with a really excellent meditation on what he calls the “porcupine approach,” by which he means the inclination of academics to get all prickly, defensive and offputting when challenged on their expertise. He’s right about all of it (and as a commenter perceptively notes, it’s not a strategy limited to academe).

I’ve commented in my own somewhat prickly way on that site, but I wanted to add to the general gist of ED’s analysis here. He counters porcupinity with an ethic of clarity, openness and humility that I admire and aspire to (again, in an admittedly grumpy personal style). He thinks that’s consistent with postmodernism and I agree. In fact, I think it’s essential to postmodernism (I’m telling a joke here, explanation follows).

The essential critical insight of postmodernism, if such a thing is possible, is that there is no essential critical insight. As Lyotard canonically put it, postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives,” including, inescapably, its own. That’s it - if you think there’s only one way to tell a story, you may be many wonderful things but you’re not a postmodernist. (The neatness of this exclusion is unsustainable within postmodernism.) This is why ‘postmodernists’ tend to collapse so easily into ‘wordy’, ‘over’(pun)ctu/ated, ‘tale-chasing’ ‘iron-y’. All the words and their parts you might use to describe it or do anything with it mean something else too in other equally valid narratives (discourses), and one must attend to these differences lest they sneak up and bite one from behind. Like all forms of skepticism postmodernism is conceptually inescapable, which is why practical people may toy with it but never entirely adopt it. You can break everything down nicely with pomo, but you can’t build anything up.

Now, here’s the thing about the academic flaps ED is talking about. Both cases involve people “dangling half-formed chunks of critical theory like a sacred totem about [their necks],” which is an awesome image. The thing they’re both doing that’s really bizarre is that the chunks of critical theory they’re dangling are derived from postmodernism. And they’re using those chunks to assert a privileged interpretive position with respect to their own work and postmodernism itself, apparently without irony of any kind. But the thing is, in pomo that is the ONE MOVE that you absolutely, positively cannot make without massive self-irony. Because a privileged interpretion is a metanarrative, and the first holy vow of postmodernists is to be incredulous of metanarratives.

It’s really interesting to see a discourse the purpose of which is to question power claims used as a power claim. In the ultimate irony, postmodernism has become dogma - or better, as ED says and NP analyzes, a fetish.

Tragedy and pathos

By accident the sports page got this right. They described as tragedy the catastrophic injury and euthanasia of Eight Belles, the filly who came in second at the Kentucky Derby this year.

(Actually, it’s entirely possible to purify a definition of tragedy where animals don’t qualify no matter what. Nowadays our community with the other critters of nature is a welcome theme, so I’ll just go ahead and include her in.)

Eight Belles suffered compound fractures to the ankles of both front legs and collapsed shortly after crossing the finish line. There are a couple of amazing things about this. Thoroughbreds are bizarrely inbred speed specialists with incredibly fragile lower legs, but breaking both ankles at once is unusual even so. It’s likely that she broke one, then kept running and broke the other one while compensating for and aggravating the first one. Most critters would stop running after the first injury, and it could well be that her original injury was treatable. So here’s the tragedy part.

It was her own courage and fundamental nobility of spirit that did her in.

Nowadays it has become customary to say something is ‘tragic’ as a way of saying ‘especially sad’. There is a word for that, but it’s not tragic. It’s ‘pathetic’. For something to be tragic, in the classic sense, the bad thing that happens has to be traceable to some active expression of a higher virtue of the critter it happens to. Tragedy does not happen to ordinary critters, only to extraordinary ones. It’s an active, ironic yet enlightening kind of hurt. You can’t just be sitting there and have a meteorite fall on your head and get ennobled by that. You’re just a poor sad schlug there.

Strictly speaking, the only potentially tragic figures in the 9/11 attack were the terrorists on the planes and the rescue workers who lost their lives or health trying to help. They actively chose their fate. Everyone else just had bad stuff happen to them. Very sad. Pathetic, in fact.

In these days when survival is the new excellence this can be hard to get a brain around. As I pointed out in the post on giving offense, everyone wants to claim nobility, for good historical reasons but still kind of missing the point. Everyone could in principle be special, but just being unique won’t get you there. So describing as ‘tragedy’ the little indignities of a life we live as victims is a peculiarly ‘modern’ sort of compliment we pay ourselves. There’s nothing noble about being pathetic, so it offends our vanity; but it really just refers to having bad stuff happen to you that you couldn’t control, which is quite a common refrain. Call me old-fashioned, but I think we should know ourselves better.

Sorry, you can’t be both a victim and noble. Take your pick.

Move your feet.

Something my Dad told me many years ago when I was just a tyke Carl Dyke has always stuck with me. It’s a good example of how I do much of my thinking analogically, as for example in the last post on “getting clear.”

He was talking about how he played offensive guard on the football team in high school. He was a tall, skinny kid and guards are supposed to be the massive road graders of the offensive line so this was really an unlikely thing. What he told me was that the key is to move your feet. If you can keep your feet moving, he said (and of course I don’t remember his exact words), you keep your balance and leverage so you can maintain your position while never giving the other guy a clean shot to knock you over.

This is just beautifully (although of course imperfectly, as are all analogies) an image of metastability. There’s lots of shifting, preferably unpredictable in specific moves without being indeterminate in a larger sense, within a bounded range. No trouble keeping track of him continuing to be the same player playing the same position, but he’s otherwise not staying still or letting himself get pinned down.

As is so often the case during this, my blogging apprenticeship (N. Pepperell is my Yoda :-) ), a thread on Rough Theory prompted this thought. The thread points to recent ‘theory wars’, which is a sort of thing I’m familiar to ennui with as an intellectual historian, although not the current instance. We all have to figure stuff out sometime, somehow.

The discussion on NP’s thread is worth perusing. In a very general sense it’s about how to ‘ground’ theories in real, sensuous histories without merely turning them into curios or losing an aspiration to broader engagement and relevance.

So it’s about our relationship to the ground. And it all made me think - move your feet. The problems come when we try to plant in one position. Too easy to hit from a blind side and get knocked over that way. Go ahead and stay where you are, but keep your feet moving. Keep turning, shifting, engaging.

Move your feet.

Getting clear

One thing is clear, there’s nothing clear about getting clear. To me, getting clear seems like what polite, competent people do when they’ve got something to accomplish. But not getting clear can also get things done.

I do have a general ethic of getting clear. Let me illustrate with the relatively simple example of driving. When I get to an intersection, I make a point of getting clear beforehand on which way I’m going. I then get clear of the intersection as quickly and efficiently as I can. This is courteous because if I’m dawdling in the intersection, I may be blocking someone who needs to use it to get where they’re going. It’s competent because the purpose of intersections is to manage traffic flows, so flowing is the specific competence they require.

Similarly, when I have a turn to make I get on with it briskly. I get clear of the road I was on as smoothly and efficiently as I can because that’s the competence associated with turning, and because others using the road I’m vacating would like to maintain their momentum and progress as much as possible. When someone ahead of me has not gotten clear on the purpose of roads, which is to transit from one place to another as briskly and efficiently as possible, I pass them. The competence of passing is to go from being behind to being in front with no unnecessary delay or inconvenience to anyone else on the road, including the passee. Accordingly, once I’ve made the decision to pass I get on with it and get clear.

On multilane roads there may or may not be opportunities to get and stay clear. A lot of traffic makes for a pretty tricky interpretive environment. I like to be clearly in view to my roadmates, to get them clear to me, and to get clear of their sudden failures to be clear on the competence of lanes. It is both courteous and competent to get clear on the concept of blind spots and following distances.

All of this getting clear on the roads has the general effect of both clarifying my relationship with and minimizing my impact on the situation and other people in it. I’m doing what’s clearly the point of the situation and getting clear of - and as - any inconvenient obstruction or entanglement. So I think getting clear is good.

However, obstructing and entangling are in fact ways of controlling the roadways. Intersection and turn dawdlers require everyone else on the road to modify their speed and progress to pay attention to what they’re doing. Speed limit ignorers likewise. Drivers who are unclear on blind spots and following distances control the space they are in by brute existential force. Drivers beside and in front must drive not just for themselves but for the encroacher, since clearly any effective avoidance of collision will not be coming from them.

In short, not getting clear is actually an excellent strategy for getting things to go your way - if you happen to be heavy enough to force others to pay attention and adjust to you. But it’s not very polite, and it gums things up. Then again, what with global warming and all maybe things need more gumming.

Elective affinities

There’s an interesting multiblog conversation going on about the merits, functions, affects and effects of writing in “difficult” style. What’s meant is mostly not (although maybe it should be) the difficulty that any learner has as they raise their ‘game’ from Dr. Seuss and cereal boxes to elementary textbooks, introductory university texts, specialized field monographs, and so on. Rather, the discussion is about high-theoretical styles in the humanities that seem or are explicitly “difficult” on purpose. These texts require a substantial commitment of time and attention to unpack, sometimes for little evident gain. They have been pithily described as producing “academic Stockholm syndrome.”

The most extensive discussion I’ve seen has been on Larval Subjects. The focus there has been precisely on the nefarious ability of such texts to colonize the minds of their victims, turning them into abject disciples doomed to a twilight existence as slaves to the master text (I’m caricaturing a rich discussion outrageously, but this is in fact the drift of much of the fretting). My contribution there has been to offer the dead vole that such texts only have the power readers give them - like this blog, of course, feel free to practice your liberation strategies here - so perhaps we might want to look at why some readers but not others are inclined to such reverential or even masochistic responses to the text. After being mistakenly accused of missing the point about the real existence of such reader communities (of course there are) we reached a nice point of agreement that it might be worth looking into why they are disposed to select and react to texts in this apparently-troubling way. But since that line of inquiry was promptly dropped there, I’m picking it up here.

At one level there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about this dynamic of text identification except the fact that all these smart people seem to think it’s remarkable. Every text from Dr. Seuss on up, difficult or not, has the charismatic potential to generate reverent reading communities that might be described as ‘priesthoods’. My own experience is with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian theorist who wrote about complex things quite clearly, all in all. There are a lot of pages of Gramsci, most of them in prison notebooks that he never had a chance to edit into a linear text, many of them on topics that very few people could care less about. This of course creates the opportunity for a mystery cult for those few who have virtuously read through all of it, sort of like the Kabbalah or the Hadith. Here are instances where the reading community in effect ADDS difficulty to the sacred text by digging out and canonizing every little detail, aside, and tangent. The characteristic assertion is that the plainish meanings of the core writings must be supplemented or even amended in light of these exclusive arcana. (Translation fetishists from the Qur’an to Weber and Foucault work the same way. Translations are not just workably second-best but unacceptable in comparison to the sacred revelation of the original.)

People choose these texts and these reading strategies for all the usual reasons they choose religions (and reject other religions). They may be born into them, or disposed toward them by cultural marking of the text. They may be seeking identity and collective effervescence in a community. The text may be culturally marked as normative or transgressive, enabling the effervescence of dominant or rebellious subculture identification. There may accordingly be a component of acceptance and/or rejection of authority, be it the father’s or the group’s. These are choices within structured fields of options and decision strategies. All of this falls under the sociology of what Weber called elective affinity and Bourdieu elaborated as the schemes of the habitus.

A sense of special belonging in something larger than oneself is, Durkheim tells us, the payoff for any religious affiliation. The content of this feeling is society, community. As I remarked in the previous post, a characteristic of modern societies is the weakening of traditional communities in favor of the elevation of the individual to sacred status. This is because of economic and demographic growth that creates a highly articulated and interdependent division of labor. Because we do so many things and serve so many functions, out of each others’ view so to speak (modern foucauldian surveillance has nothing on the continuous intimate familiarity of the medieval village, but we feel it much more keenly), we are only loosely able to regulate each other with collective morals.

The individual becomes the focus of modern societies’ sense of the sacred because it is only at that level that moral order can be established and enforced. As Durkheim noted in Suicide, this puts tremendous pressure on individuals to self-regulate, which is in principle impossible (by the same power I make a rule for myself I can break it, and so on). An internalized feel for our interdependence is needed, but that’s tricky to reconcile with the general message of individualism. The diagnostic malaise of the modern age is accordingly anomie, an anxious drifting sense of valueless disconnection.

The disposition to become religiously devoted to a text may certainly be found here in the ordinary dynamics of mismatch between the pressure put on individuals by their relative moral autonomy and their yearning for authoritative regulation in enfolding communities. The text offers direction, identity, belonging. This does not yet fully explain, however, why some readers are drawn to texts that they perceive to be harsh, demanding, inscrutable, and ultimately abusive. The problem with the “Stockholm syndrome” analogy is that books do not have guns and getaway cars; their covers may be shut at any time by a reader who feels her autonomy being threatened. The relationship is entirely at the reader’s option. Nor is an analogy to emotionally or physically abusive personal relationships, although tempting, entirely satisfactory. We often wonder why one partner stays with another who beats them, but there are often quite practical reasons having to do with plausible alternatives, livelihood, realistic physical fear, obligations to children or to relationship ideologies, and so on. None of these quite fits devotion to an abusive text.

There seems to be a completely sui generis personal commitment to misery at work, enacted or publicized as domination by the text despite the self-evident power mismatch between a book and a person. This is what makes a diagnosis of masochism so tempting. The deferral of gratification that marks the “spirit of capitalism” in Weber’s famous analysis if the Protestant character may also be at work, although this explanation may suffer from anachronism. Fortunately, Bourdieu extends this analysis of self-denial into later capitalism and connects the dots on a sociology of masochism by reference to the climbing strategies of the petty bourgeoisie. He refers to “cultural goodwill” as their disposition to practice extreme moral rigor and to accept subserviently the cultural authority of the dominant class fraction’s artifacts in exchange for imagined communion with their betters, a communion that is of course never entirely achieved.

Another possibility is that there’s nothing that advertises one’s mastery of difficult texts like complaint about the rigors of devotion to difficult texts. Except perhaps one-upping this move with a cultural meta-analysis of reading dispositions, as I’m doing here. There are also some people who seem to be complaining about something no matter what. This is apparently rooted in the evolutionary diversification of attention-getting strategies in infants as a function of brain chemistry - some laugh, some wail. Of course none of these explanations is mutually exclusive. Anyway, I read books and sometimes I get stuff I can use from them, sometimes I don’t. I personally recommend this strategy.

Giving offense

As I get more and more drug into the world of blogging I find exciting new friends to swap ideas with. This is a great pleasure. I also find all sorts of tender feelings to trample upon, virtual shoulders covered in virtual chips. I’m still thinking this all through, although, as a lifelong bull in a china shop, I’ve already got some firm ideas on the subject (see, e.g., this post and this page).

It strikes me in a half-baked way (I’m not even sure if I’m just talking about the blogosphere or I have a larger historical point to make) that there are two basic ways to give offense, with corresponding ways to manage courtesy. The first is to offend a role, position, or status with which the person is identified. The second is to offend the individual as such. Following Durkheim (tongue in cheek, since he ended up regretting this formulation), I’ll call these mechanical offense and organic offense. I am not making fun here, although I am personally very hard to offend and emotionally baffled by easy offense-taking. Both mechanical and organic offense are ‘robust’ in the sense that they connect back to the deepest ways in which our societies assign sacred values.

The core of mechanical offense is an idea of special privilege or “honor” within a status hierarchy as exemplified by “nobility.” Those nobles guarded their special privilege with a fierce sense of honor backed up by ritual violence (the duel). One had to be really careful what one said and how one said it to nobles because they were really chippy and spent a lot of time training with the weaponry at hand. Elaborate rules of courtesy were devised to intercept any possible infraction. As the nobles lost control of the means of legitimate state violence during the modernizing process (I’m talking, as usual, mostly about western Europe here) their private honor became even more chippy and even more ritually violent, until eventually you just weren’t a man in central Europe if you couldn’t ‘give satisfaction’ in a duel, weren’t in a dueling society and didn’t have duelling scars on your cheeks.

I’ve noticed a fair amount of dueling on the blogosphere. In a nietzschean way I kind of enjoy it as an enactment of a robuster form of self-assertion. But the core of any taking of offense is insecurity; and most of the offending and defending I see is of the second, more overtly insecure type which I’ve called organic offense. Here it is the individual her/himself who is considered sacred and inviolable, not their role, position or status. Accordingly, the person may assign offendable meaning to anything about her/himself whatsoever; in principle, only she/he can decide when a line has been crossed. This makes any detailed system of courtesy like the nobles had impossible.

It is therefore courteous to announce what one’s delicate areas are, but in the free flow of the web such announcements would need to be constantly refreshed or they would be left outside the reasonable attention of any given interlocutor. This would create quite a lot of clutter. On a blog where there may be dozens of commenters it is unrealistic to suppose that each new one would ascertain the personal rules and boundaries of all the others before posting. As a result, there’s a lot of casual giving and taking of offense, as well as clustering of offense communities. There’s also a lot of not saying anything but ‘excuse me, pardon me, coming through’ as all of the possible hurt feelings are anticipated and intercepted. The fussbudget veto is powerful and the pressure to self-edit is enormous. And the aggregate of offendables is virtually infinite; it may be impossible to say anything that would not offend someone.

All of this ties back to a more general feature of modern societies, again diagnosed by Durkheim. As traditional role and status hierarchies break down and the division of labor creates massive networks of functional interdependence, the individual becomes the focus of societies’ sense of sacredness. We just don’t know enough about each other to regulate each other, so self-regulation becomes the norm (within general systems like professional ethics and civic morals). These new morally-empowered individuals therefore enjoy all the personal sense of entitlement that the old nobilities did, only now there are millions of them, all out there with their fierce sense of personal honor, their chippiness and their sense of violence when violated. Yet it’s hard to really feel special when what makes one so is shared by everyone else.

What a mess.

Position and movement

There’s a thread over on Rough Theory that got me thinking a stray thought I didn’t want to clutter up that excellent site with, but did want to write down so I could see if I agreed with it. Without going into too much detail, the thread concerns what to make of Marx’s way of doing theory in general, and whether there’s something useful in the idea of ‘emergence’ in particular.

The conversation between N. Pepperell and Daniel strikes me as a classic sort of contrast between two very different ways of thinking about things, which I’ve tried to capture in my title for this post by hijacking Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a rough analogy. Daniel is an excellent philosopher, and he is oriented toward position. N. Pepperell is also a outstanding philosopher, oriented toward movement. The uncertainty principle tells us that we can know either position or movement, but not both. Since this has to do with quantum physics (which I understand only vaguely) the analogy is a real stretch; let’s see if I can pull it off.

One way to do philosophy, speaking very roughly indeed, is to attempt to gain certainty - or at least clarity - by defining entities very precisely. The entities may be words, concepts, percepts, ideals, things (-in-themselves), or whatnot. Socrates’ dialogues are a famous example of this sort of philosophy. Through a process of logical questioning, Socrates attempts to determine the exact nature of a series of important concepts. In principle, it is possible to pin down exactly what ‘justice’ is, for example, or ‘the good’, and what the relations are between them.

To do great violence to a complex history, this kind of philosophical thinking passes up through Descartes and Kant (a mixed case) to analytic philosophy. The common project is to get the world and our thinking about it to sit still so that we can say clear and definite things about clear and definite things. The “sitting still” part is the “position” part I’m getting at.

The philosophy of position has often contrasted itself polemically against “sophism”, the kind of slick and slippery wordplay of which all philosophers are accused by their detractors. This is a defensive red herring. Meanwhile, playing in the branches of the family tree of positional philosophy are monkeys for whom things and thoughts cannot be pulled out of context and nailed down schematically without killing them, or at least denaturing them. These are the philosophers of movement, for whom it is often precisely the messy (from a positional perspective) relationality and changeability of things and concepts as they arise and bounce around in the world that characterizes them. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Beauvoir, and late (but not early) Wittgenstein are this sort of philosopher. Nietzsche charmingly called his monkeying the “philosophy of the dangerous maybe.”

Marx was not a maybe kind of guy, but he did monkey around with concepts. Over on Rough Theory N. Pepperell is doing something very interesting at the moment: dissecting an instance of what happens when a philosopher of position (Georg Lukacs) attempts to explicate a philosopher of movement (Marx). Lukacs takes single instances of what Marx says and pins them down to static meanings in a static relationship to each other, then derives conclusions from this alignment, just as positional philosophy says one oughta. Meanwhile, Marx has taken what he said, realigned it with other concepts, added ‘context’, worked it all through a dynamical process in which each element is transformed in specific relations and interactions with the others, and come to quite different conclusions.

This process is ‘emergence’, but to a philosopher of position it just looks ‘confused’ because as Heisenberg told us, you can’t see motion if you’re trying to determine location. It just looks like a blur that needs to be resolved - by taking a snapshot!

The question of ‘intentionality’ is mixed up in all this, but I’ve muddied the waters enough for one post.

UPDATE: I am now satisfied that the “Daniel” simulacrum I used as the ‘philosopher of position’ has little relationship to the Daniel with whom I have been sharing pleasant and edifying chat in the comments to this post. I will leave faux “Daniel” there as an imaginary philosopher and, perhaps, a cautionary tale.

UPDATE: Ah. Thanks to the keen eyes at Perverse Egalitarianism, here is a better examplar of the type.

10 Ways to Be a Better Teacher

Just picked up this great quote on teaching from Rough Theory:

“…the first thing I learned as a teacher was that nobody is a good teacher for everybody, which I found a very bitter lesson. Slightly later in life I learned the corollary, which I found even worse in a way - that just about everybody is a good teacher for somebody. You meet these incredible klutzes, and it turns out there is somebody out there for whom they have made all of the difference. This observation led me to conclude that teaching is not a method, it’s a name for a whole group of social situations in which all kinds of things happen and about which it is not possible to say anything really very useful on a technical level.” - James Renfield

I can attest to all of this, including the further corollaries that we all look like incredible klutzes to someone; exactly the thing that makes us good in one situation makes us lousy in another; and being someone’s most favorite teacher unavoidably means being someone’s least.

Does this mean that “it’s all good?” Not by a long shot. But it does suggest that a certain diversity of teaching approach is a desirable thing, if not in individuals then certainly in departments and schools.

Conversations with Enkerli

On this and Enkerli’s blog a conversation about conversation has been developing. Conversation (thanks, Enkerli, for that link) is one of the things Enkerli is expert at, along with coffee, beer, and moving. I realize for many people this sort of “meta” analysis is a dead snooze, but not me! I never met a nalysis I didn’t like.

Enkerli has this really profound and admirable way of appreciating and teasing all at once. I dig it. He appreciates and teases me for speaking directly. Egad! Enkerli himself never fails to say what he wants to say, but his style is more gentle and diplomatic. I just can’t recommend his blog enough, not just for what he says, but for how he says it.

OK, I’m hoping I’ve reeled my friend Enkerli in for a more direct conversation about conversation here. Hey, Enkerli, here’s a case study for you. I wonder if you’ll tell me what you make of it? (Others who may be lurking, please feel free to join our conversation.)

My wife Rachel and I are both, more or less directly, from the northeastern U.S. We now live in the southeastern U.S., in the vicinity of Raleigh NC, where we have discovered that we are conversational barbarians.

Neither of us care to talk when we have nothing in particular to say. When we do, we both think it’s important, polite even, to plainly and directly say what we think. We take this to be an ethic about the content of conversation, and also a compliment to the general functionality of our partners in conversation.

We are aware that tender feelings may be hurt by directness. We ourselves have tender feelings and they are frequently bruised by the utterances of others. Our view is that this is our problem, not theirs. We think it’s our job to manage our own feelings, it’s other people’s job to manage theirs, and in the meantime the contents of conversations should be plain, direct and substantive. We’d rather know if our butts look fat in these jeans, and we’re not going to ask if we can’t handle the real answer. We bond pleasantly with people who share this conversational style; for example, we are well matched with each other.

Here in the South there are just a whole raft of things wrong with what I just said. In this culture content is important, but conversation’s function as a ritual of sociability is much more highly developed. Lots of talk with no overt content whatsoever happens here — its entire purpose seems to be to convey, without ever saying this, the message “I see you, I know you” (I refer to these, insensitively, as ‘butt-sniffing’ conversations).

Endless circumlocutions are used (including a lot of passive voice) to avoid giving any sort of direct offense to tender feelings. This seems nice, and it often really is. Yet, a fascinating thing is that offenses are being delivered, but it’s all subtly targeted and done under the cover of splendid courtesy and solicitude. It seems to me that as a result, Southerners intend all of their insults (and feel them all the more keenly), whereas Rachel and I just blunder into them (and cut others a lot of slack). I mean, if I want to tell you something you said is dumb I tell you “That’s dumb.” I don’t mean anything personal there — that sentence would be “You’re dumb.” If a Southerner wants to deliver the same message, ambiguous in the noted variants, he may say something like “What a fascinating way to think! I’ve hardly seen anything like it. You remind me so much of my sweet cousin Cletus.”

I know much better than to think one or the other of these conversational styles is ‘better’; or rather, I think they’re each probably ‘better’ for different purposes. I actually know how to perform ‘Southern’, although I’m far from expert. But it’s exhausting for me, and therefore I’m honestly baffled about what’s supposed to happen when these or other styles come into contact with each other. Enkerli, any thoughts? Or is this/am I just dumb?