Argument as war or play

I was just talking with a colleague about the nebulous modernism / postmodernism divide. My shot from the hip was that they’re basically the same basket of ideas about fragmentation, hybridity and uncertainty, the difference being that the modernists angst or ennui about it whilst the postmodernists dance on the verities’ grave. Incredulity toward metanarratives and all that. (These issues came up recently at Cultural Parody Center as well.)

In this context my colleague talked about something she’d just read that distinguished two basic metaphorical approaches to argument: argument as war, and argument as play (or dance). We’re both players. We talked about how these were lenses that could really help to clarify what happens (or fails to happen) in class discussions. And perhaps protracted blog debates about Kant.

Arguments are not always (only) about what they’re about. If I may indulge in self-quotation for efficiency’s sake, when argument is in the war style sometimes what’s happening is a status bloodbath:

When irrational waste is occurring Geertz tells us to look for ways in which people’s sense of social honor is at stake. Sometimes the particular equipment in play — cocks, novels, philosophical systems, histories, footballs — is far less important to the players than “the dramatization of status concerns.” Certainly we can see this logic being played out in the Olympic games — how else to explain the enormous economic and political capital being spent over dubious accomplishments soon forgotten? A “status bloodbath,” as Geertz quotes Goffman. But can we see this sort of game being played in our own meetings, hallways and classrooms?

Apparently I was saying that war is also a game, but of course the (perceived) stakes are much higher.

Beyond self-interest

As I commented in the last post, I’m suspicious of theories of social action that require either complete selfishness or complete selflessness as their explanatory motor. Yochlai Benkler agrees in his talk at The Edge on “The End of Universal Rationality” (thanks to John McCreery for this reference). He doesn’t talk about teaching, but what he does say about motivation and cooperation hits some key points for different approaches to teaching.

Benkler draws an interesting contrast between what he calls the dominant American economic and management theory of the last 40 years, based on a self-interest model of motivation, and newer research that shows a more cooperative model to be more effective. He characterizes American businesses (GM, for example), as “monitoring and controlling” hierarchical systems based on the premise that people will work hardest to seek maximum return if you get the incentives just right, and shirk whenever they can get away with it. As he points out, this results in ponderous management systems where every worker and manager must be closely motivated, actions must be minutely specified and monitored — all the way up to CEOs, who are also presumed to be prone to shirking if not goosed with the right incentives.

Benkler says if you set up the social situation that way, people will indeed behave that way. But then all the pressure is on getting the incentives exactly right, and the game for workers is to see how much reward they can get for the least work and involvement (free-riding). As you know, Bob, one unintended consequence of this theory was that executive compensation was vastly multiplied by all sorts of short-term incentives tied to corporate performance that only motivated executives to cut corners, take quick fixes, and shirk all the more to stimulate another cycle of reward. Does this sound like any classrooms we know yet? Just substitute grade inflation for ballooning executive compensation and go from there.

In some sense the smart students are the ones who decide it’s a hamster wheel and step off. But fortunately, what management researchers have found is that setting up the social situation differently produces different behavior.

In all of these disciplines, the last 20 years and particularly the’ 90s onward, have seen emerging studies, some models, some experiments, some observational field studies, that are showing, A) that people systematically do not behave according to the traditions of selfish rationality under controlled conditions; B) that when you set up systems with different assumptions, you get different behavior, and you get actually better results. There is a beautiful study, for example, from two or three years ago about knowledge workers….

They… built a model and they built observational studies. What happens to knowledge-sharing within teams if on the one hand, you create explicit incentives, monitor the incentives, you share more, you get more; on the other hand, you build much more team spirit and you make it the thing that’s the right thing to do as a member of this team and create much more social relations within the team. What they found was … setting up a social dynamic that’s a team dynamic, and what’s understood to be the right thing to do achieves much greater internal knowledge flows than setting up an effort to create incentives. So you have very real implications.

OK. In order to get better knowledge flows, which I think is a pretty good description of teaching and learning, what I have to do is set up a social dynamic with team spirit and a performance ethic. Students need “a sense of self image and a sense of ‘I’m okay’ relative to the world…” that fits and feeds from the class’ task and process. Individual incentives and top-down monitoring are counterproductive. Well, that sounds a little tricky but a lot more rewarding than chasing the students around like naughty children, giving out candy every time they wipe their own noses.

Serve this

Undine has an interesting post up about the tricky and oft-transgressed distinction of service and servitude in academic labor. My tangent here is a stray thought roughly in the advice-to-new-professors genre, with a hint of pop sociology, concerning the sorts of things that could be called service one might do to enhance one’s trajectory on the tenure track. Since the big stuffs like teaching, scholarship and formal collegiality are very well-covered, I’m going to address ‘the little stuff’.

The other night I served breakfast foods to the students here at an event known as the ‘Exam Breakfast’. The joke is that it’s the night before exams start and we all know [wink, wink] that all-nighters will be pulled, so out of solidarity volunteer administrators, faculty and staff feed the kids to give them a good start. It’s pretty corny, but it’s pretty fun too. I especially like to serve the grits, because a lot of students look at them like they’re alien nose droppings and I get a kick from doing a big sales routine to try to turn them around.

By this time of the semester staying at school until midnight and slinging hot greasy grits is not my first choice of a restful preparation for the final grading deathmarch, but still I’ve done the exam breakfast every semester since I’ve been here, ten years and counting, both because it’s fun and because I agree with my first Dean here, who used to exhort us to do this kind of stuff because it lets the students know we care and builds community. But I also recommend doing stuff like this on the more self-interested premise that building a general fund of goodwill is an intangible aid to getting what you want sometimes, including promotion and tenure. It’s one thing if you’re a star scholar, teacher and colleague and everyone can see it plainly from your paper trail. Write your own ticket, dude. But there’s no telling what’s going to make the heavens open up or the abyss suck you down if you’re a marginal case.

Now again, the little stuff will not generally cure any fundamental flaws (and it’s a little pathetic when folks think it will). You also don’t want to tip over into kissing ass. I only do stuff I actually enjoy, or that I see a real value to and need for, so there’s intrinsic merit in the activity and the goodwill part is just a pleasant bonus.

I am also eyeballing a hypothesis that there are some asymmetries in how services are noticed and credited. Specifically, I suspect that it’s important to cross categorical expectations to get full credit for service. For example, I get a lot of positive recognition for doing the exam breakfast, but I have not noted the same magnitude of response for my women colleagues who also serve. Perhaps I am simply unobservant or my impressions are skewed by my feminist prejudices. But I suspect that we are both getting credit for creating a special occasion by crossing the status line (professor serves food, cool), and I am getting extra credit for crossing the gender line (man serves food, cool, woman serves food, meh). This is why men barbecue after all.

When thinking in a playful or self-interested way about how to serve, I suggest thinking about where your service would be notable rather than ordinary. For women, perhaps this means working against stereotype and becoming a presence at campus sports (the double-bind trap to watch out for is doing it like a cheerleader), taking leadership of an outdoorsy club, or sponsoring a current-events discussion group. For men, perhaps organizing a faculty pot-luck (and actually doing the prep work), taking leadership of a campus day-care campaign, or participating in a recycling drive. Don’t make a big deal out of it, either. Just do it. If you’ve gotten it right, other people will make the big deal for you.

If you’re in one of the ‘professional’ fields, do reading and discussion groups. If you’re in one of the ‘egghead’ fields, do sports and outdoor stuff. Any other ideas? I’m not saying to ignore your strengths and inclinations; just look for congenial ways to disrupt expectations in ways that get a notice bump. If nothing else, it’s a way to stay fresh. And let me know how that works out for you.

Strategic misunderstanding

At Edge of the West commenter Michael complains that poster Dana has not read his remarks carefully before responding. At Perverse Egalitarianism, Frames/Sing, and Larval Subjects the battle over correlationism, ontology, naturalism and so on rage amid pervasive assertions of mutual incomprehension.

See a characteristic new installment at Now Times. Alexei, Mikhail and Shahar bond over the common hijackings of Kant and Husserl, who are so often criticized based on shortcut readings and caricatures of various kinds. Alexei hypothesizes an origin to this problem in the daunting scope of these thinkers:

But precisely because [Kant] covered all the bases he’s really — but really — hard to teach, and we always end up foreshortening lines of argument for our students, and then they get stuck with a really skewed understanding of him.

I’m inclined to agree with Alexei, but notice what happens when we take thinkers who have all the bases covered and require exhaustive, cross-referenced understanding of their entire projects as a condition of adequacy in claims about what they’re saying. In practice this is likely to produce little insular priesthoods attached to this or that master thinker, feverishly defending their prophets’ legacies against the heathen barbarian hordes, carrying their colors into each new battle with the glamour of righteousness upon them.

Another example that may resonate is Lenin’s claim that Marx’s Capital can’t be understood without reading Hegel’s Logic (which presumably itself requires prior reading to be understood). Again this is no doubt strictly true, but it would (and did) tend to cut most members of the working class out of any effective participation in the construction and adaptation of marxism as a theory of their liberation. I’m not saying that’s automatically a bad thing; it’s a dynamic to notice with consequences we may or may not like.

Thinkers who have all the bases covered are wonderful and terrible monsters. They require an enormous investment and don’t leave much space for you to think your own thoughts once you’ve made it. It may be strategically necessary to cut them down to size and stomp them out, by any means necessary, to get on with what you want to do. Of course for those of us who are not recognized master synthesists the stomping thresholds are going to come up that much more quickly with most readers.

History as middle-class proxy

From a commenter signing in as ‘Witt’ at Crooked Timber on a post about education and income inequality comes another take on what college education is good for. S/he is speaking to the distinction among different kinds of college degree: here, traditional four-year vs. distance ed. emporia like Phoenix or Strayer. No surprises here, just clearly stated and worth keeping in mind:

Again, without derailing the thread, I have participated in and conducted hiring processes at three organizations (all <50 employees) in the past 15 years, for a variety of postions. College info on a resume is usually only valuable to me in a very broad-brush way; the phone screen and interview tell me much more.

Traditional four-year degrees are a proxy for a kind of middle-class socialization. The candidate I see who have other types of bachelor’s degrees are typically a) hyper-focused on career advancement, with a perception that advancement + salary increases = number of years served + amount of credentials earned, or b) credentialed on paper but sufficiently inexperienced in middle-class norms that I spend gargantuan amounts of time training them. At present I’m in an organization with 14 full-time staff. If you’re not literate enough to learn to produce a very straightforward business letter after two or three go-rounds, you’re not a good match for the skills we need.

(And … in general I don’t hire people from Ivy League schools because their life experience and career expectations are a poor fit for the work I do. They very often self-select out during the interview process. I’ve hired two who were phenomenal exceptions, not least because they were world-class code-switchers.)

It’s nice to see code-switching appreciated.

History as pundit-resistance

Evan Goer really nailed it in a comment on the last post, in which he concludes:

If you haven’t spent the last few years marinating yourself in [a] field, you still don’t understand the context. You don’t know what’s important and what you can skim or ignore.

Anyway, my point is that if you can give your students even a little bit of this context, you’re doing something extremely valuable. If you were teaching physics, you’d be making them crackpot-resistant. Since you’re teaching them history, you’re making them pundit-resistant, which is even more important.

This cartoon from my office door shares the thought:

Incidentally, in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read Pierre Bayard starts with a discussion of the importance of being oriented to a field of knowledge: precisely this sense of context that lets you know what you can skim and what you can ignore. He cites the librarian in Musil’s Man Without Qualities who knows what’s in every book because he never reads any of them – to do so would be to get lost in detail and lose the big picture. If raw ignorance makes us most vulnerable to pundits, doesn’t narrow expertise come next?

Philosophy is an excellent thing

Over at Edge of the West, in the context of one of the usual pseudo-discussions about what philosophy is good for (prompted by yet another of Leiter’s snarky shills for the discipline, apparently), a guy named Michael Turner just posted a long, fascinating comment explaining how he went from software engineering to (Japanese) technical translation to language philosophy; in the course of which he said this:

OK, so I’m interested in what meaning is, and how meaning happens, through language. Can you philosophers help me out? Which one of you do I trust? Which ones are, by contrast, measuring their value to the field only by citation index, which might only be an indication of how many stupid arguments they’ve been able to start by feverishly propagating misunderstandings?

This is far from the most interesting thing he said (John M. and Evan, this is our kind of guy), and of course it leaves out all the genuinely valuable things the philosophers we all know we can trust do, but I still had a good snort over it.

In another comment, Anderson kindly offers up this provocative quote from Callicles’ rant in the Gorgias:

Philosophy, as a part of education, is an excellent thing, and there is no disgrace to a man while he is young in pursuing such a study; but when he is more advanced in years, the thing becomes ridiculous, and I feel towards philosophers as I do towards those who lisp and imitate children.

One might say the same of the study of history, or any of the humanities.

Muse of bloggery

When do we know that a creative medium has fully arrived? How about when it gets a Muse?

In commemoration of this blog’s recent first anniversary, I ask you to help me name and characterize the Muse of bloggery. There may also need to be handmaidens delegated to blogular subgenres.

If you’d like, go ahead and assign Muses to other modern creative endeavors while you’re at it. For example, the Muse of bogus Muse creation might be Mypoormeme, while the Muse of aerobic crosstraining might be Polygymnia and the Muse of electronic dating services might be Eutwerpe.

A group of Muses is known as 'an amusement'.

Free association: John Hope Franklin

There’s a nice recollection of John Hope Franklin by fellow historian Alvis Dunn in this week’s Carrboro Citizen. Dunn touches on JHF’s excellence and influence, of course, and focuses on his open mind and many associations, “seeking out diverse ways of seeing in order to further deepen his own,” as Dunn says of kindred spirit Frank Porter Graham.

Thinking about Undine’s dream on the value of blogging, this is something I would add: seeking out diverse ways of seeing in order to deepen our own.

Dunn loses the focus a bit when he wants JHF’s associations with communists (at a time when this took some courage) to be about “articulating ideas unpopular with those that run society. That was, in fact, the essence of his history.” And it’s true that he did so, but to call this the essence of his history risks reducing him to a dogmatist, a partisan hack, or perhaps a mere contrarian. Fortunately Dunn goes on to say that “Dr. Franklin’s research was deep and full, impeccably documented and unassailable as to his interpretation of sources, assuring that his work could never be successfully attacked on grounds of scholarship.” And this is good historical and human practice: to articulate well-founded ideas without regard to their popularity or sympathetic resonance, not for the sake of pissing off powerful people but for the sake of getting it right and deepening our ways of seeing. I take this to be why John Hope Franklin’s work touched so many.

What’s wrong with the last post?

There are a lot of things wrong with the last post, which has been sitting there bothering me for a couple of days while I took care of teaching and administrative business. A big one is that it (and its antecedent) assumes that freedom must be defined with or against the integral sovereign liberal self, and on or counter to a continuum from complete autonomy to complete heteronomy (sometimes called the ’structure / agency problem’).

Thinking as I do that the integral self is a performative myth and that selves are dynamic composites built out of the networkings of everything from amino acids to cosmic rays to neighborhoods and grandmas; and that the omnipotence of complete autonomy is part of the imaginative theological juvenilia of our species, with complete heteronomy a lazy inversion we frighten ourselves with like a ghost story; the last post is pretty dumb. But I like Foucault, Camus and Hegel – they’re part of my self – so I’m not quite ready to give them up yet.

I’d like that post to be at least productively wrong as opposed to not even wrong. Any other thoughts?