Showing posts with label The Research Model. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Research Model. Show all posts
Sunday, August 14, 2022
Found on twitter. Shklar to Rawls. So stupid.
The one issue that does puzzle me is the basic assumption on which you build you[r] edifice: the implicit values of an actual political society. The task you then set yourself is to draw out these intimations and make them explicit. The burden of historical proof then becomes very heavy. You cannot evade the demand for demonstrably accurate historical evidence to show that these are indeed the latent values. How latent? How widely shared? How deeply held and by whom at what times? In peace and In war, in secure and insecure times? Remember that most of your fellow citizens just now think that the Declaration of Independence is too radical for them. And while this is a good time for the First Amendment, It is not always so. One can say that only religion is safe, because no one cares about it that much any longer, and that in a way what is left is all Protestant anyhow. Finally your account of the conflicting beliefs that can overlap may be be out of date. It is not religion and even ideology that now separates us us, but race, language gut-loathing and ethnic incommunicability. Does your model fit that reality, or only one in which tolerance of creedal diversity was in question? My point is simple. If you base you[r] case on history, then contemporary history, which is what the best social science is, must provide you with a far less speculative ground to start from. Those latent values have to be accounted for every bit as much as more overt ones.
The Papers of John Rawls, Box 41, Folder 14. "Shklar, Dita, memorial remarks [1992]". Harvard archives.
Remove yourself from the world in order to think about it, and then you worry about the result. The refusal to participate in the political world is a political act, and an anti-political act. The letter and its subject are formed out of denial.
Someone once described art history from its beginnings as Jews explaining Catholic theology to Protestants. It's an old quote and I don't remember the source. But now with Shklar, and Moyn, and the rest, the humor and irony are gone. Jewish scholarship, and Jewish liberalism, has become Protestant pedantry.
"contemporary history, which is what the best social science is,..." The history of the past is not a science, so neither is the study of the present. But the spread of the "research model" into everything means now that everything can be—and needs to be—academic. This is how we've ended up with "Auto(erotic)ethnography"—the link's from 2012; it's not the new one. It explains why we have PhDs in creative writing, and J School, and reporters holding back important information to use later in books, betraying their obligation as hacks and ambulance chasers to play at being historians—out of pretension or for money—and why people need the state to validate and justify their fantasies. Passivity and the need to be guided, the end of agency. The need to the elite to grant permission and the need of the masses to be granted it. Corruption is weakness; weakness breeds corruption.
“In general, the more unprecedented [the] investigatory and prosecutorial steps that one administration takes in response to the acts of a prior administration, the worse.” https://t.co/GcfnCixmub
Forced pregnancy is totalitarian. It involves the kind of bodily control that America imposed on slaves before the Civil War. Criminal restrictions don’t do much to lower the abortion rate, but endanger all pregnant women by limiting doctors’ ability to treat them....
But I just said all that without so much as mentioning my opponents’ motives or treating religious support for a law as a kind of contaminant that makes otherwise legitimate laws invalid.
Forced pregnancy is totalitarian but I'm not calling you a totalitarian. That would be rude.
If you can't articulate your normative commitments in the language of the community it should play no role it law.
As I reminded him in an email exchange: politics is a schoolyard before it's a seminar. The schoolyard leads; the seminar follows: Women's Studies programs are the result of feminism not the cause. etc.
Intellectual history is academia as self-justifying narcissism. All repeats.
Adding this, from Moyn at the link above—"expectations"—because people don't click, and Koppelman's piece really is more of the same.
Ahmari can exist only as parody. You could imagine Moyn referring to his "friend" Dinesh D'Souza.
I was asked to wade into the "post-liberalism" debates kicked off by friends on the right (hi former editor @SohrabAhmari and fellow teacher @DouthatNYT) and my response is to imagine liberal perfectionism and socialism. Would that work? https://t.co/eTbS429nrn
A historian at Oxford. More of the thread, my highlights
-I’m sharing this bc how schools treat their staff hugely impacts their students -
-(sorry this is quite a long thread but please stick with it if you can!)
-a bit of context: anyone who knows (or sees) me irl will know that I have historic self harm scars on my arms and legs. It’s fairly obvious what they are, but I’ve become less self-conscious about them over time. Nowadays, I barely even think about them, let alone cover them up -
-during the January lockdown, I was in school every day supervising the vulnerable & key worker kids. One day, a kid asked about my scars + I explained that they were from a time I was unwell. As per school policy, I reported this conversation to a safeguarding lead &
-asked for support with future conversations of this nature.
Below is a selection of the responses I received from members of the school’s senior leadership team:...
The medicalization of deviance, of discourse, and the bureaucratization of everything. Teachers should be vetted and then trusted. Shah should have been trusted to communicate her history to the kids going through the same struggle, and she should have trusted herself. But she can't. She asked to be policed, and complains at the result. But passivity reinforces itself: her submission to her "lead" is another form of self-harm. On the other other side of the coin: the earnest acceptance of self hatred as body and gender dysphoria.
Thug life is barbarism. It needs no written philosophy. It needs no defense. It's not opposed to art. As I've said more than once, maybe not here, if art were about morality, killers wouldn't know how to dance.
The philosophical, academic and intellectual defense of barbarism, the theory of barbarism, is no longer barbarism. It's fascism.
That's for Dembroff. Look at the photograph she posted, at the photo of her, and her self-description. Jenner by comparison is merely an idiot male misogynist playing dress up. Drag is the equivalent of gender Orientalism, a fetish for the other. Conscious fakery renders it comic. That's why it's called The Queer Art of Failure. The need to impose the acceptance of fakery on others as reality is... I've said it all before.
The ubiquity of "leads", and "lead investigators"
Professor Insole is the Lead Investigator for a major five-year programme, called ‘Redeeming Autonomy: Agency, Vulnerability, and Relationality’, funded and hosted by the Australian Catholic University, with co-investigators Dr David Kirchhoffer (ACU), Professor Jennifer Herdt (Yale), Professor Kristin Heyer (Boston), and Professor Yves De Maeseneer (Leuven).
Professor Lambert is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings on critical theory and film, the contemporary university, Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, and; especially for his work on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. He has lectured internationally and was recently invited as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Ewha University, Seoul National University, and in the winter of 2010 was appointed as the BK21 Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea.
He has also served as a lead investigator of several other major multi-institutional research and interdisciplinary initiatives in addition to the Humanities Corridor Project, including the Trans-Disciplinary Media Studio (with SU School of Architecture) and The Perpetual Peace Project, a multi-lateral curatorial initiative partnered with Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the European Union National Institutes of Culture, the International Peace Institute, and the United Nations University.
"Research" in philosophy. "Doing philosophy". The empirical study of hot air.
Related: liberals, including the liberals who call themselves leftists, screaming about covid denialists, anti-vaxxers, while ignoring their own history of decrying neoliberal pseudoscience. Trump or "Objectivity" and "Truth". We're back to the liberal fantasies of a reality based community.
The hip young literary editor of The Nation
Too bad for Arendt but likely the checkers on her pieces made them better and I can think of a couple others that might have also been improved with a bit more checking...
I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.
Among the several sins that I have been accused of, none is more false than that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.
The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable.
They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.
Velazquez left us his idea of the people of his epoch. Undoubtedly they were different from the way he painted them, but we cannot conceive a Philip IV in any other way than the one Velazquez painted. Rubens also made a portrait of the same king and in Rubens' portrait he seems to be quite another person. We believe in the one painted by Velazquez, for he convinces us by his right of might.
From the painters of the origins, the primitives, whose work is obviously different from nature, down to those artists who, like David, Ingres and even Bouguereau, believed in painting nature as it is, art has always been art and not nature. And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic view of life.
"The philosophical role of illness – and how it can teach us to live reflectively"
Serious illness is a great calamity. It is unwelcome, violent, frightening and painful. If it is life threatening, it requires the ill person and their loved ones to confront death. Illness causes pain, anxiety, incapacitation; it limits what the ill person can do. It can cut a life short, stop plans in their tracks, and detach people from life, suspending the previous flow of everyday activity. In short, illness is almost always unwelcome but must be endured, as it is also unavoidable. We “each owe nature a death”, as Freud put it.
The link, in the original, now an obscure reference, is to a BBC biography.
The author, (on the right side of the page)
Havi Carel
Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol
Disclosure statement
Havi Carel receives funding from the Wellcome Trust (Senior Investigator Award 103340).
Investigators are researchers.
My current research explores the phenomenology of illness. I am interested in augmenting the naturalistic approach to illness with a phenomenological perspective. I believe that as embodied persons we experience illness primarily as a disruption of lived body rather than as a dysfunction of biological body. But medicine has traditionally focused on returning the biological body to normal functioning, and has therefore worked from within a problem-focused, deficit perspective that ignores the lived body. A phenomenological approach can provide a framework for incorporating the experience of illness into the medical naturalistic account, by providing a rich description of the altered relationship of the ill person to her world.
Belles lettres as research. Anglo-American philosophy is now claim-jumping experimental psychology on one side and literature on the other. Rules of submitting to Granta: "Please do not submit book manuscripts, academic essays or reviews."
No fucking footnotes. "Experience" and literature. Follow the links.
"Continental and Anglo-American philosophy are collapsing in on themselves and on each other" continuing
Monday, February 29, 2016
Freud wins again.
The author describes the paragraph below as "a few hundred words of complete nonsense" and calls the title "meaningless". Against his own worst intentions (allowing for some absolute nonsense and bad grammar) much of it is comprehensible, written while drunk, with a few good passages. The title itself makes perfect sense.
“Music, Religion, Politics, and Everyday Life: The Tensions of Utopianism and Pragmatism in Movements for Change.”
From the scribes and rabbis who wrote the original Torah, to the troubadour-activists who sang “Which Side Are You On?” and “Waste Deep in the Big Muddy,” to the gangbangers and hip-hoppers who create contemporary street rap, the relationship between culture, politics, religion and everyday life has been poorly understood. As Bloor observes: “In fact sociologists have been only too eager to limit their concern with science to its institutional framework and external factors relating to its rate of growth or direction this leaves untouched the nature of the knowledge thus created.” There is an obvious tension between romanticism and reality, between humanity and barbarism, between self-reflection and communal expression, which pervades both the written word and the oral tradition. Can a society promote utopianism and dystopianism simultaneously, while allowing its governing officials, whether military conquerors or democratically elected, to perform the necessary day-to-day functions of street-cleaning, sanitation, animal rescue, industrial production, hunting-and-gathering, maintaining law and order, and (what Heideger called the “organicity of intellectual work”) educating children and reproducing the next generation. We might call this a kind of scientism of contradiction, or the contradictions of scientific production, or the contradictory intellectual discipline of everyday life. In other words, can the rigors of so called “pure” intellectual work (including those of the priestly class and its modern counterparts), the artistry of craftwork (or the craft of artistry), and the degradations of subsistence agriculture, mining, factory work, and retail sales co-inhabit the same society without igniting the ticking time bomb of social implosion, as we've recently seen in riots in the French suburbs and in the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles? How, in other words, does the globalization of both production and knowledge work (the so-called “Walmartization” of societies) challenge our ability to think clearly about what is true in contrast to what is delusion? Self-delusion and self-discipline inhibits the reflective self, the postmodern membrane, the ecclesiastical impulse forbidden by truth-seeking and sun worship, problematizing the inchoate structures of both reason and darkness, allowing knowledge, half-knowledge, and knowledgelessness to undermine and yet simultaneously overcome the self-loathing that overwhelms the Gnostic challenge facing Biblical scribes, folksingers, and hip-hop rappers alike. Sociologists ignore these topics at their peril.
Dreier says C. Wright Mills would be ashamed.
If Mills were alive today, he’d be saddened by the exponential growth of bad writing by academics, especially by those on the left. The problem of academic jargon is not confined to a single political or ideological wing, but it certainly dominates much of the writing by leftists in the social sciences and humanities.
...I was recently asked to review a paper submitted to the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture for its upcoming annual conference at the University of Calgary in Canada. The paper was entitled “Detroit: Sense of Place and Self-Overcoming,” which I hoped would have something to do with the class and race struggles of the city’s working class, which has suffered due to the decline of its auto industry and Michigan’s increasingly right-wing and anti-union policies. Instead, here’s how the author summarized his ideas:
We build, maintain, and structure cities. Cities, however, maintain and structure certain attitudes in us. Given the attitudes generated by our sense of a place, critical perspectives that only target overt structures within city systems are incomplete. Jacobs outlines several design aspects of the city that are “Anticity…” Hardt and Negri identify the task of the politics of the metropolis as “…to organize antagonisms against hierarchies and divisions of the metropolis…” To fully engage the attitudes generated by our sense of a place requires what Nietzsche describes as self-mastery. Though important factors, design and politics alone are insufficient.
A prominent urban scholar at Harvard describes his latest research project as following:
Through a conceptual distinction between concentrated urbanization (agglomeration) and extended urbanization (operational landscapes) … we aim to investigate the historical geographies of the capitalist urban-industrial fabric in ways that supersede inherited metageographical binarisms while opening up new sociological, cartographic and political perspectives on the contemporary global-urban condition.
...Detroit and other American cities face enormous problems—poverty, homelessness, suburban sprawl, decaying infrastructure, underfunded schools, pollution, racial profiling by cops, and others. Professors and researchers who study and care about cities—and whose work is subsidized directly and indirectly (through foundation grants and government-sponsored financial aid to students) by tax dollars—have an obligation to help address these problems, in part by explaining the roots of the urban crisis and what’s needed to address it. It is difficult to see how this kind of abstract theorizing and impenetrable prose contributes to improving our cities.
"The Tensions of Utopianism and Pragmatism in Movements for Change.”
My first thought was Corey Robin's contempt for Montesquieu because "he pursued no beckoning light", then Emmanuel Todd, "A religion is a form of utopia: when it disappears, alternative utopias appear." But the obvious is the "Democratic Socialist" Bernie Sanders and "Killer" Mike.
Actually my first response posted on twitter was "What next, the idiot Hofstadter?"
The next day Ross Douthat tweeted a quote from "Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections"
In 1963 Richard Hofstadter published his landmark book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Today, Matt Lewis argues, America's inclination toward simplicity and stupidity is stronger than ever, and its greatest victim is the Republican Party. Lewis, a respected conservative columnist and frequent guest on MSNBC's Morning Joe, eviscerates the phenomenon of candidates with a "no experience required" mentality and tea party "patriots" who possess bluster but few core beliefs.
Americans, dumb and dumber. Fuck Peter Dreier, fuck C.Wright Mills, fuck Harvard (and Douthat was for Harvard before he was against it). The questions remain. Below repeats the post mentioned above. Go there for the context
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repeat from 2013
Technocracy is not democracy, and the knee-jerk, mirror-image, rebellion against technocracy is not a democratic movement. The decay of technocracy is something else; it produces another social order.
The bow-tied college professor, Jerry Herron, like Borges and his gauchos, idealizes a culture built from necessity. For the whites, including white DJs, in from the suburbs, the music was a discovery, but the men who invented the music have a richer more complex understanding. They were trying to preserve the humane in an inhumane world, using a language they as products of that world understood. There's a connection that runs through Herron to both Borges and Lawrence Lessig, and also Graeber and to Cody Wilson: a fundamental misunderstanding of culture. The knowing irony on all sides that connected Detroit techno and hip-hop to Kraftwerk and hip-hop to the gay clubs in the 70's is lost on followers of simple, otherworldly individualist, liberalism. Culture is conservative: it conserves.
Ideological liberals don't understand culture, seeing it as a choice rather than something constitutive of what they are. But libertarian culture like fascist and Stalinist culture could be called almost an oxymoron.
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And Detroit also means Bowie. Now let's talk politics.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
"Public higher education is under aggressive ideological and political—but not necessarily partisan—attack, and is fostering a fervent political defense." Siva Vaidhyanathan
A comment, posted on a piece on education and education "reform" by Siva Vaidhyanathan, "a cultural historian and media scholar" (see previous). The formatting was stripped; this a lot easier to read. The last bit repeats paragraphs quoted just below in the post on Joshua Cohen, for the same obvious reasons. Rough, I fixed the spelling and that's all, and all repeats here. It'll do. [comments were stripped years later]
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This essay is full of the sort of confusions endemic in our age when academics style themselves "public intellectuals" while indulging the biases of the academy: they’re always coming down from the mountain.
What does it mean to defend the research model for the entirety of academia while condemning instrumentalism? (I'll pretend for now that the author is defending the humanities as such, even though it's clear he isn't.) The researchers I know dislike teaching, especially teaching undergrads, because it takes them away from research. And the research model has infected the humanities so that professors now see themselves as akin to scientists or technicians, and also therefore “producing” something, even if it's only cubic yards of pseudo-radical hot air. Economics and Anglo-American philosophy are open in their claims to the status of science, as Marxism and Freudianism once were, but like literary theory and Continental philosophy there’re all forms of high scholasticism, as self-supporting as the Roman Catholic Church, certainly no defender of free thinking and curiosity for curiosity's sake.
And as far as academic radicalism is concerned, Martha Nussbaum was right about Judith Butler's self-indulgence, while Butler is now actively defending liberal principles, in Israel and Palestine, that Nussbaum is too much of a coward to stand for. The same goes for the current popstar Zizek, who's called a Stalinist by liberals who refuse to stand by their own principles, which he and Butler are left to do, as leftists. To see an amusing take on Zizek from something more engaged in what Raymond Geuss would call “real politics” see this.
And as the recent fiasco in Montana should make clear to social "scientists", there is no feedback loop in geology. Money spent studying the average man or woman on the street would be better spent raising the average: in education, not "research". The academy's constant focus on measuring to the mean puts downward pressure on the mean: it makes us all dumber. Seekers of the impossible goal of a “value free” social science are themselves models of moral passivity.
But as I said at the top, the author of this piece isn't really attacking instrumentalism, he's attacking short term instrumentalism
Some time in the 1980s, states forgot that universities benefit the broader society, not just the students who attend. They are part of the cultural and social fabric of each state. They preserve and enhance local art, music, poetry, and drama. They make sense of our past and predict our future. State universities invented Mosaic, the most influential early Web browser, and made those “waves of grain” that feed much of the world possible and profitable.
Call it serious rather than knee-jerk neoliberalism, the thinking man’s productivism, or Fordism for adults. And the mention of “art, music poetry, and drama” reminds me of Howie Cohen, the ad man who credits Woodstock and acid for giving him the imaginative freedom to come up with the lines "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" and "Try it, you'll like it!"
And now to "disruption" which the author calls "an ahistorical and specious concept". Google "modernism radical disruption" for the history and "disruptive dissensus" for the current vogue. See also of course the current popularity of anarchism. Disruption is ahistorical only because all tag lines and political fantasies are ahistorical: predicated on forgetting the lessons of history. Disruption itself is a modernist trope, just as permanent revolution is a capitalist fantasy, as “creative destruction”. Taylorism and Fordism are not the inventions of a professor at Harvard Business School. [they're the justification: the Harvard program started in 1908] The theme of the relation of modern man as individual to the collective that made him (and of which he’s a member whether he likes it or not) is as old as Hamlet. The ideal of sleepless curiosity is Goethe’s Faust: the definition of Modernity.
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
The author of this piece is defending technocratic capitalist liberalism against anarchist capitalism. I’ll offer a third option, that any professor in the humanities should recognize, though more and more they don’t. And that is the most important change in the academy over the last century, from Weber and Ford to Sputnik, a change Siva Vaidhyanathan and other academics of this age have no knowledge of because they’re the product of that change. Neoliberalism made you. You’re a product of culture without knowing how it would be even possible to be anything but “free to choose” as uncle Miltie would say.
The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell explained the Bell leaders’ concerns in an article published in Harper’s magazine in 1955: “A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.
In 1952, Gillen took the problem to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a trustee. Together with representatives of the university, Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education. There were lectures and seminars led by scholars from Penn and other colleges in the area — 550 hours of course work in total, and more reading, Baltzell reported, than the average graduate student was asked to do in a similar time frame.
...Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival.
...What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.”
...But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.
As an outsider I found the assumptions that this paper questions much more disconcerting than the paper itself. But then I'm still shocked by the references to philosophy as science. Any defense of intuitions as doing more than describing the assumptions of the speaker, alone or as one of a group, is an argument from theology.
Some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking. (Kripke 1980, p. 42)
Is this really where Quine's reference to "the supposed[!] boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science" gets us, to a reenactment 30 years later of the failures of "scientific" Freudianism and Marxism? You create a formal structure and try to give it a foundation, but then the ground shifts. The structure is intact, but what's it represent?
Ignoring the questions of sample size, intuitions show either or both of two things: the values of human beings socialized in various ways according to their cultures, and/or the structure of human consciousness and habit, as constructed by the biological attributes that separate us from other animals and perhaps to a lesser degree from each other.
It's bad enough listening to lectures from scientists and technocrats on the irrelevance of culture, but the "research model" has spread like the plague. I've read three defenses of the humanities today, all of them by philosophy professors. They weren't very good; the authors spent half their time distancing themselves from what they were trying to defend.
The great art historian Erwin Panofsky described the birth of modern humanism in the Renaissance in the separation of the sciences and the humanities that had been unified in the Middle Ages, under the Church. But... "If the anthropocratic civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a 'Middle Ages in reverse'... " He wrote that in 1955.
The arts are the most intimate empiricism. Specifics are prized over generalizations. The word "individual" is a mass noun. By the logic of the arts a written description of any single human being should seem as irreducible to you as you are to yourself. In the world of experience, ideas aren't the manifestation of the ideal they're the vulgarization of life lived. That's the contradiction between philosophy as you practice it and the humanities.
Politics is perspectival and feminism is politics. It seems to me the academic study of politics should be an adjunct to politics outside of the academy, not the other way around. I remember reading something once about the risks of aestheticization.
I'll repeat a comment I wrote elsewhere, though in response to this discussion and a third:
'The arts are the most intimate empiricism. Specifics are prized over generalizations. The word "individual" is a mass noun. By the logic of the arts a written description of any single human being should seem as irreducible to you as you are to yourself. In the world of experience, ideas aren't the manifestation of the ideal they're the vulgarization of life lived.'
That's the contradiction between philosophy as now practiced and the humanities. Defenses of the humanities by philosophy professors are defenses of generalities because it's the only language you know. That's a loss.
Reflection in and with the act of writing (writing as literature) is engaging with questions regarding your choices of terms as structure: It's a professor asking "Why does my writing read like an end of year financial report? What is the sensibility, what are the values made manifest in it?" Literature is the ironization and examination of intuition, of the sort Derrida does so gracelessly (at least in translation).
Literature is writing to describe the writer writing and his or her perceived relations to the world. Art isn't "creative" it's observational. Creativity is no more than "inventiveness". Inventiveness is the Cartesian model of art, the nature of the "I" is assumed. Cartesian art is illustration, describing assumptions.
"Science is the study of facts and philosophy the study of values. Conflating the two in favor of facts, values become assumed. Values assumed all questions are seen as those of expertise. Expertise as the goal terms of measurement are assumed. Curiosity is defined by the frame, values by the frame moral worth by the frame." [from a few years ago]
A philosopher engaged in the study of externalities ignores the observing observer, himself, imagining that he's on solid ground. His values become assumptions.
What does it mean that the language used to discuss rather than describe individual experience is now so bureaucratic in form? What are the values manifest in the architecture of contemporary academic language?
Grammar has no moral presence in the world, but every speech act has a moral aspect. The words "I love you" have a very specific very limited set meanings but the moment they're spoken meanings multiply towards infinity: tone, cadence, context. And the speaker's understanding of them may well be wrong, ask your ex. Literature catalogues those infinite possibilities. Philosophy ignores them in favor of grammar and "ideas".
Sunday, August 19, 2007
note taking. posted (by me) elsewhere:
A "serious" university education should not be based upon assumed foundations. The incorporation of the research model into the humanities means that the humanities are now governed by a (spurious) foundationalism. We all know what we value, there's no need to question it. Academic rationalism whether in economics or philosophy is pseudoscience predicated on the desire for neat and tidy order. Chomskian linguistics, Posnerite economics and scholastic philosophy all come from the same source. And even people who think the American press sucks dream of an ideal world where the press is rational and objective.
Transcendental logic. the method of discovery for the mind, was to become also the method of evolution in nature and history. Transcendental method, so abused, became transcendental myth. A conscientious critique of knowledge was turned into a sham system of nature. We must therefore distinguish sharply the transcendental grammar of the intellect, which is significant and potentially correct, from the various transcendental systems of the universe which are chimeras.
It's all well and good, in fact it makes perfect sense, to recognize that all perception begins with the self. It makes no sense at all the think that the self is therefore the center of the universe. Liberalism, as neoliberalism, has become no more or less than the institutionalization of optimism, cribbed from the sciences and transformed into the joy of an autistic child staring at the rotating motion of a window fan. Why question it if it makes you happy?
