I’m out.

And by practice I’m not referring to its meaning here: http://savageminds.org/2008/08/18/around-the-web-25/
Between the vulgar and the unworldly there is another option. That’s in fact my point.

And as to literature and philsophy, I’ll say again that literature is first and foremost patterned description in the language of its day, of events, objects and language itself. The plot is as secondary to any memorable novel as God is to the Bible.
And as for philosophy, European rationalism has always been the imaginative literature of rationalism. American is the pseudo science of language in use.
Amazing as it seems legal philosophers have contempt for practicing lawyers

I’m going to go back to writing art history. I want to write something on Edward Yang’s Yi Yi http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244316/ as pattern making (invention) and as observation of contemporary Taiwan. Good art always defeats theory.

My anger at the academy is in response to the ascendency of technicians as intellectuals. Now technicians are sad. What can I say?

The demolition of academic/philosophical abstraction is an old project, as you know. “When reality is depicted, philosophy loses its medium of existence,” Marx said. Or “the personal is political.” That sets up the usual mirror trap of class struggle, of course, where we just choose up sides over systems of prejudices.

Not to defend the indefensible but it’s not true, however, that all philosophers are platonists and rationalists. Toulmin has a nice argument in Cosmopolis about how this strand became dominant (Descartes was a key moment; math envy is part of it and so is the secular substitution of religious certainty), but there have always been more engaged strands (Montaigne, Herder, Dilthey, Dewey) for whom life is the point, not an impurity to be burned off in the furnace of reason.

However, “The best argument for leaving others alone in their bizarre beliefs, for being curious but not contemptuous, is the recognition of your own capacity to believe things equally as odd.” As faculty brats we’re not inclined to extend this generosity to our own tribe, especially when we see them violating it programmatically. But we should.

My point keeps being that despite their corporate ideologies, which should not be taken at face value or considered fully intentional any more than any others, academics’ abstractions do not issue like Athena from the echoing vastness of their own headspaces but are the product of their positioning in a class system and a division of labor that tasks and rigorously disciplines them with impersonality and disinterest. This norming is not optional for those who want to occupy this space, so irony about it just creates an odd liminality; this is why so many smart grad students who figure out the lay of the land drop out. Leaving the worst of the true believers in charge.

In a sense, academics (and artists, of course) are this civilization’s monumental architecture of the mind: our primary functions are symbolic including, of course, symbolic violence, but not real practical even for that.

And to “normalize” in the arts or rhetoric is not the same as to “naturalize” in philosophy. The literature of the past comes down to us as description, not reason. The academic philosophy of our genteel tradition claims superiority as logical and “craftless,” as gloriously indifferent to context. That error has now spread far and wide in the academy.
What’s to blame? Modernism, America, Fordism, Sputnik, math envy.

“This kind of work is not easily understood as a ‘soft’ version of ‘real’ experimental practice,”

Rex could say that he’s making my argument and say the same about his interest in anthropology as “personal transformation.” I would say he seems to be trying to explain descriptive (as opposed to speculative) literature to people who don’t know what it is: who are so caught up the the academic world that they’re unable to imagine intellectual if not emotional life outside the categories of academic discourse. I’ve met a few too many people like that.
I’d also point out that any activity taken on with a level of commitment involves personal transformation.

I guess what struck me was the tentativeness and the awkwardness of the discussion of the relation of the personal to the impersonal. I should be relieved it’s there at all.

MTB, thanks, I see and agree. Failure to examine our basic concepts is a theme here and I liked Seth’s formulation that “The choice for craft is a choice to engage consciously with techniques and manners we otherwise use every day without thinking… an action in ironic distancing relation to our everyday activities as social beings.”

It’s my impression that the Meadian tradition has gotten the most satisfactorily fieldy and reflectively open-source on the sociology side as ’symbolic interactionism’ or ‘grounded theory’. The social embedding of the researcher is well understood.

Rex, if you’d grown up singing Byrd motets it would be exactly as easy as walking and talking, which are hard. Now I’m wondering when learning new things engages the ironic distancing relation to the everyday? Is this the transformation we’re talking about?

“It’s not the difference between silence and speech but between speaking and speaking well.”
I’m trying to remember Leach’s epigrammatic comment about Levi-Strauss.

We have one thing in common Carl: our father’s were both at Temple U.
But my father was a professor of literature, not philosophy.
Makes sense.

A rhetorical anti-platonist, he has a platonic notion of the academy. We’re his bete-noir. He thinks we’ve (all!) got ourselves all twisted up in our undies thinking that the stuff we think about is transcendentally different than the stuff of everyday life. He’s got a very high opinion of our intelligence and a very low one of our judgment, and he’s stunned and outraged every time we wander from the core ordinary truth that we humans make our own realities in creative and arbitrary ways. Well, me too, except without the high opinion of our intelligence.

His point is that there’s no important difference between singing Byrd and speaking South Texan. In each case a human masters a craft of expression – a procedure to make relationships. Doing anthropology is another such craft. I agree, don’t you? If Seth was just slightly more true to his insight and less true to his belligerence he’d see that academics are in fact exactly the same thing as South Texans and Byrd singers; the full accomplishment of craft is always to retrospectively hide its process and ‘naturalize’ it; so the critique of our lack of reflective awareness always has to fight against its own grounds. (Seth may be self-aware, but if so I haven’t seen where he shows his work.)

…OK, see what happens when you act like an asshole, Seth? You force other people who are trying to take you seriously and see your value to pick through your horseshit and pluck out the peanuts of wisdom. And you’re sitting there itching to jump me for the ones I missed or that I didn’t quite get the flavor of, right? Whose job do you think it is to make sense of what you’re thinking? When did you decide to skip the step of mastering the rhetorical crafts of communicating with this particular tribe?

Go look up the definition of borderline personality disorder, think again about the concept of walking on eggshells only with you as the master, not the slave, for mercy’s sake finally work out where all this blustering rage is coming from (news flash: it’s not us, that’s the first counseling session), then come back and play nice so the rest of us who, YOU ARE RIGHT, are not doing anything different than you’re doing can fully benefit from your actually awesome but self-defeatingly unusable insight.

http://www.discourse.net/archives/2006/04/i_say_tohmatow_you_say_huh.html

The choice for craft is a choice to engage consciously with techniques and manners we otherwise use every day without thinking. It’s not the difference between silence and speech but between speaking and speaking well. Craft is an action in ironic distancing relation to our everyday activities as social beings. The model of intellectualism as asocial observation of the social is either a pretense or symptomatic or both.

To be fair here’s one example of this sort of blindness.

Where were camera phones and YouTube when we in the future really needed them?

At any rate, if he thinks that sight reading a Byrd motet with nothing but three other people, pitchfork, and a score is as easy as “walking and talking” then he is a much, much better singer than me. Or a much, much worse one.

Your embodied knowledge is manifest in the way you walk and talk, the way you dress and the way you interact with people. It’s your physical presence and social manner as experienced by others.

“This kind of work is not easily understood as a ‘soft’ version of ‘real’ experimental practice, but a form of knowing which is valuable, but which is always in danger of disappearing because it doesn’t make sense in terms of the established genres of knowledge that we work with today.”

By your logic craft itself is disappearing, including the craft of writing, which was once thought of even by academics as an intellectual activity.

You compartmentalize. rationalizing “experimental practice” in language. It’s a rhetorical trope designed to suit an academic model of intellectual life. Academics like gamers now imagine embodied knowledge as an option rather than a given. Like nerds who want to wish away their physical limitations and live their lives as virtual warriors or athletes when in fact they’re couch 300 lb. couch potatoes living on cheetos and ice cream, yours is a virtual intellectualism.

My extensive quote-unquoting was done as a jab at a certain school of anthropology. Impressionistically, I think of it as Mainline Linguistic Anthropology. Members of this school continue to present their research programs in the polemic style of the founders of linguistic anthropology despite the fact that times are different. As language was studied in the 1950s it was hard to get a study of verbal artistry taken seriously like a grammatical sketch but there has since been a division of labor—linguistic anthropology studies style and linguistics does grammar.

What I am specifically trying to address is what I see as a great irony in the practice of many linguistic anthropologists. There is a tendency by linguistic anthropologists to assert that linguists unproblematically assume the linguistic structures which form the framework for their analyses and the theories of mind that follow from them. Linguistic anthropologists then go on to use this assertion to justify their empirical study of language-based communicative behavior (or text-in-context or whatever other buzzword).

But these same scholars tend to, in my opinion, consistently fail to examine their own basic concepts. I guess my problem is the phrase “if you accept that.” Not all research can be an investigation of the basic concepts in one’s field of study. But some of it needs to be. I just feel like researchers using the work of Mead and his successors need not only preface their analyses with “If we accept that…” but also to go to the field asking, “Why should we accept that?”

Apart from the I-refute-you-thus sort of empirical reality bludgeons that are available in the hard sciences, the model of humanistic robustification that makes sense to me and follows from Mead, et. al. is Sandra Harding’s “strong objectivity” programme. Cough, wheeze, still a little bit of sumthin caught in there.

I guess I need some help understanding what you mean by case bolstering, MTB, specifically in reference to a proposition like “‘the illusion of structure’ is a result of ‘the emergent quality’ of culture, which is a result of ‘micro-social interaction’.” In non-equilibrium thermodynamics this is a perfectly ordinary sort of proposition about perfectly ordinary sorts of physical, chemical and biological processes, supported by both experiment and gnarly mathematics. If you accept that cultures are dynamical systems then to apply this sort of thinking is isomorphic, not analogic; but we’ll all need to learn a hell of a lot more math. Is that what you’re asking for, or are you doubting the value of the original proposition?