The Crisis in Knowledge

Knowledge is under attack from several fronts at once. In science itself, it is due to corporate corruption and the inherent bias toward interesting but possibly false results. There was that paper about how most scientific findings are false. 

In social science, there is a replicability crisis in social psychology and various forms of p-hacking and statistical overstatements. Then there are entire fields that just don't seem that rigorous in the first place, the typical things people look down on like management studies and education. Economics is corrupt because of its upholding of the economic status quo.  The humanities have their own well-known problems.

What all these things have in common is that institutions are self-perpetuating, and that there are greater incentives for various stake-holders in having the system we have than in having a system guaranteed to produce a better variety of knowledge. Sturgeon's Law would say that only 10% of everything is going to be of value, so in order to have the 10%, we need to reconcile ourselves to the 90% of crap.  We can't just cut out the 90% because then we wouldn't have enough critical mass to even keep going institutionally.

Faux-respect

I noticed in a lot of the reviews of the "grievance" articles what I would call "faux-respect." It is the way you write when you know the paper you are reviewing is shit, but you also know the expected tone you take with any paper is respectful. So people are bending over backwards to maintain a respectful tone when really, you know what they are thinking is "this is crap, what the hell can I say about it." It doesn't take a hermeneutic genius to read between the lines here.

So it is rather disingenuous for the authors of the grievance studies fake studies to say "look, we got a respectful hearing for our pieces of crap." I'm sure I've used the faux-respect tone myself.  It is still bad that they got any of this published, at a 35% acceptance rate, but they can't claim that the respectful hearing they got from reviewers who rejected them was a symptom of some deep problem in the field. I would have probably taken a faux-respectful tone with the Starbucks paper which I think is a pig pile of crap. If this had been a hoax paper, then the authors could have turned around and made you look foolish for being respectful toward a paper based on a handful of cultural stereotypes that tries to lend its support to BLM.

Starbucks Studies

Here's some trivial scholarship on why white girls like Starbucks:  See my bracketed comments:

The status symbol is not any over-the-top caloric, sweet drink, nor does it come from just any place. [A classic move in which the origin of something is supposed to be revelatory: not just any place, but...] Starbucks PSLs are products of coffee shop culture, with its gendered and racial codes [Everything has gendered and racial codes, right?]. European historians such as Ellis (2004Ellis, M. 2004. The coffee house: A cultural history. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [Google Scholar]Ellis, M. 2004. The coffee house: A cultural history. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [Google Scholar]) in Coffee House, find coffee shop culture’s roots in the British Empire of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. [who cares? does his really relate to contemporary situations?] Deeply masculine spaces, [ok, so what? That is trying to identify them with something bad in a ritualized denunciation, but pointless in this context because the point is to scorn white girls who order Starbucks.] coffee shops witnessed political debates, rebellion planning, and religious foment. [and people hanging out not engaged in anything related to this.] Not until the 1950s’ reemergence of coffee houses as Italian espresso bars did they “represent a place where people of all kinds could socialise together: richer with poorer, migrants with metropoles, women with men, creating a space that seemed to [did it seem to reject those values or really reject them?] reject the values of official discourse on class, gender and race” (245). [Pretentious.] Concurrent with women’s entrance were milky, sweet drinks; Ellis called them together the “lactification of the coffee-house.” His odd phrase nonetheless makes visible underlying feminizing and whitening of drinks, spaces, and practices of coffee shops. [This border on misogyny; it is easy to make fun of white women, apparently since they drink lattes] Ellis concluded, “The sociability of the chain coffee bar has cut its links with the vengeful, transgressive crowd, on the verge of insurrection. It is not simply that the mob has been excluded by the anodyne luxury of the corporate coffee shop, but that these places cultivate a sociability designed to reform the mob into a more tranquil, even docile, crowd of consumers” (258).66 Although Ellis focused mostly on European and U.S. coffee shop cultures, the demonstrations of whiteness encapsulated by Starbucks patronage might extend to other countries and continents as well. For instance, Spracklen (2013Spracklen, K. 2013. Whiteness and leisure. New York: Palgrave McMillan.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]), in his Whiteness and Leisure, argued, “In late modernity, drinking a latte has become a marker of whiteness, Westernization, and bourgeois sophistication. In developing countries such as South Africa and Kenya, local drinking practices have been swapped by the new elites in those countries for the taste of Americanized coffee. The new black economic elites in South Africa and Kenya have adopted white, Western, middle-class styles—through going to Starbucks they are becoming white in the same way the black political elites have adopted golf clubs in Kenya” (143).View all notes6 Although Ellis focused mostly on European and U.S. coffee shop cultures, the demonstrations of whiteness encapsulated by Starbucks patronage might extend to other countries and continents as well. For instance, Spracklen (2013Spracklen, K. 2013. Whiteness and leisure. New York: Palgrave McMillan.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]Spracklen, K. 2013. Whiteness and leisure. New York: Palgrave McMillan.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]), in his Whiteness and Leisure, argued, “In late modernity, drinking a latte has become a marker of whiteness, Westernization, and bourgeois sophistication. In developing countries such as South Africa and Kenya, local drinking practices have been swapped by the new elites in those countries for the taste of Americanized coffee. The new black economic elites in South Africa and Kenya have adopted white, Western, middle-class styles—through going to Starbucks they are becoming white in the same way the black political elites have adopted golf clubs in Kenya” (143).View all notes [pretentious. All this says is that a corporate Starbucks is not like some stereotype of a beatnik coffee shop.] Ellis’s prescience was demonstrated as 200 million lactified, docile consumers ordered their PSLs. [borderline racist misogyny: white girls are "lactified" {whatever that means} and "docile"] 

One of the authors is

ELIZABETH S. D. ENGELHARDT is the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3520. Her interdisciplinary research interests include Southern cultures, gender, food studies in the humanities, feminist theories, Appalachian studies, public humanities, oral history practices, and the intersections of race, class, and gender in American literature and society. 

A Flaw in the Ointment

The concept of "opportunity cost" seems flawed because it assumes that we can know what is being lost. It works in limited contexts where we can know exactly what is given up, but if we take the concept of time, for example, the opportunity cost of an hour could be expressed as endlessly variable possibilities. Even with a limited gamut of possibilities, say, reading, there are hundreds of thousands of books that I could reading instead of the one I am reading. I cannot stop myself and consider whether I should be listening to another piece of music, because there is no way of saying that anyone could ever choose wisely enough among competing musics.

I probably don't understand the concept well enough yet, not being an economist.

KFLC

I remember my first conference. It was the KFLC.  It would have been 1986 or so. I was a graduate student, and the panel consisted of me and 3 other graduate students. The moderator was a prick in suit, someone already established in the field of Golden Age. There was no audience except for the panel itself, and we met in a classroom.  The prick was very condescending to us and I despise him to this day for that. He said something about how we would eventually learn to do mature scholarship.  

Our papers were actually very good, because we were a generation that was using theory and had a certain standard for ourselves.  I still remember who one of the panelists was though I have lost track of her.

I went to other panels in the conference. I was shocked to find people doing plot summaries with a straight face and papers with the intellectual level of a high school student, a kind of rudimentary descriptive thematic summary.  So I resented being condescended to by this prick. What I was presenting got to the editorial board of PMLA before being finally rejected.

Opportunity costs: promotion to full

This Nobel prize winner made a calculation that going up for promotion was not worth the effort that would be spent on other things. If there is no pay raise involved, why fill out some forms to get promoted? She describes herself as "lazy" but I doubt she is.  The process of going up should not be so onerous that people don't bother to do it.  And there should be an incentive.

And the department chair should basically be on top of things and make people get promoted on time.   If you can win the Nobel Prize in physics then you should be a full professor already without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops. Einstein would be probably be told today he wasn't productive enough. Like, "what have you done since that relativity thing, and that other relativity thing..."  

Ineffable

Ineffability is a literary trope, so the ineffability of music is also a literary trope. The idea that music is something you cannot really talk about, or shouldn't talk or write about, runs through music criticism, writing about music or "dancing about architecture."  What is the point of it? 

Barthes talks about the tyranny of the adjective:  "To ascertain whether there are (verbal) means for talking about music without adjectives, it would be necessary to look at more or less the whole of music criticism, something which I believe has never been done."  Rosen says that musical analysis should "state the obvious." But then what is it good for, really?  

I happen to like adjectives, by the way. See my recent "dream of adjectives."   

We can talk in very precise terms about music, but then we are repeating the score: the melody begins with an octave leaps... It would be like expecting a very precise verbal description of a map to be useful for reading the map, or as good as a map at what a map does. We would just say, show me the map. Or we could play the score and say: "this is what it is." Music is very precise in its emotional valences. It says exactly what it says, in its own language, so we don't need a verbal translation of that. 



Yet I don't see writing about music as particularly problematic. What you do is to talk about what needs talking about, in any given case. Do you need to describe a texture, point out a structural feature, generalize about a performer? What I don't like is talking about music in the wrong way. The first wrong way is not talking about it at all, so that you talk about everything except the music: the words of the song, the composer's life... The second is to over-interpret, to state things that the listener is not hearing, that are not "obvious" or palpable in some way. 

I don't share the "ekphrastic fear" (W.J.T. Mitchell as quoted by Kramer in "Oracular Musicology; or, Faking the Ineffable." The idea that language will destroy the immediacy of the thing itself. What makes me nervous is that the verbal meanings found will be "wretched ones," simple disappointments. I fear the bad paraphrase.