man & nature # 134 ~ rickety & ramshackle

Rickety ramshackle • click to embiggenSeinberg (about or relating to Seinfeld and Spielberg, that is, Sein[feld][Spiel]berg .... the name spawned whilst day-dreaming in an undergraduate Philosophy class entitled Thanatopsis: Death and Dying) wrote: Your photography is great, but your repetitive sarcastic and biting remarks about academia are very revealing personally. What is all that anger really about -- surely academia isn't all that bad.

In fact, in general I am not angry with academia at all - as I always state it is the academic lunatic fringe that most often gets me a bit cranked. Not actually angry, but rather a bit annoyed. The ones that spin a zillion words that produce nothing of value. And even then it is the humanities and social sciences departments that are the primary instigators of that agita. The "sciences" that produce lunacy like:

Nothing is ever fully present in signs: it is an illusion for me to believe that I can ever be fully present to you in what I say or write, because to use signs at all entails that my meaning is always somehow dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself. Not only my meaning, indeed, but me: since language is something I am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am a stable unified entity must also be a fiction ... It is not that I can have a pure , unblemished meaning, intention or experience which then gets distorted and refracted by the flawed medium of language: because language is the very air I breathe. I can never have a pure, unblemished meaning or experience at all. ~ Terry Eagleton summarizing Jacques Derrida

Say what? (# 3) What the hell does that mean? Is this guy for real is he just a theoretical fiction?

And, a word of warning to Eagleton's significant other, if he has one, re: wedding vows - remember that he was never fully present to you in what he said because his meaning is always somehow dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself. Although, what could one expect from someone who, after all, is not a stable unified entity.

In a recent NY Times Op-Ed, End the University as We Know It, author Mark C. Taylor wrote:

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues) .... [U]nfortunately this ... has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization .... [A]nd as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

In a comment on another Op-Ed piece, one person referred to the above situation as a "silo culture" - the idea that a silo culture is "where few collaborate with parallel disciplines". The commenter went on to opine that:

We’ve more recently seen this same silo culture in the bankruptcies of our banking and finance. Too many in the biz school world learned not only to withdraw into it primarily, but also to lobby against regulations that might expose fantasy schemes to public accountability .... but please note that it is a syndrome – one that stretches from its roots in our genteel academe to equally genteel institutions across America ...

IMO, a silo culture has infected the medium of photography as found the incestuous, self-serving, self-referential, ivory-tower proclamations of the academic lunatic fringe which are so far from the real world regarding the real world and meaning and truth re: pictures that ... well ... that they are just so spectacularly unreal.

I have writing about this photographic silo culture for quite a while and, at times, I have even found a bit of light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel self-examination in the pinhead-ed curatorial ranks (credit where credit is due) wherein it has been suggested that:

... the nuances of the photographic process are poorly understood in the art critical community—the present author included—and this shortfall radically limits the discourse. ~ Christopher Bedford, an art historian, art critic and the Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

What a novel idea - actually talk with actual picture makers, study and learn about what they actually do, and integrate that into the discourse that emanates from the art critical community.

However, as fond as I am of real life, aka - "living", I'm not holding my breath ...

Comments

[Struan Gray]

I like your blog, and your photos, and - I think - you.

But your writing about the academic lunatic fringe is just so much willy waving at strawmen. You are using exactly the tactics you say you despise in them: name calling, empty rhetoric, and a firmly closed mind. It's Limbaugh lite, and it leaves a nasty taste.

Eagleton isn't the lunatic fringe by a long chalk. Even the bleeding chunk you've posted here makes sense. You don't have to buy into the whole post-modernist programme to see the utility of thinking about how your available tools and habitual mental habits might limit your ability to be creative.

[Seinberg]

Ha! Missed this! I don't have anything to add to what Struan said - he more or less summed up my thoughts exactly.

There's some truth in what you're saying, that there can be an ivory tower effect and self-referencing BS in academia, but I don't think that's an effect unique to academia (or even unique to a "lunatic fringe" of academia, as you say). You can see the same effect in the professional world in more or less any specialization, and you see the opposite effect (e.g. total nihilistic "everyone has their own equally valid opinion" BS) at the complete other end of the spectrum.