fakejazz.com

I don’t know what everyone else’s excuses are for neglecting the site, but I thought it’d best to review mine. There is in a sense a dual review going on here: I am at once reviewing my experience so far in grad school and at the same time offering up for review my experience as an excuse for the lack of time I’ve spent writing reviews. One of the things I’ve been saying for a long time too is that with the advent of higher bandwidth and the veritable ubiquity of mp3s this day, online reviews better offer something different than just simply a description of what the music sounds like, that is, there are three functions 1) economic (either as simple hype generator or as a signpost for music that deserves your [the reader’s] support) or 2) literary (the reviewer has a rhetorical point to make with what she is writing, that is not simply fulfilling a role as shill for a record label or 3) critical (the reviewer adds some kind of meaning or understanding to the art object), and I’ve said before that there damn well needs to be more of three.

One of the difficulties of the critical review though is that it takes a lot of time to come to grips with an art object, heck, not even an entire art object, simply one of its facets (let’s be honest – for a complex piece of art, no simple review will ever be able to capture every dimension that it contains). My experiences so far at a graduate school that will remain nameless simply represented by the delightful picture to the left (so no one can happen upon this through a google search) have left me little time for outside contemplation. I literally just finished three weeks of constant writing…well, not literally, the routine was like this: wake up at 11, get ready, go to school, teach or take classes, come home, eat dinner, take a nap, and write until 5am. What was the result of that intense period? A publishable paper as per the requirement? Maybe. A paper, at least, that represents me? No.

Here’s the thing about grad school. And by “grad school” I mean “my grad program in a discipline that loves wisdom”. So the thing about it is that if you are not interested in a series of canonical problems, you are slightly fucked. Philosophy in America is roughly split into two camps. These designations are rough, and most philosophy people get irked at their use, but they’re simply ways to easily delimit stuff for general conversation, and perhaps some people should learn how language works and why humans tend to simplify things for casual chatting purposes. So, there is one camp, the analytic, that tends to look simply at the argument being presented, the argument divorced from the historical and cultural contexts of its birth. Then there is the continental or post-Hegelian kind of philosophy that tends to favor the historical, the cultural, the rhetorical aspects over the simple “did this person make a logical fuck-up or not”. I’ve tried to be a little kind here, but generally analytic philosophers are philosophical fuckwits. I’ve tried in the past to be kind and have a pluralistic view, and in my generous moments, I do, but sometimes when you need to write a good polemic, you just can’t be charitable.

So right, in reality, analytic philosophy isn’t horrible and the people that practice it are usually nice people, it’s just that as a general philosophical project, it’s useless and a complete failure. Name another discipline that’s been rehashing the same problems for nearly 2500 years. Go ahead. Is physics still debating what the void is? No? They’ve moved on to different problems? Really? Huh, go figure. Yes, literally some of the same problems Plato and Aristotle introduced are still being argued over today. Now, it wouldn’t be bad if the intervening 2500 years somehow mattered, but they don’t. The terms of the argument have changed a little, but the basic underlying principles haven’t – there is a thing called truth (heck, Truth) and philosophy is supposed to analyze reality to get to the Truth. Right? That’s the standard thing you all hear about philosophy, isn’t it?

So, what does analytic philosophy do to get to this so-called Truth? What? They generalize and abstract from all circumstances and then attempt to come up with a model that will describe every possible context? I’m sorry? You want me to stop the sarcastic questioning? Fair enough. So, yes, you can see why this would be a failure. Trying to come up with a system that will describe every possible circumstance, trying to ground knowledge beyond a doubt, these are ridiculous quests. This is all simplified, of course, seeing how it’s a kind-of review on an online magazine and not a formal paper, so take what I say with a grain of salt, and if any analytic philosophers happen upon this, I’m sorry that I didn’t define the terms with rigid boundaries, and also fuck off.

Now, I don’t think I’d be so angry at analytic philosophy if it wasn’t the hegemonic method of doing philosophy in the United States. That means, the main people in most depts. do this kind of philosophy, the main journals publish this kind of philosophy, and to some extent, most grad. students are required to at the very least dabble in this or rather, it must inform their work to some extent, even if as merely a counterpoint. And I wouldn’t care at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that what I want to write about is weird stuff and how I want to write about it is in a literary style. This is a big no no. And no, spell check, I did mean to repeat the word “no”. Uh, maybe it should be hyphenated. “no-no” Hmm, that looks better.

In John McCumber’s smart book Time in a Ditch, he explains how analytic philosophy became the dominant paradigm in the US. During the McCarthy era when there was all that paranoia about pinkos and such, a lot of departments got “purged”, that is, the continental philosophers (and continental doesn’t just mean German and French theorists and the people responding to them but also includes a lot of Eastern philosophy and American pragmatism – it’s basically a hodge podge term for non-analytic philosophy…see, I told you these designations were as rough as a cat’s dick) who were usually political in some way were booted, while the analytic philosophers, who remember have nothing to do with historical and cultural circumstances, and by their very nature cannot be political, got to stay. And they got to pick the next generation of students and so on and so forth. And now philosophy is one of the last disciplines to actually become multi-cultural and accept other ways of doing philosophy. And still there’s a resistance to it.

I know what this kind of seems like. I’m painting myself as this rebel who wants to come along and shake up acadamia because the squares, man, they’re totally ruining it. Really, I just want to be left alone to write my weird essays and then sit at home and masturbate to Derrida. I’m just kidding. I don’t want to write essays at all.

So, my year and a half so far has been me wrestling with the fact that I cannot do what I’d like to do, and my writing suffers mostly because I’m forced into this kind of box where I feel I have to appease the analytic people that will read my paper, yet what I am writing about and the concepts I am writing about are decidedly not in an analytic fashion; thus, trying to balance on two chairs, I end up falling between them most of the time. I sit down to write a paper and it takes literally forever to finish it. Literally. It will be the end of time, and I will still be writing because I’m trying to translate my idiom into an acceptable dialect. And the whole thing is silly because nothing hinges on it. There is little more inconsequential than academic writing. I mean, is it going to save someone’s life? Improve living conditions? Dewey did with his writings on education.

So, I don’t know. I’m happy for the opportunity to study all this stuff and meet all these great people in my department (teachers and students alike) but the conceptual bureaucracy (my friend Eric’s neologism) of analytic philosophy and my own inability to adapt to it make for some wearying times. So, if you’re really into analytic philosophy, most schools in America are for you. If not, choose wisely or go to school outside of the country.

Graduate School at Amazon & Insound