Today I wonder if I would have kept being impressed and intimidated by them if I hadn't majored in music, something in which you have to actually produce a demonstration of an acceptable level of actual mastery of individual pieces and perform them in a way to communicate their substance. As one of my teachers pointed out, like a math major, a musician has to show that they can do it.
Only you knew that the reality was that you weren't mastering a piece, you were merely striving to reproduce it according the stated instructions left by the composer. And this has already gotten out of hand because I'm trying to describe in an abstract manner things that are as incredibly varied as the literature of my instrument which exists in what are hardly precise scores. Even the most precisely and helpfully notated pieces are open to a wide range of legitimate interpretation*. In music that situation is made obvious by the need of performance, of presenting pieces, in full, from start to finish and being presented with a continual reminder that your understanding of it is not really the composer's full understanding of it** nor the only understanding of it. And you will never, ever master the entire repertoire of any single instrument, needless to say, the entire literature. At best you can become good at playing a range of music often having to come to a knowledge of the differences in expectations of different composers. Sometimes the details are spelled out better than others, Couperin's instructions for playing the trill are, presumably, different from Bach's, though Bach wasn't as specific in any document I've seen. I take what his son and Quantz said as probably or, rather, perhaps, more reliable. And I am probably basing that on what Ralph Kirkpatrick said on the matter, just to come completely clean.
Adding to that problem, the improvisational aspects of ornamentation in that music only multiplies the ambiguity of reproducing intentions. That was one of the great obsessions of music in my life, to be as accurate as possible in being true to the intentions of the composer, which you had to admit you might be wrong about.
Clearly, I could go on about that longer than you want to read about it.
But what music provided was a confrontation with the fact that an academic career doesn't provide universal mastery, a pretense of which is practically required by stature in academic and intellectual life at its highest reaches. To achieve the highest stature in academic repute, you have to successfully gull people into believing you have either mastered more than you possibly can or to assume a more pedestrian position as a specialist. Competition in academic life often means conning the dean into thinking you know what you don't or perhaps intimidating him or her. It's often a matter of people not admitting that there are no clothes on the emperor or that the clothes have rather large holes in them. Or that's how it looked to me, one of the reasons I gave up on the idea of teaching at that level. Often the means of doing that is to skim the subject matter or make rather shady generalizations about what are, in reality, extremely specific and different things and subjecting them to your announced methodology, producing a result.
It is one of the great advantages of science in its more classical period, when science meant, mostly, physics and chemistry that dealt with fairly basic and simple objects and phenomena, that its intellectual claims were able to be held up against physical reality and rather definitely tested. The enormous success of that kind of science and the practical products of it account for the enormous repute that science earned. Academics in other areas could only envy their success until they began to pretend that they, in studying their subject matter, could follow the same methods and pretend that the result could be relied on more generally in the area of their study when those almost always included both individual things and situations that are more complex and open to more influences than operate on inanimate objects and within chemical bonding. Some aspects of some of those other subjects are quite a bit more successful in that application, many aspects of biology, for example. Quite often the success of biology, though, requires the same comparison of what is claimed by the scientist with physical reality as it can be reliably discerned. When it can't be, as in so many claims made about natural selection, the success is far less, when not, actually, an illusion.
As I've pointed out before, as full a believer in natural selection as Richard Lewontin has admitted that its invocation is quite often, not only detached from actual comparisons with reality, but that it is impossible to even observe or quantify the claimed phenomena, either today or in the lost past. It didn't occur to me until I read it again for this piece, that I realized he said what I thought yesterday as I looked at Max Weber again, only he said it in the opposite way.
It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable. Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known. But that is not true. For some things there is simply not world enough and time. It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge. Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species. Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.
Dipping into Max Weber after many, many years, I'm struck by how even those things, he said that I agreed with weren't actually based on reliably generalized "things". In fact, a number of the "things" he talks about aren't reliably things but ideas about things that have a good chance of being entirely the product of Weber's or Kant's or someones imagination***. Weber's generalizations are exactly the kinds that the allegedly scientific treatment of history and societies and politics require be done, pretend that those things are reducible to things like inanimate objects moved by physical forces and rather simple molecules and atoms, or rather the bonding of them into larger molecules and the breaking apart of those. Whatever good comes from pretending that people, the fluctuations of their interactions with other people and their environment and in documented history are subject to methods invented to come up with reliable observations of inert objects, a lot of relevant information, relevant both on a larger and an individual scale, is simply pretended to not be there and relevant to the truth. Yet Webers' greatest claim to fame, sociology, is based on making those kinds of pretenses in some of the grossest forms that have attained academic respectability and legal and political power. In other social sciences those pretenses of reliable knowledge extend into the remote and undocumented past, sometimes based on the slightest of physical evidence filled in with, often ideological, conjecture.
The pretense that what these people are doing is anything like classical physics and chemistry is ubiquitous in academic life. It is most potentially dangerous when it is given political and legal power, to actually effect lives, especially in the ability of those with that power to be merely following fashions and avoiding unpleasantness and difficulty in their work life.
In the end, I'm left to think that people today are far more likely to like what Max Weber said because he said things they liked. Or, more often, that they know they're supposed to like what he said, often based on nothing more solid than that they were taught they were supposed to like it. I would bet that most of the invocations of Weber are by those who have read little to nothing of him, though they probably know a few of the aphoristic slogans from him as well as that he is the great hero of modernism, and they know that they are supposed to like modernism and that not being modernistic is the road to disrepute and rejection. The extent to which academic reputability and, even more so, journalistic reputability is based on that kind of stuff that people should have seen through by their Sophomore year should be considered more.
To which I can't resist adding:
* The limits are often determined by nothing more reliable than the popular acceptance of what's produced, which can often rely on nothing more than the good looks of a performer, their ability to produce a ringing high note or on someone else saying they liked or disliked their performance.
** A composer's understanding of even their own music isn't a fixed and set thing. And a composer is often not entirely aware of "what they did". There's a story that Bartok was talking to a graduate student who pointed out that he'd composed a piece in conformity with some mathematical structure. The story I was told is Bartok said, "I did"? My skepticism of theory, in general, is probably based in my disillusionment with the teaching of music theory as opposed to teaching the practice of musical practice. It's a difference between an apprenticeship model and one of producing words about music. Apprenticeship is more appropriate for a lot of fields, though it isn't as reputable in academic terms.
*** A lot of reputability in this stuff, it seems to me, is based in the successful pretense that you've succeeded in dealing with some of the most varied and complex of realities by abstracting a few ideas about them and plugging them into or putting them together into an edifice reproducing your chosen philosophical ideology. I think it's a bit ironic, today, that Weber's is derived from Kant but I've got to get to work. None of this is especially important in retail, the fate of those who reject the academic game.
Too much to respond to in such a confined space. Where to begin, where to begin?
ReplyDeleteAcademic theory v. reality, maybe. I still remember bursting into laughter in a graduate seminar when a professor there (there were many in the room, it was a night class, a chance for faculty and students to preen before each other) waved toward Memorial Stadium at UT and declared we in that room were protecting the ivory tower of civilization's treasures from the barbarians (at the football stadium).
No one else laughed, and I realized I'd just shit in the punch bowl.
Decades later I find myself teaching English (I was a graduate student in English at the time of that story), and I eschew all the possible critical theories (deconstruction; biographical; historical[, psychological, feminist, etc.,etc., etc.) and focus on simply understanding how a story works. If you can get that clear in your mind, you can understand any text and how it is put together and how to use it/read it.
A practical approach, in other words; or nearly so. A "show your work" approach. Never occurred to me that was influenced by 9 years of piano lessons, but maybe it was. I've often compared reading a story to reading sheet music, if only to escape the "theory" of "what the author really meant," because works of art are not Chinese puzzle boxes that can be opened to reveal the "true meaning" within them.
Weber as quoted makes sense to me, but I would avoid accepting physics and chemistry as "true" science, if only because chemistry in the 19th century was going to explain everything; and then physics in the 20th century; and then biology in the late 20th century, which gave way to genetics at the end of the century, and Dawkins' frankly ludicrous idea that we're all just bags for genes replicating memes.
Which idea Stephen Gould rather nicely shredded in a book review in the late 90's, although I had my problems with the "Selfish Gene" the moment I heard of it. But Gould knew more about biology and genetics than I do.
There was a time when theology was the "mother of all the sciences,' and all human thought was subsumed to it, or was meant to be. Now science is the mother of all rational thought, and every school must crook the knee to the Source.
The real problem is, we are determined to reduce the complex and ineffable to the simple and material, and all that does not fit is discarded to make the model work. And as for limitations on powers, the "omnipotence" of the God of Abraham is a Christian ideal, derived from Greek notions of perfection. It is Jeremiah who reports that God says, through the prophet, that even God cannot understand the human heart, that even God must test that heart and judge by the response to the test, the results of human actions.
That sense of limitation, of ambiguity, drives certain on-line critics of religion absolutely mad, and they point to it as a reason to reject religion, presumably because science will one day eliminate all ambiguity. Which is just sad, to be so childish and immature in your thinking. But, as that Gould review also points out (I'm gonna post on it soon), even scientists can be petty and venal, because even science is a human, not a divine, project.