Another Gray Day

It occurred to me that the most important consideration for manufacturers of guitar amps is to reproduce something from the past - “that Eric Clapton Bluesbreakers sound”, tradition 1960s valve crunch”. Innovation may be used to get there but is rarely desirable in itself. And so it is within academia, even down to the “valve vs solid state argument”, or “analogue vs digital” which, as the so-called “qualitative vs quantitative debate” is equally spurious. The only judgement which means anything is the eye (or ear) of the beholder. And in many cases the beholder is in thrall to the sort of paper written by American psychology professors, which summarises previous research in a small pond, takes a sample of hard up college students, gives them credit and experiments the shit out of them. Conclusions are then produced using scary devices such as “Malmsteen’s lambda = 0.07″ to produce the illusion of rigour.

Just as Eric Bell produced fabulous guitar sounds from a totally solid-state HH 100W top, so is it possible to produce rigorous or at least useful research with nothing but good data and a word processor. Sometimes it is nice to see all that gear up on stage, with valves glowing and that nasty hum which tells you the gain is up high. But then there’s Richard Thompson…

By which I mean, a day bogged down through institutional constipation. Universities have become fixated with aims and objectives and strategies, whilst the same academics publish papers and books in which the complexity, fluidity, and dynamism of (post)modernity sweeps away fixed ideas and so-called static bodies of knowledge. Of course, no institution would admit to being aimless, though there is a book on university mission statements (as this is a blog I won’t spend hours agonising over the reference) in which (during the 1980s) several eminent university secretaries confessed shamelessly that their institutions had no such thing.
Even a casual reading of university policy statements reveals that most of them are exactly the same, especially in the following areas:
1) Attract more overseas students, especially postgrads, since these can be easily ripped off through extortionate fees
2) Publish more articles in top journals - desirable but arithmetically impossible for all of them at once.
3) Extract more value (i.e. work) from staff for less money
4) Be inclusive, accessible etc - fair enough!
5) Pursue excellence or quality, or both
6) Be research-led and student-driven
Personally I’d rather be driven by a researcher than a student. But the last one is a classic, real-world example of a gray whole. A gray whole is an object into which matter (money, people, photocopier paper) and thought can be poured without anything emerging over its event horizon. In the above example, both sides of the statement are equally vacuous and the object therefore has stability.
For a start, research is not a single entity, like a leader, but a multiplicity of disparate projects. We could be led by fish parasites, eighteenth century poets, soil erosion, teacher induction, the documentary films of John Grierson or face recognition. Furthermore, the most obvious characteristic of research is that it doesn’t know where it’s going, even in replication studies, since otherwise there would be no point in calling it research.

Presumably in the above case, being ‘research-led’ is a substitute for being Principal (=vice chancellor) led, even though the individual concerned is paid lots of money to be a leader.

Incidentally both the opposite of research and a synoym for is ‘holiday’. You can either go where you haven’t been before in order to find out what it’s like (a type 1 holiday) or somewhere totally predictable but enjoyable (a type 2 holiday). If I was a psychologist I’d devise a theory and an instrument to study these.

As for student-driven, I’m all for participatory democracy, but since students are there to find out what they don’t know, it is illogical to expect them to tell anyone else what they want to know. Students are under too much financial pressure to pursue excellence, for the most part, whilst staff are under too much pressure to pursue aims and objectives to actually do any teaching. Or research. Or even answer their email.
Cynical, moi?
Yes, but i feel much better for it!

Today was more a sort of whitish-grey as we had some rather wet snow last night. After a rather messy day shunting furniture around to Jane’s office in Meylan, time to think about two points>
What is the point of a) this website and b) what is the point, purpose or meaning of life?
The first one is the most difficult, but briefly, it is part of a trend which, pretentiously, could be called “enriching the information landscape”. Thinking back to the 1960s, getting information about technical things involved writing letters, badgering people at exhibitions (if you could get in), reading out of date reference books in the library or just doing it. Which all worked in a rather lean sort of way. Nowadays I can find out what I was doing in 1979, I can find out what I was doing it with and who built it. More or less, anyway. Across a huge range of topics, people are putting what they know into the public domain. Is this any use for anything, apart from encouraging endless surfing? I think it is, but there is no way of knowing what kind of useful.
Not a very original thought I know, but somehow it has to be worth doing, a sort of car boot sale of all knowledge.

Now for the meaning of life. I’m currently writing a book which is partly about death (link) and in order to do that I was looking at websites about the meaning of life, which of course consisted mainly of Christian contributions about divine purpose and so on. I’m sure I will be put right on this, but there seems to be a gap in philosophical thinking here. The main problem is that we have huge difficulty in imagining how something could not have some sort of ultimate purpose, without falling into “Oh what’s the point of it all, can’t go on etc etc”. In “the Principle of Reason”, Heidegger shows how difficult, or impossible, it is to find an ultimate ground for reason. But ‘ground’ is a metaphor, so there’s a clue to how to start thinking about purpose, not as something ‘built’ on foundations but as something circulating, fluid, dynamic etc. Like the web, whose purpose is to circulate information or knowledge, but to what further purpose?