sus
Moderator
Alternate title: I hear you all are into neologisms...
Erisology was originally coined by a friend of mine, John Nerst, to try and broker a new field: the study of disagreement. (Name comes from Eris, Greek goddess of discord.) The field combines psychology, rhetoric, logic, field theory, conversational analysis, communication style, etc in order to look at what leads people to disagree. Obviously this is a very timely subject in an era of charged discord; John's done some really interesting analyses of contemporary debates, and come up with some solid concepts along the way. I wanna introduce some of his ideas to the forum.
Signal and the corrective: Discourse is not a set of in-a-vacuum positions people hold. It's a series of rhetorical moves, chess-like, in a conversation whose center is an emphasis, an orientation, a general sensibility. And people speak in response to what they perceive as the pre-existing emphasis, shaping their utterances and views to accomodate—to "counterbalance"—that stance. In John Nerst's words, this emphasis is the "signal," the dominant stance. Crucially, the signal is socially contingent: it is a perception of the (sub)cultural context's assumptions and dominant views that evelop a speaker, and to which he implicitly responds—it is the perceived stance of the addressed audience. We might imagine that a lot of poptimist enthusiasm is trying to combat rockist tendencies, thus its stances aren't neutral but an attempt to "push back on" rockism. Just this morning I read a Rebecca Liu essay about how the critical invocations of "genius" and "once in a generation" aimed at young women like Lena Dunham and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are (in part) a preemptive enthusiasm meant to push against the kind of marginalization women creators have historically seen.
Nerst writes:
We can see another example in Bourdieu's discussion of Marx: Living in a post-Marx world, we cannot conceive of a pre-Marx world, Bourdieu writes; the situation he responded to is already gone, and it has vanished in part on account of its writing and publication. Thus every piece of writing, every artwork, is a corrective to a signal long disappeared. Bourdieu:
Decoupling: "the ability to block out context and experiential knowledge and just follow formal rules... the opposite of holistic thinking. It’s the ability to separate, to view things in the abstract, to play devil’s advocate."
Nerst thinks folks in the humanities are natural couplers: poetry is the art of association, baggage, etymology, subtext etc. But a decoupling approach, which is more natural to engineer types, is the ability to hold certain variables constant, to entertain hypotheticals, etc. The different styles clash when they come into contact: see, for instance, the mutual scorn of scientists (or analytics!) and continental philosophers, who represent decouplers and couplers, respectively (see Derrida's "trace," e.g.).
In the holistic, non-decoupling frame, "implications and associations are an integral part of what it means to put forth an idea, and when you do so you automatically take on responsibility for its genealogy, its history and its implications. Ideas come with history, and some of them with debt."
How this conflict plays out, when styles of discourse collide, is the subject of his post on the Klein-Harris debate.
Erisology was originally coined by a friend of mine, John Nerst, to try and broker a new field: the study of disagreement. (Name comes from Eris, Greek goddess of discord.) The field combines psychology, rhetoric, logic, field theory, conversational analysis, communication style, etc in order to look at what leads people to disagree. Obviously this is a very timely subject in an era of charged discord; John's done some really interesting analyses of contemporary debates, and come up with some solid concepts along the way. I wanna introduce some of his ideas to the forum.
Signal and the corrective: Discourse is not a set of in-a-vacuum positions people hold. It's a series of rhetorical moves, chess-like, in a conversation whose center is an emphasis, an orientation, a general sensibility. And people speak in response to what they perceive as the pre-existing emphasis, shaping their utterances and views to accomodate—to "counterbalance"—that stance. In John Nerst's words, this emphasis is the "signal," the dominant stance. Crucially, the signal is socially contingent: it is a perception of the (sub)cultural context's assumptions and dominant views that evelop a speaker, and to which he implicitly responds—it is the perceived stance of the addressed audience. We might imagine that a lot of poptimist enthusiasm is trying to combat rockist tendencies, thus its stances aren't neutral but an attempt to "push back on" rockism. Just this morning I read a Rebecca Liu essay about how the critical invocations of "genius" and "once in a generation" aimed at young women like Lena Dunham and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are (in part) a preemptive enthusiasm meant to push against the kind of marginalization women creators have historically seen.
Nerst writes:
We can see another example in Bourdieu's discussion of Marx: Living in a post-Marx world, we cannot conceive of a pre-Marx world, Bourdieu writes; the situation he responded to is already gone, and it has vanished in part on account of its writing and publication. Thus every piece of writing, every artwork, is a corrective to a signal long disappeared. Bourdieu:
Decoupling: "the ability to block out context and experiential knowledge and just follow formal rules... the opposite of holistic thinking. It’s the ability to separate, to view things in the abstract, to play devil’s advocate."
Nerst thinks folks in the humanities are natural couplers: poetry is the art of association, baggage, etymology, subtext etc. But a decoupling approach, which is more natural to engineer types, is the ability to hold certain variables constant, to entertain hypotheticals, etc. The different styles clash when they come into contact: see, for instance, the mutual scorn of scientists (or analytics!) and continental philosophers, who represent decouplers and couplers, respectively (see Derrida's "trace," e.g.).
In the holistic, non-decoupling frame, "implications and associations are an integral part of what it means to put forth an idea, and when you do so you automatically take on responsibility for its genealogy, its history and its implications. Ideas come with history, and some of them with debt."
How this conflict plays out, when styles of discourse collide, is the subject of his post on the Klein-Harris debate.
