Amateurs, Experts, Education

Forgive me for being skeptical: I have a hard time reading “When I taught at the San Francisco Art Institute’s graduate center…” and then being able to take seriously your claim that “The academy is an embarrassing anachronism.” I mean, I understand the notion of immanent critique, but you seem to be trying to have things both ways here – identifying yourself with academic cachet at the same time as you decry it.

Vainglory aside, I think you have some serious misconceptions about what it takes to effective operate in (and think through) network society. Your advocacy of amateurism verges upon advocacy of shallowness and shoddy analysis. I agree that many disciplinary boxes are ill-suited to the world we live in today, and that we need to be capable of thinking across multiple dimensions of society. But in order to do so effectively, we need to be _disciplined_. If we live in an increasingly transitory society, in which all that is solid melts into air, we need to be _more_ careful with our analysis, and more methodological in our approach to understanding it, rather than less.

One of my mathematics professors made his name studying the shapes of soap bubbles. (As it turns out, an interesting surface-minimization problem with a number of applications elsewhere.) Soap bubbles tend to vanish quickly, but he couldn't get away with an equally casual analysis – in order to understand what was going on, he had to take a rigorous look at an ephemeral phenomenon.

Great piece. This amateur/expert distinction goes back at least to Socrates, who constantly distinguishes himself from rhetoricians, rhapsodes, sophists, etc. by calling himself “a layman” and “an amateur.” Out of Socrates emerges a tradition of amateur thinkers — whom we could call uncategorizable or interdisciplinary — such as Diogenes, Montaigne, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Foucault, among others. Each in their own way is a philosopher who scorns conventional philosophy: the closed, systematic (not to mention anti-dialogical) philosophy of “the expert.”

Experts move toward pre-established points for the sake of persuading audiences and gaining professional renown. Amateurs put great emphasis on discovery and improvisation, on active and immediate thinking. At bottom this amateur/expert distinction comes down to dialogue, which explains Socrates' key role.

Amateurs are willing to talk, make startling connections, and stray from what they consider “true.” They'll often use vernacular language. Experts, on the other hand, are prone to repeating the same rigid formulas again and again via their ugly professional discourse. Even worse, they'll often stop a dialogue before it happens by appealing to their own authority on a given topic. I belive the so-called “crisis of the humanities” is the fault of its self-appointed guardians — experts who make these fields a little less relevant and a little more tiresome each year.

DANIEL COFEEN AND SIOBHAN BLEDSOE ARE MY FAVORITE PERSONS HERE.

Here's Coffeen with a stick in the hornet's nest again?
I have benefited greatly by a self directed, open ended study of fields that do sometimes cross pollinate. Linguistics, mostly etymologies, environmental studies everything from what has been extirpated from a given ecosystem to ways of discouraging unwanted building activity, fiction by writers of my generation 1961-1978, drugs, both legal and not, how they work, drug history, drug policy, psychopharmachology, modern Japanese literature,culture and history, there's more…..
Some of these are threads I've read on for 25 years, but it's not enough to just learn the information, for this model to really work, you must use it in your every day life.
As for my formal education, it was perfect, not pretentious art school, more like getting introduced to three techniques or skills a week for 2 years and spending all the rest of your time changed to your bench. Perfect for learning a technical vocabulary, not a headful of claptrap. Before and I went there , I worked about 3 years with my mentor. Oh and there were about seventy or so workshops…Now I'm friends with my mentor and continue to work with her on esoterica and aesthetic voice and craftsmanship.

i think this article could benefit from a more detailed discussion of what the author means by “amateur”. I think of the word as describing a person who doesn't know what they are doing. clearly that's not how the author is using the term.

This article is terrible. The erosion of the academy is a terrible loss, and an embarrassment. “Amateurism” is exactly what we need less of. We need fewer ignorant readers spouting off about topics they don't understand. The public is loaded with people who have a false sense for what they know, yet act as though they're so deep and clever.

Sorry, but this is really a BS piece echoing a popular sentiment among those who don't know enough to know better.

This is really prettily written but the message is just all wrong.

specialization isn't simply parochialism and the search for minutiae; it's about rigorous, critical, self-reflexive, and engaged thinking. certain subjects demand of linguistic competence, deep historic knowledge, and culture-specific understanding that the amateur can never master, who chooses instead to bounce from here to there at his/her whim. at best, amateurs can help pose new questions to old material; at worst, they end up as dillettantes, posers, and presumptuous upstarts.

“The expert is a mortician, presiding over dead knowledge.”

That's why people invented graduate education in sciences, mathematics, and theoretical engineering.

Both sides of this argument are reductive. It's nice to reduce everything to black and white then fling shit over the fence for awhile. But both inside and outside of academia, what we really need, is both. Both the amateur and the expert are searching for something. It is merely the means by which they find their way that differs.

Apart from some kind of resentment of the self turned outward, I cannot for life of me figure out why expert, amateur or dilettante should be used as pejoratives. If you are someone who is passionate and focussed and knows exactly what it is they want to find out, what question they want to answer, good for you. I envy that. I drift between spheres of knowledge, I look for patterns and connections. Because those patterns and connections are the parts that interest me. Perhaps, one day, I will dive further into these phenomenological binding mechanisms. Perhaps not. This is how I operate. If I tried to become an expert in anything, I would grow to resent it, I know myself too well.

Why is it so difficult to respect that people approach knowledge in different ways? Why are we still encumbered with childish in-fighting amongst otherwise rational, intelligent people?

Sincerely Baffled,
The Unhappy Robot

why make such a strict dichotomy between 'expert' and 'amateur'? i don't understand how this is useful. most people are experts in one area and amateurs in many areas; whether conscious or not, each individual is a blend of the two “identities”. this syncretism is, in my opinion, a most useful notion to come out of this article. if anything, the academy tries to have us separate our professional lives from our personal lives, and this is a great detriment to its reputation and the creativity and innovation it strives to bring out in its members. as a doctoral student at the university of toronto in the department of history, i can say with great confidence that my colleagues/friends are well aware of the limitations posed by the institution of the university, and are constantly being urged to break down such barriers to original knowledge-creation. each piece of academic work i create is uniquely mine, because of my expert and amateur qualities and the way they are entangled in my arguments, interpretations and methods. one must foster this alliance and bring other ways of knowing into the academic environment.