April 21, 2008
The Q In Question
by Jerome du Bois
I decided against continuing to field increasingly irrelevant grounders from Winkleman and Einspruch in the short comment thread to the last written posting. Besides being irrelevant they became irrational, ending up with Orwellspeak such as "wingnut" and "anti-gay." (Winkleman: "You defined yourself as such through your blogroll." Insanity.) Einspruch stopped sputtering "prove this, prove that" and avoided extending the discussion about "lazy arguments" to advance even more of his own.
And please notice, dear reader, that this lag in time of mine, this refusal to leap to respond like a Pavlovian dog to the latest comments, to keep some stupid stick in play, ought to put the kibosh on the notion that we seek as much traffic as we can get. Click click click. Have they said anything yet? What? No? What about now? Wearisome.
But to heck with all that because I got back on track, ruminating about questions, the origin of my first posting about ArtBloggers@. Back then, when I read Mattera's minutes--
We didn't get to the big questions-- Are we mainstream yet? Do we want to be? What is the future of art blogging?
--I dimissed those questions as sophomoric, because Catherine and I have been asking questions of the art world at both higher and deeper levels for five years on the blog. Even more disappointing, when we called out the panelists on their laziness, they claimed that we misunderstood the structure and function of the event. I don't think so; I think they failed themselves, and they're embarrassed. When I made a suggestion about generating questions in rounds by repeated emailings, I got back "you do it, we're too busy." Maybe they are. But I note that during that last comment buzz here both Winkleman and Einspruch got back to my posting lickety-split, even when I didn't notify either one about it. And a few days ago, over on Winkleman's blog, there was a very long comment thread on artists as writers (hereafter AAW), with repeated comments by Einspruch, Sharon [Somebody; I thought it was Butler, but I've been corrected, by Butler], Joanne Mattera (with an eye-opening elitist statement), and Winkleman throughout the day. How busy can they be?
But forget about it --except for that AAW thread; I've found it very useful for the present posting, and I'll be referring to it below. Anyway, I got to thinking about questions, and the Q that begins that word, because back in the Eighties, when I was doing graduate work in public administration, public sector ethics, and organizational behavior, I was required to understand and create the design of social-psychological instruments, mostly questionnaires. In these courses, which many considered a grind but I thought were fascinating, we spent a lot of time trying to create clean questions, questions gone over like a groom at a wedding, for every spare hair of prejudice, every crease of careless definition, so as not to skew the results. One must be so particular, for every word counts, and we're not trying to fool people here, we're trying to capture a faithful trace of the truths that people, millions of people, hold to be self-evident.
It was while taking these classes, and taking them seriously, in my independent research outside of class, that I came across a methodology that ran counter to the prevailing models -- under the general term R-methodology-- which were based on large questionnaire populations, stratified random samples, and hard-nugget, operationally-defined variables.
The alternative was called Q-methodology, which could get strong research results from small sample groups, not necessarily randomized, with vaguely defined variables. It had many attractions, including the possibility of clarifying the definitions of those very same vague variables, but in the prevailing academic environment at the time it was on the outs because it was inside-out. "You can't generalize from such small studies." But Q wasn't about generalizing or aggregates or percentages of populations; it was concerned with human subjectivity, the individual mental world, the commonly-shared mental world, how they're built, how they're connected, and operationalizing some of that rich structure. So I pursued it on my own, reading everything I could and designing my own studies on the side. Anyway, one of the advantages of Q over R-methodology is that the "Q-sorting technique," the core action which provides the raw data for factor analysis, is a subtle and flexible way to sift the relevant from the irrelevant questions in any area. Art, given its roots in subjectivity, is a rich field for Q-studies. I've been away from the research field for many years, but a quick internet scan doesn't bring up many Q-studies among or about arts professionals. Instead, as it was when it first took off in the mid-Sixties, Q is being used in mostly in market research, advertising, public relations, and political research, because that's where the money is.
I thought I knew a lot about William Stephenson, the polymath genius who promulgated and refined Q-methodology, but just yesterday, as I was catching up on him and Q, I ran across a new fact that I found quite charming: in the mid-Fifties, when Stephenson was working as an advertising consultant for the Ford Motor Company, he was the only person in the boardroom to stand up one special day and say that the new model, the Edsel, was a very bad idea. His Q-studies revealed it. He was overruled, and the Edsel rolled off the production line and right into oblivion.
I'll leave it to the reader to follow up on the fascinating William Stephenson (1902-1989). He should have been the communication prophet that his contemporary Marshall McLuhan turned out to be. McLuhan was flashy, and lots of people love aphorisms, but Stephenson had more precise, better-tested ideas. He had a real instrument, a powerful tool, the Q-sort, with its grounding in The Great Conversation. Though he was best-known as the author of The Play Theory of Mass Communication, and a professor of journalism, he was a philosopher, a psychologist, and a physicist, with PhDs in the latter two fields; and he made suggestive connections, in his later years, between the statistical structures of Q and those of quantum mechanics. He claimed they were anchored in the same probablistic domain. He was deep, that's for damn sure, and I'm glad this dustup with the ArtBloggers@ panelists reacquainted me with him.
I bring it all up because the Q-sorting technique, as I mentioned above, is an excellent way to generate productive questions. So I decided to sketch out how one would go about a hypothetical Q-sort experiment which would try to find the best questions generated by the question:
As art world professionals, what are the most important questions we should be asking ourselves?
But where do these questions come from? They come from the concourse.
Picture an airline terminal, with the long stem of its concourse branching out at intervals. The stream of passengers disperses itself in purposeful substreams depending on destination. By analogy, then, any discrete thing --concept, person, artwork, sentence, artifact; anything with clear boundaries, weight and duration-- can be one of these destinations, and the passengers are the statements that have clustered around the thing since it was introduced to the human conversation. It could be "quality," for example, as it relates to artworks, or a two Q-sort comparative study of "formalism" and "conceptualism." It could be "Marcel Duchamp." Or you could explore the hypothesis that the concepts "elitism" and "argument from ineffability" would cluster close together. And some of the statements for the words in quotes could be taken from that AAW thread I mentioned, since that discussion is well within the universe of discourse --the concourse-- from which the Q-sorter would want to draw their statements: the recorded thoughts of arts professionals. I'm not saying that what any of them wrote was profound, or that the thread taken as a whole tapped any wisdom whatsoever; it doesn't; but there were nuggets in there, such as George's repeated "What is at stake?" --a question worth refining.
Take the word "concourse" itself. Clustering around it in a constellation, but not identical with it, we can find Dawkins's memes, and Jung's collective unconscious, Julian Jaynes's bicameral metaphor, Tielhard's "noosphere," the Kabbalah's broken vessels, and Gaia; folk wisdom's "Great Conversation"; also Daniel Dennett's "outsourcing" and "offloading" metaphors in Kinds of Minds, which includes a brief discussion of Plato's metaphor of human memory as a huge cage of birds, another beautifully apt image. The constellation becomes a huge cloud as we include the thousands of commentaries, discussions, and writings which grew around each of the concepts above. In that cloud are all the things we know, and many we don't, individually anyway; but Q-method and factor analysis can tease out nuggets of distilled wisdom only dimly outlined in the collective cloud. These are the factors not predicted in any model; and these new factors show the value of Q. It is emergent research. After all, the purpose of all this inquiry is to learn something new and useful about ourselves, so we can better ourselves. Yes?
Stephenson once did a Q-study on Keats' "Ode On A Grecian Urn," which is a model of sensitivity, and it elicited a new, unanticipated scholarly interpretation of the poem. The concourse he drew from were all the references he could find to discussions of the poem, as well as relevant biographical facts about Keats. From these he culled 40 or fifty verbal statements, either verbatim or paraphrased, and printed them on individual cards. This is the deck --a distillation of the concourse of the poem-- for the Q-sort. His subjects were about a hundred English seniors at a university.
So what is a Q-sort, anyway? Picture a person sitting at a table or a computer screen, holding their Q-sort deck, facing this pattern:
The Condition of Instruction in this case will be our art world question:
As art world professionals, what are the most important questions we should be asking ourselves?
The Q-sort deck holds fifty of the best responses to that question that have been culled from dozens or hundreds of art-world professionals, in several rounds. These people represent the concourse, a big chunk of it anyway. (In the Eighties, we would have given our eyeteeth for effortless email. Waow.) Here's one question for consideration:
Is there a causal correlation between social justice dispositions --community engagement and service learning indoctrinations-- and the long-term aesthetic decisions of artists exposed to their influence?
The subject's task is to place this question card in one of the spaces provided in the quasi-normal, forced-choice distribution set before them. If they think the question is one of the least-important, a waste of professional time, they would place it to the extreme left, -4 or -5; if they were indifferent, somewhere in the middle.
Note well, please, that we're not trying to answer the question; we're putting it out there provisionally, to determine its social weight, and whether we should even bother with it at all. As the researchers sent out the call to the arts professionals, they would encourage as many questions as possible, but at least twenty. They could be personal, such as:
Why does the contemporary art world make me unhappy?
Or polemical:
Is a significant percentage of the contemporary art world decadent and depraved?
Again, we are not trying to answer the questions themselves; we're trying to find common themes in all the overlapping conversatiions, publications, and actions. Q is like a scythe to irrelevancy.
The question might even be politically incorrect:
What role, if any, has white guilt played in the success of artists of color in the last twenty years?
Again, if the subject has a negative reaction, they can place the card to the left somewhere, but notice that the extremes have fewer slots; one must soon begin to ruminate, reconsider, and refine, and shift cards around.
As I learned from my own experience, and as has been reported widely, people really enjoy doing Q-sorts. They aren't onerous, they aren't boring, and they respect the way people think --with several things in the air at once. Subjects like those crunchy decisions, too. And you get to change your mind right up until you're done, when each card is scored by its number and position, for factor analysis, after two dozen or so more Q-sorts. (Depending on the purpose of the experiment, one person may perfrom all the Q-sorts; or two dozen people may perform one Q-sort; or both.)
The factor analysis should reveal a few obvious clusters --concerns about money, success, being a follower, networking, global influences, the future of X kind of art-making. . . . In fact it better, otherwise we're not sampling reality, are we? These would be confirmations, then. But there should also be one or two or three new clusters --just a few questions in each, five or six, that hang together; and the experimenter's task is to summarize what these questions are converging on, somehow. And this involves the experimenter's judgment, which is sometimes used as a criticism of Q. I reply with a Heisenberg analogy. Paraphrasing, the physicist Werner Heisenberg provided evidence that at the quantum level, when a human steps into a quantum system, that action changes both the human and the system and any measurements therein. Here we say that at some point, to obtain objective results, one must study human subjectivity with some subjectivity.
Take another example I noted in passing above, about a link between elitism --it's in the news!-- and what I'm calling "the argument from ineffability." Let's start with the first. Here's Joanne Mattera on that AAW thread:
As for writing for the general public, what's the point? These are the folks who want your painting to match the sofa, whose five-year-old can make a better painting, and who don't have a clue about "what it means." They'd rather have a Thomas Kincaid or a Leroy Neiman any day.
That sound elitist to anyone? Myself, I've never met the general public, just individual, nonfungible persons. But I'd ask the reader to remember the phrase who don't have a clue about "what it means."
Also on that thread, Franklin Einspruch, who supervises the WD Bannard archive of writings, chose the following excerpt from a 1987 WDB lecture to post there:
Recently I gave a lecture at the Aibright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo called "Bad Art and Why We Have It." Part of it was given over to whacking the critics for their high-handed obscurantism, bad writing, and trendiness. Art critics are an easy, if deserving target; a mildly sardonic reading of some ripe bit of highfalutin critical bombast always tickles an audience, and I often take the liberty.
Afterwards a young man stood up and asked, "Where do these critics come from, anyway?" Where indeed? No one had asked me that before. From anywhere and everywhere it seems. They are reporters, academics, and literary people who fall into art criticism as much by circumstance as by inclination or design. They are seldom artists. Artists, for whatever reason, are usually terrible writers. Writers, on the other hand, don't understand art. They adopt an attitude of patronizing kinship, look at subject matter and other evident parts of a work, relate it to "real life" and find "symbolic meaning" and think that's all there is to it. . . .
Neatly, to me this is both elitist and commits a quasi-logical fallacy I call "the argument from ineffability." "Real life" has a lot more of what "there is to it" than any canvas hanging on any wall anywhere at any time.
When we first started this blog we ran across a local artist who dodged questions about her work's meaning by saying it was ineffable, humanly impossible (at least for her) to put into words, though she did note helpfully that she was exploring "the space between the artist and the surface of the work." Bannard is adopting a similar "experience is ineffable" pose in the above quote. More recently --this Thursday-- apropos this very AAW thread, he wrote on Einspruch's blog:
We musn't even allude to any correlation between definition and existence. Many intellectual/academic/art types wander in a world of words, and there is a nutty brain sickness among them that whispers "if a thing cannot be defined it doesn't exist."
Of course if you put this to them straight out they will say "that's ridiculous" but challenge them to "define" something like "good art" and they layer themselves frantically with conceptual armor and verbal chain mail and clank off into neverland, when all that is necessary is to say "I dunno, what I like, I suppose" or any other mildly evasive statement that implicitly acknowledges that the question is intrinsically unanswerable, as is any characteristic determined solely by individual judgement.
If you take their words away they are exposed, naked, to experience. For whatever reason, they find this unbearable.
Who knows, it very well may be unbearable to experience one of his canvases. Haven't had the pleasure or terror myself. But here and now, I myself hear the telltale crackling of many straw men marching in fascistic formation as they trample words, and any attempt to make great words, great sentences, to make any question at all "intrinsically unanswerable." How dare they! as they "wander in their world of words."
Message from reality to Mr. Bannard et al: you will fail to make us mute, or convince us that we should be mute, as we stand contemplating your paintings or anything else on Earth or anywhere. We will play our chin music until we figure out everything we can. To tell us that anything is ineffable is ignorant, arrogant, and elitist. Nothing is ineffable. Here I concur with Harold Bloom, who wrote in Omens of Millennium:
A transcendence that cannot somehow be expressed is an incoherence; authentic transcendence can be communicated by mastery of language, since metaphor is a transference, a carrying-across from one kind of experience to another.
Or, as my wife Catherine puts it more succinctly, "Words are worth a thousand pictures."
Now some readers may think I'm picking a fight with Einspruch and Bannard. No, they're just there as examples. We could tap the concourse until we had many many statements about so-called "ineffability." Anyway, I'm not going to notify anyone I've mentioned in this post. If they find it, they find it. If not, not.
What, you think elitist artists are unique? I brought these examples forth because they might provide grounds for fruitful investigation, instead of those of us outside their orbit having to take as weighty the hand-waving, peremptory judgments of an elite. A Q-sort is an effective democratizer, and often opens up entirely new conversations. The world of arts professionals could use some new ones.
Posted by Jerome at April 21, 2008 09:16 AM | TrackBack