“I can’t help but wonder if perhaps I.Q. is going out of style. Maybe pure intellect, once so revered, is becoming something of a party trick, like double-jointedness, or the ability to sing drinking songs in German.”

I like Bloom’s book; the fact that I consider it to be partly inspired by a creative failure is not a criticism of its content. In fact, I think that Bloom’s description of the virtuosic desperation evident in Pynchon hews very close to my own discussion of “noodling” in this post. Going along with Rich’s comment, I think the idea that Bloom wanted to be a creative writer and failed should be completely non-controversial. Bloom himself notes that he wrote The Anxiety of Influence, ostensibly about creative artists, after a nervous breakdown and depressive period when he did nothing but read Emerson and Freud.

I get the gist of your second point, for sure — keeping faith with intelligence helps prevent us from judging people according to their success on the market. However, it makes so much more sense to describe Reardon as someone who has written two novels he can’t sell, than it does to describe him as someone intelligent. In the former case, society is unjustly ignoring him; in the latter, it’s too bad that the books don’t find an audience, but he could presumably do something else instead.

http://nickpiombino.blogspot.com/2007_07_15_archive.html#1433111387544818636

and

http://www.pseudopodium.org/ht-20070528.html#2007-07-15

I think Nicholas sharpened what might pass as my point much better than I did, though, so you might as well skip the second one.

I’ve thought about your comment a great deal; I have no argument with your defense of tests of certain kinds of reasoning.

There are, for example, cases where a person who appears to be incapable of “learning the material” is having a different sort of problem, and high test scores bear this out. In some ways, this begs the question, since little else in life resembles a standardized reasoning test. Still, psychologists, educators, administrators, and admissions officers can all use unexpected contrasts to better understand their charges. I would argue that we should understand such contrasts in terms of environmental inhibitors for particular subjects, rather than in terms of “repressed” native intelligence.

Vocabulary is a great example of the Scylla and Charybdis of discussions about intelligence. On the one hand, it’s fairly clear that young people have other skills that sort of “compensate” for their lack of reading skills (including their more limited knowledge of conventional English). They are better at interpreting visual signs, and perhaps also better at navigating different linguistic registers (e.g. using reference and slang).

On the other hand, a decreased vocabulary is not nothing. The ability to be articulate in a variety of different rhetorical situations depends partly on vocabulary. So, again, the point is not to find out where intelligence is “hiding,” but rather to evaluate performance in context, and try to understand what contradictions exist in our processes of acculturation and education.

If I could just say one thing in defence of IQ testing in contemporary psychological practice (my mother is a practicing psychologist, so I have some vicarious insight): IQ testing is a very limited, partial aspect of intervention and assessment. It is, and should only ever be used, in the sense of a partial tool, which is to a large degree entirely subordinated to other measures such as judgement of emotional state or, for example, concrete behavioral intervention. That is, like any tool, it may tell you something, and open a door to inquiry. Like a specific element of the test, let’s take vocabulary: nobody thinks this is entirely reliable, one may be fond of memorizing dictionaries, but generally it can be an indicator, nothing more. It suggests then, perhaps, certain routes to follow, and produces more questions to ask in an interventionist scenario where more weight will be given to such questions as “In what way do you deal with this or that problem? Why do you choose these particular ways?”.

I just wonder whether we’re not ignoring how some of these pure “tools” are actually quotidianly limited and employed.

Thanks so much! I wanted to highlight one sentence in particular from your notes, which puts the matter so very well:

…even if we wanted to take IQ as a measure of intelligence (which would seem problematic, once it’s exposed as more a measure of privilege), it’s likely to be the result of a whole series of different characteristics which have historically become valued, no one of which dictates IQ.

In very short:

Intelligence is the “capital” that enables us to acquire specific skills, and the exchangeable return on investment for specific skills. Hence it is like money, whereas skill need not be sold on the market. Plenty of amateur musicians take pleasure in being skilled, as do amateur chess players, and so on. When it is a question of vocation, not avocation, obviously skill and performance have to be the main criteria.

The “intelligence” myth, rather than pleasure in skill, has saddled us with the binary of challenging works of art vs. pleasurable works of art. We feel “guilty” about pop culture because it’s not “intelligent” enough to help us think better, a la the Mozart effect. (Meanwhile, of course, we don’t really feel guilty at all.) I’m not the one arguing for use-value; instead, I’m arguing against the reduction of challenging art to the exercise of intelligence.

Complex immediacy — a busy guitar solo, a frenzied Freudian packing (in the name of unpacking) of some hapless work of art — should not be used as a wedge to dislodge culture or action from its historical context, in the name of supposedly irreproachable intellectual pleasures. Just because the punk/prog divide was a good opportunity for proving the point, does not mean that every prog album failed to have historical meaning.

Sorry that these are mere notes; hopefully you can see where I was tending.