The Movement You Need is On Your Shoulders

Rebooting

2011-06-17T21:51:00.002-04:00

I wonder if we can rethink this blog in light of what's coming up in the fall?
I think if we rethink this in terms of compiling an education dossier or generally collecting text on the processes that i would like to learn about and implement, that would be a good way to reboot this blog.

Sighh

2011-05-24T09:34:00.001-04:00

Fyuck

The Sound of Epic Suck and Fail.

2010-06-14T22:02:00.003-04:00

Let's be real honest here; I suck. Badly. This was supposed to be this great site that I was using as a way to document the journey through school. And though that sounds cheesy it was sort of what I was going for. At least that was one of the plans.

Then I stumbled...Badly again... and fell out of the loop or whatever for this thing.

And it's not just school...The house fell apart....figuratively as well as literally in some ways..

SUCK!!! But anyway, that's what's what and all that stuff.

How to rearrange and reaquire the target?
Simple.
START...somewhere, doing something...dedicate and I mean seriously honestly COMMIT to an hour doing SOMEthing.
10+2x5 the Mofo...
Anyway...back.

2009-03-07T13:59:00.001-05:00

Compiled by Prof. Alan Marscher, Director, Center for Excellence in Teaching, Boston University, for a faculty development workshop on February 13, 2006; some items were contributed by attendees at the workshop. One of the attendees strongly recommended David Allen's “Getting Things Done” book, available at http://www.davidco.com/store/catalog/Getting-Things-Done-Paperback-p-16175.php.

I. General

A. Keeping track of what you need to do
1. Write things you need to remember to do in your date book, calendar, PDA, etc.
2. Prioritize your list:
a. Important items with deadlines
b. Less critical items with deadlines
c. Important items without deadlines: give yourself target deadlines
d. Less critical items without deadline
3. Also categorize each task according to the time you think it will require
B. Planning your day, week, & semester or summer
1. Block out parcels of time for which you have obligations
2. Block out parcels of time for yourself: personal e-mails, relaxation, reflection, coffee break with friends, etc.
3. When you have a block of free time, consult your list of tasks & do those that fit into the time slot, starting with the highest priority
4. Minimize travel to essential (includes vacation!) trips
5. Organize your out-of-class time with students
a. Office hours, meeting times
b. Meet in groups if possible: can be beneficial to students to interact with peers, saves you time
c. Letters of recommendation:
i. Have students supply addressed, stamped envelopes well ahead of deadline
ii. Have students fill out an information form to give you material for letters
C. Cut corners whenever possible
1. Consider trade-off of quality vs. time
2. If you are not naturally great at a lower-priority duty, don’t compensate with higher priority
D. Back up all your work!
1. Hardcopies
2. CD-ROM, large back-up disk, whatever – it takes too much time to re-create!
E. Make others aware of your deadlines: chair, colleagues, staff, students, family
F. Maintain a good (for you) filing system
G. E-mail
1. You do not need to respond immediately to messages!
2. If a student asks a question of general relevance, send reply to entire class
3. If reply would need to be lengthy, use phone call or office visit instead
4. If you will be away from e-mail for extended period, set up a “vacation” message
Write that you will reply to messages after your return as time permits – don’t promise!
5. If faced with a pile of e-mails, go through them from latest to earliest (some issues will have already been resolved)
H. Maintain a list of accomplished tasks
For your annual report and to gain some satisfaction when many tasks are not yet done
I. Off-load tasks that you can delegate to staff and/or students
Choose tasks carefully so that time for instructions & amending their work is limited
J. Maintain a log for a week, 2 weeks, or month of how you actually spend your time
If actual time spent does not match priorities, make adjustments
K. For every new responsibility, research area, student working with you, etc.:
You MUST drop something else that takes your time.
II. Classes

A. Preparation
1. Aim for less than 2:1 prep to class time ratio for familiar topics
a. Longer prep time for less familiar topics, but give yourself a cut-off
b. Don’t aim for perfection the first time you teach a course
2. Plan to cover only about half of your initial estimate of material
a. Applies to composing syllabus as well
b. Plan time to interact with students to determine how well they are absorbing material
3. Use technology only when it really adds value
a. Consider using PowerPoint only for images + captions, animations/videos, etc.
b. At most, include outline in presentation (perhaps more in notes posted on website)
4. Unless extensive research is needed, start preparing only within a few days of class
a. Reduces prep time
b. Reduces need to refresh memory
5. Give yourself (& students!) an occasional prep break: class discussion, review session, group activity, discussion of assignment(s), guest lecturer, video, etc.
6. Write down list of items you will need to take to class
B. Before Class
1. Give yourself 15-30 minutes to collect your thoughts (& yourself!)
2. Check list you wrote beforehand of items you need to take to class
C. Immediately After Class
1. Write down issues that you need to consider for the next class & questions for exam
2. Give yourself some personal wind-down time
III. Service Duties

A. Volunteer for one or two departmental/college service duties that you think you would be worthwhile and not take too much time
B. Requests for service by your chair, dean, etc.
1. Learn (with help of mentor) what requests you can safely refuse
2. Say "no" if you really don’t think that you have time or want to perform the duty
3. If a straight "no" is infeasible, ask your boss what other service duties you can drop to make time for the new duty
IV. Research

A. Finding the time
1. Create blocks of time for research during the semester
a. No non-research-related e-mail, no phone calls, etc.
b. Find the best place with minimal distractions but with necessary resources
2. Stop working on academics within a few days of the end of classes
3. Don’t start working diligently on your classes again until late in the summer
B. Summers
1. Think of summer research time as almost over on June 1: get cracking!
2. Confine work on academics to relatively small blocks of time

Cheats for Essay writing

2009-03-05T15:50:00.000-05:00

1. Generate the Ideas 1. Generate the Ideas
Key verbs for this phase: SPEW and VOMIT

Goal: Empty your head; articulate the ideas. You’re
writing for yourself

•
Write whole sentences or phrases; avoid
keywords
•
Write down the silly and half-baked ideas too
•
Turn off the internal editor/censor
•
Don’t wait for a fully-formed idea; write down
what you’ve got
•
Use the words you have to attract the words you
want
•
Let your mind roam
•
Don’t avoid conflict—list pros and cons
•
Talk to yourself—these are private notes
•
You don’t get the idea and then write. You write
to get the idea.
•
Focus on QUANTITY—let the QUALITY take
care of itself
•
Generate more text than you think you’ll need
Move on to the next stage when you feel nothing
new is coming out.

Take a Break

•
Take a long break if you can afford it.
•
If time presses, divide the effort into thirds: spend
a third of your time on generating, a third
composing, a third expressing.
2. Compose the Ideas
Label the ideas with topic headings
1.
Print out your ideas file and label lines,
paragraphs, chunks of prose with topic headings.
2.
Write marginalia, annotations, additions on
separate paper. But do it quick; don’t linger.
3.
With ideas on paper to react to, you’ll get more
ideas. Write them down.
4.
You’re still writing for yourself. Don’t force
anything.
5.
Don’t worry about sequence; that comes later.
Just tag your ideas.
THINKING ON PAPER CHEATSHEET

Take a break

•
Congratulate yourself on the amount of raw prose
you’ve written.
•
Live with your ideas without the pressure of full
concentration.
Retype the topical draft

Yes, retype it. The whole thing.

1.
Group the topics together. Incorporate the
marginalia, annotations, and additions.
2.
If you feel inspired, add stuff, but don’t force it.
3.
Add little corrections, linking phrases, subtle
changes along the way. But don’t force them.
You’re still writing for yourself.
4.
Think of this activity as mainly retyping, though
more than that is going on.
Rewriting is rethinking. You’re re-engaging with
your material, turning what was static thinking into
active thinking.

Think of it as reshuffling, neatening your notes.

You want to keep the pressure off. Tell yourself this is
mainly mechanical, a clean-up operation.

This is your FIRST DRAFT.

Take a break

Bask in the warm glow of your productivity.

You’ve proven to yourself that you have lots of ideas
and you have lots to say.

Sequence the topics

1.
Print out the topical first draft.
2.
Mark with arrows, numbers, letters, etc. a
sequence or sets of sequences.
3.
Mark some areas “Intro,” “Conclusion,” “Main
Body,” “Supporting Evidence,” etc.
Now you’re starting to transition from writing for
yourself to writing for your reader. Think about the
arrangement of topics that will convince your reader.

Note to yourself the connections among the
various items. Add connecting phrases: this
suggests, moreover, on the other hand, etc. Seal
those relations for yourself and your reader.

This is your SECOND DRAFT.

Take a break.

3. Express the Ideas
This is the performance part of writing, where
you’re onstage.

Goal: Communicating with others.

Now’s the time to worry about style, grammar,
formatting, language, tone, etc. But it should be
easier since you’re now editing structured prose, not
generating and figuring out ideas on the fly.

Sharpen your ideas and arguments. For every
statement, ask “So what?” and “Specify!” as ways to
clarify points and to anticipate stupid reader questions
and stupid reader objections.

Retype

You knew that was coming. Remember: rewriting is
rethinking, no matter how mechanical it feels.
Experience your writing as the reader will experience
it: one word at a time.

This is an advanced stage of revision. The big
pieces should be in place by now. So keep the
changes small, unless the big changes easily suggest
themselves.

Sleep on this draft.

Read it aloud. You’ll be surprised at the small but
important changes that pop out at you.

Show it to others. Get their opinion on how to make
it stronger.

Monitoring Your Progress
Writing is a continuous process of generation,
composition, and expression. Phases are repeated
and sometimes combined (particularly the last stages
of revision).

You may skip from one phase to another,

sometimes to good effect, sometimes not.

Be aware of where you are in the process. Try to
keep generating, composing, and expressing
sequential. Avoid blocks or confusion from doing too
much at once or reaching for a final effect too early.

http://brownstudy.pbwiki.com/f/mikestipsheet.pdf
Page 1 of 2

THINKING ON PAPER CHEATSHEET

Evil Metaphors & Cliches 1
(anything) from hell
a laugh a minute
a question mark hangs over
about face
ahead of the curve
all in due time
all the way to the bank
at the end of the day
at this point in time (prefer “now”)
barking up the wrong tree
bated breath
bear fruit
bend over backwards
better late than never
blazing inferno
braindump
brainstorm
break down barriers
brutal reminder
building bridges
burn the midnight oil
burning bridges
business at hand
call it a day
carnival atmosphere
chew the fat
clean bill of health
cookie cutter
devil is in the details
dog eat dog
dog in the fight
due to (prefer "owing to" or "because of")
eat your own dog food
firestorm
firing on all cylinders
fly by night
food fight
freak accident
full-scale search
gangbusters
get a handle on
grease the skids
herding cats
holding feet to the fire
horror smash
hot pursuit
impact (as a verb)
in order to (prefer "to")
in the black
in the nick of time
in the red
last-ditch effort
leaning forward in the saddle
leave no stone unturned
Evil Metaphors & Cliches 2
left at the altar
lessons learned
let a thousand flowers bloom
level playing field
long pole in the tent
low-hanging fruit
may or may not (may implies "may not")
nose to the grindstone
not ready for prime time
on a weekly basis
on steroids
open a can of worms
outpouring of support
proactive (one is either active or inactive)
quite frankly
red herring
reinvent the wheel
run it up the flag pole
rushed to the scene
same sheet of music
sense of urgency
showstopper
shrouded in mystery
silos
slippery slope
sooner rather than later
split second
stove pipe
straw man
survival of the fittest
synergy
talk off line
teach how to fish
tense standoff
the cart before the horse
the eleventh hour
the fact (of the matter) is
the long and short of it is
think outside the box
time after time
time and again
time heals all wounds
time is money
time is running out
to be honest with you
touch base
unsung heroes
up the ante
utilize (prefer “use”)
wealth of experience
wipe the slate clean
with all due respect
work in a vacuum
zero tolerance
Evil Passive Verbs
is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been, I'm,
it's, he's, here's, she's, that's, there's, they're,
we're, what's, who's, you're
Books
Thinking on Paper by VA Howard & JH Barton
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orlando
Revising Business Prose by Richard Lanham
(or any of his books on revising prose)
URLs
Continuous revision process
http://markforster.net/index.php?view=38
Paramedic Method for Revising Prose
http://www.yale.edu/bass/2paramedic.html
Mike Shea’s writing tips PDF
http://mikeshea.net/writing_tips.pdf
See how this presentation evolved:
http://brownstudy.pbwiki.com/InlsFinalProject
Remember…
• Don’t wait for the Muse. Writing is an activity,
something you do—it is not something that
happens to you.
• Inspiration doesn’t strike when you’re
writing—it strikes when you’re in the shower.
• Writing is like prospecting for gold.
Sometimes we make a lucky find of a nugget
on the ground, but most of the time, it takes a
lot of sifting to find the precious metal in the
sand.
• Use the words you have to find the words
you want.
Diagnosing Prose Problems
1. Circle the prepositions (before, after, in, on,
to, apart, for, into, above, from, by, beside,
over, among, through, around, between, etc.)
2. Circle the "to be" forms.
3. Ask "Who is kicking whom?"
4. Put this action (the "kicking") in a simple
active verb.
5. Start fast—no mindless introductions.
6. Watch out for “shun” forms
(recommendation, initiation, interpretation,
etc.)
7. For each sentence, mark off its basic
rhythmic units with “/”. How monotonous does
the passage sound?
8. Read the passage aloud with emphasis and
feeling.
9. Mark off sentence lengths in a passage with
“/”. Do sentence lengths vary?
Process Variations
Continuous revision. Generate ideas, think
in full sentences, but stay inside one file.
Revising and embellishing, not retyping. Every
time you go back, you add more to it. Works
best with the "little and often" strategy. Good
for when you want to teach yourself about a
specific topic.
Oral presentation with no final written
product. Generate, organize, and sequence
the ideas as explained. Use these as the basis
of your outline. If you don’t want to use notes
during your presentation: Open a blank file
and type out your presentation without
referring to your notes. See if you own the
information.
Orwell s Questions
• What am I trying to say?
• What words will express it?
• What image or idiom will make it clearer?
• Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
• Could I put it more shortly?
• Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Orwell s Rules
• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure
of speech which you are used to seeing in
print.
• Never us a long word where a short one will
do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use
the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word,
or jargon if you can think of an everyday
English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say
anything outright barbarous.
Causes of Writer s Block
• Doing too many things at once. For example,
expressing ideas before they’re fully
articulated.
• Trying to get it right the first time.
Believing you need to have the right words
now, instead of writing now and finding the
words later.
• “Real writers only do first drafts.”
• Waiting for the Muse / inspiration / your
subconscious to gift you with ideas.
Fear. Dread. Boredom.
• “All I need is will power and self-discipline.”

the odd creative position that playing a game creates

2009-01-29T10:50:00.001-05:00

On another level, there’s the odd creative position that playing a game creates in terms of the opposition between the self-creating of the narrative through the play-process and the limitations placed upon you by the parameters and depth and programming. We need to ask ourselves how this is alike or different from conventional ‘fanfic’ writing. Are we not limited by the boundaries of the format from which we are poaching, in the same way that we can't escape past the boundaries of allowable play within a game? There are differences, but there are also similarities that are intrinsic to both: a sense of ‘play’ within the margins, as well as the opportunity to explore those margins. The primary goal of fanfic is to celebrate the source text, even as the edges of that text are being extended.

One of the primary questions I have

2009-01-29T10:49:00.001-05:00

One of the primary questions I have with higher-level fan fiction is the inherent legitimacy of the revisions, in view of “canon”. An example, indeed the one that started me thinking about this question, is that of the Star Trek novels of Alan Dean Foster, written in the 1970s. To understand the potential importance of his work, we need to remember that this period was the gap between the original run of the series (1966-68) and the return of the “official story” with the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. While Gene Roddenberry and later Ric Berman refer to the series--now a franchise of series-- and motion pictures as solely representing the canonical text of the Star Trek story-line, Foster’s work arguably influenced the content of the story-lines in the movies as well as maintaining both interest and sufficient remembrance of the series throughout the decade-long period in which no official text was being created. The question is then how much of this influence translates into actual authority, in terms of the text. The answer is surprisingly little officially; the Roddenberry/Berman-authorised canon remains hegemonic in the world of Star Trek.
However, when represented in new textual formats, the authorial dichotomy of ‘canonical’ and ‘peripheral’ text is often inverted. For example, YouTube parodies such as “mishaps” represent the new canon in that genre, with traditional textual representations relegated to the status of peripheral influence and cultural source language in Saussurean semiotic terms. The ideas of symbology, discrete and deliberate choice are repeated. However, it would be easy to see the differences solely in terms of symbology. Hwever the truth is more layered than a simple, single point of derivation; for every narrative “beat” in the new media there is an implied collective knowledge, one that is assumed to be understood by the viewer

Me Teach Essay Making Real Good.

2008-12-01T09:27:00.005-05:00

As you may or may not know (probably the latter) this is my second year working here: /www.queensu.ca/writingcentre

This year I got traded up to being a PAID member of the staff there, instead of volunteering there. ( One obviously led to the other, so I consider it time well-spent on a number of levels).

I really like the job, despite the occasional challenge of unravelling a student's thesis from the mass of disjointed sentences spread across a half dozen pages.

If there was to be ONE thing I'd change, were I in charge (and maybe with a bit more experience, I'd see that the system doesn't even need tweaking) it'd be the idea of actually having a formal course in tutoring; You just sort of sit in and after a session or two, they assume that since you're supposedly a hot shit Upper Year or Grad Student, YOU automatically know how to make the Froshies and 2Ys in your own image...

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. What I seemingly, and I say this because it's seldom obvious even to me on the first go round, even after 10 (1o!!!) years in Uni...what I seemingly find is obvious to me is also hard to articulate to someone else...You often see these glaring structural issues and think "How can you THINK that there's a good, cogent argument in here???"

Writing in the Margins: Organic Development of Canon in FanFic and Game-Playing

2008-09-28T22:07:00.004-04:00

It is the common cultural attributes of media that allow us to decipher the "code" of visual text. Unlike spoken language, which is a result of a consensual cultural tradition and subject to the input of various external sources, visual text--especially that of moving visual text-- is a result of a limited arbitrary pool of conventions being presented as a truncated form of 'language', much in the vein of a computer code. The limitation of the system is that the community from which it arises--and therefore the resultant language that emerges from it-- is even more arbitrary than usual. However, there is a tradition of cinematic and visual media conventions that form a core of reference as much as any language in existence. Even though cinematic language is only about 120 years old, it has already built up a sufficient repertoire of references that we need to realise that it is a language unto itself. Like all languages, although the choice of signifier might be arbitrary, the reception of it is not; like all languages, Media is subject to approval and acceptance by the recipients. We as media consumer-critics look at this mass of incoming signal and decide which of these conventions we will accept and perpetuate and which we will reject. There is the concept of cultural acceptance and compatibility that Malcolm Gladwell has labelled “stickiness”(Gladwell 1996).

Thesis Subject:Semiotics/symbology in YouTube remixed trailer mock-ups.

2008-04-29T08:34:00.000-04:00

Structure:

Intro.

Saussurean background.

Identify elements

History of those elements

Importance of the basic symbology.

Continuance of that influence in today's culture.

Implications of Influence.

Conclusion.

"Hi, I'm Mike and I'm an Internet Addict"

2007-03-23T12:30:00.000-04:00

"Hi Mike"

Seriously, though...I had to re-re-remove myself from IMDb....and still I just can't seem to get away from wasting time there, and I know that it's really putting the boots to my work....and I need to really rethink my attitude towards a lot of things...Ummm, there has to be this sort of limit that I put upon myself and really just attach myself to it...I mean, I realise that it's stupid to be ON the internet while complaining that I shouldn't be on the internet....

Anyway, I think that what I really want to do and need to do is just say no to the chat and the groups and IMDb and all that shizzit and concentrate on Getting Stuff Done...I know it's a work in progress and I'm sure that there is a lot more to be done... so...stay tuned...

Lynch on stuff.

2007-02-17T21:10:00.001-05:00

More on one of my fave Directors and artists:
Lifted from IMDb. com, just so you know....

David Lynch has beautiful hands. They stay folded much of the time, but when the director gets going, when his conversation begins to flow and an idea buzzes in his head like a fluorescent bulb, his fingers flutter in unison and his palms sweep in synchronized arcs. When this happens, Lynch could be a magician working some undefined "presto-change-o" mojo over an upside-down top hat. It makes you wonder—is he about to manifest a rabbit?
Actually, yes. Three of them. Life-sized humanoid suckers, trapped in some purgatorial deadpan sitcom. They materialize early and late in Inland Empire, and are scarcely the strangest things on display in this three-hour excursion through disintegrating consciousness, multiple darkened rooms of gloom and pretzeling movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie ambiguities. The film-which Lynch shot himself, on and off for three years, with a consumer-model Sony PD150 digital-video camera-is easily his most challenging and out there since the midnight-movie era of Eraserhead, some 30 years ago. Much as then, the new film is trickling out to theaters, city by city. It's practically being hand-distributed by Rhino (best known as a record company specializing in sometimes zany archival reissues) who will release Inland Empire as a DVD this summer.
It is, like every Lynch film save Dune, exactly what he wanted to make-a kind of parallel to the Hollywood noir of Mulholland Dr. (Just whose voices belong to those rabbits?) This time, however, there's only one actress, a fading, 40-ish star played by Laura Dern (who also starred in Lynch's Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart), whose onscreen and off-screen personas get scrambled inside her head. There's also a grim Polish saga that might have something to do with white slavery, a chorus line of streetwalkers, a Gypsy curse, a pretty brunette who sits alone in a hotel room weeping, and a pet monkey. But that's the easy stuff.
"When Mulholland Dr. came out, no one understood it," says Lynch, sitting in a candy-colored studio in a huge Chelsea nonprofit arts complex that's been secured for his low-budget promotional visit to New York. His silver hair is swept up into the kind of semi-pompadour that would do a televangelist proud, and his white shirt is buttoned to the neck under a formal black blazer. "Now, everyone understands that one but they don't understand this one." Not that Lynch understood it himself when he began shooting the fragments that would eventually become Inland Empire, a title that alludes to the non-coastal region southeast of Los Angeles, but primarily to the interior landscape of the mind, the director's playground.
'CINEMATIC JAZZ'
"When he called me, he said 'Let's experiment.' Those were the first words out of his mouth," says Dern, who appears in almost every scene of the movie, and who gave up so much of her time to assist with the often nebulous enterprise that Lynch gave her a producer credit. Dern was given a 70-minute monologue that Lynch had written, its segments forming the oscillating core of the finished work. "I loved that I played a character I couldn't even define. It's so all over the map, and to have someone trust you enough to say you can be all these aspects of a woman-it's the greatest sense of flying off a mountain."
Dern's co-star, fellow Lynch veteran Justin Theroux, reaches for a different comparison. "It's like cinematic jazz," says the actor, who had a key role in Mulholland Dr. "There's just something that happens in his films that obviously doesn't follow the conventions of normal storytelling. It eventually becomes its own animal." As the actors worked in scenes that were assembled in bits and pieces, they often seemed to be performing in a kind of void. "There are some scenes we shot, and on that day the lines are so funny, we're just cracking up. Then when you see them in the film it's a heart attack."
That's the sort of juxtaposition on which Lynch thrives. "The unknown pulls you in and it's kind of thrilling," he says, never quite explicating the journey. He becomes verbose, however, when discussing his experience with digital video. "My film students tell me, 'Geez, David, they make us work on the PD150 and we can hardly wait to get ahold of a Panavision and shoot 35 [mm] and you're leaving Panavision to use the PD150!?!'"
Fine for taking cinematic notes, perhaps, but, c'mon man, it's not even high-def.
"It's the way I want to shoot everything," Lynch insists. "It's not just for 'taking notes.' I'm falling in love with the way it goes with this small lightweight camera, with its 40-minute takes and the automatic focus, and seeing what you get, seeing it right there. You see exactly what it's going to look like and if you don't like it you can alter it. Once you get into a scene you can stay in there, deep, for a long time. You can talk to people while you're shooting the thing. Start again, get a little deeper. Start it again and catch a thing, and you don't have to interrupt it."
Suggest to Lynch that he's pushed the camera to its visual limits-giving Inland Empire a grainy, sometimes harsh look that might come from poor TV reception augmented by a broken contrast knob-and he gets even more excitable. "Yeah, it's bad quality," he says. "I'm not pushing it to make it worse. I'm seeing that it's out of focus and I don't give a shit! It's workin' for me. It's just beautiful to me."
'JIMMY STEWART FROM MARS'
This does sound perfect for Lynch, who's a full-time creative tinkerer, not terribly unlike the urbane scoutmaster he might be in a parallel universe, easily suggested by his warm, "Hey, Buddy!" persona and Midwestern twang. ("Jimmy Stewart from Mars," is how Mel Brooks described him, and it still rings true.) Daily, he indulges his love of painting, enjoys photographing nudes, builds his own furniture, and even delivers brief video weather reports weekdays on the free section of his website: DavidLynch.com. And, lately, Lynch has spoken a lot about another enthusiasm, Transcendental meditation, and the influence it's had on his life. Once a skeptic, he's practiced the discipline for 20 minutes twice a day since 1973 and credits it with leading him to "this unified field, pure-bliss consciousness." Lynch refers to this interior space by the Vedic phrase atma. "The self," he says. "Know that. Know it by being it, and you got the whole thing." Puzzled moviegoers groping for a skeleton key to the Lynchian funhouse, there you have it.
"Life becomes more like a game," Lynch says, fingers dancing. "It's way more fun to me. Way more fun. Every morning becomes more like a Saturday morning, a really sunny day. And all weekend you get to do your favorite things." He shares his inspirational thoughts in a new book, Catching the Big Fish, which is only one of many current projects. There's also Dynamic: 01, a DVD of weirdness from the website; the DVD release of the second season of Twin Peaks, Lynch's cult TV series; a March exhibit of paintings in Paris; and even his own brand of coffee.
That's right, look for David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee online and at theaters showing Inland Empire. "It's really good coffee," Lynch exclaims, settling for Starbucks this particular afternoon, smoke curling from the American Spirit cigarette he pinches between his left thumb and forefinger, held perpendicular from his upturned palm. "I drink 20 cups a day. But they're cappuccinos. There's not that much espresso in with the milk."
Now, we can all drink this strange brew. "It's perfect for art houses," Lynch says. "Like going back to the Beatnik days. Like coffee should be!"

CHANGING COPYRIGHT

2007-01-27T08:02:00.000-05:00

In an attempt to suggest a culturally sane solution to the continuing legal confrontations between owners of copyrighted cultural material and others who collage such material into new creations, we advocate a broadening of the copyright concept of Fair Use. We want the Fair Use statutes within copyright law to allow for a much broader variety of free, creative reuses of existing work whenever they are used in the creation of new work. The world wide corporate assumption of private cultural ownership is now fencing off such timely artistic directions by using copyright law to assert that virtually any form of reuse without payment or permission is theft. From their economic point of view, cultural owners now use copyright law as a convenient shield from "direct reference" criticism, and a legal justification for total spin control and informational monopolization in the marketplace.
However, from an artistic point of view, it is ponderously delusional to try to paint all these new forms of fragmentary sampling as economically motivated "theft", "piracy", or "bootlegging". We reserve these terms for the unauthorized taking of whole works and reselling them for one's own profit. Artists who routinely appropriate, on the other hand, are not attempting to profit from the marketability of their subjects at all. They are using elements, fragments, or pieces of someone else's created artifact in the creation of a new one for artistic reasons. These elements may remain identifiable, or they may be transformed to varying degrees as they are incorporated into the new creation, where there may be many other fragments all in a new context, forming a new "whole". This becomes a new "original", neither reminiscent of nor competitive with any of the many "originals" it may draw from. This is also a brief description of collage techniques which have developed throughout this century, and which are universally celebrated as artistically valid, socially aware, and conceptually stimulating to all, it seems, except perhaps those who are "borrowed" from.
No one much cared about the centuries old tradition of appropriation in classical music as long as it could only be heard when it was played live in front of your ears. But now all music exists as a mass produced, saleable object, electronically frozen for all time, and seen by its owners to be in continuous, simultaneous economic competition with all other music. The previously interesting idea that someone's music might freely include some appropriated music of another has now been made into a criminal activity. This example is typical of how copyright laws now actually serve to inhibit or prevent the creative process, itself, from proceeding in certain interesting ways, both traditional and new.
This has become a pressing problem for creativity now because the creative technique of appropriation has jumped from the mediums in which it first appeared (principally in the visual fine arts of painting, printmaking, and sculpture) to popular, electronic mass distributed mediums such as photography, recorded music, and multimedia. The appearance of appropriation techniques in these more recent mass mediums have occasioned a huge increase in owner litigations of such appropriation based works because the commercial entrepenours who now own and operate mass culture are apparently intent on oblitering all distinctions between the needs of art and the needs of commerce. These owners of mass produced cultural material claim that similarly mass produced works of appropriation are a new and devastating threat to their total control over the exclusive profits which their properties might produce in the same mass marketplace. They claim that, art or not, an unauthorized appropriation of any kind can not be allowed to directly compete in the appropriated material's avenue of commerce, as if they were equal in content, and equal in intent. The degree to which the unique nature and needs of art practice do not play any part in this thinking is more than slightly insane.
Consider the starkly stupid proposition that collage has now become illegal in music unless the artist can afford to pay for each and every fragment he or she might want to use, as well as gain permission from each and every owner. Consider how this puts a stop to all independent, non-corporate forms of collage in music, and how those corporately funded collage works which can afford the tolls had better be flattering to the owner in their usage. Where does such a routine thwarting of common free expression lead to? Society does not thrive on commerce alone, and an enlightened one would have long ago established the legal primacy of artistic intent and authority to be at least equal to that of private commercial activities when these two social forces come to blows within our free market system. One feeds the mouth, but the other feeds the spirit, and either one without the other can only be seen as a form of societal decline. And if you don't think the overwhelming colonization and monopolization of creative formats by economic interests has had a debilitating effect on the very practice of creativity, you have already succumbed to that homogenized haze of inconsequence which commercial media surrounds us with day in and day out.
Because art is not defined as a business, yet must compete for economic survival in the business marketplace, we think certain legal priorities in the idea of copyright should be turned upside down. Specifically, a revision of the Fair Use statutes should throw the benefit of the doubt to artistic reuse and place the burden of proof on the owner/litigator. When a copyright owner wished to contend an unauthorized reuse of their property, they would have to show essentially that the usage does not result in anything new beyond the original work appropriated. However, if the new work is judged to significantly fragment, transform, rearrange, or recompose the appropriated material, and particularly does not use the entire work appropriated from, then it should be seen as a valid fair use - an original attempt at new art whether or not the result is successful and pleasing to the original artist, the owners of his or her work, or the court.
This would fully protect the owner's undisputed right not to be bootlegged, and it's NOT difficult to determine! Think of any past or present examples of unauthorized bootlegging, and any past or present examples of artistic appropriation, and you will find it is always perfectly obvious which is which. The difference between any kind of fragmentary transformation of existing work, and the unmanipulated presentation of whole works by others, which is required for successful bootlegging, would be as clear to courts and jurys as it is to us. But this is precisely the crucial distinction in methodology which present law seems unwilling to acknowledge, thus throwing all kinds of valuable creative techniques and motivations into the same criminal hopper with economically motivated ripoffs. Both our courts and our corporations are now in the untenable position of assuming that once a work becomes a saleable object, that becomes its only significant roll in society, and that roll is the only one the law should be concerned with.
We acknowledge there are some complex difficulties in delineating exactly how fragmentary appropriation and esthetic motivation might be defined and allowed within revised Fair Use statutes. But awkward as that process may seem, we think that effort is possible. We presently see neither wisdom nor integrity in a set of laws that, except for very narrowly interpreted "fair use" allowances, simply ignores the validity, even the very existence of various established and valued art practices based on "direct referencing", (Surrealism for example) which have evolved through art formats of all kinds since the turn of this Century, yet do not necessarily fit within the Fair Use guidelines. Now it is implied that artists should actually strive to fit within the narrowly specified "Fair Use" government guidelines whenever attempting to use appropriated elements in new work. But when you become aware of the tiny sliver of specific artistic activity which Fair Use now allows, it doesn't take an artist to see that there is much more to be done with all the media influences which surround us. These ideas range far, wide, and weird, not always following the strictly defined "rules" of parody or carefully controlled commentary which the tiny tunnel of Fair Use statutes now provide for.
Please consider the ungenerous and uncreative logic we are overlaying our culture with. Artists will always be interested in sampling from existing cultural icons and artifacts precisely because of how they express and symbolize something potently recognizable about the culture from which both they and this new work spring. The owners of such artifacts and icons are seldom happy to see their properties in unauthorized contexts which may be antithetical to the way they are spinning them. Their kneejerk use of copyright restrictions to crush this kind of work now amounts to corporate censorship of unwanted independent work. Unlike the basic thrust of all the rest of U.S. law, copyright law actually assumes that all unauthorized uses are illegal until proven innocent, and any contested "fair use" always requires a legal defense, which remains beyond the financial grasp of most accused "infringers". This financial intimidation results in the vast majority of art appropriators caving in and settling out of court, their work being consigned to oblivion, and the "owners" having it all their way, including their expenses paid under the guise of "damages".
The question we want you to consider is this: Should those who might be borrowed from have an absolute right to prevent any such future reuses of their properties, even when the reuse is obviously part of a new and unique work? Do we want to actually put all forms of free reuse under the heading of "theft" and criminalize a valuable art form such as collage? - A form which may involve controversial social/cultural references and cannot operate true to its vision when permission is required. Present copyright prohibitions appear unable to appreciate the flow of the art forest because they are forever fixated on the money trees. One might say that Soviet Communism finally fell because it insisted on ignoring the human nature of its own citizens. Here in the land of the free, as well as everywhere else, it is basic to human nature to copy for our own creative purposes - in fact, it's how we got to this level of civilization. This ageless aspect of human creativity is nothing but desirable and need not be criminalized when the motive is to create new work.
The law must acknowledge the logical and inalienable right of artists, not publishers and manufacturers, to determine what new art will consist of. The current corporate control over our technologically based culture has an ominous feel to it because these private owners of our common cultural life have succeeded in removing the concept of culture from a pluralistic dispersement of esthetic ideas, born and realized by individual creative impulses, and given it over to fewer and fewer corporate committees of molders and marketers who are driven only by an over riding need to maintain an ever rising bottom line for their shareholders in the culture market. Is the admittedly pivotal role which society places on commerce really so unassailably useful when it begins to inhibit and channel the very direction of an "independent" art form, "allowing" it to evolve this way, but not that way? Is the role of Federal Law to serve the demands of private income, or to promote the public good through free cultural expression? Both?
Then the crux of the debate we hope to raise is how are we going to maintain reasonable forms of fair compensation for artists and their whole parasitic entourage of associated agents without inhibiting, stifling, or criminalizing perfectly healthy and valuable forms of independent music/art practice which arise out of new, enabling technology? We believe the promotion of artistic freedom should, for the first time, find a balanced representation with the purely commercial guidelines which now dominate copyright law.
Finally, this shift in the mental paradigm which now deifies all- encompassing private ownership must be forged and supported in all the little areas which now attend it. For instance, contract clauses between music labels and their artists which assert the label's exclusive right to market the artists' work could conceivably be renegotiated by fair use supporters to include the possibility of a subsequent fair use of the artist's work by anyone else. The clear and crucial distinction between bootlegging and fair uses, and the change in attitude towards the artistic legitimacy of Fair Use, should be reflected in the very legal documents of private enterprise which occasion all these lawsuits in the first place. Contracted artists who support Fair Use could begin demanding such clause adjustments in their contracts now, and in fact, this would be an interesting means for the traditionally "helpless" artist to actually begin affecting this artistically desirable change in our present legal system, as they are apparently the only people involved who are capable of putting art before profit, and no one else involved appears willing to push this convention challenging juggernaut into reality.

2007-01-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

From a discussion of "Waking Life" on StrivingLife.net

"Of importance is the line: "This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance." In other words, life/history is a bunch of moments - a succession of images/experiences. Everything, everything in the world around/about us, is made up of Spirit, of life, of Tao, of God, etcetera (pick your favorite). While we don’t normally take note, allow ourselves to ‘penetrate and digest this entire wealth of substance’ - while we don’t allow ourselves to realize that each moment is holy, or full of Spirit, or full of life - that does not mean that it is not there. Rather, we have come to take for granted that each moment is full of life/Spirit, and lose our wonderment with the world.
In a similar way, we do not realize that each moment leads to the next - that what we do (cause) leads to future events (effects) - instead believing that we live in chaos, when in fact we live in a world that flows from one moment to the next. If we were to take time to make note of the moment - of day-to-day, second-to-second, and even lower, events/effects/situations - we would notice that every moment is full of life, of Spirit, of possibilities…"

Well, I disagee with the notion that every moment is holy. And I doubt that there's this wide spread notion that the world is chaotic, at least not in the sense that we use the world. I think that a better way to look at it would be as regulated potential, in that we have potential to do what we want, within the confines of what is socially possible. I mean, I can turn left or right at an upcoming intersection or go straight though; I can't however, decide to drive up onto the sidewalk.
As well, the notion of one moment flowing into the next is pretty self-evident, I think......As I've stated, existance is relentless and I think that, even if we don't take fulladvantage of the potentiality of every moment, not every moment is there to be maximised or 'lost' if there isn't some momentuum within it.

Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as conversational scholarship

2007-01-15T21:24:00.000-05:00

Can academic work ever be considered ‘ordinary’ given the history of privilege behind
it? Cultural studies has spent many years establishing ‘ordinariness’ as a positive trait
in the practices of other people (e.g.Williams, 1958; Hartley, 1999) yet it has tended to
avoid using the concept in relation to the everyday lives of scholars themselves. This
may be understandable given the field’s original political aspirations to indict the classbased
elitism of academic modes of valuing.Many writers agree that the resources and
job security of the academic profession bestow a particular responsibility on cultural
studies practitioners (e.g. Hall, 1992; Couldry, 1996). If its total renunciation is
strategically undesirable, then, it still seems appropriate to contemplate strategies that
might ameliorate this taken-for-granted privilege. If Gramsci’s point that ‘we are all
intellectuals’ is a cornerstone of cultural studies’ practice, the second dimension of his
statement—‘not all men have the function of intellectuals’—must also be remembered.
The possible functions that contemporary cultural studies’ intellectual practice might
serve forms the backdrop for this paper, bearing in mind Gramsci’s wider and more
provocative question: ‘is it the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled,
or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer
necessary?’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 144).
It is increasingly clear that new technologies are helping to situate academic labour
as a much more banal, if not quite ‘everyday’, practice in a changing university
environment.2 Self-publishing platforms like weblogs are beginning to influence what
ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)/06/020147-14 q 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310600641604
Melissa Gregg is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and Lecturer in
Media and Cultural Studies in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of
Queensland. Her forthcoming book, Emotionally Invested: Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006),
considers the significance of ‘affect’ in the writing of key cultural studies figures and its particular role in securing
commitment to the academic vocation. Correspondence to: Melissa Gregg, Centre for Critical and Cultural
Studies, 4th Floor Forgan Smith Tower, University of Queensland, Qld 4072, Australia. E-mail: m.gregg
@uq.edu.au
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies
Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 147–160
an academic career can involve—and be seen to involve to an interested public. Blogs
have made scholarly work accessible and accountable to a readership outside the
academy, an achievement that seems important in the history of cultural studies’
concerns. Indeed, as I want to suggest in this paper, the very kinds of conversations
they encourage can be regarded as offering renewed vigour to cultural studies’ antielitist
and reflexive epistemological project.
This article marks the beginning of a series of investigations in which I hope to offer a
‘sympathetic’ account of the opportunities that new media technologies provide for
intellectual practice. Sympathetic reading asks that the critic resist ‘the temptation to
“answer back”’(Morris, 1988, p. 6) and instead approach cultural texts for their capacity
to test the habitual responses of academic training or political position. As Meaghan
Morris explains, reading texts sympathetically is ‘to understand them as criticisms of
those answers that my feminism might automatically provide’ (ibid.). It forces the critic
to question her own assumptions and practices in the process of reading others’. Such
concerted tactics are called for at a time when the presumptions emanating from
mainstream media coverage of new media technologies seem poised to threaten the
present and future use of platforms like weblogs in professional contexts (Collinson &
Delaney, 2005). Preferring to focus on the anomie or indeed aspiring celebrity of those
who choose to maintain aWeb presence, the lack of credentials of news pundit bloggers,
or the highly charged terrain of copyright, content delivery and intellectual property
issues, the subsidized nature of much media commentary is poorly matched to reflect
the complexity and subtlety of wider shifts brought with new technologies. The
‘interpellative imperative’ of criticism as a genre3 seems to have avoided discussion of
how practices like blogging fit within a tradition of public intellectualism otherwise
mourned (Buettner & Mitchell, 2005). As I want to argue here, it has also overlooked
blogging’s role in carrying out cultural studies’ long-standing commitment to
scholarship which reaches beyond the limited range of the academic sphere.
Professionalism
The institutional constraints on academics have always challenged the objectives of
sharing knowledge and fostering conversation with an audience outside the university.
As Judith Brett noted in 1991, the bureaucratization of the university has had
‘profound effects on the writing of academics in the humanities and social sciences’,
the clearest of which being that academics now write in order to fulfil the criteria of a
carefully managed institution, pushing their writing ‘away from its proper goal—the
contribution to culture and society’ (Brett, 1991, p. 516). When Brett asked ‘why so
few academics are public intellectuals’, part of her aim was to identify why it is so rare
for academics to be good writers, indeed why so many of them are ‘such bad or
indifferent writers’ (Brett, 1991, p. 514). Brett’s essay forms part of a sustained period
of reflection, in Australia and the United States in particular, lamenting the decline of
public intellectual practice on the one hand and the quality of academic writing on the
other.4
148 M. Gregg
In light of these discussions, what remains refreshing about Brett’s article is the way
in which it articulates the professional pressures which affect the ‘traditional’
intellectual function, creating a shrinking ‘public’ for academic practice:
The preconditions for good discursive prose are relatively simple: a fully imagined
audience, a sense of urgency, something interesting and important to say. The
biggest problem with most academic writing is achieving the first two. Many
academics start out with important and interesting things to say, but very few feel
compelled to say them in ways that engage an audience outside their discipline; and
in the end this corrodes the importance of what they have to say. (Brett, 1991, p. 514)
Brett considers it nearly impossible for academics to provide a public intellectual
function in the contemporary university context because it goes ‘against the grain of
the job’ (Brett, 1991, p. 515). The problem with academic writing, she says, is that it is
writing that ‘never leaves school’ (Brett, 1991, p. 521).
It is in this sense that Brett considers cultural studies to be one of a number of
intellectual challenges to have emerged from outside the academy that inevitably
narrows the audience for its writing upon entry. Like feminism andMarxism before it,
cultural studies is another of those social movements ‘in danger of becoming the basis of
new careers and so losing their engagement with broad social and political goals’ (Brett,
1991, p. 518; emphasis added). Reading this article today, it is the ‘and so’ in this
particular sentence that holds my interest. It implies that an academic career can only
mean a loss of ‘engagementwith broad social and political goals’. In so far as her remarks
are directed to the fate of the New Left since the 1960s, Brett claims: ‘The threat of
unemployment has kept one-time radicals busy ensuring their futures; academic
politics has replaced the broad public politics of their youth’ (Brett, 1991, p. 518).
This warning as to the apoliticizing effects of professionalism echoes that of another
feminist colleague with experience witnessing the trajectory of New Left colleagues.
In ‘Politics Now: Anxieties of a Petty-bourgeois Intellectual’ Morris also reads the
period from 1975 to 1985 as a shift from the full-time radicalism to the radical
professionalism of the left (Morris, 1988, p. 177). Kept busy with grant applications and
the politic-ing of various institutional matters, the horizon for investment amongst
cultural workers is described byMorris as perilously parochial, completely substituting
any other form of politics (Morris, 1988, p. 179). For both writers, professionalism
brings a necessary end to a certain cherished sense of political engagement.
Fledgling at the beginning of one of the new careers in cultural studies that Brett
anticipated, I approach these two descriptions with some trepidation. Not only are they
writers whose work has secured my belief in the value of sophisticated and timely
scholarship which transcends a purely academic audience (Morris was a freelance
journalist without ever having a full-time academic job in Australia prior to her move to
Hong Kong, while Brett has recently gained a wide cross-over readership with her research
on the Liberal Party; see Brett, 2003, 2005). They also represent the important achievement
of feminist movements which have ensured that women now have the choice to pursue
professional careers.5What troublesmeabout their descriptions nowis that for researchers
inheriting cultural studies’ legacies today, there has never been a time before radical
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 149
professionalism, before the strategic thinking required by institutional politics, a time when
one might not have spent most of their energy navigating funding bodies.What is more,
many recent graduates have been politicized by their exposure to academic theory,which is
to say that for the present generation there has never been a time ‘before’ or ‘after’ theory, as
the story usually goes (Eagleton, 2003; Butler et al., 2000). Ruth Barcan described this
wonderfully in a keynote address to the What’s Left of Theory? Australian Cultural Studies
conference in Hobart in 2001: ‘theory operated not as the suspect opposite to politics, as it
did for many people, but as the verymode ofmy politicisation’ (Barcan, 2002, p. 344). I can
identify as one of those students Barcan describes ‘whose life is transformed unequivocally
for the better by their encounter with theory, who looks at the world anew, and who
becomes filled with a sense of purpose and energy’ as a result (Barcan, 2002, p. 354).Work
in the academy hasn’t been a shift of focus for politics: theoretically and practically,
academic politics is the most familiar (if not the only) form I know.
Heroics
If I am uncomfortable with the way that the politics of professionalization has often
been described it is because there is a missing narrative to account for the experience of
more recent graduates who, having experienced cultural studies teaching at
undergraduate and postgraduate level, see political opportunities in an academic
career. These opportunities seem to me limited, however, by the consistency with
which cultural studies’ stated preference for studying ‘the ordinary’ rarely matches the
modes of writing typically practised in the attempt to legitimate such attention.
A theoretical understanding of the performative force of writing and the material
effects of discourse should make this problematic enough; what makes it worse is when
abstract writing for an initiated audience serves merely to reproduce what Eve
Sedgwick (2003, p. 108) has called the ‘thinking routines’ of contemporary theory.
In her recent book Touching Feeling, Sedgwick mounts a critique of ‘paranoid
reading’: what she perceives to be a dominant scholarly preoccupation with exposing
residual forms of essentialism, unearthing the unconscious drives and compulsions of
an author, or uncovering the oppressive forces of history ‘masquerading under liberal
aesthetic guise’ (ibid.). Demonstrating a sensitivity to historical and political shifts
that I also want to foreground, Sedgwick writes:
Where are all these supposed modern liberal subjects? I daily encounter graduate
students who are dab hands at unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie
a secular, universalist liberal humanism. Yet these students’ sentient years, unlike the
formative years of their teachers, have been spent entirely in a xenophobic Reagan-
Bush-Clinton-Bush America where ‘liberal’ is, if anything, a taboo category and
where ‘secular humanism’ is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect, while a
vast majority of the population claims to engage in direct intercourse with multiple
invisible entities such as angels, Satan, and God. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 140)
It is not simply critical mantras that Sedgwick objects to, or the political landscape in
the United States, for that matter. She queries the logic of the spatial metaphors
150 M. Gregg
common in contemporary research practice—the habitual speech that accompanies
intellectual positioning:
Beneath and behind are hard enough to let go of; what has been even more difficult is
to get a little distance from beyond, in particular the bossy gesture of ‘calling for’ an
imminently perfected critical or revolutionary practice that one can oneself only
adumbrate. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 8)
It is precisely this sense of an avant-garde or well-placed lone critic ‘calling for’ changes
in others’ political priorities that I take the ‘counter-heroics’ of this special issue’s title
to mean. If it in any way resembles the ‘sense of urgency’ that Brett demands of public
intellectual practice, it does so to the extent that the urgency is both generic and
manufactured.
Sedgwick’s descriptions may indeed be strategic caricatures, as Clare Hemmings
(2005) has recently argued. Yet I want to suggest that cultural studies’ unfinished
legacy includes abandoning the styles of academic practice that provide the substance
of their rhetorical force. For cultural studies academics to stake their politics on
providing readings for others’ benefit, or making plain the obviousness of others’
oppression, seems ill-fitting the mobilizing premises of the field. As Sedgwick argues,
such objectives depend ‘on an infinite reservoir of naı¨vete´ in those who make up the
audience’ for our work as scholars:
What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate,
anyone to learn that a given socialmanifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative,
phantasmatic, or even violent? . . .How television-starved would someone have to be to
find it shocking that ideologies contradict themselves, that simulacra don’t have originals,
or that gender representations are artificial? . . . Some expose´s, some demystifications,
some bearings of witness do have great effectual force (though often of an unanticipated
kind).Many that are just as true and convincing have none at all however, and as long as
that is so,wemust admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside somewhere
else than in their relation to knowledge per se. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 141)
As Toby Miller and Alec McHoul have argued (1998), cultural studies scholarship has
enough work cut out for it producing adequate accounts of actually existing ‘everyday’
practices to be satisfied with merely speculating about subversive pleasures. A more
modest, inquisitive, even fallible speaking position would only help in the endeavour
to discover trends that lie outside pre-given theoretical rubrics.
Resisting the Resistance Ritual
The ritualized form of scholarship that Sedgwick points to is only understandable
given the current expectation that academics publish regularly in refereed journals to
secure their career and professional advancement. Morris has noted that this model
which determines institutional funding as well as individual standing has developed in
tandem with the workload of today’s ‘hyper-busy’ academics:
To engage in it, we do not need to be involved at the time in serious ethnographic or
textual study, resource- and time-consuming as these are, and we do not need to
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 151
expect any kind of change to follow our intervention. It is entirely possible to
contribute to such a debate by referring only to a series of other contributions, each
playing variations on already familiar and firmly held positions. (Morris, 2000, p. 28)
It is this form of debate that Brett surely had in mind in her 1991 article. It also
epitomizes the effects of professionalism so abhorrent to Edward Said in the series of
lectures he delivered on the role of the intellectual in the early 1990s. Said’s formidable
description of the intellectual’s function was to:
raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to
produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or
corporations, and whose raison d’eˆtre is to represent all those people and issues that
are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. (Said, 1994, p. 11)
Said urged that a spirit of amateurism must transform professional routines ‘into
something much more lively and radical’ so that ‘instead of doing what one is
supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect
with a personal project and original thoughts’ (Said, 1994, p. 83). Said denounced
professionalism on the basis that it viewed intellectual work as:
something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five and with one eye
on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional
behaviour—not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or
limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial
and unpolitical and ‘objective.’ (Said, 1994, p. 74)
Of course what is complicated about this formulation for those pursuing careers in
cultural studies is that radicalism is itself a professional expectation of our chosen field.
Cultural studies asks that we make a career out of ‘rocking the boat’. To refuse its
dominant forms of performance and endeavour is also to admit suspicion of the
innate progressivism of its main theoretical influences. Or, as Sedgwick puts it rather
more stylishly:
Comes the revolution, Comrade, you’ll be tickled pink by those deconstructive
jokes; you’ll faint from ennui every minute you’re not smashing the state apparatus;
you’ll definitely want hot sex twenty to thirty times a day. You’ll be mournful and
militant. You’ll never want to tell Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Not tonight, dears, I have a
headache.’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 146)
This more recent regime of political ‘cool’ appearing in tandem with cultural studies’
ongoing professionalization resembles the tightly policed regime of thought and
behaviour Morris identifies as the ‘lifestyle Leftism’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Morris,
1988, pp. 173–186). Yet the difficulty it poses for intellectual work is that
commonsense assumptions limit the acuity of the critical methods available to
appreciate emerging everyday practices. In Sedgwick’s reading, the ‘ethical urgency’
of terms like hegemony and subversion, or their counterparts, repression and
liberation, evacuates any critical reflection of their original theoretical formulation.
The correct codification of a cultural object or practice becomes the endpoint of an
analysis, meaning that the rich mid-ranges of agency become extremely hard to gauge
152 M. Gregg
in scholarly terms. From a critical as well as a political standpoint this can only be
disturbing, given that it is ‘the middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual
creativity and change’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 13).
Blogging as Conversational Scholarship
It is precisely the ‘mid-range’ between disciplinary insularism and public intellectual
practice that best characterizes blogging. Instead of continuing the trend of ‘calling for’
a shift in others’ practices, I want to use the following discussion of blogging to
highlight ways in which elements of cultural studies’ political aspirations can be
adjusted to new historical contexts. I am not suggesting that blogs are an example
of ‘the way forward’ for public intellectual practice (see Dunlop, 2003), nor do I think
that they should be seen as a satisfactory complement to the very real pressures of
outcomes-driven academic publishing. Here I seek merely to provide an account
of their productive possibilities at a time when a degree of hyperbole and assumption
currently shrouds—and risks—their varied uses.
In light of recent controversy—especially following anonymous revelations in
The Chronicle of Higher Education that some hiring committees at US universities may
discriminate against bloggers (see Tribble, 2005a, b; and the many responses in the
discussion fora)—it seems odd that blogging suffers such persecution as a form of
extracurricular intellectual engagement. What I will call the ‘conversational
scholarship’ that it gives rise to can be seen to follow a tradition that includes
independent and small press publishing, reading groups, salons and even cafe´ culture;
that is, before the real estate boom and rising standards of living demanded that
urban-based students work full time to support their study, severely limiting other
forms of recreational intellectual practice. The issue seems to be with the technology
itself: the simultaneously anonymous and public nature of blogging as well as the
instant feedback the software make possible. Indeed, the virulence that typifies many
blog debates, and which is often the cause for their scorn, arises from a lack of
common ground and/or vocabulary. Blogs reveal in a very overt way how regularly
writing fails to communicate intention. They also indicate how much distance a
tertiary education can put between people trying to engage in a conversation.
Software contributes to blogging dynamics in a further notable way. Archives
memorialize the passion of intellectual debate as it happens. The temporality involved
in blogging’s ‘call and response’ dynamic is faster and more immediate than previous
forms of intellectual writing and publishing. In this sense, the disdain many academics
feel towards blogging6 can be understood at least partly in terms of the way it records
the vicissitudes and vulnerability of intellectual practice. At the very least, blogging is
useful for the way that it offers a chance to reflect upon which aspects of their ordinary,
everyday practice scholars prefer the public to see.
Yet this very capacity to offer a platform for dialogue between writer and reader is
also the political significance of weblogs.7 While blogs are generally associated with a
single author, the role of the writer quite often consists of instigator and provocateur
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 153
in the sense that Said endorses. This is a noticeable move away from any necessary
association between author and authority. Granted, it is hard to generalize too much
here: the objectives of bloggers are as diverse as the people who write them. Yet I would
venture that the amount of notoriety that individual bloggers seek to generate in the
mainstream media and in sections of the ‘blogosphere’ often relates to the degree to
which they do maintain a belief in the notion of author-as-authority. This is only to be
expected from those with an investment in maintaining or gaining credibility in order
to contribute to a broadcast model of communication (which I would further suggest
encapsulates the present love/hate relationship between many punditry bloggers and
journalists). Blogs reveal the mind of the critic as impressionable and open to
persuasion, for the writer is rarely able to sustain the confidence and assurance of a
fixed position. Such a function contrasts with conventional modes of academic
performance premised on expertise and mastery. It is to admit the hesitancy involved
in the difficult task of thinking about the world.
For cultural studies, the significant potential to be seen in blogging—in line with the
romantic new media ethos that ‘information wants to be free’—is that knowledge loses
any sense of being something to be guarded. Instead, it becomes something to be
facilitated, discussed and improved. Blogs can create an economy of generosity and gift
at the expense of jealousy and possessiveness (cf. Williams, 1958). They encourage
collaboration as much as competition. The participatory nature of writing, response
and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and
thinking-in-process. In this they illustrate very well that version of cultural studies
practice described by Stuart Hall, which is ‘to work with our always inadequate
theories to help move understanding “a little further on down the road”’ (Daryl Slack,
1996, p. 113).
In this sense, what is rarely acknowledged about blogging is how much it contributes
to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than threatening it. One of the main
reasons graduate students have taken them up with such fervour is that blogs offer
solidarity out of isolation, especially on long projects. They create the conditions for
collegiality, brainstorming and frank, fast feedback while also generating and
maintaining interest, enthusiasm and motivation. Even the best supervision in the
most convivial university department cannot offer this kind of support on a regular
basis. The persistence with which established academics condemn blogging as a
distraction preventing graduate students from timely completion and participation in
their desired career does a disservice to the many instances whereby blogs are utilized
as a sophisticated research tool. It also wilfully ignores the wider economic and
political circumstances making the potential for a tenured academic career
increasingly unlikely for a new generation of graduates (Ross, 2004; Gregg, 2006b).
In terms of the linguistic apartheid for which Brett chastises academics, blogs are
also one of the most convenient and efficient tools for improving writing skills.
Blogging forces the writer to make every word count, to be as clear as possible in
getting a message across. Unlike the preconditions for good writing in Brett’s
description, it is impossible to know precisely who your audience is as a blogger.
154 M. Gregg
Its sheer publicness—the very unpredictability of audience—is what creates a sense of
immediacy and urgency.8
For all the positive tendencies I have just noted, however, blogging can also be a
volatile, archly personal and estranging practice. To be confronted by the opinions of
others who share little concern for or understanding of your work is a discomforting and
chastening experience. It is the quickest way to have any pretensions about academic
work deflated. Then again, this is not so very unlike the process of peer review, or giving
a conference paper. If anything, the explosiveness of blogging flame wars serves to
indicate the fac¸ade of much ‘polite’ academic discourse. A blog readership may not
always share a referee’s investment in a discipline or a profession, but a willingness to
offer opinion is evidence that a particular topic has resonance beyond academic niceties.
Outside the Comfort Zone: Feeling Ordinary in the Blogosphere
In line with the participatory ethic for cultural studies we are advocating in this issue,
Iwant now to offer a brief account of the ways inwhichmy own theoretical presumptions
have been tested and invigorated by blogging over the last two years. The main point I
want to underline is the manner in which blogging provokes acute recognition of what
may otherwise remain ‘mere’ theoretical tenets in one’s academic work—a point which
adds to the benefits of Morris’s sympathetic criticism that I have already outlined. For
instance, since starting my blog I have become a lot more conscious of my status as:
(a) an interchangeable persona available for others’ use: despite my knowledge of
postmodern theories of identity fabrication and simulacra I never expected that
someone would use my blog for a personal vendetta, writing under my name and
also using the names of other regular contributors to disrupt the dynamics of the
blog and seek to expose me as some kind of fraud;
(b) a woman (assumed to be single): despite my feminist training I never seriously
thought that meeting people offline in public, group events would lead to volatile
situations with readers assuming intimacy and ‘entitlement’ to friendship because
of shared interests online. Even though I disagree with the moralizing agenda
attached to alarmist descriptions of new media I now find myself holding a similar
position, i.e. that even the most stable online personas cannot be trusted. For me,
the cliche´ has been proved;
(c) an academic: despite being regarded as an ‘early career researcher’ in a university
context I have been told by readers that what I write on my blog is too academic,
too theoretical or too jargon laden, and therefore not fitting the ‘spirit’
of blogging. Others who regard my blog as academic assume that when I write it
signifies my fully formed intellectual position on something and that I seek
to argue the point I allegedly made. Still others think that because I am an
academic I will obviously be interested in hearing the entire history of thought
behind any issue raised, because anything less would be unscholarly. This possibly
relates to:
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 155
(d) a young, female academic in a particular city of Australia: stereotypes about the
place where I currently live seem to lead some people to think I am therefore more
open to guidance or correction from others who blog from less peripheral/parochial
locations, or (of equal offence) that I deserve encouragement and support
for the same reasons;
(e) as an Australian feminist: blogging has drawn my attention to the specificity of my
training in Gender Studies in Australia rather than Women’s Studies or some of
the more polemical versions of liberal or radical feminism. The key feminist blogs
based in the United States are regularly engaged in the intricacies of legal rulings
(namely the ongoing fate of Roe v. Wade). Otherwise, their attention is usually
focused on issues of women’s under-representation on blogrolls, conferences,
speaking circuits, linking practices between blogs and the like. This means that
I have had to turn to different disciplines, for instance rhetoric and political
science, to find allies for the kind of work I do;
(f) as a person identified with cultural studies: the majority of research blogs are still
new media- or technology-industry specific, so it is difficult to find readers with a
similar disciplinary background. On the other hand, I have had cultural studies
professors find my blog and engage with my ideas at length—feedback I would
never have received otherwise. In terms of ‘political’ cool in the blogosphere,
however, cultural studies is often something of a punching bag, which has meant
that my blog has sometimes been used as a location for debating cultural studies’
politics, regardless of whether I describe my own work as political;
(g) as a white, middle-class, able-bodied, urban-based professional: these forms of
cultural capital, to my mind, define both the possibilities and the limits of
blogging’s audience reach at present, and while I have expressed my ambivalence
towards professional academic practice as a career choice on a number of
occasions, my lack of overtly identity-based or marginal politics means that I often
suffer credibility problems as an individual.
While it is clearly limited by its subjectivity, what I think this list helps to illustrate is that
despite my training in feminism and cultural studies, and hence my heightened
theoretical understanding of the ways in which my identity influences my perspective on
the world, having a blog has made me increasingly conscious of the multi-faceted ways
these identities play out in apparently banal, everyday encounters. Perhaps it was an
oversight to have assumed that these identities would not be particularly relevant to the
practice of my blogging; what I wonder instead is the extent to which even the most selfreflexive
of disciplines like cultural studies regularly strips identity characteristics fromits
dominant genres in order to accord itself scholarly status. My ability to comment as a
scholar on the practice of blogging has been to some extent jeopardized by my
participation in the practice itself. At the same time,my understanding of both blogging
and cultural theory has improved considerably during this same process. Blogging makes
me aware of my gender, race, sexuality, class, geographical location and education level
with a regularity that my typical daily encounters as an academic simply do not.
156 M. Gregg
The Will to Connect
While the analysis I have just offered seems to me an important justification for
blogging, I have yet to mention the most important reason I will continue to do so
beyond the time frame of my research. In Brett’s description from earlier, there is an
implicit distinction between academics who consider themselves to be writers and
those who consider writing to be a part of the job they do. In the face of persistent
media and colloquial opinion which categorizes blogging as variously self-serving,
self-aggrandizing or self-delusional, this distinction is useful to makes sense of what
I want to call the ‘will to blog’. As bell hooks has also argued so eloquently:
All academics write but not all see themselves as writers. Writing to fulfil
professional career expectations is not the same as writing that emerges as the
fulfilment of a yearning to work with words when there is no clear benefit or reward,
when it is the experience of writing that matters. (hooks, 1999, p. 37)
As a writer, I have a keen desire to share and discuss ideas with others. Academic forms
of evaluation and publication are often unsatisfying for me precisely because they fail
to reach an audience for whom I would also like to write. Given the current
expectations of the academic profession, however, there appears little leeway for
alternative forms of publishing and intellectual practice. The ‘publish or perish’ dictum
has been particularly effective in narrowing the ambitions that many academics hold
for their writing to the extent that a ‘yearning to work with words when there is no
clear benefit’ is regularly met with disbelief, if not also disapproval, from colleagues.
My understanding of cultural studies has always been that it emerges from a ‘will to
connect’ with others, or in the words of RichardHoggart, ‘only connect’ (Hoggart, 1972).
Blogging offers an exciting new avenue for academics and non-academics alike to ‘speak
to each other’ (Hoggart, 1970a, b). To blog is to react to the limited range of conversations
otherwise available to us in a heavily compartmentalized neoliberal culture, to share
thoughts, ideas and dreams with thosewhose paths wemay not cross ineveryday routines.
Blogs and Counter-professionalism
If we live in an era when academic practice entails radical professionalism, blogs are
a way to make contact with an audience both within and outside the narrow field of a
discipline. Instead of documenting heroic missions conducted on others’ behalf, blogs
foster conversational scholarship by actively seeking the voices of others. Blogs are
a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the hierarchies of speech
traditionally securing academic privilege. They are a way to be reflexive about the
privileges of an institutional position in the sense that Couldry describes:
if you take it as axiomatic that discursive resources are unequally distributed, then
for academics to use their discursive resources to reveal the places where others are
speaking may sometimes help those others to be heard. (Couldry, 1996, p. 324)
A career in cultural studies may meet its professional obligations as well as great
success by writing regularly about the ordinary and/or subversive practices of others.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 157
But to do so not only maintains the observer–subject, critic–amateur distinction that
mirrors wider forms of segregation and binary thinking that are manifest in our
society (Morris, 1992) but also proves that Brett’s fears about cultural studies’ political
goals were well founded. A politics which includes academic conventions in its sights
disrupts cultural criticism’s ritualistic potential by bringing different voices into a
broader conversation. Blogs allow us to write in conjunction with non-academic
‘peers’ and ‘colleagues’ who not only value and improve our ideas but practise their
own rigorous forms of assessment, critique and review.
Blogs are counter-heroic in that they expose the life of the academic as banal. They
help lay bare the fallacy of the ivory tower scholar secluded from the concerns of the
‘real world’. But blogging remains a liability in a professional environment focused on
Tier 1 journals, intellectual property and the tyranny of excellence. As a form of
counter-professionalism, blogs exhaust our most precious resources as academics:
good ideas and spare time. And this is the crux of the dilemma. Despite my
commitment to scholarly ideals, I am equally committed to any practice that makes
learning, thinking and writing feel ordinary as well as important. In this articlemy only
concern has been that such an objective, while apparently fitting the original impulse
of cultural studies, may no longer be extraordinary enough to warrant much attention.
Notes
[1] For the purposes of this paper I refer to blogging in general despite there being many distinctions
in online journal practice. At least part of my motivation in avoiding mention of journaling as
opposed to blogging is to discuss issues often downplayed in the gender and age characteristics
afforded to each (see Gregg, forthcoming 2006a).
[2] My use of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘everyday’ are residues of the original context for this paper, the
CSAA conference Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-first Century Quotidian, Murdoch
University, Perth, Dec. 2004.
[3] For specific discussion of the interpellative strategies of new media commentary see Cohen (this
issue). Graham Meikle (2002) describes a similar process of ‘backing in to the future’ in his
Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet.
[4] For an overview of the former, see Culler and Lamb (2003). For a range of views on the public
intellectual in an Australian context, see Bartoloni et al. (1997), Dessaix (1998) and more
recently Carter (2004). The 1994 Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference held at the
University of Technology, Sydney, also had the theme ‘Intellectuals and Communities’.
[5] Bruce Robbins (1993) notes that this is an achievement typically overlooked in debates on the
politics of professionalism.
[6] And, I would add, e-mail list culture.
[7] Tim Dunlop (2003), one of Australia’s most prominent ‘political’ bloggers, argues that ‘blogging
has provided at least one of the technical means of dissolving the division between intellectual
and citizen’. His essay is a more extensive engagement with the concerns raised by Brett’s article
and the idea of blogging as a public intellectual practice. ‘Rather than being in decline, as it is
fashionable to suggest’, Dunlop claims that blogs show the category of public intellectual to be
‘exploding’.
[8] Comments from readers of this paper have led me to agree that one of the most sobering aspects
of blogging regularly is the realization that one’s audience is insular, restricted and knowable,
that the idea of writing into the unknown is one of the great fallacies about everyday blogging.
158 M. Gregg
However, I would still want to accord a degree of power to the silent readers many blogs enjoy,
and the importance of this albeit small unknown readership in shaping the urgency of address.
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160 M. Gregg

2007-01-15T21:22:00.002-05:00

Repr_Persp PSA2002 11/2/2002 1 Science as Representation: Flouting the Criteria
Bas van Fraassen (Princeton University)
Abstract. Science represents the phenomena, and it does so by providing representations of nature with the phenomena at best as a part. Criteria of adequacy for a representation pertain to accuracy and truth; but that representation is selective and may require distortion even in the selected parameters is an old and familiar point, intimately related to the insight that representation is intentional with adequacy relative to its particular purpose. If we add to this that observation and measurement are perspectival and that the appearances to be saved are the perspectival measurement outcomes, the question whether this "saving" is an explanatory relation in contemporary physics can provide a new focus for the realist/anti-realist debate. The Born rule and von Neumann's "collapse" postulate in quantum mechanics provide a telling case.
CONTENTS
1. Three completeness criteria........................................................................................2
2. Appearance and reality..............................................................................................2
3. Phenomena vs. visual appearances............................................................................4
5. The Strange Case of Quantum Mechanics.................................................................6
Is there a 'collapse'?.....................................................................................................7
The appearances yoked unto a forbearing reality.......................................................9
6. The structure of appearance......................................................................................10
The Final Challenge..................................................................................................11
Science is a representation of nature, in mathematical form, accomplishing by this means ... a certain end, that philosophers debate. Criteria of success or completeness for scientific representation must be related to this end, but appear concretely in science itself in theory choice and evaluation. Remarkably, scientific progress at times involves precisely the rejection of previously proclaimed criteria. But the aftermath of such a rejection is quite typically a reactionary philosophical effort at restoration.
Repr_Persp PSA2002 11/2/2002 2
1. Three completeness criteria
The Aristotelian ideal that science must explain how things happen by demonstrating that they must happen in the way they do was rejected in the time of Galileo, Gassendi, Boyle, Descartes, and Newton. But the reaction sets in with their own and other writings of the period as they focus on the idea of laws of nature -- and both Leibniz and Descartes even suggest an a priori foundation for these laws.
Modern science recognized determinism as a new criterion: a scientific account of a phenomenon is not complete until it represents this phenomenon as part of a deterministic process. Supporting this criterion, or perhaps deriving from its force, was the philosophical creed that the very intelligibility of nature and the very coherence of experience require their possibility of being conceivable as set in a rigidly deterministic causal order.
This criterion was vocally rejected by the quantum physicists, and the success of the new quantum theory was attributed in part to its resolute acceptance of an irreducible indeterminism in nature. With one criterion gone, another must be put in place, and Reichenbach offered an apparently weaker but still substantive new completeness criterion: the Common Cause Principle1. This principle is satisfied by the causal models of general use in social sciences and for many purposes in the natural sciences as well. But the violation of Bell’s inequalities shows that even this third criterion was rejected, in effect, by the new physics. Here too, as we well know, there has been a good deal of reactionary efforts at restoration, the most successful being Bohm’s mechanics -- which surprisingly presents a picture of 'determinism without causality' so to speak.
2. Appearance and reality
There was a fourth completeness criterion much more deeply ingrained in modern physics; but that too was one clearly, emphatically, and explicitly rejected in the Copenhagen School. Physics in the modern era depicts reality as quite different from the
1 Cf. my "Rational belief and the common cause principle", and references therein. (Bibliographical data for my own papers can be found on http://web.princeton.edu/vanfraas/.) Under certain conditions this criterion actually demands determinism, as I show there. But from the example of Bohmian mechanics, we can also see that satisfaction of this criterion is not logically implied by determinism; see further notes below.
Repr_Persp PSA2002 11/2/2002 3
appearances, but accepts the criterion that a complete physics must explain how those appearances are produced in reality. The disparity is salient when Galileo and Gassendi embrace atomism: those atoms have only primary properties while the appearances are colorful, noisy, smelly, and tasty. Descartes, though not an atomist, goes further by restricting the real attributes of matter to extension in space and time. Newton's forces and masses certainly don't diminish this disparity, nor do the classical fields whether adding to or replacing matter in this representation of the real physical world.
What does "explain" mean in this context? Each of the three criteria I gave as examples before this one involved modality (whether physical, metaphysical, or logical necessity). So does the fourth, which I'll call the Appearance from Reality Criterion, for it is a demand for explanation, satisfiable only by connections deeper than brute or factual regularity. We credit modern science with adequate and satisfactory explanations of how many familiar phenomena are produced: how ash is produced when we burn a cigarette or some logs, how methane is naturally produced in a swamp, and how a flame is turned yellow when a sodium sample is inserted. These effects are not simply predicted to occur under suitable conditions: we are shown how they are produced in nature. The last example is already one in which an aspect of appearance (color) is explained, and this explanation is continued from optics to the physiology of vision. In this way the scientific representation of nature is shown to include the appearances in question not just as fitting into that representation (that would be a minimal requirement -- the one Bellarmini suggested to Galileo as solely relevant), but as produced as proper part of the reality depicted.
Before turning to the rejection of this criterion in the 20th century I want to explain the form its satisfaction took in modern physics, for the most basic attributes of the appearances, namely their spatial and temporal form. Recent philosophy of mind contains arguments against the physicalist reducibility of such properties as color, but however that may be2, the rejection I am talking about goes much deeper.
2 Cf. Ronald Giere (ms. 2000) for a philosophy of science approach to this subject.
Repr_Persp PSA2002 11/2/2002 4
3. Phenomena vs. visual appearances
There were two developments in techniques of representation before Galileo that we can see as feeding into the kinematic representation developed in his century. The first was that of linear one-point perspective in painting, and the second Copernicus' and Tycho's mastery of transforming geometric models in astronomy so as to shift the center taken as 'at rest'. Both concentrated on how a description of the visual appearance from particular vantage points can be derived from a reality admitting of many different vantage points. Both grew from the subject of Perspectiva, a melange of geometry, optics, and practical drafting techniques, and both were steps on the way to projective and descriptive geometry. But the sorts of representation they provided were more than superficially different.
Linear perspective in painting began with Giotto in the 14th century. Theory was not far behind: early in the 15th century Brunelleschi’s "experiment" demonstrated the perspectival technique, and Vasari’s monograph proclaimed that the new art of "painting is nothing more than the simple portrayal of all things alive in nature by means of design and color as nature herself produces them."3 But that this was in effect a method of measurement, with the drawing as measurement outcome, was clearly recognized upon more mathematically oriented reflection. Its techniques derived from the geometry of Euclid’s Optics, gave birth to the early stages of projective geometry (Pascal, Desarques), and was at least theoretically mechanized in Duerer’s revealingly titled Art of Measurement.
The content of such a visual perspective is precisely the content of a complex, technically advanced measurement outcome. For every triple consisting of a point in space, an orientation, and a plane cutting that orientation, there is a one-point linear perspective projecting the world onto that plane. We should recognize this as a crucial general observation concerning all measurement: measurement is perspectival. The content of any measurement outcome, whether a proposition or a diagram, is indexical, it is not how things are but how they look "from here".
3 cited Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960), p.12
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Representations of the solar system by Copernicus, and Tycho were such that each could refer to the other as showing the way things look from a different vantage point. Yet we must be clear that they were not constructing content of visual perspectives in the way of the [Vasari] painter. The latter constructs as it were the outcome of a single measurement. The astronomical models are three-dimensional, and what is shown in them is what the content must be from any chosen vantage point. It would indeed be natural for Copernicus to say that Tycho's or Ptolemy's model just shows the content of the earth-bound perspective. Natural, but inaccurate: in the same way that it is natural but inaccurate to speak of frames of reference in the modern physics about to develop as perspectival. The kinematic quantities do vary from frame to frame, but unlike the content of a visual perspective, the content of a frame does not suffer from occlusion and marginal distortion.4
Copernicus' model represents the observable phenomena, that is, certain processes in space and time. What the Copernican does in order to credential his representation is to explain by means of geometric optics and projective geometry how the visual appearances (content of outcomes of measurements made by astronomers) are produced from his reality. When frames of reference come into their own, we have eventually a three-level representation: there is the world as described in co-ordinate independent terms, then the world as described in a given frame of reference (co-ordinatization), and finally the world as it looks from a given vantage point with specific orientation. The first admits of many of the second sort, and the second of many of the third sort. In the modern era, each level has a certain completeness, in that the higher level is uniquely determined by the collection of those at the next level plus the transformations that connect them -- but also a representation on the first or second level 'contains everything' in a way that the third most definitely cannot.5 With Special Relativity, all this can still be said; with General Relativity we must already admit that a single frame of reference, like a 2-dimensional map of any part of the Earth, cannot 'contain everything' in that
4 Such limiting features may be crucial to the distinction between visual picturing and other modes of representation; see Ch. 6 of Dominick Lopes, Understanding Pictures, Oxford1996.
5 We may reasonably suspect that the conviction that this is so helped to inspire the "construction" programs of Russell's Our Knowledge of the External World and Carnap's Aufbau.
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sense. But there is no diminishing there of the rightful claim that both the phenomena and the kinematic appearances from any given vantage point in space and time can be shown to be produced within the depicted reality.
5. The Strange Case of Quantum Mechanics
The vehicle for prediction in quantum mechanics is, at heart, the Born Rule: If observable A is measured on a system in quantum state ψ, the expectation value of the outcome is < ψ, A ψ>. Measurement outcomes are the appearances; the quantum states are the theoretically described reality. For the Born rule to yield checkable predictions of the appearances to us we must be willing to lay down at least as hypotheses that a given recognizable object has a certain quantum state and that a certain recognizable process is an A-measurement. The famous measurement problem is that our two descriptions, one of what happens at the level we can observe and one of the processes as modeled in quantum mechanics, do not match.
As far as prediction goes, the riches gained have been beyond the dreams of avarice…. but no explanation of how the observed phenomena derive from the quantum state via the character of object and measurement set-up was forthcoming. This 'gap' in our understanding of nature (as it was indeed described) has engendered a plethora of attempted re-interpretations of the quantum theory, in opposition to the Copenhagen creed that there really is no gap to be filled.
How much does the Born rule say? If different measurement outcomes are compatible with the simultaneous quantum state of the whole set-up (object plus apparatus plus any part of the environment from which that is not isolated) then the measurement outcomes do not supervene on the theoretically described reality. But that "if" does not follow from what I have said so far. The Born rule starts with the initial quantum state of the object; it does not rule out that the measurement outcome supervenes or even derives from the final state of the object, or of the object+apparatus. But is that so? Can it be so?
Heisenberg was the most straightforward advocate for the view that the Born rule is enough and completes the task of physics. In contrast, von Neumann and Wigner
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provided the most salient example of wishing to add to the theory so as to satisfy the Appearance from Reality criterion (see below)6. Since then it seems to me that the currently more or less acceptable interpretations offered fall into three classes: (i) the sort that purport to derive the Appearance from the Reality but fail, and (ii)those that do not purport to do this, but either (ii-1) pay lip service to the old ideal or (ii-2) more honestly content themselves to flesh out the Born interpretation in a way that precludes this third sort of completeness altogether.7 If that is correct, of course, then the Copenhagen school was right to reject the Appearance from Reality Criterion as imperative for the sciences.
Is there a 'collapse'?
Von Neumann's Projection Postulate implies that in a measurement, the quantum state of the object is projected or ‘collapsed’ into one of the eigenstates of the measured quantity. The immediate questions are: What constitutes a measurement? and What explains this collapse? The two sorts of responses which attempt to maintain Von Neumann’s proposal were initially typified by Wigner on the one hand, and by Groenewold and Margenau on the other.
Wigner answered that a measurement is not an event completely describable in physics, it must include consciousness, a mind-body interaction.8 This only looks like it answers the second question, for in fact it provides no clue at all to how the Appearances thus derive from the Reality.
Groenewold and Margenau argued instead that von Neumann’s added postulate was
6 There have of course been others, such as Prugovecki's non-linear corrections to the Schroedinger equation and the GRW indeterministic 'swerve', a random partial collapse with measurable frequency.
7 I will actually only look at some sorts of interpretations, and realize that both the range I inspect and my assessment of what are currently more or less acceptable interpretations, are controvertible. With respect to the Bohmian option I'll again avoid a direct confrontation, but I place it in the first class.
8 Imagine Schroedinger's dismay -- he wrote " For it must have given to de Broglie the same shock and disappointment as it gave to me, when we learnt that a sort of transcendental, almost psychical interpretation of the wave phenomenon had been put forward, which was very soon hailed by the majority of leading theorists as the only one reconcilable with experiments, and which has now become the orthodox creed, accepted by almost everybody, with a few notable exceptions." [Erwin Schroedinger, "The meaning of wave mechanics", pp. 16-30 in Louis de Broglie physicien et penseur, edited by Andre George, Editions Albin Michel, Paris, 1953; page 16.
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purely interpretative and did not really augment the Born Rule. We can illustrate their argument with Schroedinger’s famous Cat: the probability that at the end we will find the cat still alive is the same on both calculations, assuming that there is or there is not a collapse of the wave function at the midway time when the infernal device functions. The ostensibly correct conclusion is that von Neumann’s postulate does not affect the empirical content of the theory. That is not correct, since there is a definable quantity pertaining to the system as a whole (box with Cat etc. inside) for which measurement outcome probabilities are certainly different on the two scenarios.9
Let's admit that von Neumann' s alteration of the quantum theory, with or without Wigner's addition, implies that the phenomena do derive from the quantum-mechanically described reality. But the Appearance from Reality Criterion is nevertheless not satisfied because physics cannot provide the derivation. The story here is that it is after all a stochastic process on the level of the quantum states themselves: they develop deterministically except for abrupt 'swerves' during a class of special interactions, the measurements.10 Very well; but then we run up against the question "When is a measurement made?" If we answer this with the quantum theory of measurement, the final transition ends up somewhere beyond description -- for there is no such discontinuous transition in an isolated system, and the set-up is certainly part of some isolated system. But if we answer it with a non-quantum mechanical description of measurement set-ups (as Bohr suggested we must) then we also close the door to a derivation of the outcome from the quantum mechanical process.11
9 'Recombination' experiments furnish today the most psychologically compelling support for rejecting collapse, but in my view Albert's point is the most solid reason. Albert's point does not give a reason to reject collapse theories -- there is no a priori reason to expect the predictions of the no-collapse theory to be vindicated, as opposed to those of a collapse theory. His point serves only to reject the Groenewold-Margenau contention that the collapse adds no empirical import.
10 That the problem I am raising does not simply derive from the indeterminism is clear because the GRW theory is not subject to the same objection. They answer the "when" question acceptably by saying that the localization is random. There is no special class of situations which are the occasions for that effect.
11 This dilemma is arguably the reason that some physicists have insisted strongly that quantum mechanics is only a theory of measured systems This sort of view is to be contrasted with one congenial especially to cosmologists, and I think most discussants from the side of philosophy, to the effect we are to think of quantum mechanics as potentially applying as well to the universe as
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a whole. The choice between these two views is clearly and explicitly laid out by Wheeler's commentary (Reviews of Modern Physics 29,463-465)on Everett's original paper.
These early discussions are illuminating not only because they begin to chart our range of options, but also because they were closely related to practice. Whatever the theoretical status of ‘collapse’, the way the working physicist calculates does always assume that the Appearances will be at least as if states thus collapse in measurement. Generations of students have applied the Born Rule to solve textbook problems imaging that quantum systems lurch from one pure state to another, simply asserting that upon measurement the object will be in one of the eigenstates of the measured observable, with given probability. The Appearances are as if von Neumann’s Projection Postulate is true.
The appearances yoked unto a forbearing reality
Jeffrey Bubs Interpreting the Quantum World, displays a large class of interpretations: modal interpretations in a general sense. On all of them a physical quantity can have a determinate value even if the quantum state does not make it so.12 Those definite values are encoded in a second state, the 'value state' or 'property state'. No collapse is needed for measurement outcomes: while in a quantum state which does not imply that at all, the object is as if it is an eigenstate of the pertinent observable.
I propose a new way to understand such interpretations. Do not take them as attributing a dual-aspect character to reality, but rather as representing Reality (the quantum states) and Appearance (the value states) jointly but separately. The value states are then to be understood as containing the contents of possible measurement outcomes, these contents being representable as indexical propositions (describing, in effect, how things look in a possible but specific measurement set-up). See how this is at the same time like and different from how Copernicus accompanied his sun-centered model with a representation of how the planetary motions look from an earthly vantage point. The difference is only that in Copernicus' case, the latter was derivable and explainable on the basis of the former.
12 (p.178) This class of interpretations include Bohm’s interpretation, Bub’s own, versions of Bohr, Kochen, and many others, though it does not in fact include all modal interpretations -- see further note below. The Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation, which I shall discuss below, is not included, but shares the features I am outlining here.
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In the case of visual perspectives as treated in projective geometry, we also think of every point and orientation determining a perspective, regardless of whether there is a thus oriented measurement apparatus or viewer present at that point. Think of it here in the same way. The Appearances are the contents of possible as well as actual measurement outcomes.13
Thus the Appearances are saved -- but in a way that explicitly violates the Appearance from Reality Criterion. The Appearances do not even supervene on the Reality, for two systems in the same quantum state may have different value states.
6. The structure of appearance
What are the Appearances like, on these interpretations? We do see quite some variation there.14 Bub’s interpretation implies that the actual state of the world is characterized by the definiteness of a single ‘privileged’ observable. That quantity need not be position. We can think of his world as follows: it has a quantum state and, in addition to that there is an observable which has a definite value, just as if that observable was just measured on the world, with a collapse precipitated by that measurement. Note well that this is a matter of Appearance only: the quantum state is
13 This must be read very carefully. All those measurement outcome contents must cohere together in a certain way, so that they can be thought of as all perspectives on a single world in some specific quantum state. In just the same way, the entire set of contents of visual perspectives, with origins in both possible and actual viewers, in a given room for example, must cohere so that they can be regarded as being "of" the same room. In the case of the modal interpretations I am discussing, the delineation of what the joint value states can be of the parts of a compound system, given a quantum state for the whole, is directed to this point. For an application to sequential measurement, see my ""Modal interpretation of repeated measurement: reply to Leeds and Healey" (1997).
14 Although Bub lists it as one of the interpretations covered in his framework, I am not going to take up Bohmian mechanics here. Bohm allows only one parameter to have a definite value – always the same one, always definite – namely position. This world is one of particles that are always somewhere – and larger objects ‘made up’ of those particles, always in a precise spatial region. Their motions are continuous in time. This view may have been inspired by the extreme operationalist idea, going back to Mach, that in the last analysis every measurement is a length measurement. (Not very plausible: could you describe even a length measurement operation using only predicates denoting lengths?) Or perhaps it derives even further back from Descartes’ dream of a world whose only objective properties are attributes of extension. That the phenomena are saved in a weak sense only and that there is still an Appearance/Reality gap here is argued in my "Interpretation of QM: Parallels and Choices", as well as in papers by Abe Stone and Katherine Bedard.
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not collapsed.
My own favored interpretation, the Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation (CVMI), relates to these more or less as windowing does to one-point perspective.15 "Windowing" is the artist David Hockney's term for a perspective-violating technique in painting, amply evident both in the Renaissance and in the modern era well before Cezanne's more drastic departures. There is in such paintings no single privileged vantage point but a number of them, to which the eye (or the imagination) adjusts smoothly as it moves around the scene. Similarly in the Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation there is no simple privileged observable. But it is as if the Ignorance Interpretation of Mixtures is correct, for every object in the world has a ‘value state’ that is pure. These value states are related to the quantum states and to measurement processes (quantum mechanically defined) so that in consequence it is also as if the Projection Postulate is true. Again the ‘as if’ describes the Appearances, that is, the value states (which include the measurement outcomes) but not the quantum state.
Why do I say that this is like 'windowing' rather than like one-point perspective? On the CVMI every object, including every part of an object, ‘looks’ as if it has just been projected into some pure state. This implies that we cannot say: it is just as if the ‘collapse’ idea is right and the world looks as if it has just been subjected to great single comprehensive measurement. For if a compound system is already in a pure state then its Appearance matches its Reality. But in general there is no projection of that state of the whole which also sends the components into pure states. Yet the value states are such that it is possible e.g. for both the whole and the parts to be definite in their Apparent characteristics (to the extent that compatibility of observables allows). So it is as if each is seen individually from some measuring vantage point.
The Final Challenge
The details of quantum theory interpretation are fascinating, challenging, and
15 See my review of Bub, Foundations of Physics 28 (1998), for an explanation of how the Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation is related to, but does not fall in, the class described in his book.
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frustrating, and its problems are by no means all settled. But my main aim in this paper is not to defend a specific interpretation -- let alone its details in one form or another! Rather, what I mean to do is to argue the thesis that this actual part of recent history of science should convince us that it is perfectly scientific, and scientifically acceptable, to reject the completeness criteria for science that I outlined. Although I take it that all of the foregoing could have been granted by today's scientific realist if by anyone, that thesis concerning the aim and methodology of science appears to clash with at least certain traditional themes in 'realist' philosophies of science.
If my view of it is right, and if in addition the Copenhagen physicists were acting in a way that counts as real physics when they introduced and developed quite explicitly a theory and an interpretation incompatible with the Appearance from Reality completeness criterion, then that criterion is not a constraint on the sciences. It is, in that case, just another of those philosophically or metaphysically motivated imperatives that could hamper science if they were obeyed, though they receive much lip service, but are anyway quickly flouted when that hampering is felt.

Another Idea

2007-01-15T20:45:00.000-05:00

I think the interesting thing is how this illustrates the notion of owning thoughts. The man sold the idea for a mechanical process and, while GM has the patent for the process, they have somehow also have captured the concept of it, this somewhat elusive "thought."
I ‘m curious as to how creating a process or whatever is allied with creating a thought.
Or, more precisely, where the idea becomes do-able or viable. I sort of look at the process as being the same as figuring out how to wrestle a viable thesis statement out from the assignments we were handed as high school and university students: the vague and non-helpful "Peace in the Middle East: Discuss" or " Compare and contrast three aspects of Shakespeare’s Tragedies."
Somewhere along the line, there has to be a point where an idea becomes non-generic and slips into that realm of individuality. One of the things I used to look at was the interaction between the subject and the observer.
As a photographer, one of the areas I used to concentrate on was what I called "Urban Architecture Abstracts", found interactions between buildings and light and colour. Now, I wonder who was the primary creator of those images that would eventually be framed… Me for seeing it and framing it? The Builder of the building, for making it possible to use that building in that way. God, for creating the forces that caused the light and colours as well as the textures? Luck?
The same goes for anything.
What part of your creative act is solely yours and not a result of your history?
Who really takes or can take sole credit for a product?
At what point does all your training and reading and interacting with the world at large and everything you’ve been exposed to become something other than what you bring to bear.
What part of you is solely you and not were you come from?
I think this really gets into the area of intellectual property.
Definition:
Intellectual property (IP) law definition – Intellectual Property is any product of human intellect that is unique and un-obvious with some value in the marketplace. Intellectual property laws cover ideas, inventions, literary creations, unique names, business models, industrial processes, computer program code, and more.

Ideas genesis

2007-01-15T20:43:00.000-05:00

I think the point of why I became interested in these discussion groups was the desire to actually find a place where people would discuss ideas and generally feel free to express themselves without all the hassles of "is this the right room" or the right forum?
It seemed that rooms would get onto a good thread so many times, only to have a wrench thrown in the process by some knuckle scraper who can’t keep up intellectually and so goes for the cheap shot by throwing down some anti Semitic or Racist comment and everyone expends their energy on beating him down.
Or, as we’ve all seen, the room gets polarised around a core of posters who recycle the same arguments over and over, even after it’s painfully obvious that there is NEVER going to be a resolution of the issue.
Sooooo, I decided to see if I couldn’t browbeat a little civility into these discussions by making my own room.
To that end:
One of the many things I’m interested in is the idea of how culture has been effected in the last 25 years by the infiltration of both TV and the Internet.
The great assertion was that the Internet would usher in a new era of transparency and knowledge. The "Great Unwashed" would be privy to the riches of information that the internet would provide and everyone would be able to communicate with everyone else and regionalism and prejudice would evaporate as everyone realised everyone else was just like them.
Well, as we know that hasn’t happened.
All this knowledge has either not been accessed or somehow, the almighty "site" reference has replaced actually looking it up in print.
The mantra has become " I saw it posted, so it must be true"
However, as we know, any Tom, Dick or Harry can throw up a website.
And "debate" has become three exaggerated statistics quoted by the Right, countered by 3 op -ed pieces referenced by the left.
Neither side has actually hit upon the actual truth, but neither side knows or will admit that.
Can we actually ever reclaim the dream of reasoned and temperate Intellectual Discourse in an unregulated and unmoderated forum or, have the Barbarians stormed the gate already?
Time will tell.
Mike

2006-12-21T21:16:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, PopMatters, like VoS is increasingly out-dated in its hyperlinks.
Hit and miss.
I think this interview dates from 2002-ish, still cool though.

Barbara: What are you trying to do with PopMatters?
Sarah: Offer smart, edgy cultural criticism to a really broad audience. At PopMatters we also try to break down the divisions between different cultural forms, such as music, film, and TV. Yes, we do lots of reviews, but the real interesting stuff is where cultural forms cross over and bleed into one another.
Barbara: Many people see pop culture as a transient or trivial phenomenon and something not worth intellectualizing about. Others who study pop culture are obsessed and wax poetic or academic. How does PopMatters find a balance between a lofty academic language and using a language more 'appropriate' to the context of pop music, let's say rock and roll?
Sarah: The intent from the beginning was to offer criticism smart enough for academic journals, but written in an engaging, entertaining manner that pulls in readers from many backgrounds. I have a background in cultural studies, as do many of the writers, but we share the conviction that formal cultural studies writing often has an elitist, alienating effect, something that rather goes against the Marxist formations of cultural studies.
All culture is political--that's the primary point to take from cultural studies. And, as such, all culture is valid as a subject of study and critique. In this age of hyper media with millions of messages flying at us each day in multiple media, pop culture is a more valid area of analysis than ever before. Pop culture is literally how we tell our human stories now. Combine that philosophical underpinning with engrossing writing and smart writers and you see how we bridge the "gap" between academia and popular media.
Barbara: What made you want to be a publisher?
Sarah: I've always wanted to be a publisher. Several years ago the publisher from a major book publishing company told me that he saw that I have publishing in my bones. He said that after talking to me for 10 minutes. Back in high school in Madison, Wisconsin, I put out a music magazine that I Xeroxed and sold in my school. Other folks were doing a lot of that then. That was in the days of new wave and the rockabilly revival.
Barbara: Do you think it's true that to run a successful magazine nowadays you must fill a particular niche or cater to a specific readership?
Sarah: Absolutely, although that niche can be rather large given the right distribution...and the Internet gets around all of those sticky distribution nightmares that you can have with print publications.
Barbara: Are there differences between writing (or publishing) on the web vs. print?
Sarah: There's very little difference writing-wise. Publishing-wise, the web is brilliant, isn't it? We can reach a global audience of very engaged readers without the distribution nightmares and high printing costs of a print magazine. PopMatters has a big European following. I can't imagine how we'd get a print version of the magazine into all the book shops in Europe as well as the U.S., being an indie publication.
Barbara: Do you think Internet publishing has changed music journalism for better or worse?
Sarah: Definitely for the better. It has opened up the exclusive club doors to more voices and given lots of talented writers the opportunity to get published that may have never had the chance in a purely print world.
Barbara: What sort of people write for PopMatters?
Sarah: There's not a single sort of writer and that is a good thing. We have a cross-section of professors with PhDs, professional journalists, long-time music experts and fans and college undergraduates getting their first publication experience with us. We like it this way. Lots of different experience levels and varying life experiences make for a more interesting publication. When you're dealing with something as broad as "popular culture", I would say that it's almost a necessity.
Barbara: How many people read PopMatters and who are they?
Sarah: We currently have 250,000 monthly readers--a figure that eclipses many large, print entertainment magazines. The audience is very international and we have a large following in the academic world, within the entertainment industries and among pop-culture heads and smart consumers.
Barbara: What's the nicest thing you've ever heard someone say about PopMatters?
Sarah: A music editor from one of the major U.S. newspapers once said that PopMatters is the model for good music criticism. I was chuffed about that to say the least.
Barbara: How is your job with PopMatters different from your regular work at the Tribune?
Sarah: At Tribune Media Services, I work in the field of interactive marketing. I'm responsible for all of the online and interactive marketing efforts of the company. Tribune Media Services is the syndication arm of Tribune Company. It's quite different from PopMatters, where I get to do what I've always wanted to do: create a compelling publication from the ground up, direct editorial, work with writers, do business development. I'd say that the lessons I've learned from running PopMatters have helped my work at Tribune more than the other way around. That said, working at Tribune has given me a thorough education in the realm of media syndication and product management, things that will help PopMatters grow over the long term.
Barbara: Can you give me some more background information...Where you were born, went to school...
Sarah: I was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Denver and Chicago and have lived in London as well. I did my undergrad work at the University of Chicago, which has a splendid program called General Studies in the Humanities. That allowed me to study music, film, art, and drama. I began life at U of C as a music major, but wasn't happy being confined to a single cultural form. PopMatters is quite a logical development of my interest in all things cultural and pop cultural. I was studying formally as a musicologist and am just as comfortable writing about classical music and Weimar art as I am about pop music and the like. I've also studied history intensively since high school and am a specialist in 19th and 20th century European cultural and intellectual history, particularly British and German. To tie it all together, I received my M.A. in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.
Barbara: Do you have a personal connection with music? Play any instruments, dance, sing?
Sarah: I've played guitar since I was seven and have been writing songs and singing since about age 11. I also play mandolin and have had stints playing piano and banjo. In college, I studied music theory and voice and was contemplating a rather frivolous career as a cabaret singer where I could indulge in my massive love for the songs of Noel Coward and Cole Porter.
Barbara: When did you discover rock and roll and which artists were part of that experience?
Sarah: I discovered rock 'n' roll at age two when I crawled around my mother's sewing room and discovered the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper's on the floor. I was intrigued by all the figures and the cartoonishness of it and I loved "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." That began an affair with the Beatles that has lasted my entire life. At five, I would sing "Rocky Raccoon" and "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da." By seven I had every Beatles record, then I really started branching out into early rock 'n' roll--Elvis, Buddy Holly and the like.
Barbara: Did you know you wanted to be a writer early on in your life?
Sarah: Yes. I started writing songs around 11 and was trying to write novels, plays and opera librettos--I told you I love classical music--in high school.
Barbara: How did you first get into writing about music?
Sarah: In high school I was writing for the magazine that I put out. Then several years ago, I started writing a syndicated music column for college newspapers through Tribune Media Service's College Press Exchange.
Barbara: If forced to choose, who is your all-time favorite writer? Would you say this person exerts a bigger influence on your style or on your ideas? (Feel free to discuss others who've influenced you as well.)
Sarah: Noel Coward hands down. I think he's the funniest person who ever lived. I've always loved reading plays and Private Lives always has me in stitches. I'm an admirer of his songs, plays, style and way of being. Coward has influenced my style more than anything else, especially in the plays and fiction that I have written. Other favorite writers are W. Somerset Maugham, Hermann Hesse, Anton Checkov, and George Bernard Shaw. I'm also a fan of great historians like Ian Kershaw, who can make history read like a novel, and superb historical fiction writers like Edward Rutherford (London, Sarum, Russka) and James Mitchner.
Barbara: Your favorite music magazines and critics in your formative years? Which critics and writers were your favorites and which ones influenced you?
Sarah: Trouser Press was my favorite magazine in my teenage years. It was the one magazine I could get in the States that kept me up on all the British bands I loved. It was a sad day when they closed shop. More recently, it's been Q, Mojo, and Uncut that I have followed religiously. Unlike many of the mainstream American publications, these U.K. publications offer really in-depth articles of the quality of a piece in the New Yorker. They treat music seriously, for the most part. I must also admit a guilty love for NME, even with all their eternal trendiness. It's still a great place to hear about up-and-coming bands. On this side of the pond, I quite like and respect The Big Takeover and Magnet. There's no one music writer that has influenced me, rather the overall style, tone and smartness of Mojo and Uncut have been an influence. But really, so have the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's.
Barbara: How has the critical landscape changed since you first started writing, or has it?
Sarah: Not really.
Barbara: Was there ever a "Golden Age" of rock criticism?
Sarah: Well, we're not really in an era of star rock critics, but that doesn't mean there ever really was a golden age. That's all in popular perceptions. Just like there is always good and great music to be found, there is always interesting and compelling criticism to be found. Whether that criticism is present in major mass-market publications is another story, but it's always around in one form or another.
Barbara: What piece of your own writing are you most proud of? Can you summarize what you were trying to get at in that piece?
Sarah: It's impossible to narrow it to one because it always changes. I'm seldom happy with something that I wrote for very long. I am rather proud of the review I wrote of the Jam tribute album Fire and Skill that was basically my defense of Paul Weller as a consummate songwriter and a refutation of the perception in the U.S. that The Jam were just a cute mod band. I'm also pleased with my M.A. thesis, which looked at the resurgence of Russian nationalism in the early '90s and was one of the first serious English language texts on Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Barbara: What specifically keeps you interested in writing about music after so many years?
Sarah: Music and writing have been the two major loves of my life. When I could finally blend them, it made all the sense in the world. I can't imagine not doing it, frankly. Only trouble is finding time these days what with my day job and handling the editing and publishing duties at PopMatters. My goal over the next year is to start writing a lot more and do writing for more publications.
Barbara: You're also a syndicated music columnist. Where do you publish now?
Sarah: I've stopped writing that column, but am about to begin writing a new column on British popular music for PopMatters that I hope will also get picked up in other venues.
Barbara: What was your last music article about?
Sarah: A review of a Coldplay and JJ72 concert here in Chicago.
Barbara: What's the most important thing to remember when writing about music?
Sarah: That the article isn't about you, it's about the music and the music has a historical and cultural context. It's important to place music within that context to both treat music with the respect it deserves and hopefully to educate your readers.

Barbara: Do you have a favorite period or genre of music?
Sarah: That varies on my mood. There are so many genres and periods of music that I am passionate about...might as well go in chronological order. Nineteenth century German classical music: Beethoven's concertos, lieder, and symphonies; Schubert's and Schumann's lieder; Wagner's operas--I'm a major Wagnerian actually. 1920s-1940s: the golden age of American popular song (with the Brit Noel Coward thrown in there): Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin. Mid-'60s: The Beatles, The Small Faces, The Kinks, The Zombies. The late '70s/early '80s: The Jam, The Clash, The English Beat. Mid-to-late '90s British indie: Radiohead, Oasis, Blur, Manic Street Preachers.
Barbara: Any new music that makes you believe in the power of music?
Sarah: Yes, great new British stuff like the Super Furry Animals and their psychedelic masterpiece Rings Around the World, Travis' stadium-size anthems and a hundred other bands that prove there's always good music to be found. Plus, the fertility and variety of the electronic music scene that makes for some of the best musical brain food since early 20th century classical music and '50s jazz.
Barbara: What are the main functions of your job as an Editor? Was it necessary to be a writer in order to do these jobs well?
Sarah: I guide the overall editorial direction of PopMatters as Editor & Publisher, but I also double as Music Editor. On the E&P side, I have to build our industry relationships, handle all the technology issues, manage all the section editors, and do tons of grunt work. On the Music Editor side of things, I make review and feature assignments, serve as the primary contact with the record labels and publicists, manage a crew of editors and associate editors, and also do plenty of copy editing and fact checking...oh, and spend dozens of hours each month making lists of the CDs that come into our mailbox for review.
Being a writer myself is obviously vital in dealing with other writers. I'm respectful of the unique voice each writer has and I'm leery of dictating a particular writing style to the music team as a result. My being a creative writer means I want to foster that creativity in the writing staff.
Barbara: What do you find most difficult about editing?
Sarah: Bad writers with insufferable egos. Good writers always want to get better. Bad ones often think they are singularly brilliant and then resist all attempts at even the faintest amount of editing or critique.
Barbara: What makes a good editor?
Sarah: Someone who knows their subject thoroughly, has excellent people skills, is well-read and knows good writing when they see it, has thick skin, and can foster creativity and inspire writers to constantly improve while seeing that they enjoy their work.
Barbara: A lot of people interviewed for rockcritics have suggested that writers need to expand their musical horizons more, that many writers nowadays are too comfortable in their little corner of the world. And yet, in most publications, you often see the same writers covering the same territory. How do you feel about that? Should people stick to doing what they're good at?
Sarah: People should certainly do what they're good at, but they should also be constantly educating themselves, not remaining static, so that they can become good at new things and develop expertise in new genres and with a wider range of artists. I'm endlessly reading about music in magazines and books to learn more about genres that pique my interest. New artists I like, I research and learn about their influences and that, in turn, leads me to even more artists and more research. It's something I've done since I was a kid and always will. Nothing galls me more than hearing people say "there's no good music anymore." There's always good music and always has been. Dig around, you'll find it.
Barbara: You must, no doubt, get a pile of submissions and proposals from hopeful writers. What advice would you give to someone trying to break in to this field?
Sarah: Know your stuff, write with some real personality, and keep music writing about the music.
Barbara: Any particular challenges you faced as the result of being a woman with your writing, editing, publishing, work, society, life? (And how did you cope with those obstacles?)
Sarah: Starting your own magazine largely gets around those issues. Being a syndicated columnist for Tribune, I did feel the boy's club atmosphere of the rock journalism world a bit more, but it's honestly not an issue for me now. It's true many music magazines have far more male writers than female. PopMatters has made a conscious effort to recruit a very diverse staff in terms of gender, race and sexual orientation. It's those different life experiences that give our criticism overall a more interesting edge.
Barbara: What have you been up to lately? Any other projects you can't wait to get started on?
Sarah: I'm developing a column dealing with British rock and plan to have that rolling on PopMatters (and maybe some other places as well) in a few months. I'll be looking at syndication opportunities for that. I also plan to write a piece on the state of cultural studies for a new cultural studies print journal. I'm going to do more writing for print magazines too.

Web 3.0?

2006-12-13T11:46:00.000-05:00

PARIS (AFP) - For the companies and individuals inhabiting the web's ever-evolving ecosystem, three big revolutions have taken place almost unnoticed by outside observers.

The first, they argue, was the initial phase -- or what they call "Web 1.0" -- when corporations like the BBC, Disney and established newspapers set up virtual shop and reached out to Internet readers and viewers.
The second -- "Web 2.0" -- saw Internet users becoming content providers themselves, through blogs, citizen journalism, homemade videos and collaborative sites such as Wikipedia.
Now, they say, the time has come for Web 3.0 -- where both sides will be involved in a complicated tango that is at once a mating dance and a competition.
And the question they are all asking is: What will this new phase bring?
The hope, according to many influential players on the web who gathered at a big European conference on the issue held this week in Paris, is money, and lots of it.
But there is also a small fear, perhaps fuelled by Google's staggering 1.65-billion-dollar purchase last month of the popular YouTube video hosting site, that expectations are too high, and that the coming Darwinian struggle will be brutal.
Web 2.0 "is like controlled anarchy," said Anthony Rose, the chief technical officer for the music and movie distributor Altnet and one of the 1,000 attendees at the two-day Le Web 3 conference that opened Monday.
It could herald in a new era spreading democracy and "empowering the end-user" in a way that will shift the power balance between complacent multinationals and individuals, he said.
But, he added: "The question we're asking is, is the Web 2.0 a bubble? Will it have come and gone before most people know what it is?"
The buzz and bustle in the Paris conference hall showed few were troubled by that prospect, at least right now.
Computer-toting geeks in t-shirts from more than 30 countries were seen happily pocketing business cards from corporate types from Yahoo, NewsCorp, Microsoft and various venture capitalists.
Loic Le Meur, the French web entrepreneur who has organised the gathering every year since 2004, boasted that it had sold out within days purely from word of mouth and from Internet searches.
"I've been fed up for 10 years to see everything happening in the United States," he said, explaining that he wanted to do something to reduce the transatlantic gap in web activity.
"We are seeing the birth of an complete economic sector that is entirely virtual and underestimated in Europe," he said.
An attendee, William Quiviger of Fon, a Spanish-based company trying to build Wi-Fi users into a global network of free hotspots, agreed that a "revolution" was underway.
"We're trying to assess in what direction we're going... every participant here is giving his or her vision of what Web 3.0 is," he said.
But as the deep-pocketed companies move on successful niche websites -- or even ones showing vague promise -- he admitted that the tone both at these once-informal conferences and in the start-ups themselves had changed.
"A lot of cynics will say we're selling it out," he said, adding that was "kinda" how he felt himself.
Florent Wolff, a French venture capitalist wearing a spiffy blue suit, dismissed that reading and declared the conference "one of the best events in Europe".
"You have 20 percent big corporations, you have 20 percent people working in finance, and the rest of the people are mostly entrepreneurs already with a business or raising money or looking for an idea," he said.
Recent big deals for web start-ups showed funds were still flowing freely, he said, adding by way of example that a French version of the YouTube model -- Dailymotion -- was also on the brink of being bought.
Still, the problem of how to eke money from these expensive virtual acquisitions was yet to be resolved and was being masked by the investment rush.
"The failures -- we don't see the failures yet, because they still have some funds to spend," Wolff said.
Thuy-Thien Tran, a strategic planner for French ad agency CLM/BBDO, also seemed stumped by how the new generation of web businesses were going to cash in.
"I don't know yet. It's a very difficult question, actually," she admitted.

Edited to add:
But do you agree with the comments? Which ones?

Well, I think this'll be just another version of the dot-com boom/bust cycle...For decades, Big Business has tried to capture the "Next Big Thing" while constantly forgetting that the mere act of commodifying and commercializing it is the death knell to its individuality. Big Biz is perpetually the last guest to arrive, long after the cool people have moved on to the next new thing. An analogy would be hearing about the coolest rave happening, but showing up to the empty warehouse the next evening, hoping that the previous night's energy will be re-captured..By its very nature, BB is the enemy of organic, populistic innovation.

Thoughts on Lit Theory

2006-12-11T17:47:00.000-05:00

Contemporary Literary Theory is not a single thing but a collectionof theoretical approaches which are marked by a number of premises,although not all of the theoretical approaches share or agree on allof the them.1. Meaning is assumed to be created by difference, notby "presence," (that is, identity with the object of meaning). Asthe revisionist Freudian Jacques Lacan remarks, a sign signals theabsence of that which it signifies. Signs do not directly representthe reality to which they refer, but (following the linguistics ofFerdinand de Saussure) mean by difference from other words in aconcept set. All meaning is only meaning in reference to, and indistinction from, other meanings; there is no meaning in any stableor absolute sense. Meanings are multiple, changing, contextual.2. There is no foundational 'truth' or reality in the universe (asfar as we can know)--no absolutes, no eternalities, no solid groundof truth beneath the shifting sands of history. There are only localand contingent truths generated by human groups through theircultural systems in response to their needs for power, survival andesteem. Consequently, values and identity are cultural constructs,not stable entities. Even the unconscious is a cultural construct,as Kaja Silverman points out in The Subject of Semiotics, in thatthe unconscious is constructed through repression, the forces ofrepression are cultural, and what is taboo is culturally formulated.3. Language is a much more complex, elusive phenomenon than weordinarily suspect, and what we take normally to be our meanings areonly the surface of a much more substantial theatre of linguistic,psychic and cultural operations, of which operations we are not befully aware. Contemporary theory attempts to explore theimplications (i.e., the inter-foldings, from 'plier', to fold) oflevels of meaning in language.4. Language itself always has excessive signification, that is, italways means more than it may be taken to mean in any one context;signification is always 'spilling over', especially in texts whichare designed to release signifying power, as texts which wecall 'literature' are. This excessive signification is created inpart by the rhetorical, or tropic, characteristics of language (atrope is a way of saying something by saying something else, as in ametaphor, a metonym, or irony), and the case is made by Paul de Manthat there is an inherent opposition (or undecidability, or aporia)between the grammatical and the rhetorical operations of language.5. It is language itself, not some essential humanness or timelesstruth, that is central to culture and meaning. Humans 'are' theirsymbol systems, they are constituted through them, and those systemsand their meanings are contingent, relational, dynamic.6. The meaning that appears as normal in our social life masks,through various means such as omission, displacement, difference,misspeaking and bad faith, the meaning that is: the world of meaningwe think we occupy is not the world we do in fact occupy. The worldwe do occupy is a construction of ideology, an imagination of theway the world is that shapes our world, including our 'selves', forour use.7. A text is, as the etymology of the word "text" proclaims, atissue, a woven thing (L. texere, to weave); it is a tissue woven offormer texts, echoes of which it continually evokes (filiations,these echoes are sometimes called), woven of historical referencesand practices, and woven of the play of language. A text is not, andcannot be, 'only itself', nor can it properly be reified, said tobe 'a thing'; a text is a process of engagements. Literary Theoryadvocates pushing against the depth, complexity and indeterminancyof this tissue until not only the full implications of themultiplicities but the contradictions inevitably inherent in thembecome more apparent.8. The borders of literature are challenged by the ideasa) that all texts share common traits, for instance that they allare constructed of rhetorical, tropic, linguistic and narrativeelements, andb) that all experience can be viewed as a text: experience insofaras it is knowable is consequently symbolically configured, and humanactivity and even perception is both constructed and known throughthe conventions of social practice; hence as a constructed symbolicfield experience is textual.While on the one hand this blurring of differentiationbetween 'literature' and other texts may seem to make literatureless privileged, on the other hand it opens those non-literary (butnot non-imaginative, and only problematically non-fictional) texts,including 'social texts', the grammars and vocabularies of socialaction and cultural practice, up to the kind of complex analysisthat literature has been opened to.9. So the nature of language and meaning is seen as more intricate,potentially more subversive, more deeply embedded in psychic,linguistic and cultural processes, more areas of experience are seenas textual, and texts are seen as more deeply embedded in andconstitutive of social processes.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------None of these ideas shared by contemporary theories are new to theintellectual traditions of our culture. It appears to many, however,that Literary Theory attacks the fundamental values of literatureand literary study: that it attacks the customary belief thatliterature draws on and creates meanings that reflect and affirm ourcentral (essential, human, lasting) values; that it attacks theprivileged meaningfulness of 'literature'; that it attacks the ideathat a text is authored, that is, that the authority for itsmeaningfulness rests on the activity of an individual; that itattacks the trust that the text that is read can be identified inits intentions and meanings with the text that was written; andultimately that it attacks the very existence of value and meaningitself, the ground of meaningfulness, rooted in the belief in thosetranscendent human values on which humane learning is based.On the other hand, 'theory people' point out that theory does is noterase literature but expands the concept of the literary and renewsthe way texts in all areas of intellectual disciplines are or can beread; that it explores the full power of meaning and the fullembeddedness of meanings in their historical placement; that itcalls for a more critical, more flexible reading.It is the case that Literary Theory challenges many fundamentalassumptions, that it is often skeptical in its disposition, and thatit can look in practice either destructive of any value or merelycleverly playful. The issue is whether theory has good reasons forthe questioning of the assumptions, and whether it can lead topractice that is in fact productive

Where are the flying cars?

2006-12-10T22:58:00.003-05:00

When I--and I'm sure a lot of you out there--were kids, the big thing was the impending appearance of flying cars, moon bases and rocket suits that would whisk us from house to office in minutes flat, all while digesting our 'protein pills', instead of eating Breakfast.All this was supposed to have been fait accompli by now, I mean '2001' WAS 8 years ago, right? We were supposed to be on our way to the stars or living in some post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland or slaves to chimps and gorillas by now, depending on what movie or novel we read.
Here's the thing,though: other than a few obvious technological advances *hugs his computer* we're living essentially the way we were 30 years ago, when I was young. The houses are the same, no plexiglasss, 175 storey mega-condo towers , like we were lead to think would exist.
No hover-cars;just the same old internal combustion engines in slightly sleeker chassis, although the Mercedes SmartCar Forone is oddly reminiscent of those teeny-tiny cars they told us we'd be driving in the Megatropolis of the "future".

So, the question remains: Why AREN'T they here? Why are we living the way we've always lived: In neighbourhoods, with Grocery stores where we still have to buy food. Malls where almost none of the clothes sold are made of NASA polyfibre mesh or come in metallic colours.

Goren Moments.

2006-12-07T10:42:00.000-05:00

Brainstorm a "single representative example of something you are trying to think more carefully about (Rosenwasser 95)….

"Bobby Goren’s" ‘cracker’ moment on Law and Order: Criminal Intent….
His almost self-conscious leap of logic in analysing a crime scene turns a spotlight on both his character and the style of writing on the show.
It becomes almost surrealistic in his view of the world.
Is this deliberate or merely a lapse in the writing?
Why was this scene allowed to play with seeming seriousness when it seems somewhat jarring?
The Answer could be that the show is demonstrating a somewhat fantastical side.
Like the dual characters in "se7en", where the cop and the serial killer are two sides of the same coin, Goren strives to make order out of chaos, rather than submit to it.
The show echoes the sentiments of "CSI" with its almost Zen approach and the "Genius" set to work opposing randomness and disorder.
-Is this a response to post-9/11 angst, where order was smashed by outside forces?
Is it a reassurance that there is, at society’s core, an intrinsic sense of order that prevails?
Or, is it the other way around? Chaos is the primary force and People merely create pockets of Order within it; you carve order into the realm of randomness and disorder.
Somehow, I think the answer is in the middle. Life is potentially both ordered and chaotic or, at best, a tentative order, threatened by chaos.

Big Brother....

2006-12-07T10:40:00.000-05:00

I was a little disturbed when I read about the KFPL possibly being taken to court by one of their patrons. I'm not sure why Irving Freilich feels he needs to file a human rights complaint against the Kingston Frontenac Public Library for refusing to pull their copies of adbusters, a Canadian magazine that carried an editorial earlier this year by its President and Publisher/Editor, Kalle Lasn that generated a great deal of controversy. In it, he claimed that the high percentage of Jews within the upper echelon of the American neoconservative movement unduly influences the current American foreign policy in the Middle East. Mr. Freilich wants the magazine taken out of KFPL branches and is willing to take action to get his way. The question here is not whether Mr. Lasn’s editorial is biased; it is. Any editorial, by its nature, is designed to be persuasive and present a particular point of view.
What Lasn asks in his editorial, in my opinion, is this: given that Jews represent roughly 2% of the general population in America today, why are 26 of the 50 most influential neoconservatives in America Jewish, and does that fact actually influence current American policies towards Israel and the Middle East? It’s an interesting and potentially valid question and, had Mr. Lasn backed it up with more than mere circumstantial evidence, I might have been inclined to give him at least the benefit of the doubt on his theory. However, the editorial is based on a faulty premise--being Jewish automatically translates to being a Zionist--a premise Lasn himself discounts later in the editorial when he states that the majority of American Jews typically vote Democrat and oppose the policies of the right wing Likud party and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. As well, Lasn's argument of the significance of the 52% Jewish component in Lasn’s Top 50 neoconservatives becomes a non-issue when you realise that neoconservatives are, by definition, staunchly pro-Israel, regardless of religious affiliation, rendering it a moot point. In the end the article collapses under a morass of muddled logic and unanswered questions.
If Mr. Freilich is worried that Mr. Lasn's article will adversely influence the public, I suggest he read the archives of online discussion groups such as rabble.ca, among others, including the adbusters site itself, to see the breadth of debate this editorial has spawned; in the months following its publication, it and Mr. Lasn have been the subject of a wide ranging and comprehensive debate regarding the validity of his ideas, a sure sign that nothing in the editorial is being taken as face value or blindly accepted.
While I applaud Mr. Freilich's desire to right a wrong as he sees it, eliminating a perceived source of anti-Semitism, I have to take issue with the idea that he or anyone has the need or the right to protect us from supposedly subversive or anti-social sentiments. What is disturbing is the fact that Mr. Freilich wants to decide for us what we can read in a public library as well as the idea that he and others feel that we as a culture need to be protected from bad ideas and that they are somehow solely qualified to do so. I am also insulted that he has chosen to compare a country that allows free speech to Nazi Germany, a comparison that should be seen as offensive to Canadians, especially those who struggled and died fighting the Nazis and their ideology. Ultimately, the real danger here is not the influence Kalle Lasn and his editorial--or anyone’s writing, for that matter-- might have on a weak-minded few. It is the free flow of thoughts and ideas being judged by political pressure, rather than succeeding or failing based on their merit or lack thereof. I believe that, inflammatory nature aside, the vast majority of these "dangerous" ideas tend to inevitably show themselves rather quickly for what they are: flawed and nothing more than part of what Canadian Journalist Leslie Millen refers to as "intellectual landfill", originally a commentary on the quality of Internet-sourced information, but also, I believe, an accurate term to describe intellectual discourse as a whole. We need to be exposed to the entire range of thought and debate in order to make fully reasoned decisions about their worth. So, I thank Mr. Freilich for his concern on our behalf, but, personally, I think I'll make up my own mind about Mr. Lasn and adbusters.

Old but true:

2006-12-07T10:39:00.000-05:00

I was up at the Canadian Tire by the Cat Centre, buying a Coleman cooler to have in the trunk of the car for our frequent trips up to the local Provincial Parks. And there she was. The Challenger K1 inflatable kayak. And, almost as if the Water Gods themselves had decreed that I take up a watersport, the K1 was on sale for half price. Of course, with the two life jackets and a pump and a paddle, the other half of the half price was quickly spent. But that was no matter. I owned a kayak. A big kayak in "rubber ducky" yellow. Pretty soon, I had her inflated and out on the lake and I was hooked. A trip or two to Peak Experience and Trailhead later, I was a kayak aficionado. I know the difference between a hard and a soft chine, that coaming isn’t something you do to your hair and that roto-molding is good enough, but you should try to get kevlar.
The only problem with my yellow kayak is this; it’s a solo kayak. If you get creative, you can get a squirmy three year old up onto your lap and sort of half-paddle around for about ten minutes before you and the child get tired of the cramped co- existence in the kayak. So, recently, we rented a two-person kayak and took it up to one of our favourite local beaches. My wife and I had rented a two-person kayak before, a few years ago, while in the Dominican Republic. Neither one of us had kayaked before and needless to say it ended badly. I realise now why they are nicknamed "divorce boats."
So, we were a bit apprehensive setting off with a three-year-old who could suddenly turn squirmy in the middle of the lake. However, he decided that he was the "captain" and sat quietly in his "Captain’s Chair" while my wife and I paddled, remarkably in synch, and managed to find our way around the lake with no undue marital stress.
The great thing about the Kingston Area is that it is so close to so many great areas in which to "get away from it all"

Arghhhhh

2006-12-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

Ok, maybe I’m getting old and crotchety at 40. However, it seems that lately, the level of customer service has dropped off into some abyss. Example: I’m in the local supermarket the other day. It’s a Saturday so yeah, there are a lot of people and so I get the very basics, frozen Indian food, Bar-B-Q chips and lemonade. With a few other luxuries like toilet paper and diapers, I have about 14 items in the cart, along with an increasingly antsy three-year old. The one to eight item express lane is empty and at every other cashier, there are carts lined up like jets at Pearson Airport on Christmas Eve, each piled to the top with groceries. So, I try to use the express line. However, even though I am the only person in line, the cashier refuses to serve me. And while I wait in line at the next cashier, she is empty most of the time. Yet, never once does she show the courtesy or even the common sense to call me back, even though my three year old son is growing ever more noisily restless. Should I have insisted she ring my groceries through rather than standing around doing nothing? Probably. Should I have had to ask? No. It’s not just that customer service is no longer as good as it used to be; customer service is no longer there, many times. It’s been replaced in many cases by clock watching automatons who resent being made to do any more than the least they can and still get a paycheque.
In a way, I feel for them. I worked in retail for a few years, so I know what it’s like: the pay is bad, the hours are long, usually and your Manager thinks he or she is God’s gift to Retail. And, more often than not, this isn’t the career path they want. Many retail staff even have a post-retail career all mapped out. However, like it or not or big plans or not, this is their current job and, although I’m not the one who physically hands them a pay stub every second Friday, I’m one of the ones that help make that pay stub possible.
So, next time they are tempted to exercise their little bit of "authority" by imposing an arbitrary item limit, I want them to remember that they work for us, the consumer.

What Rough Beast:

2006-12-07T10:31:00.000-05:00

In the 21st Century, the process of newsgathering has undergone a radical change from even 10 years ago. In apparent affirmation of Moore’s Law, the amount of information that is publicly accessible has increased exponentially, through the availability of images and radically less expensive ways to transmit media from even the most isolated areas in the world. In fact, in this Media/Technology saturated world, even terms such as "isolated" and "remote" need to be refined. While the physical space between places remains the same, the advent of the Internet and e-mail has rendered distance, in terms of information transfer, an almost archaic notion. With this explosion of available information has come a wave of what can only be described as "creative" journalism: the wholesale manufacture of elements or even complete stories that are able to be passed off as fact. Unfortunately, the availability and ease of use of incredibly powerful media tools, as well as the exceptional amount of readily available information, has allowed journalists such as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass to fabricate both the stories and the source material that these stories are "based" upon so convincingly that it has become almost impossible to verify these stories other than relying on random and rigorous "guerrilla" fact checking as Nicholas Lemann has suggested (Lemann 5). Glass, a 25 year old Associate Editor at The New Republic and freelance journalist supplying many of the top political and current affairs magazines in the late 1990s, was uncovered by a quick check of the Nexis-Lexis database by Adam Penenburg, a editor at Forbes Digital Tool; the only reference to Jukt Micronics, an imaginary software company featured so prominently in an article that Glass had written for The New Republic about teenage hackers extorting Fortune 500 companies, was the Glass article itself. (Goldberg 2). However, even that discovery was only made because of the timeliness of the Forbes inquiry. Eventually, had the article not initially aroused the suspicion of Penenburg, articles and papers would have referred to the Glass piece and thereby been added to the available database. In turn those articles and papers would have been cited until there was an impossibly intricate paper trail to unravel and--at least on paper--Jukt Micronics would have become as real as IBM or Microsoft. In their defence, editors at The New Republic countered that Glass, in order to fool the fact checkers, had fabricated both a corporate website for Jukt Micronics as well as several e-mail and voice mail accounts allegedly belonging to the characters in his article. This is where the true potential malignancy of the Internet lies, in its ability to effortlessly overwhelm the average user in masses of hyperlinks, URLs and sites with the superficial look of authority.
This mass of undifferentiated information has been referred to by Leslie Millin as " the intellectual landfill of the Internet" (Millin 400). It’s a very apt metaphor in that it captures the essence of the nature of the Internet as a dumping ground for all forms of media as well as a comment on the potential value of the majority of information gathered by quickly "scooping" it off random websites mentioned in a search engine. The "knowledge" gained by this method eliminates the linear path that traditional research forced upon students in the centuries preceding the advent of the Internet as a viable research venue. As cumbersome and involved as the traditional process could become, it forced students to actually engage the general subject material they were researching. They were required to determine what in the material was relevant to their purposes and look at it far more vigorously in order to "extract" the information needed for their specific purposes. In addition, this method demonstrated to the researcher that facts and information exist in a context, a surrounding body of ideas that predicate and qualify the information. Without this context, the relative worth of "facts" and opinions, their relationship to each other and, ultimately, the difference between them within an argument is far more difficult to determine.
In addition to adding context to evidence, much has been made of the supremacy of the peer review system as a counter to the fraudulent or shoddy "research" that seems to infest many Internet sites. While this is a valid and certainly accurate point, another result of the peer review process has been a stemming of the explosion of information that proliferates in the no holds barred atmosphere of the Internet. There can only be so much new material made available within a reasonable amount of time, due to the rigor of inquiry that most peer review imposes. And this pace has enabled most researchers to, if not keep pace with new research in terms of specifics, to at least do so in generalities. Now, with the ability to use a search engine to extract information, all the information would seemingly be relevant to the issue at hand. However, this relevance is, in many cases, an illusion, due to the complex and potentially fraudulent nature of information on the web. As well, the danger that the Internet imposes is not so much to researchers doing more advanced research, i.e. at the Masters or Doctoral level: they usually have a pretty in-depth grasp of where the areas of research in their field are being conducted and the general flow of the field. Most ominously, it is those students just entering a field as well as those exploring a topic for an isolated assignment who have not been properly trained in determining the proper sources who can be swayed by the masses of authentic looking documents online and can be fooled into thinking that what they see are the actual facts. Everything they read has, to them, the look if not the substance of authority. However, even if the information given is factual, there is the danger of the bias that many articles have built into them overwhelming or subverting the information. This bias is sometimes more a question of omitting the facts than distorting them. For example, a Right Wing online news agency will mention the incidences of John Kerry reversing his support on issues, with the implication that these reversals are an indication of a failure of resolve and character. However, they will fail to note that GW Bush has done the same thing on many occasions, as have most elected politicians, and that these reversals are, in fact, common practice in politics. Or, to use another example, the Democrats’ recent veto of the Act that would prohibit Partial Birth Abortions was portrayed by the Right as proof of the Left being in favour of PBAs when in fact the veto was against the wording of the act and was, strictly speaking, a legal matter. This lopsided presentation and the assertions that are implied by it can lead to a misinterpretation of the facts, if the student is not at least aware that these assumptions and faulty logic can exist. Obviously, the challenges that faulty logic and bias present to clarity within an argument are in no way limited to the Internet. However, as Millin states, "…Virtually all new technologies have unintended consequences…" (Millin 395) and the prevailing trend of the Internet and its associated media, such as increasingly complex video games, music downloads and visual media, has been to become an increasingly dominating cultural force. Computers and the Internet have become such a presence that their cultural influences, at least among those born since the emergence of the personal computer in the late Seventies, people who have known nothing else, have become ubiquitous.
A potential way to combat the potentially negative effects of this influence would be to instil in every student, as soon as they start to use the Internet as a research tool, the ability to evaluate the information with which they are presented. However, is this a practical thing to attempt? Can we reasonable expect to train our children to filter out the mass distractions and bombarding effects of mass culture and to somehow develop the capacity to logically and reasonably interpret information when the trend seems to be the gradual erosion of that capacity? The answer is, unfortunately, no. There will never be nor can there be a quick fix; unfortunately, the importance of this information will be increasingly inversely proportional to the amount of hype and glitz used to transmit it. The answer to this problem is never going to be cut and dried, nor will it be absolute and final. There will always be an action-reaction quality to it. However, if the strategy for combating these anti-intellectual and mass cultural blitzkrieg techniques could be reduced to one word, it would be this: vigilance.
However, this vigilance will have to encompass more than a mere resolve to look at the Internet or the Current Events section of the newspaper with a more cynical eye. It would require a retooling of the thought processes and the degree of trust that we had thought sufficient until now. In the past, sources such as the New York Times could be relied upon to provide at least factual reporting and thus maintain a certain credibility. Now, however, the actions of Blair and Glass have shattered that trust and left us with the discomfort of knowing that, in a very real sense, we are vulnerable to the actions of the technically proficient. As David Mamet pragmatically illustrates in his screenplay for the motion picture, "Wag the Dog," this technique of media manipulation can be configured to encompass any ideological objective, from Glass and Blair’s desire to create a more solid looking portfolio and thereby elevate themselves above their peers to a desire to sway a nation into supporting a course of action deemed necessary by either that nation or another’s leaders. However trivial or significant these actions are, it remains that we are a captive audience in that we are forced on rely on others to provide us with the bulk of our news and as such, are subject to the whims of the suppliers of that information. In order for us to reclaim a measure of autonomy in this relationship, it is solely our responsibility to develop the necessary mind-set and education to effectively deal with this supply. As well, we need to re-approach the manner in which we look at the media and the role we as the end-users play in the interaction between the media and ourselves. The act of interpreting media and transference of information consists of a somewhat symbiotic relationship, consisting of two "roles": the active and the passive. The role that each partner in the relationship takes and the form of media determines the dominance of each role within the relationship used to convey the message. As recipients, we can be readily divided into two camps: those who primarily receive their information through what can be described as active media, television and radio, or those who use a more passive form of media, newspapers and journals. The active media tend to assume an active mode of transferring the information to the recipient, who, as a result, is forced to be more passive in his reception of that information. Conversely, newspapers and journals force us to take a more active role in interpreting the information. The benefit of actively engaging media is this: We, as a species, are primarily visual in terms of information gathering. Language is a relatively new development, at least at its current level of complexity. Written language is even more recent, approximately ten thousand years old by most accounts, and therefore artificial in terms of the natural world. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that "…writing is in principle the representation of language rather than a direct representation of thought…. and is therefore a social construct far more than it is an evolution in communication." (Encyclop. Brit. 2004). The implication of this is that, due to the artificial quality of writing, we are unable to merely understand or process it instinctively and are therefore forced to interpret it and it is in this interpretative act that we are allowed the optimal opportunity to deconstruct and analyse the content. Michael Posner, in "Image World", a 2003 essay on the effects of visual media, states that "Text requires another level of mediation, a mental or intellectual filter that distances us from what we are reading"(Posner 239). It is this distance and mediation, along with a wary and vigilant mind-set, that are our best tools with which to fashion a defence against the effects of media bombardment and an increasingly manufactured "Reality."
Ultimately, to repel the ever more culturally entrenched trend towards passive acceptance and digestion of information, we need, to paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, to become the kinds of thinkers we’d like to see more of within the culture.

As if the weather wasn't crappy enough

2006-12-07T10:22:00.000-05:00

I was out this past weekend, enjoying the "Great Melt" that has transformed Kingston from white to wet.
My wife and 4 year-old son were along for the walk along the waterfront by the old Psych. Hospital Grounds and,due to his insatiable curiosity,
we were forced to repeat a phrase so often it might very well become our 2006 spring walk mantra:
" Watch out for the dog poop, Sam."
Ok, riddle me this. Why are so many people who own dogs and who are usually so conscientious about scooping in the other three seasons suddenly such self-centred boobs in the winter, letting Rover do his business in the snow and then just walking away?
Is it the fact that suddenly the blobs in question, usually so visible, are aided by Mother Nature’s white shroud?
Is it really that much harder stooping down into a snow bank than onto a lawn to retrieve the poop?
Is it the fact that maybe you can feel like a rebel: "My dog pooped and I’m not doing ANYTHING about it"?
Whatever IT is, I’m beginning to get a bit tired of the first signs of spring being the inevitable sight of half-melted doggy-do lining the trails in the Beechgrove Complex.
Maybe it’s because I’m not really a dog person.
I like the IDEA of owning a dog, a well-tempered "Lab" or Border Collie named Rex fetching my slippers or lying in front of the stone fireplace whilst I sit in my overstuffed leather chair, reading Wodehouse or Christie and sipping sherry.
However, in real life, I find most dogs to be yappy and slobbery and just…too much like work to keep. And I think I speak for many semi-non-dog people when I say, " if it’s too disgusting to clean up after your own dog, why should WE have to deal with it three months down the road?"
And, the whole "ick" factor of feces-infested public property aside, there is the whole health issue to deal with. I’m sure someone can state that having all this "stuff" melt into the ground and run into storm drains poses no added health hazard to us, but personally I think it’s just one more thing maxing out our water treatment services.
I’m sure we can all find a common ground about this issue.
Hopefully, not one littered with poop.

Winter Wonderland

2006-12-07T10:13:00.000-05:00

Winter in Kingston is a series of wonders. The wonder of engineering that allows the Wolfe Islander III to make its crossing several times a day even in the depths of Winter by following a submerged bubble making device that prevents the water from freezing. The wonder of the architecture along William and Earl that hearken us back to the Olde Days and provide a beautiful 19th century feel to walks through that part of the city. The ad hoc skating rinks in parks that allow kids to just be kids and adults to relive their childhood of pick up games of hockey.
However, there is a dark side to winter.
After the snowiest days in Kingston, when snow is piled eyeball high on lawns and a layer of slush and snow obscures curbs and lane markers, it is still possible to determine where the middle of the road is.
Why?
Because that is where the Pedestrians are. Maybe they are just naïve believers in the goodness of motorists. Maybe they have a guardian angel that allows them to tiptoe through the slush puddles all winter with nary a scratch or splashed Applied Science ’06 jacket (not that you would notice a stain amidst the purple).
I choose to think of them in slightly less kindly terms.
Namely, as I try to wend my way through the streets that, formerly two way, have been narrowed by the inclusion of cars and trucks on BOTH sides into compact and crowded tests of faith and courage, I think of them as self-centred boobs and want to drive them scurrying and scampering over the snow banks back onto the sidewalk, where they belong.
You can chalk my driving philosophy up to a Toronto upbringing, an aggressive style bred and honed in the mean streets of a Downtown Core full of angry and ill-trained owners of SUVs who, in a mad moment of phallic compensation, bought a vehicle only slightly smaller than a streetcar and use it to bull their way across three lanes of traffic to make a right turn because they "forgot" that Richmond Street runs one way in the opposite direction from where they need to be.
It just seems to me that, if I have to deal with navigating un-plowed side streets, Pedestrians should have to deal with un-cleared sidewalks. There is a sort of egalitarianism there that I think the Founding Fathers (and Mothers) would agree with.

My Homi, Bhabha.....

2006-11-30T22:22:00.000-05:00

Re: Bhabha’s " The Commitment to Theory".
I think where Bhabha’s essay goes awry for me is the point at which he starts, in my reading of the essay, overly reneging on the possibility of creating an indigenous organic discourse and destabilizing the loci of theory’s power in the West. However, he concedes that we need to as Western Intellectuals find a way to illuminate the position of the subaltern for them. We should be striving to create a place in discourse where the previously silenced voices can speak for themselves, using the tools of Western theoretical language, the language that we as Western academics speak as well as their particular "code" of cultural reference and create an authentically unique voice that they alone can create. Yet, what Spivak and Bhabha would like us to do, in my opinion, is heap the majority of the burden and responsibility back onto the shoulders of Western critics, while paying lip service to the belief that the new and fresh direction of theory and criticism should be increasingly in the direction of the Third World and the subalternated. This reversion of intellectual representation, I think, just puts us back in the same old position of the West pulling the strings, making us as academics in the West merely intellectual ‘missionaries’, trying to bring a "culture" to people who don’t require a voice as much as a translation of their voice, in my view, Western intellectual quasi-hegemony disguised as an attempt to create post-colonial discourse.
Now, I agree with Spivak and Bhabha that there needs to be a retention of at least the concept of subalternity in the discursive process in order to demonstrate, as Spivak states, that there are limits to the knowledge and the understanding that we can have of the ‘subaltern’ and that there will always be that ‘space of difference’, to quote Spivak, that we can never penetrate.
However, even the attempt to find the limits of that knowledge to show that space, that area of silence is another example of us appropriating the ‘voice’— or in this case the lack of voice --- of the subaltern and becoming its surrogate, all in the name of giving a voice to the voiceless. While there might be a slight softening of the edges of the traditional Western-centric theoretical base in the process of creating that indigenous intellectual, a sort of unintended educating by those we chose to represent, there is still that over-compensating Westernization of the indigenous critic in order to make his or her words comprehensible to us in the West; the hegemonic nature of Western ideas will easily overwhelm the indigenous voice and create, at best, an faintly indigenous-tinted Western theory. Even if the subalternistic critic was a, to use the cliché, create a new critical and theoretical language that wass a form of thinking outside the theoretical box, the West and its intellectual and cultural hegemony dictates the dimensions of that box that the representing think outside of.
Finally, if, as so many would dearly wish to happen, theory is to reach the masses, inform them and create a model from which to build a new theoretical language to, in turn, inform us as Western academics, I think that we need to refrain from what is referred to in the introduction to Bhabha as "dense jargon and...copiously allusive writing style[s]"( Leitch 2378) and instead concentrate on concise, precise language that highlights and privileges the complexity of the ideas over the complexity of the language.

Eno: draft

2006-10-27T14:28:00.000-04:00

Interesting ideas about Memetic theory and Saussurean signifiers.

JB: Where do you see yourself going with these ideas?
ENO: One of the understandings I look for is anything that starts to take seriously the culture that ordinary people make. I find this in books such as Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. It's important to seek to dignify and take seriously what people who don't consider themselves experts and professionals do with their time. I would want to see the same thing done culturally, that we start to recognize that people are cultural beings. They can't help themselves. It's not a question of making a decision to become an artist. You can't help yourself, to some extent. That's an important psychological step, because it says to people: you do it.
There's another level at which I would like to say that much more profoundly; it's something I didn't talk about at all because it's a difficult issue to explain. What is cultural value and how does that come about? Nearly all of the history of art history is about trying to identify the source of value in cultural objects. Color theories, and dimension theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more beautiful and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn't like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It's the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist ideas rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption: no, it's us. It's us who make those meanings.
Culture is a way of getting people to that point of understanding. The work of a lot of modern culture is to say to people: you're making value. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited a lavatory, in what he called an act of deliberate aesthetic indifference, what he was saying was, "look, I can put anything in an art gallery, and I can get you to engage with that thing in a way which makes it valuable." He was quite clearly saying that it's the transaction between you and it, and this context, which creates the value.
This is something that anyone who deals with world finances would probably understand; value is conferred and the result of a system of confidences among people. But it is not something that religions generally understand. It is certainly not something that fundamentalists understand. For me, so many of the really critical bottleneck type problems of our time come from that difficulty of understanding ÷ that it's humans that make the value in things. It didn't get there, it wasn't in there, it isn't there all the time, it wasn't made by somebody else and it's left there for us to find it. We made it. We put it there.
The engagement with culture is a way of understanding that. Of course, art history of the past has always used it to buttress that old idea ÷ ah yes, Michelangelo's Pieta is beautiful because these proportions have some kind of divine golden mean type resonance, and it communicates through to us ÷ the value is in the thing and we're like a radio receiver. That transmitter/receiver model is an old picture which I don't accept any more. The value is in the transaction. The object itself can be almost irrelevant ÷ as was Duchamp's lavatory. He could have chosen a spade, or a bicycle wheel, in fact. What he did was create the situation where he said, here, viewer, come in and make some value. And a lot of 20th century art has been about that ÷ about reminding us that we make things valuable ÷ that they don't preexist in a valuable state.

Stewart Brand's intro to Brian Eno on Edge.org

2006-10-27T07:28:00.000-04:00

Well, this is certainly an interesting thing to get into. I think the the idea that it's good to know the artist's 'frame of reference" is certainly valid. I doubt that Barthes and all the various Jacques out there in Theoryland would agree, but hey, that's the joy of Theory; everyone gets their 2 cents worth.

I think,like I've said, that we should be giving consideration if not primacy to the Authorial intention.
There's that whole buggaboo about Intentional Fallacies and all that"the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.".....but...Wimsatt and Beardsley can suck my...well, anyway... I think that as long as we are relativelty certain about intent, we should be giving it front row attention.......

"Like all significant artists, Brian works from a deep and complex and evolving frame of reference. Unlike most artists, and like most scientists, he talks about that frame of reference. He's not worried that your experience of his art might be sullied by your understanding something about what he's up to — rather the opposite: he would like to include you in the process.
This is risky, but valuable. It's risky because once viewers or listeners know what the artist is attempting, they have criteria for judging when he has failed.
Brian's approach is valuable because it is so inviting. The informed viewer or listener is invited to think like an artist and therefore in a sense to become an artist. This is good for art and good for civilization.
I think that's what makes Brian's book, A Year With Swollen Appendices, so appealing. Brian is famous, and that makes us interested, and he's charming in print as well as in person, so we engage him comfortably. But what gets us about the book is how revealing it is. We see what a good artist does with his mind all day. It's inspiring.
There's a further benefit to telling all, this time to the artist. By not keeping his frame of reference secret, Brian is freed from binding allegiance to whatever he was thinking when he first became successful. You don't cling to secrets you've told. You move on, and your work keeps being surprising as a result. Maybe this approach works best with artists who are easily bored. Brian is, after all, the author/composer/performer of the tune (now a well-known meme), "Been there, done that."

I really think this sums up Grad School, any Grad School...

2006-10-26T23:06:00.000-04:00

Yeah, yeah, this scene's been quoted a gazillian times, especially the
" Of course that's your contention, you're a First Year Grad Student" line,
but why not a gazillian and one?

I'd love to get into why there is this tendency amongst the Graduate Studentia to be such know it all pricks, but it's late and I got class tomorrow (Althusser, what fun......;))
But, I'll see if I can't throw a little something together in the next couple days, aight?

Clark: Hey, I'm the last guy to want to talk about school at the bar. But as long as you're here I want to "seize" the opportunity to ask you a question. Oh, I'm sure you covered it in your history class.
Chuckie: To tell you the truth, I wasn't there much. The class was rather elementary.
Clark: Elementary? Oh, I don't doubt that it was. I remember the class, it was just between recess and lunch.
Chuckie: All right, are we gonna have a problem?
Clark: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the early colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War the economic modalities, especially of the southern colonies could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capitalist and...
Will: [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob’ly, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talkin’ about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
Clark: [taken aback] Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of--
Will: ..."Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from "Work in Essex County," Page 98, right? Yeah I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us- you have any thoughts of- of your own on this matter? Or do- is that your thing, you come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then you pretend- you pawn it off as your own- your own idea just to impress some girls? Embarrass my friend?
[Clark is stunned]
Will: See the sad thing about a guy like you, is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda' got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.
Clark: Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.
Will: [smiles] Yeah, maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal.

Intellectual relativism?

2006-10-26T22:28:00.000-04:00

The ‘New Criticism’
‘Intentional Fallacies’ are fallacies of intent, NOT fallacies committed on purpose...
The idea is that the Author’s intent in writing shouldn’t have primacy over any other interpretation.
But shouldn’t it, really?
I mean, the person DID write it, so I would certainly think that his or her intent would command pretty strong adherence and importance....
Roland Barthe’s "The Death of the Author" from the 60s is a prime document of this New Criticism...

- Since the author’s vision is no longer the primary, any theory is as good, we are freed from the need to extract definitive and objective meaning from any text that we ‘read’....
Reception Theory?
This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for "negotiation" and "opposition" on part of the audience. This means that a "text" — be it a book, movie, or other creative work — is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader.
Therefore a basic acceptance of the meaning of a specific text tends to occur when a group of readers have a shared cultural background and interpret the text in similar ways.
It is likely that the less shared heritage a reader has with the artist, the less she will be able to recognize the artists intended meaning, and it follows that if two readers have vastly different cultural and personal experiences, their reading of a text will vary greatly.
How would THIS work then, in conjunction with New Crit?
I think that it’s interesting in that, we become the filters, the conduit, that meaning becomes communal or personal

As well, I think that it’s an interesting notion to explore the reasons behind differing interpretations, the reasons I see a text in a different way than my neighbour might.
However, is there that Krizonian "intangibility" to explain the ultra-personal?

And what exactly do we expect to mean by "communal"?
What aspects can we reasonable assume to be common amongst a community?
How many are arbitrary?
How do we demarcate "communities"?
Whose "community" within a larger mix of communities should be considered more authentic or legitimate?
I think that, within a set "community", each member brings to the discussion so many potential ‘memberships’ from within other communities that a core receptive audience can never be ‘pinned down’
That, I think, is the potential error in trying to assign an audience to any text; either an outside force decides and therefore risks misrepresentation through lack of familiarity or a desire to ‘represent’ or an inside cabal decides and the resulting demarcation lacks objectivity

My take on Michael Eric Dyson's "Open Mike"

2006-10-26T22:23:00.000-04:00

I’d be embarrassed to tell you that I found this book selling for $4.99 in the remainder’s bin at one of those MEGA-Book sales places they set-up in the malls or the downtown strip, usually in the empty shells of former clothing stores, record stores, what have you. You know the type of place. I’d be embarrassed, except for one thing: I think that I was destined to read this book, that something some higmy power told me or made me go into that "bookstore"( I usually hate to elevate those places to that title) that day. I know that sounds hokey and a bit airy-fairy New-Age-y, but I don’t care. Dr. Mike Dyson’s book changed my life. He showed me that it’s possible to engage the ‘life of the mind’ and still represent. He showed me the path to other brothers and sisters of the mind. Gates. West, hooks, DuBois, people that the School System seems to forget when they discuss black intellectuals. Seems like MLK fills the quota for them; "Give the blacks a hero, they only need the one, you wouldn’t want them to think that there’s a whole pack of them out there, waiting to be discovered and read..."
Well, DR. Dyson, thanks for showing me a way up, if not out. I’ve started the journey you and your books have set me upon....

The Technicolor Wave: a response to Michael Posner’s "Image World

2006-10-26T22:22:00.000-04:00

"

In Michael Posner’s "Image World," he puts forth the theory that visual media is a "pernicious development"(QQ 224) because it forces us to experience reality second-hand (QQ226). Initially, Posner’s thesis could be considered incomplete in that it fails to recognise the non-visual aspects of modern culture that counter-indicate a "dumbing down" of the culture.
For example, one of the questions that comes to mind when reading the article is "What about email?" Obviously, that is as vital and influential a social force as anything is within the realm of visual media, as evidenced by its impact in all aspects of modern culture. However, even email has been influenced to a certain degree by visual considerations. Supplemental aspects, such as "smileys", emoticons, various fonts and "stationary" serve to make email more visually appealing in an attempt to differentiate it. In addition, even something traditionally thought of as a non-visual medium, music, has increasingly become susceptible to the influence of the visual. Stations such as MTV, BET and MuchMusic have transformed the popular music scene into an arena where as Posner says, "…the music becomes secondary"(QQ 238). Even when music is not being presented first hand, as in a concert setting; the influence of visual culture still pervades it; the evolution of the night-club has become the ‘Rave’, with its massive " visual imperative"(QQ 238). I agree that the "tyranny of the visual"(QQ 230) is a real concern and that this "tyranny" comes from the relentless-ness of the visual image. As the saying goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words." This statement is true on many levels: not only is a picture worth a thousand words, it excludes a thousand words from ever being seen as well as any interpretation there might have been of those words. Posner states that it "...is because the message it communicates is unmistakable and instantaneous…"(QQ 229). To me, this implies that the interpretation of the image is forced upon you without your consent. Posner refers to the state in which this places your interpretation of the image as "pre-rational" (QQ 241). By continually doing this, those who generate the images are eventually able to shape our reaction to them by constantly re-asserting their "vision" upon us. Unlike books and music, where we have to fill in the missing visual stimuli, visual images fill that stimuli for us and hardly ever in the way that we would. As well, by way of this massive influx of visual stimuli, the brain, out of self defence against being over loaded, only accepts and registers the most basis and blatant images being presented.
Visual media has even been able, through constant cultural "indoctrination", to transcend the strictly traditional venues of film and television and move into areas not traditionally associated with the "high tech" world of image. These areas include food and books, although seemingly apart from those considered affected by image, have actually become as saturated by image as any area. A perfect example of this in food is the strawberry. Even though intellectually we tend to know that strawberries and indeed any produce from a Farmer’s Market tends to taste better than those from commercial farms and supermarkets, we have fallen into the trap of coveting large, red, shiny and plump strawberries. However, these "perfect" strawberries come from irradiated seed stock, heavily sprayed fields that are flooded with water for several days before the berries are picked semi-ripe and allowed toripen on route from fields several hours away from their final destination. Unfortunately, due to their increasing popularity, the pressure to produce visually appealing "Franken-food" is slowly becoming the norm. Farmers are increasingly switching to this method in order to compete, even though their original product is superior.
In the same way, even "Literature" has fallen to the tyranny of the visual. There is an increasing trend, as Posner points out, to write books with one eye as to whom will play the characters in the movie. More ominously, we have been conditioned to trust our commentators by how good looking they are or by the image they exude. Take, for example, the two current top Conservative authors Ann Coulter and Debbie Schlussel. Both are well respected (by American Conservatives at least) political commentators. Both are blonde, buxom, healthy looking all- American women. Both are intelligent and well-educated. (Both graduated from ivy-league law schools). Both women’s books top the best seller charts for weeks on end and generate rave review after rave review in all the "best" magazines and online sites. However, the books themselves contain numerous research errors as well as misquotes and faulty reasoning. However,despite these lapses, both Coulter and Schlussel continue to be favoured guests on political commentary shows. The reason? People have become conditioned to believe what they see. They see two well-dressed, well-spoken women speaking out about issues; they tend to believe that "spin" on those issues. These women and the media consultants behind them have created the image of these women, as well as others, as "people to listen to."
As this trend of "reality constantly filtered through the distorting prism of contrived images"(QQ 229) continues to grow, there will be a schism between the factions of the population in terms of opinion and level of general knowledge by virtue of how they gain their information. Those who gain their information visually through the evening news will lose the ability to differentiate opinion to the degree they would be able to by reading the newspapers and magazine accounts. As this schism widens, there will be the "readers" and the "watchers" and the forms of interpretation will diversify into new and competing schools of thought and criticism.
Jean Baudrillard is quoted as saying "The world of media fantasies is more real then everyday life" (QQ 230). I think that, while this is true, there is a flip side to this theory in that certain forms of media can allow us to experience a reality that we might never be able to otherwise experience. Many visual forms of modern culture could actually be beneficial, if used properly and the momentum followed up: in "Tomb Raider; The Last Revelation." a video game by British designers Core Designs, the heroine explores tombs in and around Egypt in search of clues about an ancient treasure. While, admittedly, the graphics representing actual archaeological sites within the game are somewhat historical inaccurate-sites that in reality collapsed Millenia ago are shown fully intact-the inclusion of links to other Internet sites would indicate that there is a desire to tie the game to real world events as well as providing a forum for further teaching about Egyptian history. Included on the game disc are links to sites dealing with historical aspects dealt with within the game, including www.kv5.com, a multimedia exploration of the excavations in the Valley of the Kings. As well, many simulation games introduce the player to historical events, such as D-Day and the American civil war and allow them to immerse themselves in that period and gain at least a cursory introduction to the events. Obviously, most action-oriented video games are not primarily geared towards education and those that do contain some historical accuracy cannot replace actual study of these periods.
Posner is correct about the dominance of visual culture in modern society. Its primary vehicle has been television, which has seen itself bear the brunt of the criticism of "dumbing down" the culture as well as bearing the onus for counter-acting that trend by creating cutting edge programs such as "Six Feet Under" and "Oz", shows that would not have had an American audience a decade ago. In fact, television and other aspects of modern visual culture have gained a certain sort of legitimacy in that they have become a full-fledged academic discipline, examined by cultural scientists such as Henry Jenkins at M.I.T and Robert Thompson at Syracuse University. Jenkins’ work deals with the influence of the settings of video games and how they might constitute a "shared space" in the same way a school playground would in real life while Thompson explores the unifying effect of television on American families. While many traditionalists in the academy would argue that studying television on a par with literature or philosophy is a sign of decay of intellectual standards, I would argue that they are both missing the point as well as being prematurely dismissive and elitist. We are entering the era of what has been termed the "fan intellectual", where those who have grown up exposed to the full force of the media culture in the past twenty years are now in a position to reflect upon that culture in a rational and informed way. Perhaps their studies will allow us to look at the process of visual culture as a determining factor in shaping future cultural parameters. As Bruce Mau says, "Unless we recognise the techniques being used to manipulate us, we are doomed to a life of decorating and redecorating" (QQ241). The key therefore is vigilance and an active participation in the process.
In the early nineteen-eighties, motion picture director Francis Ford Coppola allegedly predicted that the proliferation of "camcorders" would revolutionise the motion picture industry within a generation; the relative simplicity of these devices and the ability to instantly playback, re-record and edit would provide a much more "professional" look to even the most amateur productions. In the same way, music was reformed with bands like the Sex Pistols and Rappers like Run DMC and Grandmaster Flash. The idea in the Seventies and Eighties was to de-commercialise music and film, de-emphasise it as the sole domain of the professionals and bring it back to the kids in the basements and bedrooms around the world. Devices like synthesisers and drum machines meant that one or two people could, with a little practice and some technology, transfer the ideas in their heads and souls out onto a TDK cassette and create a product that, until that point, had only been possible in a professional recording studio.
Much in the same vein, the development of personal computers and the Internet has changed the way we as a culture think and gain information. Roughly one in five people on Earth now either own or have regular access to a computer and the Internet is comprised of hundreds of millions of websites, allowing access to almost every major source of data ever compiled. In many ways, it’s an embarrassment of riches. From the vastness of the Internet have emerged several venues of intellectual and pseudo-intellectual thought: university listservs, quirky magazines like hermenaut.com and the ubiquitous online discussion forum or "chat room". In fact, even this last item can be divided into two distinct sub-genres. The more authoritative, as it is still a version of the University listservs that spawned this genre, is the discussion "group", which is in essence a series of e-mail posts to a central site, replies to those e-mails, replies to the replies, etc. However, the vastly more popular and free-form in structure are the "chat room", real-time discussion forums. To get an idea of the dynamics of this type of discussion, imagine yourself at a huge table with dozens of friends and strangers, all having a conversation or several conversations at the same time, yet each person being heard by everyone else. The topics discussed range from the profound to the banal and vulgar. Every once in a while people get up and go to the bathroom, have dinner, live their regular lives, etc. People leave, new people join. Alliances, rivalries, even enmity forms between the people at this "table". Yet, through all this, the conversation continues day and night, in many cases for years, ever shifting but never ceasing. Many people, myself included, have often wondered at the intellectual potential of these groups, groups that many theorists believed would be the keys to breaking down regionalism and racism through the interchange of viewpoints across the planet. Would the dialogues in these groups eventually allow us to "talk through" the world’s problems? I have even started a few of my own, in the hopes of discovering and discussing the "Big Ideas". However, despite my best efforts, I have had limited success trying to coax and control the flow of ideas within these groups. In one way, it’s a great affirmation of the freedom of speech and thought that we enjoy. However, in these groups, this freedom has resulted in, more often than not, a Babel of "voices", all competing and running counter to each other. It’s often difficult to find a balance between the raw and profane energy of a popular group and the refined, but infrequent discussion of a smaller, more specialised group.
Granted, there is a hierarchy of discussion levels on the Internet and by staying within the borders of a certain web site, Yahoo! , no matter how wide-ranging its particular parameters are, I am definitely limiting myself to a certain forum. However, the range and sheer number of existent if not active (another issue I’ll deal with) sites should allow it to create a sort of Critical Mass of thought, rather than the circular ideas that seem to perpetuate. And, if this circularity is avoided by a degree of professionalism, then the sheer lack of posts relegates it to a minor sub- text of the discussion in general. There seems to be, as far as I can see, no median, no middle ground where the conventions and modus vivendi of the "smarter" groups can merge with and survive the tumult of the free market atmosphere of the general interest groups. There seems to be almost contempt for those who bring an ordered and cogent argument into the midst of these groups. Flashing credentials and evidence seems almost gauche in the context of the general discussion group. The seeming general consensus seems to be that the person should be able to make his case without having to resort to the " I’m an expert, so listen, all ye below me" kind of edict.
In the 21st Century, the process of newsgathering has undergone a radical sea change from even 10 years ago. In apparent affirmation with Moore’s Law, the amount of information that is available has increased exponentially, through the availability of images, radically less expensive ways to transmit media from even the most isolated areas in the world (In fact, in this Media/Technology saturated world, even terms such as "isolated" and "remote" need to be refined. While the physical space between places remains the same, the advent of the Internet and email has rendered distance an almost quaint notion, in terms of information transfer).
With this explosion of available information has come a wave of what can only be described as "creative" journalism: the wholesale manufacture of elements or even complete stories that are passed off as fact. Unfortunately, the ease of use of incredibly powerful media tools and the mass of available information has allowed people such as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass to fabricate both the stories and the source material so convincingly that it has become almost impossible to verify these stories other than reverting to random and rigorous fact checking as Nicholas Lemann has suggested (Lemann 3). Glass was uncovered by a quick check of the Nexis-Lexis database in which the only reference to Jukt Micronics, an imaginary software company featured so prominently in an article Glass had written for The New Republic was that article. However, even that discovery was only possible because of the timeliness of the inquiry. Eventually, had the article not been questioned, articles and papers would have referred to the Glass piece and thereby been added to the database and, in turn those articles and papers would have been cited and so on until there was an impossibly intricate paper trail to unravel and, at least on paper, Jukt Micronics would have become as real as IBM or Microsoft. This is where the potential malignancy of the Internet truly lies, in its ability to effortlessly overwhelm the average user in masses of hyperlinks and URLs and seemingly leap from one site to another and create a wonderland of knowledge without the linear path that traditional research forced upon students in the centuries preceding the advent of the internet as a viable research venue. Much has been made of the supremacy of the peer review system as a counter to fraudulent or shoddy research. There could only be so much new material available within a reasonable amount of time, due to the rigor of inquiry that most peer review imposes. And this pace enabled most researchers to, if not keep pace with new research in terms of specifics and individuals, to at least do so in generalities.
As well, the danger that the Internet imposes is not so much to researchers doing more advanced research, i.e. at the Masters or Doctoral level; they usually possess an in-depth grasp of the areas of research in their field and the general flow of trends within the field. It is those students just entering a field and those exploring a topic for an isolated assignment who have not been properly trained in determining sources who can be swayed by the mass of authentic looking documents online and fooled into thinking that what they see are the actual facts. However, even if the information given is factual, there is the danger of the bias that many articles have built into them overwhelming or subverting the information. This bias is more a question of omitting the facts than distorting them. For example, a Right Wing online news agency will mention the incidences of John Kerry reversing his support on issues, with the implication that these reversals are an indication of a failure of resolve and character. However, they fail to note that GW Bush had done the same thing on many occasions, as have most elected politicians and that these reversals are, in fact, common practice in politics. This lopsided presentation and the assertions that are implied can lead to a misinterpretation of the facts. A way to combat this would be to instil in every student, at an increasingly earlier age, the ability to determine the legitimacy of the information with which they are presented.
However, is this a practical thing to attempt? Could we reasonable expect to train our children to filter out the mass distractions and bombarding effects of mass culture and to somehow develop the capacity to logically and reasonably interpret information when the trend seems to be the not so gradual erosion of that capacity? The answer is unfortunately no. There will always be a trend towards the ‘quick fix’ approach to transmitting the information that needs to be transmitted. The unfortunate thing is, the importance of the information will be increasingly inversely proportional to the amount of hype and glitz used to convey that message.
One answer is never going to be absolute and final. There will always have to be an action-reaction quality to it, a sense of putting out brush fires within the cultural landscape. If the strategy for combating these anti-intellectual and blitzkrieg techniques could be reduced to one word, it would be this: Vigilance.

Notes on Barthes and "The Death of the Author":

2006-10-26T22:20:00.000-04:00

Barthes gives us what could be one of the first indications of the shift into Post-Structuralist thought with his contention that the Author, long thought the creator and final arbiter of the meaning of a text, is shown to be superfluous to the meaning and in fact holds no real meaning to the interpretation of a text, but is merely the writer of the words, a scriptor.
I think the main issue I have with removing the "Author" from the ‘text’ is that it opens up this void of implied intention that’s hard to logically re-fill; there is suddenly no objective definite-ness to the interpretation of the text. As we have discussed, not all interpretations are valid and because of this, we need to (re) construct a methodology to determine quantifiable hierarchies of legitimacy in order to get at the objective "best" interpretation. Of course, the danger/difficulty in this is trying to determine the validity of determining the criteria for evaluating that hierarchy, etc. It’s potentially an endless attempt to find a priori states for comparison of every benchmark along the process, with potentially never a definitive resolution of anything. So, while we can bring our own reactions to the text and certainly have a legitimate dialogue with it, we need to, if not submit blindly to the writer’s intent, at least acknowledge it. Barthes’/Saussure’s idea of the arbitrary nature of signifiers leads me to think that Authorial intent is important, as we need to wonder about WHY the particular language and signifier was used, when they are many variants of signifiers out there from which to choose. If there is a definite process of selection, then we need to decipher the reasoning behind it. It’s hard to look at a piece of writing or a theoretical position and get it the first few times we read it. As Saussure implies with the structure of words, it’s only in contrast or opposition to other theories or points of view that the particulars of a theory make themselves seen. Therefore, we need to see how other theories play out against the same text so that we see the variances and nuances of theoretical applications.
However, obviously the text physically in most cases outlives the Author, so it’s not that huge of a leap to say on many levels that the text indeed does take on a ‘life of its own.’ The question is when does the text really divorce itself from the writer of it? At the instant the writer stops typing or the creator stops the act of creation or translation from the realm of ideas to the page or the video tape, the instant there is this release, a point of no return from which the author cannot recall the text?
We need to see on the one hand that ideas and concepts speak though the writer and that these concepts exceed the writer and are manifested through him or her.
We see this certainly more in non-fiction and theorectical writing in which the Idea attains conveyed clarity—or fails to--- through the writer.
While I agree that the interpretation of a text is subject to far wider a range than the author’s intentions may have been, we need to see the distillation process that the author has chosen, the why of choosing this text as influence or that phrase over another. WE need to see the process of choice and understand it to understand why literature is what is and not something else.

Re: Derrida's statement that "The Unconscious is structured like a language"

2006-10-26T22:19:00.000-04:00

Now, does Derrida mean to imply that, like language, the contents of the unconscious are socially created, a sort of Saussurean arbitrary picking of the symbolic dream-object to represent the ideas of the phallus, the wish-fulfillment, etc??
Are our dream-images what they are because of what we have been taught in our segment of society?
Wouldn’t this sort of refute Carl Jung’s theory of a Collective Unconscious ( That is if I understand the theory to be seen as positing the Unconscious as a universal species-wide collective)?
If the Unconscious is a ‘language’, would it be subject to the conventions of a "text" language; the arbitrary social conventions of what signifier represents what signified?
Therefore, the Unconscious would only be "collective" within a somewhat narrow socio-tribal/cultural sphere.
My dream images would be roughly the same as my Western, Canadian, Middle Class society, but different than say the dream images of a Kenyan Bushman or a Beijing housewife...Would this have to be factored in when trying to interpret my dream images?

An interesting post on Mindwalk...from IMDb.

2006-10-26T22:02:00.001-04:00

I ran into this whilst perusing the boards over there.
My comments are in italics. I think that movies like Waking Life and Mindwalk and Donnie Darko and whatever are great in that they aren't your run of the mill sort of shoot em up.
Also, you'll see, especially on a somewhat combative board like IMDb, that these really polarise the audience into those who think that these films are God-sends and that anyone who doesn't 'get it' is a knuckle-dragging cretin and those who think that to quote these films are 'hoity-toity spew'..

Well, on to the post:

I'm surprised at the comment that this film has no plot. True, the plot takes second seat to the ideas discussed and the photography.
(Technically, would that be THIRD seat then, behind the (1) idea (singular) being discussed and the (2) photography?)
True, the plot is so subtextual it's almost like watching a Checkov play.
(True, while listening to someone using the word "subtextual" ‘it’s almost like’ reading the blog of some first year college student who just got back to the dorm from his Philosophy 101 seminar.2]Actually there IS no such word as ‘subtextual’)
But the plot is in what all the characters seek to get out of the conversation.
(Huh?)The physicist is seeking some form of absolution. The politician is looking for the next new campaign issue. The poet, if you pay attention, is trying to pick the physicist up. (Ahh, so if I disagree with the idea that the poet’s trying to pick up the Physicist, I wasn’t paying attention?) It's there. The brilliance of this movie is that under all that hoity-toity philosophical spew (which is fascinating, at least to me),
(But, you diss it as ‘hoity-toity philosophical spew’ even while you say it’s fascinating, at least to you? Interesting way to say you approve of something, calling it ‘hoity-toity spew’)
the same-old same-old kinds of motivations are going on and playing out. (Such as?)I can understand not liking the film because of its extreme understatedness,
(What about not liking it because it’s heavy handed and didactic? Do you understand not liking it on THAT basis?) but in an industry so populated with mindless eye-candy (a lot of which I guiltily admit that I like), this film serves as a nice change of pace. (‘Change of pace’, sure...However, just because it isn’t ‘Dude where’s her car?" doesn’t make it automatically a decent piece of work; the bar is, unfortunately set a little higher than not simply being shite...)If anyone thought it was pushing an agenda, then they just don't like to hear any conception that alters their world-view. It seemed more food-for-thought rather than evangelical chaos theory to me . . .(Again, if anyone disagrees with you, it’s because of THEIR deficiency, not the possibility that your interpretation of the film might not be the only valid one? How sweet to be omniscient. It seemed pretty evangelical to me, clumsily so, although it was Systems Theory and Quantum Mechanics they were discussing, not Chaos Theory)

Editors’ Introduction

2006-10-26T21:59:00.000-04:00

The history of cultural studies has often been characterized by ‘moments’ of youthful
rebellion that are later reconstructed as points of emergence for new trends in the field.
Indeed, it is clear that the field is periodically and ritualistically regenerated by the
celebration, contestation and memorialization of such moments, and that professional
careers have been built on them. Beyond cultural studies, the celebration of youthful
resistance is echoed in much of the rhetoric around ‘new media’ as disruptive—even
revolutionary—at the same time as its innovations are celebrated for their ‘coolness’.
This special issue on Counter-heroics and Counter-professionalism evolved from
a conference panel which in turn evolved from six months of ongoing discussion of
these trends, and how they might be ‘countered’without falling prey to the artifice of yet
another moment of contestation. The panel was ‘Fields ofUncool: Counter-heroics and
Counter-professionalism in Cultural Studies’, presented at the CSAA conference
Everyday Transformations: the 21st Century Quotidian at Murdoch University in
December 2004. The articles publiId here byMelissa Gregg, Jean Burgess, Kris Cohen,
and Jane Simon are developed from papers presented on this panel, and because of its
synergy with the problems we aimed to address we have also includedWill Tregoning’s
article on self-help which was presented at a different session at the same conference.
While our topics and approaches are diverse, all of the authors share an interest in
cultural practices and modes of criticism that remain quietly outside radical, subversive
or avant-garde registers. Each of the articles considers instances of mundane, perhaps
less fashionable forms of media consumption and participation while attempting to
conceive the critic’s role as collaborative and collusive with the objects of analysis: in the
case of Gregg and Cohen, everyday and scholarly blogging; for Simon, home movies on
Super-8 film; for Burgess, digital storytelling; and for Tregoning, self-help literature.
The writers invite us to think about how cultural studies might effectively engage with
the contemporary shifts that are occurring in specific media economies and cultures, by
exploring the tensions and continuities between tradition and innovation,
professionalism and amateurism, criticism, narcissism and pleasure. In this way, the
papers question received understandings about how ‘the everyday’ operates within
regimes of cultural or intellectual value and the reified aesthetics of both art and theory.
In dealing with new media in particular, the papers share a desire to avoid reproducing
notions of pure emergence or indeed obsolescence—in various ways, the aim is to
recognize the complexity with which media pasts, presents and futures fold into
each other.

Waking Life Question: from the Web....

2006-03-14T22:13:00.000-05:00

WAKING LIFE (2001)
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES: Personal identity, free will, appearance/realityCHARACTERS: Unnamed lead character (Wiley Wiggins); other major characters listed below in discussion questionsOTHER FILMS BY DIRECTOR RICHARD LINKLATER: Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995), Suburbia (1996), The Newton Boys (1998)SYNOPSIS: “Waking Life” is an animated story about a nameless young man, played by Wiley Wiggins, who finds himself trapped in a continuous series of dreams. He walks or levitates from one scene to another, listening to a range of theories by philosophers, intellectuals and crackpots. The text commentary to the film states that “Waking life features a complex interweaving of conversations with professors, artists, writers and performers. There is no single theory behind the film. Rather the film is an exploration from many points of view of past and current trends in philosophy.” The principal plot to the story is that Wiley returns to Austin, Texas after a trip, is dropped off at a random location in town and subsequently hit by a car. During the first half of the film he listens to various peoples theories about human existence, saying very little himself. In the second half of the film Wiley realizes that he is stuck in a series of lucid dreams, and he attempts to wake up. As his efforts fail he considers that he may in fact be dead, and experiencing a dream-like condition in the afterlife. Director Richard Linklater states in the DVD filmmaker’s commentary that all of the ideas expressed in the movie should be accessible to viewers, even though the dialog is conceptually dense. Several of the exchanges were from ideas developed for his previous movies, which were left out of those projects for various reasons. Other exchanges were generated from the actual views of the professionals or intellectuals who appear. About half of this movie’s content, he stated, is intentionally philosophical. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:1. The man in the boat/car states that his vehicle is a window to the world, in which every moment is a show. He glides along, remaining in a state of constant departure, while always arriving. The ride, he states, does not require an explanation, only occupants. This scenario parallels Hume’s problem of personal identity: our identities seem to consist of fleeting perceptions. Hume was troubled by this problem and felt that our minds in fact construct a more lasting notion of the self. The boat/car man, though, seems to live out Hume’s worst fears. What’s so bad about how the boat/car man approaches life?2. Wiley attends a philosophy lecture by real life philosophy professor Robert Solomon, at the University of Texas at Austin. Solomon is lecturing on existentialism, presenting it optimistically as a philosophy of creative freedom. After class Solomon tells Wiley that he disagrees with postmodernist philosophy since it views humans as social constructions, the mere confluence of forces, fragmented, and marginalized. This gives people excuses for their behavior. Existentialists like Sartre, though, feel that we are responsible for our actions, and this responsibility stems from human freedom. We should not, Solomon argues, see ourselves as victims of various forces. Do we really need notions of freedom to give us a sense of responsibility?3. Wiley visits the home of Kim Krizan, a screenwriter who discusses the nature of language as a system of signs. The fact that we can create words that refer to tangible things, such as a tree, is not really remarkable. What is remarkable, she explains, is how words convey abstract concepts such as love or frustration. When we say these words, and people understand us, it amounts to a kind of spiritual communion. That feeling might be transient, but, she thinks, it is what we live for. Is the conveying of abstract notions as rewarding as she contend?4. Wiley visits Eamonn Healy, Chemistry professor at Austin. Healy discusses human evolution and the values that are associated with it: parasitism, dominance, morality, war, predation. In this scheme “the individual is at the whim of the collective.” He then states that we are beginning a new kind of evolution, which involves bio-technology (artificial intelligence, neuro-biology), which will occur much more rapidly, and involve a new set of values: truth, loyalty, justice, freedom. Here the individual becomes more valuable in its own right. Healy seems to be somewhat optimistic about futuristic human-robot life forms. Is there some grounds for his optimism?5. The man who sets himself on fire argues that society hasn’t given us an opportunity to voice our opinions beyond the rather meaningless voting process. He feels this way in particular since his particular message is destruction and chaos. The issue isn’t one of censorship but of audience access. What’s so important about having an audience for our opinions, especially if we’re ignored – just as bystanders ignored him as he was burning to death?6. The couple lying in bed together (from Linklater’s movie “Before Sunrise”) discuss a version of Chuang-tzu’s dream paradox: a man dreams he’s a butterfly, but he might really be a butterfly dreaming that he’s a man. The young woman thinks that her waking life might be the memories of an old woman in the last moments of her life. The young man suggests that recent studies of the brain activity of sleeping or dying people show that a lifetime of experiences can could be condensed into a few actual minutes of activity. If this is true, does this make the “all is a dream” hypothesis any more compelling?7. The couple also discuss the notion of collective memory, a view articulated by Rupert Sheldrake, which involves a large pool of knowledge that we all draw from. The young man states that this would explain seemingly spontaneous world-wide innovative leaps in science and the arts, prompted by people working independently of each other. “Once the answers are out there, we can all pick up on them; it’s like we’re all telepathically sharing our experiences.” Is there a more simple explanation to such world-wide innovative leaps?8. The prison inmate’s ranting are especially troubling: he wants to torture everyone responsible for putting him in prison, yet he is incapable of seeing that he is precisely where he needs to be because of his anti-social inclinations. Assuming that he is incapable of grasping his own guilt, does he deserve any less punishment than a similar person who understands his guilt?9. Wiley visits UT Austin philosophy professor David Sosa, who argues that there’s not much room for free will. Classic philosophers believed that God set things up in advance. More contemporary philosophers maintain that humans are just a system of molecules. The big bang set up the initial conditions, and our human lives are just the playing out of the subatomic particles. This picture, he argues, threatens the idea that humans have a special dignity. Does determinism necessarily undermine human dignity as Sosa suggests?10. Sosa argues that the indeterminacy of atomic particles does not give us a model for acting free: this at best explains random behavior. Sosa says that he’d rather be a gear in a big deterministic machine than some random swerving in a probabilistic system. Do you agree?11. Libertarian talk show host Alex Jones appears driving through the city speaking through a PA system mounted on his car. He argues that we are being conditioned on a mass scale to give up our freedoms, which society does by making us feel pathetic and small. Instead, Jones argues, we should embrace the “creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit.” Isn’t it worth giving up some of our creative freedom in exchange for security?12. English professor Lisa Moore sits in a restaurant with author Carole Dawson discussing the problem of human identity over time. They discuss a theory by Benedict Anderson that we need to construct a story in order to connect, for example, a photograph of ourselves as an infant with who we are now. Anderson seems to have in mind fictional stories that we create. Suppose that I attempt to create a fictional story about my past in which I would be the forgotten heir to the British throne. Wouldn’t historical reality keep my fictional account in check?13. The monkey in the classroom expresses the views of Steve Fitch, a photographer and musician. According to Fitch, art is the language that humans created to distance ourselves from our empty and degraded human past and reach for a new world. Do you agree?14. Wiley visits UT Austin philosophy professor Louis Mackey, who argues that the gap between the average person and Plato is greater than the gap between the average person and chimpanzees. True genius, he argues, is rarely achieved, largely because of human laziness. Is this an overly pessimistic view of human achievement?15. The drunk man at the bar, played by actor Steven Prince, defends gun ownership. The bartender agrees and states “A well armed populace is the best defense against tyranny.” When Prince accidentally shoots the bar tender, he is shot in retaliation (a tragedy based on a real event). Is there a gun control message here (Linklater states that he was intentionally ambiguous on the issue)?16. The second half of the film, which focuses on lucid dreams, explores the philosophical issue of appearance/reality, much the same way that Descartes in the Meditations raises the question of whether he is dreaming. One character argues that, “to the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and actually the waking perception and action.” Descartes raised the issue as a matter of theoretical doubt about the real world. Does the above scientific theory make the dreaming/waking problem any less theoretical? 17. Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi discusses a theory by André Bazin: film is a record of God in the sense that we are all God manifest at different points in time. The more that a film is bound to a narrative storyline (rather than recording the spontaneous expression of the actors) the less it is a record of God. Film is best when it preservers these “holy moments”. Why should a spontaneous moment be any more “holy” than a planned moment, such as an actor reciting a script?18. Poet David Jewell, in conversation with Zahedi, points out the various layers awareness when attempting to engage in the “holy moment” such as the holy moment itself, and one’s efforts at achieving this moment. Some people claim that they can strip away all the extraneous layers and experience the pure holy moment itself. Are these people lying?19. A gang of intellectuals roam the streets, spouting philosophical one-liners. They see an old man who was on a telephone pole for no apparent reason. One of the gang comments “he’s no worse than us; he’s all action and no theory, and we’re all theory and no action.” Is there any way to determine what the best balance is between theory and action?20. Wiley bumps into a red-haired women in a stairwell, who laments that people behave like they’re part of an ant colony – acting out of efficiency and politeness – with no real human engagement. D.H. Lawrence calls such engagement the confrontation between souls. This also parallels Martin Buber’s distinction between I-It and I-Thou relationships. As with Buber’s theory, we can ask this woman: do we really want to live in a society in which all of our encounters with people involve genuine human engagement?21. Poet Timothy “Speed” Levitch meets with Wiley on a bridge and states that self-awareness consists of discovering that one is a dream figure in another person’s dream. Taken literally, this has implications for Wiley’s current dilemma. For the rest of us, who are not dreaming, what is the more metaphorical meaning of Levitch’s point?22. Wiley’s last encounter in the film is with a man playing pinball, played by director Richard Linklater. Linklater relates a theory by Philip K. Dick (author of Blade Runner and Total Recall) that it’s really 50 AD, but there’s an evil spiritual force trying to make us forget that the kingdom of God is immanent. Time, according to Dick, is just a continuous distraction. Linklater then relates a variation of Dick’s theory that he once had in a dream: the year that we’re stuck in is not really 50 AD; instead, there is only one instant, and in this instant God is asking us whether we want to be one with eternity. Time, then, us just our constant saying “no” to God’s invitation. Do these theories have any merit beyond their initial shock value?23. In the DVD filmaker’s commentary, Linklater states that a good dose of scientific skepticism needs to underlie far out ideas. Or, as he says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. He states that he enjoys the strange theories nonetheless. Why might a skeptic like Linklater give a hearing to strange theories that he’d ultimately reject?

Some whacky shit about accelerating evolution. Brought over from a discussion of the completely freaky and strangely wonderful movie "Waking Life"

2006-03-14T22:08:00.000-05:00

EH: If you're looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism, and then add the development of the interaction with its environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life, proceeding through the hominid, coming to the evolution of mankind: neanderthal, cro-magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you're looking at here are three strains: biological, anthropological (development of cities, cultures), and cultural (which is human expression). Now, what you've seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time-scale that's involved here: two billion years for life, six million years
for the hominid, a hundred-thousand years for mankind as we know it, you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then, when you get to agriculture, when you get to the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution, you're looking at ten thousand years, four hundred years, a hundred and fifty years. You're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's going to telescope to the point that we should see it manifest itself within our lifetimes, within a generation. The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence; The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism, and you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before, under the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But, under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, non-competitive grouping independent from the external. Now what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually-centered process eminating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process, where the individual is just at the whim of the collective.
So, you produce a neo-human with a new individuality, a new consciousness. But, that's only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence pods on intelligence, as abilty pods on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until you reach a crescendo. In a way, it could be imagined as an almost instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human, potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual...the multiplication of individual existences, parallel existences, now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space. And the manifestations of this neo-human type evolution could be dramatically counter-intuitive; That's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold, it's sterile, it's efficient. And, it's manifestations are those social adaptations. We're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, war, predation. These will be subject to de-emphasis. These will be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution, and that is what we would hope to see from this, that would be nice.

Commentary:
Boy, this guy sure says a lot in the short time he is on-screen. Pretty much what he is saying is that the process of biological evolution was very slow at first. It took two and a half billion years to evolve from the earliest cells to multi-cell animals, and another billion years to evolve through fish and reptiles, to mammals. But then evolution seemed to have speeded up (telescoped). It only took about a hundred million years to develop from the early mammals to us. The reason is, fish contain most of the important human organs, and mammals, essentially all of them. All that was required to evolve from early mammals to humans was a bit of fine-tuning.But with the human race, evolution reached a critical stage, comparable in importance with the development of DNA. This was the development of language, and particularly written language. It meant that information can be passed on, from generation to generation, without having to rely on genetics. There has been no detectable change in human DNA brought about by biological evolution in the ten thousand years of recorded history. But, the amount of knowledge handed on from generation to generation has grown enormously (far surpassing the amount passed on through genetics). Even more important is the fact that the information in books and other forms of storage can be changed and updated much more rapidly.
This has meant that we have entered a new phase of evolution. At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection from random mutations. This Darwinian phase lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information. The external record, in books and other long lasting forms of storage, has grown enormously. We may be no stronger, or inherently more intelligent, than our cave man ancestors, but what distinguishes us from them is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, over the last three hundred. This is the basis of the new evolution. "As intelligence pods on intelligence, as abilty pods on ability," mankind will reach technological acheivements that are unimaginable even to our own minds. The basis for this is called The Law of Accelerating Returns, a confluence of exponential trends that exist in our current world, recently outlined by Ray Kurzweil.
I was watching Ripley's Believe It or Not the other night, and there was this guy on there that implanted a chip into his body that would trigger electrical and computerized objects whenever he came within a certain distance of them. Many scientists around the world have begun experimenting with these first steps in creating human "cyborgs." They have also begun to experiment with altering DNA, the very building blocks of life. With all the knowledge that we are acquiring, and at the rate at which we are acquiring it, we are truly entering a new evolutionary paradigm. In this new paradigm, it is possible that humans, as we know ourselves to be humans, can cease to exist, if we are ever surpassed by an evolutionary superior being of our own creation.

My Take on this:

You know, Healy has some interesting points, although I seriously doubt we'll EVER be spontaneously be evolving through some sort of instantaeous radical development paradigm. I DO agree that technology will eventually be making HUGE leaps in relatively short times, as the exponential growth of computing power and storage continues. I DO believe eventually that there will be the possibilty of EVERY single bit of information that's in the public domain being available and portable. My Children, when they are at University in 15-20 years, will have laptops with HDs of several Terrabytes and processors capable of creating the most elaborate and life-like images(True virtual reality indistinguise-able from reality) and the abilty to store the contents of all the major sources of information. The concept of the 'bricks and glass library 'might very well be a thing of the past. The very idea of Intellectual thought and learning might be significantly different. 'Classes" might be nothing more than a collection of students and a facilitator, all in different places on campus or even countries, discussing a common theme or concept in a chatroom or on their individual laptops.....which I think will be the essential accessory in the next 25 years... I think you'll see them appearing sooner and sooner in the schooling process. Already here at Queen's they are mandatory for most of the programs; Law, Engineering and Commerce all now have minimum standards for their courses; wifi setup, 2Ghz proc. speed, 40Gb Hd. All that will continue to evolve and filter down through the grades until you'll be needing a T3 ThinkPad in 6th grade....Already we see the increased pressure that kids are put under. FCS, my 4 year-old has HOMEWORK in JK!!!!!
What the hell will HIS Grade 12 year look like???? Endless competition to get the University spots. Tutors becoming the new hot job market, with their own rating systems and exhorbitant fees(taking out a second mortgage to pay)because you'll want the RIGHT tutor in order to get into the RIGHT school....I think we're heading down a slippery slope here, to the Japanese Grades mania that I read about in the papers, with teen suicides climbing in the spring as the Offers of acceptance come in the mail and some realise that their futures are shattered because they didn't have that extra .25% needed to get into the program of their choice...
Entrance percentages here are already reaching impossible levels, low 90s to get into anything really, beyond General Arts and Sciences, itself in the mid 80s....
I think all we're training our kids to do is become grade machines, just learning how to twaek that test score or figure out what the teacher/marker wants to hear/see, rather than actually learning anything....

BIC sells its 100 BILLIONTH pen!!!!!!!!!!( and School thoughts)

2006-03-14T22:03:00.000-05:00

Great for them.
Personally I find BIC pens too tiny for my hands.
My hands cramp up and get sweaty after 10 minutes with a BIC.
I much prefer these:
http://www.business-supply.com/office_supplies_2017773_zebra-jimnie-gel-non-refillable-rollerball-pens.html and a yellow newsprint legal pad for notetaking/idea barnstorming.
Now of course, 5+ years of my University essay rough notes are scattered through a few dozen of these pads( and a few 3.5 discs). You can see the arc of thought, from the first scribbling of rough ideas and clustering exercises and suggestions for my first essay in April of 1999 at the University of Toronto, through the library notations and websites I looked up, through definitive drafts and sections, all the way to just pep talks to myself and little entries to talk through sections and the process...plus, shopping lists and phone #s of people that are now merely names from the past ( Andy? Michelle... Sean? Tuesday-night darts at the Firkin on Spadina?) That crappy classroom that was like a billion degrees on the third floor of St Mike's college? Longing for one of the Grad Carrels on the 13th floor of Robarts? ack......all good memories...)
It's been a long strange trip, to quote the late great Jerry Garcia( I THINK it was him[Ken Kesey?]), but something I'm glad I did and that I'm doing, for all the bullshit that sometimes comes up....

Yup, threw out my overstuffed Food Prep notebook from 1994.

2006-03-14T22:02:00.000-05:00

Yup, threw out my overstuffed notebook from Basic/Advanced Food Prep from 1994. I guess it was just time to move out of that time and get on with getting on.
Still, it was a bit wierd sort of finally officially thinking of myself as an EX-Chef, even though I haven't cooked professionally in 5 years.... But, the house was simply too messy and that was just another remnant of some former live that I no longer am. I just really had to be ruthless and get past my packrat ways and cull the crap that's been clogging my office and storage rooms for all these years. Time to clog it all up with books and academic journals and print-outs from obscure articles that I've collected over the past few years. Then, go through the same soul-searching in 2015.

Went and saw the new(Well, to me,I haven't been since they moved) MEC on King West.

2006-03-14T21:57:00.000-05:00

I dunno, it lacks the funkiness of the space on Front. Maybe I'm just saying that because of all the hours I spent in there with the Chris's and Audra.....sigh............ and buying my gear and just hanging out and digging the freedom of being 21 or whatever. Maybe I'm just suddenly having a "miss the old days" evening, the beer and Bushmill's kicking in and it's a quiet evening, but I miss the shopping excursions down there, back in the day, and pints at Down Under. This so sucks that the Gang's busted up. I mean, I REALISE nothing's forever and that at least we WERE together once and had those great moments and to celebrate THAT.....but suddenly there was this sadness, this sense of loss when I suddenly remembered Frosh Week '83 and meeting these guys for the first time and through those 2 or 3, the rest and through THEM....... Maybe it's time for bed.

It's 0930 hrs, do you know where your whiny little tantrum is?

2006-03-14T21:44:00.000-05:00

Been lurking, as they say, on the old boards...Yeah, THOSE boards.
I feel like an ex-moonie; wondering what the HELL I saw in this board.....see my thread title above.
Just the same old bitchy cat-fights.....just strange to NOT be in the middle, for a change

Anyway, paper's in, FINALLY...sure it's a piece of lesser work, but it was already a week late, and it wasn't getting any more done, really, just pushing the words around and getting the same results, so I let it go into the eather of the Philosophy Department...stupid thing'll probably get either a C or an A.....hard to predict.....

ok, REALLY going to try to get things squared away...and get stuff done...

So, this is a good thing:

2006-03-13T17:05:00.000-05:00

Just sort of reached the end of the line, my tether, whatever you want to call it with the Discussion group: Like most there say, all the decent discussions, debates or whatever have evaporated in this mass censorship mentality the "admins' have adopted ;Threads being deleted en masse for nothing more than the wrong idea being expressed or a four-letter word being used by a troll.
I know I haven't been here in a while and I want to rectify it.
But, I know, I'm addicted, yeah, you heard me, ADDICTED to that stupid board.

when I think of the literally hundreds of hours and at least 2,000 posts I've done in 14 months and, thanks to the admins, 98% of them are just GONE now.

It sucks.
I could have been done my Thesis by now, without having been on those boards ACKKKK!~!!!!!

Just venting.

Mike.

Old 80s Radio getting me down

2006-03-13T16:57:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's just because I'm thinking back all those years to 1980-1982 when this stuff was out and all the dumb shit that I've suddenly got myself into this week and just thinking that it'd be cool to be back in that bedroom of mine in North York and be 18 again and have all the time in the world again and not be facing deadlines and realising that my day off from writing shouldn't have been such a complete write-off.....and that, if I continue like this, there's no point in throwing away money just to fall behind .....