John Seely Brown on Tinkering
Posted on February 3, 2009 - Filed Under
JSB is a sharp dude. This video offers lots of things to chew on regarding play and invention in learning. As I watched it, I found myself in the unlikely spot of thinking about creative writing workshops and flarf simultaneously (if only he didn’t sneak in the bit about giving credit to those whose machines one takes pieces from…):
Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge Production in a Digital Age: John Seely Brown from carnegie commons on Vimeo.
This video is part of Anne Balsamo’s MacArthur project on tinkering in the Digital age:
http://spotlight.macfound.org/main/entry/anne_balsamo_tinkering_videos/
Is this true?
Posted on February 2, 2009 - Filed Under
OMG I could have sworn I was really in the library!!
From the Princeton Alumni Weekly…what humanists want from libraries:
Still, Grafton believes that humanists will want to wander the stacks. ‘Students need to be in the library because that’s how you learn your fields of scholarship,’ he says. ‘I don’t actually think you can learn it on the Web in the way you learn it by walking the stacks and seeing the books and reading some of them and leafing through others. I don’t see any other way to train graduate students.’
That’s how Princeton English professor William Gleason familiarized himself with the history of leisure as a graduate student at UCLA. ‘It’s really important for libraries to strike a balance between having all those data-generating machines and creating an environment that invites people into the library, to read and to use it in a way that’s not available on your laptop,’ says Gleason. ‘The closer digital technology comes to actually reproducing the experience of wandering the stacks, the better — that’s really what the humanists are looking for. So much of the work we do involves a kind of serendipitous wandering through the library.’
What would Gleason be imagining here, a virtual reality cave? It makes me think of the scene I saw recently in a Futurama rerun where we first see someone playing skeeball, then we see someone playing virtual skeeball, then we see Amy Wong with a helmet on playing “virtual virtual skeeball.” She says, “wow this is just like playing virtual skeeball.” I take the point that humanists wander, and that our invention practices tend to involve something of the flaneur’s jaunt, but how would that translate to code?
In the long run…
Posted on February 2, 2009 - Filed Under
“Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” — John Maynard Keynes
ReBlog: Peter Klausler, American Cargo Cult
Posted on February 2, 2009 - Filed Under
From http://klausler.com/cargo.html
Peter Klausler on
Principles of the American Cargo Cult
“I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it.
I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate.
I. Ignorance is innocence
Complicated explanations are suspect
The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.
Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness
Admitting alternatives is undermining one’s own belief.
Changing one’s mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the prior opinion.
Your opinion matters as much as anyone else’s
When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.
The herd should be followed
The contemplative lemming gets trampled
Popular beliefs must be true.
No bad idea can survive.
People are generally smart.
Even if a popular belief doesn’t pan out, at least you’ll be in the same boat as everyone else.
II. Causality is selectable
All interconnection is apparent
Otherwise, complicated explanations would be necessary.
The end supports the explanation of the means
A successful person’s explanation of the means of his success is highly credible by the very fact of his success.
You can succeed by emulating the purported behavior of successful people
This is the key to the cargo cult. To enjoy the success of another, just mimic the rituals he claims to follow.
Your idol gets the blame if things don’t work out, not you.
You have a right to your share
You get to define your share.
Your share is the least you will accept without crying injustice.
Celebrate getting more than your share.
III. It’s not your fault
If it’s good for you, it’s good
Society is everyone else.
Good intentions suffice
You can always apologize.
There is no long term
Don’t miss an opportunity.
Consequences are things that happen to others
Only you can hold yourself accountable. Don’t let others make you do that.
If somebody starts the blame game, you can still win it.
There are evil people and institutions, and surely one of them is more responsible than you are.
You are not the problem
An ugly image means a bad mirror.
IV. Death is unnatural
You’re special
Bad things shouldn’t happen to you.
Pain is wrong
Life should not hurt.
It’s a Whiffle World.
Tragedy is a synonym for calamity
Bad things are never consequences of one’s own action or inaction.
There will be justice
Bad people get punished.
You, however, will be forgiven.”
Wordsworth/Keats: Some Class Notes
Posted on September 29, 2008 - Filed Under
Today, in the poetry intro class, we had a pretty successful conversation about Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Keats’ letters. We are using Kwasny’s Poetics Anthology, Towards the Open Field. As I expected, students found the philosophical tenor of the language a bit challenging (and also a bit dull, I think). We started out with Keats and tried to work backwards to Wordsworth. So, first, I laid out these three famous Keats squibs:
1. “As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from this relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually [informing]—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical all God’s Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? … It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children.” (45-46)
2. “at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (44)
3. “the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout” (44)
Obviously, we needed to try to suss out what Keats could mean by “the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” and I figured that would help us a) get some kind of handle on what Wordsworth himself thought he was up to—even as Keats is disagreeing with it—and b) what kind of alternative Keats could be offering in the guise of “Negative Capability.”
We began by looking more closely at the idea of the “poetical Character” that has “no self.” When asked what that could mean, one student suggested it sounded like acting, which I thought was a great way to open things up a little bit. We spent some time talking about the range of typical associations we pair with acting and actors, and things got very interesting.
As a working analogy, we tried talking about Keats’ description of poetical Character alongside the idea of “method acting.” One student told us that Daniel Day-Lewis never broke character while filming Last of the Mohicans (including camping on location, etc.). This was helpful as we pushed further into what it is we think good actors do when they take on a role. One student suggested that they must imaginatively try to project themselves into another person’s situation and (in doing so) filter out the parts of themselves that don’t fit. Others countered with a description that sounded more like spirit possession. To me, this pair sounded like a pretty good way of describing a fundamental difference between the way Keats views Wordsworth’s project on one hand and his own on the other. Wordsworth wants to project some of himself on to characters and objects in the world, whereas Keats wants to let the same into himself and into his poems. A subtle difference semantically but a major difference in attitude towards the poetic “role.”
We talked about Wordsworth’s professed interest in “common men” and “rural occupations,” as complicated by an interest in “elevating” the passions while also practicing selection, e.g. “removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion” (14).
A student asked the class (I was very pleased that he directed the question at the group) whether it didn’t seem that Wordsworth felt a moral obligation to his society that Keats seemed to lack. In response, another student said she thought Keats seemed to feel an obligation to “art” in contrast to Wordsworth’s stated obligation to society. This struck me as helpful insofar as it helped us get away from calling Keats “selfish,” which doesn’t really make sense, given his repeated protestations to having “no self.” I suggested that both seemed to feel moral obligations and both felt those moral obligations were bound to be mediated by art; they have slightly different emphases. I then reminded them of our conclusions regarding the different kinds of acting performance we’d imagined earlier in the class.
I pointed to the apocryphal story about “Ode to a Nightingale” having been written in one go (and brought in Keats’ “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all” (45)). I then briefly compared that to “The Thorn” and Wordsworth’s claim that he’d wanted “by some invention [to] do as much to make [a real thorn] permanently an impressive object as the storm ha[d] made it” to his eyes on a stormy day on the ridge of Quantock Hill.
From this position, we were able to pretty much agree that Keats’s openness to light and shade, Imogen and Iago amounted to imagining the poetic self as a kind of neutral vessel or conductor for the full range of phenomenal experience, whereas Wordsworth’s “proportional capability” (wherein, “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulant” and by which “one being is elevated another” (8)) aims at an fairly idealistic, even Platonic, amount of control over what should be experienced. We briefly talked about the threat posed by violent movies and video games as 21st Century fields in which these questions are still contested.
Wordsworth probably got the rough end of the conversation ultimately, but I was delighted that the discussion was so lively. I had been somewhat apprehensive about the day’s prep because I found Negative Capability to be an extremely slippery concept when I was an undergrad. Today, my overall impression was that folks had a pretty solid grasp of what Keats could have meant, and I’m impressed. Wednesday, we will talk about the poems more, and it should be interesting to see how the Poetics informs our take on the poems: as Keats admits, “it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it” (45). Likewise, dare we say, “to read it”?
Note
Posted on August 9, 2008 - Filed Under
If the Internet (along with its models of “globalizing” interconnectivity and hyper-subjectivity) represents the most significant and meaningful leap in technology in our era, and this leap has (will have) major implications for the way we think about reality and actuality, should poets not be thinking against its grain as much as along it? Meaning: shouldn’t poets be wondering about the possibilities/necessities of a kind of radical “autism” (this would be a version of the Deleuzian body without organs, I think … where breakdown is productive in itself).
Blogging on the go
Posted on August 7, 2008 - Filed Under
Now that wordpress has a working app for the iPhone, I am hoping to be a bit more regular in making posts.
The whole idea of blogging from a mobile device seems like it could exaccerbate the problems that often keep me from blogging in the first place (namely, the temptation to blurt things out without the benefit of adequate forethought). On the other hand, extemporanious utterances have their valid place, and this takes things to new heights of ease in the realm of access.
Today is almost perfect. I am going for a run.
A Kind of Schizoanalytic Stroll
Posted on May 13, 2008 - Filed Under ,
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
New Review of Little Ease at Word For/Word
Posted on May 7, 2008 - Filed Under ,
Adam Strauss has written an astute review of my most recent book Little Ease over on the new issue of Word For/Word. Stop on by for lots of other good stuff.
Neighbor-love and Daniil Kharms’ “The Old Woman” (more notes towards an unquiet metaphysics)
Posted on April 18, 2008 - Filed Under ,
I’ve been thinking about the idea of “the neighbor” for a long time. I was raised in the Methodist Church in Tennessee by parents with fairly eccentric views on religion (at least for the bible belt), and my reception of Christian doctrine and dogma was always pretty bipolar. On the one hand, I was attracted to the basic ethical message I found in scripture, and I was also invigorated by the feeling of community I found among my peers at Church (as opposed to the typical “freaks and geeks” dynamics of high school). On the other hand, I was often infuriated by the social conservatism of my more fundamentalist peers, and I could never square the exclusivity of the creed (particularly the Nicene’s “one baptism”) with the offer of Love, the insistence on Love, the command to love that made the religion revolutionary…the part that felt like Truth to me. There were many, predictable, heated arguments about Gandhi and hell, etc. I remember being fairly obsessed with Matthew 25:45 “whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me.” I’m not sure why this one of all the injunctions to love the neighbor (and enemy) really struck me. But it did. It really pinned me down in the way Kierkegaard describes the “as oneself” in the commandment of Matthew 23:39 pinning one down: “it penetrates into the innermost hiding place where a person loves himself; it does not leave self-love the slightest little excuse, the least little way of escape … this as yourself—indeed, no wrestler can wrap himself around the one he wrestles as this commandment wraps itself around self-love.”
Kierkegaard’s Christian ethics pivot on the effort to eradicate narcissistic self-love and replace it with neighbor-love. This isn’t about some sort of masochism. It is about identifying the “good life” in a universal, objective duty-bind with others. That has always appealed to me (irrespective of my own selfish tendencies). Identifying with this trend of thought has not come out of moral drills and sermons. It has surfaced in me as a kind of primal recognition: every time I think about Matthew 25:45 it surfaces. Often, when I am thinking about typical daily happenings, it surfaces. Infuriatingly, feeling (much less doing) what one ought, is difficult to the point of impossibility. The Judeo-Christian tradition knows this, and that is why it obsessively returns to the subject of the neighbor. Psychoanalysis and Political Theology have been similarly obsessed. Hannah Arendt’s description of the neighbor is particularly compelling in its emphasis on claustrophobic closeness. It seems virtually irrelevant to me that she is speaking of relationships under totalitarianism. I have no experience of such totalitarian relationships, but the following gloss from Kenneth Reinhard makes it sound pretty much identical to federal-democratic loneliness:
totalitarian loneliness is not simply a function of the disappearance of traditional social relationships of neighboring, but results from the overwhelming presence of this neighbor, who is neither fully interiorized nor exteriorized, but whose unbearable closeness makes the self ‘equivocal,’ interchangeable rather than singular, and thus threatens its ability to speak to others within a symbolic order.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud understands the pressure of the neighbor as an irritant, so far from lovable that it is rather an irresistible temptation to cruelty. Our neighbor, according to him, is “not only a potential helper or sex object, but also someone who tempts [us] to satisfy [our] aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity to work without compensation … to torture and to kill him” (66-69). That strikes me as rather overheated, to say the least, but the basic perversity of it is not utterly misguided. It helps me read Daniil Kharms, whose work I’ve been spending some time with over the last week. Kharms, of course, was a citizen of a totalitarian regime (Stalinism). A good, extensive selected edition of his work (Today I Wrote Nothing) has recently been released by The Overlook Press, edited and (for the most part) translated by Matvei Yankelevich. The entire volume is interesting, and Matvei’s introduction is a warm, useful one. He repeatedly stresses that it is a mistake to read Kharms as an “absurdist,” and I find that an interesting protest. Absurdism doesn’t do much for me. A friend once described it as “what’s going on inside the mind … of no one.” I think that captures absurdism at its most uninteresting, and it crops up all over the place in American poetry as nursed by Bly, Simic, Strand, Wright, Hugo, Tate, and the rest of the 70s-Quiet-Surreal. That inheritance is a blessing and a curse, and it makes me approach a book like Today I Wrote Nothing (another entry into the Another Republic sweepstakes) with some apprehension. And some of that apprehension ends up being well-deserved. Many of Kharms’ micro-fictions do feel like what is going on inside the mind of no one. However, “The Old Woman,” one of Kharms’ best-known pieces, is incredible and basically redeems everything around it (not that there aren’t also other pieces that redeem themselves). It is weird, disconcerting, and magical, but it is also something that has gravity. It is no joke and has none of the kind of irony that ends up colluding with power in order to get its bitter laugh. The story is brutally alienating, sublimely alienating, and its alienation effects depend on the problem of neighbor-love.
In his introduction, Matvei implies that the subject of the “miracle worker who worked no miracles” is the story’s heart (the story is hatched out of writers’ block), but I don’t think so. The old woman referred to in the story’s title is what’s interesting. She just shows up at the speaker’s apartment, barges in, and dies. Her ontological status is a little murky (she has a watch with no hands, for example; she appears while the speaker is napping and dies while the speaker is sleeping; and she seems to be a bit undead at certain moments). Her ethical status is a little murky, too, but it is that murkiness that gives the story urgency and weight. The speaker’s two primary reactions to the old woman are 1) sleepiness and 2) fury (when he discovers that she has died in his apartment, he kicks her in the jaw). As the speaker then muddles through the rest of his day, his disparate, mildly absurd non-adventures are made coherent by a recurring concern over what to do with the body and annoyance at being imposed upon in such a manner.
The speaker is oppressed by neighbor-love. He would like to be an autonomous agent, even if that autonomy is expressed only in personal clumsiness or decisions not to act (the speaker’s story really begins when he realizes he has forgotten to turn off the stove, and he returns home then only opting to take a nap). The old woman appears at his door seemingly out of the blue, but really, we can say she appears to call him back to the fact that even his petty marks of individuation are knotted up with relations to and responsibilities for others. Her dying and then being violated by the speaker only reinforce this fact, and they would seem either to give the lie to or to solidify (I’m not quite sure which) Kierkegaard’s conclusion that the ideal neighbor is a dead neighbor. Since the old woman seems to shift back and forth between being dead and sort of undead, maybe she does both. In any case, the speaker tries to shirk his responsibility by putting the old woman in a suitcase and getting on a train with plans of dumping her in the woods somewhere. Curiously, he feels physically ill on the train ride, leaves the suitcase unattended, and returns to find it stolen. This amplifies his concerns about being blamed for her death but also extends those worries into infinity (because he can never really know what the thief will do when he finds out what he has stolen). The worry and frustration, over which the speaker had initially had an illusory sense of control and which drove his narrative, thus becomes apotheosized into an almost mystical problem. The speaker can do nothing now but anticipate punishment, and so the story ends abruptly. He gets off he train, heads for some bushes to hide in, and prays. There are three lines of ellipses and then: “At this point, I temporarily end my manuscript in the belief that it has drawn on long enough.” Again, agency is indicated here (“I temporarily end my manuscript”), but it is a kind of empty agency. If this is a story about the problem of neighbor-love, there is no more story to tell. The speaker has lost his neighbor (albeit his dead neighbor), and in doing so, he has lost a future for himself.
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