Self Evaluation, Fall 2011
“It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.”
–Marshall McLuhan
With this independent study I proposed to explore various forms of how “culture” is rendered, looking at the different ways of presenting, storing, sorting, searching, and perceiving types of cultural data. I started by defining what I meant by cultural data as the presentation/perception of a culture within a certain geographical and/or historical context. I then explored the theoretical significance of various storage and search architectures, both archaic and contemporary—analogue and digital—for rendering cultural data. Although I proposed to root my study between the historical contexts of the Romantic era and the present day, I ended up focusing more on the present day. I found that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Occupy movement generally offered an excellent case study for the rendering of culture.
I am thankful that my independent study wasn’t confining. I couldn’t have predicted how OWS’s actions would offer such a fertile case study for my work. Looking at, which is to say reading, OWS in conjunction with working on various archiving projects (some scholastic and some in a more professional context) has led me to become increasingly interested in the work of archiving, and how it is that through the collection, curation, representation and display of data, stories can be constructed and understood. Likewise, I have become increasingly interested in looking at how a particular representation of data (which is to say the manner in which a certain media is able to render any given data) effects our perception of that data. Because of my work this term I am interested in further exploring archiving, and how it is that principles of archiving and representation can be used to tell stories—particularly in the contexts of eduction and journalism. It is my belief that this not only entails looking carefully at archivism, but also at how it is that people are able to read an archive’s contents.
I feel that I completed the Fall term of my first year of graduate work at College of the Atlantic right on track to continue my studies—I went into this term with a vague sort of understanding of my interest and am leaving it with a solid one. This independent study was structured around the other two courses I was enrolled in, Reality Effect and Nature of Narrative (which I was the TA for). These two courses occurred simultaneously so I was only able to attend one class session of each per week. I found this to be an incredibly frustrating state of affairs. I feel that I wasn’t able to do my best work in either class because I wasn’t present for half of every week. I also feel that I wasn’t ever able to fully articulate to either myself or my advisors what exactly I was doing. This was partially because I did not yet know exactly what I was doing, and partially because my advisors and I never sat down at the very start and spelled out what our expectations of one another were. All in all this term was one of progress and learning—both about the workings of the institution and my academic interests.
“Gnothi seauton,” or “know thyself,” was the inscription at the Temple of Apollo where the Oracle of Delphi professed. This is the goal of my education: To learn to better know myself, and in that way to better know the world that I perceive. It is my opinion that the obligation of a teacher is to generate, hold and to preserve spaces for learning, and to do so in a manner which is both compassionate and unconditional. By “compassionate” I mean something like an awareness of the interconnected nature of learning—that it is worth studying one thing closely, or a million things broadly because there is something telling about a “whole” (which is to say “the self” and in turn “others”) when either is done, which perhaps is also to say “human ecology.” By “unconditional” I mean that the ultimate misstep or treachery a teacher is capable of fecundating is to say that they cannot teach something.
Perhaps this has been to loosely stated: “…to say that they cannot teach something.” It is not the obligation of a teacher to teach, per se. Rather, the obligation of a teacher is to generate, hold and to preserve spaces for learning. A teacher is a space-maker. A teacher is a curator. A teacher is a presenter. A teacher is a performer. A student, like Indiana Jones, is a scholar and an explorer—spending equal amounts of time in the library and in the “real” world. A student wanders and searches within the space built, maintained and protected by a teacher. In this way, it isn’t the obligation of a teacher to be an expert on everything necessarily, rather, it is the teacher’s obligation to be aware of their students and the space in which their students learn (which is perhaps, to say the “real world”). A teacher doesn’t hand to students knowledge like Moses was the commandments. A teacher builds a space wherein through carful presentation, distillation, exaggeration, repetition and pattern (which is to say “pedagogy”) students are able to take up what they have experienced and store it away inside of themselves—making their interior spaces a mirror of the ones created by their teachers so that when the students venture out into the real world (which is to say “uncurated space”) they have within themselves not only a template with which to understand the world, but a personal mechanism for learning within the real world itself. Ultimately, what all teachers teach is how to learn outside of the classroom—how to be a human.
It is my opinion that the obligation of a journalist is inline with that of a teacher. A journalist, however, rather than generating a particular space, presents elements from the real world to readers (“students”) in order to help these readers understand the world. I think that the best of journalism is an artistic function, like that of a photographer: to assemble the elements of the world in a composition that speaks truth. Of course, a lot of journalism doesn’t exactly do that—it presents someone’s personal take on truth.
So, what’s missing?
Simply put, art school should be more fun for all involved. I want the spirit to be less one of attempting to please authority figures, and more one of trying to surprise oneself. I like the rebellious students. I find the combination of rebelliousness and hard work seems to make for the best artists (and students).
If you look up “Physical Computing” and “Human Computer Interactions,” then you are willing to understand “computer” to be inclusive of someone dancing, my interest is squarely situated at the center as described by those three points.
what is a note if it’s never returned to?
if not for exhibition then for what?
i want to equate tracing an image with tracing paper and pencil or pen to reblogging an image or piece of text.
i’m at a loss for what happens to the traced image.
Reading is construction within a shared space—this is to say that reading is an emergent phenomenon between a reader and the read.
“No right is absolute and with every right comes responsibilities. The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out–but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others–nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no ambiguity in the law here–the First Amendment protects speech–it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.
Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”
–Excerpted from a press release distributed by the office of New York City Mayor, Bloomberg, <nyc.gov>
Tents speak volumes. Speech is more than text and words. Speech is present wherever it is read. Speech and reading are closely linked because both are acts of inscription1. The folks who have occupied Zuccotti park aren’t allowed to use audio amplification systems of any sort. Their occupying of the park–of space–is their message. Their message isn’t “cogent” in a linguistic sense, per se. Their message, however, is abundantly apparent in their actions. Their message is an experience rooted in the world of experience (of piss and shit), not in a digital or Platonic space.
I am interested in learning to read, and speak with my body through experience. I have been taught to write essays that utilize a series of references to make certain points, always being careful to clarify my terms so that what I am writing and what a potential reader reads aline. Another way of saying this is that I’ve been taught to write in a way that builds off of a shared base. I’m not setting out to destabilize or distance myself form this sort of writing. I wonder, however, why anyone needs to necessarily build a “shared base” because don’t we occupy the same space? If anything has been written or said or heard or read hasn’t anything an inherently “shared base?”
It worries me that Mayor Bloomberg’s office so certainly understands speech to be only textual in nature. Words, both written and spoken, are symbolic; a tent can be used symbolically. It worries me because a side effect of ignoring the shared base we do have, which is to say the world, is that we forget about where we all live and what it is that we do inherently all share.
Reading is construction within a shared space–this is to say that reading is an emergent phenomenon between a reader and the read.
1 > asked, “Inscription of what?”
“Of symbol” < answered.
Q n’ A
A thesis paper is structured like this:
Question -> Answer -> Question -> ad inifinitum.
My papers are structured like this:
Proposal -> Question -> Evidence -> Question -> Suggestion -> Deduction -> Question….you get the point. There’s no answer leading to a new question. Is the human ecological process? I’m told that if I want to do graduate work outside of College of the Atlantic I’ll need to abandon the human ecological process.
I must find a way to wed the two, though I imagine it will look something like Wittgenstein’s INVESTIGATIONS.
I temporary compromise may be the route of
Proposal -> Evidence -> Answer
Proposal -> Evidence -> Answer
Seeing your reflextion in the river Styxx
academia does not exist, it is merely work which thinks it doesn’t exist.
[why woman is a symptom of man: women are unbearable but without them life would be worse. “So, if woman does not exist, man is perhaps simple a woman who thinks that she doesn’t exist.” - Zizek]
So what if as a man I’m attracted to other man the way Lacan is attracted to women?
and.
What if my graduate work is on something I would nerd out on in my own time? Is it graduate work because I bring in theories after accomplishing the feat of abstract recitation?
Doing human ecology means being brave enough to make the connections others aren’t seeing. It’s not enough to recognize them, they must be acted on. It’s an endless task in which we become strong thinkers, lean after grazing on thin protein and exercise. The men want us and the men want to be us (too bad there aren’t any men around).
Supported Self Direction—an experiment in over simplification
This is contingent upon an oversimplification:
There are two sorts of Ivory Towers among the many. The sort that foster a self directed education and the sort that are filled with rails, leading to a specific track based education.
For some reason or another it seems that the Ivory Town of which I am a part, one which professes a self directed education, seems to take “self directed” to mean “alone.”
I feel that this isn’t a perfect state of affairs. I think that the more self directed an education is the more support that the institution fostering and nurturing such an education ought to offer. “Support” doesn’t mean “coddling,” or “instruction;” “support” means that said institution ought to offer certain tools for navigation, not merely the space and freedom inwhich to navigate. Of course offering space and freedom is an important step, but the job is only half (perhaps this isn’t the correct fraction?) done. Without the proper tools with which to navigate an explorer is just a lonely-lost wanderer.
While perhaps not directly corollary, I feel that this issue is some how connected to a distinction that can be drawn between “community” and “collective:” A community is a symbol. A community can justify removing bits of itself for the “greater good,” while a collective is entirely itself: if any constituent bit of a collective is removed the collective is no longer what it once was. It is something entirely new.
Notes On A Conversation With Eli And Virginia
Intent: This is a re-presentation of a conversation in which I attempt to reach a way of writing about the distortion of time and space in Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth and Last Year at Marienbad (with some help from Lacan and Žižek).
How to talk about a novel and film within the same dialogue?
Eli uses the word “re-presentation” as noun for paintings, films, and novels. Allowing him to speak of all types of objects and get at the “thing” behind them. I disagree in this word choice. I will use re-presentation to discuss the repetition in Last Year at Marienbad and In the Labyrinth.
Matt: So, I want to discuss the thing happening within these two works but recognize the inherent dialectic between them, regardless of the potentially minute size of that dialectic.
Virginia: So talk about that!
Eli: It’s ok to say “it’s” structuring in this way but say how it is structuring in this way.
The “how” is repetition and re-presentation. Talk about it (the event as presented) is a mediated event in itself. (Eli suggests: rooting my language of time in Chronoschism by Heise. Time is re-presented as doing such in This and is therefore doing THIS.)
Eli..Matt: The temporal structure of the postmodern work…infinite loop…rendered in this way because it is already existing in such a way. Like Lacan’s time-paradox of the symptom, initially appearing as a trace. Analysis is the symbolic integration of meaningless imaginary traces. The repressed returns from the future with the symptom’s meanings constructed retroactively. Only through the detouring of time does the objective state of things become retroactively what it always was (as in time-travel).
Eli: Spatiality and temporality as being culturally constructed and this being critiqued in Robbe-Grillet. You don’t have to say what the critique is, just how he’s doing it (re-presentations, the reality effect of Last Year at Marienbad and In the Labyrinth.
Virginia/Eli: You’re approaching the nature of narrative in different contexts through two works by Robbe-Grillet.
Matt: But it’s a closed, looped space as means for addressing psychological temporality. A closed loop forces continual movement through the same time and space and yet it is never the same space in time. How can the works be in dialectic and part of the same loop?
Eli: What you should do is write a preface on the differences between writing about novels and writing about films. What are the differences and what are the overlaps. Then you can address each one within the same structure, by creating your own structure.
Wrapping up:
The experience of reading In the Labyrinth and watching Last Year at Marienbad are so close to the same experience and yet Not. These things are like the infinite loop of Main Street in Pleasantville. They exist with similar structures (re-presentation) yet use different elements in construction of that structure: sentences in one and pictures in the other. Operating in the same manner by presenting themselves in slightly altering states over a small period of time (a few days).
The content reflects the way the narrative is rendered. These structural elements reflect the structures in the story its self. What makes Labyrinth and Marienbad so captivating to behold is that their narrative structure is the only way in which to render the structures inherent to the stories told.
[The story of a soldier wandering a vacant city and a lover attempting to conquer the apparent amnesia of his former lover are perfectly placed for narration through a loop of time and space.]
- -
Brooks, Virginia. Kalamazoo: Edwin Brooks and Holly Lovelace, 1989. Person.
Heise, Ursula K. “Chronoschisms.” Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. 3rd Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 361-386. Print
Last Year at Marienbad. Dir. Alain Resnais. Perf. Delphine Seyrig, Girorgio Albertazzi, and Sacha Pitoëff. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.
Mellen, Eli. Washington, D.C.: Mitchell Mellen and Lisa Karen Steinberg, 1989. Person.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Two Novels: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Brooklyn: Verso, 1989. Print.
So what happens in the end? The Doctor is locked in the Pandorica.
Yes. sharing. Yes. we all feel paranoia — that great big worry of failing to achieve (progression in thought).
And in the “end” they lock the Doctor in the Pandorica. But he loves the universe so, especially us humans (dumb!) because we just keep going. In our parasitic nature there is always something more for us to conquer.
In our attempts we ravage the path [creative destruction] because too careful a plan only assists in the realization of everything we fail to incorporate in doing human ecology. In being human ecological we have to leave the dishes dirty in the sick and allow Rory to die.
But we will emerge from that dark box of academic jargon. I know what metonymy and use it everyday, so when I fail to recognize the word in lectures and texts why not let it simply speak to the fact that I made fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and mixed greens for dinner for a small group of friends from a recipe I had never tried (never deep fried before) from a cookbook written by a woman taboo at my academic institution (Paula Deen) AND in that period of sitting at table with friends had the best conversation all week.
I love you Jacques Lacan, and I know you’re right but mostly he has a name. Only in “writing papers” will I refer to him as the object petite a. The rest of the time I’m going to chase him madly.
Re: Not to you dear Eli
I think this feeling of failing is perhaps less a result of any particular scholastic endeavor, but perhaps a side effect of the human condition?
It makes me think about a scene from the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005 film) that I think of often, where Arthur confesses to Slartibartfast that “All my life I’ve had this strange feeling that there’s something big and sinister going on in the world,” Slartibartfast responds that, indeed, “No, that’s perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe gets that. Perhaps I’m old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what’s actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, ‘Hang the sense of it,’ and keep yourself busy. I’d much rather be happy than right any day.”
“And are you?”
“Ah, no,” pausing to snort-chortal, “Well, that’s where it all falls down, of course,” sighs Slartibartfast.
We (if I may speak for “us all”) go around, pretending that we are all in the same big-ol’ space… but when we really get down to the nuts and bolts of subjective individual experience (experience, here being the operative word—not rooted in any particular function of sensing per se, but this is a gerund-y sort of thing: living) we find that sharing is really really difficult.
This is why I want to either teach literature at a collegiate level, be a kindergarden teacher or cook for my professional life. All of these are about sharing, in very different sorts of ways of course, but sharing is nonetheless formative to all of them. I think that sharing is mighty important.
Here I haven’t answered your question:
“Do you feel like this as well? I think this is where a lot of my academic frustration stems from. Because we fail to use singular words in speaking of complex ideas, we fail to progress in thought.”
Perhaps it is a result of this very failing that we actually progress? If we all spoke with singularity (like a black hole) I am not certain that we would be able to progress at all. Maybe it is a double bind—catch 22—paradox, where in singularity we would both comprehend e v e r y t h i n g as well as collapse all of that which is constituant of e v e r y t h i n g, because through achievement of singularity everything is made to nothing…
That sounded cookier than I was intending. I think that more simply what I’m trying to say is that in our efforts to share we are able to share.
