möbius discourse

preparing to depart

2005-05-04T11:57:00.000-04:00

Now I take my exit as a time for further entry. Some may know what that means....

How do we go about heading into the DMZ? Do we really need to sneak in unnoticed? If we think there is intellectual life and new or un(der)recognized logic there, should we not call open attention to it? I'm not sure. For the most part, the Orator army lost its singular presence on the front when the Scriptorists gave way to the Incunabulists under General Gutenberg in the 1450s. New Auralists renewed the opposing ideological front in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with electronic apparatuses like radio and TV. And ever since, the Textual Agonists have used the educational system to con/script all possible into the ranks of the rational equation.

I want to think the New Auralists are less hostile toward opening up territory in the DMZ. Cable news programs now maintain blogs. Radio stations stream programming. But others have entered the DMZ unofficially, only to be accused of piracy and violation of intellectual property rights. And the Textual Agonists still scorn them all. Remember their slogan from the mid to late 20th century: "The movie was good, but did you read the book?"

And we're leaving from the Textual Agonist's academic battalion. So some care is in order. Going AWOL from agonism likely means leaving behind exposition. Will we need to move from the narrative, too (and how long can I keep this metaphor up)? Perhaps, as we need to invert the pattern of ideo/logical progression, we need to go from west to east. And we will enter at dawn, our silhouettes swallowed by the brilliance of the rising sun.

Word from on High

2005-04-02T13:53:00.000-05:00

I have been formally chastised for my lack of blogging.

It has been too damn long, and I don't have a really good reason why. Yeah, yeah...busy reading, writing, conferences. Not good excuses for not posting. Reasons to post. Or at least, material to work with.

I've also heard some lamenting that academicians aren't doing anything different with blogs. Not going to point any fingers at who's griping/challenging and who's parroting written/institutional conventions. Am going to try to figure what might happen differently. The blog ain't just a journal. Usually, the blog ain't just a web log, either. What is new going on here? How am I (am I?) going to help this hybrid (whatever this hybrid is) do something different with discourse?

Do we rake over the ruins between oral and textual logics? Do we leave the print-based shores, and set adrift in abstract waters to discover a new (media) world? A remediated world?

I can't get out of the metaphorical mode, so I'll make my own. Writing in the university centers on the thesis statement. Is your argument clear? Is it well supported? Are you become effectively agonistic? The metaphor of militarism.

If I'm making a move, then I'll say let's build between the metaphor, let's write the demilitarized zones. The zones are not contested, and only the edges are critiqued and analyzed. Binary ideologies agree not to enter. We cannot, must not enter armed with argument. What is it we do there? It's time we start sneaking in...

Chorographing

2005-04-02T11:31:00.000-05:00

Working on another mystory (a la Ulmer). Detroit still factors in heavily, though this time constitutes a different popcycle--the personal--and plays out across at least one of the others. Here's how this recipe begins:

School: Cass Technical High School--I am/was a "Technician"
Discipline: The academy--composition and rhetoric, in two parts: "techne" (Aristotle and Janet Atwill), an interest of mine as a concept/means of invention; and technical writing, a discipline within the broader field of comp and rhet
Personal: Detroit--birthplace of Fordism, the perfection of
routinized "praxis" (at times antithetical to techne)

So, my mystory beginnings recall my being a "Technician" from Cass Technical High School. But I am a "humanist" now--my discipline is in the humanities. I start from the binary narratives of academic ideology (humanism and sciences), and write the chora between/out of which the two emerge.

For a little while I've struggled with where an entertainment popcycle would open an area for me to work through. The times I've thought of this in relation to the mystory, entertainment always begins as music for me. I consume plenty of other media...TV is probably the grains and cereals of my media-diet pyramid. And yet, I think of music first....

Driving home from school the other day, I heard London's Calling by The Clash (damn, it's been years). My eureka moment. Probably more than any other band, they were the mainstream icons of punk rock. Yeah, I know...the Sex Pistols were more punk, more nihilistic, underground, counter culture. But nevermind the bullocks. The Clash were the bigger irony in that they were so identified with the punk scene but were so much else--including a moderate mainstream success.

As my mystory begins with the recognition of my intellectual collisions of the technical and the humanist, The Clash set the other socio-ideological binary against Fordism and the drive of Detroit industry. The socialist/communist and the free market capitalist ideologies.

Where do we see this ideological intersection in Detroit? Diego Rivera. The mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Creation from the metaphysical to the physical. God makes man, man makes commodities. Production is there, but what's getting invented? The tribute here is to the proletariat, the laborer, the doing. But in the inversion of this ideology, the parallel of industrial labor with the creation of life becomes the manufacturing of the individual spirit with the creation of Fordist mass production. Keep making the masses. We'll keep consuming them.

Edsel Ford commissioned Rivera to paint the Detroit Industry mural for the DIA in 1932. At that time southwest Detroit already had a moderately substantial Latino (mostly Mexican) population, most of whom had come to Detroit because of employment opportunities emerging from the auto industry. Folks worked for Ford. My wife's great-grandfather had been in "the neighborhood" for over a decade. Rivera, interested in a commemorative gesture for Latinos in Detroit, came to the community with an offer to paint a mural in southwest Detroit. For free.

Rivera was by then a world famous muralist. He was also a world famous card-carrying communist. He was received with hostility by many who had left Central and South America because of destitute economies and oppressive political regimes. Capitalism was working for them, and Rivera was sent not-so-kindly on his way, leaving no mark on the future Mexicantown.

addin some space

2005-02-15T19:03:00.000-05:00

The image on the last post doesn't fit well, and I'm too lazy to modify the template right now. So, my alterantive is to add a heap of blank space to try to move things down some....

digits and liteacy

2005-02-15T10:17:00.000-05:00

So, in the English department where I'm a grad student, we've (the institutional we here) been searching for "computers and writing" hires the past few years. We were indeed lucky to get Jeff Rice. This year's search was not so successful...

This candidate search comes out of the English department's digital literacy initiative. A story I've heard about this process involves a high-level administrator asking candidates a joke-question: "Digital literacy? What do fingers have to do with literacy?"

Indeed, what do fingers have to do with literacy? And here's the Achewood tie-in: notice Little Nephew (aka tha_snazzle) has only two digits--just hands/paws, no fingers. And yet, he's digitally literate (ruinous, though not down with the nomenclature).

Most of us have 10 digits, perhaps consequently the basis for our decimal numeric system. Little Nephew has two digits. If "civilization" were borne out of the consciousness of people of LN's species, would we then center on a binary system? Wait...don't we already?

Maybe this is just another odd-ball observation, but I'm sure there's something to a digits, the digital, and (digital) literacy juxtaposition. Sense, abstraction (concept), and consciousness. Where do they overlap? Where do they connect?

poor, poor thing

2005-02-15T10:06:00.000-05:00

I didn't water my jade plant for nearly three weeks because I moved it upstairs (my wife and I own a duplex, and the upper apartment is photo studio space for us right now). It was absolutely fine...in fact, doing better from the extra sunlight and probably me not over watering it.

Oh, but my poor blog has languished here. I don't know why I see my blog as analogous to my jade plant--they're really nothing alike. Maybe it's just my "I put something in it to keep it going/alive" thinking. And I've clearly put nothing here in a while.

OK, I'm almost done with the meta. This is just my penance.

My thinking was that blogging would be a reward for keeping up on things, but now I see that it will have to be a sort of break (even if mandatory) from all the other crap I struggle to keep up with.

Why do I keep writing this pathetic post? Penance. It must be penance. Oh lord, increase my suffering and my frequency for posting to my blog....

emotional engineering

2005-01-26T18:57:00.000-05:00

Watching Nova on PBS last night and there was a short segment on Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculpture. (I haven't gotten the image upload quite figured out yet, so you'll have to follow the links.)

This is great stuff. As he says, he's interested in motion (hence the kinetic part) because he finds it always generates a reaction, a feeling, and he wants to "make statements really on a purely emotional level." Clearly there's little use for his sculptures other than emotional involvement, aesthetic. And they're so well engineered.

I like the artichoke petal and the scraps of paper that look like birds. How was he able to tear all those pieces to look so alike?

And the abandoned doll is wonderfully creepy.

an opening?

2005-01-26T13:24:00.000-05:00

I struggled with where to begin this, my first post to my first blog. I still am reluctant and not entirely certain why. Maybe because I actually read other blogs. But why do I feel like I have to have an opening, and introduction? No doubt, years of english studies and complicity in print-logic....

Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, a recent read of mine, has helped me get a perspective on how literacy shapes the construction of consciousness and approaches to thinking. Obviously Ong distinguishes between orality and literacy as cultural centers of thought and expression, but he goes further into distinctions of writing--say with a quill, pencil, or ball-point pen--and printed text. So how does this affect consciousness? Well for starters, having to write or type something demands we use a different format/formula than just talking about something extemporaneously, or dialogically, or just casually. But more than this, print also situates knowledge (or knowledge claims) as something external and potentially permanent. We don't have to memorize valuable information like orality-centered cultures do; that information is reified in printed texts. Of course, just because a book exists doesn't make it accepted knowledge, but text is where we now turn to for knowledge access. Knowledge, and thus in part the reality we build from it, is just a copius collection of documents. Maybe librarians should be running the world.

None of this is particularly new or insightful. But here's why I'm bothering to begin with Ong:

Secondary orality--the orality of an electornic age--"the orality of telephones, radio, and television, which depends on writing for its existence" (3). Through the (critical?) analysis and abstraction we value in and made possible by printed text, we realize elements of orality, like spontaneity, are important again. But secondary orality is different from the "primary" orality of older/more isolated cultures, perhaps most notably through the influence of technology. John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" was only delivered to a few people, though further distributed with text; Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech reached hundreds of thousands (with microphones and amplifiers) upon delivery, and has reached millions more through audio and visual recording technologies, in addition to printed text. But even this is a limited example because Winthrop and King obviously wrote their speeches, then delivered them orally, which makes it a sort of hybrid of primary orality and literacy. Which brings me to my next point/intrest:

Hybridity--Ong doesn't deal with this specifically (I'm struggling to remember if he even mentioned the word), but the idea clearly emerges--as in my example above and his (brief) consideration of the influence of computers on writing/literacy. Actually, I'm not that interested in rehashing what Ong thinks is significant about this intersection of technology and writing tools/trends. This is just my nod to Ong for providing my grounded starting point for considering the idea and it's importance.

Hybridity is interesting because it shows how different uses for existing modes of thought and expression are indeed becoming something new, something of their own. Secondary orality is a prime example--old school communication meets new school gizmos. What we get is something like it was several thousand years ago, yet like nothing we've had before. Our consciousness constructs get changed by these hybrids. (Greg Ulmer and the mystory have helped me begin to grapple with this.)

And this is what's happening with computers--or rather, "digital" literacy. A new media is changing how I conceive of puting text to paper/screen. And this blog (all blogs) is just like hand-written journals I've kept, and is nothing like them at all.