It's not that the author is dead. The author is still only too alive.
Rather it's that authors are very expensive in the generation of knowledge.
Behind that standard idealization, author – text – reader, is a material range of industries and other assemblages of things, skills, people, kinds and venues of use. Every author costs that materiality something of its substance, value, recognition, and working.
At the same time, these industries and other assemblages include as part of their (partially) working systems, elements in which an author, the author, authors, and other makers are adjudicated, manufactured, brought into being, misrecognized, and even sometimes rewarded.
To make an author requires a lot of erasure, deflection, humility, and distain, and is possible only when many people collaborate to make it happen. Even the most independent zine maker or scribe depends on materialities that cannot be created individually.
Not that authoring isn't hard work for individuals, as well as these collectivities.
Bearing the burden of the social maker is extraordinary – in all its facets of action, thought, contemplation, imagination, connection, symbol, and hope.
It's not just that some people, skills and things don't get their share of recognition, but rather that we don't collectively understand how making works. We make it expensive to try to understand this. Sometimes the cost is being able to make something we need and don't have.
We think ideas are the important part. At the expense of all the work to communicate ideas. We think communication is the important part. At the expense of all the collective work in which ideas come into being, over time, and through communities and possibilities.
We make knowledge products, like books, which circulate. Sometimes the venues of circulation are hostile, sometimes friendly, sometimes so heterogeneous they can't be characterized, sometimes small, or large or unexpected or newly created through this very circulation itself. Sometimes circulation never happens, sometimes it happens in some other future or venue, unknowable in some moments.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
should writing be deceptively simple?
Recently I encountered a set of admonishments to better writing. Partly my presentation here has elements of a debunking exercise, but actually, I do also want to take this list seriously too. Anyway, debunking is itself an activity that is interestingly problematic. So I do want to take all this seriously enough to wonder which of these admonishments to take to heart, which ones to respond to in some form, I'm not sure what, which ones to dismiss as improper. I want to ask others to help to analyze them together with or maybe apart from the points Warner makes (previous post).
So, here are the instructions recreated as a list of ideological assumptions, for examination, possibly analysis, maybe debunking, or even embrace:
1. To be complex and interesting, writing actually needs to be clear and deceptively simple.
2. The laying out of concepts needs to be done only once. The vocabularies need to be set only once.
3. Do what you set out.
4. Quit delaying and displacing.
5. Get yourself out of there.
6. Be felt instead of seen.
7. Let the writing perform you instead of insisting on your presence by making yourself the subject of the text.
8. If you love your teachers’ work, take it further, don’t waste time telling us what your relation to them or it is.
9. Bring joy in ideas and connections instead of quotes.
10. Demonstrate instead of declaring.
11. Use instead of presenting.
12. Make the terms and concepts mean something by playing them out through analysis of the specimen texts.
13. Make the writing produce the emphasis instead of italics.
14. Quit coining terms.
15. Consider the ideological impasses of taxonomy.
16. Respect your readers.
17. Don’t worry about being a critic or an academic. Capitalist or not, there is still a place for intellectual activity and intervention.
So, here are the instructions recreated as a list of ideological assumptions, for examination, possibly analysis, maybe debunking, or even embrace:
1. To be complex and interesting, writing actually needs to be clear and deceptively simple.
2. The laying out of concepts needs to be done only once. The vocabularies need to be set only once.
3. Do what you set out.
4. Quit delaying and displacing.
5. Get yourself out of there.
6. Be felt instead of seen.
7. Let the writing perform you instead of insisting on your presence by making yourself the subject of the text.
8. If you love your teachers’ work, take it further, don’t waste time telling us what your relation to them or it is.
9. Bring joy in ideas and connections instead of quotes.
10. Demonstrate instead of declaring.
11. Use instead of presenting.
12. Make the terms and concepts mean something by playing them out through analysis of the specimen texts.
13. Make the writing produce the emphasis instead of italics.
14. Quit coining terms.
15. Consider the ideological impasses of taxonomy.
16. Respect your readers.
17. Don’t worry about being a critic or an academic. Capitalist or not, there is still a place for intellectual activity and intervention.
style, membership, future publics and the burden of world-making
For about the last fifteen years I have been more and more concerned about ideologies of clarity and accessibility. Folks who know perfectly well that one way to describe ideology is as common sense assumptions about everyday practices seem to take the clear and accessible as unproblematic goods.
A few days ago I googled "critiques of clarity and accessibility" to see if others were working on what might be problematic about these and related terms and assumptions. But there were no critiques of these terms. Clarity and accessibility were over and over always the solutions to various other critiques, not subjects of analysis themselves.
The best discussion of this subject I've come across myself is Michael Warner's essay "Styles of intellectual publics" in the book Just Being Difficult? Academic writing in the public arena (Stanford 2003). Here are bits from this essay I find most helpful in beginning to consider histories and ideologies of clarity and accessibility.
"In modernity...an extraordinary burden of world-making comes to be borne above all by style." (109)
"The possibility I would like to raise here is that those who write opaque left theory might very well feel that they are in a position analogous to Orwell's diarist--writing to a public that does not yet exist--and finding that their language can circulate only in channels hostile to it, they write in a manner designed to be a placeholder for a future public." (109)
Warner disputes readings of Orwell that espouse coming "as close as possible to an address to all persons," asking "Does Orwell really stand for the idea that accessible style leads to mass markets and therefore to effective politics?" (110)
He points to Adorno's distrust of "common canons of clairty" in which precision is devalued through mass culture and "an idealization of common sense that is based on commodity culture." "the expansiveness of mass circulation affects and distorts a desire for social membership on the part of readers.... The wide circulation of language in mass culture is perceived and treasured as a quality of style by those who misrecognize it as clarity and sense." (112)
"The false aesthetic of transparency, defining clarity as that which communicates widely, has a powerful social effect of normalization. One result is that it will naturally privilege the majority over less-familiar views.... The result is a kind of invisible power for dominant norms... alienated from the labor of judgment." (113)
"We begin to normalize intellectual work whenever we suppose a direct equation between value and numbers--imagining that a clear style results in a popular audience and therefore in effective political engagement. So deeply cherished is this way of thinking that to challenge it is to court derision, especially in journalistic contexts." (115)
"What kind of clarity is necessary in writing? Clarity for whom? ...different kinds of writing suit different purposes, that what is clear in one reading community will be unclear in another, that clarity depends upon shared conventions and common references, that one person's jargon is another person's clarity, that perceptions of jargon or unclarity change over time." (115)
"Should writing intended for academics in the humanities aspire to accessibility for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there should be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of the humanistic disciplines should make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch to enter into a discussion--of, say, the theory of sexuality--should be at no disadvantage compared to someone who had read widely in previous discussions of the question? ....It allows people to think cumulatively, without starting at each moment from the zero point of maximum accessibility." (115-6)
"Instead of assuming a self-evident standard of clarity and a moral obligation to follow it, one could argue that the imperative to write clearly is not the same as the need to write accessibly, that the project of an academic discipline requires a rigor of definition, argument, and debate. What would count as clarity, in this view, might remain highly specialized and inaccessible to lay audiences or journalists. Indeed, to the extent that clarity might require conceptual precision of very unfamiliar kinds, it might compete with accessibility." (116)
"Style performs membership.... At stake in the dispute about style, then, are different contexts for writing, different ways of imagining a public." (118)
A few days ago I googled "critiques of clarity and accessibility" to see if others were working on what might be problematic about these and related terms and assumptions. But there were no critiques of these terms. Clarity and accessibility were over and over always the solutions to various other critiques, not subjects of analysis themselves.
The best discussion of this subject I've come across myself is Michael Warner's essay "Styles of intellectual publics" in the book Just Being Difficult? Academic writing in the public arena (Stanford 2003). Here are bits from this essay I find most helpful in beginning to consider histories and ideologies of clarity and accessibility.
"In modernity...an extraordinary burden of world-making comes to be borne above all by style." (109)
"The possibility I would like to raise here is that those who write opaque left theory might very well feel that they are in a position analogous to Orwell's diarist--writing to a public that does not yet exist--and finding that their language can circulate only in channels hostile to it, they write in a manner designed to be a placeholder for a future public." (109)
Warner disputes readings of Orwell that espouse coming "as close as possible to an address to all persons," asking "Does Orwell really stand for the idea that accessible style leads to mass markets and therefore to effective politics?" (110)
He points to Adorno's distrust of "common canons of clairty" in which precision is devalued through mass culture and "an idealization of common sense that is based on commodity culture." "the expansiveness of mass circulation affects and distorts a desire for social membership on the part of readers.... The wide circulation of language in mass culture is perceived and treasured as a quality of style by those who misrecognize it as clarity and sense." (112)
"The false aesthetic of transparency, defining clarity as that which communicates widely, has a powerful social effect of normalization. One result is that it will naturally privilege the majority over less-familiar views.... The result is a kind of invisible power for dominant norms... alienated from the labor of judgment." (113)
"We begin to normalize intellectual work whenever we suppose a direct equation between value and numbers--imagining that a clear style results in a popular audience and therefore in effective political engagement. So deeply cherished is this way of thinking that to challenge it is to court derision, especially in journalistic contexts." (115)
"What kind of clarity is necessary in writing? Clarity for whom? ...different kinds of writing suit different purposes, that what is clear in one reading community will be unclear in another, that clarity depends upon shared conventions and common references, that one person's jargon is another person's clarity, that perceptions of jargon or unclarity change over time." (115)
"Should writing intended for academics in the humanities aspire to accessibility for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there should be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of the humanistic disciplines should make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch to enter into a discussion--of, say, the theory of sexuality--should be at no disadvantage compared to someone who had read widely in previous discussions of the question? ....It allows people to think cumulatively, without starting at each moment from the zero point of maximum accessibility." (115-6)
"Instead of assuming a self-evident standard of clarity and a moral obligation to follow it, one could argue that the imperative to write clearly is not the same as the need to write accessibly, that the project of an academic discipline requires a rigor of definition, argument, and debate. What would count as clarity, in this view, might remain highly specialized and inaccessible to lay audiences or journalists. Indeed, to the extent that clarity might require conceptual precision of very unfamiliar kinds, it might compete with accessibility." (116)
"Style performs membership.... At stake in the dispute about style, then, are different contexts for writing, different ways of imagining a public." (118)
Friday, August 18, 2006
How the Hell Do I Get Out of the Field?
This is the last line of Donna Haraway's book, Primate Visions. It's a quote from Octavia Butler's book, Dawn and its heroine Lilith. I'm paraphrasing Haraway here--Lilith is a young African American woman rescued with people who have survived nuclear war and is chosen by an "alien" species the Oankali as a midwife for the refugees whom they've impregnated as part of an effort to become trading partners with "humanity's remnants." Primate Visions ends, "She laughed bitterly. 'I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork--but how the hell do I get out of the field?'" I'd like to use this ending to introduce my "world," as a feminist ethnographer. This is a world in which one doesn't ever leave the field, tearfully looking back. Fieldwork today is about a different kind of apprenticeship. Let's call it galling.
I wake up today and open up my local newspaper, the Wichita Eagle. As always, when the Israeli military goes into one of its many "operations," as Israel calls them, there are exchanges of letters. One Rabbi in town can be counted on to get drawn into defending Israeli actions, which come under scrutiny. That they come under scrutiny and are not just celebrated is an historical achievement involving many, including the principal actors, Palestinians residing in the O.P.T. (Occupied Palestinian Territories). The other Rabbi tends to stay away from the editorial page of the Eagle, but he made an appearance today in a letter responding to a Christian minister who said he went to the mosque to pray during the latest war on Lebanon. This minister wrote the letter, because when Israel's war on Lebanon began (see how words are part of war--I've said Israel's war "on" Lebanon, not "in" Lebanon--these distinctions matter) the other Rabbi who tends to always be out ahead of today's columnist organized a prayer meeting at his synagogue in which people prayed for Israel. The mayor went, no doubt because he was invited, sending a "message" to many that he was taking sides. Some would claim he was taking sides for "peace," but I don't buy it.
At any rate, some in town have felt like they needed to respond to the paper's coverage of the praying for Israel meeting. A friend and I went into action and organized a demonstration in which over 100 people showed up towndown on a Saturday evening. And a minister in town wrote to the Eagle to say he understood the prejudice that Muslims face in the U.S., etc etc etc.I'm going to link the Rabbi's letter.
Welcome to my neighborhood which is also part of "the field" from which I can't get out. I cannot leave untouched and pristine, his claim that Israel does not target civilians, while the terrorists do. This is the crux of Israeli propaganda, and is part of the "war on terror." I will revise and close by saying, "Israel has F-16s and F-18s, "goddesses," as Palestinian-Israeli, Azmi Bishara calls themwhich create public relations disasters on a regular basis for Israel. Then some members of the local Jewish community who identify with Israel’s way of accounting for dead Arabs, come to the rescue of these F-16s and military hardware as well as the Israeli soldiers who use them, and most importantly, the military generals who plan and implement Israel's wars on, yes on, her Arab neighbors.
I wake up today and open up my local newspaper, the Wichita Eagle. As always, when the Israeli military goes into one of its many "operations," as Israel calls them, there are exchanges of letters. One Rabbi in town can be counted on to get drawn into defending Israeli actions, which come under scrutiny. That they come under scrutiny and are not just celebrated is an historical achievement involving many, including the principal actors, Palestinians residing in the O.P.T. (Occupied Palestinian Territories). The other Rabbi tends to stay away from the editorial page of the Eagle, but he made an appearance today in a letter responding to a Christian minister who said he went to the mosque to pray during the latest war on Lebanon. This minister wrote the letter, because when Israel's war on Lebanon began (see how words are part of war--I've said Israel's war "on" Lebanon, not "in" Lebanon--these distinctions matter) the other Rabbi who tends to always be out ahead of today's columnist organized a prayer meeting at his synagogue in which people prayed for Israel. The mayor went, no doubt because he was invited, sending a "message" to many that he was taking sides. Some would claim he was taking sides for "peace," but I don't buy it.
At any rate, some in town have felt like they needed to respond to the paper's coverage of the praying for Israel meeting. A friend and I went into action and organized a demonstration in which over 100 people showed up towndown on a Saturday evening. And a minister in town wrote to the Eagle to say he understood the prejudice that Muslims face in the U.S., etc etc etc.I'm going to link the Rabbi's letter.
Welcome to my neighborhood which is also part of "the field" from which I can't get out. I cannot leave untouched and pristine, his claim that Israel does not target civilians, while the terrorists do. This is the crux of Israeli propaganda, and is part of the "war on terror." I will revise and close by saying, "Israel has F-16s and F-18s, "goddesses," as Palestinian-Israeli, Azmi Bishara calls themwhich create public relations disasters on a regular basis for Israel. Then some members of the local Jewish community who identify with Israel’s way of accounting for dead Arabs, come to the rescue of these F-16s and military hardware as well as the Israeli soldiers who use them, and most importantly, the military generals who plan and implement Israel's wars on, yes on, her Arab neighbors.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Galling Flexibilities--A Response to Katie
I am a friend and colleague of Katie's. We both got our Ph.D.s from the History of Consciousness Program at U.C. Santa Cruz. I am also tenured in a "free standing" Women's Studies department. Like Katie, I was "his conned," then had to try and figure out what it meant to be in a field called Women's Studies, a local, national and global project. Like her, I often chafe against processes of disciplinization, while also having to cope with or negotiate them, since my background and training is all interdisciplinary. I came to His. Con. from American Studies.
I said to one of my departmental instructor's today, the next new course I teach is not having the word, women, in the title. I share Katie's sense from His. Con. that feminism is self-reflexive, asking about who or what counts as a woman for example, but also about what counts as feminism, but the word, feminism, doesn't do the work I want it to in my own research and writing, although I'm still hanging out with anthropologists talking and writing about "feminist ethnography." I was on a panel at the American Anthropological Association meeting this past December, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" and was completely taken aback by the number of people who showed up. I was thrilled by the number of students and the kind of questions they asked.
So, I am interested in feminist ethnography, and I'm very interested in the interface of feminist ethnography and multi-site ethnography and how that has emerged from what George Marcus, a chronicler of cultural anthropology and trained anthropologists calls "second projects," or the kind of projects anthropologists form in reaction to graduate training.
I did fieldwork in the Palestinian Territories in 1998-1999 and have gone back for summers or winter break (sometimes both) every year since then until 2006. I don't know what post-fieldwork means, since I stay in touch with people I know there vis a vis email, and I go daily to internet sites to read news about the ever changing circumstances on the ground in Gaza, Ramallah, etc. I have also been reading about surrouding countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, as I teach a course on Women and the Middle East--it used to be called Arab Women and the Middle East Conflict. I changed the title to try and draw more students into the course, but also to signal some consideration of white U.S. women's relationship to the Middle East post 9/11.
I am interested in galling flexibilities, because Katie's conceptualization of flexible knowledges intrigues me, but I want to draw attention to the Arab-Israeli war zone as a site where "knowledges" are embattled in practices of warfare. "Galling" signals the kind of extreme political asymmetry between Palestinians and the state of Israel that I want to keep in the foreground. Galling is about the condition of living under a military occupation that has not been temporary, is not and cannot be permanent, but also keeps grinding on with increasing levels of unfreedom for Palestinians and their long search for justice.
I find a lot of the discussion of "borders" that has occured in the academy over the past twenty years to miss something I think is profound about what it means to live, think, work, write in the Occupied Territories. As one informant, an academic aware of a lot of the theoretical currents in the U.S., stressed to me, "our problem is that we have no borders." I'll explain more about that later.
I said to one of my departmental instructor's today, the next new course I teach is not having the word, women, in the title. I share Katie's sense from His. Con. that feminism is self-reflexive, asking about who or what counts as a woman for example, but also about what counts as feminism, but the word, feminism, doesn't do the work I want it to in my own research and writing, although I'm still hanging out with anthropologists talking and writing about "feminist ethnography." I was on a panel at the American Anthropological Association meeting this past December, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" and was completely taken aback by the number of people who showed up. I was thrilled by the number of students and the kind of questions they asked.
So, I am interested in feminist ethnography, and I'm very interested in the interface of feminist ethnography and multi-site ethnography and how that has emerged from what George Marcus, a chronicler of cultural anthropology and trained anthropologists calls "second projects," or the kind of projects anthropologists form in reaction to graduate training.
I did fieldwork in the Palestinian Territories in 1998-1999 and have gone back for summers or winter break (sometimes both) every year since then until 2006. I don't know what post-fieldwork means, since I stay in touch with people I know there vis a vis email, and I go daily to internet sites to read news about the ever changing circumstances on the ground in Gaza, Ramallah, etc. I have also been reading about surrouding countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, as I teach a course on Women and the Middle East--it used to be called Arab Women and the Middle East Conflict. I changed the title to try and draw more students into the course, but also to signal some consideration of white U.S. women's relationship to the Middle East post 9/11.
I am interested in galling flexibilities, because Katie's conceptualization of flexible knowledges intrigues me, but I want to draw attention to the Arab-Israeli war zone as a site where "knowledges" are embattled in practices of warfare. "Galling" signals the kind of extreme political asymmetry between Palestinians and the state of Israel that I want to keep in the foreground. Galling is about the condition of living under a military occupation that has not been temporary, is not and cannot be permanent, but also keeps grinding on with increasing levels of unfreedom for Palestinians and their long search for justice.
I find a lot of the discussion of "borders" that has occured in the academy over the past twenty years to miss something I think is profound about what it means to live, think, work, write in the Occupied Territories. As one informant, an academic aware of a lot of the theoretical currents in the U.S., stressed to me, "our problem is that we have no borders." I'll explain more about that later.
revisions, generations, contexts of resistance
Hey, Debbie Gordon, I appreciate your comments from the perspective of a US academic trying to work with another national academy and set of politics. Does this itself necessitate a post-disciplinary perspective on the US side, if not on the Palestinian side? Or is that inadequate to a transnational mapping?
You've got my attention here bringing up underlying assumptions about constant revision. Your comment that in the Palestinian political constant revisions are not a choice is probably more true than not over more time periods and places than the idea that multiple revisions and particular kinds of polishing are possible, necessary or even desirable. I'm not sure how to bring your insight together with the ideologies of clarity and accessibility that some revision practices assume and attempt to fulfill.
When you comment on the aging of America, are you referring to some kind of consolidation of power in the hands of baby boomers? Does such power in the academy inflect generational politics within and among various disciplines, interdisciplines, and other knowledge formations? I think of the generational meanings that shift over the last 5 years that attract around the term Queer, for example.
Are transnational feminist scholar-activist knowledges of Palestinian struggle and academies generational in the US along the same lines of not delivering the goods you comment on in the Palestinian academic context?
How do the contexts of resistance operate to make some epistemological issues, say allegiances to disciplines, background or foreground differentially?
You've got my attention here bringing up underlying assumptions about constant revision. Your comment that in the Palestinian political constant revisions are not a choice is probably more true than not over more time periods and places than the idea that multiple revisions and particular kinds of polishing are possible, necessary or even desirable. I'm not sure how to bring your insight together with the ideologies of clarity and accessibility that some revision practices assume and attempt to fulfill.
When you comment on the aging of America, are you referring to some kind of consolidation of power in the hands of baby boomers? Does such power in the academy inflect generational politics within and among various disciplines, interdisciplines, and other knowledge formations? I think of the generational meanings that shift over the last 5 years that attract around the term Queer, for example.
Are transnational feminist scholar-activist knowledges of Palestinian struggle and academies generational in the US along the same lines of not delivering the goods you comment on in the Palestinian academic context?
How do the contexts of resistance operate to make some epistemological issues, say allegiances to disciplines, background or foreground differentially?
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
How does it feel to inhabit the post-disciplinary?
To belong to too many communities of practice all at once? And none of which speak to each other?
To belong to too few communities of practice that know they aren't the center of how it should be? Who fantasize that if they don't understand something it is not understandable, or if they do, that that is the standard of good practice?
To constantly be trying to explain mistakes and misrecognitions?
Mistaking new sensations for pain? mistaking honor for destruction? mistaking another's practice for your own done badly?
Belonging otherwise?
Building new vocabularies as ends in themselves?
Taxonomizing without someone else's telos of a real argument, a real interpretation, a real analysis, a real ethnography, a real history, a real discipline?
To be sloppy, speculative, too personal, without enough examples, or the right examples, or someone else's examples?
To have not included something pivotal from another community of practice that requires your participation?
To offensively violate rules for practice, consciously or not?
To be only too aware of how many rules and practices there are among your constituencies and to be unable to satisfy them all, indeed to even know what they all are?
To belong to too many communities of practice all at once? And none of which speak to each other?
To belong to too few communities of practice that know they aren't the center of how it should be? Who fantasize that if they don't understand something it is not understandable, or if they do, that that is the standard of good practice?
To constantly be trying to explain mistakes and misrecognitions?
Mistaking new sensations for pain? mistaking honor for destruction? mistaking another's practice for your own done badly?
Belonging otherwise?
Building new vocabularies as ends in themselves?
Taxonomizing without someone else's telos of a real argument, a real interpretation, a real analysis, a real ethnography, a real history, a real discipline?
To be sloppy, speculative, too personal, without enough examples, or the right examples, or someone else's examples?
To have not included something pivotal from another community of practice that requires your participation?
To offensively violate rules for practice, consciously or not?
To be only too aware of how many rules and practices there are among your constituencies and to be unable to satisfy them all, indeed to even know what they all are?
Sunday, August 06, 2006
interdisciplinarities and flexible knowledges: where they intermix
I've just been rethinking the term post-disciplinary. Until recently I didn't really like this term. Instead, I have been concentrated on working to multiply the many kinds of interdisciplinarity in the academy. But I reread Lois Menand's essay "The Market Place of Ideas" not long ago, his historicization of pre- and postdisciplinarity, with disciplinization and scientistic rigor as cold war imperatives for the post WWII US academy. This made it possible for me to consider using the term "disciplinary" as a much more local term, one with historical specifics that make the term "post-disciplinary" also much more local and specific. This is shifting my thinking.
Now I want to contrast those imperatives for rigor with the ones for the knowledge environment today in which simulation, academic capitalism and the training of a different and more expanded set of sensory perceptions and venues are being enlisted to play new roles. This contrast sets up reenactments as a species of flexible knowledges and begins to chart some of these shifts across and beyond the academy.
What's happening now is not exactly new; rather one set of imperatives is being demoted as another newer set is both intentionally elaborated and also emergently self-organizing. This second newer pairing I am pointing to here is akin to, say, an online Britannica made to work with a CD (intentionally elaborated) now also coupled with the Wikipedia (sort of self-organizing). And similar to one set of differences and overlaps between interdisciplinarity and flexible knowledges.
Reenactments matter because they reframe a range of practices. Ethnography is one, for example. My argument is that what counts as an experience, what counts as participation, what counts as observation, what counts as the description of these, is up for grabs in some strange ways.
On the large scale one might think about new imperatives for intentional elaboration under academic capitalism of what "interdisciplinarity" is coming to mean, kinds of corporatized collaborations that result in products or services, organized on the level of individuals and units of individuals.
This is why the term interdisciplinary seems to have narrowed in the last few years, such that it is represented by "interdisciplines" and the stakes in evaluation and gatekeeping seem to have become more important. I think of Julie Thompson Klein's wonderful book Crossing Boundaries in this vein. It's full of extensive examples of many kinds of interdisciplinarity, but they tend to be collective in various ways. The idiosyncratic lone wolf scholars and alternative practices are not at the heart of this interdisciplinarity, but evaluated out. Since some of my own mentors were of this sort, I find this excision appalling.
In contrast to all that, though also intermixed, are emergent self-organizing practices in which individual or particular actions turn out to be part of larger organizing structures and forms only perceptible at these other levels, largely not intentional. These are the flexible knowledges I am interested in, often on the edge of validity, authority, membership, as they border communities of practice.
Especially I'm trying to get at the experience of being inside scales in which your practices are bits of larger self-organizing structures that are not self-organizing on the level of you. They are dynamically continually reorganizing in layers of locals and globals and you are part of this, differentially perceptive of various layers and agencies and your actions and effects, motivated to use new sensory mixes to take in and alter information.
On the one hand, the experience of being inside scales has always been true, just as globalization can be used to describe travels over a long historical range. On another hand, this is more and more an element of embodied experience and knowledge making. Reenactments are about this shift.
The sensoria accessed and trained within these experiences of scale in some contexts is the very pleasure of gaming, of entertainment new media, and so on. This is Johnson's point in Everything Bad. In other contexts this is overwhelming, uncomfortable or even excruciating, or terrifyingly unfamiliar. I am trying to build up a range of intellectual associations that make it possible to experience some of this within intellectual argument as pleasurable or curious or worth attending to.
Now I want to contrast those imperatives for rigor with the ones for the knowledge environment today in which simulation, academic capitalism and the training of a different and more expanded set of sensory perceptions and venues are being enlisted to play new roles. This contrast sets up reenactments as a species of flexible knowledges and begins to chart some of these shifts across and beyond the academy.
What's happening now is not exactly new; rather one set of imperatives is being demoted as another newer set is both intentionally elaborated and also emergently self-organizing. This second newer pairing I am pointing to here is akin to, say, an online Britannica made to work with a CD (intentionally elaborated) now also coupled with the Wikipedia (sort of self-organizing). And similar to one set of differences and overlaps between interdisciplinarity and flexible knowledges.
Reenactments matter because they reframe a range of practices. Ethnography is one, for example. My argument is that what counts as an experience, what counts as participation, what counts as observation, what counts as the description of these, is up for grabs in some strange ways.
On the large scale one might think about new imperatives for intentional elaboration under academic capitalism of what "interdisciplinarity" is coming to mean, kinds of corporatized collaborations that result in products or services, organized on the level of individuals and units of individuals.
This is why the term interdisciplinary seems to have narrowed in the last few years, such that it is represented by "interdisciplines" and the stakes in evaluation and gatekeeping seem to have become more important. I think of Julie Thompson Klein's wonderful book Crossing Boundaries in this vein. It's full of extensive examples of many kinds of interdisciplinarity, but they tend to be collective in various ways. The idiosyncratic lone wolf scholars and alternative practices are not at the heart of this interdisciplinarity, but evaluated out. Since some of my own mentors were of this sort, I find this excision appalling.
In contrast to all that, though also intermixed, are emergent self-organizing practices in which individual or particular actions turn out to be part of larger organizing structures and forms only perceptible at these other levels, largely not intentional. These are the flexible knowledges I am interested in, often on the edge of validity, authority, membership, as they border communities of practice.
Especially I'm trying to get at the experience of being inside scales in which your practices are bits of larger self-organizing structures that are not self-organizing on the level of you. They are dynamically continually reorganizing in layers of locals and globals and you are part of this, differentially perceptive of various layers and agencies and your actions and effects, motivated to use new sensory mixes to take in and alter information.
On the one hand, the experience of being inside scales has always been true, just as globalization can be used to describe travels over a long historical range. On another hand, this is more and more an element of embodied experience and knowledge making. Reenactments are about this shift.
The sensoria accessed and trained within these experiences of scale in some contexts is the very pleasure of gaming, of entertainment new media, and so on. This is Johnson's point in Everything Bad. In other contexts this is overwhelming, uncomfortable or even excruciating, or terrifyingly unfamiliar. I am trying to build up a range of intellectual associations that make it possible to experience some of this within intellectual argument as pleasurable or curious or worth attending to.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
to people who don't like neologisms and who do like elegant language
It's always good to have to rethink and even justify one's fundamental suppositions, but it's rarely a wholehearted pleasure!
I am frustrated trying to communicate with folks who share some of your concerns and intellectual approaches. It is amazing how wide some of these intellectual gulfs are. The language one is so daunting. I have to laugh when I realize we are on opposite soap boxes there! You think English has plenty of good words and as a matter of principle don’t believe in neologisms, but I come from and value intellectual traditions that rejoice in a totally different vision of English!
I'm a junkie for English language histories and theories about the distinctive properties of English as a language. I've studied literature in Old, Middle, Modern (ie Shakespearean) and contemporary Englishs (and taught English as a foreign language and so on). (My UG thesis was on Beowulf in Old English.) Frankly, from my traditions refusing neologisms in English is not like putting your finger in the dyke, it's more like mistaking the dyke for the ocean!
English is one of the world languages with the largest vocabularies, much larger than the vocabularies of the Romance languages for example. One reason is because English is so good at and depends so much on neologisms and on borrowed words. The ability of English to do this is one of the reasons (though not the only one, power matters too) that English is now a global set of many Englishes, its words used all over the world, and why it is an increasing lingua franca (!) as well as its associations with the most colonizing power today! I taught English in Thailand, where people learn what one could only call "Thai English" from the time they enter school. When I was in Sweden everyone of a post war generation spoke English (before then it had been German).
People who speak English have never had the kinds of language regulation you get in, say, France (lingua franca), where they regulate new words, either coinage or borrowings, and which is why French isn't any longer a useful global language for technology, globalization, economics or even media today.
New words are Good! They are good to use, to think with, to share, to dream about, to love, to hate, to make communities inside and outside and so on. They matter in all these ways, and I love and appreciate new words, love to make them myself, love the work of folks who coin terms and phrases, and find their work among the most valuable in my own education, life, and aesthetics!
Voila! The gulf!
Nor do I believe that using neologisms, per se, creates work that folks won't read. Now I don't know which people will read MY work, but I don't believe for one minute that if they don't it will be because I use neologisms or try to come up with language for thinking new thoughts, for noting features of reality that we don't have good terms for, or for clunky language. I and many others read all kinds of stuff that does all these things, and my own teachers and others I admire and emulate do all those things and are read widely and even commercially. So I simply know one does not entail the other. I don't mean by saying this however to claim that I will be widely read or commercially successful however. I think other factors, some of them totally contingent, others perhaps to do with my own skills and value, figure in all this.
In fact, my own projects are at their very heart about coming up with language for thinking with, word-places or points that cry out for something English doesn't yet have. Feminism-and-writing-technologies is a term I want to make work in these ways and all of my writing is about doing that, all of it. That's the whole point.
I love, for example, science fiction like Suzette Hadin Elgin's (a linguist once from UC-Santa Barbara) Native Tongue, in which the women of that world create a new language Laadan, in order to change reality. The whole book is a wonderful teasing joke about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I especially love her description of "encodings," which are new morphological bits that make speakable elements of reality that are unnamable until they come into being. Or science studies like Bowker and Star's Sorting Things Out, which is all about classification and creating languages that reflect new classifications of the world.
I think it is a current problem that many folks seem to have somehow bought ideas about language generally and English in particular with what amount to anti-intellectualisms that glorify pretend immediacies: the misrecognitions of so-called "accessibility" for example. This is precisely one of the arguments I keep trying to work through: a refusal to take "accessibility" or "clarity" for granted as seeming unproblematic "Goods" instead of an ideology of contemporary capitalisms, with a history in, among other things, advertising.
I am frustrated trying to communicate with folks who share some of your concerns and intellectual approaches. It is amazing how wide some of these intellectual gulfs are. The language one is so daunting. I have to laugh when I realize we are on opposite soap boxes there! You think English has plenty of good words and as a matter of principle don’t believe in neologisms, but I come from and value intellectual traditions that rejoice in a totally different vision of English!
I'm a junkie for English language histories and theories about the distinctive properties of English as a language. I've studied literature in Old, Middle, Modern (ie Shakespearean) and contemporary Englishs (and taught English as a foreign language and so on). (My UG thesis was on Beowulf in Old English.) Frankly, from my traditions refusing neologisms in English is not like putting your finger in the dyke, it's more like mistaking the dyke for the ocean!
English is one of the world languages with the largest vocabularies, much larger than the vocabularies of the Romance languages for example. One reason is because English is so good at and depends so much on neologisms and on borrowed words. The ability of English to do this is one of the reasons (though not the only one, power matters too) that English is now a global set of many Englishes, its words used all over the world, and why it is an increasing lingua franca (!) as well as its associations with the most colonizing power today! I taught English in Thailand, where people learn what one could only call "Thai English" from the time they enter school. When I was in Sweden everyone of a post war generation spoke English (before then it had been German).
People who speak English have never had the kinds of language regulation you get in, say, France (lingua franca), where they regulate new words, either coinage or borrowings, and which is why French isn't any longer a useful global language for technology, globalization, economics or even media today.
New words are Good! They are good to use, to think with, to share, to dream about, to love, to hate, to make communities inside and outside and so on. They matter in all these ways, and I love and appreciate new words, love to make them myself, love the work of folks who coin terms and phrases, and find their work among the most valuable in my own education, life, and aesthetics!
Voila! The gulf!
Nor do I believe that using neologisms, per se, creates work that folks won't read. Now I don't know which people will read MY work, but I don't believe for one minute that if they don't it will be because I use neologisms or try to come up with language for thinking new thoughts, for noting features of reality that we don't have good terms for, or for clunky language. I and many others read all kinds of stuff that does all these things, and my own teachers and others I admire and emulate do all those things and are read widely and even commercially. So I simply know one does not entail the other. I don't mean by saying this however to claim that I will be widely read or commercially successful however. I think other factors, some of them totally contingent, others perhaps to do with my own skills and value, figure in all this.
In fact, my own projects are at their very heart about coming up with language for thinking with, word-places or points that cry out for something English doesn't yet have. Feminism-and-writing-technologies is a term I want to make work in these ways and all of my writing is about doing that, all of it. That's the whole point.
I love, for example, science fiction like Suzette Hadin Elgin's (a linguist once from UC-Santa Barbara) Native Tongue, in which the women of that world create a new language Laadan, in order to change reality. The whole book is a wonderful teasing joke about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I especially love her description of "encodings," which are new morphological bits that make speakable elements of reality that are unnamable until they come into being. Or science studies like Bowker and Star's Sorting Things Out, which is all about classification and creating languages that reflect new classifications of the world.
I think it is a current problem that many folks seem to have somehow bought ideas about language generally and English in particular with what amount to anti-intellectualisms that glorify pretend immediacies: the misrecognitions of so-called "accessibility" for example. This is precisely one of the arguments I keep trying to work through: a refusal to take "accessibility" or "clarity" for granted as seeming unproblematic "Goods" instead of an ideology of contemporary capitalisms, with a history in, among other things, advertising.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
emergent ontologies: layers of multiple locals and globals
Francois Lachance, thank you for the suggestion to check out the term "local ontologies." A brief googling does suggest how useful this term is. I like one bit I found describing communication concerns in larger organizations that do not share a "global" ontology, but rather multiple local ones, noting that differing communities of practice within the organization can use the same terms with quite different meanings. This is indeed one phenomenon I am interested in, in women's studies in particular, my own local organization (my department), and more broadly, as a necessary condition of interdisciplinary practice. I wrote my first book on how the term "theory" travels among differing feminisms. (Theory in Its Feminist Travels) Or actually, how many different objects "theory" travel under this single term. This was before I read Bowker and Star (Sorting Things Out) on boundary objects, but that was the travel I was trying to describe.
One link I found quite fascinating suggests some possibilities: mapping multiple ontologies on to each other point to point, or creating "a global reference ontology." In women's studies Adrienne Rich wrote an amazing book of poetry called The Dream of a Common Language. I continually encounter feminists who appear to assume that the language they speak ought to be that "common language." Academic publishing today seems to consider that it promotes a common language for some common public to which all academic thought can be translated for a common reader, one beyond the academy. I think this is a fantasy, and my book on reenactments is one attempt to address this fantasy seriously, not rejecting it, but engaging with it. (my manuscript on Networked Reenactments: histories under globalization)
Mapping one to one could entail the kind of mutually learning practice I think is part of the interdisciplinarities I wish myself to practice with others. A global reference ontology is of course always relatively global: what works for one organization might be helpful but not actually global for another organization. This is why I like to think about "layers of locals and globals" and how they are relative and relational. I use locals and globals within many metaphors of "mapping" – from the materially geographical to the meta-languages to describe degrees and kinds of abstraction.
I heard the term "emergent ontologies" at a conference last year, where it was used to describe categories for databases generated by users manipulations of the data over some period of time, then becoming the template for new and shifting ontologies. I like this use as well, it captures the dynamics of use and flux I am also trying to think about and learn how to describe.
One link I found quite fascinating suggests some possibilities: mapping multiple ontologies on to each other point to point, or creating "a global reference ontology." In women's studies Adrienne Rich wrote an amazing book of poetry called The Dream of a Common Language. I continually encounter feminists who appear to assume that the language they speak ought to be that "common language." Academic publishing today seems to consider that it promotes a common language for some common public to which all academic thought can be translated for a common reader, one beyond the academy. I think this is a fantasy, and my book on reenactments is one attempt to address this fantasy seriously, not rejecting it, but engaging with it. (my manuscript on Networked Reenactments: histories under globalization)
Mapping one to one could entail the kind of mutually learning practice I think is part of the interdisciplinarities I wish myself to practice with others. A global reference ontology is of course always relatively global: what works for one organization might be helpful but not actually global for another organization. This is why I like to think about "layers of locals and globals" and how they are relative and relational. I use locals and globals within many metaphors of "mapping" – from the materially geographical to the meta-languages to describe degrees and kinds of abstraction.
I heard the term "emergent ontologies" at a conference last year, where it was used to describe categories for databases generated by users manipulations of the data over some period of time, then becoming the template for new and shifting ontologies. I like this use as well, it captures the dynamics of use and flux I am also trying to think about and learn how to describe.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
relative universalizations
I began college at UCSC in 1970, within a formation Lattuca calls 60s interdisciplinary curricula. She talks about the University of Wisconsin's humans and environment curriculum, in which colleges were organized on environmental themes rather than academic disciplines. At UCSC in 1970 colleges were organized around interdisciplinary themes too. I was in Cowell College. I remember our college slogan, "the pursuit of truth in the company of friends," and I guess in some form I still find myself there. I'm not sure I remember the exact wording of our theme if this slogan was not it, but we did our college general education work in two years of "World Civilizations." Harry Berger, Jr. was one of the synthesizing figures in all this, and our work was a combination of literature, anthropology, art history, and cultural theory.
We were also willy-nilly in the midst of student movements too: the second year of World Civilizations was taken over and reorganized politically to focus on political movements. I took courses on revolutionary theory, in which we studied Paris May 68 for example, and my first women's studies course in Merrill College, with Ruth Needleman, on women and literature. This was also when Wally Andrews, Luita D. Spangler and I founded the Gay Students Union.
Lattuca also notes the year 1972 for a new kind of interdisciplinarity based in general systems theory and structuralism. When Gregory Bateson arrived at UCSC I started classes with him and learned about systems, cybernetics and structuralism. I had already been reading about the Bourbaki group and set theory and trying in my naive way to express cultural concepts in such terms as I understood. I guess reading Bourbaki stuff was the beginning of my current interests in category theories and cognitive sociology.
Lattuca notes that systems work attempted to unify theory from various areas without regard to disciplinary divisions. I've written a bit about this in relation to Bateson in my "Queerish Travels" essay. From Harry Berger and Shelly Errington I studied oral and written consciousness in Havelock's terms, out of the Toronto school's work engaging McLuhan, Ong and others. I continued these studies and more on cross-cultural poetics and structuralism in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, studying with Ramanujan, Redfield and others. It was there I also learned critiques of the Toronto school and the beginnings of poststructuralist thinking.
When I returned to UCSC and the History of Consciousness in the early 80s poststructuralism and postmodernism became the theoretical resources for my work in feminist theory. When I met Donna Haraway for the first time we connected across the work of our teachers, hers Evelyn Hutchinson and mine Bateson. Haraway's was the first critique of systems theory and organicism that I encountered too.
My BA was in Anthropology and Literature, my first graduate work in Social Thought, and my PhD in the History of Consciousness. I am an instantiation of a trajectory of entirely interdisciplinary training both undergrad and grad in a particular set of venues of interdisciplinarity. In the Committee on Social Thought we were told that it was founded to provide social scientists with a "classical education." The Committee and the University of Chicago come out of movements Lattuca describes as in the 20s promoting integration across social science disciplines, and applied social sciences adopted by academics, in the 30s support for area studies by the Ford Foundation, and in the 50s to 70s the National Defense Act. The Committee was a venue for nondisciplinary knowledge formations.
My undergraduate teachers were themselves examples of individuals whose work was interdisciplinary, whose general education teaching was team focused, but whose research was not. Berger, Norman O. Brown, Errington and others, produced examples of idiosyncratic individual studies and critiques of area studies, while women's studies I understood then as anti-disciplinary. Thus my early intellectual experiences mixed together theory, politics, epistemology, and critiques of disciplines, together as "interdisciplinarity." Far from gaining the impression that only projects were interdisciplinary, not individuals, or that polymaths were dilettantes, my role models were intellectually playful yet concerned with a variety of forms of rigor.
In the History of Consciousness I learned from Donna Haraway what she would eventually be calling feminist technoscience. I moved among peers studying with and took classes from Hayden White on meta-history and James Clifford on transnational intellectual travel, TAing for Vivian Sobchack on media technologies and discussing editing epistemologies with Michael Warren. Some of my graduate peers were Sharon Traweek, Bill Pietz, TV Reed and Noel Sturgeon, Caren Kaplan and Debbie Gordon, Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, Chela Sandoval and Gloria Watkins.
While to some extent those early general ed courses on World Civilizations involved the collaborative tasks Lattuca discusses, planning, content integration, teaching and evaluation, I think what I actually if indirectly learned there and later were positive noncommensurabilities: contrast in worldviews, objects, evidence, argument, practices, membership, initiation, gatekeeping and boundaries. In other words, not a universal "integration" but a range of multiple mappings and paradigms, seeing how travel among them is achieved or not, how communication works or doesn't and so. Sometimes but not always a "critique of the disciplines."
My own history would corroborate Lattuca's generalizations connecting feminism and postmodernism as challenging conceptualizations of interdisciplinarity based on collaboration by individuals from different disciplines, challenging disciplinary knowledge as such rather than attempting to integrate disciplines, and highlighting epistemological reflection and theory in women's studies, ethnic studies, cultural and literary studies, as well as in anthropology, history and science studies. It would also corroborate her contention that this sort of interdisciplinarity is part of a project to redefine knowledge and that therefore reflection on epistemological assumptions is paramount. This indeed was what we called "feminist," thus entailing dismantling disciplinary perspectives, not maintaining and integrating them. Lattuca links feminism and postmodernism as viewing disciplines as power structures to be altered and in which the political and the epistemological are inseparable. In this view disciplinary approaches can only be partial, distorted, serving those in power, while interdisciplinary approaches are intended to be less distorted and to redistribute power, both a means to an end and an end in itself.
Today, however, I belong to feminist communities that do not necessarily share those commitments, and my own projects have shifted somewhat. Now I would like to be able to describe cycling through ranges of interdisciplinary practices – meta-movement among many cognitive mappings of interdisciplinary workings. Rather than whole-scale rejection of say, universals to be discovered, with Bruno Latour I am interested in relative universalizations – maybe universals to be created among knowledge producers at political moments of importance. Rather than working within a feminist postmodern interdisciplinarity that would exclude modern, positivist scholarship, with Latour I wonder about the amodern, in which meta-mapping acknowledges as simultaneous cognitive maps valorizing either purification or hybridization. Following Latour, Haraway and others I want to learn to describe interdisciplinarities that allow for disparate epistemologies, rather than prioritizing partisan alliances within them.
creating mappings of interdisciplinarities
I am using the term "flexible knowledges" as something that includes but is not limited to academies. I keep moving between this larger formation and academic knowledges understood among disciplines and interdisciplinarities.
I just began reading a book recommended to me by my friend TV Reed, Creating Interdisciplinarity by Lisa Lattuca (2001). For a while I have been trying to consider how to talk about a range of possible interdisciplinarities. I'd like to come up with some descriptions, maybe names for, a range of practices that could reasonably be called interdisciplinary. I'd like to do this in a mix: of things people I know do, together with schematizing their practices as possible types. I began doing this in a working paper I wrote "Theorizing Structures in Women's Studies". There I talked about "a project becomes a new field," and "disciplines as world views."
Lisa Lattuca refers to the work of Salter and Hearn 1996 on two types of interdisciplinarity that help me understand some differences important within my own women's studies department:
instrumental interdisciplinarity: a pragmatic approach which focuses on problem-solving without worrying about a synthesis of perspectives, or perhaps, which assumes a given synthesis as more important than a examination of it; and
conceptual interdisciplinarity: a more theoretical and epistemological enterprise developing new conceptual categories and methods.
Different degrees of mix among these poles on some continuum might be one way to map practices within my own department.
Salter and Hearne are also quoted: "interdisciplinarity as an integral part of the knowledge-production system: a normal part of the processes of fragmentation, synthesis, and recombination of knowledge." This is where "flexible knowledges" and "interdisciplinarity" overlap in my own interests here.
I trying to put together a personal mini-history of interdisciplinarities, charting where my own assumptions, preferences, biases and commitments come from. That will be the content of my next blog bit I think.
I'm inspired to consider a meta-mapping: that is to describe a range of conceptual maps that are in play currently in understanding interdisciplinarities, and to work out meta-movement among these mappings. I think of this as an other species of what Chela Sandoval calls "differential consciousness."
I just began reading a book recommended to me by my friend TV Reed, Creating Interdisciplinarity by Lisa Lattuca (2001). For a while I have been trying to consider how to talk about a range of possible interdisciplinarities. I'd like to come up with some descriptions, maybe names for, a range of practices that could reasonably be called interdisciplinary. I'd like to do this in a mix: of things people I know do, together with schematizing their practices as possible types. I began doing this in a working paper I wrote "Theorizing Structures in Women's Studies". There I talked about "a project becomes a new field," and "disciplines as world views."
Lisa Lattuca refers to the work of Salter and Hearn 1996 on two types of interdisciplinarity that help me understand some differences important within my own women's studies department:
instrumental interdisciplinarity: a pragmatic approach which focuses on problem-solving without worrying about a synthesis of perspectives, or perhaps, which assumes a given synthesis as more important than a examination of it; and
conceptual interdisciplinarity: a more theoretical and epistemological enterprise developing new conceptual categories and methods.
Different degrees of mix among these poles on some continuum might be one way to map practices within my own department.
Salter and Hearne are also quoted: "interdisciplinarity as an integral part of the knowledge-production system: a normal part of the processes of fragmentation, synthesis, and recombination of knowledge." This is where "flexible knowledges" and "interdisciplinarity" overlap in my own interests here.
I trying to put together a personal mini-history of interdisciplinarities, charting where my own assumptions, preferences, biases and commitments come from. That will be the content of my next blog bit I think.
I'm inspired to consider a meta-mapping: that is to describe a range of conceptual maps that are in play currently in understanding interdisciplinarities, and to work out meta-movement among these mappings. I think of this as an other species of what Chela Sandoval calls "differential consciousness."
how to read and listen to the unfamiliar
I'm thinking of writing something on how to read and listen to stuff that you find unfamiliar. I guess I've been trying to do this all along, but I never seem to get the right tone. Cultivating curiosity, enjoying denaturalization of your own communities of practice, dealing with information overload via the pleasures of new sensoria, using questions to deterritorialize rather than reterriorialize, enjoying incommensurability of knowledge species and then arranging them in telescoping nested layers.
Maybe I should use new televisual techniques as examples of each of these -- if I can figure them out. One of my new favorite TV shows is the best thing the US history channel has begun to offer: Digging For the Truth. Recently they had a marathon of shows all taking apart bits of the objects used in the Di Vinci Code. Actually, the history channel did the Di Vinci code all week before it opened, debunking it with many shows. The ones I've seen are great.
====
Working with Flexible Knowledges: how to read and listen to the unfamiliar
1. enjoying denaturalization of your own communities of practice
2. dealing with information overload via the pleasures of new sensoria
3. enjoying incommensurabilities of knowledge species
4. arranging knowledge species in telescoping nested layers
5. using questions to deterritorialize rather than reterritorialize
6. cultivating curiosity
• Johnson : probing and telescoping
• Haraway : when species meet: zest for excess making room for acid indigestion and regurgitation rather than idealization and disillusion
• Latour : fraternizing instead of denouncing, sorting out instead of debunking; iconoclash -– don't mistake new forms of respect for destruction
Maybe I should use new televisual techniques as examples of each of these -- if I can figure them out. One of my new favorite TV shows is the best thing the US history channel has begun to offer: Digging For the Truth. Recently they had a marathon of shows all taking apart bits of the objects used in the Di Vinci Code. Actually, the history channel did the Di Vinci code all week before it opened, debunking it with many shows. The ones I've seen are great.
====
Working with Flexible Knowledges: how to read and listen to the unfamiliar
1. enjoying denaturalization of your own communities of practice
2. dealing with information overload via the pleasures of new sensoria
3. enjoying incommensurabilities of knowledge species
4. arranging knowledge species in telescoping nested layers
5. using questions to deterritorialize rather than reterritorialize
6. cultivating curiosity
• Johnson : probing and telescoping
• Haraway : when species meet: zest for excess making room for acid indigestion and regurgitation rather than idealization and disillusion
• Latour : fraternizing instead of denouncing, sorting out instead of debunking; iconoclash -– don't mistake new forms of respect for destruction
Monday, July 25, 2005
working off the books
Well, here they are, the books on the course list for this class on Reenactments. The course includes both advanced undergrads and grad students, currently 30 registered. This list includes some books folks taking the class wanted to read with others and things I have found useful or imagine I will find useful.
We will also be looking at some TV documentaries and visiting sites of "reenactments" broadly understood. I'm hoping students will have their own ideas of what edge to the term "reenactment" they will each explore, and will become resources for those venues for the class.
WMST468 Feminist Cultural Studies: TV, Museums, Reenactments; (3 credits) Grade Method: REG.
0101(58524) King, K.
WMST698D Special Topics in Women's Studies: TV, Museums, Reenactments; (3 credits) Grade Method: REG.
0101(59503) King, K.
TuTh......11:00am-12:15pm (HBK 1108)
====
Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: Minnesota.
Handler, R., & Gable, E. (1997). The new history in an old museum: Creating the past at colonial Williamsburg. Durham: Duke.
Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you: How's today's popular culture is actually making us smarter. New York: Riverhead.
Nash, G. B., Crabtree, C. A., & Dunn, R. E. (2000). History on trial: Culture wars and the teaching of the past. New York: Vintage.
Rosenzweig, R., & Thelen, D. P. (1998). The presence of the past: Popular uses of history in American life. New York: Columbia UP.
Roth, S. F. (1998). Past into present: Effective techniques for first-person historical interpretation. Chapel Hill: North Carolina.
We will also be looking at some TV documentaries and visiting sites of "reenactments" broadly understood. I'm hoping students will have their own ideas of what edge to the term "reenactment" they will each explore, and will become resources for those venues for the class.
WMST468 Feminist Cultural Studies: TV, Museums, Reenactments; (3 credits) Grade Method: REG.
0101(58524) King, K.
WMST698D Special Topics in Women's Studies: TV, Museums, Reenactments; (3 credits) Grade Method: REG.
0101(59503) King, K.
TuTh......11:00am-12:15pm (HBK 1108)
====
Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: Minnesota.
Handler, R., & Gable, E. (1997). The new history in an old museum: Creating the past at colonial Williamsburg. Durham: Duke.
Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you: How's today's popular culture is actually making us smarter. New York: Riverhead.
Nash, G. B., Crabtree, C. A., & Dunn, R. E. (2000). History on trial: Culture wars and the teaching of the past. New York: Vintage.
Rosenzweig, R., & Thelen, D. P. (1998). The presence of the past: Popular uses of history in American life. New York: Columbia UP.
Roth, S. F. (1998). Past into present: Effective techniques for first-person historical interpretation. Chapel Hill: North Carolina.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
reenactments
I use the term reenactments inclusively, to write about changing systems of knowledge production. From new ways of understanding former writing technologies such as the Inka khipu, to immersive experiences such as living history sites, heritage websites, time traveling television documentaries and museum installations.
I'll be teaching a class about all this in the Fall. Suggestions for books are very welcome.
I'll be teaching a class about all this in the Fall. Suggestions for books are very welcome.
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