The Qydz are alright

May 20, 2011 By 1 Comment

I suppose after Linell’s, John’s, and David’s timely and thoughtful responses to Grant McCracken’s Symposium keynote talk, it might be overkill or overdue to pitch in my inflation-adjusted 

But seeing as some of my BLSCI colleagues might be awaiting something from one who could talk some smack but still state facts, get down to brass tacks, not exactly attack but risk a lack of tact, and maybe attract fellow hacks to take a crack at McCracken. Wise-cracks and shellackings, maybe followed by retractions and being sent home packing.

Or maybe a pact. But not exactly to shack up intellectually with this jack of all trades and his tract on value-extraction.

Alack, what to make of McCracken?

I started calling myself an anthropologist not too long ago, and since Dr. McCracken does as well, I suppose we have something in common. I suppose our differences are an invitation for me to police the boundaries of our discipline. The stakes seem to be broader than just defining what a proper understanding of anthropology or ‘culture’ can or should be. In any case, for all their propensity to deploy opaque jargon, anthropologists don’t maintain a monopoly on the concepts and methodologies of their field. Ethnography is increasingly popular in business, law, design, as well as other academic disciplines. The right to talk about culture belongs to everyone. I don’t think many anthropologists would object to that sentiment.

That said, McCracken’s take-away message was that successful companies need to be hip to culture and its vagaries, especially of a certain category of people he referred to repeatedly as the ‘Qydz.’

The Qydz are, as I understood McCracken, a rather large and underexamined tribe. They actually live among us, rather than in some faraway rainforest or mountainous highland. (At least, we aren’t so interested in the Qydz residing in such remote lands.)

These Qydz are the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism. Any business worth its salt should devote its energies toward studying the values and aesthetic tastes of this people. For the Qydz are nothing else if not consumers. And oh, the stuff they consume! Baggy jeans! Flip-out keyboard texting gizmos! Snapple!

Apparently, the Qydz are not born or raised. They have no provenance, no parentage, no institutions that foster their development. They simply appear in their present form (or ‘respawn’ as they might say in their own video-game parlance), as autonomous beings arranged into ‘generations’ we can only designate as ‘X’ or ‘Y’ (no word yet on any Generation Z sightings). Qydz culture prizes individualism, but their collective will is mighty and a thing to be feared only if business does not have the products to appease them.

Three female Qydz foraging for sustenance (not such a rare sighting, actually)

McCracken is right to suggest that capitalism has been increasingly dependent on the desires of consumers as a resource to mine and extract value. (Actually, he never said this outright, but it seems central to his research agenda.) Is this a fair assessment of capitalism, Linell seems to ask in the previous post? I would add, is this a fair assessment of desire?

For McCracken, the wants of the Qydz are limited only to their own imaginations, which, he contends, are limitless. Business can only hope to track the Qydz desires by means of increasingly sophisticated trend-tracking technology and–gasp!–ethnographic methods. Yes, really getting to ‘hang’ with some Qydz is a thrilling and potentially dangerous experience.

Academics spend oodles of time with Qydz, but McCracken may lament the time professors waste speaking to them, teaching them of our ways of life, rather than listening to and observing them. Pity.

It is increasingly clear that the Qydz are a natural resource we must safeguard carefully, lest they begin to imagine and wish for things business cannot manufacture and sell to them.

Great former tribesman Qydz referred to as Qurt Qobayn (center). He is still revered on t-shirts and other sacred memorabilia as an unsatisfied customer.

Filed Under: Baruch College, BLSCI, Conferences, Culture, edupunk, Fun, Politics, Resources, Symposium, To Ponder, Tools, What if . . .

Burying the earth

April 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which, in the catastrophe subgenre pantheon, was a rather strange one. The explosion of reaction #4 and resulting fallout provided few media-ready images that persist today.Not that the Soviet television would have broadcast it. As a child in the US I remember only news graphics of a vague ‘toxic cloud’ spreading across Eastern Europe. It was something to fear, but it was over there. Nuclear radiation is, of course, invisible, and its effects are not immediately evident. There will be no Hollywood version. So what we have instead are enduring legacies and hauntings.

It’s baffling why nuclear power continues to be touted as a safe energy alternative in the face of its history of accidents. Along with environmental and health risks, the technology is a political failure: it is difficult to establish democratic rule over an industry that so few understand and even less know how to manage. I do not know of any historical account that makes this argument, but it seems plausible that Chernobyl was a nail in the coffin, so to speak, to a USSR already disintegrating. Experts and authorities could claim to contain the radiation, but not the claims around this ongoing calamity.

Paul Fusco, "Chernobyl Legacies"

Ordinary people are left to put together claims from the evidence that emerges, or that is allowed to emerge. Photographer Paul Fusco put together this harrowing account of Belarussian children with an array of birth defects and mental disease, calling them, with grim irony, “a different race of people.” It’s just about the saddest thing you will ever see, yes. And it is still debated whether these kinds of cases are attributable directly to Chernobyl. It is depressing to consider that the same debate will emerge around Japan in the coming years.

The effects on future generations go beyond deformed bodies, however. In a startling book of interviews with survivors and “liquidator” volunteers, Svetlana Alexievich reports of firemen digging up the poisoned topsoil around Chernobyl in order to bury it deep in the earth: plants, animals (which were indiscriminately killed), everything had to be buried, sometimes in lead containers or rolled up in plastic sheets.  ”We buried the forest… One of the poets says that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them, buried them” (p. 89).

Greenpeace, in its role as our better conscience, mentions 76 cities and villages were abandoned.

What has happened in the void? Tourism and hunting. Vice Magazine, in its gonzo reporting way, took cameras into Chernobyl in search of big game: as humans evacuated the region around the reactor, animals thrived. Nature has begun to reclaim this ruined land over the last 25 years, but it’s not the same as before. So hunters now enter the zone, looking to shoot mutant bear and dear.

 

It may be difficult to commemorate something like Chernobyl, it seems Chernobyl has its ways of reminding us.

 

Filed Under: Politics, Technology, To Ponder

Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

Japan

March 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I can’t get Japan out of my head.  A strangely compact little bundle of news images, inchoate anxiety, and deep grief seems to be lodged somewhere just behind my right ear, pulsing with a dull ache while I go about each day’s business.  I sat down to write a blog post on one of several other matters, smaller spheres I could actually speak to, but my brain just keeps saying Japan, earthquake, tsunami, radiation, food-water-shelter, Japan, Japan.

I don’t want to get these things out of my head, but I don’t feel like writing about them either.  What makes me balk is not just that I am profoundly unqualified to say anything precise or revelatory about the still-unfolding crisis, it’s that I don’t really know what to say at all, much less what to do (here are a few ideas, by the way).

I’ve been thinking about the roles that information and communication play (and might play) in how we “witness” massive crises from often great distances.  In the current case of Japan, the information is abundant and ubiquitous, most of it in the form of images (photos and video clips, many of them shown over and over); succinct fact- or update-bites (“The Fourth Reactor Is Now Leaking Radiation”); and spin-off stories (“Iodine Tablets Flying Off Shelves in the U.S.”).  All of these things are packaged, inevitably, in the form of a running current-events-news-spectacle, a carefully chosen title signaling the “story”: “Disaster in Japan” or simply “Japan Quake”—we now turn once more to the devastation overseas…etc.

Less frantic, perhaps, than streaming news are the sort of interactive maps and satellite photos on the New York Times website.  These at least provide some crucial, basic facts that can stabilize and focus one’s awareness.  But what real communication is going on in the midst of this torrent that we passively field or manipulate at our leisure?  To what degree is each of us able to sift meaningful (that is, clear, bracing) facts from the turbulence?

The net effect of merely receiving this sort of “knowledge” often seems to be a low-level bewilderment, which the brain responds to by bundling the news item and holding it close-by but off to the side, somewhat as I tried to describe at the top of this post.  For reasons that include but also go beyond the very real emergencies in Japan right now, news-of-it-all tends to render one stunned, speechless.  In the past week, I have observed and participated in several exchanges like the one below:

“This Japan stuff is crazy, huh?”

“Yeah, terrible…”  [Beat]

And then, after this beat—an impasse-indicating pause—the conversants are likely to steer themselves abruptly to a new topic, something lighter or closer at hand.  Terrible natural disasters—or “Acts of God” in the pseudo-pious language of the actuary—have been rampant in the past 7 years or so: the cataclysmic 2004 tsunami in the Pacific, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquakes in Haiti and recently New Zealand, to name some of the most destructive. (Of course there are always unnatural disasters going on, too, wars and oppressive regimes and terrible exploitations of people and the environment.)  This is all overwhelming.  So what do we really know about these catastrophes elsewhere, and how are we already—or how do we become, functionally—implicated in them?

I’m hung up on the question of responsibility here, something I’ve often asked my students to think and write about.  They tend to hear this word as “duty,” and squirm or bristle at the suggestion that they might be responsible to anything outside of conventional spheres of obligation, like family and close friendships.  I ask them to rethink the term as hinging not on binding rules but on responsiveness, habits of possible response that could be shaped in various ways and that would thus inhere certain valuations.  With regard to the current situation in Japan as well as other such disasters, the potential for realizing some working sense of this responsibility seems to arise less from passively receiving information than from actively reflecting, speaking, and even writing, of or through this information.

There’s no shaking that back-of-the-mind awareness of Japan right now, and there shouldn’t be.  But at best, such awareness would be more than a vague, shelved anxiety.  Maybe venturing into language can begin to draw it toward the front of the mind, catalyze our capacity to absorb, translate, convey, and maybe act on what we know.  Silence has its place here, but too often it is just a mark of the dislocated bystander’s numbness.  What has happened and what is still happening in Japan is perhaps impossible to comprehend, in the sense of compassing something, though it would be woefully glib to dismiss the situation as “too awful for words.”  Disasters might be inherently unfathomable but they’re not unspeakable.

Filed Under: To Ponder

What would Krishna say?

March 18, 2011 By 1 Comment

When I get to the classroom where I teach Great Works, usually about 10 minutes early, I commence my usual routine: put the chairs in a circle, gingerly clear the day’s accumulation of food garbage from the floor (I teach at 7:40 PM so the accumulation is immense and often baffling), take my piles of papers out of my bag, chat with students as they walk in. But mostly I watch them as they check their phones for what must feel like the last time ever but is really just the last time ever for 100 minutes. Some have even begun to come early and jockey for the outlets in order to plug their various devices in – this way at least they’re charging and not lying dormant, completely unused.

Last week we read selections from the Bhagavad Gita. Near the end of the period I asked my students whether they found the way of life that Krishna advocated at all tempting, in particular the idea that one should avoid acting with passion. Most of them found this idea repellant. “What is a life without passion?” they asked. “Sure, you might be less likely to get hurt if you don’t put yourself out there, if you don’t try, if you don’t care about things, but what kind of life is that?”  I tried to push it further by asking them whether part of what Krishna was telling Arjuna was to stop desiring insubstantial things and instead, to  remove himself a little from the world, or the worldly. “Why is it appealing to so many people,” I asked, “to dream about leaving New York and moving to the country? Why do I always hear people tell each other that they’re sick of working at jobs, even ones they like, that they’re tired of always being reachable on their smart phones,  that they need to take time out of their fast-paced lives to relax or vacation? What if instead of making it a vacation you turned it into a life?” They were much more receptive to this idea. “We need to simplify our lives and care about less” one of them said. Then time ran out, and I hadn’t gotten to my final point about Krishna, which was that he was bridging the gap for Arjuna, offering him a way to live in this world (fight your battle) while also living for another world (focus your attention on the tip of your nose and stay that way for hours). It wasn’t all “fight” and it wasn’t all “resist desire.”

As I walked to the subway after class, frustrated that I hadn’t gotten to talk about what this amalgam life might look like, I began to wonder about my students and their phones. And about myself and my addiction to the internet (my phone lasts for 7 minutes of talk time, at best, so an addiction is simply not possible). Is being plugged in a way of living in the world or living out of it? Are we fighting our fight on our phones and our various devices or are we using them to live without passion, to remain disconnected? Should our worry be that we are living too passionately or not living passionately enough? What would Krishna say?

Filed Under: teaching, Technology, To Ponder

Horror-Movie Capitalism?

March 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As Tina’s post earlier this week attests, the ideas of Karl Marx live on, in ever clever guises. Her anonymous student vociferously wished to avoid intellectual contact with the thinker/giant bronze head (eww, commodity fetishism!), but once he got to know Uncle Karl a bit better, he could, at least for present purposes, better satisfy the stern critical eye of his anthropology professor. But wait, there’s more, so listen up:

Kids of the world, you have nothing to lose but your student debt, dire job prospects, and terribly overpriced cell phone plans!

Karl Marx would be a huge Twilight fan, at least if we consider the following quip:

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Greenspan hunnngrrry for morrrtgages rrrrawwwrrr

Yes, I believe that is as close as we get to actually claiming that Marx said, effectively, “Capitalism sucks.” But what draws my attention is the personification move. Marx was always making this rhetorical maneuver, giving Capital its own agency so that he could identify how it behaves and thinks. Many times, actual human capitalists are rendered “capital embodied.” It walks among us… Beware!

I won’t deny that I am pointing to a hint of paranoia, even behind the (attempt at) humor here. I think that is one of the main modes of popular resistance to Marxism today. McCarthyism and red-baiting as an American Tradition™ may have not completely faded as effective ideological tools, but in classroom and colloquial settings there is a common reliance on articles of faith still associated with our dominant economic system: “Capital is no vampire; just look at how He fosters creativity, drives innovation, defines property and individual identity, acts as a fair arbiter of the value of goods and labor,” one might argue. Well, if you put it that way, Capital sounds like a whole different kind of bloke.

Let’s concede that Marx was paranoid. As Marx also said: “If things appeared exactly as they are, there would be no need for science.” Marx considered himself a scientist, interested in getting past the surface appearances of the world toward an underlying reality. That is the mentality of a paranoiac, to be sure, but it is the foundation of any critical enterprise to doubt things are as they seem. Freud did the same with human behavior, for example, by positing that we must be at least partially governed by something we can’t see or touch, an unconscious. That idea is now commonsense and lies at the heart of, say, all advertising and politics in consumer societies, if you follow the argument in this documentary, “The Century of the Self” (below is just Part 3: “There is Policeman Inside all our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed”):

One recent attempt, by actual comedian and voice of animated rodent gourmet Remy, to define the world through dominant social figures is Patton Oswalt. But he doesn’t see vampires. The eponymous chapter of his new book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland seems an attempt at popular sociology. It’s kind of beautiful in its daring but laid-back tone. The essay is part bong-hit musing, part exercise in bringing clarifying order to a confusing human universe. In Oswalt’s formulation, if we can call it that, everyone from adolescence on conforms to one of three social types: you’re either a Zombie, a Spaceship, or a Wasteland. Let’s let Patton summarize these figures:

“Zombies simplify… Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact… Zombies can’t believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits.” (pp. 96-98)

“Spaceships leave. No surviving infrastructure for them. No Earth, period… Spaceships figure it’s easier for them to build a world and know its history or, better yet, choose the limited customs and rituals that fit the story.” (p. 98)

“Wastelands destroy. They’re confused but fascinated by the world. The wasteland is inhabited by people or, for variety, mutants… Variations of the human species grown amok–isn’t that how some teenage outcasts already feel? Mutants bring comfort.” (p. 100)

Behind the archetypes, however, is a more interesting insight. The world of zombies, spaceships, and wastelands is something created, somehow. He locates these categories’ origins “as aspects of a shared teen experience,” but, in a typical academic move, I want to make a bigger, lamer deal out of something that was meant mainly as a joke and a memoir of a science-fiction nerdom upbringing.

For Oswalt, until misfit teens grow into adults, “anything we create has to involve simplifying, leaving, or destroying the world we’re living in.”

The more I look at these musings, the more they sound like Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling. What I enjoy about Oswalt’s way of writing here is that these social types are not altogether models fabricated in any conscious kind of way. They are skins people inhabit but can’t quite get out of. They are not only found in movie tropes and protagonists (“Darth Vader is, essentially, a Zombie, born in a Wasteland, who works on a Spaceship,” p. 99) but are also spaces and ways of being. They are inside and outside of us, in living practices and landscapes.

All I would do here is to expand Oswalt’s concepts with the question, “what kind of world produces Zombies, Spaceships, and Wastelands, makes those imaginable, workable worlds?” What is it that makes practices of simplifying, leaving, or destroying viable and even creative? In Oswalt’s examples you can discern all kinds of things and people: suburbia, punk rock, hipsters, Star Wars, excess, fast food, college. It’s as if he’s trying to think, on the widest possible level, how all these things come together. All three are alienated types, to be sure, and this is what may connect them to Marx.

What Uncle Karl would have to say about zombies, spaceships, and wastelands might be a way of defining what most of contemporary critical theory is grappling with today. The villains, the scenes have changed, and we don’t yet have a language to understand it–critically, at least. These days it might not be only about sucking dry the blood of the laborer, but also about after-lives of the dead, utopian launches, and broken ruins?

Oswalt, to close: “Weirdly, Wastelands are the most hopeful and sentimental of the bunch. Because even though they’ve destroyed the world as we know it, they conceive of stories in which the core of humanity–either in actual numbers of survivors or in the conscience of a lone hero–survives and endures. Wastelands, in college, love Beckett.” (p. 101)

Patton is apparently guarded about his writing

Filed Under: Asides, edupunk, Language, literature, Politics, To Ponder

Starting at the top: Notes on cliché and seduction in academic titles

November 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

As a writing fellow, I’ve had a few glimpses into the importance, faculty tell their students, of doing research. Part of this activity inevitably involves going to the library, or at least the library website, and scouring publications for pertinent scholarship to one’s inquiry. Since conducting “original research is a novelty for undergraduates, and since the electronic media offer myriad sources of information ready for the cutting-and-pasting, it make sense that a professor would be concerned with (1) making sure the student does not plagiarize others’ work and (2) instilling a sense that one’s research must enter an already ongoing conversation. So much of instructors’ pedagogical emphasis tends to lie in two fields: the moral and the intellectual, oftentimes in that order. I suspect that students do not make the connection between the two, too terrified of not (appearing to) tread on someone else’s intellectual toes to recognize that the point is to stand on their shoulders. Or, for those enterprising cheaters, the exercise may consist in, as Hillel Schwartz puts it (since I have no original way to put it), “mak[ing] their name by standing on shoulders buried in sand.” But my point here is to draw attention to a third register of the research experience: the aesthetic. Every stroll down the stacks aisles, every click through JSTOR articles, what faces the browsing scholar are titles, titles, and more titles. There soon appear patterns, styles, conventions, some kind of comforting regularity to the vastness of knowledge. Here I want to make some observations of the norms of titling in academic writing. These remarks are not (all) disparaging or snarky about the re-use, mis-use, or abuse of certain linguistic conventions in academia; I simply want to draw attention to how scholars label their work, reproducing in playful or unintentional ways specific kinds of headlines.

  • Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

  • The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
  • Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.
  • The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Asides, Copyright, Education, Fun, Higher Education, Language, Literacy, literature, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Scholarship, Style, To Ponder, What if . . .

Parkour Poetics

October 6, 2010 By 6 Comments

For the past couple months my bedtime reading has consisted of passages from Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his recently published journals from the three wild, setback-ridden years it took to make the film Fitzcarraldo (1982) (the one that involved actually dragging a steamship over a small mountain, etc.).  Herzog’s writing is marked by an observational and detail-obsessed intensity one might associate with either a scrupulous scientist or a naturalist mystic.  It’s fascinating stuff, and I’ve marked-up and dog-eared hundreds of discrete moments that have stood out along the way.  Several weeks ago, though, one particular paragraph elicited a more uncommon response: startled recognition.

Earlier on in a given day, Herzog and several members of the Campa tribe in Peru must hurry along a rugged trail from one part of the jungle to another.  He later reflects on the experience:

“I have often paid close attention to the way [the Campas] move; it is a bit like a slalom, in which they have already spotted the next obstacle—a protruding root, a dangling liana, a thorny branch—and circumvent it with a graceful turn of the entire body that starts two paces in advance and merges with the rapid trot, never interrupting the overall movement, whereas Europeans stop, advance in fits and starts, stumble, hesitate.  Once an obstacle has been smoothly skirted, the next one has already been registered, and the steps toward it all contribute to a flowing, economical circumvention.  Their torso bends, and their feet, I noticed, tend to go up onto rather than over an obstacle, provided it is stable.  It is better to step onto a loop formed by a vine than to get one’s foot caught in it, and meanwhile the eye remains fixed on the objects one can grab onto in steep, slippery places without being stuck by a dozen thorns.” (164)

My audible outburst upon reading this: “parkour! he’s inadvertently describing parkour!”  Does everyone know about parkour?  (Also called “free-running”.) Originating, as a defined thing, in France some 13 years ago, it’s a self-described “discipline” involving lots of risky-looking running, leaping, vaulting, and climbing through (usually) urban spaces.  AmericanParkour.com offers this core definition—“Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment”—and then elaborates, explaining, for instance, that parkour requires, “consistent, disciplined training with an emphasis on functional strength, physical conditioning, balance, creativity, fluidity, control, precision, spatial awareness, and looking beyond the traditional use of objects.”  The central idea is to learn to move more smoothly and aesthetically through physical space, drawing on your body’s innate creaturely capacities and appropriating would-be obstacles into your course instead of avoiding them.  An initiate into this discipline becomes a “traceur” or “traceuse,” someone who traces out new, more efficient, more interesting paths.

Though rarely with any identifying tag attached, it’s made its way into movies and commercials, for obvious reasons of spectacle.  Parkour’s most glorious moment in the pop culture sun, which many of you will remember, was probably the epic “pas-de-dude” foot-chase sequence at the beginning of Casino Royale (the chase features one of parkour’s legendary founders and traceurs, Sébastien Foucan, who you may also recall seeing some years back in Nike’s “Angry Chicken” commercial).

At a glance, the whole thing is easy enough to dismiss as a pseudo-sport or a fad or another instance of boys showing off.  Parkour is kind of awesome and also, somehow, kind of dorky and embarrassing, since its adherents will always look like clamoring, artificial poseurs (more French!) next to the Peruvian Campas, for whom fluid, efficient movement is more expedient, more authentically bound up with a whole way of life.  Yet I don’t think the phenomenon should be dismissed.  It is, after all, a legitimate—if poignant and/or futile—effort to revitalize the human animal through new habits of thinking and action, ways of doing things that fuse the practical with the pleasurable. (Read an extensive New Yorker piece for a consideration of parkour in these and other respects.)

These ideas about movement—the descriptions and the posited philosophy—felt eerily familiar.  Isn’t much of this the very language we use to describe good writing?  In fact, what most excited me about the Herzog passage, I realize now, was not the initial jolt of the parkour association but the meta-thought that followed much later: Herzog’s sentences about the Campas’ movement were enacting the very same sort of obstacle-negotiating fluidity under consideration (or at least the translator’s renditions in English did as much).

I want to put forth, very provisionally, a hypothesis about parkour’s affinity with writing, “affinity” because I think the comparison goes well beyond mere metaphor.  Each is a human activity—inextricably an art and a skill both—that requires habituation and aims for the elaboration of continuous, compelling, and effective sequences.   Parkour and writing seem to be correlated in a very tight analogy, down to the moment-by-moment anticipations, shifts, and circumventions, and I wonder if thorough and lively reference to actual human movement—rather than only to abstract principles and lateral examples of “good-writing-to-emulate”—might not usefully inform writing pedagogy.

We call a successful speaker of a language “fluent,” invoking, I suppose, the fact that she possesses open channels whereby thought can flow out directly as speech; the person doesn’t have to mechanically translate parsed bits by parsed bit, but rather holds forth in a stream of words.  And conversely, when evaluating student writing (or looking at our own writing) we know too well the catch-all sense that something is “awkward,” meaning, of course, that it doesn’t flow as forcefully, as gracefully, or as effectively as it could.  To move with and in language is always a matter of negotiating fairly complex terrain—a jungle, whether Amazonian or urban, is precisely the most apt conceit (a writer could never really be said to “sprint in a line across a salt flat”)—thus, perhaps if we presented and discussed more examples of people physically negotiating complex terrain, students would begin to better grasp the analogous movements and adaptations and effects of writing.

PS- Here’s one more clip, for kicks.

Filed Under: To Ponder, Writing Instruction Tagged With:

Can (cyber)bullying be prevented by teaching about (cyber)bullying?

October 5, 2010 By 3 Comments

At least four youths have taken their lives nationwide this month following incidents of anti-gay bullying and harassment. A New Jersey college student jumped to his death from a bridge last week after two classmates broadcast a videotape of him having sex with another man in his dorm room. The students had recorded Tyler Clementi’s sexual encounter without his knowledge. The eighteen-year-old Clementi had just started his freshman year at Rutgers University. In California, thirteen-year-old Sean Walsh died on Tuesday, nine days after a suicide attempt left him on life support. In Texas, thirteen-year-old Asher Brown died last week following months of alleged bullying. Brown’s family says he revealed he was gay shortly before taking his own life. And in Indiana, fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas hung himself earlier this month after also being bullied by classmates.
- Headlines news from Democracy Now!, September 30, 2010

I was petrified to learn about the recent cases of suicide by teenagers that were results of intensive bullying. The thought of children as young as thirteen committing suicide is beyond tragic. All cases included cyberbullying, the most obviously in the last case of Tyler Clementi.

There have been several articles about the case in The New York Times. Most of these articles provide a description of the events that led to the tragedy, the debate about responsibility of involved students in recording and posting an incriminated video online, and the response of Rutgers university officials before and after the tragic death of the student. The New York Times also hosts an online discussion about whether “[…] the death of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers student, argue[s] for tougher laws against malicious acts online.”

The contributors are predominantly lawyers, but also psychologists and a “researcher in cyberbullying.” Their responses include quite a variety of opinions. For instance, some put forth a strong opposition to treat this case as a criminal case, while others talk about difficulties in coming up with well defined laws on cyberbullying. One of the contributors, John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law School, believes that the issue is not only to have adequate laws but the tools to enforce it and sees solutions ‘beyond the law’. He proposes the “blended approach of outreach, education, and enforcement of the law.” Specifically, Robert Treston from Anti-Defamation League suggests that “schools must develop strategies to teach children about cyberbullying and its impact, mechanisms for prevention and response need to be established, and everyone in our schools must be trained. All of this needs to be in place before an incident occurs.”

Importantly, several of the contributors pointed out the power and perseverance of cyberbullying as the victim can be attacked continuously 24/7, via several media (e.g. email, text message, social networks, chat rooms, etc) without the necessity of direct physical contact. Furthermore, the humiliation of the victim can be witnessed by endless number of individuals online almost instantly. It seems that it is the inescapable, relentless power of cyberbullying that overwhelmed these four teenagers in the last month to the point of total desperation that felt that could only be escaped by taking their young lives.

I tend to agree and support the calls for education for students, teachers and school administrators about bullying, and cyberbullying in particular. However, I am not sure how exactly one goes about it. How can bullying be prevented? How do we instruct youth in how to protect themselves from bullies? And how do we make them effectively follow those instructions? I believe that bullying can only be approached within its context, that there is no such thing as “bullying” per se. Bullying always occurs in the social context of the relationship between a bully and his or her victim, and there are several ingredients to bullying.  First, there are reasons why a bully wants and has the need to exercise his or her power against the potential victim. Second, a victim of bullying is perceived as “having” the “weak” or “bullyiable” characteristics on which bullying is developed. Third, the social context that enables and can even facilitate or intensify bullying.

In the cases of these children and young man the bullying was based on anti-gay prejudices and the victims’ “weakness” happened to be their homosexuality to the extent that they themselves were made to believe it to be a reason they deserve to die for.

So although I support education on bullying, I am thinking about its meaning and effectiveness without addressing what seems even more fundamental and burning issue; its context and the reasons and conditions for bullying. If we do not question and educate ourselves in how society (and its communities) create beliefs, practices and prejudices that enable to see e.g. same-sex attraction and relationships as punishable, undesirable or worth of ridicule, we cannot effectively fight anti-gay bullying.

Filed Under: Politics, Technology, To Ponder

Guilty Pleasures

October 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

I think Cacophony now generates telepathy in the characteristically uncanny way. Thinking about a possible subject for my post, I was fixated on the idea of sharing a few random photos I got at a London book fair a couple of weeks ago. I sat down to read recent posts, hoping to be swayed away from my non-academic topic, and of course saw that Zohra has recently explored so gracefully the experience of (re)discovering archival treasures. Now I feel a bit less guilty to talk about my discovery.

The Bloomsbury Book Fair took place at a hotel where a large hall was transformed, probably overnight or in the course of early morning hours, into a very natural habitat for a great number of book dealers and their collectibles: books, photographs, maps, manuscripts and the like. As its numerous virtual counterparts dealing with found photos and paintings, this physical place exuded the air of an orphanage, urging you to adopt abandoned beings. Once you did, however, you immediately felt unimaginable pangs of shame and discomfort one feels when intruding upon someone’s privacy, claiming possessions of another, and depriving something of its independent existence, albeit in a box. I wonder if the physicality of both the place and its ‘orphans’ can evoke these feelings more powerfully than ‘orphan’ websites can.

However, the book fair also had a regal aura, proudly hosting a procession of respectable relics: first editions; dusty, yellow-paged books, cleverly and warmly inscribed; glowing surviving maps of the Chinese Empire, etc. It was my first time at such a strangely honorable gathering, so I had to be slowly introduced to the protocol. Those who frequent such book fairs explained that I could put aside the things I liked and come back to them. I also learned, to my embarrassment, that a person “manning photography” would not direct me to American letters, as this was not a store where books were classified neatly on the shelves.

All I could do was quickly embrace the exuberant promise of accidental finds!

I was drawn to a box brimming with photographs. And, here are some of my black and white picks: a 1929 photo of “sea nymphs at play on the rocks at Dinard, before taking a swim,” as the inscription reads; an undated wedding photo of two people who look alike before even starting to live together; a copyright protected photo (oops) of charming chimps, the property of the Gibraltar Tourist Office; the image of a solitary gentleman who in his solemn elegance doesn’t seem to know what to do with the boundless, breathtaking landscape behind him (except to make a picture perhaps and  meditate later on the meaning of life).

Virginia Woolf would call these “moments of being”; Milan Kundera may see occasions for character creation (as he famously reflected on the birth of his charactes, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite. …[C]haracters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about”);  Joseph Cornell would be tempted to construct a new existential context for them in a shadow box.

I’m also thinking of Baudelaire, in particular his prose poem “Windows,” in which the speaker is more passionate about looking into a closed window than out of an open one:

A man looking out of an open window never sees as much as the same man looking directly at a closed window. There is no object more deeply mysterious, no object more pregnant with suggestion, more insidiously sinister, in short more truly dazzling than a window lit up from within by even a single candle. What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of windowglass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming….

To me, looking at an unknown photo epitomizes the same kind of promise as looking through a closed window does to Baudelaire: it is a promise of simultaneously discovering and creating a life (if you’re thinking this is my way of redeeming my fetishism, you’re probably right ), and, if we are lucky with the visual or written cues, a life in history.

Filed Under: Art, To Ponder
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