Category Archives: Epistemology

Pedestal as Canon

My friend Neha Bawa in a comment writes

Heck, there are times when I think that post-structuralists like nothing better than to sit around a square table (round is too structured for them, I think) and knock every [sic] theory against the wall either out of pure spite or complete laziness.

On the other hand, you’re talkin’ to a Lit major here…I would never reject that feast listed up there…but I would challenge the pedestal.

I would disagree with this. Post-structuralism as a large set of approaches–which include critiques of medicine, law, and literature–to reading “the world” has produced highly rigorous and interesting points of view: I find Foucault readable and interesting. As in any area of human affairs and talk, there are bound to be cranks, hacks, and opportunists. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the work seriously. But I agree with Neha about challenging the pedestal, hence the call for other lists of “reader” points of view. This is why I don’t like top one hundred or top ten lists as totalizing paradigms. Perhaps the world does indeed stand atop an infinite stack of turtles (plugged metaphor).

Reading lists

I’m currently working on a reading list for a friend. It’s a list of suggested readings build on two parts, foundational texts and advanced. The foundations include such authors as Augustine, Saîkaku, Montaigne, and Julius Caesar, while the advanced (in time) include Kristeva, Ong, and Feynman. The readings are world-oriented and cover intellectual history. This isn’t a list of favorites, but what I consider influencial texts across the areas of human concern and the human life-world, so we have poetry, politics, history, philosophy, architecture and science among the offerings.

So, you’re a canon builder. A friend comes to you in all honesty and asks for a “course” in the breadth of human making? What would your list include?

On reading the garden

Here’s Susan Gibb on reading

As I weed, I am thinking about how I am reading the soil, the dill, the crabgrass. All the years of gardening have taught me to recognize most weeds and vegetables from the time they are only about an eighth of an inch high. I know that weeds sprout and grow faster than most desirable plants, and can soon overtake the especially slow-growing herbs. I used to use a trick in sowing rows, tossing in a few radish seeds along with the rest because they come up quickly and will mark the rows easily before the rest come up. It works, but this tool was interfering with the slower basil; radish grow so quickly that they push everything out of the way, and by the time you pull them, you are as well destroying the basil. The tool then becomes a blockage to good growth, it is in the way.

Monsters

Susan Gibb writes in a comment:

Never wanted so much to discuss a book. It is endless in its questions and yet is satisfying in its story. I think you have it nailed with your estimation of Suttree as so completely human, and think that valuation answers the question of monsters within. Don’t we all harbor them? Don’t we daily forget them unless they rattle at the gates, and we check the lock to make sure it is secure. Or sometimes, let them loose.

We know that characters in fiction aren’t human, yet the genius of fiction is to focus the reader onto the populations of a fiction “as if” they were. We agree that Sherlock Holmes is a fiction. But he seems real, so real that most everyone knowns who he is, even if they haven’t read the stories.

In life, we have to act. But we also have no way of verifying whether our choices are the “right” ones, regardless of external influence or position. For example, in the letter section of the morning paper, a comment is made about the UCC’s stance on same-sex marriage as an “endorcement of sin,” referring to Leviticus’ “abomination” section as “proof.” The writer writes, “If you are going to believe that the Bible is the word of God, as many of us do, then you must follow it to the letter.” In this writer’s world, human “choice” is an alien concept, since all he must do to live correctly is to “follow” the letters, without any doubt as hindrance to “right.” Whenever a thing is to be done, consult the book. This is not, however, “proof” of right, as Sophocles teaches in Antigone. It’s a paradigm. This is far from saying that anything goes or that ethical models are “wrong.” The paradox is that we “must” choose; we can’t however cast off reason and replace it with “thoughtlessness,” which is not what Augustine argues in the rigorous City of God as a measure of the good of faith. Suttree chooses to depart Noxville in the novel (is this the right or wrong decision?). He moves just ahead of the “hunstman” who “lies all wheres” and whose hounds tire not.” Suttree will always be dogged. And this huntsman will reapear in another aspect in Blood Meridian as the “judge.” But both the huntsman and the judge are shadows and deceivers, working behind the “coldforger” who will construct his image in the eyes of other witnesses, just as the reader constructs the fiction from “letters” on the page or screen with that most valuable of things human: the thinking mind.

Experience and preparation

Drawing from the last post and its active comments, it would seem that the fundamental conflict in Antigone is important. We know what happens: Creon acts, Antigone acts, and bad things happen as a result, with no godly interference, no god to swoop down and pause the action and aide the poor mortals in their bad decisions and woe, no Theseus to provide answers. Hence we’re left with the idea of judgement in the hands of Creon and Antigone and they become our ears and eyes into the Sophoclean world.

But this “contained” world provides very little control, just as it does in Cortazar. Fate is strong. What’s going to happen to Oedipus is going to happen regardless of what he does or what we do. Same goes with Sir Gawain and in the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” In SciFi, the question of time always matters. If we’re put in a position of changing the future by interrupting something in the past, a past which has always led to our present position, we may suffer oblivion. This calls attention to the “rightness” of what happens in time. Don’t go back and change the past because that interrupt the “natural” flow of time; therefore, we conclude, what happens “should” happen as it occured without human interference. Changing even the most minor bit or byte of things, could result in disaster. But didn’t we create disasters anyway? Are disasters natural within the natural arrow? And if human agented disaster is “natural,” then is going back into time and changing something to avert disaster, is that not immoral then? If an individual could prevent 9/11 by going back and changing an element in the chain of events, would it be immoral or moral (hypothetically) to do so? This, yet again, assumes that the time traveller will make the right choice and is outside Sophoclean boundaries (and subject to what law?). If we could manipulate time, isn’t the ability to do so also “within” the boundaries of time itself?

The logic, of course, becomes strained here. In the text, the narrative boundaries for even the most complex of hypertexts are limited. The hypertext must have physical boundaries however they may be defined, by “resolution” or computer memory. There’s always a boundary, a last word. For some the boundary is where “they” stop. For others it’s the last count. A hypertext isn’t “the” universe which at this point continues to inch outward, extruding space. A game should close at some point, but not the universe. One day should lead to the next not continue to loop. Hense the narrative is “spatial.” It has physical boundaries.

But we know all this I think. Do we leave Sophocles with a sense of doom, paranoia, or satisfaction knowing that we “can’t” control everything? Do we leave Sophocles with a greater sense that we need to do better with the givens? We know we can’t leave Antigone thinking, wow, that was really fun watching those nice kids get killed off. Do we leave with a greater appreciation of “responsibility”?

The future’s shape

One of the interesting qualities of story is the idea of change. Some action is taken or something happens and the result is inexorable. The audience can do nothing to “save” the principle character. All we can do is “read” about Connie’s removal from the home in “Where are you going.” We can’t interrupt the action of Antigone and inform Creon that he will lose his son and his wife because he failed to “know” the consequences of his actions. Shouldn’t King Lear have known better than to divide his kingdom up? Should we not have known that space travel kills people? Should Oedipus have simply ignored the answer?

The idea that we would want a character to display sophrosyne as a value in story is at odds with what we know about Creon, Oedipus, the gods, Antigone, and most characters in story. We know that Creon isn’t going to display coolheadedness or any sort of golden mean. We need Creon’s arrogrance, just as we need a confused Hamlet and a pridefilled Coriolanus. But this is just one element.

The other element is our reaction to the story that comes from the principles. Hopefully we won’t repond by laughing and leaving, but that something about the tragedy proves either true or captivating, yes, like watching a trainwreck. Do we “need” to see the children not just eat their way out of a cage but also step forth into the dark wood where “we know” the hungry antagonist waits.

This returns me to the story once again. Creon makes his edict and stands by it, thinking himself in the right as the “state” made manifest, the state on whose side Ares has smiled, the state that must take a “moral” stand against the actions of Polynices. But do his reactions to the sentry and to Antigone “reveal” him as a corrupted leader or a coward? Is his original intent corrupted?

Another example. In Suttree, now being covered by Susan Gibb, the principle has money sent to him by a relative. The reader knows what he’s going to do with it. I can’t remember how much but Suttree hides some of the money for safe-keeping prior to the night of waste, in a place where he will forget while drunk or keep hidden from theives. The rest of the money will be lost. We know that something horrible is going to happen. Still, as we read, we hope it won’t.

Good software, reading, and TV

So, at the moment I’m eating a chocolate cone, watching an old episode of Homicide on the Playstation–tough to get the disk in with the cone in my left hand–and reading Mark Bernstein on food, good software, and weblogs and identity. He leads me in lots of directions. This is what comes.

I wish that I could get Neha and Susan and others to Belgium for Blogwalk 7. Also, I’d like to take a new media crew over to San Francisco for DSF 8.

Additionally, Mark writes (here’s the context link),

If your blog inscribes your calendar — adding speaking engagements and consulting trips — does it inscribe you? If it inscribes your bank account, does it change who you are?

practical teaching and learning

I like this. The group is generating good spreads of discussion on games, teaching, learning, pedagogy, history, and new media essentials. Coonce-Ewing links to this article from W-M, Susan Gibb is digging into Silent Hill and Suttree (in my mind one of the great American novels next to Twain’s Huck Finn), and Professor Timmons is digging it too with this post.

As concerns the broad issue of learning, education in the United States supports different kinds of life narratives, the most fundamental being “I’m born, go to school, get a job, retire, and die” with a wide variety of variations. Along the way, I have a few choices to make and sometimes choices are made for me. I may be 15 and not know what I want to do when I grow up so I do what the friends do or take the advise of a wise councilor and become a lawyer. Education supports–and needs to support–the institutions of a given time and place. In the US we have a legal system that helps the country stay its course, thus some piece of the education pie must provide space for the instruction of lawyers and some space of the cultural pie must give them a place to operate. The space where the lawyer and the judge operate needs an architect and a carpenter and all of these people need some means of getting to their jobs and thus the cultural hypertext grows and grows and grows. Everything is connected.

Along the narrative, I might have an inclination to become a game programmer or a snowplow driver.

When we talk about education as a phenomenon, we need to talk context. The Great Lettuce Head tells me, though, that I need to watch out and take care. GLH says that everyone is a student of something. Perhaps there’s someone trying to learn to roll a joint. This is an act of learning. Or, perhaps this is a better example, a person needs to learn how to clean the carburator of their snowthrower in order to get the thing started. They could 1. read the manual 2. call the mechanic 3. watch someone else 4. approach the job by trial and error 5. use a shovel and fantasize about the wonders of technology in all its shapes and sizes. Some people would say that this kind of education is “training.” I could learn how to use photoshop and that would be the same as knowing how to work with machines. Some people know how to build the machine from scratch, though, and this kind of learning is “education,” the kind you have to pay big bucks for. Some people might claim that these two definitions are different. I don’t.

Context is important for almost everything. The education institution reflects the culture. In this view, systems are interpreted using metaphors of order, such as that of the body politic or the well-oiled machine. We need engineers so there’s a School of Engineering at the University. We need people to know Milton . . . oops, cut that one out. Or should we leave that example in? Anyway, when someone alters the system, say, proposes that we aren’t going to do homework anymore, other “react” to that change as an element of disorder, and disorder is bad. But is “order” realistic in the human context.

Of course, all of this is pretty macro and general because it doesn’t take into account other types of system disruptions, such as discovery and natural disaster. Education throughout human history has served many masters: prophets, kings, shamans, deans, fathers, gods, mothers, bullies, managers, politicians, theoreticians, students, and madpeople. In college, we see how programs evolve, fail, or just disappear. We see the thought process behind new courses and new hires. We see things change and we see things stay the same. We have seen the teacher who uses the same syllabus for thirty years and when called on it simply shrug off the critique as if they know best. We see the teacher in constant flux, that one over there with hair like wire and eyerims red as a fresh rash. We see fads come and go. We see reintroductions of ideas thought long dead.

I put approaches into two broad classes, both of use in context: “procedural education” and “improvisational education.” I don’t think these classes should be taken all that seriously, but I see a major conflict in education these days with how we deal with learning communities in spaces that are rigid and categorical. This doesn’t mean that nurses or lawyers shouldn’t be taught how do to do their important work in a rigorous “rote” based curriculum, since procedural and fact recall in these areas is critical. But it does mean that problem solving is becoming more and more necessary for more and more numbers of people. Malcolm McCullough in Digital Ground writes it this way

By now it is common knowledge how recombinant communities of knowledge workers remake older chains of command. The postindustrial conception of design has promoted a more interdisciplinary approach to the building of information technologies.

In particular, an emphasis on communities of knowledge has legitimized more emphasis on context . . . .This is because knowledge workers do not follow procedures so much as expertly play their contexts. Without an ability to improvise in context, people who are merely following official prescriptions are utterly lost as soon as they stray from known conditions . . . (150-51 italics mine; see original for notes)

Professor Timmons knows that this “improvisational approach” is inherent in games themselves, i.e., chess and, I would hazard to say, Milton reading, both in their development and in their contextual use, and much commentary on games in education is “about” this rich quality of solid hypermedia to involve complexity, surprise, and discovery at many levels.

How to teach Milton using the techniques, environments, and analytics of new media? Well, that’s a good question. Why teach Milton using blah blah blah? That’s another good question.When to teach Milton with blah, blah, blah?

Should I ask these questions or just freakout?

Digital Ground and new media

Malcolm McCullough’s Digital Ground begins this way

How do you deal with yet another device? How does technology mediate your dealings with other people? When are such mediations welcome, and when are they just annoying? How do you feel about things that think, and spaces that sense? You don’t have to distrust technology to want it kept in its place.

The new field of interaction design explores these concerns. The more that interactive technology mediates everyday experience, the more it becomes subject matter for design. Like the electric light that you are probably using to read this book, the most significant technologies tend to disappear into daily life. Some work without our knowing about them, and some warrant our occasional monitoring. Some require tedious operation, and others invite more rewarding participation, as in games, sports, or crafts. These distinctions are degrees of interactivity.

McCullough’s writing is quick, direct, precise, and reminds me of the writing of Yi Fu Tuan, who I would imagine influenced the writer’s content and considerations of human geography and ecology. It’s a hard book to put down thus far. I’m hooked.

In the Fall New Media Perspectives course we talked a lot about “degrees of interactivity” as a general criteria to describe not just new media but buildings and books. But here’s something of a nice, tight flavor as it concerns “new media”

Software engineers think they know what they mean by design, and so do architects. When information technology becomes a part of the social infrastructure, it demands design considerations from a broad range of disciplines. Social, psychological, aesthetic, and functional factors all must play a role in the design. Appropriateness surpasses performance as the key to technological success. Appropriateness is almost always a matter of context. We understand our better contexts as places, and we understand better design for places as architecture (3).

This sounds exactly what we’ve been talking, writing, and teaching about in New Media Communication.

This one’s for John Timmons and Bill Kluba

The use of the term interaction design instead of interface represents a cultural advance in the field . . . Interaction designers claim to know at least partly what is wrong with information technology, and that overemphasis on technical features and interface mechanics has been a part of the problem. By turning attention to how technology accumulates locally to become an ambient and social medium, interaction design brings this work more closely into alignment with the concerns of architecture (19).

civil war and games

One of the things that continues to work through my interests is history teaching and learning. History and its relationship to memory. I remember distinctly what I have read about the American Civil War, for example. And there are important reasons why. One of them is personality. I remember distinctly reading correspondence, personal writing, and war history relating to campaigns after Gettysburg and the Vicksburg seige, especially as they dealt with the western war in Tennessee and Georgia, the principles being Resecrans (Blues) and Bragg (Greys).

We know that Bragg and Rosecrans spent the ’63 winter (about the time the Spencer repeating rifle was introduced into the conflict) wrestling with supply and command issues. Bragg, a sickly, tortured, and confused general, who gained his reputation in Mexico, had mighty issues with his subcommanders, such as Polk (why do I remember this so vividly), opposed to Rosecrans, who suffered very little conflict with his lieutenants. Rosecrans had all kinds of scuffles under Halleck about supplies, reinforcements, and what was perceived as his slow going through the Cumberland, especially during Rosecrans’ push towards Chatanooga in the summer of ’63. The correspondence and wires between Halleck and Rosecrans are interesting just for their clever and competent writing.

Why do I remember? Because the complex story of the western campaigns can be told around the generals’ personal problems, their tempers, their relationships with brigadiers, presidents, and the foot soldiers, even the weather and politics, the day to day crap that mucks up the machine of war and state. We know that Bragg’s generals expected his orders to be written down on paper, despite the inconvenience of this, while Rosecrans faired a lot better with his men. When confronting choices in planning and writing, the choices made had vast consequences and reminds of the “problem” of choice enmeshed in the stories of Borges. You make the choice and go with it. In the civil war, we reflect on the choices but shake our heads against the inevitable and say, “why that instead of another choice.” It’s one problem in sophisticated study. Why did Rosecrans hang back at the Duck river? What if Longstreet had been in charge in Tennessee? What ifs are a looming consequence of the study of what happened.

Peter Cozzens tells the brief story of competent signal officer Otey of the Army of the Tennessee who identifies Wilder’s approach to Chatanooga.

Glancing toward Raccoon Mountain that Friday morning, he was startled to see his signalman frantically waving word of the approach of Wilder and Wagner. Otey immediately rushed off a message to army headquarters. The report could not be true, came the reply, scouts had sighted no Federals for miles around. Before a flustered Otey could scratch off another message, a shell whizzed overhead and fell into the heart of town, then another and another, and headquarters had its answer. “Ah, then and there was hurrying to and fro, and gathering tears and tremblings of distress,” recalled Otey. (source CV 8 no. 3)

Otey might have gotten a more satisfactory reply had someone in authority been at headquarters.

And the tale continues. It happens that this day is a day of prayer, declared so by Jefferson Davis. Command is at church. And Bragg is off sick. The branching of consequences. Can the what ifs serve to instruct?

Or we could put it this way:

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What should Otey do next?

1. Compose another dispatch
2. Call in the signalmen
3. Run like hell

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