Front Porch Cycle Chic: A bicycle on every autarchist's front porch

The Roberts and Gregory families, Kentucky, early 20th century. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

What follows isn't exactly a continuation of yesterday's post. It's more like a picking up of another thread and unraveling a perfectly good idea from Front Porch Republic so as to hastily (and, no doubt, clumsily) re-weave it here in combination with other recent concerns of mine as a garment to hang in cycling's metaphysical closet. I'm not sure, incidentally, whether the following, famous injunction from Thoreau's Walden--"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes"--implicitly condones or condemns that re-weaving. But if the latter, I take some presumptuous hope from George Bernard Shaw's statement, "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

Enough preambling. On with the ambling.

One of the central causes of what the writers of Front Porch Republic contend is our current cultural and political predicament is a perversion of our understanding of property and the resulting policies and politics arising from that perversion. This matter gets addressed directly in James Matthew Wilson's "The Need for Autarchy": Following Hannah Arendt, Wilson argues that that perversion is the result of "the specious conflation of the idea of private property (which Aquinas was right in defending as necessary to a good society) with that nefarious invention of modern usury, unlimited wealth accumulation." Here's Arendt, as quoted by Wilson:

Private property is not a euphemism for anything I happen to acquire, but a reference to the place in the world that is necessarily mine if I am not to be reduced to dependence on another. The way to secure such property is not usually to expand it and widen its frontiers (though that may sometimes be the case), but to fortify it, to fill it with the productive means necessary to maintain it and for it to maintain me. That kind of security and self-sufficiency-in a word, autonomy and autarchy-requires stewardship and conservation rather than expansion and avarice. Such virtues serve the purpose of having the property remain my property with a permanence approximating to the solidity of its literal foundations. [. . . ] [W]e reply to the capitalist that he does not defend private property but, instead, rationalizes endless wealth accumulation, and in so doing he does not defend the one, best hope for the wide distribution of private property. He advocates, rather, the source of its usurpation and dissolution.

Wilson then sums up Arendt's argument: Private property, once freed of market capitalism's co-opting of it, "is a public good but also provides for the individual household the basis for what is itself a great good, the foundation of a family’s liberty: autarchy [which literally translates from the Greek as "self-sufficiency" and thus is not to be confused with "autocracy"]. And the autarchy of the family household, I contend, is the analogous foundation, the microcosmic model, for still another public good: the sorely needed autarchic independence of our country." (Wilson's italics)

So: what does all this have to do with cycling in particular and, more broadly, issues of livability?

The rest is here.

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Problems in translation

(Cross-posted at the House of Leaves forum)

Submitted for your consideration:



Sure: laugh. I wouldn't have found this if someone from The West hadn't run across it, found it to be funny, and posted it on his website. But personally, I didn't find it so much funny as weird: that at some level there was something I just wasn't getting. As I watched this, I couldn't help wondering two things:

1) Is there something present in the basic Superman story that Westerners (or Americans, at least) are culturally blind to but which the maker of this film saw as a kind of space that allows for a Bollywood reading? Surely it's true at some level that the members of a culture naturally assume that non-members of their culture will read a given cultural product in exactly the same way that members will. Another way of asking this: I assume most Indians think of Bollywood films as participating in their cultural idiom, but what are non-Indians who consume them responding to? If some, for example, are aficionados of camp, is the camp they see in those films an Indian campiness?

2) Just how in earnest is this video? It looks nuts to Westerners, but does it to Indians? (And of course I hope sutrix [a forum member who lives in Mumbai] will weigh in on this, but I don't presume that his view is that of a billion people--not all of whom, I'm pretty sure, have his fluency in American pop culture.)

I've wondered these sorts of things with regard to translations of House of Leaves, too: specific issues concerning language, of course, but also that strong sense of American-ness that I get from the novel--whether and to what extent that comes across in its various translations, too. Admittedly, whatever else HoL is about, "American-ness" is (probably) not integral to that, but it does, I would argue, give the novel some texture that it otherwise wouldn't have. It's akin to the effect of watching a French film and sensing, apart from language and setting, its je ne sais quoi that marks it as "French" that language and setting don't.

Anyway. Comments?

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New World babies as articulations of cultural difference

Note: This is heading in the direction of a preface or introduction to the book project. The image below is its starting place, at any rate. Would reading this make you want to read more? Comments welcome and encouraged.

Detail from a panel of Diego Rivera's mural at the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City. Click to enlarge. Photo taken by the Mrs.

In a panel filled with figures, most appearing in full or partial profile, all going about the business of colonizing/being colonized, this infant, suspended in a plain rebozo from its mother's shoulder, its skin slightly lighter than its mother's, slightly darker than that of the soldier I assume is its father, gazes fixedly at something just above and beyond the viewer's left shoulder. It is difficult to say what accounted for my standing in front of this image for some minutes when my wife and I visited the palacio (Mexico's national capitol building) back in October: whether it's that the baby is the only figure in the panel's foreground looking in the viewer's direction yet not quite returning the viewer's gaze; or the color of its eyes--two tiny stones of aquamarine in a sea of reds and browns and yellows. Or both.

Though I did not have this image in mind when I worked on my dissertation, in a sense it is precisely because of what we see in it that I chose that dissertation's subject: an attempt to discuss historical and fictional narratives of consensual miscegenation as tropes of New World culture more generally. It is not merely that individual mestizos, métis, and mulattoes are, to borrow Joel Williamson's phrase, new people; it is that the culture that has emerged in this hemisphere is also, I argue, something demonstrably different from the European, African and indigenous cultures that contributed to its creation. Analogous to the baby's not quite gazing directly at the viewer, New World culture is simultaneously familiar and strange--and, moreover, not one fully explained by most mainstream critical theories of culture.

As an example of what I mean by that last statement, here is a passage from the introduction to Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture, coincidentally published in the year I defended my dissertation:

The move away from the singularities of 'class' or 'gender' as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions--of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation--that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood--singular or communal--that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining society itself.

It is in the emergence of the intersticies--the overlap and displacement of domains of difference--that the intersubjective and collective experience of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed 'in-between', or in excess of, the sum of the 'parts' of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender. etc.)? How do strategies or representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable? (1-2, emphasis mine)

Readers of Bhabha will recognize in this passage an implicit articulating of the concerns at stake in his concept of hybridity, an idea that has great resonance--and potential pitfalls--for the citizens of the Western Hemisphere¹, and one I am largely sympathetic with. But, the bolded passage strikes me, a citizen of this hemisphere and someone who attempts to understand and write about its culture, as not quite speaking to our cultural condition. I would argue that it is precisely in "those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference"--phenomena that Bhabha calls on critics to examine so as to be "theoretically innovative and politically crucial"--that we find the New World's "narratives of original and initial subjectivities": the very sorts of texts Bhabha argues we "need to think beyond." To put this in terms of the baby in Rivera's mural, Bhabha's stance is that we already know where babies come from. I contend that, in this hemisphere, we're still trying to figure out how to articulate where this particular baby comes from--and what those origins tell us about ourselves as a culture.

(If you're still interested, the rest is here.)

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Reason #6853 why my daughters' mother and I used to joke about putting our girls into convents

Via the new-to-me blog Dante and the Lobster comes this story from the BBC (emphases mine):

Bedroom furniture for young girls with the brand name Lolita has been withdrawn by Woolworths following complaints from parents.

[snip]

Catherine Hanly, editor of parenting website raisingkids.co.uk, was among the parents to complain about the furniture advertised on the Woolworths website.

She said a Woolworths press officer had told her staff running the website "had no idea" of the word's connotations.

"I expect a company like Woolworths to actually know what it means and the connotations and stuff," she told BBC Radio Five Live Breakfast.

"It has become a name that is synonymous with sexual precocity and the fact that it is tied to a girl's bed - it literally couldn't be worse taste."

A Woolworths spokeswoman said: "Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect."

[snip]

It is not the first time retailers have been criticised for using branding with sexual connotations on goods marketed for children.

In 2005, WH Smiths came under fire for selling youngsters stationery bearing the Playboy bunny - a symbol of the pornography empire.

Prior to that Bhs decided to withdraw its Little Miss Naughty range of padded bras and knickers for pre-teen girls after attracting criticism.

Just this quick observation: Woolworths' official position of corporate ignorance of the very culture and its referents that it markets to is one thing; what is more distressing, if one is in search of Ultimate Causes, are two things 1) Even if Woolworths is/was ignorant, the branders of these products clearly are not; 2) (actually, this is one I'd rather not dwell on too deeply, since it's not yet sunrise as I write this and I prefer to retain a cheerful demeanor this early in the day until I have reason not to) Without at all excusing the actions of pedophiles, one has to wonder about a consumer culture that on the one hand rightly condemns and punishes such actions and yet on the other (and not on fringes of that culture, either, as anyone who has strolled into a children's clothes section can attest) implicitly subscribes to the notion that it's acceptable to for clothes to present prepubescent girls' bodies in sexually-alluring ways. While I would much rather these manufacturers just not make such things, period, I'm smart enough to know that they wouldn't make them, and in such quantity, if a market for them didn't exist.

So, yeah: I'd just as soon not believe we've produced and/or become inured to what is in essence a culture of barely-closeted pedophilia. It's too damned early in the day--and my daughters too close to puberty--to think that.

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Returning to the biggish screen: The moving picture in the age of digital reproduction

Image via Cartoonstock.com

Recently over at Clusterflock, Deron Bauman asks a simple question: "What movie(s) have you seen the most?" As I read over the comments and contributed my own, I was reminded of something I said in this post, specifically the following:

I'd like to argue that we can apply [Walter Benjamin's] concept of aura¹ to the not-so-old days of moviegoing, in which the only way the vast majority of people could see films was at the moviehouse with hundreds of other people. True, scores of copies of these films had to be made, but the audience desirous of seeing a film more than once had no choice but to go to the moviehouse again, in obedience to its--not the audience's--schedule, and then, when its run ended, would most likely never see that film again. Sure: film can endlessly reproduce images of reality; but surely the aura of film [by which I mean more precisely "moviegoing"] lay to a large extent in the fleeting and arbitrary nature of its exhibition. More: each successive viewing of the same film back in those days would itself have been an irreproducible experience. The individual viewer would notice different things each time, think differently about the same things . . . but just as important would be the different composition of the audience each time.

The corollary to that, I say elsewhere in that post, is that our current ability to see films pretty much whenever we want to, and via ever-expanding and ever-more-convenient and portable delivery systems, signifies several fundamental changes in how we experience film now.

Well, okay: in that post, I identify just one fundamental change: that whereas before, the communal space of the moviehouse was part of the experience of movie-going, that communal space has become devalued via the simple fact that it's no longer a prerequisite of . . . well, not "movie-going" any longer (since we no longer have to "go" anywhere, not even away from our computers, to see a film), but "movie-watching." Indeed, I speculate there that movie-going shares in some ways the dynamic of church-going and may, indeed, fill in a secular manner the idea of churchgoing-as-communion (in "communion"'s broadest sense).

[aside: the big program-oriented non-denominational churches are analogous to multiplexes, come to think of it . . . ]

But the Clusterflock question--specifically, its querying of multiple viewings of films--got me to wondering whether the delivery systems for films shape how we regard them. This is something that partly involves saying, "You should really see [name of film] on a biggish screen," but it also involves asking, How do the easy availability of films and all these different delivery systems shape how we perceive certain actors, certain films or, for that matter, the experience of watching films?

I have some hazy ideas about these matters that I hope will assume more definite form when I also have a moment to blog about them.
_________
¹Discussed here (from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"):

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

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"Signature Event Context" and the Deathly Hallows

UPDATE: Welcome to those of you visiting from Easily Distracted via Russell's link to my post in his comment there.

This post could also have been titled J. K. Rowling's Lonely Hearts Club Band or, more tangentially, "Better Harry Potter than Paris Hilton."

Anyway. I promised a review, so I'll get that out of the way right now, seeing as that's not quite the point of this post. Mild spoilers contained therein; to reveal the review, you'll have to scroll to the bottom of the post and click on "Read More."

I liked it very much, overall. It didn't resolve as I had thought it might: I chose to believe that Dumbledore wasn't really dead and that, because I suspected Snape had some redeeming qualities, I thought he would have a greater, more dramatic role than he does. Something that doesn't get fully explained is why, in the scene in the Malfoy mansion, no one--not even Draco--seems able (or, significantly, willing) to positively identify Harry, Ron and Hermione when they're brought there. I at least thought that this was a sign that Draco had come to regret the evil his family had chosen to serve, and it certainly provides enough justification for Harry's saving him during the climactic battle. Yet in the immediate aftermath of that battle, the Malfoys sit apart from the other Hogwartsians. Perhaps that ambiguity is intentional, a sign that, though Voldemort has been vanquished, those evils that he represents--the lust for power, class prejudice--remain intact, these being human beings and not immortals, after all.

And that brings me to the question of whether the Potter books are "any good." Rowling is not the most elegant of writers, but she has a firm grasp of what the greatest children's books--and, for that matter, the greatest books--should do: address the very biggest themes (the realities of life, one of which is death; the inevitability of confronting and deciding what to do about evil; that few people are entirely good or entirely evil and that it can be very difficult to accept either of those truths; the nature of friendship and loyalty and courage and sacrifice) and present them in all their befuddling complexity without trying to tidy them up completely. For more--and a more subtle--consideration of the Potter books as "children's literature," you could do much worse than have a look at Russell Arben Fox's post--and the very thoughtful comments--on Deathly Hallows.

End of review.

Back on Friday, waiting for 12:01 to arrive, surrounded by perhaps 300 noisy and excited people, most of them in costume (one, extraordinarily, as a very plausible centaur!), some admittedly there less because of their love of Harry Potter than because, hey, it's a party!, it's Spectacle!, it's an Event!, I was reading Derrida's essay "Signature Event Context." Really. Long story as to why, but the upshot is that it turned out to be an appropriate choice for the evening.

Derrida's essay is about as straightforward a piece of writing as is available from him; those still puzzling over just what deconstruction is would, I think have many of their questions answered by it. This remark about a writer's intentions and its consequences for the idea of "context" struck me especially as I had a look around me that night: "By all rights, it belongs to the sign to be legible, even if the moment of its production is irremediably lost, and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor meant consciously and intentionally at the moment he wrote it, that is abandoned it to its essential drifting."

Surely, I thought, that whatever-it-was I was sitting in the midst of has become as much a part of the context of the Potter books as the world those narratives create--so much so, in fact, that some commenters in Potter posts I've read contend that PotterMania! has become the context to be assessed, and not the books. That's a strange argument to be making--those who make it tend to identify themselves as lovers of classic literature and thus of good writing who would reject arguments that the assumed value of those great works has also been shaped in some measure by marketplaces of various sorts; yet the Potter books' value is slight at best; at worst, they've become famous for being famous, and not because of any intrinsic merits.

Well, fine. If you want to talk about spectacle, let's do. Let's just have a look around my Barnes & Noble and try for analogies to what I found myself in the midst of. Christmas? Halloween? Mardi Gras? Well, yes, sort of . . . but all those events repeat themselves. It wasn't until sometime Saturday, as I was about halfway through Deathly Hallows, that it really struck home that literally millions of people all over the world were or soon would be doing exactly the same thing. It was most akin, therefore, to the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, when radio stations would be allowed to play it beginning the Sunday at midnight a week in advance of its release in stores. The stations played it over and over again, competing with their rivals to see who could play it the most. Langdon Winner wrote of that time, as he happened to be travelling I-80 and hearing music from this album almost literally wherever he was, "The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. . . . For a brief while the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young." (from The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, p. 183)

Sounds familiar, no?

Setting aside the merits of the Potter books--and keeping in mind that there are some who don't regard Sgt. Pepper's the Beatles' best album, much less the greatest rock & roll album--I would argue that the Potter books' achievement in grabbing our collective attention as it has is an even greater one. We have far more media sources for our music-and-image-dominated society, yet it's a book (aren't those supposed to be dinosaurs?) that's causing all this fuss, that's holding all these kids, their parents, and, let's face it, even those of us who haven't read it and won't, in some way preoccupied by it. When put in those terms, merit is somewhat beside the point. What is astounding is that this moment is occurring at all. And merit, too, is to a certain extent in the eye of the beholder: in grad school one of my fellow students thought it absurd that our program required one to earn 3 hours of credit for reading the works of only one writer, some flash-in-the-pan named Shakespeare.

I am glad to have witnessed and been a part of this collective engagement with a single text, if only because it seems highly unlikely to me that its like will occur any time soon. Indeed, it may never occur again. Writing is iterable, says Derrida--it is that very quality that allows us to call it "writing." But this context that we're still in the midst of, this collective immersion in a text and its world and what that text's extraordinary success might say, for good or ill, about our world, that is uniterable. At least for this set of texts. But perhaps not for another, some time.

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American aesthetics I: Bingham's Lion

George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845

In an earlier post, I initiated a discussion whose eventual goal is to articulate whatever it is that informs an American aesthetic (assuming there is an aesthetic that is identifiably American). It had as its starting point a (to my mind) thought-provoking passage from this post by Gawain at his most-excellent arts and culture blog, Heaven Tree:

My third observation is that all the eclectics I have ever known have all been Americans. I have never heard a Chinese, a Japanese, or a European argue for the equality of pop and classical (or interchangeability of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claudio Monteverdi). What is it about Americans which makes it possible for them to believe such things? Indeed, to experience them? Is their ideological commitment to imagined equality of everything so strong as to make them blind to obvious emotional stimuli? Or do they have congenitally different brains? I don’t know. I really do not know. It is one of those ways in which my American friends (of whom many I love dearly) will remain to me inscrutable ciphers. A human mystery.

Wittgenstein once said: If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.

Well, yes. (Emphasis added)

By way of response to this passage, I said that that there was some truth here but that it needed teasing out. This is the the beginning of that, in which, below the fold, I'll make an argument that American aesthetics more properly rests on the principle of pastiche than of eclecticism.

As I have thought about this passage and how to respond, it struck me that the aesthetic egalitarianism Gawain attributes to Americans in the above passage is a bit off-target. Americans have historically had the cultural attitude of not "What is the best that has been thought and said?" but "What is at hand?"--it is something of a plein air approach to aesthetics, as Emerson argues we should have:

Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are swiftly passing away. Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearning, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eye; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters. . . . [W]hen we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical. ("The Poet")

In the same essay Emerson says he "look[s] in vain for the poet whom [he] describes[s]," though he had at hand the examples of Irving, Cooper, Longfellow and Bryant--all of whom made use of just the materials Emerson lists in their poems and narratives. Perhaps Emerson felt their art was still too beholden to European models. Whatever the case, Emerson also had available to him the by-then 300-year-old example of Latin American Baroque art and architecture, a "What is at hand?" aesthetic sensibility if there ever was one, as Miguel Rojas Mix's article "The Angel with the Arquebus: Baroque Art in Latin America" makes clear.

Here is that article's concluding paragraph:

Baroque art in Latin America is not a mere transposition of Spanish or Portuguese art. It is a hybrid art. And it embraces more than two cultures, for along with the Spanish tradition it received the Arab heritage in the form of the mudejar style. It is said that the Indian contribution is shown in a preference for a range of pure colours and in the use of abstraction in the portrayal of figures. But the Black influence can also be seen, both in the dark complexion of angels and Virgins and in the syncretism of African gods with the traditional Christian saints. A marvellously enriched style emerged from all these influences, the style of an art that was fundamental to a new world. Such is the art we know as 'Latin American Baroque'.

What's described here is not eclecticism but pastiche. As I understand the term, eclecticism is an appreciation for diverse cultural expressions but also a recognition of their integrity. That's not the same thing as saying all artforms are created equal. Pastiche, on the other hand, is the realm of syncretism, of miscegenation, of hybridity. It's the creative dynamic of a space that can produce a Natty Bumpo; a novel that is simultaneously a sea-faring tale, a work of naturalism, and metaphysical quest; a space in which the Virgin can appear as a mestiza; a place with stone-carved Christs on crosses girded with loincloths decorated with indigenous symbols.

These days, the tendency is to talk of pastiche as a feature of postmodernism, as a sign of our cultural distrust in past genres to signify what they used to. In this sense, then, pastiche is actually a destructive force. In the case of American aesthetics, though, pastiche is profoundly, radically creative. It is (or at least once was) driven by the sense that something new was being made in this hemisphere; the old forms, European or indigenous or African, would not serve.

Bingham's painting captures this sense well, I think. The men, garbed in a fusion of Western and indigenous garb, regard us warily. They are heading downstream--toward a town--to sell their furs. Compared to the Plains and Rockies, might Civilization be riskier still for them? The cat and his reflection in the water miraculously balance the composition--and in more ways than one. Sitting placidly in the bow of the canoe as he does, he seems like a bit of Civilization taken into the wilderness by these men. Look closer, though, and we see he's tethered. Is he a flight risk? A danger, perhaps, to the men he accompanies?

On the water's almost-blank surface, almost any narrative might be written.

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A language really spoken by men . . .

The Cumbria Tourism Board notes that this is the 200th anniversary of William Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (to refresh your memory, here is the text of the poem). Hmm, they wondered as they wandered over there . . . how to get people up here to see some daffodils . . . ?


(Hat-tip: NPR)

Will this hasten or delay the arrival of Spring? Will M. C. Nuts cause Wordsworth to spin in his grave even as he joins Lucy in rolling

round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees[?]

I'm not horrified by this, but I do think, though, that the Board's choosing to do this represents, at the very least, a mistrust of Wordsworth's poem to move a new audience these days. Do not our postmodern hearts with pleasure fill, too, upon looking upon hosts of golden daffodils? Is emotion also one of those Grand Narratives that Lyotard warned us about, a ride that needs pimping so that we are moved by its coolness and thus keep our distance from that nasty ol' emotion?

I'm asking half-seriously, just so you know. Perhaps pure, unalloyed, tranquility-recalled emotion is passé, too, unrecognizable, or perhaps something to be suspicious of, lest our cool, sophisticated critical faculties be seduced into shutting down just this one time. Perhaps this at least partly explains my suspicion and loathing of Thomas Kinkade.

Something (else) to ponder . . .

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Eclecticism as an American aesthetic: A lion's preliminary throat-clearing

I don't have time to develop this just now, but between now and when I do, I'd like to encourage my reader(s) to comment on something, either here or elsewhere.

Gawain of Heaven Tree frequently posts on aesthetics and the notion of taste. A central assumption of his on these issues is that the values and standards giving shape to these matters are not, in the end, culturally- or historically-determined but are both discoverable and universal. He has clearly done more--and more careful--thinking and writing about these matters than I have, and I greatly respect that fact about his work, even as I wonder sometimes whether he's right. Sometimes, as in a passage from this post on the implications of evolutionary psychology for aesthetics, he can write so eloquently that, even if I'm not sure he's right, I find myself wanting him to be right:

my primitive intuition (and that of most of us) that when I (we) find something beautiful, there really is something there, something beyond the social ambiance of the work, something unrelated to power structures and religious meaning and media manipulation, role of education and museums, something unquestionable and immovable and immutable. Something which makes us completely powerless, something which rules and overcomes us. That there is something not arbitrary but, on the contrary, ultimately indisputably really beautiful about some works of art. Some element, however miniscule, of beauty pure and simple, unalloyed and independent of its religio-politico-sioco-econo-moral associations.

It's been some time ago that I first read his provocatively-titled post, "Why I hate pop music, or the mystery of eclectic tastes", but the passage below has recently come back to mind:

My third observation is that all the eclectics I have ever known have all been Americans. I have never heard a Chinese, a Japanese, or a European argue for the equality of pop and classical (or interchangeability of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claudio Monteverdi). What is it about Americans which makes it possible for them to believe such things? Indeed, to experience them? Is their ideological commitment to imagined equality of everything so strong as to make them blind to obvious emotional stimuli? Or do they have congenitally different brains? I don’t know. I really do not know. It is one of those ways in which my American friends (of whom many I love dearly) will remain to me inscrutable ciphers. A human mystery.

Wittgenstein once said: If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.

Well, yes.

Now: I'll just say here by way of marking out some territory that I'll build on later that a) I think there is some truth embedded in this paragraph but needs some teasing out; and b) while Gawain's tone here smacks a bit of that old joke, "The natives are revolting."/"Yes--they certainly are," I'd argue that eclecticism (of a sort other than Gawain's characterization here) is not some congenital condition that causes my countrymen to fail their Art Appreciation classes but, instead, is nothing to be ashamed of--if, that is, we want to call ourselves "Americans."

What think y'all? I hope those of you who are so inclined, whether or not you're from the States, will comment here or initiate a discussion at your own places. If you choose the latter option, I hope you'll link to this post so that I won't miss your posts.

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: Another nugget to chew on regarding this topic: Sorry to be vague as to the sourcing, but I was only half-listening to the radio when the announcer said this by way of quoting someone else: "Duke Ellington is of the belief that that there are two kinds of music: "Good," and "The other kind."

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"Collage Students," Part V: Two models, and a solicitation

(Those interested can find links to all the previous "collage student" posts here.)

First things first: I am duty-bound to make note of the contributors whose own posts and their ideas served to spark and then spur on this series of posts: Randall (and the EMBLOS), with an assist from Walter J. Ong; Winston; a collective thanks to the good people of Clusterflock (in particular Daryl Scroggins and Sheila Ryan), where earlier posts in this series found homes and excellent comments; Conrad, whose post provides a model for what I'm after; Hank, whose post provides the attitude for what I'm after; Raminagrobis, whose oh-by-the-way mention of the meaning of a-leitheia is the reason behind what I'm after; and, finally, an interview with Brian Eno, the source of the term "curator" below.

The orchestra has begun playing, so I'd better get on with things:

Here's what I'm toying with as a priori assumptions regarding the sorts of students I see today and which I'll be using as a guide for shaping class discussions and assignments in my Comp I classes this spring:

1) My students--we all--are "collage students": that is, we are assemblages of experiences and knowledge, some of it commonly held, some not, the commonly-held things not understood or thought of in the same way from person to person to person.

2) We can divide "collage students"--specifically, their relationship to the things they know--into two basic types:

a) "collectors": the subject is meaningful to the student at a personal level, but that interest, for whatever reason, doesn't extend beyond the personal. That is, the student feels no compunction (or, perhaps, lacks the ability, or just flat hasn't tried) to explain its meaning to someone else. This student, if asked why s/he likes or is interested in something, is likely to say little more than, "I just do/am."
b) "curators": the subject interests the student at both a personal and an intellectual level. The latter means that the student is able to speak about the subject in such a way that s/he can convey to an audience why the subject should matter to others. This is the realm of comparison, the establishing of context, analysis, synthesis, etc.

3) The goal, I hope would be obvious to them, is for them to begin to think like "curators." I want them to think about that goal in relation to two things:

a)the definition of Truth as a-leitheia: "the absence of forgetting," along with Heidegger's further gloss on that word as "the uncovering of that which is hidden."
b) Neil Postman's distinction between "news" and "information" and how the finding and hanging onto of Truth--"the uncovering of that which is hidden"--these days has become both harder to do and never more important to do.

Okay: Those are the pedagogical assumptions and my first-day mapping out of those assumptions. Below the fold comes the solicitation.

Psst . . . c'mere, buddy . . .

Given all the above, do any ideas for writing assignments suggest themselves to you? I have some, of course; and, this week being my college's Faculty Development Week, I have occasion to ask my colleagues about all this as well, but I'd like to cast the net as widely as possible. The one framing requirement I have to keep in mind is that we have six writing assignments, five of which employ some of the rhetorical modes (example or definition, narrative or process, division/classification, cause/effect, compare-contrast) and the last must be persuasive. I've toyed with the idea of asking them to choose one "subject" (just about as broadly defined as possible)--something they are passionate about and think others wouldn't care about but should--and make it the focus, or at least the starting point, as the spirit moves them, of the various assignments. My fear is that students might find that limiting, but if I make it clear that they choose something that they are truly and deeply passionate about, my hope is that they will, with a bit (or a lot) of thought they should find plenty of things to say, and ways to write, about their subject.

The idea of audience will be especially crucial this semester, too: curators are teachers, after all.

Oh, yeah: if you think all this is just nuts, please say so, because I need to hear that, too. But please tell me why it's nut I will just say preemptively that what they'll be doing in this class--to not just regurgitate information but really think about getting at why this matters to them and should matter to someone else--will be by far the most challenging thing I've asked any freshman comp class to do. I've tried to design assignments before that (I thought) would yield papers of the sort that I want these to do this spring, but to no avail. Thinking about things in this way, though, just might do the trick. The other preemptive remark: I know my students are in a community college. All the more reason to push them.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks in advance for whatever thoughts you care to share.

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Pedagogy, Education, Teaching, Writing, Knowledge, Culture

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