Addition not Subtraction

Posted on September 24, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Latour:

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. (“Why Critique Has Run Out of Steam” 246)

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Latour and Risk

Posted on September 22, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

From Pandora’s Hope::

Speech implies by definition the risk of misunderstanding across the huge gaps between different species. If scientists want to bridge the two-culture divide for good, they will have to get used to a lot of noise, and, yes, more then a little bit of nonsense. (17)

And, for a nice parallel, D. Diane Davis’ opposition to philosophic logocentrism from Breaking Up [at] Totality:

An ethics of decision in a world that has lost its criteria for responsible action begins with straining to hear the excess that gets drowned out, sacrificed for the clarity of One voice, One call, One legitimate position. A post-humanist ethics ought not be about shutting down the flow but about opening it up, pulling back the stops. (19)

Risk and nonsense, nonsense and risk.

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Walking Notes: Latour on Heidegger

Posted on September 9, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I was thinking today about Latour’s move to Heidegger in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam”. He notes that it might strike many as odd, a hyper-realist turning to one among the most speculative of phenomenologists. But Heidegger’s fourfold moves us away from matters of fact because it moves us away from a conception of the Real (of) Being in terms of abstraction.

Yesterday, in my new media class, I introduced Ulmer’s anti-definition assignments via a discussion of tables. Aristotle, if chasing down the “reality” of the table, would seek to cut away anything peculiar to a particular table. These he would call accidental qualities. His aim would be to arrive at the elements common to every table (the essentials). Western philosophy spent the better part of 2000 years following Aristotle’s lead.

But the 20th century saw a turn away from Aristotle’s quest for the Ideal table. Slowly, an appreciation grew for the peculiarities of particular tables. A cut in the wood from the time your brother ran his tricycle into a table leg, for instance. Tables become permeated with memories. So, the question I pose to my students was this: “don’t tell me what you think when I say table, spend sometime telling me how you feel when you hear that word. What is the first memory that pops in your head? This is what Ulmer might call the affective table.” To which one student responded: “yes, but why are we talking about tables at all? Why does this matter?” Aristotle would be proud? This question I leave open to them.

Back to Latour: his interest in the fourfold lies in its opposition to chasing down the one Ideal, abstracted table, divorced from time and space. The fourfold represents for Latour a method for reconceptualizing our relation to the world (see Rivers here for an extremely smart explication of how “world” in Latourian discourse deconstructs the West’s foundational nature/culture binary, 196-197). Method is actually too strong a word–what we are talking about here isn’t even a heuristic–rather I would identify it with Ulmer’s term heuretic. It is a way of opening a way of thinking about the world. As Hawk emphasizes, it is not a predetermined system but rather a kairotic sensibility to the possibilities a context makes possible (see Hawk 206). Its elusiveness, which Bay and Rickert explicate so wonderfully, is its very charm (which, to a positivist, will stink of magic, deception, and pastry-baking).

Posted in aristotle, bay, essentialism, hawk, heidegger, heuretic, heuristic, kairos, latour, new-media-class, rickert, rivers, ulmer | Comments Off on Walking Notes: Latour on Heidegger

SF Zero

Posted on August 3, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I’ll be putting more up soon about SFZero. For now, I need to post the URL for Rowan and I’s first mission.

Mission Completion.

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When the world becomes art

Posted on August 1, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Artist Rodrigo Derteano’s robot constructed Ciudad Nazca in the deserts of Peru.

Via Coudal Partners

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Writing

Posted on July 26, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I spent most of today writing up my Nussbaum/Sloterdijk/Ulmer/SF Zero article, turning handwritten rough draft into (sloppily) typed rough draft. A fun process. Essentially, I critique Nussbaum’s connection between critical thinking and empathy, and argue instead for a post-pedagogical, non-critical, self-explorative thinking alongside a call for local action. More on this to come.

A colleague stepped in and returned a book he borrowed last year–Mark C. Taylor’s Moment of Complexity. Flipping through the pages, I came to a passage that rifted nicely with my writing; Taylor:

Through his deconstructive analyses, Derrida attempts to disrupt digital technologies and the systems they produce by turning the digital divide into a rupture that can never be overcome. However, his critique is, in the final analysis, ineffective: deconstruction changes nothing. While exposing systems and structures as incomplete and perhaps repressive, deconstruction inevitably leaves them in place. This is not merely because deconstruction involves theoretical analyses instead of practical action but also because of the specific conclusions reached by the theoretical critique. Instead of showing how totalizing structures can actually be changed, deconstruction demonstrates that the tendency to totalize can never be overcome, and, thus, that repressive structures are inescapable. For Derrida and his followers, all we can do is to join in the Sisyphean struggle to undo what cannot be done. (65)

Essentially, I accuse Nussbaum of something similar to what Taylor accuses Derrida–of a kind of navel-gazing philosophy that does not adequately address the complications of real world change. I do think Taylor is intentionally under-reading (is that a thing?) Derrida here in order to set up his later articulation of complexity (one that draws quite heavily on this “useless” deconstruction). Deconstruction, I think, can suggest to us the necessity of approaching change on a local and concrete level–it is not necessarily inevitable that we leave structures in place.

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Fall 2011 Reading Lists

Posted on July 25, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I was doing so well posting here. I even got a comment from Dave Weinberger. And then last week happened.

I spent most of today finishing my syllabi for the fall and submitting my book orders. Here’s how my two classes shape up:

Historical Rhetorics

  • Week One (summer reading, discussed week one): Gorgias, Republic VII
  • Week Two: Phaedrus, ???
  • Week Three – Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book 1-2
  • Week Four – Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book 3, Isocrates’ “Against the Sophists”
  • Week Five – Isocrates’ Antidosis w/ Welch “An Isocratic Literary Theory” and Vitanza “Isocrates, the Padeia, and Imperialism”
  • Week Six – Paper Day #1
  • Week Seven – Gorgias / Protagoras, Dissoi Logoi, Plato’s Timaeus (w/ Ulmer, Heuretics 61-78; Schiappa “Toward an Understanding…” 64-85)
  • Week Eight – Vitanza (chapters 1, Ex. 6) / Jarratt (all of Rereading the Sophists) / Poulakous “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric”
  • Week Nine – McComiskey (chapters 1 and 2) / Consigny (Chapters 4, 5, and 6)
  • Paper Day #2
  • Week Eleven – Cicero (De Oratore, Book 1 and 3)
  • Week Twelve – Quintilian (from books 1, 2, and 10) / Lanham, “The Q Question”
  • Week Thirteen – Augustine’s On Christian Teaching
  • Week Fourteen – Ong’s Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue
  • Week Fifteen – Grassi’s Rhetoric and Philosophy (w/ Proctor on Petrarch)
  • Week Sixteen – Paper Day #3

Yup. That’s a lot of reading.

Last time I taught the course, I concluded with Locke and Campbell, Whatley, and Blair, to give some frame of the Enlightenment’s disparagement of rhetoric (and its later emphasis on rhetoric as style). But I think Ong’s explication of Ramus does that sufficiently; this time I want to dig into the humanist rejection of Cicero’s “civic obligation” as our concluding note.

New Media

My undergrad students will read four books next semester:

  • Kalman, Maria. And The Pursuit of Happiness 1594202672
  • Stolley, Karl. How to Design and Write Web Pages Today 0313380384
  • Weinberger, David. Everything is Miscellaneous 0805088113
  • Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention 0321126920

I’ve already read everything here. This will be my first time teaching Weinberger, but I think it will compliment our New Media Wiki project nicely.

So that’s what I am reading this fall–what are others looking forward to?

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“Unschooling” and David Weinberger

Posted on July 12, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today a student shared a piece appearing over at the Washington post on education, focusing on debates over class sizes. The piece details two general approaches to education–the first teacher driven, the second student driven. This second approach the article refers to as “unschooling,” since it emphasizes how learning has to involve developing independent initiative Coincidentally, I was reading through David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous today (at student asked about the books I would be teaching in my New Media class this fall, I’ve decided to try Weinberger). Flipping through my Weinberger, I came to the following page contrasting what Weinberg identifies as social knowing to traditional, teacher-driven notions of knowledge and education:

Now poke your head into a classroom toward the end of the school year. In Massachusetts, where I live, you’re statistically likely to see students with their heads bowed, using no. 2 pencils to fill in examinations mandated by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System. Fulfilling the mandate of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the MCAS measures how well schools are teaching the standardized curricula the state has formulated and whether students are qualified for high school degrees. Starting with the third grade, students’ education is now geared toward those moments every year when the law requires that they sit by themselves and answer questions on a piece of paper. The implicit lesson is unmistakable: Knowing is something done by individuals. It is something that happens inside your brain. The mark of knowing is being able to fill in a paper with the right answers. Knowledge could not get any less social. In fact, in those circumstances when knowledge is social we call it cheating.

Nor could the disconnect get much wider between the official state view of education and how our children are learning. In most American households, the computer on which students do their homework is likely to be connected to the Net. Even if their teachers let them use only approved sources on the Web, changes are good that any particular student, including your son or daughter, has four or five instant-messaging sessions open as she does homework. They have friends with them as they learn. In between chitchat about the latest alliances and factions among their social set, they are comparing answers, asking for help on tough questions, and complaining. Our children are doing their homework socially, even though they’re being graded and tested as if they are doing their work in isolation booths. But in the digital order, their approach is appropriate. Memorizing facts is often now a skill more relevant to quiz shows than to life.

One thing is for sure: When our kids become teachers, they’re not going to be administering tests to students sitting in a neat grid of separated desks with the shades drawn.

At least, we hope they won’t. Weinberger’s book was written in 2007–and the changes to education I have seen in Florida since moving here makes me wonder if Weinberger’s certainty is so certain.

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Teaching a Philosophy of Life

Posted on July 11, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s snippet comes from a student’s paper defending the value of his liberal arts major. One of the questions I posed this semester, while reading Academically Adrift and Not For Profit was whether Universities’ missions included teaching values, or whether teaching values was the province of other social/cultural institutions (family/church). For the most part, my students resisted discussing this question. But one student took up the question in his paper, and noted how research points to a decline among students in prioritizing values; he cites a 2000 study by Pace and Connolly (“Where are the Liberal Arts?”):

In 1966 the percent of students saying that ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life’ was an essential or very important goal was 80%, but in 1996 it was down to 42%. The materialist goal of ‘being well off financially’ was regarded as essential or very important by 45% in 1966, but in 1996 it was up to 74%” (Pace 54)

I’m looking forward to reading the whole article because I am especially interested in the parameters of those numbers. Of course, the social demographics of college enrollment have transformed significantly since 1966, especially in light of Vietnam spikes in enrollment. And our economy has transformed as well, such that now there are fewer career options available to those without college education.

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Rotten With Perfection

Posted on July 5, 2011 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Burke fans will probably enjoy today’s offerings from one of my favorite sites, Slaughterhouse 90210.

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