Matthew Arnold, in describing the subset of the middle, or Philistine, class that "gives all its energies to organising itself, through trades' unions and other means," asserts that this group is seeking to affirm "its class and its class-instinct, its ordinary self not its best self . . . not an inward perfection." Arnold claims that this class is occupied, "according to Plato's subtle expression, with the things of itself and not its real self."
Arnold seems smitten with some abstract ideal of mind, a tendency toward "truth" and "right reason" that a few from each class will always be inclined toward, but which requires the right circumstances to be brought to its full potential. With Nietzsche's "original model" of the "leaf" in my mind, and the argument surrounding it, it's difficult for me to take Arnold too seriously. And after all, wasn't the struggle of the working class to organize and demand rights very much in pursuing its "best self"? Isn't that what Karl Marx would tell us?
When Arnold says of the Populace, "What hope . . . of inculcating the belief that excellence dwells among high and steep rocks, and can only be reached by those who sweat blood to reach her," I get the feeling he's placing his own internal struggle toward some abstract perfection over the material struggles of the various classes he describes. Material existence is steeped in "bathos," but using the material world, such as "high and steep rocks," as metaphor for an internal striving toward "truth" is apparently admirable, noble, and to be encouraged and cultivated as much as possible.
Hume, like Arnold, is interested in discovering broadly applicable truth, though primarily with respect to taste and aesthetics. Like Gorgias and Protagoras, Hume contrasts sickness and health, describing the "man in fever" and his diminished senses as a means of illustrating a "sound and defective state" in "each creature." Only if there is "considerable uniformity of sentiment among men" who are in the "sound state" can an idea of the "perfect beauty" be formulated. Unfortunately, "many and frequent are the defects" that keep us from a clear, healthy perception.
This move toward establishing a healthy perception is a moral one, and it suggests once again that some cultivation is required to get there. Though I'm not always comfortable with how Arnold and Hume go about making their respective cases, I think they have a point. Certainly practicing rigorous analysis and careful argument, as well as keeping yourself open to the various sensations a given text or experience might excite, have both practical and intrinsic value. And they are not skills we are necessarily born with. Arnold spends quite a bit of time describing Prussian education for a reason, though his argument, that aristocrats ought to be using their elevated status to create exemplary educational institutions, is a little strange.
How then do we establish educational practices and institutions that allow and respect difference without resorting to quasi-religious idealization of essentially privileged and protected sensibilities?
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
No Dessert Until You've Mastered JavaScript
Adam Gopnik recently wrote a pretty good article in the New Yorker summarizing many of the issues surrounding our transition to digital literacy (Feb. 14 and 21, 2011). Our friends Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr are both discussed, along with a few others cluttering recently deceased trees with printed words intended to tell us what the future holds.
Gopnik references Kevin Kelly, who apparently compares our "fragmented, multi-part, shimmering" life to "Keats's 'waking dream.'" I read this article right after I'd finished Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in which Nietzsche describes an Athens where, "as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes" (89).
Part of Gopnik's point is that a sense of fragmentation has been with us at least since Nietzsche, so it's not necessarily significant that both pieces give us the analogy of a dream. And I'm also a little skeptical of Nietzsche's/Herodotus's characterization of the Athenians--were they really so gullible when beholding their returning tyrants?
But I can't help but find Nietzsche's description of the Athenian dream world quite appealing when laid over our fragmented, digital landscape. After all, many of us (I'm thinking of myself in particular) are wildly ignorant when it comes to the technical circuitry behind the letters we write into conveniently designed blog templates. Our programmers and designers seem to have supernatural powers, having invented even the "natural" environment we enter when we interact with the super-brain that is the World Wide Web, a place where "anything [seems] possible at any moment."
But when we've in effect become the gods animating the environment, how many degrees removed are we from the "essence" of reality? It would seem a sophistic attitude is most helpful here: reality is what we make it.
It also occurred to me that if those of us who really understand programming are at an advantage, are we living through a time similar to that described by Havelock? My wife has been learning html via the Internet, and I wonder if in another generation or so, programming languages will be taught as soon as kids grasp the alphabet.
My friends who got their bachelor's degrees in computer science waltzed out of U of I straight into $60K/year jobs. I got an editorial internship at $8/hour, and when they hired me as a full-fledged copy editor, my pay swelled to $10/hour. All right, English degree!
So was I like one of those upper-class-twit Athenians who wouldn't deign to learn to read and write (code) but still wanted to show off their pottery (blog)? Were my values rooted in cultural practices whose relevance was vanishing in the wake of an emerging technology?
Though I suppose radio and television made books irrelevant before I was even born, and I tend to agree with the argument that the Internet prizes a relationship with the text more than those mediums. So does that mean the Web is good news for people with my educational background? Generally speaking, it would appear that the Web is driving down the market value of writing and editing, so on that level, nope.
And I think this connects to another issue, particularly as we are (supposedly) lurching out of a recession: what happens to displaced economic value? When people like Shirky celebrate all that we can now create with our leisure time, they conveniently omit the fact that leisure time is unpaid time. And it looks like it will be a while before the economy figures out how to create more paid time for those whose skills have officially become unnecessary. (This is particularly sobering when budget crises potentially give certain ideological camps the leverage they need to in effect leave those people out in the cold--though it might not be cold to you.)
Gopnik references Kevin Kelly, who apparently compares our "fragmented, multi-part, shimmering" life to "Keats's 'waking dream.'" I read this article right after I'd finished Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in which Nietzsche describes an Athens where, "as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes" (89).
Part of Gopnik's point is that a sense of fragmentation has been with us at least since Nietzsche, so it's not necessarily significant that both pieces give us the analogy of a dream. And I'm also a little skeptical of Nietzsche's/Herodotus's characterization of the Athenians--were they really so gullible when beholding their returning tyrants?
But I can't help but find Nietzsche's description of the Athenian dream world quite appealing when laid over our fragmented, digital landscape. After all, many of us (I'm thinking of myself in particular) are wildly ignorant when it comes to the technical circuitry behind the letters we write into conveniently designed blog templates. Our programmers and designers seem to have supernatural powers, having invented even the "natural" environment we enter when we interact with the super-brain that is the World Wide Web, a place where "anything [seems] possible at any moment."
But when we've in effect become the gods animating the environment, how many degrees removed are we from the "essence" of reality? It would seem a sophistic attitude is most helpful here: reality is what we make it.
It also occurred to me that if those of us who really understand programming are at an advantage, are we living through a time similar to that described by Havelock? My wife has been learning html via the Internet, and I wonder if in another generation or so, programming languages will be taught as soon as kids grasp the alphabet.
My friends who got their bachelor's degrees in computer science waltzed out of U of I straight into $60K/year jobs. I got an editorial internship at $8/hour, and when they hired me as a full-fledged copy editor, my pay swelled to $10/hour. All right, English degree!
So was I like one of those upper-class-twit Athenians who wouldn't deign to learn to read and write (code) but still wanted to show off their pottery (blog)? Were my values rooted in cultural practices whose relevance was vanishing in the wake of an emerging technology?
Though I suppose radio and television made books irrelevant before I was even born, and I tend to agree with the argument that the Internet prizes a relationship with the text more than those mediums. So does that mean the Web is good news for people with my educational background? Generally speaking, it would appear that the Web is driving down the market value of writing and editing, so on that level, nope.
And I think this connects to another issue, particularly as we are (supposedly) lurching out of a recession: what happens to displaced economic value? When people like Shirky celebrate all that we can now create with our leisure time, they conveniently omit the fact that leisure time is unpaid time. And it looks like it will be a while before the economy figures out how to create more paid time for those whose skills have officially become unnecessary. (This is particularly sobering when budget crises potentially give certain ideological camps the leverage they need to in effect leave those people out in the cold--though it might not be cold to you.)
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Do Not Attempt to Engage the Static Words of This Post in Dialogue, for They Cannot Defend Themselves
The Miles Burnyeat interview available in the supplemental materials on Blackboard offers a number of good insights about what the dialogue is all about, both for Plato and as a form of inquiry in its own right. Because it's a video, it's difficult to cite specifically, so my ideas are probably mixed in with those presented by Burnyeat (sort of like we're schizophrenically in digitized dialogue).
The dialogue creates a common ground where ideas can be discussed in pure form, at least in theory. I like that the Phaedrus opens with Socrates and Phaedrus looking for a suitable spot to have a discussion, under a "lofty and spreading plane-tree" (loc. 691-99). I don't know enough about the various references, for example the digression about Boreas, but I wonder if Plato is trying to say something here, either about the neutrality of place or its inevitable bias. It's hard for me to say. Maybe it's just a convention. (Though there is this: "I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country" (loc. 699-705). There's a pretty significant statement about place.)
That it's a dialogue implies that there is not necessarily a power relation. The two people speaking are both equally capable of presenting valid ideas. Of course, in a Socratic dialogue, this is an illusion. Despite all the fawning charm--"My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide"--there's never any doubt that Socrates will be the "winner," and that this has been a contest all along. The added layer is that Plato is presenting all of this with his own agenda in mind. Burnyeat's take, if I'm representing it correctly, is that over time Socrates becomes more and more of a mouthpiece for Plato, who becomes more confident in his own ideas. Burnyeat thinks that the early dialogues are more of an attempt to validate and redeem Socrates after his death.
The dialogue then is a really useful trick for Plato. It allows him to express his ideas without actually having to answer for them. The form, and the fact of Socrates' life and influence, allows Plato to say, "Hey, he said it. Not me." And it's great that he does this in writing. Socrates dismisses writing, and his pupil adopts it at least in part because it allows him to, like a text, not have to answer for himself.
I wonder too if there might be some angst simply about the technology of writing. Hesiod and Homer, depending on which estimates you look at, only lived a few hundred years before Socrates, and the spread of that technology (writing stuff down), and its required literacy, was probably quite slow and mediated by factors such as region, class, sex, and so forth (sound familiar?). So if Socrates was this brilliant eccentric, it may be that he was just plain illiterate. Or maybe he distrusted writing in the way that many archetypal grandparents distrust the InterWebs.
But in Plato's hands, the only hands we have (because they wrote), it's something different. It's a philosophical point about the loss of meaning between what's represented in writing (the painting) and what actually is (the image the painting depicts). (Of course this happens in speaking, too! It happens as long as we're using language.) So Socrates' point is that a "living, breathing" person can defend his or her ideas in spoken dialogue, whereas the written word loses this authority and becomes utterly static.
There's something to be said here too about the simple pleasure of good conversation. I like that Socrates would prefer to chat you up over a beer rather than write treatises. There's a "down-home" charm here that's irresistible. (But then I find that I often have the opposite bias: what I say is so sloppy and regrettable; I have so much more control over what I write.)
And not only good conversation but good presentation. And these were all such central concerns of the sophists, why would Plato send Socrates after them? The Socrates of the Phaedrus is a sophist, it seems to me.
I think history shows that dialogue and writing are not competing forces. They work together quite nicely. The tradition of Westsern philosophy serves as evidence of this. And written texts aren't static. They're constantly reinterpreted, challenged, and built upon.
The dialogue creates a common ground where ideas can be discussed in pure form, at least in theory. I like that the Phaedrus opens with Socrates and Phaedrus looking for a suitable spot to have a discussion, under a "lofty and spreading plane-tree" (loc. 691-99). I don't know enough about the various references, for example the digression about Boreas, but I wonder if Plato is trying to say something here, either about the neutrality of place or its inevitable bias. It's hard for me to say. Maybe it's just a convention. (Though there is this: "I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country" (loc. 699-705). There's a pretty significant statement about place.)
That it's a dialogue implies that there is not necessarily a power relation. The two people speaking are both equally capable of presenting valid ideas. Of course, in a Socratic dialogue, this is an illusion. Despite all the fawning charm--"My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide"--there's never any doubt that Socrates will be the "winner," and that this has been a contest all along. The added layer is that Plato is presenting all of this with his own agenda in mind. Burnyeat's take, if I'm representing it correctly, is that over time Socrates becomes more and more of a mouthpiece for Plato, who becomes more confident in his own ideas. Burnyeat thinks that the early dialogues are more of an attempt to validate and redeem Socrates after his death.
The dialogue then is a really useful trick for Plato. It allows him to express his ideas without actually having to answer for them. The form, and the fact of Socrates' life and influence, allows Plato to say, "Hey, he said it. Not me." And it's great that he does this in writing. Socrates dismisses writing, and his pupil adopts it at least in part because it allows him to, like a text, not have to answer for himself.
I wonder too if there might be some angst simply about the technology of writing. Hesiod and Homer, depending on which estimates you look at, only lived a few hundred years before Socrates, and the spread of that technology (writing stuff down), and its required literacy, was probably quite slow and mediated by factors such as region, class, sex, and so forth (sound familiar?). So if Socrates was this brilliant eccentric, it may be that he was just plain illiterate. Or maybe he distrusted writing in the way that many archetypal grandparents distrust the InterWebs.
But in Plato's hands, the only hands we have (because they wrote), it's something different. It's a philosophical point about the loss of meaning between what's represented in writing (the painting) and what actually is (the image the painting depicts). (Of course this happens in speaking, too! It happens as long as we're using language.) So Socrates' point is that a "living, breathing" person can defend his or her ideas in spoken dialogue, whereas the written word loses this authority and becomes utterly static.
There's something to be said here too about the simple pleasure of good conversation. I like that Socrates would prefer to chat you up over a beer rather than write treatises. There's a "down-home" charm here that's irresistible. (But then I find that I often have the opposite bias: what I say is so sloppy and regrettable; I have so much more control over what I write.)
And not only good conversation but good presentation. And these were all such central concerns of the sophists, why would Plato send Socrates after them? The Socrates of the Phaedrus is a sophist, it seems to me.
I think history shows that dialogue and writing are not competing forces. They work together quite nicely. The tradition of Westsern philosophy serves as evidence of this. And written texts aren't static. They're constantly reinterpreted, challenged, and built upon.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Help! I've Been Cyberattacked!
Did anyone else catch Clay Shirky on NPR this morning? The story discusses Egypt's recent Internet shutdown, and in particular the U.S. response.
Congress is currently debating a cyber-security bill that would allow the U.S. government to "permit some limits on Internet traffic into and out of sensitive facilities such as a power grid" in the event of "cyberwar" or a "cyber-emergency." But as Shirky points out, "Might not Egypt's Mubarak have argued that his government faced a 'cyber-emergency' — a political one, perhaps, but still a cyber-emergency?"
The point is a salient one, though let's not forget the claim of the Senate sergeant at arms that "Computer systems of Congress and the executive branch agencies are under cyberattack an average of 1.8 billion times per month" (as relayed by Sen. Susan Collins). What exactly does "cyberattack" mean here? Shirky is arguing that "cyberattack" can mean nearly whatever the government wants it to mean, whether it's Mubarak's or Obama's. What kind of agreed-upon norms are there for a cyberattack? We know that if the World Trade Center gets knocked down by two hijacked planes, it's a violent act of terrorism that will inevitably lead to a military response (whether or not it's a wise one). But how exactly do we conceptualize "cyberattack"?
Is Julian Assange guilty of cyberattacking? Shirky's blog has some interesting soul searching about WikiLeaks; he explores the ways in which the WikiLeaks phenomenon is and is not similar to the Pentagon Papers leaks of the 1970s. Perhaps Congress is looking to craft legislation that will facilitate the extradition and trial of Assange, and convince us all that we should be willing to give up some Internet freedom when it's "for our own good."
But why should the state be so worried about its secrets? Hasn't Facebook already shared all of them with app developers and advertisers? (Oh, right, that's just everybody else.)
Congress is currently debating a cyber-security bill that would allow the U.S. government to "permit some limits on Internet traffic into and out of sensitive facilities such as a power grid" in the event of "cyberwar" or a "cyber-emergency." But as Shirky points out, "Might not Egypt's Mubarak have argued that his government faced a 'cyber-emergency' — a political one, perhaps, but still a cyber-emergency?"
The point is a salient one, though let's not forget the claim of the Senate sergeant at arms that "Computer systems of Congress and the executive branch agencies are under cyberattack an average of 1.8 billion times per month" (as relayed by Sen. Susan Collins). What exactly does "cyberattack" mean here? Shirky is arguing that "cyberattack" can mean nearly whatever the government wants it to mean, whether it's Mubarak's or Obama's. What kind of agreed-upon norms are there for a cyberattack? We know that if the World Trade Center gets knocked down by two hijacked planes, it's a violent act of terrorism that will inevitably lead to a military response (whether or not it's a wise one). But how exactly do we conceptualize "cyberattack"?
Is Julian Assange guilty of cyberattacking? Shirky's blog has some interesting soul searching about WikiLeaks; he explores the ways in which the WikiLeaks phenomenon is and is not similar to the Pentagon Papers leaks of the 1970s. Perhaps Congress is looking to craft legislation that will facilitate the extradition and trial of Assange, and convince us all that we should be willing to give up some Internet freedom when it's "for our own good."
But why should the state be so worried about its secrets? Hasn't Facebook already shared all of them with app developers and advertisers? (Oh, right, that's just everybody else.)
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
I Totally Produced a Killer YouTube Video in My Mind
Because the ukulele theme popped up at the end of class, I can't resist sharing this rather stiff instructional article I wrote: http://www.ehow.com/how_5070360_strum-baritone-ukulele.html. The comment at the bottom is about right in its tone, but hey, my PayPal account swelled by a few bucks. It's worth noting here how difficult it is to write about certain skills, particularly musical ones. Thus, the beauty of YouTube learning.
Speaking of YouTube, here's a silly video that's become a hit in our house:
I'm not sure if the version I just embedded will have it, but the version I looked up on YouTube begins with an advertisement. This is something that aggravates me somewhat; one never saw this sort of thing at the dawn of YouTube. The early days of the printing press, as Sheldon mentioned in class, were consumed with figuring out how to make the new technology profitable. With the Internet, as was (and is) the case with much of the media that preceded it, advertising seems to be the answer to the how-to-pay-for-it riddle.
In my last post, I suggested that Shirky's optimism may be steeped in a somewhat conservative faith that "institutions" will arise to make sense of the new media landscape. But if these institutions--and YouTube is surely an Internet institution by now--are transformed into profit-making businesses (that essentially exploit user-created content with very little overhead), have we really changed anything significant about the way our society functions? And is the end of professionalism really to be celebrated if it means a regime in which creativity is still book-ended (old-fashioned metaphor) by "words from our sponsors" with even less compensation for artists? How long before Julia Nunes becomes a Horatio Alger myth, if that makes any sense? I fear that the Wild West of the Internet is rapidly becoming Bakersfield.
But back to the Mean Kitty song. It's good. Not "deep" exactly, but it does communicate a message in an entertaining way without using "text" (though he must have spent some time on the lyrics). I really want to learn to do video-editing on a computer. I like the implication that literacy in this century will mean something much broader than reading and writing. If one can easily and cheaply create a message using video, text, music, and, hell, holograms, and if that becomes our standard expectation of the components a message should be made up of, then it's inevitable that all educated citizens will be basically fluent in those skills, both in terms of production and interpretation. That would be totally cool! It would also enable brilliant rebuttals like the following:
Now that that's settled, I'd like to mention our old friend, Dana Gioia. I ran across his name in a Poetry magazine review of a new anthology of rap (Adam Kirsch, Feb. 2011). I can't link to that hopelessly dated print source, but I can link to this: http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm. In true Internet-research fashion, I haven't read this entire essay, but I probably should. Gioia calls rap "the new oral poetry," which made me think of the "old" oral poetry: all the freestyling the Greeks did before Homer, among other things. Does the Internet present some full-circle moment? Do rap videos about house pets reveal a shift to post-print, performance-based oratory? And is there a Phaedrus 2.0 argument to be made here? Something along the lines of, "YouTube videos should be made as aids to memory only. The YouTube video which is produced with intelligence in the mind of the learner is far more powerful."
Speaking of YouTube, here's a silly video that's become a hit in our house:
I'm not sure if the version I just embedded will have it, but the version I looked up on YouTube begins with an advertisement. This is something that aggravates me somewhat; one never saw this sort of thing at the dawn of YouTube. The early days of the printing press, as Sheldon mentioned in class, were consumed with figuring out how to make the new technology profitable. With the Internet, as was (and is) the case with much of the media that preceded it, advertising seems to be the answer to the how-to-pay-for-it riddle.
In my last post, I suggested that Shirky's optimism may be steeped in a somewhat conservative faith that "institutions" will arise to make sense of the new media landscape. But if these institutions--and YouTube is surely an Internet institution by now--are transformed into profit-making businesses (that essentially exploit user-created content with very little overhead), have we really changed anything significant about the way our society functions? And is the end of professionalism really to be celebrated if it means a regime in which creativity is still book-ended (old-fashioned metaphor) by "words from our sponsors" with even less compensation for artists? How long before Julia Nunes becomes a Horatio Alger myth, if that makes any sense? I fear that the Wild West of the Internet is rapidly becoming Bakersfield.
But back to the Mean Kitty song. It's good. Not "deep" exactly, but it does communicate a message in an entertaining way without using "text" (though he must have spent some time on the lyrics). I really want to learn to do video-editing on a computer. I like the implication that literacy in this century will mean something much broader than reading and writing. If one can easily and cheaply create a message using video, text, music, and, hell, holograms, and if that becomes our standard expectation of the components a message should be made up of, then it's inevitable that all educated citizens will be basically fluent in those skills, both in terms of production and interpretation. That would be totally cool! It would also enable brilliant rebuttals like the following:
Now that that's settled, I'd like to mention our old friend, Dana Gioia. I ran across his name in a Poetry magazine review of a new anthology of rap (Adam Kirsch, Feb. 2011). I can't link to that hopelessly dated print source, but I can link to this: http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm. In true Internet-research fashion, I haven't read this entire essay, but I probably should. Gioia calls rap "the new oral poetry," which made me think of the "old" oral poetry: all the freestyling the Greeks did before Homer, among other things. Does the Internet present some full-circle moment? Do rap videos about house pets reveal a shift to post-print, performance-based oratory? And is there a Phaedrus 2.0 argument to be made here? Something along the lines of, "YouTube videos should be made as aids to memory only. The YouTube video which is produced with intelligence in the mind of the learner is far more powerful."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)