Tag: institution

CCCC Atlanta Rewind, Part II

/ Derek Mueller

I don’t think there will be a part 3 in this series, but I wanted to post in a consolidated location the various pieces I brought to Atlanta last week. Steve offered a careful play-by-play of many of the meals and local excursions I was a part of. And he mentioned in the entry that we had a fairly small audience at the N.30 session. With that in mind, I figured I may as well render my talk into an overdubbed video and post it to YouTube where it will surely get a couple of more views in the year to come.

But first, Steve’s video, which initiated and enframed our roundtable:

Below is my contribution to the roundtable. To continue experimenting with YouTube’s closed captioning, I uploaded the full script of my talk as a text file. I’m impressed at how capably YouTube creates alignments between the video’s audio track and the text. Also, all of the oooh-aaah cloud photographs come from the recent New York Times installation, “Up in the Clouds.”

And finally, here’s the poster I tacked up in the Computer Connection room and that I’ve posted in a half dozen places already.

3.33 Ways: Tracing Rhetorical Style from Prose to New Media

The accompanying a/v playlist (linked from the QR codes) is available over here.

Writing Feverlets*

/ Derek Mueller

Curious about her critique of Derrida’s Archive Fever, I picked up a
copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History from
Bird Library, recalling it from another patron who had checked it out (v. sorry
about that). I deal briefly with AF in Chapter Three. Steedman
makes the point that AF is less about archives than about Derrida’s
concern for the slippage of origins (a theme in his other work) and the
inseparability of psychoanalysis from Freud (and also Judaism). She
writes, "The Foreword [to AF] carried the main argument, about Freud’s
Jewish-ness, and the contribution of Jewish thought to the idea of the archive,
via psycho-analysis" (7). Basically, Steedman is suspicious of Derrida’s
characterization of the fever (as a frenzied pursuit of origins which do not
properly exist). She complains that the concept of the fever is degraded in
translation from Mal d’Archive, and then she enthusiastically claims the
sickness Derrida mocks: "Archive fever, indeed? I can tell you all about
Archive Fever!" (17). Dust undertakes this "all about-ness" at fever’s pitch;
Steedman, all the while, works to correct (or tune, at the very least) Derrida’s
glancing consideration of the archive left behind in his treatment of other
concerns (psychoanalysis, Freud, and so on).

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Chreod: Alignment of Set-ups

/ Derek Mueller

Reading more than writing today, I planned to get down notes on another run
through Porter, Sullivan, et. al.’s "Institutional Critique," (re: my own little
life raft in postmodern geography) the same for Richards’ short piece on "The
Resourcefulness of Words," from Speculative Instruments (re: wandering
resourcefulness, another spatial, and I would say networked,
consideration) , and the same, yet again, for Miller’s latest (Spring
2007) RSQ essay on automation, agency, and assessment, "What Can
Automation Tell Us about Agency?"–not for the diss., this last one, but because
I need to know more about it before responding to an email marked urgent.
Only, rather than note-making, the day turned to night, and my efforts grew more
digressive when I sought out one of Miller’s references to Latour, an article I
hadn’t heard of called, "Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of
a Door-Closer" (Social Problems 35.3). Here is Latour, er, "Jim
Johnson," at his most playful. Terrific. Coincidentally, I also have an
special place in my heart for compression
door-closers.

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