Because some flaws are more glaring when the paint is fresh, before it has dried.
The first word of chapter three’s draft: in. The last word: hence. The last word winks at me and smiles. Why? I don’t use the word “hence” often. We both know it is not the last word but instead the word that comes–for now–at the end.
I thought I would use something from Everything Is Miscellaneous (Weinberger) or Ambient Findability (Morville), but I have not. They are relievers–back-ups for coming revisions.
Picked up this clip, “The Child,” from infosthetics this morning and found it striking enough–for its geotypography–to justify pasting it on. This is what the world would be like were it purely textual. The premise is simple enough–a couple in New York City rushes to the hospital where their baby will be delivered. Only, is the baby a word? And wouldn’t NYC have more words?
Anyway, I say it’s worth stowing in your playlist as a conversation troubler the next time culture-as-text, thick description, or an everything’s text worldview comes up.
I may have mentioned before that I subscribe to the RSS feed for
my del.icio.us network. For me
this means big things. I use Google Reader to aggregate all of the links bookmarked in
del.icio.us by users I have identified as belonging to my network.
Twenty-two more or less active gatherers of the net’s goods, the whole team
working in service of, well, themselves (I almost wrote me). They
don’t necessarily post links for me (although del.icio.us makes this possible,
and others have shared links with me directly a time or two). But because
they post them for themselves, the bookmarks carry something like credibility, a
small portion of this sort of matters to somebody. How much time do I
spend sifting through the feed bubbling with all of these links from my
del.icio.us network? Rarely more than a minute. Sometimes I herd the
links into my own collection. Other times I open a link in a new tab and
see what it’s all about (this is the most time-consuming practice; also,
sometimes, the most rewarding). Most of the time I move along, having merely
glanced the bookmarks. Even when I pass them by, they give me a vague
sense of what someone else is collecting (or researching or doing or even buying
for holiday gifts…I won’t say whose gift ideas I borrow every
December). These practices, like many others (not all of them digital), promote
what I think of as network sense (this, a key idea I am developing in the
diss).
On this, the Barthes of September (so
occasioned),
I am left with no choice but to post an excerpt. But which one? Something
apropos to this afternoon’s mood (any respite from Why does this over-warm
office where I sit working on my dissertation smell like shit? It’s
94F–record-setting heat in CNY. A dead squirrel in the eaves? I refuse to
climb in the small, hot, unlit nooks to inspect them. Tactic: wait it out–in
the office, curious, resting on hope alone that the unbearable stink resolves itself).
RB (from RB) on "My Head is Confused":
On a certain kind of work, on a certain kind of subject (usually the ones
dissertations are made of), on a certain day of life itself, he would like
to be able to post as a motto the old-wives’ remark: My head is confused
(let us imagine a language in which the set of grammatical categories would
sometimes force the subject to speak in the aspect of an old woman).And yet: at the level of his body, his head never gets confused.
It is a curse: no value, lost, secondary state: always consciousness: drugs
excluded, yet he dreams of them: dreams of being able to intoxicate himself
(instead of getting sick right away); anticipating from a surgical operation
for at least once in his life an absence, which was denied him for a
general anesthesia; recovering every morning, upon waking, a head swimming a
little, but whose interior remains fixed (sometimes, falling to sleep with
something worrying me, upon first waking it has disappeared; a white minute,
miraculously stripped of meaning; but the worry rushes upon me, like a bird
of prey, and I find myself altogether back where I was, just as I was the
day before).Sometimes he feels like letting all this language rest–this language
which is in his head, in his work, in other people, as if language itself
were an exhausted limb of the human body; it seems to him that if he could
take a rest from language, he could just rest altogether, dismissing all
crises, echoes, exaltations, injuries, reasonings, etc. He sees language in
the figure of an exhausted old woman (something like an antique cleaning
woman with worn hands) who sighs for a certain retirement…. (176)
Why not this? While there is no relief from the odor (decomposing flesh, I am sure of it),
there is a little relief for my head. It is a couple of pages less
confused than it was yesterday.
Miller, Carolyn. “What Can Automation Tell Us About Agency?” RSQ 37.2 (2007): 137-157.
Porter, James E., Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffrey Grabill, and Libby Miles. “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change.” CCC 51.4 (2000): 610-642.
Whether or not the moon is made of green cheese is of no concern to my dissertation. Because I make other claims, however, Latour’s account of the performance of statements and things in Science in Action (1987) applies:
[W]e have to remember our first principle: the fate of a statement depends on others’ behavior. You may have written the definitive paper proving that the earth is hollow and that the moon is made of green cheese but this paper will not become definitive if others do not take it up and use it as a matter of fact later on. You need them to make your paper a decisive one. If they laugh at you, if they are indifferent, if they shrug it off, that is the end of your paper. A statement is thus always in jeopardy, much like the ball in a game of rugby. If no player takes it up, it simply sits on the grass. To have it move again you need an action, for someone to seize and throw it; but the throw depends in turn on the hostility, speed, deftness or tactics of the others. At any point, the trajectory of the ball may be interrupted, deflected or diverted by the other team–playing here the role of the dissenters–and interrupted, deflected or diverted by the players of your own team. The total movement of the ball, of a statement, or an artefact, will depend to some extent on your action but to a much greater extent on that of a crowd over which you have little control. (104)
Must every statement be written as if it will endure the perpetual jeopardy Latour names? Not necessarily. But–and this gets at the challenge of making statements–“the total movement…of a statement” should be, to the extent possible, anticipated, even if this requires granting too much clout to the crowd (i.e., audience in action).
Flower,
Linda S., Karen A. Scriver, James F. Stratman, Linda Carey, and John R. Hayes. "Cognitive
Processes in Revision." Advances in Applied Psycholinguistics.
Sheldon Rosenberg ed. New York:
Cambridge, 1987. 176-240.
Flower,
Linda S., Heidi Swarts, and John R. Hayes. "Designing Protocol Studies of
the Writing Process: An Introduction." New Directions In Composition
Research. Richard Beach and Lillian S. Bridwell, eds. New York:
Guilford, 1984. 53-71.
Ulmer,
Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York:
Routledge, 1989.
