So outside the school was a man with a drum, he
was on a bicycle and he was drumming and when Rose heard him drumming she went to the door and the man was calling out either or either or, either there is a lion here or there is no lion here, either or, either or. (GS, The
World Is Round, 58)
When Six Apart released MT3.0 (Beta-Developer) and a new pricing structure
early last week, I started out with an uneasy feeling. Lots of froth and
fray bubbled out from the announcement; some among the MT faithful cried
out Betrayal!, some swiftly dumped MT…hooks to beefmeat.
Parts of what Clay Shirky wrote at Many2Many
yesterday got me thinking about content management systems as social
organizers, more
specifically weblogging systems, as a kind of cybersocial fabric, a
"community enabler" as he puts it. He argues that social
software built on a free now, pay later upgrade scale dupes the community by imparting a class system
and, basically, the branches or divergences in the system are inimical to
the sense of community shared among users. It makes sense that
"changes to the [social software] tool trigger anxiety." Many anxious
variations have turned up in these six days (apart) from the announcement. FWIW, I
have a less easy time making sense of the move to separate the rational
users and emotional hooks. And I grant that I have, in the use of a handful of
MT plugins, benefited from the fruits of an MT developer community that might
shift, fade, vanish in the months ahead (toward other platforms or more recent
versions).
The comments following Shirky’s post are worth a read, too. Perhaps
it’s because I’ve never fully realized membership in a community of MT users
that I don’t see my laggard attachment to the older, freer version of MT as a
social rip-departure from the upscale 3.0 users. I’ll be able to read
their blogs; they’ll be able to read mine. Presumably, I will be able to
leave them trackbacks; they will be able to link to me. In fairness, I
really don’t want to use Shirky’s post daftly. However, as a blogger, I never
saw myself as a member of an MT community more than, say, a member of a blogging
community among people I admire and read regularly (mostly) in my field(s) of
interest. The self-defined blogroll trumps the CMS community, I think, and
it’s much more directed, much more real to me, having a greater effect by far on
how I conceive of blogging as purposeful. These are the people whose weblogs I keep up with. So, Shirky’s entry set me to thinking about a few
other issues that have stirred in these six days–other material I want
to dig my 2.65 anchor (temporarily, perhaps) against.
First, my blogroll, which has remained relatively stable lately, includes a
array of platforms:
Mister BS – Blog-city; Clancy Ratliff and Charlie Lowe – Drupal; Dennis
Jerz – WordPress JWeblog; Will Richardson – Manila; Dr.
B – Blogger; Ken Smith – pMachine;
Marie Freeman – TypePad; John
Lovas – Manila; Rich Rice –
Who knows?; Amy
Propen – Blog*Spot; Jeff
Rice – Greymatter
These are most of the non-MT bloggers I keep up with (although aggregation
isn’t possible with a few of them, so I visit less frequently, attributable to
business, absentmindedness). Without
gushing burning bloglove, their regular entries, getting to know people by their work,
their ideas, their weblogs–that’s the sense of community membership I identify
with. And…important and, here…I appreciate that they work
from different platforms. I’d feel uneasy if all of them used Movable Type
or Drupal or WordPress.
Changes to platforms (upon which or through which our conversations unfold, our
connections manifest) are less significant to me socially than their persistence
as available, present, and connected bloggers. In other words, it would
matter less if John Lovas, for example, switched to Blogger or Manila than
if he gave up blogging altogether–literally checking out of the
"membership in a community."
Second, software choices present ideological window dressing, perhaps
more, perhaps less. Hanna from join-the-dots makes
this point squarely in her announcement of the switch from MT to WordPress.
For folks committed to GNU
GPU licensing, true open source, as I understand it, the point is
crucial. Honestly, I’m not sufficiently well versed in property law to
give a responsible run-down of the differences between CC, GNU GPU (which
applies to software source more than IP?) and all the gradations. Suffice it to
say that I’ve always struggled to live out ideological fancies with lasting
vigor–I have worn Nikes, munched on KFC, even thrown away perfectly recyclable
materials in the trash. So, without preferring to be an ethical slob or a
hypocrite, I’ll continue with MT 2.65, no matter how that reflects an
ideological layer. I on-ramped to blogging with a recommendation to use
MT. It was free. I’m content with it. I don’t have time to
tinker with Drupal or WordPress. MT will continue to meet my needs for
writing here and teaching and so on. Bunker the social and ideological
gales along the way.
Third, I haven’t observed any features in other blogging systems that vastly
expand the potential of EWM to do what I mean for it to do. Maybe my mood would
change if I got hit with 1000 spam comments, but that hasn’t happened yet. Drupal is the only system whose look, feel and usability appeal to me–for
the wiki functions than the threaded comment functions. On that note, Drupal
and WordPress users have
been out in full glory, converting the MT-disgruntled, inviting the dejected
into the warm and gregarious open source alternatives. Distracting us from
smashed idols and empty dreams. Please forgive the evangelical language.
I’m just having a bit of fun.
This is less of a defense of sticking with an earlier version of MT or riding
out the ripples of Six Apart’s mustard-on-the-shirt announcement last week than
it is an attempt to make sense (for me or for you) of why I’m doing what I’m
doing. Maybe, in the next six months, the competing platforms will feature
collaborative entry authoring (co-authorship or tri-authorship
functionality…for comments, too) and other stuff, such as [insert wishlist
here]. In the meantime, I’m going to idle, wait it out and blog
contentedly in this MT space, crossing my fingers that my delicate sense of
community won’t be obliterated.
| Before |
|
|
| …middle school…hoops practice…pass a few years… |
 |
| After |
Organized a Stampede swimming party yesterday at North Kansas City Community
Center. It was my farewell to the young men who’ve done mostly what I
asked on the basketball court for the last four years. Fine times.
Not much of a before and after comparison. The crew on the left (in
fifth grade, three years ago) morphed into the group on the right (yesterday’s
bunch). Along the way, we expanded to two teams, holding open roster spots
for seventeen players this past winter. And, although I confess to whining
once in a while, joking that it was a mistake to take on so much, I can’t say
I’d change any of it, trade any of the kids or their families for different
ones. Six of them didn’t make it yesterday for the swimming and
pizza. Baseball, church stuff, graduations.
My talk was briefer than usual yesterday; the lifeguard interrupted me to go
over the important pool rules. I told the boys and their families two
things: 1. Young players shouldn’t play for the same coach for more
than four years (which means my time is rightly served and we’re both better for
it being done), and 2. Second place is a better teacher than first place
(note that everyone was holding second place trophies from this winter–both
teams, green and blue, finished one spot behind an unbeaten squad in their
respective leagues). All in all, we finished with a record of 60-32 over
four years–including a couple of first places, second places, and even, um,
well, a winless season in Smithville (against older kids). In late
December, we even matched up with an "eighth grader" who dunked three
times against us in a 90-something-to-much-less-than-90 blowout. Some days
there just weren’t enough timeouts. Still have a few t-shirts in a box if
faithful EWM readers want to claim one (various sizes, athletic gray).
They’re like the one A. (front left in the photo on the right) is wearing.
Seriously–extra shirts. Just shoot me an email. Spare tees are free
(to the first five readers who tell me they’d like one…kinda like a radio call
in); the nostalgia, on the other hand, is priceless.
D’Angelo,
Frank. “The Search for Intelligible Structure in the Teaching of Composition.” On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998.
Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 51-59.
Big Idea
Look! We, compositionists, are disciplinarily vital. We have an
epicenter, proven radials, recognizable and defensible structures holding our
work together. D’Angelo’s essay, I’d say, is best read as a freeze frame
in composition’s becoming. In his afterthought, he notes, "Much has
happened in the teaching of writing and literature that suggests that our
earlier emphasis on structure and sequence may have been misguided and
naive" (59). He cites a long list of folks (Leonard, V. Burke, Scully,
Stade, W. Rice) whose critiques hammered at the (perceived to be) thin, 1976
shell of the dispersed ranges of academic writing. Toward "new unity
and order," D’Angelo diagrams the modes of discourse, partners them with
Kinneavy’s aims of discourse, and folds them together with the contention that
the field must be drawn with a sense of coherence, visible chalk
lines.
Monday Morning
D’Angelo’s essay, brief as it is, proceeds descriptively more than
critically. It’s not an overtly political defense of the field of
composition, but by leading with the allegations that "writing is the
disgrace of American education" (Leonard) and that "many entering
students are in fact ‘functionally illiterate’" (Scully), the essay serves
up an answer as well as a call for a recentering of stray pedagogies. In
one sense, I see D’Angelo’s Braddock as a crucial moment: it carved out a future
into which compositionists could proceed critically. By promoting a
disciplinary structure, it also sets up a core fade to (trained) corps fade
to clubhouse fade to "what you’re doing isn’t
composition."
Because I had time yesterday to take on a decent chunk of the latest CE,
I’m thinking about "Intelligible Structure" under beams of Bonnie
Kyburz’s essay on chaos theory in composition and at least one small bit of
Joseph Harris’ response to Beech and Thelin’s critique of his article on
"Revision as a Critical Practice." First, Kyburz’s chaos theory
work probably wouldn’t have been well received thirty years ago;
"Intelligible Structure" is, in part, D’Anglo’s response to Virginia
Burke’s claim that "there is chaos today in the teaching of composition
because since the turn of the century, composition has lacked an informing discipline."
Arguing for chaos could have been like rocks to a fragile figurine–hazardous.
And I wonder: are these different brands of chaos? In "Meaning Finds
a Way: Chaos (Theory) and Composition," Kyburz writes;
I have long been fascinated (like Taylor and Walker) by the concept of
writing as a chaotic process, and I find that this notion is encouraged by
conversations regarding "alternative discourses" and
"post-process" pedagogy. These progressive,
"alternative" discourses–which shape-shift, form, and reform
according to rhetorical purposes, unbound by the strictures of traditionally
bland, uniform, and regulated "academic writing"–have recently
gained currency in composition studies. Yet, as Gary Olson tells us,
there remains within the field a conservative and nostalgic presence that
denies these and other progressive discourses the sorts of disciplinary status
that can create appreciable change for the composition classroom and for our
notions of what we are about in composition studies ("Working").
Perhaps by returning in iterative fashion to the chaos metaphor–via chaos
theory–that has for so long informed ideas about writing, we may find ourselves
rethinking writing in increasingly complex and promising ways, effectively
resisting pressures to define ourselves and our students through standardized
testing and retrogressive pedagogies, among other ages practices, as the
gatekeepers and worthy practitioners of "order" (that is, Standard
Written–white, middle-class–English. (CE 66.5 505)
Retrogressive pedagogies. Hmm. Good stuff. It reminds me of
Joseph Williams’ phrasal links interface shared via techrhet a few weeks
ago–loosely associated links from among the spray of web texts–discovery and
potentials in chaotic textual extension. Wonderful.
And this clarification from Joseph Harris on his use of diverge fits
with D’Angelo, too, I think:
The verb I actually use in my essay is diverge. I don’t see myself as
trying to head off or rebut the work of Ira Shor, James Berlin, or Patricia
Bizzell. Rather, I view us as starting out with a similar set of aims and
values, but ending up in different places, doing different kinds of
work. Our approaches to teaching don’t conflict so much as branch away
from one another. We need to find ways of talking about such divergences
that don’t lock us into fixed antagonisms–and especially that resist
valorizing some teachers for "empowering" students while dismissing
others as serving the "dominant ideology." (CE 66.5 557)
With this, then, I need only to note that I see D’Angelo’s essay as a
necessary, momentary assembling of the field toward "intelligible
structure" so that compositionists could, again, diverge in good
stead, loosely tied, supported, affirmed by some conceptual disciplinary
guard–a force at once beneficent and differentiating, making divergence
possible yet risky.
Detached Structures
"But one of the most important reasons for our inability to teach
composition adequately is that we have failed to identify the most significant
principles and concepts in the field which make intelligible everything we
do" (52).
"My thesis is that composition does not have an underlying structure
which gives unity and coherence to the field, that that structure can be
conceived of in terms of principles and forms (akin to those found in music or
painting, (for example), and that these principles and forms need to be taught
in an orderly sequence" (53).
"Virginia Burke emphasizes this point even more forcefully: ‘There is
chaos today in the teaching of composition because since the turn of the
century, composition has lacked an informing discipline, without which no field
can maintain its proper dimensions, the balance and proportion of its various
parts, or its very integrity. Consequently, the practice of composition has
shrunk, has lost important elements, has become a victim of all manner of
distortion’" (51).
"According to many critics, the composition curriculum was a loose
amalgam of separate skills and content which tried to pursue its various
objectives in a bewildering variety of ways" (57).
The sixteen-year-old hot water heater in our basement started to wet itself
when the house-shopping plumber came in for the open house today. Did I
mention that we’re selling this place ourselves? Yeah. Great.
Part-time real-estating. Ask me anything about the "Statement of
Condition" form. Anything. Maybe we’ll turn it over to a professional in
early June.
The water heater isn’t gushing yet. Probably got another hot shower or
two in there. I replaced the thermocouple
this winter; figured that would get us through the sale of the house. No
such luck.
Fine with me that the plumber won’t be buying the house. He could’ve
offered to fix the leak he provoked by tapping on stuff. He just walked
around the house, knocking on the walls, looking behind furniture, grumbling
about the tangle of copper lines that *is* the ceilingof the garage. No
aesthetic sensibility, this guy. Those pipes all criss-crossing are beautiful and masterfully crafted. Unconditionally, he wins Most Irritating
Visitor among the three shoppers who stopped by today. The other two were
upbeat and polite.
Between online course conversions and house-selling, I’ve been swamped. And
now I’ve got a hot water heater dilemma to sort through. Took one call
already from a guy who wants $525 to install a new one. "No," I
said, "It’s spelled R-h-e-e-m." Dunno if I can handle replacing
a gas water heater on my own. But for 500 bucks, it had better come with a scalding
sponge bath.
Due to post a serious entry at the blog any time now. Maybe even
later today.
First, the quiz tells me:
| At work or in school: I need to be “hands on”: I like to play games, to compete, and to perform. I enjoy flexibility, changes of pace, and variety. I have difficulty with routine and structure. My favorite subjects are music, art, theatre, and crafts. I often excel in sports. I like solving problems in active ways and negotiating for what I want. I can be direct and like immediate results.
With friends: Planning ahead bores me because I never know what I want to do until the moment arrives. I like to excite my friends with new and different things, places to go, and romantic moments. With family: I need a lot of space and freedom. I want everyone to have fun. It is hard for me to follow rules, and I feel we should all just enjoy one another. |
|
Well, yeah, I’ll be something different tomorrow. Shades of green, gold
or blue. [via Culture
Cat – tks!]
Syracuse
U. announced yesterday that its mascot is now plain and simple: Orange.
Previously the [athletic] department had multiple marks and logos. In addition, Syracuse University’s teams will now use the nickname Orange, replacing Orangemen and
Orangewomen.
Fragmentation is bad for branding; fair enough. Now Otto’s rotund
genderlessness perfectly matches the desexed mascot name. I never cared
much for the genderbent mascots anyhow. It’s been tricky at my current
institution, where "Pirates" is *usually* engendered as male, and
where "Lady Pirates" doesn’t do the trick–in my thinking. Our
graphic solution was to prefer a skull; the skeletal face is pretty much
neutral, right? Of course, the graphic of the skull scares the kids, so
they drew up an alternative for "Little Pirates." What a relief
that SU is simply Orange (and portends to be the first U. with a single official
color, rather than two).
Beats the heck out of rose
pink and pea green (SU’s original colors in 1872). At Park, we’ve been
dickering over Canary and Old Wine versus their modern cousins, Maroon and
Gold. Flipped back, forth and back again in my seven years there.
Old wine: is that the color left in the bottom of the wine glass the morning
after a bottle of Chardonnay? Shiraz?
So I should be reading and working on course migrations into eCollege for the
summer and pasting a trail of fresh caulk in the bathrooms for house showing in
the days ahead. I have to balance my priorities; SU trivia is going to
come in handy when we visit in early June. Maybe I’ll find a sweatshirt
freshly reduced to the discount rack as a result of the switch to the latest
official logo.
 
A
number
of
smart,
insightful
posts have turned up in recent days, working over the abhorrent prisoner abuse
news out of Abu Ghraib; I’m not sure I have a lot to add. I’m still not
ready to dig my heals in on the whole issue; haven’t come to many firm
conclusions about what’s happened, although I do find Mike’s mention of
command
failures to be compelling. Jenny’s reading of Shaviro’s post is
interesting, too, for the suggestion that many of the young folks who
follow the enticements of recruiters have few other post-secondary options, have
vexed experiences with power and aggression, and find, in the recruiter’s pitch,
something promising.
Lynndie England has become the poster child for U.S. military recklessness,
gone to abuse and photo op celebrations of abuse. In one story (whose link
is down), England’s uncle said, basically, she was just following orders.
Another story
from the Baltimore Sun, describes England as a "paper pusher";
she’s also termed a "scapegoat" by a family friend. So what the
world needs now is a resurrection of Stanley Milgram’s experiment on subjects’
willingness to inflict harm by subduing conscience in deference to authority: agentic
shift. It’s the same sort of critique applied to Adolf
Eichmann who was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death.
Note: Some accountability went to his superiors, too.
I mention Eichmann because the corollaries are considerable. And since
Eichmann’s role surfaced during the Nuremberg trials, I thought the following
connection was good enough for the blog. See, Mark Bowden’s Atlantic
Monthly report on "The
Dark Art of Interrogation" seems almost prophetic now, in light of the
torture. In October 2003, Bowden’s piece ran with its premise that
coercive discomfort, while not exactly "torture," is militarily
useful. It saves lives, it enables intelligence officers to head off
plots, and it’s vital to criminal interrogation. Fine. The project was
eerily predictive as I re-read it over the weekend, during the garage sale when
I needed something interruptible. From Bowden:
The official statements by President Bush and William Haynes reaffirming the
U.S. government’s opposition to torture have been applauded by human-rights
groups–but again, the language in them is carefully chosen. What does the Bush
Administration mean by "torture"? Does it really share the activists’
all-inclusive definition of the word? In his letter to the director of Human
Rights Watch, Haynes used the term "enemy combatants" to describe
those in custody. Calling detainees "prisoners of war" would entitle
them to the protections of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the
"physical or mental torture" of POWs, and "any other form of
coercion," even to the extent of "unpleasant or disadvantageous
treatment of any kind." (In the contemptuous words of one military man,
they "prohibit everything except three square meals, a warm bed, and access
to a Harvard education.") Detainees who are American citizens have the
advantage of constitutional protections against being held without charges, and
have the right to legal counsel. They would also be protected from the worst
abuses by the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits "cruel and unusual
punishment." The one detainee at Guantanamo who was discovered to have
been born in the United States has been transferred to a different facility, and
legal battles rage over his status. But if the rest of the thousands of
detainees are neither POWs (even though the bulk of them were captured during
the fighting in Afghanistan) nor American citizens, they are fair game. They are
protected only by this country’s international promises–which are, in effect,
unenforceable.
And this:
The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter.
Candor and consistency are not always public virtues. Torture is a crime against
humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly handled with a wink, or even
a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly practiced. Those who
protest coercive methods will exaggerate their horrors, which is good: it
generates a useful climate of fear. It is wise of the President to reiterate
U.S. support for international agreements banning torture, and it is wise for
American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work. It is also
smart not to discuss the matter with anyone.
Apart from sensationalizing passages, it’s a strong
article for context, for digging into the semantics of "torture,"
splitting out what it is and what it’s not, in legal terms.
"Torture," in this sense, is avoidable–duck the Geneva Compact, dodge
international law and the Constitution, play the slippery terms.
As I looked into Bowden’s article and what follows, I
was especially taken by the letter from Stephen Rickard, Director of the Nuremberg
Legacy Project, an effort to memorialize historic atrocities of war.
Rickard’s letter
shows up in the Jan/Feb 2004 Atlantic Monthly, an issue with the
White House Chiefs of Staff, including Don Rumsfeld, on the front. In his
letter (scroll down to "Interrogations"), Rickard defends the Bush
Administration’s definitive stance on torture and coercion:
Mark Bowden’s article "The Dark Art of Interrogation" (October Atlantic)
is an important survey of calculated cruelty. But when Bowden argues that the
Bush Administration’s position on the legality of "torture lite"
(so-called "stress and duress" interrogation) is ambiguous and
should be, he is wrong on both points.Bowden correctly notes that Administration officials said for months that no
detainee was being "tortured," but failed to rule out "cruel,
inhumane, or degrading" treatment. Both are prohibited by the U.S.
Constitution and international law. Specifically, he cites an April letter
from William J. Haynes II, general counsel for the Defense Department, to
Human Rights Watch, which ruled out only "torture," and says,
"Haynes’s choice of words was careful–and telling."
It’ll be interesting to see how the Nuremberg Legacy
Project responds to the atrocities now upon us, U.S. culpability in the fiasco,
and the currency of it all. So many other atrocities of war have been set
against years of discovery. Eichmann, for example, was pursued for years
before he was tried in 1997 for crimes nearly fifty years past. And while
I’m not sure recent events match Eichmann’s crimes, I recommend a quick read
through Bowden’s story and some of the letters of response. If nothing
else, they affirm the drastic shifts in meaning stemming from context: the
meaning of these months-old articles has been overhauled in the last ten
days.
Thank you for your very thoughtful spam letter. I read it with great
interest. I tried hard, but I wasn’t able to make sense of the cryptic
word list at the end of your message. The part where you said
"splutter blank cutworm" is especially perplexing. What did you mean by that? "Boric magnet budd" is unclear to me, too. But I know you use the word “meaningful,” so I’ll keep working on it.
I saved your note in my spam folder in case I decide one day to call.
Good luck peddling Academic-Qualifications by email,
dmueller
Marylou’s letter in its entirety:
Sun, 09 May 2004 14:03:39 -0500
Academic-Qualifications from NON–ACCR. Universities.
No exams. No classes. No books.
Call to register and get yours in days – 1 203 286 2403
No more ads: elizslifer@poczta.onet.pl
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replicate snuggle australite trumbull boric magnet buddknick avow saffron illustrious roughish eisenhower
pneumatic ethanol anomaly upstate sistine andromeda billow desmond acyclic
splutter blank cutworm debt teletypewrite spectral cartography singleton
meaningful dairymen chauncey client conform nectareous oaken barium roebuck douglas
No need to overstate the obvious tonight. More house stuff in the
works. Notice the jump between the Rc terminal and the Rh terminal somewhere in
40 minute range. It was an afterthought, an after-reading-the-directions
afterthought. Of course, by the time I read the directions, I already had mounted the new thermostat. Only upon trying it out did its
failure reveal phase two (take it apart, read the directions, marry the
terminals in a union of white-coated copper wire.
The garage sale today was a hit–constant traffic from 9 to 3. Only one p’d off customer; we thought she was going to call the BBB, turn us in for selling the bunk bed to another fella before she could grab it. Maybe I’ll blog more about the garage sale tomorrow. They’re really extraordinary social experiments with elaborate codes (we didn’t know), systems for negotiating and just plain weirdness (As in: Old Man: “Do you have any guns for selling?” Sales clerk: “We had a plastic water gun, but it’s already been sold.”)
On the photo: I see a clock says 1:50, a thermostatic map of our house’s climate control switch, a look down R2D2’s neck, and the face of a bot whose expression changes when set to "Cool" or "Fan On." What do you see?
Art preservation isn’t exactly my bag. I understand the great pains
museums go through to fight the agents of time. But everything ages;
the art object, in effect, can never be construed as materially permanent.
Right?
This article from earlier in the week started me thinking about the
possibility that DaVinci could have imagined transformational deteriorations in
his most famous painting, Mona Lisa. So she’s warping; the wood is
bending, with it her expression, her "look": skew. Time has its way. The
certainty of decay evades the most technologically zealous efforts to counteract
imminent physical forces. What will Mona Lisa’s expression be in thirty
years? three-hundred years? three-thousand years? as she peers from
behind the Lourve’s sealed container and untold layers of varnish.
The material alteration–a warped original–is less concerning to me than the
unmentioned details about the numerous ways in which her image has, through
reproduction, been simulated and processed, pasted on t-shirts, etc. John Berger
touches on this in "Ways of Seeing"; Walter Benjamin, too, divides the cult
value from the exhibit value, differentiating between the object and its
original. The cult value is more interesting to me; perhaps the diminishing of
the exhibition value arouses the cult value, and, in turn, the cult value shifts
the exhibition value into a grotesque copy of itself, as a sort of popular
distortion. These value shifts underscore political revolution, too, I
suppose, turning Fascism on its head. (Yep. I need to go back and brush through Benjamin’s
"Mechanical Reproduction." And all of this–Berger included–is in the
Ways of Reading anthology, 6th ed.)
This brings me to a confusing mix of issues that I find fascinating.
Where Benjamin discusses "unconscious optics," I wonder about the extent
to which conscious optics are akin to copyright infringement, to the
controls creeping counter to the CC movement and twinkles of liberated IP. Technologies
are making mechanical reproduction–via fragmented pixelations as frequently as
film photography or film-based moving pictures–more popular and accessible than
ever before. I imagine conscious optics lining up with comp/rhet in
ways they seek for students to engage in the –graphy that is openly,
visually reproductive. And this call for a mix of visual rhetoric, image
and design is not new, nor should it ever be entirely divorced from the
construction of meaning and its pal, hermeneutics. That is, rather than leaving aesthetic making to
inaccessible technologies and their expert operators, we ought to engage students in
aesthetic reproductions tuned rhetorically, tuned textually. No doubt, this
approach to composition is catching on in a few exciting places.
This turn is also playing out against IP tensions, intractable media
ownership issues, and Paleolithic systems for sharing (or not). It makes me
wonder whether the fight for Creative Commons can buck the fangs-sunk-in monster
of sole proprietorships in new media. We have systems–albeit arcane–for
documenting text, attributing origins(!), and giving credit when we must.
But systems for attribution in new media seem far less wieldy. What are
they? Do they come in the form of a Works Cited at the end of a flash
clip? Consider this excerpt from
an article in the NY Times this week (link via
unmediated):
Mr. Routson’s work, which is not for sale, is the latest to find itself in
the murky zone between copyright infringement and artistic license, between
cultural property rights and cultural commentary. On Oct. 1 a new Maryland law
will make the unauthorized use of an audiovisual recording device in a movie
theater illegal. Last week two people were arrested in California for operating
camcorders in movie theaters. One was apprehended by an attendant wearing
night-vision goggles.
It’s not definitive (nor am I carefully read in these matters–sincere
apologies!), but there comes a convergence between mechanical reproduction,
media proprietorship, reproductive rights (as in copying media rather than
making babies), and this business of conscious optics. I have
suspicions that as the gulf between technology and humans narrows, as assistive
devices help us see, hear, remember with tech-stimulated consciousness
(recorders, amplifiers, etc.), the boundaries between experience and mediation
will blur and with them, the battles over IP will flourish, perhaps even
crossing over into our minds (you can’t think it if you don’t have the rights!).
Mona Lisa’s warp and laws against filming in a movie theater: pieces of a
fascinating series of media twists.
