Tag: politics

Decay Curators

/ Derek Mueller
Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash.

A couple of recent conversations led me promisingly to Caitlin DeSilvey’s work from around 2017 related to her book, Curated Decay: Inevitable Loss and Other Opportunities. Although the book itself hasn’t arrived yet, I’ve learned from reviews and by watching Desilvey’s 2018 Handbury Historic Preservation lecture at UVa that historic preservation scholars consider her work postpreservationist, in that it keys on the cyclical generativity hinging decay to renewal and renewals again to unavoidable decay. I especially appreciate about Desilvey’s research that it accords with gone-noting as I have been studying and otherwise coming to terms with it in recent years, and so I thought I would highlight just a few more points from the lecture and consider their implicit connections to more than aging structures and their contents (e.g., sheds pulled to leaning and their rusty, or dusty inventories).

At one point DeSilvey says, “There is always a politics to loss.” I remember vividly a question posed to me after a talk I gave a few years ago that suggested gone-noting should strive for more causal and jurisdictional attribution. In other words, when a journal, listserv, conference, publisher, or other so-called structure of disciplinary participation lapses, gone-noting its lapse and marking it for possible renewal or repair is sort of like again and again bowing to “graceless turnover” (North) but without bringing us up close to root causes. Certainly politics play a part in loss, though such politics are not neatly codified nor attributable to individual actors. These do not tend to be a megaphonic politics of campaign texts, candidate yard signs, or bumper stickers. The discontinuation of EM-Journal years ago at EMU may serve as one simple example. Although its short run was successful if judged by its accomplishments, like 1) publishing period issues of student writing from first-year writing and across the disciplines; 2) featuring writing from selected senior capstones in economics and anthropology, which in turn were used instructionally, and 3) apprenticing graduate and undergraduate students to developmental, technical, and copy editing and related publishing workflows, it could not gain even modest support from administration. We had included a sunset clause in the charter (owing, notably, to advice I’d once heard Bill Hart-Davidson give), declaring an end if after three years it did not have modest support, and in 2014, the journal shuttered, lights out. To return to the point about the politics in any loss, it would be challenging to locate tangibly the executors of those politics. Tempting as it might be to link them to individual decision-makers, in retrospect I see it more as a case of running decisions through the befuzzed filters of austerity and agentic shift, with the agentic shift pointing to managerial spreadsheets and the budgets sort of articulated therein. In far too many cases, considering the ends of writing program related things (albeit in my limited experience), the politics of loss owe to an lossy economic surrounds. With this example, I am led again to a scale question I have not resolved just yet, about the scales of gone-noting, about big gones and little gones, or perhaps about gones whose discontinuation affects the polis within the political as distinct from the oikos/house within the economic. Some gones are planets; other gones are lint.

This all leads to another keen turn of phrase in DeSilvey’s presentation, “continued ruination as management.” The phrase strikes me as worthy of return, especially given the repeated pattern of how we (in public systems) frequently aw-shucks in the faculty lounge about declining state appropriations, longing for creative and resourceful workarounds, commiserating about how tough it is to do the same (sometimes, more) with less. We do not as of yet have in higher education Officers of Continued Ruination any more than Officers of the Encouraged Parrhesiast. Change takes time; titles don’t always keep pace, and the regents know we cannot afford more administrators but perhaps we can do with just one more fiscal bard whose song sings of infocratic spreadsheets. Formula fed, resulting tabulations are never enough due to new construction and despite gainful investment profiles, stacked endowments, cheddared hedge funds, and superlative credit ratings.

DeSilvey turns to personal stories to contextualize the permission she extends to using palliative metaphors for buildings (around the 25 minute mark of the lecture, specifically). In a few cases, I have noticed others commenting on academic programs, departments, colleges, and even entire university systems using palliative metaphors, implicitly extending care ethics and related public health, healing, and medicinal ethics to institutional entities. The same for the field: a journal on its last breath, an unwell conference or organization, a hypersomniacal listserv. I take from DeSilvey’s go-ahead that the palliative predicts a gone-going arc, that it scores pronoiacally an alignment of setups more aptly figured as breakdowns. The use of palliative metaphors notes a decay path. I can’t quite come up with the right word for this. It’s not the same as a chreod, or canalized path, but it does seem linked to -hodos, or pathing. Rot, decomposition, half lives: these terminologies name something similar, yet I would like to have a term that is chreod-like while denoting decay curation. For now, composting will do, I guess, though compost hearkens to organic breakdown. In the context of a budget committee I have served on, I once heard an institutional/organizational variation of this called “reduction exercise.” I’m going to hold this detail open, wait on the word, and imagine that doing so will bring along a name for ‘chreod gone to decay.’ Possibly ‘atropheod,’ for wasting path.

My last highlight, for now, from the lecture holds onto the notion of ruderality, or the plant species who root first and participate in the reclamation of disturbance zones. Ruderality (from rudur, Latin for “rubble”) considers what grows amidst interruption, what roots within-across entropic landscapes. In the previous EWM entry, I mentioned the Spanish needles showing up with yellow-flowered force all along the embankments where I live here in SW Virginia. Their seeds attach to everything, and evidently, this assures for them a formidable expansion, especially in places subjected to bulldozing within the past decade. I wonder, too, about the interruptive landscapes that are not terrestrial/biospheric but that instead track toward what Han calls the psychospere. When attention structures are bulldozed, as can be and oftentimes is the entropic case with streaming media, social media, and especially email, what grows there, what reading and writing are possible, what roots relational and holds, substantive enough to accrue memory or meaning. I suspect I’ll be holding onto ruderality as a model for thinking about aftermaths and what rustles hopeful in anything noted as gone.

A Different Temporal Politics

/ Derek Mueller

Lightly pressed, zig-zagging, and non-confident is the line I want to ever so cautiously draw to distinguish the sort of informatizing that 1) engluts the “inforg” from the sort that 2) revitalizes familial, cultural, and community shards, enshrouding them with metadata and re-siting them for a while maybe longer (if max-accessibly, or openly, all the better). In Non-Things, Han writes “This terrestrial order is today being replaced by the digital order. The digital order de-reifies the world by informatizing it” (1). The short book goes on to deliver on this premise. “Inforg”, according to Han, comes off the bench, subbing in for Dasein. And we humans are changed; for me, Han’s language—his theory made as art—pointilates felt senses, impressions, and hunches that have visited. I want to scrawl that line between 1) and 2) above because the informatizing, as much as it fuels estrangement from the terrestrial realm (Are those kids outside playing soccer I hear? No.), we still have rhetorical non-things (e.g., memories) that may be informatizing while at once mediating many of the human effects Han also values: community, sited culture, and old things. Thus, I am making sense of Non-Things with full acknowledgement that, yes, for the most part, material culture is losing the hold it once held; but, with this, there do seem to be at least a few exceptions (archives, languages, artifacts, recipes, etc.). Perhaps informatizing is nevertheless a seductive postponement, or a kind of rain delay; gones still go gone, but at a slower clip. Not tooooodaaaaay, inforg. Not today.

Time again! On page 7, Han writes, “Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding, and commitment are time-consuming practices. The decay of stabilizing temporal architectures, including rituals, makes life unstable. The stabilization of life would require a different temporal politics” (7).

I have not yet read Adrian Little’s book, Temporal Politics, though the table of contents has me nodding with curiosity. And that I was re-reading Han for class while Jenni Odell’s Saving Time sat on the couch next to me—a book I’ve only just begun—suggests I have more work to do with fanning out this idea of temporal politics, reading more on the heels of others who have built upon or with this idea. In consideration of first principles, I associate it with a cosmological tension we discussed in ENGL6344: Rhetoric in Digital Environments a couple of weeks ago: Do you conceive of time as a line? A circle? Or both? And it reminds me, too, of the U.S. voter suppression efforts that have shifted from redistricting and gerrymandering as a spatial phenomenon to, in recent years, a temporal phenomenon (i.e., gerrymandering time as yet another push to discourage certain kinds of voting). As a third arrow, I considered who do we know whose temporal politics is already different. Besides yogis and ghosts and chickens, I don’t feel especially sure. Cicadas, black walnuts, crows, earthworms1I pose this casually and playfully but don’t mean for it to be flippant. Here I am not wanting to take nematode politics far, but celebrate these kin whose living burials, growth layers, and durative patterns are refreshingly mysterious.. There are plenty of examples of time figuring into politics (the deeply gray prospect of octogenarian presidential candidates, lifetime appointments for supreme court justices, the dinky leadership terms in low-level orgs like condo associations, boards of supervisors, and higher ed admins, and so on). I mention this not to plant a flag in the matter but instead to wonder aloud, to write, an intransitive verb.

Recast with discplinary prefixtures, the passage from Han also surprises with a dismount of a different, potentially also-heavy, gravity: “Everything that stabilizes [disciplinary] life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding, and commitment are time-consuming practices. The decay of stabilizing temporal [disciplinary] architectures, including rituals, makes [disciplinary] life unstable. The stabilization of [disciplinary] life would require a different temporal politics” (7). List decays. Note gones. This is [disciplinary] living.

I set out, above all, to underscore just how personally appealing is this different temporal politics. I like the idea. I’m already learning how, listening to the seasons, senses halved, senses doubled, groundward and skyward.

Notes

  • 1
    I pose this casually and playfully but don’t mean for it to be flippant. Here I am not wanting to take nematode politics far, but celebrate these kin whose living burials, growth layers, and durative patterns are refreshingly mysterious.

Woolgar and Cooper, “Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence?”

/ Derek Mueller

I stumbled across Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper’s article, “Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses’ Bridges, Winner’s Bridges, and Other Urban Legends in ST&S” (Social Studies of Science, 29.3, June 1999), a few weeks ago as I prepared for a session of ENGL516:Computers and Writing: Theory and Practice in which we were taking up, among other things, Winner’s chapter from The Whale and the Reactor, “Do Artefacts Have Politics?” Reading the chapter yet again, I thought I would try to learn more about these well-known bridges. I’d never seen one of them, after all.

Woolgar and Cooper’s article is one of those I wish I’d read years ago. It opens with an unexpected event: Jane, a student in a grad seminar, challenges the premise of Winner’s artefact-politics example. In effect, she says the clearance-challenged bridges are passable, that they don’t actually prevent buses from traveling the parkways on Long Island, that Winner’s claim is a “crock of shit.”

Woolgar and Cooper turn next to Bernward Joerges’ investigation of Winner’s bridges, their history, and the legitimacy in Winner’s attribution of politics to these artefacts. Rather than accepting Joerges’ position that Winner’s example crumbles because the actual bridges allow buses to pass, however, Woolgar and Cooper suggest the bridges-articulated wield a certain “argumentative adequacy” that is not necessarily eclipsed by the bridges-actual (434). In fact, they say that proof of Winner’s error is difficult to come by, despite the bus timetable they ultimately obtained, despite Jane and another student’s efforts to corroborate the effect of these bridges on bus traffic.

The important recurrent feature in all this narrative [about efforts to corroborate the effects of the bridges] is that the definitive resolution of the story, the (supposedly) crucial piece of information, is always just tantalizingly out of reach…. For purposes of shorthand, in our weariness, in the face of the daunting costs of amassing yet more detail, or just because we’re lazy, we tend to ignore the fact that aspects of the story are always (and will always be) essentially out of reach. Instead we tell ourselves that ‘we’ve got the story right.’ (438)

Following a discussion of urban legends and technology, Woolgar and Cooper conclude with several smart points about the contradictory aspects of technology, that it “is good and bad; it is enabling and it is oppressive; it works and it does not; and, as just part of all this, it does and does not have politics” (443). They continue, “The very richness of this phenomenon suggests that it is insufficient to resolve the tensions by recourse to a quest for a definitive account of the actual character of a technology” (443). And, of course, once we can relax in efforts to trap a-ha! an “actual character,” we might return an unavoidably rhetorical interplay among texts and things, between discourses and artefacts. Winner, too, has built bridges, “constructed with the intention of not letting certain arguments past” (444). Periodically inspecting both bridges-actual and bridges-articulated is also concerned with mapping or with accounting for the competing discourses, the interests served by them, and so on: “Instead of trying to resolve these tensions, our analytic preference is to retain and address them, to use them as a lever for discerning the relationship between the different parties involved” (443). And, importantly, this is a lever that produces a different kind of clearance, “under which far more traffic might flow” (444).

Note: There’s much more to this, including Joerges’ response here (PDF), which I have not read yet, but I nevertheless find the broader debate fascinating, relevant to conversations about OOO we’re having on our campus in preparation for Timothy Morton and Jeff Cohen’s visit next month, and–even if I have arrived late–a series of volleys I need to revisit if and when I return to Winner’s example in the future.

Primary Flavors

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

Primary Flavors

So that the sweet tooths of the house (my own included) would stop gnashing
at me about how little we have on hand to please (and also to rot) them, I
boiled together three half-batches of rock candy early this afternoon:
peppermint, anise, and cinnamon. Can you tell from the photo that I’ve
never made rock candy before?

Continue reading →

Insinewating Ties

/ Derek Mueller

Election coverage this week has shifted from the blaze town hall draw to the
cascading economic slide (i.e., a crash dragged out for a few days) to the
McCain campaign’s great efforts to weave strong ties between Obama and
Bill
Ayers. Am I riled up about any of this? Not really. I had the
debate on in the background as I did other work, I have watched the modest
paltry TIAA-CREF nest egg I micro-accumulated over seven years at Park U. suffer
disfigurations akin to Humpty Dumpty, and I don’t for a second accept that Obama
is terrorist-like for the company he kept with Ayers.

So what, then?

I have been interested in the way the campaigns try to establish ties and
linkages. Palin and other McCain surrogates have tried mightily to forge a
strong tie between Obama and Ayers. If they succeed, if they get people to
believe that such a tie is strong, that, in effect, Ayers of old and Obama of
late think alike, then they will have sprung from thin air a damaging blow:
probable guilt by the company one keeps. Yet, nodes perform ethos. Obama
can simply say, "No tie," or "weak tie," and the burden of establishing a
linkage falls on the accusers.

There are other interesting questions here about temporality and, perhaps,
about how the ties suggested by associative technologies (e.g., Facebook) will
function as evidence of strong ties in the future. Serving on a board
together, dinner at one’s house: these are time-constrained connections.
They do not live on in quite the same way as some more recent developments.
Maybe we’ll see more of it in the weeks ahead, but so far this election cycle
has seemed to me to dwell on whose network is more presidential, more executive
in its constitution: McCain’s? (a network of houses, a claim to be a Senate
boundary-spanner, a hand in the Keating Five heist) or Obama’s? (a recklessly
outspoken
pastor in Wright, a radical former colleague in Ayers, generous
friends in F. May and F. Mack). Campaign: another name for the high stakes
practice of network building at breakneck pace–a rhetorical production of ties and associations
that will trip one candidate into second place and vault the other into the
White House.

***

Somewhat related (via). Warning: Cover their ears or the innocents will pick up a cuss at the end:

SPPF

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment

Just one month ago John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his V.P.
running mate. I’d never heard of her. Oh, how much we have learned over
these thirty days. I can’t say that I tune into the news all that often,
but I feel like I’ve taken a short course on Palin or, worse, had an emergency Palinoscopy performed on my brain (not to worry, I remain lucid enough to know
how to vote in another month).

For instance,
here’s a
can’t-miss tidbit from the New Yorker’s "Coconut Oil Department"
about the tanning bed Palin bought for her Juneau home.

Of the many things revealed about the Alaska governor Sarah Palin since
she became John McCain’s running mate last month, one of the most curious is
the fact, reported two weeks ago, that she had a tanning bed installed in
the state mansion in Juneau. Obama supporters seized on the news, arguing
that private tanning-bed ownership is evidence that Palin isn’t the folksy
hockey mom she claims to be, while Republican partisans pointed out that she
bought the bed secondhand from an athletic club, and, moreover, that tanning
is a reasonable activity, given Alaska’s sun-deprived winters.

Meh. Might be nothing. Although this does stand in odd
contrast–Vitamin D or no Vitamin D–to McCain’s medical record. The
tanning bed can’t have all that much bearing on Palin’s promise as a candidate, can it? The following two,
however, are pieces I can’t seem to forget any time her name comes up. These are
the lingering associations that have, for me, overrun any other impressions I
might have (including, perhaps, any that will emanate during Thursday
evening’s debate).

1. The Runaway Train Response to Couric (via)

2. Lessig’s Research on Palin’s Experience Relative to other VP’s (via)

Don’t watch them back to back unless you’re unafraid of enduring (er,
enjoying?) with me a full-on Palindectomy.