“I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation–with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.” — Amory Blaine
A friend of mine recently opined,
“In the south they don’t mind living next to black people as long as they make less money, whereas in the north we don’t mind them making the same salary as long as they live across town.”
This, admittedly uncomfortable statement, seems pretty true to me and I don’t think it just applies to African-Americans. And lately I am wondering what is to be done about it.
It is a gorgeous afternoon here in St. Louis after a morning of rain and I have found myself in the usual haunt –with a large chunk of unexpected free time–with my left foot soaked and my right foot dry after a puddle across the street got the better of my agility, thinking about cognitive surplus.
At the very moment I had built the impetus to write that first sentence and plunge myself into the act of putting “black on white” a friend, an expert in paleotypography (Newton, primarily), comes to me with an existential crisis which evolves into a long conversation. The gist of our discussion is the obvious absurdity of his work on seemingly unimportant minutia in the face of unresolved injustices in the world. The hypotheticals of youth, his free time, and frustrated efforts led him to feel guilt for his sins of omission: he has done nothing to make the world better. The man who had dismounted his Harley at the peak of our conversation aptly said, “These are the problems of a man with a full belly.”
Too true and directly relevant to Clay Shirky’s point (text or video):1
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
Full bellies and free time can be as much an asset as a deficiency and Clay articulates well they means a society cops with such existential dilemmas:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
In an age where there is cognitive surplus (his phrase) and easy exchange of information, I think, easily exacerbates these sentiments. His point was that the dawn of the internet and its increasing use is a boon for this cognitive surplus, a good medium for its trade, through blogging and content creation. However, in light of the social injustices in this world, I suspect blogging in all its forms is hardly the answer–and Clay, I presume, would agree with me. While it does get people thinking and interacting with ideas in a more engaging way then, say, television, it still is a means for deferral at worst and merely a way to organize data at its best. Cognitive surplus is certainly a blessing for Western culture but only if we can figure out how to cash it in.
This is very much Clay’s idea and I suggest you go check out his perspective.
As it turns out, sleep deprivation is not condusive to writing and, couple that the neglect of putting black on white, you will find yourself in the position of writing about writing. Normally I would just forgo jotting something down and watch a film or play some sort of video game (I have developed a recent fascination with art house games) but the virtue of daily writing and the urging of a friend sitting across from me at the cafe. This is all terribly meta, I know, and consequently just a preface to anything of real substance (and I legitimately wonder why you are still reading).
Isn’t this, however, the case with much of our media consumption these days? in lieu of any absolutist or, to be softer (stronger?) in my language, courageous ideas we are willing to proffer, we find ourselves pushing the real questions to the background only to ask continually more and more basic questions. We are enamored with–and please pardon the word–”prioricity.” I know it is the case with me anyway: the only question I ever seem to ask anymore is “why do I/you think we know what we know. I, and quite possible a large swath of academic culture, spend our times on prefaces and prolegomena. A few years ago, and if you read this blog (or its earlier incarnations) with any frequency you will surely remember, a trilogy of essay I began discussing:
1. Why I should write
2. Why I should not write
3. Why I should not play devil’s advocate
The purpose of the essays was to assualt prioricity, to out-meta the meta, and show the covert vacuity of the ironic and clever. Quite naturally and un/ironically, the beforehand-saying obscured and frustrated the trilogy itself. My plan? To out wit the clever by its own gestures rather than criticism, sketching a protrait of the clever.
In a culture where meaning is defined less and less by the external world and more and more by one’s perspective of it, rhetoric and, consequently, hermeneutics shapes our beliefs more than in the postivists heyday. Successful rhetoric, the arguments people buy (the economic term is not accidental), are more powerful than any measure of “objectivity.” (Now I am as skeptical as the next contemporary about such words as “objective” and will in the future replace it with “intellectual honesty” or “proper reading.”) In other words, the clever has more value than the true (shall we say, instead of “true,” “honest and charitable assessment” or “philosophical” in its most etymological sense?). But I am not sure that the essays are actually possible, that they cannot stand on/by there own feet/feat. Perhaps the clever cannot out wit itself. Only time will tell. Shoot, it helped unravel modernism, didn’t it?
Regardless, I am using this post to give myself the impetus to pick up the essays again. I have a reasonable amount of time to work on the project because I have a few other projects I am working on. Andrew has a new theory on how to avoid procrastination, differ projects with other projects. Something is bound to get done eventually.
I found this little gem while rooting through the old record collection with the soon-to-be Eisenbrauns:
A few days ago a fellow flocker asked for a theological analysis of Jung’s notion of Synchronicity. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of his work for about five years but his question was less academic and more concerned with the broad perspective of coincidence and meaning so wikipedia was a reasonable place to start for information on the subject:
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.
In other words, there is acausal meaning for coincidences which aren’t from God. Hence my friend wrote, “I think Christians are conspicuously firm in disregarding synchronicity, but certainly there are, at least for me in my research, questions regarding what happens in our free will that appear to have meaning, a synchronicity, yet the answer is not revealed or may never be revealed so we can feel strongly that it isn’t from God,” and then posed this question: “If there’s meaning and we conclude that it isn’t of God, then is it the universe? Time and space to connect with the subconscious?”
I took, not surprisingly to those who know me, a fairly circuitous route to answer the question. The first part gives some context and analysis of the Christian perspective of human free agency and God’s will and the second discusses the question posed. Below is a revised and reformatted version of my answer, rough but ready enough.
An interpreter is a decipherer and communicator of meanings. He is a translator between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions. He is, in essence, an executant, one who ‘acts out’ the material before him so as to give it intelligible life. Hence the third major sense of ‘interpretation’. An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia. A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography. a violinist a Bach partita. In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation.Such understanding is simultaneously analytical and critical. Each performance of a dramatic text or musical score is a critique in the most vital sense of the term: it is an act of penetrative response which makes sense sensible. The ‘dramatic critic’ par excellence is the actor and the producer who, with and through the actor, tests and carries out the potentialities of meaning in the play. The true hermeneutic of drama is staging (even reading out loud of a play will, usually, cut far deeper than any theatrical review). In turn, no musicology, no music criticism can tell us as much as the action of meaning which is performance. It is when we experience and compare different interpretations, this is to say performances, of the same ballet symphony or quartet, that we enter the life of comprehension.
– Real Presences, by George Steiner
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