Culture

Historicism and Materiality

preterite Computers, Culture, Economics

Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, in their “Introduction” to The Jameson Reader, point to the uneasy intersection of discussions of literature and culture with discussions “of economic and social structures” (1) in Jameson’s work. While a lot of the work that’s been derived from Jameson’s writing makes me incredibly impatient (it seems to me a fine example of what the Tutor has lambasted as the spineless equivocations of postmodern theory), some of Jameson’s ideas are useful, and seem germane to what I’m looking at.
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Conspicuous Leisure

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Meta), Culture, Writing

Worsley talks about “The division within the working class between the ‘rough’ and the ‘respectable'”(316) and notes that when such divisions are coupled to other identity markers — ethnicity, say, or religion — class conflict and resentment can become more intense. A city near here recently agreed to receive (not sure what the proper non-paternalistic verb is here: permanently settle?) several hundred refugees from an African nation. There’s been considerable hubbub, much of it because the community in question is poorer and historically Polish and Puerto Rican and members of those ethnic communities have pointed to the inevitable heightened competition for jobs, apartments, et cetera that will result. In other words, there’s resentment in the community into which the refugees will be attempting to assimilate. This is nothing new — recall the conflicts in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing — but still, it points again to ways in which members of a particular class as economic category will struggle against one another for the same resources rather than engaging in struggle with members of other classes or in attempts to change the nature of the hierarchy.
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Two Links from PLSJ

preterite Culture, Economics, Politics

From the super-smart Anne Galloway, two links of interest.

“World’s poor to get own search engine.”

Great. So now the world can shunt the poor into slums online as well as offline. Instead of diddling with the symptoms, folks, why not have a go at the causes? Does the assertion that “people in poor countries are short of money but have time on their hands, whereas people in the West are cash-rich but time-poor” strike anyone else as problematic?

Real Life: The Full Review

A nice joke, that’s been kinda done before (check out the site for Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet; the book itself offers some interesting insights, and some less-interesting obfuscations), but most engaging to me for what the review says about the author’s/audience’s view of the world. Would most folks characterize the following quotations as indicative of mainstream American ideology? (It’s an honest question, and given my previous post, I acknowledge that my selective quotation is a form of fisking, although I’d protest that my intent isn’t to demolish whatever I may see as reviewer Greg Kasavin’s “argument” in the joke review, but to ask other folks who might read this for their sense of the prevalence of the ideology behind Kasavin’s descriptions. Not trying to be nasty, Greg; I thought the faux-review was kinda fun in spots.)
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Easy Online Agonism?

preterite Culture

In watching the aftermath of the recent discussion of humanism and anti-humanism (now there’s a fine reductive binary that could use some deconstructing, no?) at Invisible Adjunct, I was startled by the apparent hostility of the fisking performed by Robert Schwartz. Certainly, others in the discussion engaged in a bit of fisking, but none to Schwartz’s degree. It got me thinking about fisking as a genre particular to the net, and so I did a little googling. Imagine my delight at seeing that fellow traveler Dennis Jerz was far, far ahead of me, and even included a link that I see now, long after the fact, as demonstrating quite well that the recent discussions of “the postmodern” (as I think most of the participants understood) were hardly a new topic. (Now there’s a clunker of a sentence structure.) But thinking about fisking (definitions here and here) raises some interesting questions for me about the instrumental view of technology.
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Educause: Throw Tech At It

preterite Computers, Culture, Education

Cross-posted as a response at Kairosnews in slightly abbreviated form.

cel4145 at Kairosnews has posted an interesting story featuring two links (PDF warning on both) from Educause, an organization that I feel really ought to have a .com domain, or at the very least a .org, but definitely not a .edu: after poking around their site for a bit (check out the corporate stuff), it’s pretty obvious these guys are total shills for corporate technology in education. Not that it’s really surprising, given the tenor of the articles, or even the organization’s motto (“Hello, tech support? Yes, the state has cut our budget, there’s a cheating scandal in the Physics department, the adjuncts are trying to unionize, the English faculty has been snacking on continental philosophers again, and our quarterback’s in jail; we’d like our university bugfix service pack 4.8.3b, please”), but worth noting, since both articles demonstrate unproblematic alliegance to the philosophies that (1) technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods is an independent and value-free force driving social change, (2) universities in providing education qua consumable good must respond to that technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods, (3) universities in their responses to that technological advance should serve corporate/consumer culture. To be even less surprised, check out what Educause says about their readership and their corporate sponsors and advertisers.

Maybe you can tell that I didn’t much care for what either article had to say.
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Still More on Relations of Production

preterite Computers, Culture, Writing

I used weblogs yesterday as an example to make a distinction between for-profit and for-pleasure writing. As usual, I was a little hasty. Consider what Glenn Reynolds had to say this morning:

“You can blog for the money — in which case you should be very glad that Andrew [Sullivan] is raising the bar, and generating a general sense that it’s okay to donate. Or you can blog for fun, in which case why should you care if he’s getting some bucks out of it?”

Reynolds goes on to talk about his reasons for blogging, and has some interesting points and links; his perspective helps me to see that maybe, as with the tentative answer to that question Catherine Gammon asked me, the motivations might not matter as much as the act itself. For me, this is a small step towards one way of thinking about the production of writing, within and outside of the composition classroom. At the same time, it raises other questions.
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Writing as Property

preterite Computers, Culture, Writing

The Movable Type templates (which I’ve only so far modified very slightly for this weblog) include a section for Creative Commons licenses, which I’ve thought about using here, in particular an attribution license. However, the smart points folks have made in the Creative Commons discussion at Metafilter caused me to stop and think a little; I still haven’t made up my mind.

Compositionists who do research in their classrooms, furthermore, are expected to respect students’ writing as the property of the student, and to take considerable care around issues of permissions before reproducing that writing. And student anonymity and permissions around writing and representation are why I’m being weird about self-identifying on this weblog.

What I’m trying to lead into, I guess, is my focus for this post (the thing I didn’t quite make it to yesterday) on the concerns associated with an understanding of writing as property.
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