Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Kermit Snelson wrote: Intellectuals and artists have always relied on patronage, patronage depends on plunder, and plunder depends on deceit and exploitation. Who, after all, paid for Europe's cathedrals? Who paid for Beethoven's sonatas? Who pays for universities today? [...] which side are we, as intellectuals and artists, really on? Who pays for *any* activity? No human occupation is divorced from the economic and political order in which it takes place. Workers in a cooperative, if they're paid in money, go out and spend it in the capitalist economy, thus supporting that economy. Everything is contaminated in this way. How you personally manage to survive in a thoroughly contaminated economy matters less than the actions you take to help change the world order. Theory is necessary, but practice has a much greater ethical value than theory. It is your actions that determine which side you are really on. Ben # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
snip It was just an exercise in comparing now and then, here and now. I don't have a particular axe to grind. Since I write quite a lot, I think about what makes heroes of some writers and how their achievement might be grounded in their social practice. Strauusian enough for you, Kermit? Keith Hart I think anonymity versus attribution is not merely a question of fame and fortune or 'cred', but of a literate culture spinning webs of ideas with strands which are traceable regarding their sources - primary, secondary etc. Even the Wiki may obviously account for IP numbers. We need some instrument for overviewing the revision history of documents and thus be able to estimate their reliability, truthfulness or authenticity, which in turn is crucial for their usefulness. This, BTW, is part of the so often misunderstood moral aspect of copyright. Karl-Erik Tallmo -- _ KARL-ERIK TALLMO, writer, editor ARCHIVE: http://www.nisus.se/archive/artiklar.html BOOK: http://www.nisus.se/gorgias ANOTHER BOOK: http://www.copyrighthistory.com MAGAZINE: http://art-bin.com _ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Sat 10/04/03 at 04:32 PM -0400):
New Media Education and Its Discontent
there's something hilarious about the proposition that, were it not
for andrew jackson -- author, they say, of the quintessentially
all-american 'OK' ('oll korekt!') -- this country would be more
inclined love its intellectuals. in the service of this theory,
examples are offered which assume that what's needed most in the
discursive prisoners who are our 'leaders' -- the figureheads who
sit atop baroque administrative empires -- isn't 'personality' but,
rather, intellect. one needn't endorse the outcomes of recent or
current elections to be skeptical about that argument. reigning in
these vast apparatuses requires an 'unproblematized' attitude toward
exercising power, but over the last few decades american intellec-
tuals (such as they are) have devoted staggering amounts of energy to
'problematizing' power from every perspective -- and then they wonder
why they have so little of the damn stuff. hey, we've got to blame
*someone* for this sorry state of affairs, so let's pick on a dead
white autodidact autocrat who 'hated...Jews, homosexuals and immi-
grants'! uh, but he died twenty years before the civil war. 'yeah,
well, it *would* take a lot of time for his ideology to propagate,
wouldn't it?!'
the plaint that intellectuals don't get the respect they deserve
emanates, of course, from those who would 'be' intellectuals. i'm not
sure what that's supposed to entail (and it'd be hard to find a better
way to describe what i've been doing for the last decade and a half),
but in the specific context given (the classroom) the telltale signs
of anti-intellectualism were diagnosed as 'not reading assignments,
not contributing to class discussion, complaining about a high work
load, skipping class, giving low evaluations to instructors with high
standards, not bothering to do extra work, [and] by dispassionately
condemning intellectual debate as boring.' luckily, the obvious
response -- that in some very intellectual circles these signs would
be seen as a healthy disregard for the authoritarian hypocrisy of the
classroom -- was saved by the bell, as it were: a pious invocation of
bell hooks, untertheorist of self-consciously intellectual cant about
'sites of resistance.'
weirdly, though, in trebor's recount, the people doing all this 'res-
isting' in the classroom seem to be the teachers, not the students.
like many mysterious inversions of logic, the truth of this proposi-
tion is hidden in plain sight: in a classroom, students *do* rule --
directly, through sheer number, and indirectly, through procedures
such as teacher evaluations (which definitely weren't developed by
anti-intellectuals). and how, he asks, can teachers be 'courageous'
when those darned students get to speak their mind out-of-band, as
it were, by saying mean stuff about teach to the boss? faced with this
plight, the teacher's 'resistance' consists in part, he suggests, of
being 'transformed.' maybe i'm missing something, but none of the best
teachers i ever had -- in studying quite classical disciplines -- were
transformed in the course of a semester; they did, however, know ex-
actly what they were teaching. iirc, their personal odyssey didn't
play a big part in the syllabus, which mainly focused on transforming
students from people who didn't know something into people who did.
trebor claims that 'Media Study Departments bring together the most
relevant sources of knowledge.' this may be so, but that assumption is
hardly the clearest basis for constructing a curriculum, let alone a
syllabus. those tasks are much more banal, involving as they do the
orderly presentation (and, over the years, repetition) of whatever
'knowledge' is being supposed to be imparted. a field founded on the
presumption that it's the bee's knees is likely to have a hard time
explaining in plain terms (which students do tend to appreciate) what
exactly is being taught. 'relevance'? 'sources of knowledge'? 'cult-
ural theory, and literature to technical skill, from the vocational to
the conceptual'? could it be that media studies, however 'relevant,'
doesn't constitute a coherent field, discipline, or object capable of
sustaining a disciplinary structure that supports sustained inquiries
into Intellectualism and Art? could it be that the students are res-
ponding sensibly to a lack of clarity? that their 'careerism' is less
'anti-intellectual' than a pragmatic and affirmative request for the
department to please explain how they're supposed to make a living
with all these high-minded values? the (old-school) answer could well
be, 'well, if you're smart enough to ask that question we trust that
you'll be smart enough do what you're going to have to do anyway,
namely, figure it out for yourselves.' that'd be honest; but then the
line of inquiry would shift very quickly from top-down Art and Intel-
lectualism to bottom-up What the F---?. which would be an excellent
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Brian, the point of yours to which I was replying was not opposition to consensus, but rather the implication that to oppose one must have anonymity. That is not to suggest that current society is reasonable, liberal, democratic, desirable, un-opposable or necessarily irreplaceable. Kermit makes an important point in suggesting that Kelly is a Straussian, which to me makes Kelly's assertions and explanations highly suspect, reinforcing my previous doubts. Conservatives in the United States quite thoroughly dominate political discourse, yet are continually proclaiming that they are persecuted in the media, the academy and by the elite, which presumably justifies their conspiratorial and deceitful practices. Some leftists have at times done much the same, although in the US their claims of persecution have had a somewhat more solid foundation. Still, on either side, too readily donning this mantle of persecution and using it as an excuse for anonymity or for covering up one's real intent undermines any possibility of genuine democracy, and must lead to a general and debilitating distrust across the board. In a state of such distrust there can be no real consensus, assuredly, but at the same time honest dissent also becomes impossible. Derrida indicates that utterances without ambiguity and at least unconscious double agendas are not fully possible, but that is a quite different point, suggesting that discourse can only possibly be workable when every effort is made to reveal who one is and what one's interests are, as Kermit proposes we strive for. The more anonymous the voice, the less the possibility for such self revelation, and the more must be taken on faith. Reasonably, within the precarious limits of reason, but not contentedly, Michael H. Goldhaber Brian Holmes wrote: Similarly, Michael Goldhaber appears to me eminently reasonable, and perhaps lacking in historical imagination. Is a civilization like the current one replaceable? What could possibly motivate people to answer in the affirmative? Kermit Snelson's justifiable concern with the state of the Union, whether that lamentable state is attribuable to Leo Strauss or not, rather bears out the limits of Michael's reasonableness. For many years, worldly Americans have nodded their heads, quoted statistics, and pointed to demographic, economic, and psychosocial explanations that make the decay of our democracy appear quite plausible and normal. And look where that has got us. On a road which appears, in many ways, to defy reason. still waiting for a little less consensus, Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Kermit Snelson wrote: But to be honest with ourselves, we must look deep into what intellectualism means. I know that intellectuals are killers, sometimes not just figuratively. I am one myself, after all. But not all forms of thinking or persons that we might deem to be intellectual are equally homicidal. Indeed some intellectuals struggle mightily to retain their humanity and even to contribute to schemes of human improvement. This notion of the close affinity between intellectuals and death starts with opposing ideas and life. Hume called ideas pale sensations and we all know what he meant. Ideology, Marx's camera obscura, is the attempt to persuade people that ideas shape their lives rather than the other way around. The author's dream and nightmare is that his/her living thoughts will survive like so many frozen embryos in dead books. Trebor Scholtz (New Media Education and Its Discontent, nettime, 5.10.03) published a fascinating essay on this list, while we were extending the boundaries of the present thread, about the anti-intellectualism of American students. This aspect of the Anglophone empiricist tradition goes far beyond the students and helps to account for the estrangement of American intellectuals from their own public. When I was dining at the high table of my Cambridge college one evening, a neighbour asked me if I thought I was an intellectual. I replied yes. He looked around at the other fellows, deep into their mortgages and creme brulee, and said Well, you are the only one here. I have long thought that the function of the universities is to take bright young people and persuade that they will never change the world with their ideas. The intellectual has to dehumanise him/herself in order to do the work. That is what detachment means -- avoiding domestic responsibility, staying out of today's political fight, separating ideas from the persons who acted as midwife to their birth, subjecting oneself to inner torment in the small hours, riding the rollercoaster between mania and depression. And if the intellectual is nourished by social engagement, by acrtually caring about other people, by all the human passions, then moving between the two poles of his/her existence can be a rocky ride. Max Weber, who suffered from terrible depressions and tried to be both a politician and an intellectual, wrote two wonderful essays called Politics as a vocation and Science as a vocation. In them he claimed that the politician, in engaging with the struggle for power, must be guided by passion. But he also has to take care to be reasonable, since people will reject him if he is clearly mad. Equally, the scientist must be guided by reason and cultivate objective detachment. But Weber notes that the best scientists are also passionate enthusiasts for their work. So that, although the two professions appear to depend on the ideal types of passion and reason respectively, in reality they must be combined to be effective as human practice. Nevertheless, DNA was not discovered by people kissing babies on the stump. How can engagement and detachment be synthesised as a pattern of daily work or as an alternating cycle? Exile, as Edward Said among others insisted, is one possible answer. The involuntary exile has to time to think and write, while being reminded daily that s/he is the victim of coercion. Imprisonment, in some extreme cases, has been an even more powerful incentive to sustained intellectual production. It is curious, given this intellectual-killer hypothesis, that Rene Descartes, our common ancestor, found that signing up as a professional soldier in the Thirty years war gave him lots of time to think between the sporadic fighting. He spent most days in bed until midday and then got up to read books by the fire. Every now and then he took a few weeks' sabbatical in a Paris monastery. This example raises Kermit's second point about the dependence of intellectuals on patrons who are themselves directly or indirectly responsible for killing (or let's call it exploitation). Well, again there is wide variation in that. A 19th century French civil servant holding down a sinecure while writing novels on the side isn't exaxctly Paul Wolfowitz. Compromised, for sure, but then we all define our personal politics by picking the battles we want to fight. In the 70s, I worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the British Foreign Office, USAID etc, but I was never employed by the same agency twice. Some people would prefer to stay outside. I wanted to see how these things worked and kept my tattered integrity by writing reports that no proletarian could afford to write. The kind of intellectualism and its forms of expression also make a difference. For the last two centuries, the relationship between living persons and impersonal collective entities has been obscured by most traditions of western social thought. This contrasts vividly with the two vehicles of mass instruction and entertainment
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Michael Goldhaber wrote (speaking of far left and right in the US): ...on either side, too readily donning this mantle of persecution and using it as an excuse for anonymity or for covering up one's real intent undermines any possibility of genuine democracy, and must lead to a general and debilitating distrust across the board. Thanks for your reply, Michael, this thread is rather interesting and the opinions of all are appreciated. The two of us could go on talking at cross-purposes for a long time, and I suspect it would be somewhat my fault. Personally, I have always signed my name, and in the economy of commentary and reasonableness (of which I am certainly part) this is the only way to go. At a certain point it may also become a way to go to jail, which would then be the place for an honest man, as one of our great literary heros of the American tradition once said. We're not there yet, apparently not so far from it either. Personally I will continue in all modesty with the modus operandi you have eloquently detailed, for want of better options. But what I have been trying to get at here is this (and I'm sorry to have been so unclear): I'm amazed and increasingly disappointed about how little searching doubt is expressed concerning the trends in our present, Euro-American civilization that point to the unviability of same over even the medium term (i.e. the upcoming half-century). Sustained examination leads to further questions as to whether exchanges of the type we're having now will change anything either. One would think this kind searching doubt might lead to the conclusion that other steps are required to change things. One of the reactions to this kind of frustration is, effectively, to fulminate insurrection without a signature (as for instance the journal Tiqqun, and a rather wide spectrum of post-situationists in France). We are all cybersavvy enough to know how unlikely it is for the identity of such fulminators to go undiscovered, and we may therefore conclude that their production must be inconsequential. However, consider this: the present form of globalized Euro-American civilization depends, actually quite heavily, on a network called the SWIFT (interbank transfer), just to take a prime example. Who can imagine unplugging this network, which (along with others) makes the contemporary financial sphere possible? Under current conditions, one can hardly imagine even a nation-state doing so, as Bureau d'Etudes pointed out in their text for the Next 5 Minutes. Is it possible to imagine a form of collectivity that could tame or even do away with certain systemic phenomena such as the domination of capital via the systems of quasi-instantaneous financial speculation? In a completely vague, even lazy (sorry about that) and rather lamely oracular way I was trying to point to that possibility, when I suggested that there might be a thought dangerous enough that it would require anonymity. (Please note that events seem to prove that Mr. Bin Laden's thoughts are not dengerous enough to change anything, except by polarizing the situation for the worse and actually lowering the chances of systemic change: however, the story is till unfolding on that one.) It seems that such an anti-systemic thought will not unfold from a personality which can be located and targeted for neutralization within the current onomastic system (I could be wrong about that, but that's what I think). I remain rather curious about the social formation that could succeed in halting or even slowing the irreversible ecological damage and mounting social catastrophe which is being effected by the contemporary (and marginally enlightened) pattern of human development. How might such a social formation develop? How would it escape the many mechanisms which guarantee the equilibrium of the present system? And how could it remain self-conscious enough to keep from falling into the millenary, religious pattern that we associate with apocalyptic fears? (All of this, by the way, does relate directly to the experiments of collective authorship currently centering around still-fledgling technology such as Wikis.) I find myself required to ask these rather broad questions because I do not believe, for instance, that Mr. Clinton was particularly better than Mr. Bush. I think that Mr. Clinton's management of the capitalist globalization process in the 1990s was disastrous, followed very closely the pattern set since the early 1980s, led to September 11 among many other things, and therefore created the opening for a resurgence of the noxious oligarchy around Mr. Bush, whose positions in the US are, in any case, structurally very well established and well defended, seemingly inexpungible within the present frameworks of humanity's possible self-reflection on its own evolution. I realize these kinds of opinions may not be popular and may lead to outraged accusations
