Taylor: Intro & Chapter 1
A Lacanian Cord
The first 50 pages were an intruiging read, I especially appreciated the way in which Taylor stresses the development of the modernist "grid" in terms of desire for order. This is manifest on his opening page, when he explains that
for many people, confusion and uncertainty create a desire for simplicity that leads to a futile longing to return to basic values and foundational beliefs. In today's world, however, simplicity has become an idle dream that no longer can be realized. (3)
I disagree with him that we have come to a point of no return--if the extreme polarity of recent presidential elections shows us anything, then it shows us that some people are willing to ignore a great deal to hold onto a modernist ideal that promises simplicity, order, and control. As his discussion of Le Corbusier demonstrates, the alure of the grid is almost intoxicating in its offer of precise regulation. This is where I hear echoes of Lacan & Zizek, since their writings explore the appeal of symbolic order and the extents to which the concsious mind will go to sustain the fantasy.
Taylor succintly presents the postmodern criticisms of the grid mentality and its emphasis on objective reason:
All too often rationalization and colonization seem to be inseperable. When the ideal of universality is put into practice uncritically, it can lead to a uniformity that excludes or represses everything and everyone deemed different. (30-31)
As someone used to perusing pomo texts, the "uncritically" in there startled me a bit. I actually didn't catch it until I started writing this post... complexity research does stem from the hard sciences and is still built upon the foundational belief that research and analysis can discern certifiable truths, although those "truths" are very different then the kind kin to Newtonian or even Einsteinian physics (at least, this is what I'm getting out of my reading of Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity).
So far I am really enjoying Taylor's book. As slow and boring as Waldrop's book can be at times, it prepared me for Taylor's book by giving me perspective from the Other (science) side. The most immediate application for this material in composition would be with "the process" debate. Process oriented models of composition rely too heavily on the kind of linear causality grounding Newtonian science. Complexity models demonstrate recursiveness that makes such idealistic notions of progression (first we invent, then we draft, then we revise) naive.
That's all the notes that's fit to print.
The first 50 pages were an intruiging read, I especially appreciated the way in which Taylor stresses the development of the modernist "grid" in terms of desire for order. This is manifest on his opening page, when he explains that
for many people, confusion and uncertainty create a desire for simplicity that leads to a futile longing to return to basic values and foundational beliefs. In today's world, however, simplicity has become an idle dream that no longer can be realized. (3)
I disagree with him that we have come to a point of no return--if the extreme polarity of recent presidential elections shows us anything, then it shows us that some people are willing to ignore a great deal to hold onto a modernist ideal that promises simplicity, order, and control. As his discussion of Le Corbusier demonstrates, the alure of the grid is almost intoxicating in its offer of precise regulation. This is where I hear echoes of Lacan & Zizek, since their writings explore the appeal of symbolic order and the extents to which the concsious mind will go to sustain the fantasy.
Taylor succintly presents the postmodern criticisms of the grid mentality and its emphasis on objective reason:
All too often rationalization and colonization seem to be inseperable. When the ideal of universality is put into practice uncritically, it can lead to a uniformity that excludes or represses everything and everyone deemed different. (30-31)
As someone used to perusing pomo texts, the "uncritically" in there startled me a bit. I actually didn't catch it until I started writing this post... complexity research does stem from the hard sciences and is still built upon the foundational belief that research and analysis can discern certifiable truths, although those "truths" are very different then the kind kin to Newtonian or even Einsteinian physics (at least, this is what I'm getting out of my reading of Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity).
So far I am really enjoying Taylor's book. As slow and boring as Waldrop's book can be at times, it prepared me for Taylor's book by giving me perspective from the Other (science) side. The most immediate application for this material in composition would be with "the process" debate. Process oriented models of composition rely too heavily on the kind of linear causality grounding Newtonian science. Complexity models demonstrate recursiveness that makes such idealistic notions of progression (first we invent, then we draft, then we revise) naive.
That's all the notes that's fit to print.
posted by Insignificant Wrangler at 2:05 PM
8 Comments:
I am cautious of thinking of Taylor in terms of the analogy of presidential elections or in hearing in his work too many echoes of Lacan or Zizek.
I want to make a suggestion that we adopt we stick close to Taylor's bibliography --taking names such as Chuck Close as a re-beginning point-- and perhaps drifting to websites and other readings across T's bib, or whosever bib is under consideration.
The leap to Lacan or Zizek might be done, but perhaps cautiously ... Example: 1) Here's the specific passage from X that reminds me of Y or Z, and 2) Here are some passages from Y and Z.
I know that when I read, I tend to conflate figures all the time in an effort to gain a sense of where they're coming from, but the result has often been a constant pairing of a big name (say "Deleuze" or "Derrida") with every encounter I have in reading-writing ...
What do folks think of this suggestion? (I'm okay w/ finding Lacanian cords, but maybe in texts that more directly encounter his work ... ???)
Mark's take on the process model being too limited is one I certainly share, and I think he's right that it doesn't get at the complexity that Taylor is going for.
What strikes me about the Complex Adaptive Systems model on pg 167-168 is that "every system is embedded in more or less extensive networks that provide streats of data that must be processed."
The problem w/ the process model is that it is based on hierarchy: 1) first you brainstorm in your head, 2) then you draft it for a peer group, 3) the peer group comments about stuff "from yer head" before the teacher sees it, and 4) the teacher judges what was "in your head" and what your peers allowed through ...
What is desired is a sense that is more embedded where INVENTION is sustained for a longer period of time.
How to get away from the language of "draft" and take up the language of "drift"?
Can you imagine dumping the entire language of "draft"? Letting loose, letting it go, letting it blow away entirely?
Now, of course, the students will continue to supply a "backdraft" that will seek to use the language of every Engl class they've had before ...
I think if we were to jettison the languge of the "draft" :: "Down w/ the 'Draft'!" :) :: it's loss might be felt in this way:
"While occasioning confusion, uncertainty, and sometimes despair, this inescapable turbulence harbors creative possibilities for people and institutions able to adapt quickly, creatively, and effectively."
The fact is that students want the re-assurance of the draft because it lets them know how much more of the process that they have to engage.
But the driffffffffffft dis/engages not as a "process model" that is a series of stages, but through a sense of DURATION ...
The process model misses --as Mark points out-- the recursiveness of duration.
... still, in another play that occurs to me, perhaps "draft" will be too hard to loose ... can we say , "Your raft is due?"
"Rafts," catches the sense of "drift," of course, and perhaps students might float w/ that ...
I don't know...
These are my playful-serious thoughts for this evening ...
I wasn't suggesting that we turn to Zizek or Lacan... my point was that in Taylor, as in many pomo-oriented thinkers, we again encounter a sense of mourning for the loss of foundation. While this loss is found in Derrida, I think it appears most prominently in the work of psychoanalysists.
I love the quote you riff off:
"While occasioning confusion, uncertainty, and sometimes despair, this inescapable turbulence harbors creative possibilities for people and institutions able to adapt quickly, creatively, and effectively."
And I agree that it is difficult to teach without drafts, although last semester I did it. Rather than have students produce different copies of the same paper, I had them write different papers on the same subject (each a bit longer than the previous one). This forced some duration with a subject so their ideas had time to mature.
The difficulty for me w/ the single-topic pulled across a few projects --an approach I took at ASU, particularly in fashioning argument-- is that the topics themselves become stale.
I am drawn to the sense of mini-papers within papers, each with its own exigencies such as pulling them through Ulmer's popcycle (personal, pop culture, historical, theoretical) and then out of *that* further variations that perhaps leads to simply a TITLE.
Titles have the benefit of being able to take up the sense of problems in variation rather than being consigned to one problem/issue.
Of course, picking a title/topic and sticking with that title/topic is that one is supposed to give it the breadth of development ...
It's precisely this development, though, that may well be caught up in the process model.
When I say "duration," in some sense I am trying to hook this up to a sense of "dissolving" or repeating an idea over time.
In a Saturday Night Live skit, for example, Steve Martin and Bill Murrary look at the camera and say over and over: "What the hell is that?" The repetition of that comment changes over time, and there are slight modulations and variations that they engage in when looking at the camera.
In terms of student writing-reading, I am interested in the sense of a single NOTE, rather than a single TOPIC.
If duration is a minor form of process, perhaps notes are a minor form of topics.
In Taylor's terms, I think that process-topics still lend themselves to a sense of "embranchements" (175).
The sense of embranchement seems to me to be a building towards higher levels of complexity, rather than finding what is complex already in a given note.
Although Taylor does not engage in wordplay in this work as he does in some of his earlier efforts (-Nots-, for example), it's worth noting that note is --via the anagram-- TONE ...
Now the question might become:
What DEGREE of tone?
What KIND of tone?
... How to distinguish between differences in degree and kind insofar as process/duration and topic/note-tone ...
A quick word on the loss of foundation in Zizek and Lacan.
It's my sense that neither are particularly "mournful."
Zizek evinces sharp, angular Lacanian structuralism, which while not exactly "foundational," nevertheless makes of the 'petite object a' something of a razor.
It's worth noting, perhaps, that in his collection of interviews, something he says about a the criticism that philosophers are "just dreaming about the structure of everything."
Z sez, "I then realized that philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions."
It is a movement from "What is the structure of all?" to "What are the concepts the scientists already has to presuppose in order to formulate the question?"
I don't think Z laments this, though. I think he uses a discussion about these PRESUPPOSITIONS to *attack* efforts made to construct FOUNDATION.
The loss of foundation, in this way, is just ol' Z chipping it away, and claiming its province under Lacan's sense of the symbolic, imaginary, and the Real.
A Structural, rather than Foundational difference.
Kristen notes that she's "talking epistemology here, not ontology" in the above example, but adds "(though I think the same would apply there as well)."
What might be gained / lost in thinking of the differences between epistemology and ontology?
I will say that the sense of ontology, in particular, has become to the forefront of my thinking in recent months, particularly insofar as I see that what Deleuze's philosophy does --in some sense-- is offer an ontological reading of other philosophers.
Does "ontology" as such have a role in FYC, or even in the sense of "Deleuze" as --say-- Vitanza deploys his proper name?
... a COMPLEX question, it seems to me ...
What might be gained by the sense of "epistemology," particularly as it dis/connects to Taylor?
Kristen writes:
Geof, this seems to be what the SNL skit was doing through repetition, but is self-reflection merely repetition? Patterns emerge from the slight variations – Ah, through self-reflexivity the miniscule difference is amplified through repetition. Noise is amplified. The anomaly, the unintended and thus un-ordered element, is allowed to surface through the pattern itself, causing the patterns to shift slightly.
Geof replies:
Exactly. As the line in the movie -Slacker- goes:
"Repetition is a form of change."
Perhaps the sense of "self-reflection" might be pushed so far as to --in an ontological sense???-- run up against of IDENTITY.
Deleuze is not about "identity," and more about seeing oneself --as K notes later in her mess-- as a "group" or "band."
Check out this quote from Deleuze:
"[Felix Guattari] was not a philosopher by training, but he had a philosopher-becoming all the more for this, and many other becomings too. He never stopped. ... Always the same Felix, yet one whose proper name denoted something which was happening, and not a subject. Felix was a man of the group, of bands or tribes, and yet he is a man alone, a desert populated by all these gropus and all his friends, all his becomings."
Hi all,
Been busy with Meg's move in, but I wanted to breifly respond to Kristen's post on "universality." I have always been skeptical of people, especially in groups. Especially when distributing power. So I am always on alert when I see anyone discussing "general nature."
Of course we need generalizations. But we need to ensure that we have developed ethical systems/practices that carefully regulate their use.
And, of course, I realize how ironic my comments are: my post on my skepticism regarding power, ethics, and generalizations relies on the general assumption that I am better than most of humanity and therefore they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.
History, however, is on my side. People often don't treat each other well. If anything, I teach to correct this problem, and I approach this problem through teaching writing (contextualization).
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