Shaviro & Asimov
I have been reading Steven Shaviro's Connected, or What it Means to Live in the Network Society. I would recommend it; in a series of short sections Shaviro makes connections between critical, complexity, and network theory and science fiction, popular culture, and current events (such as the battles regarding Napster and the rise and subversion of contemporary surveillance culture. Shaviro considers the book itself to be science fiction- a look at what the networked world could become. He concludes: "science fiction is about the shadow that the future casts upon the present. It shows us how profoundly we are haunted by the ghosts of what has not yet happened" (250). Which reminds me how difficult it is to include time in an understanding of the network. It is one thing to say that the network is never static--it is another thing to think through the implications of that statement. Its a really deep rabbit hole.
My emphasis while reading this summer has been on contextualization (not only in terms of composition)and Shaviro nicely contributes to the subject. Discussing Richard Dawkins's concept of the meme (the cultural equivalent of the gene--for instance... da-da, dud-dut-da- I'm lov...see you can finish it yourself), he writes:
If we take seriously the idea that memes, like genes, are always engaged in a Darwinian struggle to survive and reproduce, then we cannot assimilate them to the fashionable view that the world is nothing but patterns of information.... (16)
He grounds this position in a complex conceit between information and parasites (I quote liberally since I don't think either of you are planning on reading Shaviro):
A pattern of information is meaningless by itself. A virus remains inert unless it encounters a suitable living cell. A configuration of ones and zeroes is similarly no more than gibberish until it is processed by the right program. Genes and memes are helpless without their hosts. They need to be instantiated in flesh, or at least in matter. They can only replicate themselves by means of the effects they have on bodies. But these effects are multiple, contradictory, widespread, and often indirect. We cannot think of information as just a pattern imprinted indifferently in one or another physical medium. For information is also an event. It isn't just the content of a given message but all the things that happen when the message gets transmitted. As Morse Peckman puts it, "the meaning of a verbal event is any response to that event." In other words, meaning is not intrinsic, but always contingent and performative (final emphasis mine)(17)
This circles round what I have been attempting to articulate all summer: composition potentially presents itself as a way to help students come to terms with the networked nature of contemporary existence by emphasizing the need to read every sign in terms of its context. And our technologically driven culture further emphasizes the importance of this orientation away from "static" [modernist] epistemologies (ways of knowing that want to freeze, solidify, "permanize") to dynamic [postmodernist? complex? network? digital?] epistemologies (ways of knowing that emphasize fluidity, temporality, and motion).
Santos Out.
My emphasis while reading this summer has been on contextualization (not only in terms of composition)and Shaviro nicely contributes to the subject. Discussing Richard Dawkins's concept of the meme (the cultural equivalent of the gene--for instance... da-da, dud-dut-da- I'm lov...see you can finish it yourself), he writes:
If we take seriously the idea that memes, like genes, are always engaged in a Darwinian struggle to survive and reproduce, then we cannot assimilate them to the fashionable view that the world is nothing but patterns of information.... (16)
He grounds this position in a complex conceit between information and parasites (I quote liberally since I don't think either of you are planning on reading Shaviro):
A pattern of information is meaningless by itself. A virus remains inert unless it encounters a suitable living cell. A configuration of ones and zeroes is similarly no more than gibberish until it is processed by the right program. Genes and memes are helpless without their hosts. They need to be instantiated in flesh, or at least in matter. They can only replicate themselves by means of the effects they have on bodies. But these effects are multiple, contradictory, widespread, and often indirect. We cannot think of information as just a pattern imprinted indifferently in one or another physical medium. For information is also an event. It isn't just the content of a given message but all the things that happen when the message gets transmitted. As Morse Peckman puts it, "the meaning of a verbal event is any response to that event." In other words, meaning is not intrinsic, but always contingent and performative (final emphasis mine)(17)
This circles round what I have been attempting to articulate all summer: composition potentially presents itself as a way to help students come to terms with the networked nature of contemporary existence by emphasizing the need to read every sign in terms of its context. And our technologically driven culture further emphasizes the importance of this orientation away from "static" [modernist] epistemologies (ways of knowing that want to freeze, solidify, "permanize") to dynamic [postmodernist? complex? network? digital?] epistemologies (ways of knowing that emphasize fluidity, temporality, and motion).
Santos Out.
posted by Insignificant Wrangler at 11:52 AM
3 Comments:
Interesting that Shaviro should cite Morse Peckman ... my thesis advisor for my MA did a portion of his dissertation on Peckman's work.
-Man's Rage for Chaos- is the name of the book ... I just looked it up.
Might look into this again. See how it holds up after all these years.
MORSE Peckham ... he and Walker Gibson were the first names I really followed up on following my MA at CMU, at least in terms of coming to terms w/ what eventually turned out to be an Amherst inspired curriculum that John Dinan put together at CMU.
Worth noting is that Theodore Baird, the guy who assembled that curriculum --and it's one that Robin Varnum and Janice Lauer have had a few exchanges about in terms of defining the "origins" of rhet/comp by way of "invention"--is that according to Varnum, the ANNALES SCHOOL played a formative role in AMHERST'S curriculum design.
Will be following that path shortly, as it takes Sirc's fondness from Coles out of the "avant-garde," and into the program initiated by M. Bloch ...
But, Morse is a different code ...
'Some MORSE' code ...
. // ... /// .. / ...
For me, thinking through various questions means thinking through exemplars who solve problems.
Kristen asks:
"Are we the only ones who should recognize the complexity of the writing situation/event? Or are we to teach this recognition, this ecological awareness, to our students?"
One examplar who comes to mind --and perhaps pushes the ecological sense of composing events-- is the sculptor, And.y Goldsworthy ...
Here the sense of EVENT itself is put into varience as Goldsworthy's sculptures are composed and decomposed out of such elements as icicles which he fits together by hand as the sun starts to rise and threaten his entire process.
Here is less a sense of "writing" that is less a BIG EVENT, but a composing that, too, unfolds as a decomposition ... and, perhaps, in this sense of de/composition we glimpse a sense of the speeds-slownesesses in eventS of writing that is different than THE EVENT that students often preceive writing to be ...
As writing instructors, the emphasis is often put on THE OCCASION, but there is the stranger ... the movement of moments that are taking place --and taking us places-- that are perhaps different than the final product.
I don't ... Kristen also mentions the the "perfect 'cop-out'," which I would say puts off the THE BIG EVENT of writing such that it might be described in a series of micro-events, including --alas-- the cliche micro-event, "the dog ate my homework."
And yet, there is in this "excuse that their mood, physical location, or some other variable kept them from writing" something that intrigues, because it suggests that the BIG EVENT of writing is somehow not as compelling as the micro-movements.
How might one begin thinking through these "moody" or affective senses that students are using as an excuse?
Event ... Ereignis ...
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