Homage to Friends

Something in your last post sparks yet another re-beginning: the sense of collage as an "homage to friends."

I think you're on to something here ...

Eleanor Kaufman has written a book on Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, and Klossowski entited -The Delirium of Praise-, and it leads w/ this quote from Mark 5:9

Then Jesus asked him, 'What is your name?'
'My name is Legion," he replied, 'for we are many.'

Kaufman's work is an effort to explore the "friendships" of these French intellectuals, such that she claims that "Deleuze and Foucault are not so much individual writers adn thinkers as they are a mode or a configuration or even a constellation" (70).

Or, Bloc.

"They are a multiplicity that encompasses, in every gesture or evocation, a vast network of domains that might be variously classified as philosophical, the political, the personal."

Or, Popcyclical.

"They are not one thinker or even one unit, but rather an approach to thought--which is also a singularity--one that traverses a wide array of discourses."

In plainspeak: Lots of inside-jokes.

"The concept of such a thought-configuration is nowhere better articulated, in fact enacted by being articulated, than in their corpus of mutally glorifying essays. Such a mode of ENCOMIUM AS CONVERSATION, neither critique nor original, might best be characterized as the replication or double of that which it describes: thought as pure event, thought as theater, thought as style or gesture."

In other words, within this friendship --this delirium of praise-- there is a movement towards thinking thinking's thought ...

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I don't know if it is fair to think in terms of friendship w/ regards to Fredric Jameson. Certainly he has his clan. But how much time is spent BLOCKing other clans and other bands ?

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Insofar as our students are concerned, of course there homage to friends is much more "private," though from an outsider it may appear much the same. The very idea of High School, after all, thrives on a sense of different packs all sharing in the event called prom. It's no wonder that their collages should contain lists of favorite songs from those events and that they should come across as "the same old song" --THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME-- even as it seems so different for the students and their friends.

The difficulty I think is in moving this sense of friendship to wider fields.

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As another example, I'll use Thomas, mostly to see if he's still listening in. When he writes, I would say that his work is, in a sense, an homage to friends. In one of the essays that Byron mentions in the essay T sent out, Thomas mentions Marilyn Manson. I bet he had friends that he used to talk about MM with.

The difficulty was his using that friendship such that one might hear Ross Winterowd's arguments differently.

Thomas doesn't exactly shut down Winterowd, however. It's just that his alternative friendships come through.

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I don't know, k. I guess what I am trying to say is that I like being friends w/ folks that have friends. That doesn't mean they have to be my friend back. In the movie, Adaptation, one of the pivotal scenes in the movie is when Kaufmann's brother says: "You are what you love." And this love does not necessarily need to be reciprocated.

For me, when I read Eleanor Kaufman, I find this sense of the ENCOMIUM AS CONVERSATION a rather profound idea.

Students, in their collages, of course, are making little memorials to their friends. It might not seem like much. But I would claim so much is work of friendship. Listen to Keroauc-Ginesberg or Coltrane-Coleman or Cixous-Derrida or Davis-Ronell ...

Deleuze does this, as I mentioned, in thinking of Guattari and his rodeo ride ...

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Is there room for friendship --the delirium of praise-- in utopia ?

seems to me that by its definition utopia is, in some sense, there in advance.

maybe your sense and jameson's sense is a slouching towards utopia ...

i don't know. i know that thomas used to like to point to his FRUITopia, but that's a different topic.

... utopia ... fruitopia ... uTROPE-ia ... uTOPOI-ia ... dsytopia ...

reminds me of my friend in S.F. wrote his MA thesis on Dystopia in road literature and he used, after a conversation we had, Edward Abbey's -The Fool's Progress- ... I mentioned this story of stopping in the cemetery in Copeland, KS when we ate at the Arby's on the way to the airport earlier this summer...

Thanks again for lunch, btw.

Current Collage

Below is an excerpt of an exchange that is currently unfolding on the WPA-list. I am posting it here as an example of some "thoughts" concerning collage.

You'll note that I have included Jenny Edbauer's smart thoughts on this matter. I will say that I admire Jenny's work a great deal, and --truth be told-- I am more than a little envious of her recent job appointment at Penn State.

When I read Jenny's post, it reminded me of the importance of sometimes saying one's views quickly and then letting others contribute (or not contribute). I modeled my response, in this case, on her brevity, though you'll note that I also feel compelled to demonstrate/perform some of my ideas in the third part of my reply.

I am curious what you or Thomas think about Todd's questions and --if there's anything to say at all-- about my reply by way of collage. Let me say this, however, before you read what is enclosed:

I have this dream or fantasy that folks on WPA --and perhaps in the field of English overall-- that, in addition to all the fine adminstrative ideas and necessary data collecting that there will be micro-movements of performance in the approach to "writing." Jenny Edbauer's work, I think, elsewhere approaches this sense, though it doesn't really come across in the short message I have excerpted here. (Again, I think brevity is important, but then there are times when I'd like to get caught up in a "performance" of some kind.)

Thomas does this is in explication of Brian Enos, particularly his taking anecdotes from Enos's experience w/ a phonograph and re-mixing that into this discussion of Taylor. I like illustrations like these. I've never really listened to Enos before, but Thomas's work makes me want to check it out.

... This is what I like about Collage : There are so many things to check out and re-link w/. Mark C. Taylor, as I may have mentioned earlier, gets a lot of mileage out of his daughter's bedroom collage in -Nots- ... He plays w/ the Derridean sense of "GAP" as well as noting interesting juxtapositions w/ Robert Raushenberg.

I don't know. I guess I've always seen COLLEGE as COLLAGE ... I love re-mixing ... So, I am sharing that here, for what it's worth. I know people are busy and that Summer 05 is soon to become Fall ...

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I've written to this list before with some general questions; now I come with
a fairly specific, though large, one. I am on the core team to create
a new high school in Douglas County, CO, a little south of Denver. We open
next fall. We've been charged by the new principal to create something
different, something outside of the traditional model of high school. Basically,
we've been given the freedom to think "outside the box."

This is, of course, why I am writing. I am heading the curriculum committee. While we do want to be non-traditional, we also want to make sure that our students get what they need for college. I'd like to set up a 9-16 articulation, at least as much as possible.

Given the quality of the experts on this list, I'm hoping to draw on your
knowledge. So, I'd like to ask a few questions. I'd appreciate any responses or thoughts you have. I'll hopefully be taking these responses as we build the curriculum for the new school. Reply on or off list. I'd just really like to hear what you have to say on some of the following questions:

1) We're building an English department from scratch. As college
educators, and FYC teachers, what would you like to see us provide our students?

2) If you could say anything to a new high school regarding the
curriculum -- English or beyond -- what would you suggest?

3) In your eyes, since you see our kids after we let them go, what
areas should we really try to improve in this new high school? What are the weaknesses you see in your students that we might create a curriculum to
try to fix?

Of course, I'll take any suggestions, thoughts, book suggestions, etc.
I just want as many quality voices as I can get since without voices we
can't make a quality decision. It's an exciting time, but we can't forget that
we, as a high school, are in a context that includes college -- a reality for
the majority of our incoming students.

Thank you in advance for your comments. I look forward to reading them.


Todd Reynolds
English, High School 8
Castle Rock, Colorado
Yeatsian@aol.com

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Todd,

What a cool opportunity this is. Two suggestions:

(1) Bring students into a curriculum that is designed for a digital age.
It's surprising to me when students think of "writing" only as the thing you do
in Microsoft Word. The skills of "digital literacy" (if you want to use this contested term) are every bit as important as teaching The Essay. You can teach things like rhetorical reading in many ways, not just essay-based analyses.


(2) Keep the joy, interest, creativity. Every semester, I start off with
at least a few first year students who tell me how much they hate, dread, and
fear writing. I can't say that I blame them, however. I remember high school
English class, which wasn't so different from their experiences. Research papers
don't inspire enjoyment. That's a loss--one that does a lot of real damage.

Good luck,
Jenny

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Todd,

I'll limit my suggestions to two as well:

1) Stress the importance of bibliographic networks over the "Great Book
tradition" that tend to valorize individual genius, or what can be worse, the
high school textbook tradition that makes use of linear timelines rather than intertextual negotiation.

2) Allow students to experiment and invent new methods of learning through
electronic mediums that Jenny mentions below. Although such experimentation
may run counter to stated goals and objectives, it important that high school
teachers find ways to accomodate (and extend) student / cultural variation.

Drifting w/ a recent encounter --an itch towards your scratch-- re-begin the
next curriculum development meeting simply with the word "Adaptation."

See where it takes you and others ...

Here's one such example :

http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2002_adaptation_007.html (scroll down)

http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&cf=gen&id=1800018581

http://www.creativequotations.com/one/1672.htm

http://www.mediamatic.net/article-200.5768.html&q_person=200.2286

best,
Geof

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Theoretical Biology

I wanted to post on J. Von Uexkull's -Theoretical Biology- (1926) as it is important work for Heidegger, Deleuze, Agamben, and others. Agamben's chapter on "The Tick" in -The Open- owes a great deal to Uexkull's work.

Here's a brief passage that approaches the sense of a butterfly wing flapping in Galveston, TX giving rise to events on St. Vincent Street in Montmarte.

"In principle, the step of a beetle's foot or the stroke of a dragonfly's wing must carry their effect as far as the dog-star. For, according to the causal conception, even the smallest component of natural phenomena is absolutely necessary, and cannot be thought away from the general system of action and reaction, wihtout making the whole impossible" (159).

Of course, all of these little wings are part of networks of emergence.

Another interesting passage is one that I believe either Heid or Husserl cite:

"It has been found that if, while a bee is feeding, its abdomen be carefully cut off, the insect will go on drinking with the honey flowing out of it again behind. In this case the action does not cease; the bee goes on drinking like Baron Munchhausen's horse" (169).

Uexkull talks about this in reference to "subjective annihiliation" which he links to the female praying mantis devouring the male after sex.

... It's also worth noting Uexkull's many bloc/ks that span from Giordano Bruno --who "rent open the roof of the heavens, and in its place put space, infinite and meaningless"-- to Kant.

Von Uexkull also speaks by way of "assemblages" and "community-machines" that resemble some of the language of Delueze.

Anyway, I want to suggest that along w/ Louis Agassiz and G. St. Hilaire, Uexkull is important historical figure for thoughts on emergence and complexity.

Strands of System

I'm currently reading Douglas R Anderson's -Strands of System: The Philosophy of C.S. Peirce- published by Purdue University Press (Go Boilers!:)

I'm interested in Peirce's sense of abductive or retroductive reasoning, particularly as Ulmer discusses it in relation to Conduction in Heuretics.

Here is the form of abduction:

The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,
Hence, there is reason to suspect A is true.

... the model for fidning possible answers has as illustration the work of S. Holmes, who is able to use the clues (topoi) of a given situation to construct a plausible narrative such that he can test it out deductively and inductively (empirically). Ulmer uses this notion to move on to conduction where he thinking of clues from particular to particular, often through their aesthetic images.

But, where Peirce is useful is that it allows for a provisional testing of ideas.

I might add that CSP is a forefunner to Pragmatism.

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.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

I don't think either of you are delving into this one, so I'll try to give you a brief (ha!) synopsis (I'm a little over halfway through--this one moves pretty slowly).

Waldrop's Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos tracks the genesis and evolution of the Santa Fe Institute from its inception in the early seventies. The Institute was founded by a number of scientists (all with piles of Nobel prizes) interested in pursuing a truly interdisciplinary investigation on nonlinearity and complex adaptive systems.

Much of the book focuses on one of the institute's first major conferences. Funded by Citibank corporation, the conference brought together progressive physicists and economists try and come up with a more reliable system for predicting economic fluxuations. John Reed, CEO of Citibank, was frustrated with traditional economic models that didn't live up to the dynamic conditions of real world economies. Waldrop explains: "the existing neoclassical theory and the computer models based on it simply did not give him the kind of information he needed to make real-time decisions in the face of risk and uncertainty" (93).

Neoclassic economics relies on the concept of "perfect rationality" in order to predict the actions of an economic agent (be it a consumer, corporation, or country). Waldrop describes perfect rationality thusly:

Perfectly rational agents do have the virtue of being perfectly predictable. That is, they know everything that can be known about the choices they will face infinitely far into the future, and they use flawless reasoning to forsee all the possible implications of their actions. So you can safely say that they will always take the most advantageous action in any given situation, based on the available information. Of course, they may sometimes be caught short by oil shocks, technological revolutions, political decisions about interest rates, and other noneconomic surprises. But they are so smart and so fast in their adjustments that they will always keep the economy in a kind of rolling equilibrium, with supply precisely equal to demand. (142)

This generalization guiding the behavior of all economic agents becomes the postulate upon which all economic theory is grounded. It is the "c" required for all the math to work. If this sounds ridiculous to anyone, then, good, it should. It sounded especially ridiculous to a group of physists that have to test every theory with empirical evidence. To the scientists, "too much theory and you could end up gazing into your navel" (87).

Unlike traditional Newtonian or Einsteinian influenced physicists, many of the people associated with the Santa Fe institute were more concerned with pattern than with particle: instead of following the scientific tradition that focused on the composition and behavior of a single agent (be it atom, electron, or neutrino), these scientists concerned themselves with the collective behavior of agents. They were interested in noticing the dynamic relationships in particles that often yielded results unequal to the sum of individual parts. More than anything else, however, the scientists of the Santa Fe institute came to terms with being "messy." One of the institute's founders, George A. Cowan, explains:

"Almost by definition," he says, "the physical sciences are fields characterized by conceptual elegance and analytical simplicity. So you make a virtue of that and avoid the other stuff." Indeed, physicists are notorious for curling their lips at "soft" sciences like sociology or psychology, which try to grapple with real-world complexity. But then here came molecular biology, which described incredibly complicated living systems that were nonetheless governed by deep principles. “Once you’re in a partnership with biology,” says Cowan, “you give up that elegance, you give up that simplicity. You’re messy. And from there it’s so much easier to start diffusing into economics and social issues. Once you are partially immersed, you might as well start swimming.” (62-63)

What becomes key here is something that comes up in many of our (and I mean this locally and disciplinarily) discussions: simplicity vs. complexity. The (almost utopian, right Kristen?) allure of simplicity and the extent to which people are willing to go to secure it. Waldrop’s book celebrates (again and again and again) scientists who were able to take the plunge and dive in.

Two economists especially agreed with them: Brian Arthur and John H. Holland. As someone looking to make connections between this material and composition, I found Holland’s ideas on complex adaptive systems particularly cogent:

1. …regardless of how you define them, each agent finds itself in an environment produced by its interactions with the other agents in the system. It is constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. And because of that, essentially nothing in its environment is fixed.
2. …the control of a complex adaptive system tends to be highly dispersed… If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves.
3. …complex adaptive systems are constantly revising and rearranging their building blocks as they gain experience.
4. …all complex adaptive systems anticipate the future… this business of anticipation and prediction goes far beyond issues of human foresight, or even consciousness…. Every complex adaptive system is constantly making predictions based on its various internal models of the world—its implicit or explicit assumptions about the way things are out there. Furthermore, these models are much more than passive blueprints. They are active…like any other building blocks, they can be tested, refined, and rearranged as the system gains experience. (145-146)

I know I should work out point by point how the above material relates to composition, but I am starting to burn out and will save that for a later day. Briefly, I will say that many of the process-based/textbook approaches to writing rely on a type of “perfect rationality” imbedded in economic theory. Writing is made to look clean and simple. Those of us in the field know that this is ridiculous. Also, I am recognizing how important contextualization is to my pedagogical approach to writing. Teaching students to recognize the social, cultural and political webs around them. Teaching them that everything is always (al----y) in flux. That its o.k. that everything is in flux. Framing writing as a series of choices based on awareness of the situation and their audience.

There’s a final point made by Holland, one that I believe is a bit more complex and thus I will quote it at length. In an educational discussion it seems a bit depressing in the sense of Bourdieu: it rings of the kind of cultural determinism that made me listen to Rage Against the Machine in the days of my youth. Now perhaps I have read too much Derrida to think I can ever change the system… or does the chaos theory discussed by Taylor and Waldrop (an initially small force can have dynamic, unpredictable, and incredibly influential impact upon a system) encourage me? Perhaps the point is to orient as many agents as possible? Hmph, I have been writing too long to work that one out. Here’s the paragraph:

Finally, said Holland, complex adaptive systems typically have many niches, each one of which can be exploited by an agent adapted to fill that niche. Thus, the economic world has a place for computer programmers, plumbers, steel mills, and pet stores, just as the rain forest has a place for tree sloths and butterflies. Moreover, the very act of filling one niche opens up more niches—for new parasites, for new predators and prey, for new symbiotic partners. So new opportunities are always being created by the system. And that, in turn, means that it’s essentially meaningless to talk about a complex adaptive system being in equilibrium: the system can never get there. It is always unfolding, always in transition. In fact, if the system ever does reach equilibrium, it isn’t just stable. It’s dead. And by the same token, said Holland, there’s no point in imagining that the agents in the system can ever “optimize” their fitness, or their utility, or whatever. The space of possibilities is too vast; they have no practical way of finding the optimum. The most they can ever do is to change and improve themselves relative to what the other agents are doing. In short, complex adaptive systems are characterized by perpetual novelty. (147)

Thomas's Taylor

... If Thomas signs on --and if we decide to continue w/ this forum-- I thought it might be interesting for T to comment on his JAC essay on Taylor.

What strikes me, after the last few mess.ages that endeavor to look at differences between Derrida, Deleuze, and Taylor, is how Thomas's work takes Taylor towards the sense of SOUND.

As I mentioned, I see much more of the sonic brick dimension playing out in Deleuze's work, and the more I look at Taylor's efforts, I see how much his interest moves towards the visual arts. (-Altarity- begins w/ a reading of Derrida's -Glas- and the juxtaposition of Hegel and Rembrandt, and it concludes with a consideration of the doodling of Kierkagaard ...)

Taylor does take up w/ Madonna in -Nots-, but Thomas's essay pushes the Brian E. angle, and in some ways begins using "Taylor" to consider dimensions of "Taylor" in new ways.

Mark C. Taylor to the sonic bricks of CECIL TAYLOR, perhaps.

(...oh, and Cecil is close Cilliers, if I might continue to weave names ... :)