When I first upgraded from a dial-up account to DSL (in 1997), the DSL modem that was given to me was branded Alcatel. The pending merger between these two companies, in addition to the usual questions surrounding monopolization and trust, raises concerns of American national security. The New York Times explores some of these issues in �Lucent Talks Raise Issue of Security� by Vikas Bajaj and Andrew Ross Sorkin. (It's too bad that's not the same Andrew Ross who wrote No-Collar: the Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs and Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits, but that's a whole other entry.)
�The technologies which Lucent is engaged in are at the cutting edge of military innovation,� Mr. [Loren] Thompson[, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, VA,] said.
Some of the work has a decidedly futuristic focus, like an $11.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop high-speed wireless networks that can be quickly assembled to allow troops to communicate with one another on battlefields.
Such ad-hoc wireless networks are a step away from objects that are already enmeshed, not only able to join and propagate already existing meshes, but also able to create meshes. Once a standard protocol is developed by which mesh security, encryption, duration, radius (spatial), and population (number) can be controlled, assemblages can be instantiated and dissolved for military operations, music concerts, group research, artistic collaboration, collective sex, accompanied travel, and interconnection between assemblages, for example an artistic collaborative mesh coupled to an environmental rehabilitation network and a urban architectural grid.
Object-oriented programming achieves this in the domain of networked computer systems, even to the extent computer architectures and platforms are irrelevant to the network process. SETI@home is a particularly famous (if somewhat whimsical) example of a network computation model. SETI@home uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing as do projects such as climateprediction.net (global climate modeling), Folding@home (protein folding), and malariacontrol.net (malarial epidemiology). What kind of interface could combine the work of Folding@home and malariacontrol.net, an artistic mesh, an entrepreneurial collective?
The state-of-the-art is in its infancy as these meshes formally engage primitive computers for their processing capabilities. When humans (capital) can be formally connected to such meshes the age of informatic capital will have arrived.
I’m selling rascal and spanky. rascal is my venerable, whisper quiet Pismo Powerbook G3. I love this machine and wish Apple’s laptops were still fanless. I also am a bit sick of the über-chic brushed aluminum. The black molded plastic on the end-of-series Powerbook is, simply, beautiful.
They will be revered by future Mac collectors in a way that the boxy and Scandinavian-esque squareness current G4 Powerbooks will never be.
Ever.
Alas, I need to be able to synchronize my work across machines and ever since my department requisitioned a Final Cut Pro- and DVD Studio Pro-capable 15-inch aluminum Powerbook—which I named varmint—for me, work synchronization has been an issue. I also am considering trying out Apple’s iWork suite, for Pages in particular as I’m tired of quasi-professional wordprocessors like Mariner Write and Nisus Writer. I loathe Word. I’m disturbed that Corel doesn’t see the Macintosh as a viable platform. I guess they’re married to the lawyers and that’s enough for them.
Anyway, I didn’t intend for this to be a long rambling post. I only wanted to acknowledge that these machines—which have served me so well for the better part of a decade (I’ve had spanky since 1998 and rascal since 2000) and which have quite a bit of life in them yet—are soon to find new homes.
rascal’s eBay listing has a link back to this organ. Yesterday (Saturday, 19 February), I backed rascal up using Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner over the Internet. (I ran the session using Chicken of the VNC.) When fygar, the main hard drive partition on rascal, was backed up, I took varmint to the office and copied the contents of rascal’s several hard drive partitions: fygar, pooka, siggie, wire, and writers.
When I returned to Vanilla Falls (my rented home), I used Apple’s Disk Utility to restore fygar to the used 1.04 GHz Mirror Drive Door G4 I recently won on eBay. I booted that machine and hooked it up to my LAN. It faithfully behaved just like rascal, up to and including running DNSUpdate and commandeering desiringmachine.net! The result was that dyndns.org started routing requests to my home LAN which requests were handled spanky’s doppleganger (a dual 1.25 GHz G4 MDD G4, which I also recently acquired on eBay). I didn’t realize what I had done until I pulled up this page.
So, this morning I drove back to the office to wake rascal up and get him talking to dyndns.org. Things appear to be back to normal. On the cloverleaf from 682 South to 50 East, I thought about how these networked objects require so much care, that bringing a machine onto the network even from backups or already working hard drives requires quite a bit of attention, a lot of face-to-face, a lot like babies. (Of course, when I reflect more concretely on the analogy, I am not for a second fooled into thinking a machine is anything like a real live baby. I suppose being single and without children makes me think of the ways I fill my life with non-humans that require my care.)
baby will take her place just after rascal’s winning bidder pays.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of fun research over the last two weeks. It all began with checking out a couple of articles in MLA’s Profession 2004. In “Academic Disidentifcations,” In that article, Yung-Hsing Wu considers the degree to which the academy privileges the body of the academics over their chosen affiliations. So, for example, a Chinese American scholar is expected to have a professional relationship to Chinese-American literature. This kind of orthodoxy in a discipline which claims to have long ago rejected such restrictive racial orthodoxy is, according to Wu, the rule in trajectories of academic advancement and estimations of scholarly prestige. Though I’m still at the beginning of my academic career, I can see the truth in what he says.
Wu investigates the problematics of affiliation in Gish Jen’s sequel to Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, whose eponymous protagonist is ridiculed by her mother for choosing to convert to Judaism. For Helen Chang, Mona’s mother, filiation trumps affiliation. Wu compares Mona’s vexed attempts to construct a Jewish identity with academic affiliation, noting that essentialist notions of diversity can be complicated by unconventional ethnic affiliations and the perspective the latter provide regarding the former. Wu qualifies this possibility by noting that “eras[ing] difference reified and purified through its association with ethnicity, in order to retain the possibility of difference” is difficult because “affiliation guarantees no happy ending for ethnic subjects, be they characters in a novel or academics. As a number of critics have argued convincingly, the dynamic of academic affiliation, while it appears to bypass oedipal dynamics, turns out to be riddled through with all-too-familiar dysfunctions” (115).
Here, Wu provides a note about who some of these critics are: Jeffrey R. DiLeo, David Shumway, and Stephen Watt (the last of whom I met years and years ago). These three critics all write regarding the issues surrounding academic affiliation, and after reading part of DiLeo’s 2003 collection, Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture, I went on a research spree obtaining articles such as Shumway’s 1997 “The Star System in Literary Studies” (PMLA 112.1: 85-100), Michael Bérubé’s 1998 The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, Terry Caesar's 1991 SAQ article, “On Teaching at a Second-Rate University,” and issues 52 through 54 of The Minnesota Review titled “Academostars.”
These several days of research have led me back to Leslie Fiedler, and his notation of the advent of Post-Modernism in “The New Mutants,” published in 1965. In that article, as many of my friends have heard me explain, Fielder identifies what we call as counterculture in terms of a rejection by young white men of the history and education in general, and of literature in particular. As is well known, Fiedler’s landmark essay “Cross the Border, Close the Gap” 1969 extols the virtues of postmodernism for aging critics such as Fiedler himself. There is a dramatic change of tone with regard to the Postmodernism which Fielder in 1965 identifies with countercultural mutant hordes and in 1969 Fiedler sees as a fountain of rejuvenation for critics such as himself.
In 1967, Fiedler found himself and his family arrested for hosting a pot-and-hashish party, the subject of his 1969 Being Busted (which was first brought to my attention by Rob Detmering, a graduate student in my postmodernism course). Certainly, Fiedler’s encounter with the law is symptomatic of a shift in his life, not to mention his critical position. My sense is the shift Fiedler undergoes is part of a larger trend in American academics at the time, the increasing importance of performance in place of persuasion.
Shumway argues “that performance has replaced persuasion as the standard by which scholarly practice is judged. Audiences no longer care where an essay takes them as long as they enjoy they enjoy the ride” (180). Shumway argues that performance both feeds and results from the academic star system. Stars are not expected to be right about something as much as they are expected to present their points of view. The history of the shift from a persuasion-biased system of academic reward to a performance-biased as articulated by Shumway, Jeffrey Williams, and Gerald Graff (among others) is the also the story of the shift from a system of patronage (aka “the old-boys’ network) to a more democratic system which depends on ascertaining value by identifying highly mobile stars who travel from conference to conference to address audiences of expert peers, a system of valuation which correspondingly deemphasizes teaching. In other words, the shift from a n old-boys’ network to a star system also corresponds to a shift from pedagogy to research in considerations of academic advancement.
My growing sense is that at the time he wrote “The New Mutants” in 1965, Fiedler’s reputation was only just experiencing the effects of his 1960 publication of Love and Death in the American Novel, a reputation that finds its initial controversy with his 1948 publication of “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” (Harris). Like much of the academy and many of his colleagues, Fiedler was still a faculty of the school of persuasion. The increasing diversity of students as a result of the G.I. Bill had by the mid-1960s forced the profession of literature to a crisis of legitimation which begat anxieties of reproduction among established members of the academy. The massive cultural upheaval Fiedler documents in “The New Mutants” disturbs Fiedler precisely to the extent that questions of literary history are no longer relevant to the current generation of young white men. Fiedler cannot yet see that the rejection of history will be followed by an embracing of the current, which takes form as the beginning of the institutionalization of academic celebrity.
Love and Death in the American Novel secures for Fielder exactly the kind of notoriety that can propel an academic critic from Montana State University to academic stardom. The period between 1948 and 1960, then, should be a good place to look for the signs of the shift from what Shumway identifies as “soundness” to “visibility” or, more the point, academic celebrity/notoriety. I’m guessing that between 1965 and 1969, Fiedler began to experience some of the benefits of celebrity, enough such that he can celebrate postmodernism in “Cross the Border, Close the Gap.”
Partial Bibliography
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago, U Chicago P, 1987.
Harris, Charles B. Introduction. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1997.
Shumway, David R. “The Star System Revisited.” The Minnesota Review. ns 52-4: 175-184.
Williams, Jeffrey J. “Name Recognition.” The Minnesota Review. ns 52-4: 185-208.
Yesterday, an email from the eng-grads mailing list at the University of Virginia (I’m still on the graduate student mailing list through the calendar year) came to me about a response to the NY Times’ anti-intellectual obituary of Jacques Derrida.
What an utterly impossible moment. Derrida died today at the age of 74. I found out after returning from dinner with KK and loading up this New York Times article . KK and I had gone to dinner at Star of India in celebration of my passing my defense. We talked quickly and non-stop about her boyfriend, D, relationships, manuscripts out of dissertations, love as action taken to advance the spiritual growth of another being, crotchetiness, detailed letters of resignation, being mistaken for a bimbo, and just which gestures can communicate the notion of an all-consuming feeling.
We also talked about Derrida. D uses the metaphor of a house to explain subjectivity as described by structuralism and poststructuralism. Structuralism is like a house because the people inside it are limited by the structure of the house whereas in poststructuralism the house takes its meaning from the activities of the people inside the house. I’m pretty sure I botched the example. What I do remember clearly is that I suggested he try “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human and Sciences” which lays out the end of structuralism in topological terms.
I’m trying to think about what happens now that one of the most recognizable and important thinkers of the twentieth century has passed. Along with postmodernism, deconstruction is one of the most widely recognized but poorly misunderstood piece of specialist language to be produced by twentieth century philosophy.
But this is not an elegy about Derrida’s passing. It’s not really much of anything, just details about what I did around the time I learned he had died.
It’s later than I wanted it to be. I was on the road back from Charlottesville yesterday. I watched Disco Pig tonight (last night). I liked it though it’s closer to a bed-time story than a full-fledged movie. The characters aren’t fully developed nor is the world in which they live.
I wanted to say something about what I have in store for “Recombinant Media,” post-dissertation, but I’m tired enough to call it a night. I do want at least to say that I can already see how different the book will from the dissertation. Where I saw the dissertation articulating a relationship between the substantial and incorporeal especially insofar as I’m dissatisfied with the interconnection of what Lacan terms the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic Order, I think the book will be less concerned with the interconnection between the real and the symbolic.
Johanna put it nicely when she said there is a difference between the production of a different medium and the representation of such. It’s the fundamental difference between “multimedia” (God save us) and a book about multimedai. Didn’t someone once say, “You can’t get the sound from a story in a magazine?” (BH would kill me for that.)
It doesn’t make sense to hallucinate one’s media.
Why not share?
