this Public Address 4.0

G.W.

2010-02-17T22:19:49Z

I knew this looked familiar (via Riley Dog). Apparently he's been moved.

Baldessari sings LeWitt

2010-02-06T00:44:36Z

Foot Rests

2010-01-12T00:32:05Z

Ran across this little artifact while sorting through some pictures, and it reminded me of an entry from 2003.

]]> However, it seems that my blog has become more of a magic pillow lately: strictly soporific.

On the other hand, at least if I keep my mouth shut I'm less likely to get rained upon.

You're either with it or you're not.

2010-01-09T02:12:43Z

Cock Soup

2010-01-06T22:30:19Z

The Rhetoric of Douchebags

2009-12-26T14:41:14Z

hcwdb

The rhetoric of stags is a display of raw physical and psychological energy conveyed by the simplest possible techniques and thus illustrates my contention that rhetoric, in essence, can be viewed as a form of energy that results from reaction to a situation and is transmitted by a code. Though costly in energy, since it can go on for as much as an hour, it is less costly and dangerous than an actual fight. From this and from similar evidence it seems clear that nature has encouraged the evolution of rhetorical communication as a substitute for physical encounters. The rhetorical energy a stag can exhibit is directly proportional to his physical strength and potential as the best mate for a female. This is tested by debate. The evolutionary function of the display is to determine who is the fittest to survive and transmit his genes to future generations of the species. The social function is to secure authority, territory, and mating rights.

In terms of the traditional Western concept of the five parts of rhetoric, the confrontation of the stags seems to contain elements of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, though these are natural attributes and not conscious “art.” The inventional elements, the code by which the stag’s energy is transmitted, are of the simplest sort: repetition of the same utterance, with increasing volume, for as long as possible up to an hour. Here, as in all animal communication and to a considerable extent in human communication, overstatement and redundancy are the means of overcoming distracting noise in the environment, securing attention, and expressing confidence and resolve to prevail.

George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric 14.

Following up on my earlier puzzlement about Kennedy’s contention that “rhetoric is an energy,” it seems that this is his formulation rather than something with a solid source. I think that his observations have merit, though I am not at all convinced that rhetoric is entirely “transmitted by a code.” Code implies articulation of the elements into discrete “packets” or symbols—this is the part that I struggle with. I don’t think that visual experiences can be summarized that neatly.

Nonetheless, Kennedy’s articulation of the role of overstatement and redundancy seems particularly key in analyzing the rhetoric of the health care debate—on both sides. Few people seem to have actually read the legislation and insist on repeating hearsay evidence from dubious sources until it secures attention, expresses confidence and cements their resolve to prevail.

Froth and scum

2009-12-13T19:16:14Z

Aut insanit Homo, aut versus facit—
[The man is either raving or composing. Hor. Sat. 7. lib. 2.]

Composing and Raving must necessarily, we see, bear a resemblance. And for those Composers who deal in Systems, and airy Speculations, they have vulgarly pass’d for a sort of Prose-Poets. Their secret Practice and Habit has been as frequently noted:

Murmura cùm secum & rabiosa silentia rodunt.
[They chew over mumbles with themselves and rabid silences. Pers. Sat. 3.]

Both these sorts are happily indulg’d in this Method of Evacuation. They are thought to act naturally, and in their proper way, when they assume these odd Manners. But of other Authors ’tis expected they shou’d be better bred. They are oblig’d to preserve a more conversible Habit; which is no small misfortune to ’em. For if their Meditation and Resvery be obstructed by the fear of a nonconforming Mein in Conversation, they may happen to be so much the worse Authors for being finer Gentlemen. Their Fervency of Imagination may possibly be as strong as either the Philosopher’s or the Poet’s. But being deny’d an equal Benefit of Discharge, and with-held from the wholesom manner of Relief in private; ’tis no wonder if they appear with so much Froth and Scum in publick.

’Tis observable, that the Writers of Memoirs and Essays are chiefly subject to this frothy Distemper. Nor can it be doubted that this is the true Reason why these Gentlemen entertain the World so lavishly with what relates to themselves. For having had no opportunity of privately conversing with themselves, or exercising their own Genius, so as to make Acquaintance with it, or prove its Strength; they immediately fall to work in a wrong place, and exhibit on the Stage of the World that Practice, which they shou’d have kept to themselves; if they design’d that either they, or the World, shou’d be the better for their Moralitys. Who indeed can endure to hear an Empirick talk of his own Constitution, how he governs and manages it, what Diet agrees best with it, and what his Practice is with himself? The Proverb, no doubt, is very just, Physician cure thy-self. Yet methinks one shou’d have but an ill time, to be present at these bodily Operations. Nor is the Reader in truth any better entertain’d, when he is oblig’d to assist at the experimental Discussions of his practising Author, who all the while is in reality doing no better, than taking his Physick in publick.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, "Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author," Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 1 [1737]

Highway 31

2009-11-23T15:43:24Z

Cicero, NY

Rhetoric/Anger is an Energy

2009-11-23T14:54:32Z

Rhetoric, in the most general sense, is the energy in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisions or actions.

George Kennedy, “Introduction,” Aristotle On Rhetoric

Your time has come, your second skin.
You climb so high and gain so low.
Walk through the valley.
The written word is a lie.

May the road rise with you. (4x)
I could be wrong. I could be right. (3x)
I could be black, I could be white,
I could be right, I could be wrong,
I could be black, I could be white.

They put a hotwire to my head
'cuz of the things I did and said.
They made these feelings go away,
but those feelings get in every way.

May the road rise with you. (4x)

Anger is an energy. (4x)

Rise (Public Image Ltd. song)

There was a time that I would have agreed with Kennedy that rhetoric is systematic and symbolic (semiotic). I am not so sure any more. But I wish I knew where he was drawing (in the classical world) the idea that rhetoric is an energy, and that this energy is inherent in thought and emotion.

God Bless America

2009-11-21T16:01:52Z

Read it four times

2009-11-21T15:56:46Z

INTERVIEWER
How much of your writing is based on personal experience?

FAULKNER
I can’t say. I never counted up. Because “how much” is not important. A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination—any two of which, at times any one of which— can supply the lack of the others. With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what it caused to follow. A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can. Obviously he must use as one of his tools the environment which he knows. I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, since it came first in man’s experience and history. But since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better. That is, music would express better and simpler, but I prefer to use words, as I prefer to read rather than listen. I prefer silence to sound, and the image produced by words occurs in silence. That is, the thunder and the music of the prose take place in silence.

INTERVIEWER
Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?

FAULKNER
Read it four times.

INTERVIEWER
You mentioned experience, observation, and imagination as being important for the writer. Would you include inspiration?

FAULKNER
I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is —I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.

…

INTERVIEWER
What were the kinds of work you were doing to earn that “little money now and then”?

FAULKNER
Whatever came up. I could do a little of almost anything—run boats, paint houses, fly airplanes. I never needed much money because living was cheap in New Orleans then, and all I wanted was a place to sleep, a little food, tobacco, and whiskey. There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp. I don’t want money badly enough to work for it. In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 12

Working Metaphors

2009-11-21T00:10:42Z

Michael Crawford wrote Shop Class as Soulcraft as a way to make sense of his work history:

This book grows out of an attempt to get a critical handle on my own work history; to understand the human possibilities latent in what I was doing when the work seemed good, and when it was bad to identify the features of the work that systematically preempted or damaged those same possibilities. In sorting things out, we have had occasion to think about the nature of rationality, the conditions for individual agency, the moral aspect of perception, and the elusive ideal of community. (198)

One of Crawford’s conclusions is that when a job is “scaled up, depersonalized, and made to answer to forces remote from the scene of work” that the results are disastrous. The formulation is not a new one. Karl Marx came to this conclusion in the mid-nineteenth century. I remember vividly getting tossed out of a high school government class because I agreed with Marx's theory of the alienation of the worker, based on watching the slow gnawing despair in my dad as he coped with his job. The textbook (and my teacher) insisted that capitalism was perfect and that this “theory” was fatally flawed. She would not allow me to endorse such a “communist” thought in the classroom and she ejected me as a troublemaker.

I never can seem to think of “work” in the same way as other people. It comes from my upbringing. My father went to a job he hated every day. Increasingly, automation and MBA’s were running the oil fields from the central office and he felt as if he was not taken seriously. Dad seldom talked about this “work” but he constantly had work to do that he did discuss with me. Mostly, what he was interested in doing (and sometimes talking about) was the work at home—building fences, raising animals and crops, sawing firewood, shingling the roof. None of these activities resulted in any monetary benefit (other than spending less at the supermarket, I suppose). Work and the earning of money were completely separate activities.

]]> This made sense to me. My dad was an oil worker who drove around checking on the state of equipment, usually calling other people in to repair or replace it when there was a problem. He paid his dues with backbreaking work when he was younger, and was paid for his opinion as much as anything else as he got older. He hated his job more and more as “command and control” grew distant from him. He tolerated the job until he couldn’t anymore—he retired early, with a pension of about 400 1980s dollars per month. He never made much money before that either, but it didn’t matter because money was not what he cared about. In later years, the easiest way to sum up what he cared about would be to say that he simply enjoyed a good tomato and fixing things. He was good with his hands.

I grew up as a service worker of a different sort. After an interlude of working as a photographers assistant/darkroom flunkie, I decided that it was ruining my interest in photographic work to actually “work” as a photographer. So for years afterward, I primarily sold things and occasionally fixed them. I never considered what I did to be “work.” Work was what I did when I got home—I made photographs in the fullest sense, printing, mounting, staring at them and then trying to do it better the next time.

Crawford recalls securing payment for time spent at work as “compensation” but I never really gave it that much thought. Everyone has to hold down a job, right? It was how I afforded the materials to do the work I really cared about. The only time money seemed connected to work was when I received commission, a percentage of profits from sales. Mostly, work was just about showing up and being civil.

As I began to hang out with musicians, a different model emerged. Many of the creative artists/musicians I knew really never held jobs. They had very little in the way of material things, but claimed that they didn’t need them. What they dreamed of were “royalties” for their performances/products. The word directly reflects its statutory heritage—they wanted to be granted something for just being themselves. A different model of service than what I was used to. To be paid to just be yourself? How odd—but nice work if you can get it.

Knowledge work is where I ended up after service employments. I was a teacher, which I think qualifies as knowledge work. But again, it’s simply a metaphor for something else— unlike the terms “compensation” and “royalty” which are somewhat grounded in their deployment, “work” is simply an empty container that defers the meaning of what happens (hopefully productive, in either a physical or mental sense) to an elusive image of accomplishing something. Sometimes that equates to money, but more often it does not. To be “productive” is not exclusively the province of wage earners. In fact, I find it notable that academics are "awarded" contracts based on their performance or background achievements. These jobs are not wage jobs in the conventional sense, making evaluation nearly impossible.

Work for me is tied to the artist's model rather than the worker-drone. I feel that it is my work to make those things that satisfy me. Earning money is complicated and I can’t say that I ever really figured out how to integrate it into my sense of work. Earning is conceptually tied to the deployment of resources to profitable ends. It matters little whether the resource is skill (as in management skill or mechanical skill) or capital.

Currently, I invest to make money—it is not what I would call work. In the end, work is a metaphor for what actually happens—transformation. In all cases, work is transformative: one resource is transmuted into something else. If I invest money in a mining company, they mine a resource, subsequently transforming it into more money. I am granted a share for my troubles. But that share doesn’t seem like a “royalty” or “compensation” for the absence of my money in the meantime, or even (as is more likely) a "reward" for tolerating the risk of losing my initial investment.

All this is quite slippery, and I’ve only frozen a moment of my process of wrestling with it. Crawford’s book offers a lot of food for thought (as polemics sometimes do) but I get frozen simply considering the terminology. Crawford never considers “royalty” or “investment” or "awards" because it doesn’t mesh with his system of wages and compensation. All these terms just don’t satisfy; they suggest without quantifying.Work doesn’t quite work.

Shopcraft as Polemic

2009-11-20T15:23:06Z

Breaking back into serious reading after the travails of the summer came in the form of a popular polemic, Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. I saw the author, Matthew B. Crawford, on the Leno show one evening and talked to Krista about it. She mistakenly thought that I wanted to read his book so she ordered it. [She also informs me that a friend had read the book and said it was awesome and wanted to read it herself.] I read it, and its sloppiness motivated me to pick up the habit of reading again and look for something good. Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own was the next book I read, and it made me get over just how shallow Crawford was in comparison. It’s not that the Crawford book was that bad, it’s just that the logic underpinning it seems hopelessly flawed. Hopefully, I’ll return to talk about Pollan’s book later, because it genuinely excited me—but for now I want to record some notes about Shop Class as Soulcraft.

Crawford was made for Leno, because both of them are motorcycle fanatics. There is a long tradition of biker-philosophers tracing back to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hoped that this new book might extend/develop that line of thought, but it deliberately avoids the mysticism associated with most of the “craftsman” literature. He wants to deal with the more prosaic side of working in the trades.

]]> Declaring in the introduction that “manual competence” is separable from “craftsmanship,” Crawford tries to carve an new niche for himself, failing in my estimation due to his insistence on treating the book as “a cultural polemic.” His critique of modern society is mostly hollow and poorly thought out, though he raises interesting distinctions about the nature of work. Following Marx without citing him, Crawford declares that “Work is meaningful because it is genuinely useful” (6). This formulation is not controversial, but when he extends it declaring that productive work is the foundation of all prosperity, while meta-work that traffics in “the surplus skimmed from other people’s work” he conveniently ignores thousands of years of human history. Shipping, not manufacturing, is the backbone of the global economy.

I can wholeheartedly agree with Crawford’s formulation that the territories of “meaningful work” and “self-reliance” are tied to a struggle for individual agency (emphasis his) at the center of modern life. What I cannot abide by, though, is his constant conflation of economic models and cultural norms. “Work,” for me at least, is not reducible to wages, compensation, or skimming. His disdain for “knowledge work” is palpable, and his first chapter is dedicated to the rise (and eclipse) of shop class, formulated as its competition.

Crawford’s move here is an interesting one—to explore pedagogical history as proper ground for seismic shifts in the culture. He offers a brief overview of the “Arts and Crafts” tradition and its mixed messages, as well as his own training (mostly outside school) as a mechanic and tradesman. He shines when offering personal reflections, but the historical reflection is shallow. Primarily, he builds from recent criticism several planks for his platform: manual trades require a substantial level of cognitive ability and offer “psychic rewards.”

The second chapter takes on the assembly line and recent declarations of the “creative class,” equating the low wages of the supposedly “creative” as damnation. He offers a staid and long discarded formulation: “creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice” (51). Not many people would agree with that—the wedge driven between creativity and skill in the last hundred years will take more work to dismantle. The systematic deskilling of arts education is legendary. But Crawford draws an interesting connection between “submission” (loss of freedom) and true creativity compared with the absolute freedom of consumption. The pattern repeats throughout the book—a poor level of scholarship (common in popular literature) followed by sweeping unsupported generalities and within them, a grain of useful observation. I do not have the time to fisk the book entirely, but it was maddening.

The real take away for me was the distinction he offered between repair work and the activity of making. To design/build something is not the same thing as repairing and maintaining it. To repair other people’s systems requires a different sort of understanding—a different sort of cognitive work that is rapidly disappearing. This sort of work is based on submission to the object/function at hand. I wanted more careful distinctions, and fewer ill-informed rants on history and contemporary culture. Craftsman literature generally offers more useful material per inch than cultural polemics. This book did prompt me to return to the literature of craft.

Oneida, NY

2009-11-20T13:23:40Z

Calipers to the head of a songbird

2009-11-12T14:02:37Z

What is most menacing about the logic of sustainability is evident to anyone who wishes to look into its language. It will “operationalize” sustainability. It will create metrics and indices. It will create “life-cycle assessments.” It will create a sustainability index. It will institute a “global reporting initiative.” It will imagine something called “industrial ecology” and not laugh. Most famously, it will measure ecological footprints. What the so-called sustainability movement has accomplished is the creation of “metrics,” ways of measuring. It may not have had much impact on the natural world, but it has guaranteed that, for the moment, thinking will remain only technical interpretation. In short, it has brought calipers to the head of a songbird.

Curtis White via wood s lot