Critical Studies week 7-8

Critical Studies week 7-8

Musings on a deluge of information and riding on the train...

Compare the pace of the increasing volume of information available to someone with reasonable access to modern communication technology to the changing view of the rail traveler in (citation here). The rail traveller's viewpoint is changed by moving through the world while isolated from it within a container.

The pedestrian travels at the pace of life, and notices more of the world while walking immersed. The rail passenger is passively witnessing the world changing, outside of the train, outside of themselves and therefore receive a more generalized impression of the world.

To be a pedestrian is to pay attention to the specific details of something, to get close to it and exist with it inside a common space.

To ride the train is to gain a more diffuse understanding of the landscape more of a "lay of the land" kind of thing.

Once upon a time information was limited and pedestrian. Our consumption habits were developed to handle the pace and volume of information available. This lead to a study of fine details and specifics not possible from the train of modern communication.

The question is whether our information consumption habits can evolve to suit the increasing pace and volume of information and derive understanding while sitting in a coach watching the landscape go by, unable to focus on details in the foreground.

The information train passenger:

This person has a phone, a TV, Cable, Satellite etc. and significant creative lesisure to fine tune information consumption habits from a vertical to a horizontal model.

Perhaps this is not you personally, but the frequency of this person is increasing as more and more generations are born into the situation of information quasi-omniscience. It follows that new habits of cognition will be necessary to cope, and even thrive within this increasing information awareness, because the key to information is understanding, regardless of the sources and volume of the information.

The value of information in terms of understanding/wisdom is not proportional to the volume of information but the reception and understanding of the right information, at the right time.


The reading:

Boxcar Bertha,
276-280
Seems dropping out of typical middle class life is not new to the 1960's or free love for that matter etc. (funny SE highlighted exactly the same points in class)

While there were somen hobos the lifestyle choice to ignore bourgeois life for the low budget travel life somewhat equalized women and men in SOME ways. Reflecting back on Walking after Midnight where women are disallowed to walk by themselves, the hobo people seem egalitarian by comparison. However like the hippies of the 1960s I suspect that it was still an overwhelmingly misogynist arrangement, as the women cooked, and performed other personal servitude to maintain their slim freedom. I suspect that men and women hobos were equally untouchable and that bourgeois society wanted to ignore them.

284

It warms the hackles to also realize that anti-war and anti-militarism it would seem were also not solely a 1960's phenomena either. This provides me hope that the pendulum will swing again to the left.

Walking after midnight
279
Two casts of women are apparent here. Women were compelled to trade respectability for mobility.
298
Patrilineal (new word for me with old roots)
298
The view that architecture contains within it's basic intent to control the sexuality jibes with Boxcar Bertha's open sexuality of the road.

Critical Studies week 5-6

Critical Studies Week 5-6

Comments on class:

It was a good thing to get the readings ahead of time so we can have a comprehensive look at the material we might use for our research assignment.

Mention of Bathes' "Camera Lucinda" with regard to how photographs transform banality. I'll have to believe it when I see it. If Barthes is involved I have some faith that this will happen, however I see a lot of banal photography that never transcends anything. Not knocking Photographers, but I believe that it is just as difficult to take a brilliant photograph as it is to paint a brilliant painting. In the case of photography I suppose context might be more important though....

Sorry if some of my notes are fractures....I brought my computer in this week to enable me to take notes faster and more accurately. Truth is I can hardly read my writing when I am taking notes longhand.

-Object of Knowledge? Historically, geographically, define an OOK

-I am so conflicted about the whole "Journaling" idea and dislike these kinds of "irresolute" projects because of the lack of structure. I suspect that my critical analysis of the class might offend, so I cannot really journal, not really. Self censorship drags on my train of thought and sours the moment. I also don't want to offend, and don't mean to. It is that my ideas are often wrapped in opinions (as you can tell from class participation). For instance during this class the instructor "revealed" certain journals and commented positively on them, and then made them available for the entire class. I could not help but notice that half of the class retrieved their little books before anybody could read them.

Perhaps the word journaling has connotations not in keeping with the intent of the exercise. I am gratified that I am not the only one who assumes that journaling is "revealing". Some don't want to reveal what they are thinking. It wrankles. However my journal is published in public, but somehow that is not as daunting as the instructor reading my thoughts. There is a certain anonymity in being so public.

More fractured notes:
Semiotics
-empty - recuperation of the object
- re-find older historical
-invent

- jargon - empty cliche
- language of the other?

Metaphor
One thing stands for another, an implicit comparison or symbol. Something that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another. "a sea of troubles"

Metonomy
One word stand in for another. Washington DC is used in speech to stand for the entire US Govt.


Stories as a means of transportation.

-Place is static, a location
-Space is something moved through. it is dynamic and is described as the intersections of mobile elements actualized by movements. Space is a practice.

-Discussion of the penis.

It was discussed in class regarding the reading "Imperial Leather" how the fetishistic chronicler Arthur J. Munby obsessively and anthropologically catalogued working women of his era while engaging in cross dressing seductions with his partner. This is all pretty much none of our business really. If one applies the values of the San Francisco Bay Area in the present day to Munby he seems tame and rather private. I think that he should be respected as such even after his death. This is not to say the material should not be available, but that the intent of the writer interested enough to find and distribute Munby's story is in question.

However to do so is I suppose tit for tat since Munby studied working women, why shouldn't Anne McClintock study him back?

What are the ethical questions about one's privacy when they are dead? I think the assumption that your privacy is void and everything is fair game after you die is ethically questionable within a less-than-ancient span of time. I wonder who Munby was obsessively documenting for? I suspect that it was for himself and that he would be horrified to know that his private business was used to justify a discussion about the insecurities of human beings endowed with a penis.

While this is a simplification of the discussion, it is an accurate one. The general gist of the discussion was that dominant heterosexual men are essentially afraid of being castrated, emasculated and essentially losing the traditional power that having a penis symbolizes.

While it is impossible to not deny that this is a part of the story, it is far from the only, or salient part of the story of persons born with a penis. Rather this seems like an analysis made by thinkers who do not have penises. How could they know that having a penis is not so much a matter of worrying about losing it as, a responsibility to use it wisely. Like any tool the penis is sometimes the right tool for the right job. The trouble begins when the penis is expected to perform out of its useful range.

For instance a penis should never be allowed to be a head of state. This does not mean that someone in possession of a penis should not be allowed to serve the people, as long as it is not to exclusion of people who do not have penises. It's also important that the head of state who might happen to possess a penis not act as if the penis is in posession of the person. There is some precedent for this unfortunately.

However back to Munby. I am afraid that too much emphasis was placed on an indictment of Mumby's prurient intentions and too little on the service done in the anthropological realm. Is it not true that the story of humanity is overwhelmingly obsessed with stories about people with penises? How then can it be so bad that someone with a penis puts their heart and soul into life long research into the conditions of life of people who never, ever get to populate the pages in the story of humanity?

Having a penis comes with its own extensive set of "heavily encoded" sociological requirements with no operators manual save parental council (god help us). Imagine an overwhelming drive to use a crescent wrench but with conflicting accounts of what crescent wrenches are supposed to be good at. The person with a crescent wrench MUST use the wrench because their core programming requires it as an expression of being.

Do we have any choice how we are born morphologically speaking? Not at this time. So it makes sense to avoid assumptions about someone's character based on their morphology. This also means that people who are born with penises can be as unenlightened and misinformed about people without them about the other.




3-1-06 Critical Theory B
Notes from class discussion of Spatial Stories

The distinction between place and space is interesting in another way.
There are people who might suggest that one "know their place" which is a figure of speech in opposition to the definition of place as a fixed location. Nobody ever says "know your space".

Parse the journal in clumps named, reading notes, class notes etc, make coherent.

First draft of the research paper is due on April 5th.

I need to work out my research project via email with SE.

Notes from class 3-1-06

Journal is due again next week (week 7)

Re: Travel Narrative of Mary Louise Pratt and Postcards..

The veil works to the advantage of the person wearing it. Photographers were freaked out about it. The veil thwarted the male gaze and despite assumptions of the west ALSO empowers in a way. It is interesting that the eastern culture seems aware of the intrusive character of the male gaze. Men aware of the ramifications of the male gaze associated with desire long before Western discourse.

Here's my question for the class regarding the Imperial Leather reading:

Mumby's prurience is not surprising at all (given that we live in San Francisco and all sexual expression is ok) What is surprising is his comprehensive expression of desire.

Based on the reading we can be somewhat sure of Mumby's intent. What is the intent of the person writing about his prurience? How is a detailed treatment of Mumby's particular expression of sexuality useful?

Freud's conscious, unconscious
Dreamwork Metaphor and Metonomy two forms of displacement Lacan says your unconscious has a language. Psychoanalytic theory is a tool.

Freud left open stories for people to go back and re-read.

Borders of gender and sexuality as travel narrative.

"Naturalization" of traits as rationalization for social piegonholing morays.

Denial - how can people block out violence and historical wrongdoing? Nostalgia is a form of denial.

Fetish - theory tries to describe a dynamic. Derived from African fetish objects. Marx and Freud borrowed the term. Marx = commodity fetish

Freud = protection from the fear of castration, hiding Fetish economy and theater crossing borders of gender and sexuality. This economy denaturalizes these tropes. Because it is private it doesn't effect the larger picture. S and M appears as a symptom of cultural anxiety.

This is the moment when private and public space came into being. The Mall is contested space.

bell hooks = looking back