tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2948587177299361082024-03-21T07:54:35.309+01:00Remix IT to the StreetsLike it share it remix itSargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.comBlogger398125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-29209780478528825052019-12-23T09:18:00.001+01:002019-12-23T09:18:46.774+01:00That thesis I wrote about speedrunningIn 2018, I wrote a sociology master thesis about speedrunning. Here is a summary of it.<br />
<br />
The impetus to write about speedrunning was born after watching an <a href="https://gamesdonequick.com/" target="_blank">AGDQ</a> video in conjunction with reading one of Weber's warnings about how instrumental rationality will destroy the human soul, turning us all into uncaring machines dutifully performing our duties with swift efficiency and as little <a href="https://discursiveanomalies.com/2017/09/11/jacobus-romantic-things/" target="_blank">sentimentality</a> as humanly possible. Weber cautioned that this future world would be akin to living in an iron cage, where all the bars were made in accordance with all the best state of the art practices, but with little thought of the consequences of building such an inescapable cage. When all you have to care about is the bottom line, <a href="http://streetremix.blogspot.com/2016/03/how-holocaust-could-happen-again.html" target="_blank">nothing else matters</a>.<br />
<br />
Speedrunners, on their part, have exactly one goal in mind: to finish a game as fast as possible, using every and all means available to them, up to, including and going way beyond breaking said games in the process. What some call game breaking glitches, others call time skips. Gotta go fast, after all.<br />
<br />
To an untrained eye, the parallels between an unfettered commitment to maximize efficiency at all costs, and an unfettered commitment to minimize time at all costs, might seem obvious. However. There is this thing in the academy where obvious things have to be explained in roundabout ways in order to be considered obvious. Gotta go slow in order to explain why you gotta go fast.<br />
<br />
This presented something of a challenge in my research review process. As you might imagine, there is not a great body of scientific literature out there on the topic of speedrunning readily available, so I had to find a proxy for it. A first foray was to find out what others had written about Weber and instrumental rationality, to find a continuity of thought to draw upon. The results of this first foray was a scattershot of articles who all pointed in various directions, all interesting in their own right but not too useful when it comes to confidently making statements such as "the current research says x". "The current research", in whatever field you might be interested in, generally consists of more than one or two interesting articles.<br />
<br />
Thus, I operationalized the drive towards maximum efficiency in narrowly specified metrics into a current trend to do just that in the academy, commonly discussed under the rubric of "audit culture". (To be sure, said process takes place in other institutions as well, but seeing as it is academics who write academic articles, the academy gets overrepresented in the literature.) In reviewing the articles on audit culture, I found what I was looking for: a broadly coherent set of observations and arguments all pointing in the same direction, most of them lamenting that the increased pressure to perform according to arbitrary impact ratings and bibliometric rankings stifled the lifeblood and creativity of the academy as an institution. Finally, I had sure scientific footing when talking about modern incarnations of Weber's iron cage; the bars are in this cage not made of iron, but rather of the slightly less well crafted slogan "publish or perish".<br />
<br />
This presented me with the problem of how to summarize Weber in an efficient manner. Those of you who have read Weber know that he was a bit of a speedrunner himself, laying out his writing as a set of logically coherent propositions which lead to a general conclusion. Upon having presented this conclusion, he then expects the reader to tease out all the social and economic implications by themselves, whilst he goes off laying out another set of logically coherent propositions. This makes for a speedy read, since the relevant section rarely spans more than a couple of pages at most, but it is not advisable for a master student to simply quote a source and say "he has spoken". Gotta achieve the word count, after all.<br />
<br />
Fortunately, others have tackled the same problems as Weber, and a later author who dealt with the same problem with Weber firmly in mind was Habermas. Habermas, in his decidedly unspeedrunny thousand page tome <i>Communicative Action</i>, pointed out that a great source of distress for Weber could be sourced to a grammatical unclarity. In short, Weber didn't distinguish between subjects, and thus jumped willy-nilly between speaking about the rationality of individuals and the rationality of institutions. This is a bit of a problem, since it meant that when Weber found that instrumental rationality outcompeted all other values in institutions, it led him to think that said other values went away in individuals as well, and vice versa. This led to a dystopic vision where instrumental rationality as a disembodied whole held society in an iron grip, from which nothing could conceptually escape.<br />
<br />
This conceptual confusion gave me an opening to ask just who the rational subject is, and what they are trying to achieve when they go about being rational. Drawing from <a href="http://streetremix.blogspot.com/2017/01/that-thesis-i-wrote-about-fan-fiction.html" target="_blank">my other master thesis</a>, I posited that rationality could be something that happened on a group or community level, rather than in a single individual or in society as a whole. A group such as - to take an example completely at random - the community of speedrunners.<br />
<br />
Here, I should add that Weber distinguishes between four different kinds of rationality. Instrumental rationality, as you might have surmised, is concerned with achieving a specific goal, and being able to continue to achieve it sustainably for an extended period of time (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides" target="_blank">Pheidippides</a>, the original marathon runner, does not qualify as being instrumentally rational; while he did manage to deliver the message, falling down dead after completing his task makes it difficult to tick off the sustainability box). Weber also uses the concept of value instrumentality, i.e. something being done because it is the right thing to do. The exact nature of "right" varies from time to time, but we can count aesthetics, justice and honoring the dead to this category. To exemplify the difference: while putting flowers on someone's grave might not attain a goal in terms of instrumental rationality, it scores high marks on the value rationality scale. The other two kinds of rationality Weber discusses are tradition and strong (albeit temporary) emotions; these didn't come into play, so I will leave them with an honorary mention.<br />
<br />
Back to our beloved speedrunners. The way I examined them - gained access to the empirical data, in science speak - was to watch AGDQ videos. Usually when trying to examine human actors acting in specific circumstances, the scientist is required to undergo <a href="https://discursiveanomalies.com/2019/08/11/lindner-walks-on-the-wild-side/" target="_blank">a lengthy process</a> wherein they get to know the people involved, the situation these people are in, and the proper questions to ask to get the kinds of answers that suit the research aims. That is, if said people even tolerate the scientist poking their nose in where it does not belong long enough to allow for questions of any kind to be asked. The great virtue of AGDQ is that the speedrunners are explaining their thinking to a general audience, along with a hands-on demonstration of what they do in the most practical terms possible. In short, getting access to the empirical data was a straightforward and speedy process.<br />
<br />
Of course, a single person can not capture all the complexities of the speedrunning community in one single thesis, so I had to limit my scope somewhat. I chose to focus on three games in particular: <i>Prey</i> (2017), <i>Diablo 2</i> (2000) and <i>The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time</i> (1998). These were chosen in order to demonstrate three different important strategic considerations of going fast: glitching through walls & sequence breaking (Prey), RNG manipulation (Diablo 2) and route planning (Zelda). I am happy to report that all the strategies I so carefully outline in my thesis are hopelessly out of date at this point, and that going for flashy quotes rather than descriptive depth was indeed the correct way to go.<br />
<br />
When writing this section, I faced the problem of how to present said strategies. The academy is not known for its detailed understanding of electronic entertainment, and merely gesturing to things being well established tropes would not cut any amount of mustard whatsoever. In the end, I fell back on the Weberian habit of presenting an ideal type in order to have something to compare actual reality to. Which is to say, I presented readers with an ideal type casual player, and the game loop said casual would likely fall into during their gameplay. This could then be contrasted to the, ahem, chairs to the walls shenanigans undertaken by the speedrunners.<br />
<br />
The conclusions drawn from this study are somewhat counterintuitive, and I find myself at something of a loss in how to best convey them. Fortunately, as the sole author of my thesis, I have the privilege of being able to speedily give myself permission to quote extensively from the source material, so here is most of page 35 and a respectable part of page 36:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A defining characteristic of Weber’s ideal types of rationality is that they are not bound to any substantive defined content. As ideal – almost platonic – forms, they are informed by the context within which they find themselves, and the actors performing meaningful actions within these contexts. By situating rationality in the community, as per Wenger (1998) we can overcome the contradiction inherent in Weberian rationality pointed out by Habermas (1987). There is an aesthetic, value-oriented rationality employed by what I have thus far referred to as the ideal type of ordinary gamers, and another value-oriented rationality employed by speedrunners. Neither of these are wrong or – worse – irrational, but they have to be understood as different methods of attaining the same type of goal defined by the same type of rationality. The fact that these approaches have a tendency to be mutually contradictory when compared across communities does not take away from their rationality – it merely underscores the situational nature of rationality as a concept.<br />
<br />
More importantly, this allows us to sidestep the trap of relativism. There is not one kind of rationality in one community, and another in another, where the epistemological rules of the universe are different and incommensurable. Nor is there a single defined rational course of action, where all other alternatives are irrational. Rather, we have a framework from which we can refer to different practices with commensurate results; different communities try to attain the same goals, albeit with different means. By bringing this to light, we have gained useful information with regards to the object of our study: the speedrunner’s relentless application of instrumental rationality does not undermine the gains they make in terms of aesthetics, but rather constitute it. Completing a twenty hour game in seven minutes is a beautiful thing, as is the realization of an optimal pathing solution in Ocarina of Time or the improbable conjecture of unlikely events of a Diablo 2 run where everything randomly goes as planned. The fact that this beauty may or may not be scrutable from an uninitiated perspective is beside the point.</blockquote>
<br />
The thesis then goes on to yell at academia for falling prey (pun intended) to the tendency to chase after arbitrary metrics, and yelling some more that the speedrunners might make a better job of it by making it an all out aesthetic virtue. It is, after all, better to strive for virtue than to grudgingly accept an arbitrary activity as an all-encompassing, soul-draining sidequest which distorts the whole purpose of the institution you find yourself in.<br />
<br />
I will conclude with another long quotation (from pages 37-38), not just because it allows me to write this post quickly (which is another intended pun; as is the reference to Keenoy in relation to wall glitching), but also because it underscores just how much insight into contemporary social processes remain to be gleaned from the world of computer games and online cultures. The internet stopped being new a generation ago, and we have to drag academia into this new age, kicking and screaming if necessary. The coming decade will be very interesting in this regard, and I suspect that in some cases, we gotta go fast.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The lesson to take home from this is not that the speedrunners have the right idea, in that we as academics should abandon all hope and embrace the metric. Rather, it serves as an ideal type against which to compare and contrast our theory and practice. It is possible to perform the metric to the exclusion of all other things, thus accomplishing the academic equivalent of finishing a twenty hour game in seven minutes. It is also possible to insist that something will be lost by adopting such a methodology, and that there is an inherent value in taking the slower, more comprehensive route. Sometimes, knowing how the former can be performed can save time and generate useful insight into the various things we take for granted (walls are, after all, very substantial guidelines [Keenoy 2005]); at other times, knowing when the latter is appropriate leads to approaching the long haul with better preparation and readiness. The essence of autonomy is to not automatically choosing the one or the other, but to be able to make up your own damn mind about what to do and how to go about it – and why.<br /><br />The humanities, in particular, are at the center of this problematic. On the one hand, they are being asked to justify themselves according to metrics that are very far removed from the autonomous values they hold and educate; there is a very clear gap between long-held values and institutional demands. On the other hand, those departments that manage to secure funding with reference to the useful skills gained by delving deep into our shared history – do so only by in an ever so gradual way renouncing these long-held values so as to approach the metric. In an era of declining funding, accepting heteronomy might be the only way to remain within the walls of academia. Again, the lesson is not to automatically go for either maximum autonomy or maximum heteronomy, but to think through the situation and face the fact that there is a choice to be made. Moreover, it is not clear whether performing the metrics or asserting the traditional values inherent to the humanities is the right course of action; ‘right’ and ‘rational’ are not necessarily synonymous.</blockquote>
Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-425761187680825322019-05-02T00:16:00.000+02:002019-05-02T00:16:34.777+02:00What do sociologists know anyway<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">[In this master paper, I pull the rather unorthodox move of reading Foucault, Bourdieu and Habermas through the lens of the literary critic Wayne Booth. You can read it as a comparison of epistemologies, as an introduction to each author, or as a strange progression of paragraphs which keeps happening until it suddenly stops. Either way, our sociology department is rad and cool for letting me get away with this. You can read a truncated, slightly more to the point version of the Booth section <a href="https://medium.com/@sargoth/the-six-kinds-of-programmers-there-are-392531705d75">here</a>.]</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<h2 class="MsoTitle">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Booth</span></h2>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Wayne Booth of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Critical Understanding</i> (1979) is all
about reconciling different views with each other. Through wit and extended use
of examples, he walks the reader through different ways of working out the
implications of a multitude of perspectives and what it means to have a
commitment to theoretical pluralism. As such, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Critical Understanding</i> transcends its humble pretense of merely
being a book on literary criticism, and comfortably strides into the epistemic
category of being a book on the methodology of science. In the following chapter,
I shall endeavor to demonstrate how and why that is, and how it can be used to
understand contradictory and complementary sociological theories without
accidentally confounding or confusing them.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Booth identifies six
archetypical attitudes to the multitude of approaches with regards to
criticism. That is to say, six ideal types (to impose Weberian terminology)
which can be used to describe what happens when the world is larger than human
attempts to understand and capture it in words and theoretical models. Seeing
as this is roughly analogous to what sociologists do in their craft, I reckon
each of these types will generate nods of recognition along the way.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The first ideal type
Booth identifies is an appreciation of the diversity of epistemic approaches,
and an implicit (sometimes explicit) hope that frequent clashes between these
points of view will garner insight into both the object of study and the models
used to study them. Different paradigms (to impose Kuhn’s terminology) will
strive to conduct the task of understanding the world their own way according
to their own internal rules, and through a process of comparing and contrasting
we as critics (and social scientists) will come to a better understanding of
what is going on and how to move forward. The debate itself is sufficient to
reconcile the plethora of perspectives.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Booth rebukes this
ideal type by pointing out that in actual practice, critics rarely respond well
to other critics making critical interventions and remarks on their work. More
often than not, the charge of misunderstanding is leveled in the direction of
those who voice dissenting opinions (be they ever so theoretically grounded),
and the only result of the interchange is both sides doubling down on their own
paradigms, rather than reaching some kind of elevated mutual understanding.
Although Booth is keen to point out that the process of peer review is
essential, on its own it is by no means sufficient to the task of reaching a
state of paradigmatic reconciliation and cooperation. At best, it amounts to
merely hoping for the best and soldiering on with whatever task one is
preoccupied with.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The second ideal type
is an attempt to reconcile different paradigms by resolving the semantic
differences between them, and thus make them linguistically comparable and
interoperable with each other. The goal of such an attempt is to show how each
and every theory relate to each other (and the inherent implications of these
relations), and to reduce the amount of conflict that arises from merely
semantic differences in theories that roughly describe the same entities. By
thusly creating a shared linguistic platform from which to operate, critics
(and social scientists) can proceed using either of the translated paradigms
with confidence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">An inherent assumption
of such an approach is that the main difference between paradigms is semantic,
and that clearing up any confusion caused by differences in vocabulary will
sort out any other important differences too along the way. Booth does not
mention the differences between quantitative and qualitative methodologies, but
it is easy to visualize that not even the most semantically clear communication
between adherents of these standpoints will solve disagreements in and of
itself. There is more at stake than merely not understanding one another
clearly enough; some differences persist even once semantic misunderstandings
are sorted out. Moreover, Booth concludes, any given project to unify the
multitude of perspectives would itself constitute another perspective, with the
implication that it too would have to be semantically reconciled down the road.<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A third ideal type is
monism, the thought that there is a single correct point of view, and that we
(or, as the case may be, I) have it. Booth differentiates between two kinds of
monists. The first is a person who simply does not know enough to realize there
are other points of view, and proceeds under the assumption that their own
reference point is the correct one (by default). The second, more interesting
kind, are theorists that set out to create universal theories that can account
for every aspect of every thing in every way. One theory, one truth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">As you might imagine,
this approach does not solve the problem of reconciling different paradigms as
much as it proposes to do away with it altogether. If others are wrong, then
taking their viewpoints into account would be a something of a misguided effort
(e.g. quantitative and qualitative methodologies). As a critical endeavor,
Booth maintains, this approach tends to settle with showing how others fail to
approach the truth in a correct way, without engaging with the more complex
aspects of these other theories in a constructive or useful manner. Monists
are, in every sense of the word, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">uncritical</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A fourth ideal type is
skepticism, a critical mindset dedicated to investigating the faults and merits
of any paradigm it encounters. A skeptic differs from a monist in that the
former does not necessarily require the overarching theory characterizing the
latter; a skeptic might very well be skeptical in general, an equal-opportunity
critic. In a sense, all social scientists are skeptics, in that statements must
cohere with some minimum of plausibility before being entertained as
potentially true. In short, taking things at face value is not the skeptic’s
way, and a claim has to be substantiated with both evidence and logic to be
believed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Booth, writing as he
did in 1979, did not have the advantage of being able to refer back to
postmodernism as the process of skepticism run amok<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a>.
Nevertheless, he describes the drawbacks of the skeptical mindset in a way that
is eerily reminiscent of the (sometimes unfairly ascribed) postmodernist
tendency to reject everything out of hand. While there is method to the
postmodernist madness, for our purposes it suffices to say that even skepticism
is not an ideal platform upon which to build a mutual understanding between practitioners.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A fifth ideal type is
eclecticism, the gathering of many different aspects from a variety of sources
into a new whole. The overall aim of this approach is to take the ‘good parts’
from different theories and, through a process of integration, end up with a
somewhat unified course of action, allowing the critic to proceed with a
confidence informed by many different perspectives. Eclectics are open to new
ideas and eager to put them to use; other points of view are not wrong, merely
different.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Booth, as you might
suspect, has reservations against this approach as well. For one thing, it
might devolve into an uncritical acceptance of disparate and contradictory
ideas, a hodgepodge of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. For
another, it might merely be a monism in disguise, accepting some aspect of a
theory while denouncing everything else as wrong. The initial premise of
eclecticism – to be widely read and open to new impressions – is easy to get
behind in theory, but in practice it tends to lead to scattered, undisciplined
and (paradoxically enough) dogmatic thinking, albeit without the advantage of
being aware of its organizing principle.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The sixth ideal type,
finally, is what Booth calls methodological pluralism. This approach consists
of taking in two or more paradigms on their own terms, and applying them on
real world phenomena according to their own internal rules. It does not try to
resolve the contradictions between paradigms, but rather attempts to keep them
both in mind at the same time. If one theory says A, and the other theory
not-A, this does not constitute a logical impossibility that has to be resolved
one way or another; rather, it is indicative that applying either method in
situations pertaining to A will have different implications that should be
taken into account when choosing the correct method. The plurality is not an
attempt to create a new monism, but a pragmatic admission that the world is
larger than our theories, and thus necessitates more than one<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">At this point, a
reader might interject that this is all very general, and that we are no closer
towards having a positive framework regarding how to deal with the presence of
multiple points of view. To be sure, being able to entertain more than theoretical
outlook as plausible and possible to apply makes sense, but surely we did not
need this many words to arrive at this conclusion. How can we make things
concrete? Booth, fortunately, proceeds by making things concrete, by using
three contemporary critics as examples of three ways of applying methodological
pluralism. In the interest of expediency, I will omit the particulars regarding
the three critics (Ronald Crane, Kenneth Burke and M. H. Abrams) and focus on
their methodological approaches. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Crane, according to
Booth, subscribes to a methodological heuristic of first defining the problem
and then applying the best possible method of solving the problem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as defined</i>. This heuristic has the
initial advantage of being intuitive and straightforward – out of all the
possible methodological tools available, the best one is chosen for the defined
task. Define the problem, select the appropriate theoretical tools, then set
out to solve it. Preferably, the theories chosen should exhibit coherence,
correspondence and comprehensiveness with regards to the object of study (be it
poem or social phenomena). As simple and unproblematic as this approach might
seem from the point of view of the person doing the defining, choosing and
solving, it is not as straightforward when observed by an external observer.
Booth primarily focuses on the aspect that Crane explicitly defines his work in
a particular way, and his critics lambasting him for not doing the work of
solving another problem defined another way, and the confusion that results
from this state of things. For our purposes, we can go further and point out
that the same confusion reigns with regards to the choice of means as well as
the execution of the chosen solution. Merely making what we perceive as the correct
choice of theory and method is insufficient; what this approach offers in terms
of clarity of action it lacks in terms of intersubjective accessibility.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Burke, again according
to Booth, offers up another methodological wrinkle by pointing out that the
theory chosen by necessity brings with it its own set of definitions and
assumptions. Indeed, some problems might only be definable from within certain
theories, meaning that defining a particular problem in a particular way
overdetermines the choice of that theory. This is an inversion of Crane’s
approach, in that Crane began by defining the problem and then proceeded by
choosing the appropriate theoretical means to solve it. We thus end up in a
chicken-and-egg situation, where the problem to be solved is only ever made
possible to define by using the means to solve it. Thus, Crane’s described
process of defining a problem and then choosing the best possible means of
solving it becomes a mischaracterization of what actually happens. Burke is not
overly concerned with the epistemic wrinkles of this inversion, and settles on
concluding that this is the way theories work; adhering to any given theory
provides a “terministic screen” through which to view and define the world (and
the problems to be solved in it). Thus, being in command of a multitude of
theoretical perspectives allows for the formulation of a wider range of
problems to be solved through the methods at hand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Abrams, still
according to Booth, performs yet another inversion of methodological propriety.
In his explication of the poetry of Wordsworth, Abrams draws upon a multitude
of historical and literary sources to show how this influence can be seen in
this way, and another in another and so on, in such an intensely close way that
the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. In one sense, Abrams’
project is an exegesis of a particularly dense poem; in another sense, it is an
expose of the entire historical moment commonly referred to as Romanticism. By
focusing so intently on the particular, something general is uncovered. But –
and this is the methodological wrinkle – Abrams did not follow a prescribed
method in his efforts, nor did he try to solve a defined problem. Rather, he
was guided by a sense of where the historical linkages were to be found and a
deep familiarity with the associations Romantic poets would have made at the
time. Abrams’ work was not the result of methodologically driven processes, yet
by virtue of the sheer performance on display throughout the work, it became a
cornerstone upon which further methodologically driven critics and researchers
have to rely. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The task at hand for
Booth is to develop a working model of methodological pluralism that takes each
of these inversions into account without succumbing into monism, eclecticism or
radical skepticism. In the simplest possible framing, Booth’s project is to
give readers the tools they need to keep two or more frameworks in mind at the
same time, without falling for the temptation to call either of them truer than
the other. In a sense, it is a return to Aristotle’s maxim that what
distinguishes an educated mind is the ability to entertain an idea without
accepting it, with the added critical wrinkle that ideas are not just
propositional statements, but whole worldviews whose implications have to be
thought through.</span></div>
<div class="MsoTitle">
<br /></div>
<h2 class="MsoTitle">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Foucault</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">With this, it is time
to let go of Booth and turn to Foucault. Foucault (2003) famously wrote on the
nature of knowledge and power, intertwining them in such a way as to say that
one is readily translatable to the other. This has been the source of a great
deal of confusion, as well as an equal measure of conceptual clarity. It is my
endeavor to begin this section by discussing the clarity, and then turn to the
confusion; readers might even now see where this is headed, but there is an
order to these things.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Discipline and Punish</i>, Foucault outlines
the mechanism whereby individuation is a paradoxical result of the
standardization of expectations. An example he mobilizes is the disciplined
soldier, whose ability to move in perfect formation and keep up an immaculate
appearance is a measure of his capacity as an individual agent. When seen from
afar, a regiment in formation seems to consist of a number of interchangeable
parts, where the particular placement of an individual is incidental to the
performance of the unit as a whole. When inspected up close, however, any
deviations from the expected performance can be noted as marks of individuality.
More often than not, they are marked as reasons for punishment – a ruffled
uniform, unpolished boots, movements that are ever so slightly out of sync with
the other troops’. Foucault zooms in on these small differences, and remarks
that it is here individuality is constructed. Not in the sense that
disobedience is the root cause of individuality, but rather that individuality
is constituted by the subtle variations in the degree to which and given person
coheres to the standardized expectations.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Another example of the
same process is modern education. Here, too, standardized expectations are at
play, and pupils are graded on how well they manage to live up to them. At the
beginning of the educational process, the cohort is an undifferentiated mass of
people whose precise characteristics have yet to be determined. At the end of
that same process, a myriad of evaluations have been made and documented about
these characteristics, and from these documents the pupils emerge as
individuals. Some have shown proficiency in one area, and are graded thusly;
others have shown affinity for other subjects, and are graded accordingly.
Based on the picture painted through the documentation created through the
educational process, the life trajectories of the individuated bodies can take
different courses. Some might be presented in such a favorable light as to be
railroaded towards a life of academia, while others find themselves struggling
to convince anyone that they are legitimate participants of polite discourse.
The process of subtle differentiations ends up resulting in differences that
are anything but subtle.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It is in this way
knowledge amounts to power. Not in the sense that individual pupils can
leverage themselves into a more powerful life status by learning well in school
(although this is a popular narrative), but in the sense that the fine-grained
practices of evaluation and documentation present in the school system as a
whole grants it the power to determine the life trajectories of a great number
of those passing through it. The knowledge produced about individuals by
documenting their every move becomes the very thing that defines them as
individuals – the individual does not exist prior to having undergone the
process of being evaluated with regards to the standardized expectations.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Foucault then shifts
his analytical approach from the particulars of barracks and schools, and
generalizes this principle of disciplined individuation to society as a whole.
At any given place in and given moment in time, there are any number of
standardized expectations at play through which individuals are being evaluated
and judged. Some of them are written down and formalized (as in the many
instances of bureaucratic documentation that permeates modern life), but a
great many of them are left unsaid, implicit in the general interplay of
individuals (such as social norms which dictate who is ‘hip’ and who is not). Rather
than give an account of each and every particular instance of this process,
Foucault generalizes it and describes the latent standardized expectations
inherent in social interactions as “the discourse”. This shift, while
understandable from the point of view of making a point and finally getting a
book ready for publication, is also the source of a non-trivial amount of
confusion. We shall return to this confusion after a brief discussion on
Foucault’s shift from the specific to the general.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">If we view Foucault’s
move from the specific to the general through Booth’s typography of theoretical
approaches, we might notice that it more closely resembles Abrams’ approach
than anything else. Foucault did not set out to solve a defined problem using
an explicitly described series of methodological steps. Rather, he gave thick
descriptions of a series of [arguably early] modern practices in such a way
that, upon having read them, readers can not but nod to themselves in
recognition. This would, in one sense, make it bad science, an under-documented
investigation into the social processes of documentation and differentiation,
where inferences are made without adequate material support for moving from the
particular to the general. Yet, as with Abrams, the proof of the pudding is in
the eating. At some point during the reading, the sheer amassed volume of
details pointing in the same direction becomes overwhelming; the presentation
reaches a critical mass where methodological objections are somewhat beside the
point.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This does present
something of a methodological problem for those who want to apply Foucault,
however. They can not readily proceed through mere mimesis, by replicating his
feat in the same manner he performed it. Or, rather, they could, but the effort
involved would be greater than an average academic is likely to have available
in their everyday practices. A more manageable way to go about it would be to
follow the Burkean way of applying Foucault as a terministic screen for the
purposes of defining the problem to be investigated, and then proceed by
following Crane’s example in choosing the best method for the problem as
defined. The fact that Foucault pulled off being Foucault does not mean this
possibility is democratically or evenly distributed, and it behooves us to
temper our ambitions accordingly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To return to the
confusion mentioned above, we might gainfully apply Booth’s six ideal types of
how to handle theories. What leaps to mind intuitively is that Foucault’s
insistence of referring to “the discourse” can be – and has been – read as a
commitment to radical epistemic warfare, the first of Booth’s types. “The
discourse”, understood as merely words without referent in the material, is a
free-floating social construct from which any and all social behavior is
derived, meaning that anything is possible and everything is permitted.
Unmoored from the material, the discourse offers a reading in which anything
goes, as long as it can be expressed with sufficient self-confidence. In the
postmodern condition, everyone gets a shot at pulling off a Foucault.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In hindsight, this has
not panned out. There are any number of books with the words “postmodern” in
their titles which can scarcely claim relevancy today, despite taking the
free-floating discursive premise and running with it. In part, this is due to
the fact that they rely on a misreading of Foucault, and in part because of the
untenability of their methodological premise; when everything is relative and
all truth-claims equally valid, it makes no sense to read them rather than
anything else. Donald Duck beats them by virtue of at least being amusing to
read.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A more rigorous
approach would assume the fourth type of attitude, that of radical skepticism.
If the categories we use to differentiate people from one another are socially
constructed, then it makes sense to critically examine and critique these
categories and their social effects. Up to a point, this approach manages to
accomplish what it sets out to do – it problematizes the systematic use of
certain labels to disenfranchise certain groups from participating in public
discourse (e.g. “hysterical” women), and increases awareness that words matter
in a concrete, material way. The challenge is to not fall into a knee-jerk
habit of dismissing every categorization out of hand, or to become so sensitized
to every nuance of every word that practical communication grinds to a halt.
While it is true that Foucault describes the present as the sediment of the
past (this is the premise of the <i>Archaeology of Knowledge</i>), one has to be
strategic when choosing when to engage in archaeological explication and when
to merely say things with the plainness the situation requires them to be said.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Those who wish to
engage Foucault in the mode of methodological pluralism have to confront the
fact that it requires at least one hard swallow. By this, I mean that given
that Foucault’s main mode of grounding his theory is demonstration, it follows
that readers either have to accept or reject what they have been shown along
the way, despite the lack of methodological progression from first principles
to full theory. If this can be accepted, then the theory can be applied in a
fruitful manner. If it can not be accepted, then Foucault merely comes off as
making one unsubstantiated claim after another, somehow managing to capture the
attention of a great number of people. The methodological pluralist would have
to take this into account when considering the applicability of Foucault’s
theories, and – should it come to it – bite the bullet.</span></div>
<div class="MsoTitle">
<br /></div>
<h2 class="MsoTitle">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bourdieu</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">At first glance,
Bourdieu (2012|1990) tackles what might seem to be the same questions as
Foucault. Foucault tackled the question of power and how it operates; Bourdieu
tackles the question of how it comes that a great many individuals, all unique
in their own ways, nevertheless happen to act in the same manner and seem to be
formed from the same mold. The path each respective author has taken to getting
to these questions differ radically, however, and as we have seen the way to
arriving at a particular question is as important as the questions themselves.
The main difference between Foucault and Bourdieu being that the latter is
explicitly defining himself as a sociologist, while the former does not.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bourdieu, the
sociologist, tackled the question of how structures and individuals can coexist
without one overdetermining the other. Or, to phrase it another way, how to
bridge the gap between methodological collectivism (Durkheim) and
methodological individualism (Weber). It is true that humans in groups exhibit
predictable tendencies that can be modelled without any particular knowledge of
any of the individuals involved. It is also true that biographical facts
sometimes trump these predictions and propel individuals into life trajectories
that are not accounted for by collectivist models (the life trajectory of
Bourdieu himself is a much-noted example of this). Having theories for both
collective and individual processes provides a bigger understanding of what is
going on, but it also leaves something of a gap between one and the other.
Bourdieu’s project was to bridge that gap, without reducing either category
into the other.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The main concept
Bourdieu uses to bridge the gap is that of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">habitus</i>.
A habitus is a set of generative dispositions, tendencies and propensities that
frame the range of action and understanding in/of a particular individual.
These are inculcated into the individual through a combination of socialization,
ideology and lived experience, so as to form a totality of their being in the
world. No two individuals are alike, and they might differ in a great many
respects, whilst at the same time share an overall habitus that propels them
into similar life trajectories. The concept encompasses both these similarities
and these differences, without overdetermining either.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It is important to
note that a habitus is not akin to an algorithm, which produces the same
results every time when given identical input. The “generative” of “generative
dispositions” connotes a probability of acting along certain lines, but leaves
the specifics as to how these probabilities play out empty. This allows for
individual agency, whilst at the same time giving an account for why, given a
sufficiently large sample size, certain trends and patterns will emerge along
class lines. Individuals from the working classes will, overall, act
differently when encountering a work of abstract art than individuals from the
upper classes. This does not preclude the possibility of working class
individuals responding with a deep appreciation of the artwork at hand, but it
does maintain that, statistically speaking, this would be an outlier rather
than the norm. This outlook allows sociologists to speak both of individual
biographies and social structures at the same time, without engaging in complex
translations between individualist and collectivist theories.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The formation of
habituses is as much material as anything else. The formation of a working class
habitus is as much determined by the importance of work and the workplace in
the lived experience, as it is by the conditions outside and surrounding the
work itself. A vulgar example is the stereotype that workers are too tired to
read Hegel when they come home from work, and thus engage in less
intellectually stimulating activities, which means they never engage their
capacity for philosophical thought, which would explain why the working classes
are less philosophically inclined than those further up the class structure.
This example ascribes capacities to individuals of a group, and thus does not
describe a habitus; rather, it is a stereotype. A better, more nuanced
explanation of the same phenomenon is that those in the working class are not
encouraged to engage in the habits of casually reading anything at all, much
less Hegel in particular, and that (writ large) this means members of the
working classes are less likely to know someone who can get them into the
habit. The impulse to do something has to come from somewhere, and if this
impulse is not present, then something else will most likely be done. Those are
the probabilities.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The education of upper
class children, by contrast, more than likely include trips to museums, the
reading of important literary works and other excursions into high culture.
Whether individuals retain any specific knowledge about particular works from
these experiences is of lesser importance than the fact that they get
accustomed to going to these places and engaging with these activities. What is
ingrained is a set of habits, tendencies and memories associated with these
activities, and thus also a higher likelihood of engaging with them at a future
date. To be sure, there might be individuals who are utterly unmoved by any of
the aspects of high culture, but as a class the propensity to revisit these
sites of knowledge remains a permanent feature. An upper class habitus brings
with it a familiarity with these things, if nothing else.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In a seminal work on
education, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) notes that the educational system has a
distinctly middle class character. The teachers, who are by definition educated
and in possession of a non-trivial amount of cultural capital, are more often
than not belonging to the middle class themselves, and accustomed to
socializing with others possessing a middle class habitus. The educational
aims, too, tend to assume the possession of a middle class habitus, albeit
implicitly and without framing it in terms of class. This results in a system
that, from the word go, treats children belonging to the working and middle
classes differently. The latter are already socialized in such a way as to know
what is expected of them, while the former suddenly discover that things are
not as they are at home, and that their success moving through the system is
contingent on learning middle class mannerisms and habits. Failure to do so
means academic death (which is to say, an exit from the system of education,
either after completing the mandatory part, or earlier than that in extreme
cases)<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a>.
Working class pupils will, to put it bluntly, have to learn twice as much as
their middle class counterparts in the same amount of time. This is one of the
ways in which class structures reproduce and perpetuate themselves.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">If we turn back to
Foucault, we see that there are similarities between their accounts of the
process of education. We also see that they arrive at these seemingly similar
conclusions through very different processes, and that it would be a mistake to
assume that they can be easily translated back and forth between one another
without losing important contextual and methodological assumptions along the
way. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and the implicit assumptions with regards
to structuring structures, is not at all the same as Foucault’s concept of the
disciplining discourse, and the assumptions that go along with it. Class is the
name of the name of the game for Bourdieu; for Foucault, not so much. To invoke
Booth’s second archetype, these are not merely semantic differences which can
be sorted out through careful linguistic analysis and exegesis. These are
different conceptual universes that have to be understood on their own terms,
lest the sum becomes smaller than the sum of its parts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">From this, it is easy
to understand why Booth included eclecticism (the fifth archetype) as a
non-optimal mode of critical understanding. While the theorists overlap in
their subject matter, it would be a mistake to take a little bit of one and a
little bit of the other and uncritically combine in a theoretical stew. For one
thing, the different theories lend themselves to different methodological
approaches (Bourdieu is very explicit about his methods, and in the Distinction
(1984) I would argue he is explicit to a fault), which means careful
preparation is required to ensure that any inquiry informed by both theories
actually investigates what it claims to investigate. It is very easy to slip up
and begin empirically exploring Foucault’s theory of habitus. While this
approach would indeed manage be novel, it would not be informed by the same
conceptual apparatus employed by other scientists in the field.</span></div>
<div class="MsoTitle">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></div>
<h2 class="MsoTitle">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Habermas</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">When it comes to
methodological pluralism, Habermas (1984, 1987) is it. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communicative Action</i>, he summarizes in exhaustive detail<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a>
the theories of Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Mead, Adorno, Lukacs and a number of
other social theorists, in such a way that it is clear where each respective
theory ends and Habermas’ continuation begin. To say that Habermas is firmly
grounded in the theories of the sociological field (pun intended) would be to
understate the case – I reckon many a sociologist read Habermas and only then
firmly grasped what the aforementioned theorists were about. Clarity at length
is not just a stylistic achievement, however – it is a cornerstone of his
theory of communicative action.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Like Bourdieu,
Habermas is primarily focused on bridging the gap between individual and
structures. The former is expanded into the concept of lifeworlds, a concept
imbued with the full philosophical force of phenomenology, from Schutz and
Husserl onward. The latter is expanded into the concept of systems, derived
both from the then emerging systems theory (including and beyond Parsons) and
from Weber’s looming iron cage of rationality. Both of these concepts deserve
elaboration in turn.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A lifeworld is the
material and mental circumstance within which an instance of human subjectivity
finds itself. This encompasses everything encountered by the subject in
question, from the most private of experiences to the most public of actions.
This is at once both very general and very specific. On the one hand, there are
a great many experiences to be had between birth and death, and filing them all
under one singular rubric is ever so slightly handwavy. On the other hand,
Habermas needs to differentiate personal experience from the myriad of
objective societal and technological processes that take place in the world,
which affect said personal experience but do not stem from it. The wide/narrow
definition of lifeworld performs this function and manages to preserve the
human experience without reducing the scope of the theory to it; it is a move
that encompasses processes on the micro level whilst also acknowledging trends
on a macro level. It also avoids the reverse tendency: to fully and irrevocably
incorporate lived experience as aspects of larger systems.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A system is, as might
have been inferred from the above paragraph, the supra-individual processes
that affect and shape social reality; among them, capitalism is the most
general. Science, politics, art, technology – modernity consists of and is
constructed by an innumerable amount of systems working in concert and
parallel. What differentiates modernity from earlier historical periods is that
these systems have grown more specialized, autonomous and powerful at a rapid
pace (Bauman [1999], drawing on Hans Jonas [1994], would contend that they have
outgrown humanity’s capacity to manage them). As with the concept of lifeworld,
the wide/narrow definition serves an analytical function – it allows
sociologists to talk about macro level tendencies without having to seek recourse
in micro level counterparts.</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is not to say
that lifeworlds and systems do not interact. On the contrary, a substantial
portion of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communicative Action</i> is
preoccupied with spelling out in exhaustive detail just how such interactions
take place on a theoretical level, and the implications of each such
interaction under various circumstances. In the interest of keeping things
short, I will now speedrun to the most famous of such interactions, which
Habermas refers to as the tendency of systems to colonize lifeworlds.</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The easiest way to
characterize such a colonization is as an intrusion. In keeping with the
discussions on the other authors, it would be prudent with an educational
example. A student is embedded in a lifeworld, with a family, friends, social
relations and the whole phenomenological package. Then, she is given an
assignment of unusually large proportions, and have to devote more time than
usual to completing it. Thus, she has to take time from her other lifeworld
activities (socializing, attending family gatherings, etc) in order to ensure
that the assignment is completed within the allotted time frame. Somehow, she
will have to navigate the demands from both spheres. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More often than not, the logic of the
(educational) system overrules the logic of the lifeworld. Not only in this one
particular instance, but also in the way our imaginary student over time
becomes more socialized into the specialized mindset that characterizes
whatever field she studies. Upon completing her education, she will be a
different person both compared to when she began, and compared to her peers;
the logic of the system has colonized her lifeworld.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To be sure, this
process is not an irresistible, one-sided endeavor. Rather, it is to be
understood as an endless series of negotiations instantiated within the context
of an individual and her lifeworld, where strategies to resist (or assist) the
process can be leveraged with various degrees of success. The point, for
Habermas, is to draw attention to the myriad of such situations that prevail in
modern societies, and the tendency of specialized logics stemming from
particular systems to permeate and determine the shapes of particular
lifeworlds. The logic of completing an education is but one such systemic
presence; the capitalist demand to get a job another, the medical imperatives
to adopt certain habits yet another, whatever ideological ideas have captured
the political moment is yet another still.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The point of pointing
out these tendencies is, as we alluded to in the beginning of this chapter, to
support and enable clear communication. Being able to clearly identify the
systemic demands put upon individuals allows them to clearly communicate about
their circumstances, and possibly also to collectively formulate courses of
action to deal with them. The most dramatic example of this would be, to invoke
Marx, the working class transcending being a class-in-itself to become a
class-for-itself, thus initiating the proletariat revolution (or, with a
slightly higher degree of probability, the formation of unions and the
initiation of collective bargaining). In less dramatic terms, it would help
reduce interpersonal drama caused by systemic (dys)functions. Our imaginary
student would be able to convey that university life demands a non-trivial
amount of time, and her lifeworld peers would be able to make the counterpoint
that there are other things in life than university assignments.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Here, we see a
distinct similarity with Booth’s second archetype (that of semantic resolution).
Ironically, this is also most frequent critique leveraged against Habermas in
general and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communicative Action</i> in
particular. More often than is reasonable to count, it has been said that the
ideal forms of communication formulated by Habermas are unrealistic, utopian
and impossible to achieve. The irony is that Habermas would agree with these
assertions, but insist that the attempt be made anyway. Even if perfectly
undistorted communication is impossible, removing even one distortion would be
an improvement. This ethos shines through not only in his argumentation, but
also in his commitment to making sure each theoretical foundation is as
transparent as possible. While Habermas does not manage to translate every
social theory of individual and structural processes into one coherent,
all-encompassing whole, his attempt has made it easier to navigate the
theoretical landscape moving forward. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communicative
Action</i> is not a Rosetta Stone, but – and this is the critical question –
why should it have to be?</span></div>
<div class="MsoTitle">
<br /></div>
<h2 class="MsoTitle">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">References</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="SV">Bauman, Z. (1999). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vi vantrivs I det postmoderna</i>. </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Göteborg: Daidalos.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Booth, W. (1979). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Critical understanding: the powers and
limits of pluralism</i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bourdieu, P. &
Passeron, J-C. (1990). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reproduction in education,
society and culture</i>. London: Sage.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bourdieu, P. (1984). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Distinction: a social critique of the
judgment of taste</i>. London: Routledge. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bourdieu, P. (1990) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The logic of practice</i>. In Calhoun et al
(ed) (2012): <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Contemporary sociological
theory</i>. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Foucault, M. (2003). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Övervakning och straff</i>. Lund: Arkiv.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Habermas, J. (1984).
<i>The theory of communicative action. Vol. 1, Reason and the rationalization of
society</i>. Boston: Beacon Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Habermas, J. (1987). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The theory of
communicative action. Vol. 2, Lifeworld and system: a critique of functionalist
reason</i>. </span><span lang="SV">Boston: Beacon Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="SV">Jonas, H. (1994). <i>Ansvarets princip: utkast
till en etik för den teknologiska civilisationen</i>. Göteborg: Daidalos.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Munroe, Randall.
(n.d). Standards. https://xkcd.com/927/</span></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There is an XKCD comic that illustrates this phenomenon rather
poignantly. </span><span lang="SV"><a href="https://xkcd.com/927/"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">https://xkcd.com/927/</span></a></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The whole book, written as it is in the mid-1970s, is a fascinating
insight into a world prior to the advent of explicitly postmodernist theory. It
makes frequent references to Barthes, Derrida and other names associated with
the postmodern moment, but these references take on the nature of gesturing
towards individual authors rather than a more overall movement; reading between
the lines, it is possible to glimpse what is ahead, but it has not yet come to
pass.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Booth discusses at length whether this constitutes a monism in and of
itself. Reading between the lines, and in the context of his overall project,
it is difficult not to get the impression he does this more as an elaborate and
humorous poke at overly pedantic philosophers, rather than as a serious
objection. The rhetorical structure of first proposing five ideal types, only
to reject them in favor of a sixth type, supports this reading.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It is interesting to note that Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) do not view
academic death as a failure state. Rather, it is a statistical index of when
certain populations end their education. The working classes tend to opt out of
further education after the mandatory portions are completed, while the middle
classes continue into the levels of secondary education. At tertiary levels,
even the middle classes begin to opt out, populating the universities with a
distinctly upper class crowd. With the recent expansions of higher level
education, the contemporary class ratios at any given level are bound to be
different now, but a systematic investigation of who succumbs to academic death
would most likely find that the same tendencies persist then as now. Plus ça
change, only a select few survive long enough to become professors.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It amuses me that Calhoun et al (2012) chooses to focus on the equally
exhaustive account Habermas gives of the communicative situation facing a
workplace deciding to acquire a morning drink. Not only because it is a window
into a different time with a different work culture, but also because it frames
Habermas as a symbolic interactionist. This is an odd editorial choice to make,
given his overall ambition to move beyond the merely interpersonal into a
theory of struggle or dialectics between lifeworlds and systems.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-68877102821402094862019-04-04T01:56:00.000+02:002019-04-04T01:56:51.785+02:00How to avoid graduating - a guide for PhD students<br />
<h2>
Introduction</h2>
<br />
Not graduating is relatively easy in the early days of one's education. The student union provides a host of alternative activities which effectively crowds out all attempts at studies. At the PhD level, things become more difficult. The doctoral student will quickly discover that it is no longer socially acceptable to spend evenings at the union pub. He/she has to find other strategies for avoiding reaching the end point of student life, strategies which are both socially acceptable and compatible with his/her conscience. Fortunately, there are a number of such strategies which have been empirically proven to be very effective with regards to avoiding graduating and attaining the title of Dr. The purpose of this writ is to provide examples which can stimulate doctoral students' creativity with regards to self-directed activities in the fascinating field of graduation avoidance.<br />
<br />
The safest strategy to avoid graduating is, of course, to ensure that the dissertation work never gets off the ground. Many doctoral students have adopted this strategy with great success. The effectiveness of this strategy depends primarily on how well you choose the alternative activity which will motivate not working on the dissertation. Since education at the PhD level contains a course section, an obvious course of action is to focus extensively on said courses, but given that this section can only be extended so far, it is imperative to not burn through it too quickly. Here, lessons learned from the early days of university life will come in handy.<br />
<br />
In order to write a dissertation, a topic has to be chosen. This fact lies at the core of an excellent strategy for postponing graduation. When asked how the dissertation is coming along, the answer "I am currently in the process of choosing a topic" will provide extended cover from further uncomfortable lines of questioning. Much time can be devoted to interviewing different people in the selection process. Every and all suggestions should be carefully considered at great length, before finally (inevitably) being found lacking for this or that reason.<br />
<br />
Another effective strategy for avoiding progress is the strategy of "but this is not a suitable thing to include in a dissertation". In short, this strategy consists of consistently refusing to accept that the thing keeping you busy at the moment is of sufficient interest or significance to warrant inclusion into the dissertation. This strategy is especially useful for doctoral students who have happened to be included in a research project. By letting the work pertaining to said project be entirely unrelated from the dissertation work, further progress can be postponed with impunity until the project has run its course.<br />
<br />
<h2>
The Penelope strategy</h2>
<br />
In the Odyssey, Odysseus' wife Penelope was besieged by a large number of suitors during his absence. She deftly avoided giving an answer one way or another by employing the following strategy. She promised to pick one of the suitors once she had completed the weave she was working on. Since she every night tore up the progress she had made to said weave during the day, she managed to never get closer to finishing it. The doctoral student seeking to avoid graduating have ample reason to see Penelope as a role model. Many of the strategies described below can be seen as variations upon Penelope's original strategy.<br />
<br />
Of course, this strategy is difficult to apply literally in the context of a dissertation. To habitually burn the pages written during the day each evening would arouse suspicion. But remember:<br />
<br />
No dissertation chapter is so good that it cannot withstand an extensive revision!<br />
<br />
In other words, there is great potential for extending the dissertation writing process by constantly revising chapters. Additionally, this strategy can be varied: experiments can be redone (there will always be methodological flaws), and if the dissertation is based on gathered data there is always room for suddenly discovered it has to be replaced with different data, and so on.<br />
<br />
Another variant is the "just a little bit more" strategy. That is, to suddenly discover that the dissertation requires just a little more material, a few more experiments, an additional literature review, and so on. This strategy has the distinct disadvantage of becoming less convincing over time.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Live dangerously!</h2>
<br />
As previously stated, literally burning the pages written during the day is an unconvincing approach. But a doctoral student can, by applying carefully considered systematic carelessness, significantly increase the chances of unfortunate incidents substantially slowing down their dissertation progress. For instance:<br />
<br />
A time-honored method (cf the <i>Wonderful Adventures of Nils</i>) is to place the dissertation manuscript near an open window, especially during windy days. With luck, the manuscript can be distributed over a great geographical area using this method.<br />
<br />
Briefcases and other bags which include dissertation manuscripts should be brought along everywhere to increase to probability of being lost or stolen.<br />
<br />
A comprehensively implemented system of loose sheets significantly increases the chances of important chapters being lost, at least temporarily. Avoid putting labels on binders and floppy disks. This simple step can ensure important texts becomes inaccessible for years and years.<br />
<br />
Another important rule, which applies to all above strategies, is to avoid keeping safety copies of the dissertation. This is especially effective when using a computer. A crashed and non-backuped hard drive can delay graduating for several years. If diskettes are used, the older, soft kind is recommended, especially in combination with bad disk readers and copious consumption of coffee.<br />
<br />
<h2>
How to avoid working on your dissertation</h2>
<br />
One category of strategies has the common trait of avoiding graduating by simply avoiding working on the dissertation altogether. This category can be divided into two subcategories: manic and depressive strategies. Manic strategies consist of doing as much as possible which is completely unrelated to the dissertation. Depressive strategies consist of doing as little as possible overall. The two kinds of strategies suit different personalities to varying degrees, but there is nothing preventing you to mix and match. Correctly applied, they both amount to the same thing.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Manic strategies, or "Work promotes health and prosperity, and prevents many opportunities for research"</h2>
<br />
There are, in fact, many alternative activities a doctoral student can engage in to avoid working on the dissertation. These activities can be divided into academic and non-academic.<br />
<br />
The academic activities are primarily all forms of institutional work. The major advantage of this kind of work is that engaging in it is highly socially accepted, and in many cases actually ends up being more appreciated than working on the dissertation. This includes teaching low-level courses and taking on various administrative tasks, which tend to be highly prioritized by the powers that be, and often have the additional quality of being in need of doing with brisk swiftness.<br />
<br />
Activities relating to the student union and its various social functions (party committees and so forth) are other examples of excellent things to do to prevent dissertation progress. Helping your fellow doctoral students with their dissertations is an excellent activity with high graduation-postponing potential (for the helper, that is). (Conversely, one should of course avoid accepting too much help from other doctoral students, as this might inadvertently lead to making progress, or worse, graduating.)<br />
<br />
In the non-academic world, we also find suitable activities: having a job (motivated by the student's economic situation), engagement in civil society, sports, evening courses, and so on. There is also the big Dissertation Delayer, particularly for women, known as the Family. This requires its own section, which is why we won't discuss it further at this point. Instead, we want to highlight romantic affairs as an activity with great potential to delay any and all dissertation-related progress.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Depressive strategies</h2>
<br />
Here, too, we can find a literary role model: the protagonist of the 19th century Russian author <span>Goncharov</span>'s novel Oblomov. Oblomov spent most of his life in bed, meditating over all the nice things he would do once he managed to summon the energy to get up. With this role model in mind, you will surely find much inspiration in your efforts.<br />
<br />
A depressive strategy worth its salt should not only prevent dissertation progress under the time it is deployed (if this is the correct term for doing nothing), but also contribute to the doctoral student's general discomfort and overall lack of capacity to perform. Physically moving as little as possible is an excellent principle with a high return on energy invested. (Note the manic corollary to this strategy: do all the sports! Everything that works, works!)<br />
<br />
A drawback of going full Oblomov is that it is difficult to combine with having a clear conscience. Therefore, a <b>modified depressive strategy</b> is recommended. This consists of filling your time as inefficiently as possible. Here, there is no end to the possibilities:<br />
<br />
Running errands at the bank, post office or other government institution are perfectly socially acceptable activities, which can gobble up a lot of time and effort, and have the additional benefit of having to be performed during office hours - i.e. the time usually spent working on the dissertation. Good planning can increase efficiency significantly. For instance, avoid running more than one errand at a time.<br />
<br />
Things in need of repair can fill a lot of time which otherwise would have gone to writing. Especially effective is to employ plumbers or construction workers who do not arrive at the appointed hour.<br />
<br />
Appointments to doctors or dentists (not to mention therapists, or better yet psychoanalysts) are excellent opportunities for making zero progress. The ideal is of course to pick practices that lie quite a distance away, scheduling mid-day appointments, so as to maximize the working time spent moving to and fro.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Family</h2>
<br />
As mentioned above, the Family is an especially important potential dissertation delayer, especially for women. Here are some handy tips for exploiting this opportunity to its fullest extent.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The kids should be well-planned and well spaced, such that there will always be two or three toddlers in the house during the critical dissertation years.</li>
<li>Daycare centers and other such rational options should be avoided. If it can not be avoided, pick a daycare center committed to radical parental participation and community cooperation. If possible, pick two different daycare centers spaced far apart to increase time in transit. Also keep in mind that kids do not fare well by being more than six hours a day at the daycare! By carefully following this rule, it is possible to reduce efficient working ours per day to about five (or four, with sufficiently long transit times). (Alternatively, it is also possible to break this rule and instead spend the work hours nurturing feeling of guilt about this state of things, which is also an efficient way of reducing productivity). The ideal strategy, though, is to employ the good old play schools, whose three hour schedule make impossible any rational activity on the part of the responsible adult.</li>
<li>The non-dissertation writing parent should pick a job where being absent for even a single day is strictly impossible, combined with working hours which make dropping off and picking up of kids wholly the responsibility of the writing parent.</li>
<li>Plan your apartment such that secluded work spaces are avoided. The children should have access to as much of the apartment as possible. Placing the dissertation works pace in the shared bedroom is an efficient way of preventing work during night time, which otherwise holds the inherent potential of boosting the making of progress.</li>
<li>Pick a partner with little or no understanding of research and the conditions under which it is conducted. A hostile attitude towards research has a very significant potential for dissertation delayage, especially if it is combined with general dudebro machoism. Naturally, the kids too can be taught to hamper progress at every turn.</li>
<li>The strategy of living dangerously (see above) can be effectively applied at home too. Small children are particularly effective at destroying manuscripts and diskettes, if given the opportunity. Pets are viable substitutes for children. A cat, for instance, has a high probability of acting out on a strategically places manuscript pile.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
How to best manage your adviser</h2>
<br />
The adviser is many times an obstacle facing a doctoral student wanting to avoid graduating. A lot is won by choosing the "correct" adviser (although this is sometimes as difficult as choosing correct parents). By "correct" we mean an adviser who either (i) leave the student alone, or (ii) participates, but whose input is sufficiently destructive to not accidentally contribute too much to the process.<br />
<br />
To have the biggest chance to get an advisor of type (i), the following traits should be sought out: (a) senile, (b) alcoholic, (c) ignorant of the dissertation topic (if applicable, see above), and (d) disinterested in general. Fortunately, many universities boast a hearty supply of such persons.<br />
<br />
Choosing an adviser of type (ii) is risky, since their destructive capacity sometimes affect the student in unpredictable ways. Properly handled, however, a type (ii) adviser can be efficiently employed in the dissertation delaying efforts. Especially if he (it's usually a he) can be used to cultivate a low sense of self-esteem (more on this later).<br />
<br />
In the unfortunate case of getting an ambitious adviser with a constructive attitude towards dissertation writing, all hope is not lost: there is a wide range of strategies to employ to get around this. We will detail them below.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Defensive strategies: how to avoid your adviser</h2>
<br />
In order to satisfy the demands of the social setting and conscience, a doctoral student should seek out their adviser at least once per semester. Generally, dates which are not immediately connected to the deadline for student grant applications should be chosen, to avoid giving off the wrong (correct) impression. However: seeking out your adviser is not the same as actually meeting them. A careful study of their habits makes it possible to strategically pick times to call or knock when they are not available. Upon subsequent questioning of why you haven't talked to them, you can with a clear conscience refer back to your frequent failed attempts at communication - "I've been trying to get a hold of you all week, but you're never here". Another strategy is to refer to how busy they are, and how you didn't want to be a bother or intrude. A slightly ruder variant is to claim that you've previously made a deal that they would initiate contact.<br />
<br />
It is of course sometimes necessary to avoid the general campus area, if the risk of bumping into them is too large. Upon chance encounters, it is advisable to have some other reason to be there, which can be used to deflect the question of how the dissertation is going.<br />
<br />
If you have made an appointment, it is usually a good tactic to be there at exactly the appointed hour. Should the adviser be ever so slightly late, you can with a clear conscience claim to have been there (preferable leaving right after having placed a passive-aggressive post-it note on their door).<br />
<br />
<h2>
Offensive strategies: a good offense is the best defense</h2>
<br />
Some of the strategies in the previous section contained aspects of being on the offense, but it is always possible to go all in. The core principle of an offensive strategy is to disarm your adviser by placing them in a morally disadvantageous position, normally by instilling within them feelings of guilt. Here are some handy phrases to use when your adviser expresses displeasure at your rate of progress with the dissertation:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>But you never read what I write anyway.</li>
<li>You only had bad things to say about the last draft.</li>
<li>When was the last time you wrote an article?</li>
<li>You are only going to use my results for your own ends.</li>
<li>Why haven't I received my funding?</li>
<li>There is no point in graduating, there are no jobs to be had anyway.</li>
</ul>
A strategy that is hard to counter is the upbeat strategy. It consists of happily denying any and all problems. Here are some variations: <br />
<ul>
<li> Sure thing, you will have the draft by tomorrow!</li>
<li>Yeah, it's been slow going, but now I'm really getting into it!</li>
<li>I suppose I could send in the chapter now, but I have so many great ideas, so I have to write them out as well!</li>
</ul>
A simultaneously offensive and divertive strategy might be called a <b>social strategy</b>. By, for instance, asking your adviser out to dinner just as they are about to launch into a serious discussion about your progress, you can get them off balance to such an extent that things do not progress further than that. More advanced variants of this strategy are left to the reader's imagination.<br />
<br />
<h2>
"Not today, but soon...": some ways of justifying why you have not finished the promised dissertation chapter</h2>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">My ink ribbon snapped</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">(slightly more modern variant: my printer toner expired)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">My mother in law turned 70</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">My son had a math test</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">My cat had kittens</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I have to get the car to the repair shop</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">The metro is on strike</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I'm waiting for an article from overseas</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I'm waiting for a printout from the computer central</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I'm waiting for comments from [insert name here]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I found a math error, so now I have to redo everything</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I haven't been inspired</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I'm in love</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I have a cold</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Was I really supposed to hand it in today?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I forgot the manuscript at home</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">My husband promised to post the manuscript, haven't you received it?</span><br />
<br />
<h2>
How to handle your extended social situation</h2>
<br />
Your adviser is not the only obstacle you will face in your effort to prolong your studies. Any long-term dissertation delaying stratagem has to include ways of deflecting questions and attacks from your extended social situation. Relatives, friends, acquaintances, and (lest we forget) colleagues and other doctoral students often tend to show a non-zero amount of interest in how you're doing and when you plan on graduating. You can, of course, employ the same strategies as have been outlined above. You also have the option of blaming your setbacks ("setbacks") on the incompetence or malignancy of your adviser (see the section on "Strategic paranoia" below). When it comes to non-academic relatives, the opportunities to strategically bamboozle abound, since they often do not know the specifics of what writing a dissertation actually entails.<br />
<br />
The possibly most difficult proposition is to keep your fellow doctoral students out of the loop. They know the specifics of what writing a dissertation actually entails! But the experienced dissertation delayer knows no fear, and finds solutions to every situation. For instance, the <span>Chutzpah</span>-strategy can usually be gainfully employed, but requires having the personality to back it up. It simply consists of, at every possible opportune moment, declaring that the dissertation is almost 100% complete and that you're ready to defend it this very instant, would it be possible. Which it won't, because reasons, possible adviser-related. A slightly milder variant is the general boasting strategy, where you namedrop the prestigious persons who have read your manuscript and glimpsed the bright future to come.<br />
<br />
Oftentimes, even simpler strategies can be successfully employed. Younger doctoral students will often find themselves distracted should you ask them a sufficiently specific question about this or that author.<br />
<br />
<h2>
"Get married, get divorced, join a club or something"</h2>
<br />
The heading is a quote from an old Hasse&Tage skit which makes fun of the kinds of vapid relationship advice put on offer in tabloids. It just so happens that these very same vapid pieces of advice work marvelously as strategies for delaying your dissertation. The basic principle is that any and all life changes draw time and energy away from the dissertation, and thus fulfill the objective of delaying it. The general strategy can be formulated as "Change", where the thing to be changed can be chosen arbitrarily. For instance:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Change partner</li>
<li>Change place of residence</li>
<li>Change job</li>
<li>Change car</li>
<li>Change adviser</li>
<li>Change computer</li>
<li>Change word processor</li>
</ul>
That last change is particularly effective. It takes a lot of time to learn the new program, and even more time to convert all the old files to the new format. The biggest, most classic change you can pull is<br />
<ul>
<li>Change dissertation topic</li>
</ul>
It is very possible to apply this strategy iteratively (which is to say, several times). Over time it tends to lose effectiveness and become a source of annoyance among your peers in general, and with your adviser in general. Your chances of success increase if you can back it up with reference to someone else already doing what you were doing, or better yet if someone else has already done it.<br />
<br />
<h2>
How to cultivate low self-esteem</h2>
<br />
A genuinely abysmal self-esteem is an invaluable resource for a disputation delayer. The challenge is to cultivate it in the desired direction, without accidentally allowing constructive input from your peers to hamper the process.<br />
<br />
The core of the bad self-esteem is a hypothesis about reality, specifically that you as a person is insufficient. In this context, it can be formulated thusly:<br />
<ul>
<li>I will never be able to complete this dissertation</li>
</ul>
The philosophers of science tell us that hypotheses can be "immunized" against falsification. This is an important strategic moment for doctoral students. They have to learn to deal with any and all information contradicting the big hypothesis and find smaller, supporting hypotheses that help explain it all away. For instance: if your adviser praises a dissertation chapter, you can make one of the following assumptions which remove the validity of the positive information:<br />
<ul>
<li>They're just saying that to make me not drop out</li>
<li>They haven't read it correctly</li>
<li>They don't understand any of this anyway</li>
<li>(if applicable) They probably just want to seduce me</li>
</ul>
Another strategy is of course to completely avoid situations wherein one might be exposed to positive information. For instance by avoiding to hand in your manuscript for evaluation. It is also important to avoid giving seminars and other presentations, especially at conferences, where you might (woe betide) become famous outside your own university.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Strategic paranoia</h2>
<br />
A paranoid outlook on life can also be an asset for an intrepid dissertation delayer. One advantage is that it removes the necessity of a negative self-image (which can be quite painful to carry around with you), by placing the blame for one's failures to the (supposedly) hostile situation at large. The core principle for the paranoid explanatory model is that "it won't even matter if I try, since everyone is going to actively try to undermine my efforts, due to p", where p is a proposition about the world at large. We will now exemplify some possible values for p.<br />
<br />
<b>Discrimination</b><br />
<ul>
<li>I am an immigrant</li>
<li>I am a woman (or, of applicable, a man)</li>
<li>I am working class (or, if applicable, upper class)</li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>Sexual harassment</b><br />
<ul>
<li>My adviser wants to get revenge on me because I rejected their advances</li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>Jealousy</b><br />
<ul>
<li>My adviser is jealous because I am smarter than them</li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>Wrong paradigm</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Everyone at this university follows the X school of thought, while I follow the Y school </li>
</ul>
<h2>
Creative paralysis</h2>
A true dissertation delayer have to master the subtle art of placing themselves in a state of <b>creative paralysis</b>. This state can be achieved in a multitude of ways. A primary set of strategies consists of making further progress contingent on some factor or event outside your direct control. You might, for instance, ask the most busy, least cooperative technician at the shop to come fix your computer. Whilst awaiting said computer to be fixed (whilst also not being too hasty in reminding said technician to come fix it), it simply is not possible to continue working. Similarly, it is fair game to await a colleague's response to the current draft, to await a statistician to double-check the data, and so on and so forth.<br />
<br />
Another variant is to have some problem which one really ought to tackle, but which for some reason or other is too much effort to do right this instant. Bibliographical references is an excellent example. You find a reference in a bibliography to a book that is not in your local library, and then spend several depressive weeks gathering energy to go to the one other nearby library where you know for sure the book awaits. (To be sure, there are interlibrary loans, but those take a long time. Also, where even are the forms to fill out for such loans anyway?) Even better is of course to have a reference to a work which 100% most certainly contains information absolutely essential to the dissertation, but which can not be sought out. Such a state of things can delay progress for years on end.<br />
<br />
Shorter bursts of creative paralysis can be of use, too. "There is too little time left to do anything meaningful anyway" is a particularly effective method in this context.<br />
<br />
Let us conclude this summary of useful avoidance strategies by reminding you, dear reader, of a number of <b>distractions</b> which can be employed to interrupt of delay a working session:<br />
<ul>
<li>Computer games</li>
<li>Beautiful weather outside</li>
<li>Major sporting events on TV</li>
<li>Phone calls</li>
<li>Cleaning your desk</li>
<li>Water the flowers</li>
<li>Visit the loo</li>
<li>Check your mail</li>
</ul>
<h2>
</h2>
<h2>
Appendix: schedule for two typical days of a doctoral student </h2>
<br />
The following work schedules are representative cases based on empirical studies which will be presented in my upcoming dissertation (Ask, forthcoming). The most important finding of these investigations is that the effective working time per day for doctoral students of all personality types trends asymptotically towards a period of time which I refer to as <i>Ask's constant</i>, which equals to exactly 29 minutes.<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">1. Typical workday for depressive doctoral student</span></span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">10.00 Wakes up</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">10.00-10.30 Meditates over the perils and hardships of being a doctoral student</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">10.30-10.45 Gets dressed</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">10.45-11.30 Eats breakfast and reads the newspaper</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">11.30-12.00 Looks for a lost article</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">12.00 Leaves home</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">12.10 Misses the bus; the next bus arrives in half an hour</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">12.10-12.40 Awaits the next bus</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">12.40-13.00 In transit to university</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">13.00-13.15 Discusses the perils and hardships of being a doctoral student with a peer</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">13.15-14.10 Lunch</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">14.10 Finds all reading spots in the library already taken; goes to cafeteria</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">14.40 Returns to library; finds reading spot; claims it</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">14.45-14.55 Queues to retrieve a book</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">14.55-14.59 Sharpens pencil</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">14.59-15.04 Visits the loo</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">15.05-15.34 WORKS ON DISSERTATION</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">15.35-15.50 Smoke break</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">15.51 Returns to reading spot</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">15.52 Realizes that today is the last day to pay the rent, and that the bank closes half past four</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">15.53 Leaves the reading spot</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">15.54-17.30 Miscellaneous errands</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">17.30 Returns home; tired to the bone</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">17.30-18.00 Reads the evening news</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">18.00-18.30 Prepares an evening meal</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">18.30-19.15 Eats the evening meal</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">19.15-19.30 Does the dishes</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">19.30-20.00 Watches the national news on television</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">20.00-22.00 Really ought to do more dissertation work, but gets stuck watching a movie on TV</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">22.00 Falls into bed, exhausted</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Effective dissertation work time: 29 minutes. (=Ask's constant)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">2. Typical workday for manic doctoral student</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">07.00 Wakes up, immediately arises and gets dressed</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">07.10-07-40 Morning gymnastics</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">07.40-07.50 Breakfast, reads the news</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">07.50-08.10 Bikes to campus</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">08.10-09.00 Prepares for teaching</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">09.00-10.30 Teaches</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">10.30-10.40 Drinks coffee</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">10.40-10.59 WORKS ON DISSERTATION</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">11.00-11.55 Meeting with student union</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">11.55-12.30 Lunch</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">12.30-14.00 Substitutes for sick guidance counsellor</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">14.00-14.45 Meeting with the faculty work group for increasing graduation rates among doctoral students</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">14.45-15.45 Plays badminton</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">15.45-15.50 Drinks coffee</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">15.50-16.00 WORKS ON DISSERTATION</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">16.00-17.00 Listens to guest lecture</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">17.00-18.00 Prepares post-lecture seminar (buys wine)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">18.00-21.00 Participates in post-lecture seminar, engages in conversation with the guest speaker </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">21.00-21.20 Bikes home</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">21.20-22.00 Grades essays</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">22.00 Falls into bed, exhausted</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Effective dissertation work time: 29 minutes. (=Ask's constant)</span></span><br />
<br />
<h2>
Translator's note</h2>
This is a translation of Sam Ask's seminal work. The version upon which this translation is based can be found <a href="https://www2.ling.su.se/staff/oesten/undvik/Undvik.htm">here</a>. Some things have been changed to make sense to an international audience; others have been left intentionally inexplicable, as reminders of a time when things were different.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-17645394109697245552019-03-12T04:38:00.000+01:002019-03-12T04:38:49.062+01:00What does it mean to have achieved a learning objective?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">[Introductory notice: this is one of the papers I wrote during my sociology master, which I suspect shines through in patches (e.g. the the first paragraph, and the frequent use of Calhoun et al 2012). Nevertheless, I reckon these words might be more useful in a published state, rather than merely collecting entropy on a hard drive somewhere. Enjoy.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The learning
objectives state that the student shall display an “in-depth knowledge of
classic sociological theories, concepts, and topics”. This might seem a
straightforward enough proposition at a glance – there is a verb and a noun,
and the relationship between the two is possible to parse grammatically. Upon
closer inspection, particularly through the lens of the theories put forth by
the thinkers categorized under the rubric of ‘classic social theorists’,
matters become ever so slightly more complex. As we shall see, “knowledge” is
situated in the social context at a more general level, rather than in any particular
individual. This makes the notion of an individual “displaying” knowledge
somewhat disingenuous, since it masks the necessarily social dimension of being
in the know. An individual is not possible outside of the social, just as the
social is not possible without individuals. They are mutually constitutive,
meaning that – as Sinatra did sing – you can’t have one without the other.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Kant (2012|1949), for
instance, wrote of the difference between private and public reason. “Private”
here refers to a situation wherein a particular person acts in a particular
circumstance, such as when employed to perform some clerical or administrative
function. In such a situation, there is no room for argument or reasoned
disobedience – the taxes have to be collected, the legitimately given orders
obeyed, the functions of state performed as written. Private reason is
particular, situated. Public reason, on the other hand, addresses a more
generalized audience (“the entire reading public” [p 51]), using all available
arguments and evidence to make the best, most reasoned case possible. Public
reason is not concerned with the specifics of how the arguments laid forth
inconvenience or embarrass the powers that be – it merely seeks the truth for
its own sake, based on the available and through logic sustainable lines of
argument put forth in previous applications of public reason. Later on, Matthew
Arnold (1864) would phrase public reason in terms of using “the best possible
knowledge” (with the added probabilistic observation that the likelihood that
we already possess this knowledge is low, and that we thus should be on
perpetual lookout for it).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">From this one
distinction alone, the issue of displaying knowledge becomes a question of just
what kind of reason is sought after. Are students asked to display an apt
performance of private reason, thus showing that they are fit for this or that
employment or some other particular niche contingency relevant to the
university at hand? Or are the students asked to perform a more generally
applicable form of reason, regardless of whether it is relevant to the private
situation of anyone involved?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To be sure, learning
objective number six states that students shall act in a critical and
independent manner, which at a glance would suggest a preference for public
reason. It is, however, possible to be critical and independent in the
application of private reason as well – many a philosopher (Hegel, Heidegger,
take your pick) have found themselves justifying what the state apparatus would
have done anyway, albeit with less scripture to fall back on. Add to this the
ever mounting pressure to self-regulate in all domains of life, rather than to
merely conform to previously given decrees, and we are back to asking whether
private or public reason is the order of the day.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">From here, it might be
fruitful to jump over to Benjamin (2012|1969) and the tendency of modern
fascism to incorporate public reason into its private functioning. Or, in his
terms, the tendency of fascism to reproduce any work of art in such quantities
as to render its qualities irrelevant. No matter how egalitarian or progressive
a work might have been upon creation, once it has been incorporated within the
fascist aesthetic the work is subsumed to whatever teleology professed by the
state. Not necessarily due to flawed efforts on the part of the artist, but due
to how the mass production of art distorts and affects artworks: the endless
repetition of a unified aesthetic reduces any particular element of it to
merely a component, a replaceable part of an ideological machine. Whatever the
conditions of an artwork’s production, its reproduction into a new context
renders it moot. Context trumps content.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The challenge
presented by Benjamin is to create works which nevertheless resist this
reduction. While he does not go as far as Adorno & Horkheimer (2012|2002),
who claim that the entirety of what is produced by the culture industry (which
is to say, anything an ordinary person can reasonably expect to encounter by
means of purchase) is a rigged game, Benjamin does acknowledge the difficulty
of being genuine whilst also being widely distributed. A painting – existing in
singular – invites viewers to partake of its particular aura and peculiar
circumstance. A poster – existing in multitudes – invites a very different mode
of engagement. The former has the potential to move viewers, while the latter
is more prone to mobilize them. The aim is to foster appreciation of the few
paintings that remain their own contexts, whilst not falling for the lure of
producing too many posters whilst trying to make a living.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is, I reckon, a
more contemporary version of Kant’s distinction between private and public
reason. There is no small irony in the fact that the mass-produced, ubiquitous
forms of art that are available to everyone, and thus present in everyone’s
private homes, while the manifestations of public reasoning have become rare and
hard to come by. More so as universities are under pressure to become relevant
to the job market – to subsume their commitment to public reasoning to private
interests, in all senses of the word.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In all this, it
becomes difficult for a student to know how to proceed in order to fulfil the
learning objectives. On the one hand, an overt commitment to public reason is
unlikely to be rejected on explicit or ideological grounds – these are, after
all, the values enshrined into academia by virtue of hundreds of years of
tradition and continual practice. On the other hand, there is – as Merton
(2012|1949) pointed out – a need to distinguish between manifest and latent
functions of social practices. The stated goals of an organization might not be
the entire story of what this organization is actually doing, sociologically
speaking, and merely identifying the manifest function in ideological terms
does not provide the full picture of what needs to be learnt in order for the
objectives to be deemed fulfilled. Merely knowing the official story means
knowing nothing at all, which – Socrates notwithstanding – is not a comfortable
situation to find oneself in<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Again we are
confronted with the vagaries involved with the individual display of knowledge.
There are, as it were, two kinds of knowledge in circulation, both of which
have to be present in equal measure for the display to be valid. There is the
obvious, explicit knowledge of what different authors wrote and how their ideas
interact with each other. And then there is the implicit familiarity with the
tradition of the discipline, the injokes, the informal sentiments, the
recurring themes, and other ephemeral yet foundational aspects of a body of
knowledge. Displaying one form of knowledge without the other would not pass
muster; the display would be found lacking in either substance or soul.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Here, it is
illuminating to view the educational process as a gradual initiation into a
community, rather than as a series of tests to be undergone and passed. To be
sure, undergoing the tests is still an integral part of the project, but their
latent function is to ever so gradually become more socialized into the
discipline and its customs. Being a sociologist – or indeed belonging to any
academic discipline – is more akin to possessing an attitude or a worldview
than anything else, and can not be reduced to knowing the contents of a
discrete set of foundational texts. As rigorous and systematic as the
evaluation criteria might wish to appear, a core part of determining whether an
education has succeeded comes down to whether a student <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gets it</i> or not. Or, to return to Benjamin: the quality sought is
made plain in the difference between appreciating a painting and plastering a
poster.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">These are not
qualities that exist as independent measurable variables which can be isolated
and controlled for using ever so systematic metrics and procedures. Rather,
they are constitutive of and inherent to the very situation the education takes
place in. What is evaluated is not whether the student knows this or that, but
whether they manage to comport themselves in such a manner that the
conversation keeps flowing without interruption.<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a>
To invoke Bakhtin (1986), it is more important to be aware of genre (defined as
a series of social expectations on frequently recurring situations) than to
know exactly which year a particular author published their seminal work. A
student gets more mileage out of gesturing towards a shared exhaustion from
reading a particularly painstaking introduction, than they derive from
paraphrasing it with unerring accuracy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A pragmatic student
would apply Mead (2012|1934) to this dynamic. Mead differentiates between the
“I” and the “me”. The “I” is the stream of impressions, thoughts and emotions
that occur in any given moment. The “me”, in contrast, is a gestalt self-image
which takes into account all aspects of one’s place in a local and global
social context. The “I” uses whatever information is retained in/of the “me” to
orient itself and plan its upcoming course of actions. Our imaginary pragmatic
student would shift the goal of the educational process from the I to the me –
rather than seeing it as an individualistic trait that can be summoned or
performed at any given moment, it is rather a characteristic of the social
situation they happen to find themselves in upon nearing the completion of
their education. Rather than hitting the books, they would seek out social
gatherings in which to gain insight into the social processes at work within
their field, and possibly wherein they could get recognition as belonging to
the very same community. To pun: the important thing is not whether I know this
or that, bur whether they know me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The learning objectives,
however, remain on the level of individual assessment. The student, singular,
shall display their acumen through individual effort. The goals are framed in
such a way that the knowledge is situated within the student, as so many crates
in a warehouse, rather than as a more general proficiency to draw upon the
collective fount of shared resources, references and reflections. There is an
inherent contradiction between the praxis of performing academics and the
stated learning objectives. The former heavily emphasizes surveying the
collective state of the field, of surveying the literature and probing the
limits of established disciplinary achievement. The latter collapses all of
that into a single unit of performance, and applies a single value to it. The
student either knows or does not know – a binary solution to a complex social
dynamic.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This contradiction
might seem a subtle point, but it manifests very directly in everyday
educational situations. The most overt example is when a student asks whether
some concept or theorist is going to be on the exam. From the point of view of
being introduced to the discipline’s traditions and tools, this is the least
interesting (and most parochial) question that could possibly exist – an entire
history of knowledge is reduced to a single social situation in the near
future. From the point of view of the student, who sees that the only thing
they need to do is to perform the learning objectives, this is a rational
inquiry which could provide useful information upon which to structure their
efforts. If a theorist appears on the exam, then being able to reiterate the
general outline of their thoughts is a demonstrably good thing; if said
theorist is not on the exam, then focusing on the theorists that do appear is a
more rational option. It is a far cry from engaging in public reason, but it
achieves the learning objectives. Why appreciate a painting when plastering a
poster does the job just fine?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Here, the reader might
object that a student asking whether something appears on an exam or not is an
indication that they lack the proper insight into what the point of higher
learning is. Which is fair as far as it goes, but it does highlight that this
very point ultimately boils down to whether or not the student <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gets it</i>, in the manner discussed above.
Too direct and explicit focus on the process of passing the educational
obstacles and jumping through all the hoops draws attention away from the very
goal to be achieved. Learning objectives and learning outcomes diverge, despite
their grammatical similarity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is, of course,
not a new observation. Quintilian (1987|95) noted that every educational situation
is a unique context with its own dynamics, wherein the values and virtues to be
inculcated have to be reaffirmed anew, lest the pupils learn something else.
The reasons for learning something are as important as learning the thing in
itself. Quintilian uses memorization of literary passages as an example of this
dynamic. The desired outcome is not that the pupils can regurgitate the
selected passage on command, but to show them that being able to access a wide
range of literary sources will help guide them in their efforts at living a
good life, where everyday occurrences are connected to greater themes and thus
possible to analyze as parts of a whole, rather than as individual incidents.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the goal of a Quintilian
education is to ever so gently point towards the greater picture.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Dewey (2005), in
slightly more contemporary terms, made the same observation when he noted that
pupils only ever learn what they are interested in, and that education is only
as effective as it is capable of capturing this interest. An explanatory
lecture on the finer points of algebra might be effective in conveying
information pertaining to math, but it might also be a fine opportunity to
practice falling asleep whilst sitting in a room with various degrees of
directed noise. The latter is motivated by a very clear and directly applicable
use value, while the former requires a higher degree of contextual introduction
to come to pass. Both outcomes are equally likely, and both learners are
equally motivated.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A way to rectify the
situation would be to punish those who are not interested. Or, rather, those
who fail to learn. This would introduce a very clear motivation to be
interested in the topic at hand, and very concrete reasons to perform the tasks
laid out. It would also, with equal clarity, reframe the situation as being
about avoiding punishment, rather than as ultimately striving to reach some
sort of more refined worldview with access to the tools of reason and
rationality. At best, it would be an inefficient didactic methodology. At
worst, it would be an attempt to force individuals to freely participate in
public reasoning, a proposition quite contrary to what Kant envisioned.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The overarching
project in de Beauvoir’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Second Sex</i> (2011)
is to underscore all the ways in which women – historically and at present – have
been formally and informally barred from participating in public reason. By
describing in detail every aspect of women’s lives – youth, menstruation,
marriage, sex, rape, pregnancy, housework, prostitution – she also describes
what makes women <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i> when compared
to men, the implicit default. These aspects are peculiar, particular and personal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More specifically, they create a different
starting point from which to engage the world, a different social and epistemic
staging ground from which to launch any attempt at participation, be it in politics
or public reason. There are men, the universal subject who tackles universal
issues with the tools of rationality and reason, and there are women, who
tackles the particular, emotional and utterly local. Men are constructed as
universal, women are constructed as other.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The efforts of
McDonald (2004) are indicative of this state of affairs. Her ambition to gather
and introduce female social theorists is not motivated by trying to justify
women’s peculiar or different contributions over the centuries. Rather, it is
an attempt to draw attention to how these contributions follow the same
developmental lines as male theorists, using the same tools and more often than
not the same lines of arguments. There are not two differing historical tracks,
male and female, which never interacted with each other as time passed. Rather,
theorists from both genders engaged in lively and fruitful debate where the
results were a better understanding of the contemporary social and political
situation. To quote: “[t]he problem, after all, is not that the women founders
of the social sciences failed to publish but that the scholarly world failed to
recognize their work” (p 242).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">McDonald (2004) notes
that the omission of female theorists from the canon of social thinkers has had
the unfortunate consequence that many contemporary social theorists have felt
as if they started from scratch, and based their approaches to the social sciences
on this premise. Rather than being able to draw upon the rich tradition of
female authors discussing women’s issues – in the broadest possible use of the
term – these efforts have been hampered by a lack of theoretical underpinning
and a sense of methodological commitment to qualitative approaches. Given that
all social theorists presented in the canonical works are men, women had to
carve out a niche for themselves, theoretically as well as institutionally.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Needless to say, this
redoubling of otherness, as described by de Beauvoir, has not done the study of
women’s issues (or women’s studies) any favors. It has framed the feminist
approach as somehow optional, something to do above and beyond the real work,
an excursion into private reason only allowed once the appropriate work has
been performed with regards to public reason. To put it in the bluntest
possible terms, it creates a dichotomy which is nigh impossible to overcome:
there are public intellectuals, and there are women.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Neither has it done
any favors to individual women, who – to gain access to positions in academia,
and thus the right to participate in the conversation – have had to read
through an extensive amount of theory which only marginally concern a large
portion of their lived experience. Which is not to say that this theory is
irrelevant or inapplicable, but it introduces something of a delay to getting started
with the actual work. There is a lot of universal theory to power through
before being allowed to proceed with the particulars, where every step of the
way has to be retraced to theories which do not take the lived experience of
women into account<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a>.
The barrier to entry into public reason consists of a non-trivial amount of
hoops, some more onerous than others.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Given this state of
affairs, we could use Simmel’s (2012|1971) theory of group dynamics to predict
that feminist scholars in different fields will have an easier time of
collaborating with each other than would non-feminists. According to Simmel,
one group functions more or less like any other group, despite their overt
differences. Thus, performing the work necessary to maintain some particular
function in one group creates a kinship with those who perform the same work in
other groups, by virtue of a shared range of experiences and skills. Applied to
feminist scholars, who (regardless of field) have had to struggle for the
inclusion of actually existing women into the historical canon, there is bound
to be a rich potential for interdisciplinary cooperation to draw upon in future
efforts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To return to the
question of learning objectives, this places objectives 1 and 2 in a precarious
position. On the one hand, women have been excluded from the canonical writs of
the history of sociology to such an extent that the official history has become
almost exclusively male; any effort to accurately describe the historiography
of the field must take this social fact into account. On the other hand,
efforts to include female authors are under way at present, and part of these
efforts is the inclusion of these very same authors in new rewritings of the
same history. The question then becomes whether to report on the history of
sociology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as written</i>, or to give an
account which includes actually existing social thinkers who have not yet been
labelled as sociological. Both courses of action follow from the learning
objectives as they stand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Of course, contextual
evidence suggest that the second approach is to be preferred (such as the
inclusion of McDonald 2004 in the syllabus), but this bounces us straight back
to informal knowledge guiding the process of adhering to formally stated goals.
What is asked for is not knowledge of the history of sociology in general, but
a very specific subset of a very specific categorization of history of
sociology with a local emphasis. History is indeed, as Cannadine (2011) noted,
a situated activity in the present.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">An attentive reader
will have noted the parallels between the global and the local, the state of
the field and the state of the syllabus. Sociological theory is not a static
thing that can either be known or not known; rather, it is a dynamic and ever
changing ethos formed as much by tradition as by propositional statements made
by individual theorists. Thus, evaluating whether a student knows sociological
theory or not becomes a somewhat extracurricular activity. To be sure, knowing one’s
Weber and Durkheim is important, but it is equally important to know them for
the right reasons<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a>.
As Quintilian pointed out, merely going through the motions is insufficient; a
successful education will have had the student approach the subject matter in an
appropriate manner, the manner being of greater import than the matter. The
same applies to the teaching of sociological theory, mutatis mutandis.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This frame of
reference is rather far removed from the contemporary tendency of envisioning
education as a series of boxes to tick off, where the educational aims have
been achieved in full once each and every aspect has been individually
fulfilled. I reckon that Merton’s distinction between manifest and latent
functions is very much at play in this tendency. We can not take the learning
objectives at their words – that would be akin to analyzing rain dances only
with regards to their efficacy at making it rain. There are far more
interesting social processes at work, and it is very fortunate that we as sociologists
are uniquely positioned to analyze these processes using the traditional tools
of our trade. They only need to be applied appropriately.</span></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The same goes for reading syllabi. As Wahlström (2015) points out, these
documents are situated in a political, institutional, ideological and sometimes
didactical context, where the specific content is determined by a number of
competing forces vying for influence. And, I might add, merely reading the
syllabi, words on a page, does not translate into knowing what transpires in
classrooms or seminars.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bourdieu (1990) describes this process, and points out that students
from middle and upper class backgrounds have an advantage over their fellow
students from working class backgrounds. Where the former carry a habitus
suitable for performing academics (albeit still with a need to be socialized
into a particular discipline), the latter have to pull double duty of both
reading the required literature and relearning their way of being in the social
world. They have to learn to be middle class as well as mastering the subject
matter, as it were.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Being behind Rawl’s veil of ignorance takes on a substantially different
quality should you happen to be pregnant.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=294858717729936108#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="SV" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: SV; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="SV" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Weber wrote extensively on 19<sup>th</sup> century economics, and
Durkheim famously made reference to phrenology as a legitimate scientific
method. Building an argument on these two historically accurate propositions is
not likely to garner favor in the contemporary sociological community, however;
it would be an inappropriate approach.</span></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
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Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-75107768731934936872019-03-04T19:17:00.000+01:002019-03-04T19:17:39.204+01:00The transition from postmodernity to liquid modernity in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The attempt to
summarize the trajectory of an authorship can take different forms. One such
form is to begin at the beginning, with the very first books of the author in
question, and then gradually move forward in chronological order until there
are no more books. This has the advantage of being both complete and
comprehensive – the theoretical seeds that lay dormant in the early works can
be seen to blossom in the later ones, and the potential blooms that did not
come to pass can be noted by virtue of their absence. There is a trajectory,
which exists in the form of the works published, an irrefutable empirical fact
just waiting to be revealed through methodological observation – the method
being the orderly progression through time.</span>
<br />
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The orderly progression
through time is a key theme in Bauman’s work. It is one of the key aspects of
modernity (and the way in which he characterizes its self-image and
self-justification). As he notes at length with regards to the physical
countenance of the Leeds town hall (Bauman 2000, p. 130ff), the inscription
“Forward” is not merely an idle slogan meant to convey a vague sense of
anticipation for what is to come. It is a direct invocation of the project of
modernity and its promise of eternal progress; the movement forward is both a
temporal and developmental affair. The work performed today will lead to a
better tomorrow, whose improved conditions can be harnessed to lay the
groundwork for an even better day after tomorrow. The immediate roadmap for
moving ahead is laid out in planning documents, visions of a better ordered
society and ever increasing statistics measuring the quality of life; the
slightly more distant and future trajectory is dotted with utopian promises
that are impossible today, but which will inevitably be possible once the
future materializes through the efforts of today.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The counterpoint to
this orderly progression through time is the specter of chaos, ornately
developed dead-end inventions, and societal visions which do not quite manage
to survive the transition into social practice. While Bauman characterizes
modernity as the (both perceived and actualized) steady drumbeat of accumulated
improvements, he also contrasts it with the ever more present condition of
postmodernity and/or liquid modernity, wherein plans are held onto until better
alternatives arrive, and the scope of future visions have been reduced to a
pragmatic and frantic ad hoc crisis management of the immediate present. The
confident forward momentum along a predetermined plan towards a clearly
envisioned goal, a hallmark of modernity, is a maladaptive strategy under the
conditions of postmodernity and liquid modernity. Modernity turned everything
pre-modern that was solid into liquid, and then kept going as new modern
institutions began to solidify. The only constant feature is change, but where
modernity envisioned itself the architect of this change, liquid modernity
finds itself sculpted (and defined) by knowing neither how things are nor how
they are going to be moving forward. The steady progression into a bright
future turned into a constant state of ambiguous uncertainty, a condition quite
opposite to what was promised.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This, of course, has
repercussions for how to read Bauman and the trajectory of his work over the
years. Not only would it be a mistake to see it as an orderly progression from
beginning to end, unambiguously and inexorably moving towards a clear
conclusion; such an undertaking would also not quite be in the spirit of his
thought. Bauman dwells in and upon the ambiguous, uncertain conditions wherein
one course of action is as valid as any other, and the only difference between
them is the self-imposed sense of right and wrong we bring to the table. We
will, like so many of the hypothetical individuals described throughout his
work, have to find our own way through it. To quote from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Evil</i> (2016):</span></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoQuote">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">What one can – and
needs to – do, when aiming at its fullest possible representation, is to
discover the river’s sources and its most copious tributaries, trace the trajectory
of the riverbed (or, if such needs arise, its multiple – coexisting or
alternating – trajectories), and map them both (even if being aware that what
can ultimately be achieved is more of the nature of a snapshot than of the
conclusive, lasting image of the phenomenon in question). (pp. vii-viii)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To be sure, Bauman did
not primarily intend these words to be instructional with regards to how to
read his works, but – as has already been suggested – things do not always turn
out the way they were intended.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">One way of taking a
snapshot of the trajectory, as it were, is to take a quick look at the book
titles as they have been phrased over the years. In the 90s, we saw titles like
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modernity and the Holocaust</i> (1989), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modernity and Ambivalence</i> (1991), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mortality, Immortality and Other Life
Strategies</i> (1992), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodern Ethics</i>
(1993), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life in Fragments</i> (1995), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodernity and its Discontents</i> (1997),
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Work, Consumerism and the New Poor</i>
(1998), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Search of Politics</i> (1999),
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Individualized Society</i> (2001),
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Society Under Siege</i> (2002). A
cursory glance indicates that there seems to be some kind of unifying direction
or theme to these works, albeit the exact nature of this common trajectory will
have to be explored through closer reading. In the 00s and 10s, we find a more
explicitly unified set of titles, such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid
Modernity</i> (2000),<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Liquid Love</i>
(2003), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Life</i> (2005), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Fear</i> (2006), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Times</i> (2007), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">44
Letters From the Liquid Modern World</i> (2010), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Culture in a Liquid Modern World</i> (2011), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Surveillance</i> (2012), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid
Evil</i> (2016), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nati Liquidi</i>
(2017). While the exact nature of this common trajectory also requires and
deserves closer reading to uncover, it should be a fairly straightforward
proposition to suggest that some sort of change took place between the one set
of titles and the other. As Foucault famously noted, whenever there is a
discontinuity, there is probably also something interesting afoot.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A more ambitious text
would now say something along the lines of “and over the course of the next
several chapters and hundreds of pages, we will discuss this in extensive
detail”, but alas, we only have a few pages to go about this snapshot. The
snapshot will take the form of a brief summary of a number of books from the first
category – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modernity and the Holocaust</i>
(1989), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mortality, Immortality and Other
Life Strategies</i> (1992), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodern
Ethics</i> (1993) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodernity and
its Discontents</i> (1997) – followed by a brief look at some later works. The
result will, naturally, not be a complete and comprehensive account of before
and after, but it is in the nature of these things that no amount of effort is
ever sufficient; there is always more to be done.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The postmodern period</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman of this period
was very keen on exploring the relationship between individual and structure,
or between micro and macro. Unlike Habermas or Bourdieu – or even Giddens, his
contemporary – however, Bauman is not striving to give a stringent theoretical
account which connects all the dots and crosses all the t’s, thus explaining
how the two interrelate. Rather, his project is to show how the two do not
connect, and how individual attempts to cross or bridge the gap may or may not
succeed at performing the task. He is less interested in showing how to comprehensively
describe the current state of things through elaborate theoretical models, than
he is in showing that all attempts at this feat would necessarily result in the
snapshot mentioned above; the river shifts and moves even as it is being
mapped, making the resulting map slightly less obsolete than its predecessors.
The inexorable passage of time is not methodologically irrelevant, as it were.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mortality, Immortality and Other Life
Strategies</i> (1992), Bauman explores the situatedness of individual lives
within the larger context of cultures and institutions. No man is an island,
and everyone is to some degree shaped by the situation they find themselves in.
Not even the most fiercely independent and individualistic of persons can escape
the necessity of using tool, frameworks and languages already put in place at
the time of their birth by the forces of history. As Heidegger puts it, humans
are thrown into the world and have to sort things out in medias res. History
does not begin with the individual, and it does not end with the individual.
Life is short, but art is very long indeed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This state of things
implies the question of the meaning of life. Barring a few select individuals,
most actually existing humans have lived, worked and died without making a
notable dent in the formation of history. The vast majority of human lived
experience were never recorded, documented or in any other way remembered. Upon
death, activity ceases and the process of forgetting begins. Biographical fates
are not historical fates, and most biographies – should they have been written
– would be rather unremarkable in the grand scheme of things. The question then
becomes: given this inexorable march towards death and epistemic oblivion, what
meaning does it all have?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">For Bauman, the answer
lies precisely in the longevity of art and human institutions. Being able to
look back on past generations and centuries and see what has come before,
provides a context for one’s lives and actions. On a small scale, this can mean
looking at family traditions and the community created through their
perpetuation; the larger family unit becomes immortal where the individual is
not. The same tendency is borne out writ large with regards to intellectual or
artistic traditions, where individual efforts are able to inscribe themselves
into a shared history by continuing the work into the present. The great ones
of the past (like Habermas and Bourdieu, and perhaps even Giddens) provide an
existential anchor upon which to rely. When death inevitably comes, it will
bookend a life lived in service of something greater than oneself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The crux of the matter
is – as is often the case for Bauman – that these life strategies do not always
work, and that contemporary society is (more than anything else) characterized
by a sense of discontinuity and disconnectedness from the past. The great
family units of the past have disintegrated, the means by which to inscribe
oneself into the tradition of the old masters tend to be ever so slightly
unattainable, and the jobs with which one pays the rent is more often than not
utterly orthogonal to any sense of meaning or purpose whatsoever. The
strategies employed to ensure survival are not the same as those employed to
give a meaningful account of one’s life, which only serves to accentuate the
disconnect. This is a theme which will recur in later works.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modernity and the Holocaust</i> (1989), the
gap between personal biographies and historical tendencies is explored in the
context of the Holocaust. For Bauman, the holocaust is not the result of a
resurgence of barbarism in the civilized world, a momentary lapse of reason in
an otherwise orderly progression towards a better future. Rather, it is a
symptom of modernity, an outcome inherent as a possibility of the modern
condition as such. The Holocaust was not the result of a large multitude of
Germans unifying in their unrelenting hatred of the Jews; rather, it was the
result of ordinary people going about their ordinary days in an ordinary
manner. The salary office clerk, train maintenance worker and time table
organizers did more or less what you would expect them to do today – ensured
that salaries were paid on time, that the trains kept rolling, and that they
did so in a manner which was both predictable and efficient. The fact that the
salaries happened to go to the staff members of concentration camps and that
the trains were bound for Auschwitz is, when it comes to understanding modern
division of labor, an irrelevant but deeply morally disconcerting detail.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Much has been made of
the figure of Adolf Eichmann, the administrator responsible for ensuring that
trains arrived at the concentration camps in an orderly fashion. His work had a
direct impact on the lives and deaths of those sent to these camps, and if he
did his work well this meant more people would arrive there than if he did it
poorly. Yet despite these effects of his work, he did not think particularly
ill of the Jews. According to Arendt – who Bauman quotes and discuss at some
length – Eichmann did not think anything particular about anything at all. He
did not have to – his ethical and moral dispositions were orthogonal to his
work of optimizing the train time tables. He famously said that all he wanted
to do was to perform his duties; the results and consequences were quite
literally above his pay grade.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Eichmann may be an
extreme case, but his situation is not uncommon in a modern society. There is a
fundamental decoupling of moral agency and the functions performed whilst at
work. At the Nuremberg trials, it was concluded that merely following orders
was not a sufficient defense against the charge of having committed war crimes.
Nevertheless, “just doing one’s job” is still to this day an acceptable excuse when
having to perform some ethically questionable task whilst on the clock. The
moral and ethical responsibility is routinely delegated to whomever gave the
order, who more often than not have received their own orders from even higher
up the chain. When Bauman says that the Holocaust is an inherent possibility of
modernity, rather than a one-off anomaly contained within a particular
historical circumstance, he is referring to this mode of social organization.
For Bauman, it is an ethical imperative to not settle for being another
Eichmann, content in performing whatever task is set before him with efficient
alacrity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This has implications
for what we saw above with regards to life strategies, but it does not provide
a clear course of action moving forward. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodern
Ethics</i> (1993), Bauman sets out to explore the ethical conditions we find
ourselves in, not just post-Holocaust but post-modernity in general. When we
can no longer inscribe ourselves into the tradition of relentless progress
towards a better tomorrow – the Holocaust was indeed performed using better
tools and at higher levels of organization than previous efforts of a similar
nature, but it would be repugnant to call it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">progress</i> – we have to try to find our own way best we can. Bauman
characterizes modern ethics as a universal, one size fits all framework which
is applicable to any and all situations, a final solution to the question of
morals, whereas postmodern ethics have to make do with provisional, ad-hoc and
quite possibly temporary solutions to immediate, contextual problems.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">On the very first line
of the book, Bauman makes it clear that this is a work about contemporary
ethics rather than contemporary morals. The distinction between ethics and
morals is crucial. Ethics is defined as the rigorous thinking that goes into
determining whether something is right or wrong, praiseworthy or deplorable,
good or bad; the system of values that determine which actions, past or future,
are to be recommended or advised against. Morals, in contrast, are defined as
what you do in an actual, immediate situation which requires your attention and
participation. This distinction between ethics and morals makes the decision to
limit the book to the realms of ethics quite understandable – the former can be
assessed by reading and observing the zeitgeist, whilst the latter requires
extensive empirical investigations to determine. The results of such
investigations would also be subject to the passage of time; again, the river
moves whilst being mapped out.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">One way to visualize
the distinctions – both between modern and postmodern, and between ethics and
morals – is the trolley problem. In its modern form, it consists of a trolley
moving along the tracks towards a group of ten people. By pulling a lever, our
hypothetical ethical agent can divert the trolley onto another track, where it
will only hit a single person. The ethical discussion then consists of various
attempts at determining whether pulling or not pulling the lever is the correct
choice, and the reasons for making such a judgment. Everything is very
hypothetical and ethical. A postmodern rendition, however, would place you on a
trolley, packed with people going about their day, nothing out of the ordinary.
Suddenly, you discover that the person sitting across from you seems to be
silently crying. You are now in a situation where you, personally, are called
upon to act. What do you do? Do you ask what is wrong, do you pretend not to
notice, give some other sort of emotional support,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or – and this is a very real possibility – do
you become immobilized by indecision, unable to act one way or another until
the other person gets up and exits at the next stop?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The modern trolley
problem is characterized by access to perfect information. It is known that the
trolley will hit those people, and it is known where the lever is and how it
works. The postmodern trolley problem, to the contrary, is characterized by an
overwhelming lack of information. We do not know who the other person is, what
kind of situation they are in, whether our intervention would be helpful or
detrimental, how to find out what is going on, or even which stop they are
going to. All we know is that we are in a moral situation and have to act now,
based on the limited amount of information available to us in the immediate
moment, lest the moment slips by and we have missed the opportunity to make a
difference. It is a very immediate situation, where inaction speaks as loud as
action.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">For Bauman, moral
situations are not just exceptions to an otherwise ordered social reality.
Every situation has an inherent potential to become a moral intervention (good
or bad) into the lives of others, and the project of the book is to expand the
realms of ethics from particular, well-defined situations to the messy muddle
of everyday life. To simplify almost to the point of absurdity: where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modernity and the Holocaust</i> is an appeal
to not be an Eichmann at work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodern
Ethics</i> expands it to the whole realm of human experience. What, given the
postmodern lack of certainty, are we to do?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The question returns
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodernity and its Discontents</i>
(1997), where Bauman turns his attention to processes of inclusion and
exclusion. Given the aforementioned lack of certainty, new categories are found
or invented as focal points for social organization. The specifics differ from
context to context, but the general tendency is to create ever subtler social
distinctions where even minor variations become intensely significant and lead
to tangible consequences. This turning of attention to what seems to be minor
details has the double effect of providing certainty and a clear sense of
direction as to what to do next. The thing to do, of course, being to redouble
one’s efforts in ensuring that one continues to fulfil the criteria for
inclusion, whilst also taking comfort in not belonging to the group of those
excluded.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The ‘discontent’ of
the postmodern condition is, of course, a term applicable to both those
included and those excluded. The former have to work ever harder with ever more
enthusiasm to maintain their status as still being allowed inside, while the
latter face the consequences of exclusion. An employed person might find
themselves working overtime as a result of the implied (sometimes not so
implied) threat of losing their job, where an unemployed person find themselves
the subject to any number of bureaucratic checks and controls to ensure they
are not somehow cheating the system. Neither position is particularly
comfortable, yet they are endured nevertheless; if nothing else, it is a survival
strategy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">As the mechanisms for
exclusion become more effective and intrusive, they also become more expensive.
Given the contemporary tendency to decrease budgets whenever possible (in the
name of using taxpayer money more efficiently), there is a systemic incentive
to push people out of the system altogether. Not giving someone social security
is cheaper than giving it to them, and so ever stricter rules are put in place
regarding who counts as a legitimate recipient. These stricter rules are then used
as leverage to keep those still included (albeit on a permanently temporary
basis) on their toes; it is a self-reinforcing cycle where those who inevitably
drop out are the examples used to scare new employees into new levels of work
performance (a theme further explored in Bauman 1998).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Needless to say, there
are inherent dangers to these processes. If the population of excluded
individuals becomes too large, it has to be dealt with somehow. Any one
particular individual makes little difference, but in sum total they can become
perceived as an existential threat to the fabric of society. The fact that
their status as excluded is a byproduct of how society is organized is beside
the point – they are seen as a problem that has to be dealt with, and history
has proven ample example of how such problems prompt final solutions (see also
Bauman 1991). There is cause to be discontent indeed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The liquid period</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Having read thus far,
readers would not be surprised at any of the themes brought up in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Modernity</i> (2000). Modernity in
its liquid state has overwhelming similarities to modernity in its
post-prefixed state, with the same discontents and perils. It would be possible
to trace each and every theme back to a previously published work (an effort which
would be educative as an excuse to read said works, but whose end result would
not be an interesting read). What does differ is the metaphorics, whose
implications are both more and less obvious than it would seem at first glance.
The obvious implication is of course the letting go of the term “postmodern”,
and the connotations it bears to heavy-duty theory and difficult-to-read books.
A less obvious implication, related to the first, is a commitment to reaching
and engaging with a wider audience. The metaphor of liquidity is easy to come
to terms with and apply to lived experience – things used to be stable and
solid, but now things change in ever new and inscrutable ways. What the
metaphor loses in terms of being traceable to the postmodern lineage, it gains
in terms of simply being able to hand someone the book and being confident in
their ability to read it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The significance of
this shift can be gleaned from the evocatively titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What Use is Sociology</i> (2014). Here, Bauman extensively discusses
the continued relevance of the social imagination (as envisioned by C. Wright Mills), and the role
sociology has in connecting personal issues with societal and structural
problems. The move from postmodernity to liquid modernity is a measure taken to
give ordinary people access to the tools of the trade. What use is sociology –
pun very much intended – if it is locked away behind jargon? Moreover, what use
is it if it reduces itself to a mere hunt for statistically significant
correlations which, upon being presented to the public, only results in an
indifferent shrug so profound as to move mountains? The purpose of sociology is
to be relevant and of use, a purpose which should be reflected both in the
chosen subject matter and the way it is conveyed. The metaphor of a world
turned to liquid seems to cover both of these bases, warranting its extended
use.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moral Blindness</i> (2013), Bauman and his
interlocutor Donskis return to the themes laid out in the last chapter. The
blindness refers to the capacity of normal human beings – unremarkable in every
way – to perform acts of unspeakable cruelty during the course of their normal
lives, be it to ignore the physical presence of those in need (beggars come to
mind, but also prisoners) to report someone to the secret police for minor infractions
out of a sense of duty and loyalty to the system. Again, we see the theme of
doing what you are supposed to, and of following orders. Here, the different
ethical threads explored in the previous works are brought together with a
clarity afforded by hindsight and familiarity with the new liquid metaphorics.
The ethics are still, in essence, postmodern, in the sense that actual
situations humans find themselves in are still defined by a radical lack of certainty
and an ever growing sense that something has to be done. Our technical capacity
to act on this impulse has grown since the publication of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodern Ethics</i> (1993), without a corresponding growth of our
ethical sensibilities. Indeed, innovations such as the internet and social
media have given individuals the capacity to find more information about the
issues and problems of the day, but it is not the kind of information that
makes for radical ethical empathy. Rather, it allows for the ever finer
pinpointing of the identity of the excluded Other, and the coordination of
unsavory activities pointed their way. To use an example not found in Bauman,
but relevant in our Swedish context: it allows for the mobilization of ordinary
people in burning down housing units intended for refugees, arson in the name
of nationalism. Only this time, no one gave the order; it just emerged as the
moral thing to do.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Evil</i> (2016), the tendency of
technology to dissociate morality and the potential to commit evil is discussed
in more explicit terms. To quote: </span></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoQuote">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">One of the consequences
of [liquid modernity] has been to render redundant mass participation in
state-initiated, state-commanded and state-monitored evils. We no longer have
massive conscription armies; murder has turned into a task for professional soldiers
– and those soldiers have turned mostly into fully programmed attachments to
smart technological contraptions. […] Smart missiles and drones have chased
away battleships and fighter pilots. Ever more seldom do the killers face the
killed – and so the demands of obedience come unto direct confrontation with
moral scruples much less than they used to – if at all. (p. 33)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoQuote">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The turn to discussing
these technological developments explicitly in terms of evil might seem
hyperbolic, but as Bauman’s own work has shown, the atrocities committed by man
against man far transcends the realms where any other term becomes
insufficient. Rather than locating the evil at particular agents – the Germans
in the case of the Holocaust, the soldiers in the cases alluded to in the quote
above – Bauman locates it as a possibility inherent in each and every one of
us, aided and abetted by the new technological means which allow us to do it
ever more efficiently with ever less risk of facing the consequences, legally
or even physically. This, and nowhere else, is where the orderly progression
implied in the slogan “Forward” has taken us. In no uncertain terms.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A conclusion of sorts</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">As I hope has been
clearly shown in the snapshot given above, Bauman is not in the business of
giving us fixed and universally applicable answers. Rather, his project is to
create a framework for ethical (and sociological) reflection, and to make it
available to those in need of it. Which, as it turns out, is each and every one
of us. If there is one hopeful message that shines throughout Bauman’s work, it
is that with the capacity to do evil also comes the capacity to do good. There
is still a human subjectivity capable of making ethical judgments, and thus
there is still a humanity left to make ethical appeals to. It would be very
easy to look upon the world as he describes it, and despair. Yet despair is not
a very effective emotion; it does not spark feats of ethical prowess.
Fortunately, the race is not over yet – there are still things to be done.
There is still an alternative. There is still time. We can still choose to be
ethical.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A second, more literal conclusion</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman</i>
(2001), published relatively soon after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid
Modernity</i> (2000), Bauman expresses a growing unease with the term
“postmodernity”. Not only because of its gradual falling out of popularity, but
also because it implies that modernity came to an end in some undefined way. It
is an accurate description to say that modernity took one form and then changed
into another form, but Bauman wanted to convey that they were both of a kind.
Postmodernity was, in a sense, the most modern we have ever become, the logical
conclusion of the transformative process initiated by the modern project. These
two tendencies conspired into finding a different metaphor for describing both
the transformation of modernity and the changes to the transformations of
modernity<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></span></span></span>.
Which is a more literal, but slightly less ethically interesting, answer to the
question of why the shift in terminology from postmodernity to liquid modernity
occurred. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" />
</span>
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<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">References</span></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (1989).<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Modernity and the Holocaust</i>. Cambridge:
Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (1991). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modernity and Ambivalence</i>. Oxford:
Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (1992). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mortality, Immortality and Other Life
Strategies</i>. Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (1993). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodern Ethics</i>. Oxford: Blackwell.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (1995). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life in Fragments</i>. Oxford: Blackwell.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (1997). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postmodernity and its Discontents</i>.
Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (1998). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Work, Consumerism and the New Poor</i>.
Buckingham: Open University Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (1999). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Search of Politics</i>. Cambridge:
Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2000). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Modernity</i>. Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2001). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Individualized Society</i>. Cambridge:
Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. &
Tester, K. (2001). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conversations with
Zygmunt Bauman</i>. Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2002). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Society Under Siege</i>. Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2003). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Love</i>. Cambridge: Polity. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2005). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Life</i>. Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2006). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Fear</i>. Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2007). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Times</i>. Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2010). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World</i>.
Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. (2011). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Culture in a Liquid Modern World</i>.
Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. &
Donskis, L. (2013). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moral Blindness</i>.
Cambridge. Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. & Lyon,
D. (2013). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Surveillance</i>.
Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. Hviid
Jacobsen, M. & Tester, K. (2014). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What
Use is Sociology?</i>. Cambridge: Polity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bauman, Z. & Donskis,
L. (2016). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liquid Evil</i>. Cambridge:
Polity. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="SV">Bauman, Z. & Leoncini, T. (2017). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nati Liquidi</i>. Sperling & Kupfer.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-58336434508582537702018-12-20T16:42:00.002+01:002018-12-20T16:42:58.715+01:00Shake, shake, shakeI've been thinking a lot about the topics broached in the <a href="http://streetremix.blogspot.com/2018/11/shaking-habit.html" target="">last post</a>, and how we learn the darnedest things without realizing it. Get into the habit, as it were. The darnedest of these habits is the one where you are expected to give a too full account of yourself - covering every aspect that may or may not be relevant to what's going on.<br />
<br />
Academia in particular fosters this kind of habit, in a very explicit fashion. When writing anything larger than a paper, you have to describe your methodology down to the nuts and bolts, and then evaluate the merits of the chosen brands of bolts against other brands. It is all very down to the wire and very literal - no obfuscation or ambiguity is allowed. Everything has to be explained, and it has to be explained well.<br />
<br />
Part of this comes down to the scientific method, and the importance placed on being able to replicate results of previous efforts. Like recipes, they becomes easier to follow when the steps are clearly laid out in a straightforward manner. But another, I suspect more important, part of it is that it's become a habit which is (pun very much intended) habitually applied even when scientific exactitude is not on the line. It keeps going even outside the specific domains wherein it is a virtue.<br />
<br />
Thus, we often see young academics spring into action writing in public about past thinkers with alacrity. Five posts into the new blog, they are grappling with the significance of semicolons in Derrida or the travails of making sense of the few remaining pre-Socratic fragments in context. Which is all very interesting, to be sure, but it is also way too specific, too explicit - too much in the vein of giving an account of oneself and justifying one's claim to be an academic. As if failing to live up to the implicit academic ideal would disqualify one's efforts and forever cement a reputation of being a fraud, a know-nothing, an amateur. It's all or nothing, and "all" includes lengthy and explicit accounts of whatever one happens to be doing at the moment.<br />
<br />
If this sounds very much like impostor syndrome, it's because that's what it is.<br />
<br />
That academics in particular fall into this habit more often than others is no accident. It goes with the territory: introductory courses demand that you show you've read the literature, with intermediary courses demanding more of it, and theses being a culmination of expository discourse. At every step of the way, you have to prove yourself, justifying each and every sentence. Down to the semicolon.<br />
<br />
It is a very difficult habit to shake indeed.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-73634767764889089882018-11-28T21:40:00.000+01:002018-11-28T21:40:57.919+01:00Shaking the habitAs I am ever faster approaching the end of my time as a master student, I naturally become more reflective of times past. Not only because these times are soon to be irrevocably over for my part, but also because others are bound to begin the same journey soon enough. It's an integral aspect of institutionalized education - there have been others before you, and there will be others after you. The show doth go on.<br />
<br />
Part of this process is seeing young ones (they do get younger every year) enter into university life and encountering everything for the first time. And second time. And a lot of times until they, probably, hopefully, possibly get it. Or get a degree, whichever comes first. Their path is as personal as it is predictable - first comes the obstacle of getting into reading, then the obstacle of getting into writing, and somewhere along the way it all translates into getting into thinking. One step at a time, until either understanding or degree undergoes the formality of actually occurring.<br />
<br />
I don't say this to imply that bachelors leave with a partial understanding of whatever field they've studied. Everyone has a partial understanding of everything - the world is to big for it to be otherwise. Rather, what I mean to imply is that there are habits that one gets into that one does not necessarily get out of. The most prominent of these habits is to write in the way that is demanded by the university system - particularly, in a way that shows you have actually read the literature on the syllabus. It is an easy habit to get into, seeing as it keeps graders off your back. However, it takes work to get out of this habit once the need for it has passed.<br />
<br />
Like, say, after graduation.<br />
<br />
The reasons for teaching such a style of writing are many, but most of them relate to a vaguely protestant notion of having Performed the Work. Thus, it is routinely demanded that students include page numbers whenever they refer to an author, rather than just make the reference in general. The only way to actually have a page number on hand, it is assumed, is if you have the opened and read book right there in front of you. This goes for every reference at all times, meaning that writing becomes an bibliographically exhausting (not to be confused with exhaustive) effort - every time an author is mentioned, there has to be a page number to go along with it. To show that you indeed read the book.<br />
<br />
If you at this point are having flashbacks to your university days, I apologize.<br />
<br />
Thing is. Unless you are doing heavy duty exegesis where every word has to be read and understood in context, there is no reason to write like this outside of the educational setting. It is sufficient to give an account of what the author wrote, get the year of publication right, and move along with whatever argument you are trying to make. Especially if you are trying to tie several authors' lines of thought together - the overall thrust of your discursive momentum is sufficient to give context to your writing, and the addition (or, as the case might be, subtraction) of page numbers will not substantially contribute anything.<br />
<br />
The same tendency can be seen, albeit writ large, in comprehensive introductions which mention every author in the field before getting to the topic at hand. This is an excellent writing strategy if you need to convey that you have read about a number of theories and can place them in a proper context. It is a less than excellent strategy if you want to write a compelling introduction which gets right to the heart of things.<br />
<br />
There are a number of these habits that gets drilled into you during your university years. Most of them are there to make you easier to evaluate (and subsequently grade), others are accidental. Some are even useful. The key to moving forward is to take a look at oneself and assess which habits still serve a purpose, which have to be unlearned, and which have to be kept in a state of being just remembered enough so that you can give useful advice to new students upon encountering them. The goal, of course, being to nudge these young fellows toward the habit of thinking, rather than settling for a habit of performing.<br />
<br />
The show doth go on.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-7324494997226480862018-10-25T04:27:00.001+02:002018-10-25T04:27:30.199+02:00Getting ahead, one leg at a timeThere are three different ways of going about riding a bike.<br />
<br />
The most intuitive way is to give it your all and effort to maintain maximum speed, Tour de France style, where it is all muscle all the time. Full speed ahead, legs thumping and whooshing. Oontz oontz oontz oontz. Faster, harder, overtake that Scooter. This usually occurs when you are in a hurry to get somewhere, want the exercise, or simply have not thought too hard about how to go about biking.<br />
<br />
Then there is the economical way, where you effort just enough to get the bike into enough sufficiently sustained momentum that you can move forward without additional input. Just keep on rolling, maybe lean forward a bit, until more power is required. Then repeat the process as many times as necessary, alternating between building momentum and effortlessly moving forward. Eventually, you'll get where you are going, minimum effort style.<br />
<br />
And then there is the low-speed high effort method, where you effort just enough to get moving, but not enough to actually move at sustained speed, and thus have to continually apply leg power to move at a crawl. Friction and gravity keeps on slowing down the bike to such an extent that every pedal push becomes akin to the initial oomph to transition from standstill to motion. Previous efforts do not accumulate or help you sustain momentum, and every iota of speed has to be reestablished anew every step along the way.<br />
<br />
At this point, you might be asking yourself - is this some sort of metaphor for life in general, where the different modes of biking represent different approaches to everyday activities and how to approach them? Or, possibly also, different states of mind that a person might slip into as they go about doing the thing called being alive?<br />
<br />
To which I say: yes. Yes it is.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-39232485514368762362018-09-01T04:51:00.000+02:002018-09-01T04:51:13.035+02:00An analytical pokeEvery now and again I come to think of the big disconnect between the act of performing rhetorical communication and rhetorical analysis. Rhetorical communication happens any time you strategically choose your words to get someone to do something (from passing the salt to approving a bank loan). Rhetorical analysis is the act of looking really closely at some sort of rhetorical communication and analyzing what's going on in it. The communication usually happens very fast, and the analysis very slowly. That's the disconnect.<br />
<br />
The disconnect is, of course, inevitable. An analysis has to perform many tasks, and be explicit about most of them. It has to provide context, justify the significance of the communicative act under analysis, and describe it in sufficient detail to convey to readers what's going on. This takes quite a number of words, even if only performed with the minimum of surplus verbiage. Even after subsequent revisions with the explicit intent to reduce word count, there will by necessity be a substantial amount of words to it. It goes with the territory.<br />
<br />
The communicative act, on the other hand, only has to do what it set out to do. Once done, it's over, and other things can commence. In trivial cases, it literally takes seconds - the salt is passed. In other cases, it can take a bit longer, but tends to be limited by the physical constraints of the human body. A speech can only be so long. All said and done, other things happen. Life goes on.<br />
<br />
Thus, analyses tend to end up being much ado about seemingly nothing. On first glance, you might wonder how it is even possible to write thousands of words about something that takes seconds to perform. Then you dig into it and discover that there's a lot going on in that one moment, which indeed needed all those words to unpack. Worse, you begin to look at similar situations for similar implications - the analysis continues inside you. Further communicative acts require at least some thought before they become routine again.<br />
<br />
The power of rhetorical analysis lies in this disconnect. A good analysis will disconnect you from a situation, and then force you to reconnect to it in a new way. You think you knew what's going on, but looking back on it you realize that, no, there's more to it. Your perspective has changed, and so you must pay attention to the differences made visible. You have permission to be perturbed.<br />
<br />
In all this, life goes on. But you still have to reconnect.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-11221247096569743542018-08-07T04:15:00.001+02:002018-08-07T04:15:46.834+02:00Active listening by the numbersI like hearing mathematicians talk about doing math things. Usually I do not follow along, but it's nice to listen to. The [name] algorithm passed through the [name] filter and then cleaned up through the [name] process. It all makes sense to someone, probably.<br />
<br />
There are different ways to approach discourse you do not understand. One is to simply throw up your hands and declare you do not understand any of it. Sometimes, this is in fact the most useful approach - radical honesty and all that.<br />
<br />
Another approach is to take what you do understand and try to parse it using available data. If we know that, in math, procedures are often named after those who formulate them, we can gather that each time a name is mentioned, some sort of procedure is brought into the context. The names themselves do not matter as much as the courses of action they connote; they are shorthand for what to do and how to go about it.<br />
<br />
This does not make the specifics any clearer, to be sure. But when someone objects "but what about the [name] conjecture?", you are now clued in to the fact that there is something amiss with the proposed course of action, which needs to be addressed. The content of this objection is unknown, but the form of it is clear. Whatever comes next - be it an "oh, but the [name] postulate solves that" or a heartfelt "shit shit shit shit shit" - your act of active listening has provided you with some insight into what's going on.<br />
<br />
The same goes for any context. There are always two conversations going on at any given time, where one might be more prominent than the other. There is the factual conversation where specifics are tossed around left and right, where knowing what's what helps tremendously. These facts are timeless, and can be grappled with later on, on their own terms. There is also a very time-sensitive conversation going on in the now, where everything is specific to the very moment it is happening. This is the realm of moods, postures, physical positioning within the room, hierarchy - everything that affects a situation without necessarily being explicitly mentioned by anyone involved.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, the fact that it goes without saying does not mean it is unimportant.<br />
<br />
There is an ideal out there that conversations ought to take place solely in terms of the first conversation. Putting ideas against each other and all that. It has the merit of being an ideal, but as an analytic approach to actual social situations, it leaves out too many relevant aspects to generate useful insight. The "shit shit shit" response above might be a response to the fact that the [name] conjecture makes the thing difficult to perform, but it might also be a response to the fact that the person in question was planning on going home early that day, and just had that very plan dashed to pieces right there and then. Merely thinking in terms of content leaves out the very real life implications of form.<br />
<br />
Be sure to keep both ears open as you move through life. Arguments are very seldom about the things they are about, and there are cases where losing the argument in the first kind of conversation means winning in the second. You just have to know to listen for it.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-31567353456678531842018-07-23T09:56:00.001+02:002018-07-23T09:56:18.832+02:00Universal literacy and youEvery once in a while, I remind people that writing (and reading) is a technology. This might seem an obvious point, but it has a series of non-obvious implications. One of the most important implications is that no one is born literate, and everyone has to attain it somehow. Writing is not an intrinsic ability of human beings, but a technology that can be mastered through practice. There is no natural age at which literacy occurs; it's all culture.<br />
<br />
If you consider this in the context of education, the implications become slightly more tangible. Especially with regards to standardized education, where everyone is supposed to achieve the same goals at the same time. On the one hand, there are organizational and administrative reasons for having a system like that; standardization brings interoperability and routine. On the other hand, it is easy to over time begin to view the goals as natural stages of development. By age x, the standardized child is supposed to know a, by age y b, and so on. Performance becomes both expected and measurable.<br />
<br />
The thing about technologies is that they are not one size fits all. Like clothing (another technology), it fits differently on different bodies. Some can just put it on, no big deal, while others have to struggle to even get an elbow in. Everybody is different, and expecting everyone to conform to the same standards becomes something of a contradiction in terms. Or, to invoke Foucault, a power tool.<br />
<br />
Literacy has the advantage of having a high adoption rate. A large proportion of everyone can attain some basic level of literacy with effort, enough to process the written word for functional purposes. A high adoption rate is still less than 100%, however, and there will inevitably be those who for various reasons are simply not cut out for it. Not because of personal defects or lack of effort, but because that's how statistics work. Even at an adoption rate of 99%, there will be a sizable number of non-adopters. By feat of statistics, the illiterate walk among us.<br />
<br />
To be sure, this is not an either/or issue. There are a significant number of dyslectics in the world, who can do the reading but have to effort for it. This is a result of the same process; the technology simply does not sit right with how their bodies work. <br />
<br />
By reminding people that writing is a technology, I perform the slightly violent act of recontextualizing illiterate persons from deficient to unfortunate. Being illiterate in a society which expects universal literacy is a massive disadvantage, no two ways about it. If writing is a technology with less than 100% adoption rate, however, those unfortunate souls who end up being born as non-compatible become an expected (indeed inevitable) side-effect of a policy choice, rather than malfunctioning individuals. It is not their fault that one of the major societal technological choices made happened to have the side-effect of excluding them.<br />
<br />
Writing is a technology. It is an obvious point, with many non-obvious implications.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-1349611846229807882018-07-09T01:12:00.000+02:002018-07-09T01:12:14.147+02:00The funny side of systematic literature reviewsI find myself thinking about systematic literature reviews these days. It is an unexpected thing to be randomly thinking about, to be sure, so I guess that means I'm officially an academic now. My habitus is augmented.<br />
<br />
The quickest way to introduce systematic literature reviews is through a detour to unsystematic literature reviews. The unsystematic approach is easy to grasp: you simply grab a hold of any books or articles that seem relevant and start reading. At the other end of the reading process, you know more than you did before. This is generally a good way to go about learning (especially if you have a nice local library to draw from), and should not be underestimated.<br />
<br />
It is not, however, systematic.<br />
<br />
The lack of systematicity is something of a problem, though. Not to the learning process, mind, but to the performative aspect of being an academic. It is not cool or hip to say that you've read a lot of books and keep tabs on new articles in your field, and thus know a thing or two. This is not the image of a structured, rigorous and disciplined scientific mind that academia wants to project (both to itself and to the public), so something has to be done. A system has to be created, to let everyone involved claim that they followed proper procedure and did not leave things to chance. Thus, systematic literature reviews.<br />
<br />
Depending on where you are in the process, the systematic approach can take many guises. If you are just learning about science and scientific literature, having a system in place to guide you through the reading is immensely helpful. It gives permission to look at a search result of 2931 articles and cut it down to a more manageable number. If it is a robust system, it specifies that search engines giveth what you asketh, and that you probably should be more specific in your search. Moreover, knowing which questions to ask the articles beforehand gives a structure to the reading, and allows for paying closer attention to the important parts. And so on, through all the steps. Having a template to follow answers a lot of questions, even if you find yourself deviating from it.<br />
<br />
When you've been at being an academic for a while, the presence of an adopted system can shield you from the burden of overreading. There are always more books and articles than can be readily read, and every text ever written can be criticized on the basis of not taking something into account. By using the system, the age-old question of "why did you choose to include these texts but not these other texts" can finally be put to rest. The systematic literature review unburdens the load by defining exactly which texts are relevant and which are not. And thus, the rigorous and disciplined reading can commence, conscience clear.<br />
<br />
Next up the abstraction ladder, we find another use of these systematic reviews. When research has to be summarized and administrated, it simply will not do to go with something as unscientific as a gut feeling. The scientists involved might know what's what, but this intricate insider knowledge is not easily translated into something outsiders can partake of. Outsiders, such as the non-scientist bureaucrats put in place to administrate the funding mechanisms that determine which research efforts are awarded grants and which do not. By strategically employing review systems that include desired results (and exclude undesired results), funding can be directed in certain directions under the guise of impartial systematicity. Administrators (or their superiors) can claim all the academic benefits of rigorously following the method laid out for all to see, while at the same time subtly steering research efforts without having to be explicit about it. It is systematic, disciplined and impartial, whilst also being ruthlessly political.<br />
<br />
The key takeaway here is not that systematic literature reviews are bad (problematic, maybe, but not bad). Rather, it is a reminder that the presence of a system does not in itself guarantee a robust outcome. Like all methodologies, there are strengths and weaknesses to consider in each particular case, sometimes more obvious than not. When a systematic review finds that only articles published by (say) economists are relevant to a particular issue, despite decades of scholarly publishing on the subject on other disciplines, the issue is not a lack of systematicity, but <i>too much</i> of it. A flawless execution of review methodology does not preclude asking what is up with such unrepresentative results.<br />
<br />
I find it amusing that strategic and rhetorical dimensions of academia are obscured by reference to systematicity and specialized vocabulary (the terminology surrounding systematic literature reviews is something to behold). Not least because academics are the very people best positioned to problematize the living bejeezus out of just these kinds of subtle processes.<br />
<br />
It's funny that way.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-18041990919826019452018-04-29T03:29:00.000+02:002018-04-29T03:29:17.482+02:00What Marx can tell you about creating youtube videosThe first association that leaps to mind when someone mentions youtube is probably not Marx. In fact, he is probably not among the top five or the top fifty. Which is understandable, given that Marx is something of an 1850s guy and youtube is not very 1850s at all. The line between these things is not altogether clear.<br />
<br />
Unless, of course, you are a David Harvey fan, and have listened to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk&list=PL0A7FFF28B99C1303" target="_blank">his series of youtube lectures</a> on the man.<br />
<br />
Those who have dabbled in creating youtube videos know that it is difficult to predict just how many viewers a video will get. There tends to be an average number, and some variations up and down for the most part. Then, seemingly for no reason, there are videos that get far more viewers than the others. Seen in context, they are the same as the other videos, except that something funneled viewers into that one video in particular. With enough sifting through the stats, it is sometimes possible to figure out what's up; if you do, then that is useful information.<br />
<br />
Anecdotal evidence has it that it is usually the videos that took the least effort to make that wins this accidental lottery. Conversely, those videos which take hours upon hours to produce tend to remain at their usual levels of viewers - possibly slightly fewer, just out some spiteful statistical quirk. This perceived inverse relationship between effort and outcome is probably just imaginary, but it's easy to feel that it would be better if viewers flocked to the effort-intense video rather than to the throwaway two minute thingamabob. If viewers are only gonna see the one video, then it might as well be one of the good ones.<br />
<br />
As it happens, Marx has something to say on the matter of the relation between effort and results. Specifically, he talks about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_necessary_labour_time" target="_blank">socially necessary labor time</a>. It is a very technical concept, given that you have to understand what "socially", "necessary", "labor" and "time" are defined as in order to really get the full story. The short of it is thus: if it takes you five hours to make a pair of shoes, and your competitor can crank out thousands of those same shoes in the same span of time, the market value of the pair you made does not go up because it took you a lot of time and effort. Consequently, any attempt to sell them at a price that corresponds to your time and energy invested will fall flat, given that there are other shoes sold for cheaper.<br />
<br />
This has consequences for your career as a shoemaker, as you might imagine.<br />
<br />
It also has consequences for all shoemakers. The competitor who put you out of the shoe business has to face the same dynamic. He can crank out shoes by the thousands, but if someone comes along who can produce tens of thousands of shoes in the same span of time, this is going to be an issue. The same dynamic that made it unfeasible to make one pair of shoes at a time, also make it unfeasible to remain someone who merely produces thousands of shoes. The sheer amount of shoes will drive down prices until it becomes an economically sound idea to either upgrade the production line or move into another line of work.<br />
<br />
If you are tempted to say that this is why capitalism is good, seeing the immense amount of shoes it produces, Marx would agree with you.<br />
<br />
The main point of the concept of socially necessary labor time is to decouple personal effort from market outcomes. As you can see in the example of shoemaking, the price someone is willing to pay for a pair is not based on personal factors; there is an impersonal dynamic at work beyond any one person's capacity to control. Those who want to compete in the shoe market, have to produce shoes in such a way that it makes sense in terms of price and production capacity. One pair every five hours simply will not cut it, even if you worked really hard at it.<br />
<br />
The same goes for youtube videos, in two important ways. The first is most obvious, so let's get at it first: expending vast quantities of time and effort into producing a video does not guarantee that viewers will flock to it. There is always a risk that you are making the youtube equivalent of those five-hour shoes, and it does not reflect badly upon you if this turns out to be the case. It's in the nature of the game.<br />
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Less obvious, but equally as important, is what this tells us about those who crank out videos at an alarming rate without investing too heavily into the research or production quality departments. It is easy to become resentful and mutter about the unfairness of it all, where hard work is left unrewarded in favor of these clowns. This is not a useful state of mind, however, nor is it a useful analysis. Instead, it makes more sense to see it as an instance of socially necessary labor time: apparently, this is how many videos you have to crank out in order to remain competitive, even if these videos end up containing easily preventable errors and mistakes.<br />
<br />
If you are tempted to say that this is why capitalism is bad, seeing the immense amount of shoddy videos it produces, Marx would anachronistically agree
with you.<br />
<br />
To reiterate: the point here is to decouple effort and market outcomes. Working hard in the sweat of your brow is not a reward in itself, nor does it guarantee that viewers will show up. Finding ways to streamline your process and make time for other things (or to do things better) is not cheating, it's just efficient. Moreover, being hard at work does not mean viewers owe you anything; being resentful that they are not appreciative enough of your efforts will not help you going forward. Conversely, if it turns out viewers really like that throwaway two minute thingamabob, then that is useful information.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, if this goes for shoemaking and making youtube videos, then the notion of socially necessary labor time probably goes for a lot of other things as well.<br />
<br />
Marx is sneaky like that.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-39792976378202386242018-04-10T01:29:00.001+02:002018-04-10T01:29:27.698+02:00Musing on being less on TwitterOver the recent months, I have found myself looking less and less at Twitter. This manifests itself in many forms, the most dramatic being that I nowadays only occasionally turn on my middle monitor, which main use is to display a never ending live-updating stream of tweets flowing like a less stylized version of the Matrix. The monitor just stands there, a black mirror in portrait mode.<br />
<br />
The strange thing is that Janetter - my ancient twitter client that new users can not run due to long-forgotten arbitrary API limits - still runs, in preparation for the ever rarer occasions when I turn the monitor on just to see the flow of tweets again. As if closing the program would be some kind of definite gesture, irrevocable once performed.<br />
<br />
Less strange is that I find my thinking has changed. This is to be expected - as <a href="https://discursiveanomalies.com/2017/09/29/byung-chul-han-in-the-swarm/" target="_blank">Byung-Chul Han</a> noted, it is difficult to focus during a noisy party. But it is also more subtle than simply having less input to process. I find that I direct myself towards different company. Even if I were to think about something that happened to be trending on Twitter right this very instant, it would be from a different starting point, with different aims.<br />
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"Company" is the key term here, I suspect. <a href="https://discursiveanomalies.com/2017/07/19/booth-the-company-we-keep/" target="_blank">Booth</a> uses it to muse on the fact that we spend time in someone's company when we read their words, and conversely become company as others read ours. The quality of our company, both reading and writing, in many ways shape who we are, and who we try to be. Good company inspires upwards, while bad company keeps you down.<br />
<br />
In more Twitter-related terms, this manifests as an implicit demand to become company to those we follow and those who follow us. As we think through the issues introduced and reiterated by those in our timelines, we ever so gradually come to feel the pressure to add our own thoughts to the flow. After seeing fifteen tweets about something, it becomes almost a knee-jerk reaction to write a sixteenth. Even if we only just heard about something mere minutes ago, we feel compelled to have said something about it.<br />
<br />
This dynamic creates a very specific and other-directed way of thinking. You build up a sensitivity to trends and keywords, and act on what you see. Others see this as well, and react to your reactions; the fact that you both see and react to the same things is an immense sense of community; it is sometimes referred to as social media validation. It is company, good or bad.<br />
<br />
This thinking is like riding a bike, though. True, once learned, you do not forget it. But if you've not rode a bike in a while, there is a strong possibility that the muscles used to pedal things forward have become less muscular than you remember, and thus the going is slower than it used to be. You still know what to look for - the trends, the keywords, the subtweets - but it is an effort to care. An uphill effort, to combine metaphors.<br />
<br />
Thus, on the ever rarer occasions when I power up my middle monitor, I see what is going on and how it unfolds. The impulse to contribute to the goings on and insert myself into the company, however, is not strong enough for me to do it as often and as energetically as I used to. I'm simply not in that frame of mind any more. My thoughts and words are directed elsewhere.<br />
<br />
It is only prudent that I mention this somewhere. For future reference.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-79449486513560990352018-03-22T05:19:00.000+01:002018-03-22T05:19:26.380+01:00That thesis I wrote about PatreonI wrote a thesis about Patreon.<br />
<br />
There are different ways of going about writing a thesis about Patreon. An intuitive approach would be an instrumental, goal-oriented investigation as to which strategies work and which do not. The findings of such an investigation could then be distilled into a simple list of do's and don'ts, which readers could implement in short order and (probably, maybe, hopefully) generate more revenue.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/adampieniazek/2784992613/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="375" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_9mlqcJxE9SFEXoN0ELidU8mYk2QRJ8CEP9YoTa3hgSn4CT9c02bvf-PIyPsb8cLVgPGX_ilTdkAaDfrWKt82qLHqmckyu4KVFLyjel9KOgjJMJDFbphuVye0G3egGxHAutI20mQ9Nm0/s400/patreonoldschool.jpg" width="300" /></a>I did not write that kind of thesis. If you came here looking for simple, straightforward advice about how to run your Patreon page, then this wall of text is not for you. (Neither are the posts about my my <a href="http://streetremix.blogspot.com/2016/06/when-rhetoricians-and-pedagogues-clash.html" target="_blank">other</a> <a href="http://streetremix.blogspot.se/2017/01/that-thesis-i-wrote-about-fan-fiction.html" target="_blank">theses</a>, for that matter, despite them all relating to each other in interesting ways.)<br />
<br />
What I did was seemingly simple. I asked a straightforward question, and saw where it took me. The question was thus: what is Patreon, and what does being on it do to you?<br />
<br />
As with all straightforward questions, the answer turns out to be everything but clear cut and easy to summarize. In order to answer it, we have to answer a couple of sub-questions first, just to make sure everyone is on the same page.<br />
<br />
Seeing as this was a thesis in Rhetoric (Americans call it Composition and/or Speech; the discipline has different names depending on where you happen to be geographically), the first of these sub-questions is what we mean by "rhetoric". To summarize hundreds of years of back and forths, there are two main answers to this question. The first is the (neo-)Aristotelian answer that it is <b>the art of finding the best possible means of convincing someone in a particular situation</b>. In this case, rhetoric would be a set of strategies for maximizing Patreon donations, with varying degrees of excellence in execution. The other answer looks at the situation as a whole and asks what it implies for those who participate in it, and if things could be done differently. In this case, rhetoric consists of <b>analyzing what it means to have a Patreon page, which implicit assumptions inform interactions on this page, and how these assumptions might lead to outcomes that were neither expected nor beneficial for the participants</b>.<br />
<br />
As you might have gleaned from the gist of things, my thesis fell firmly into the latter category. Hence the lack of simple, straightforward advice in list form.<br />
<br />
We need to keep the different kinds of rhetoric in mind, as the difference between them tells us something about what goes on with regards to Patreon. Specifically, we shall look at the concept of "ethos" and how it plays out differently in the two paradigms.<br />
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In the (neo-)Aristotelian framework, ethos is a means of persuasion. The word "ethos" connotes <b>everything that is related to the person doing the talking, and how these aspects of self are being used to convince the audience to do something</b>. In this case, the "something" is donating. There are many possible means, depending on who is doing the asking for donations. For instance, various ailments or difficulties can be leveraged to generate sympathy, which creates a willingness to donate. Similarly, skills can be leveraged to show how donations go towards new projects (e.g. donate so I can afford to make a new movie or whatever). Or a common goal can be invoked, along with a more or less defined correlation between donating and achieving this goal (e.g. most fundraisers and charity drives). And so on and so forth. In short, ethos is a means to an end, and it is used as such.<br />
<br />
In the more modern framework, "ethos" is more akin to "ethics", in that it connotes <b>a way of being in the world</b>. It is not as directly interested in solving the problem at hand, as it is in understanding the communicative process in a wider context. For instance, it does not see communication in terms of problems to solve (in this case, how to get people to donate), but rather as <b>a series of interactions which generate certain expectations on future interactions</b>. It also emphasizes the role of choice on the part of the person doing the communication - they can choose to present themselves this way or that, and they do so on the basis of available knowledge and ethical propensities. A person does not present themselves in a certain way only in order to solve a problem, but also as a way of being in the world. A Patreon page is not just an invitation to donate - it is also a declaration: <a href="https://discursiveanomalies.com/2017/07/09/hyde-the-ethos-of-rhetoric/" target="_blank">this is who I am and what I do</a>.<br />
<br />
This might seem like a subtle difference, and it is. Thus, an example is in order, to put the two perspectives in perspective.<br />
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Let's say we have a rhetor without any particular political opinions one way or the other. One day, he (let's make it a he) stumbles upon an alt-right blog, and notices two things. First, that it gets a lot of donations. Second, that it is very formulaic and uncreative, and mostly posts the same things over and over and over again with minor variations. Based on these two observations, he decides to hack the process and start his own blog in a similar vein. Not because he agrees with the opinions expressed, but because it seems an easier way to get an income than doing more labor-intensive work. After a while, his low-effort blog gets noticed by the true believers, and the donation money starts to pour in. Seeing as it works, he puts a little more effort into it, and eventually finds himself being a part of this political ecology. Not because he believes in what he writes, but because the donation money keeps coming his way.<br />
<br />
Seen through the (neo-)Aristotelian framework, he has solved the problem. By presenting himself as someone who holds these particular beliefs, he manages to persuade his audience to donate money. He has succeeded with what he set out to do, and his audience is happy to see him keep at it.<br />
<br />
As you might imagine, the modern framework is less than sympathetic to this course of action. For one, he uses his powers of rhetoric to exploit those who are vulnerable to this kind of industrially produced propaganda, <a href="https://medium.com/@sargoth/and-now-something-that-is-actually-about-ethics-3df334a2c3f4" target="_blank">in a sense preying on the weak</a>. For another, his participation in this political milieu reinforces its message and makes it a more prevalent presence in the online spaces he frequents; there is strength in numbers, and he now numbers among them. Moreover, this is not the best use of his rhetorical skills, and he could contribute better things to the world than a low-effort repetition of insincerely held opinions.<br />
<br />
In the former case, our fictive rhetor makes good use of ethos, as he manages to present himself as a fellow extremist, thus getting his audience to donate. In the latter, he fails his ethical obligation to be a good person whose presence in the world makes a positive difference when all is said and done. He has not been <a href="https://discursiveanomalies.com/2017/07/19/booth-the-company-we-keep/" target="_blank">good company</a>.<br />
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If you have read this far, you might have thought that we have moved rather orthogonally with regards to what Patreon is and how being on it affects its users. <b>But I reckon you also understand why simply asking what to do in order to make donations happen is insufficient in order to understand what is going on</b>. It is more than merely a quest to maximize the monthly donations, and the analysis has to widen in order to take all the relevant aspects into account.<br />
<br />
With this in mind, we can pose the question of what Patreon is. In the simplest terms possible, it is a web site that allows people to ask for money from other people. Patreon also provides an economic infrastructure for getting said donations from here to there. Anyone can create a Patreon page and ask for donations on it. Moreover, they can present themselves in whatever terms they like in order to make these donations happen. This is, in short, it.<br />
<br />
(To be sure, there are certain limitations as to who is allowed on the site, mostly relating to contradictory US social values. In order to keep things brief, I'm going to gloss over this fact with the quickness.)<br />
<br />
This presents us with an interesting rhetorical situation. On the one hand, <b>Patreon users are free to define themselves however they like</b>, applying every bit of autonomy and rhetorical prowess they can muster. On the other hand, <b>the very act of being on Patreon is a message in and of itself</b>. Patreon exists to facilitate donations, and anyone who has a page is asking for such donations - even if they do not write anything on their page at all. There is communication going on between the lines whether the user acknowledges it or not. At the end of the day, a Patreon page is a Patreon page.<br />
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During the course of my thesis writing, I identified three strategies (broadly defined) for writing a Patreon page. Here, I present them in falling order of popularity. <br />
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<b>The most common strategy is to describe what happens when someone donates</b>. This is heavily encouraged through the system of rewards and goals; if an individual donates x amount of dollars, they get a reward, and if the accumulated donations reach a certain level, some action which could not previously be performed will now be performed. In this way, the relationship between the parties involved is well defined: everyone knows what will happen, and donors can weigh their options before choosing a course of action.<br />
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<b>Another common strategy is to not have rewards, but to frame donations as encouragements to keep whatever activity is at hand going</b>. The donation becomes its own reward, as it were. There are still overall goals (e.g. at x amount of total donations there will be an upgrade of recording equipment) but individuals are not rewarded above and beyond knowing that the thing they enjoy can keep doing its thing.<br />
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<b>A less common strategy is to flat out not reward donations at all, but accept them nevertheless</b>. This might be done for tax reasons (some legislations exempt gifts from taxation, and explicitly not giving anything in return qualifies the exchange as a gift rather than a business transaction). They might also do it to avoid getting into a situation where gratitude is required (those who choose to donate even though they know they will receive nothing in return know that this is not a purchase). Or it might simply be because the user simply can't be bothered to think of something to write. There are no goals, no rewards, but the option to donate is open nevertheless.<br />
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It would seem at first glance that this last strategy is counter to the whole concept of having a donation page. But - as we saw earlier - simply having a Patreon page is a message in and of itself, and sometimes this is enough to get the point across.<br />
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<b>All of these strategies deal with the tension between freedom and autonomy</b>. Freedom means doing what you want to do, while autonomy means defining your own laws (or, in this case, your own goals). The tension comes into being whenever you want to do something that requires more effort than simply doing it. For instance, reading a book requires that you keep reading until you've read all you decided to read. At any point you are free to stop reading, but if you want to finish the reading, you have to make the decision to limit your range of options until it is completed. <b>If you set a goal for yourself, you also have to discipline yourself until the goal is achieved</b>.<br />
<br />
The tension here is that both freedom and autonomy are limitations of each other. The defining characteristic of autonomy is that you choose your own rules and goals. <b>Once you set upon the path of realizing the chosen course of action, however, you must limit yourself to doing the things that lead to attaining the goal</b>. Not because someone else tells you to, but <b>because this is what you decided to do</b>. Whether it happens to be reading a book, finishing an education, or performing some other feat, the dynamic remains the same: once your decision has been made, you have to stick to it. Even if you at times feel like doing something else.<br />
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An example of this (to stick with the literary theme) is writing a book. <a href="http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20150930" target="_blank">The only way to finish it is to sit down and write</a>. It might be tempting to go outside to enjoy the nice weather, or binge watch all seasons of Buffy, or go hang out with friends. At all points in time, you are free to go do these things. But if you ever want to finish that book - the goal that you, by your own volition, set for yourself - you have to set these freedoms aside and focus upon the task of writing.<br />
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Looking back on the three strategies outlined above, we can see how the tension plays out in each of them. The <b>third strategy</b> - that of not rewarding patrons - maximizes the amount of freedom in the relationship between parties. No reward is given, no reward is expected, and donations keep happening in so far as the donors find it in their interest to continue. The creator, for their part, can choose whichever creative direction they desire, unburdened by expectations and obligations. What you see is 100% what you get, take it or leave it.<br />
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This can be contrasted with the <b>first strategy</b>, that of giving specific rewards to everyone who donates a particular amount of money. Here, autonomy is maximized, is as far as the creator can choose which rewards are awarded at which levels of donation. However, over time, this might lead to the creators finding themselves spending more time than initially expected making sure that donors get their just rewards. <b>Making a donation is, in a sense, to enter into a contract, and it is up to the creators to live up to their part of the bargain</b>. The freedom of the present is bound by autonomy expressed in the past. (Whether this is a productive relationship between creators and donors, or an inescapable iron cage where next month's rent depends on cranking out yet another unit, is always a contextual question.)<br />
<br />
The <b>middle strategy</b> is, of course, a combination of the two. A degree of freedom is maintained, but if donations reach a certain level, something will happen. This something, while it is not a reward or contract in the same way as we saw above, is still a promise, and as such brings with it the obligation to fulfill it. (If nothing else, it looks - and sounds - bad if the audio recording equipment has not been upgraded for months and months after reaching the goal.)<br />
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I should stress that there is nothing inherently wrong with aiming for either autonomy or freedom in these matters. The point of this wall of text is not to say that you should do either instead of the other. Rather, the point - the thesis, as it were - is that <b>you ought to make an informed choice when you create a Patreon page, and write it in such a way that you can live with who you potentially become</b>. Giving lots of rewards is labor-intensive, but it is also an efficient strategy to get those donations to happen. Conversely, you might find that your creative efforts are hampered by the amount of extra effort you have accidentally committed yourself to. It all depends on who you are and what you are about.<br />
<br />
Seen in this light, we are rapidly approaching an answer to the question of what Patreon is and how it affects its users. <b>Moreover, we are able to ask new and interesting questions with regards to the ethos/ethics of online donation services</b>.
Given that Patreon users are free to define themselves and what they do
(and for how much money this will be done), the tension between freedom
and autonomy becomes front and center. Having a Patreon page becomes
not only a way of asking for money, it also becomes an act of
self-definition: this is who I am and what I do.<br />
<br />
So. <a href="https://www.patreon.com/sargoth" target="_blank">Donate to my Patreon, maybe</a>? Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-11173834304866634302018-02-07T23:36:00.000+01:002018-02-07T23:36:51.264+01:00Avoiding the problem head onValentine's Day approaches, and with it, a new blog project. This one will be the tenth iteration, and thus I wanted to do something special. My usual approach is to figure out a concept and use it as a template for new ideas - <a href="https://relationshipstatues.com/" target="_blank">Relationship Statues</a> is an example of that. This means I do not have a great deal of verbiage at hand on day one, and ever so gradually figure out what kind of posts to write. It's discovery and exploration as much as anything. This time, however, it is different.<br />
<br />
This time, the new blog has a definite beginning, middle and end. And - more importantly - it is frontloaded to a never before seen degree.<br />
<br />
This has me worried.<br />
<br />
The funny thing about being worried is that there are different kinds of worry. There is the worry that <a href="https://streetremix.blogspot.se/2018/01/its-not-end-of-world-but-we-can-see-it.html" target="_blank">the world will end</a>, an all-consuming paralyzing worry. Or the worry that some dangerous element in one's immediate presence will spring into action, like a tiger. Or the worry that some elaborately planned course of events will fail to occur, leaving you in an awkward position (or botching that job interview). Or the worry that some unforeseen aspect will reveal itself and cause all previous plans to become obsolete - the factory closes, the application is rejected, the price goes up instead of down. Tangible, concrete worries about very specific things.<br />
<br />
And then, there is my worry. I worry about capitalization.<br />
<br />
That's right. Should I spell certain words beginning with an uppercase or lowercase letter? This is something I worry about.<br />
<br />
There are two ways to understand this worry. One is to take it at its word, and face it head on. In the grand scheme of things, there are arguments for either case, and the matter can be resolved by simply picking one course of action and sticking with it. It might raise an eyebrow, but since it is consistent, it won't be a big deal. The worry is about a concrete problem that can be solved.<br />
<br />
The other way to understand this worry is as a symptom. What I'm really worried about is not actually the capitalization (although having it solved would be a minor step forward). It is, however, a convenient thing to be worried about - thinking about it means not having to confront other things that are also worrying, but more indirect and difficult to pin down. If it was not this, the generalized worry would find some other minute aspect to zoom in on and fuss about.<br />
<br />
This goes not only for this project, but for everything. Sometimes, you are worried about some minor detail because you genuinely do not know if it's this way or that, and the problem will go away if a solution comes along. At other times, the problem is not the problem, and the solution is to zoom out and take stock of the larger picture.<br />
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The difficulty is telling which is which, and when. -Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-83360655211970171762018-01-14T13:07:00.000+01:002018-01-14T13:08:37.906+01:00It's not the end of the world, but we can see it from hereThe world did not end yesterday.<br />
<br />
This statement has two qualities. One is that it is universally true for literally every situation you will find yourself in, a precondition for situations being that yesterday led to the present. The second, and more immediately pressing quality, is that it is related to a very specific event.<br />
<br />
If you are reading in the future, then here is the context: yesterday, an alarm went off in Hawaii, warning about an imminent ballistic strike. Which is a technical way of saying that the nukes are coming, and they are coming this way. As you might imagine, this caused quite a bit of emotional anxiety for everyone involved. The fact that the whole ordeal happened because someone pressed the wrong button (I have been given impression that this is the literal truth, rather than mere evocative language) - did not help.<br />
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In fact, very few things help when the world is about to end. That is kind of the point of the world ending.<br />
<br />
This is a very immediate situation to find oneself in. Everything becomes irrelevant, and one singular question becomes the totality of all possible lines of thinking: what do you do? Nothing matters any more, and thus the only thing that matters is what you do. Other questions, such as "what would others think?" "would this look good on my CV?" "does this affect my credit rating?" "can I really afford it in the long run?" - are swept away, and you are left with the immediacy of choice: do or do not, do this or do that. The long term is gone, this is your moment to define yourself in terms of your own. For the duration, you are the most important thing in your reality. You decide. What do you do?<br />
<br />
This immediacy is both terrifying and, in a perverse way, liberating. The word that most perfectly summarizes the situation is the old version of "awesome": to be struck to one's very core with awe in the presence of some overwhelming factor which quite literally is larger than anything one has ever encountered before. It is the kind of experience that leaves you mouth agape and your mind repeating: everything I knew was wrong. Nothing makes sense any more, and because of that, the multitude of considerations that permeate everyday life melts away. Nothing makes sense, and the only thing that is of any importance whatsoever is:<br />
<br />
What do you do?<br />
<br />
Fortunately, the news about the world ending happened to be greatly exaggerated. We are still here to talk about it, and to try to get a grip on what this all means. Most, I suspect, will see it as just another news item among many, and not think too closely about it; there are still plenty of everyday chores to be done, and the non-ending of the world means they will not do themselves. Life goes on, <a href="https://longersky.com/2016/11/23/disaster-preparedness/" target="_blank">with ruthless indifference</a>, and this confronts us with a single, even more pressing question:<br />
<br />
What do we do now?Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-61688886178146232452018-01-06T05:47:00.000+01:002018-01-06T05:47:22.398+01:00Backstage sociologyThis semester, we talked a lot about Goffman's concepts of frontstage and backstage. One of the things that struck me about it is that it is, as so many other concepts, fractal. You can apply it to just about any level, and then move either upwards or downwards, finding roughly the same processes going on. The scales differ, but the process remains the same.<br />
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These words have the advantage of meaning <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology)" target="_blank">what you think they mean</a>. Backstage is the social space behind the stage, where the last-minute rehearsals, costume changes and informal banter takes place, while frontstage is, well, on stage. The two spaces have different social dynamics, and things that are proper in one is improper in the other, and vice versa. While the play is on, only the actors who are supposed to be on stage are on stage, and they have very defined roles to play; the show must go on. Only when they have retreated backstage can the actors let their guard down, stop acting and - quite unceremoniously - collapse into the post-performance heaps they really are.<br />
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The audience members, too, have roles to fill whilst the show is on. The fact that these roles mostly consist of sitting and watching makes them comparatively easy to play; this does not, however, take away from the fact that things get very strange very fast if audience members suddenly decide to join in on the action. Everyone present have roles to fill, and most everyone present know these roles implicitly.<br />
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A non-theatrical example is a restaurant. Out among the tables, things are quiet and posh, with hushed conversations taking place among the dining guests, a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. In the kitchen, however, the hustle and bustle is in full swing, with yelling, fast-paced motions and a stress level that is through the roof. The difference between frontstage and backstage is not subtle.<br />
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The fact that these two states of things happen in close proximity to each other means that there have to be boundaries between them. Often enough, these boundaries are subtle until you try to cross them. A restaurant guest is usually not allowed into the kitchen, and quickly escorted out should they somehow stumble into it. Shoppers are allowed to browse the store area, but any attempt to enter the back rooms will be ever so efficiently discouraged. If you do not have a keycard, you are not allowed into the office building. At concerts, only those with backstage passes are allowed into these mystical spaces.<br />
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Most spaces can be analyzed using these concepts. They are very versatile in this regard.<br />
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They are also fractal. Individuals act differently when they are frontstage (often quite literally meaning that they are not alone) than when they are backstage, and the boundaries between these states allow very few persons access. A small group (beginning at two persons) can similarly act differently when in a frontstage setting than when alone, with similar boundaries to entry. A large group (a theatre production, for instance) can project a particular image frontstage, while having very different dynamics backstage. And so on, scaling up as much as need be. (I suspect the discovery of alien life will have interesting implications in this regard.)<br />
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The only thing needed to use these concepts is an impulse to apply them to concrete situations. Upon reading this, you now have this impulse.<br />
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Have fun.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-23674605307533925252017-12-18T00:16:00.000+01:002017-12-18T00:16:54.030+01:00Spoiler warnings and youThere is a new Star Wars on the loose. With it comes the division of the entire human race into two categories, as radical as it is universal: those who have seen it, and those who have not seen it. The gulf between these categories is immense and absolute; there are no in-betweens.<br />
<br />
Except, of course, in the case of spoilers.<br />
<br />
Given that I at one point was a media studies major, spoilers are utterly irrelevant to me. There is no "right" way to consume media - there are only degrees and ways of paying attention. Knowing how something ends prior to seeing it does nothing to change the experience. Everything important lies in how the medium is being used (and sometimes abused). The narrative aspects are a part of that, but there are many other parts of equal importance, and a movie is at all times the interplay between all of its parts.<br />
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To be sure, there are movies that rely heavily on surprise endings. Good ones are described in terms of subverting expectations; bad ones in terms of deus ex machinas. If a movie does not hold water despite the surprise being foretold, it is not spoiled - it was always-already a bad movie. We do not rewatch favorite movies because they surprise us, but because they are <a href="https://discursiveanomalies.com/2017/07/19/booth-the-company-we-keep/" target="_blank">good company</a>. If a movie is bad company, it will be thus even if someone already told you the butler did it. The goodness and badness lies not in you having knowledge - it lies on the level of production, geometry and acting.<br />
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Very few viewers found themselves disliking the recent remake of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(2017_film)" target="_blank">Orient Express</a> because they knew how it ended. The enjoyment and/or dissatisfaction lies elsewhere.<br />
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Looking around on social media tells me that this is not a view widely held. There are people posting spoilers, people yelling at the aforementioned group for posting spoilers, and people decrying the posting of spoilers in general. It is something of a trending topic, especially in relation to the new Star Wars movie. Posting spoilers is framed akin to murdering the movie, a sin above and beyond the pale. Friendships have ended over it.<br />
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It is interesting to note this difference in perspectives on media. On the one hand, there is the view that spoilers are irrelevant. On the other, the view that spoilers are everything. Both are valid experiences of being human. The fact that both views can coexist and seldom interact with each other tells us something about this world we live in.<br />
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I do not know exactly what it tells us. But it would be nice if someone posted a spoiler of it. - Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-24938767797203075272017-12-11T02:14:00.000+01:002017-12-11T21:18:12.189+01:00Connecting the recent developments of Patreon and bitcoinsThese last few days have been intense, online-wise. <a href="https://medium.com/@sargoth/what-patreon-did-wrong-and-how-to-understand-it-6b16f6ef902f" target="_blank">Patreon did what they did</a>, and the price of bitcoins soared way above the limits of reason and sanity.<br />
<br />
It is tempting to see these two things as connected. It is even more tempting to connect them. Because it is a very easy thing to do.<br />
<br />
The thing about what Patreon did is that it underscores the need for what bitcoin supporters claim bitcoins do. Patreon gave - gives - everyone the opportunity to donate money at people without too much fuss, and it provided a social vehicle for accepting these donations. At the heart of Patreon's raison d'etre we find the sending and receiving of money.<br />
<br />
In short, online transfers of money is kind of a big deal. For Patreon and bitcoin both.<br />
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If we go back to the olden days of bitcoin evangelism, we find that the emphasis was much more on the crypto than on the currency part of cryptocurrency. It would be possible to perform transactions in secret, without the prying eyes of government surveilling every transaction. You didn't have to justify why you used your digital moneys the way you did - you could do what you want with them. Including donating them to others for no particular reason whatsoever. No borders, no taxes, no limits, no donation fees.<br />
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There is no reason bitcoins could not have evolved to fill a similar role Patreon fills: donations freely given to those who are deemed worthy of them. There could have been an active crowdfunding culture within the bitcoin community.<br />
<br />
But there isn't. And there can't be.<br />
<br />
The reasons are manifold, but they all revolve around the fact that bitcoins fundamentally do not work as money. The recent dramatic rise in value of bitcoins, with values eclipsing $16 000, only serves to underscore this fact: if you bought something with bitcoins a week or two ago, you would have lost out on this increase. The deflationary nature of bitcoins mean that any use of them that is not getting more bitcoins is an irrational use. Buying things with bitcoins is always a losing proposition; the only winning move is to sit on them until their value inevitably rises.<br />
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The most extreme example is the bitcoin pizza, bought for 10 000 bitcoins; the <a href="https://twitter.com/bitcoin_pizza/status/939694687098728448" target="_blank">estimated value</a> of that pizza is now $137,408,583.<br />
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Moreover, the wildly fluctuating value of bitcoins make it hard to price things. You might try to sell a pair of socks for what currently seems a reasonable price, only to discover mere hours later that it now amounts to thousands of dollars. Sellers cannot set prices, buyers cannot gauge if the prices that are set actually make sense, and the usual <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_mechanism" target="_blank">market mechanisms determining prices</a> are in effect nullified. Prices carry no information, and in conjunction with the deflationary process mentioned above, it makes using bitcoins as currency a wager at best and a guaranteed loss at worst.<br />
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Adding to all this is the cost of conducting bitcoin transactions. Turns out there is in fact a transaction cost to bitcoins, aptly named a <a href="http://bitcoinfees.com/" target="_blank">fee</a>. Sending money without paying the fee will either take a long time, or simply fail. The minimum fee is 0.00001 bitcoins, or a $1.52; more if you want the transaction to complete with any degree of certainty and/or quickness. It is <a href="https://twitter.com/garblefart/status/939893222255579136" target="_blank">not unheard of</a> for fees to reach the <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoin-fees-are-skyrocketing/" target="_blank">twenty dollar</a> mark.<br />
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Needless to say, buying a ten dollar pizza for thirty dollars is the opposite of a good deal. <br />
<br />
The list goes on. The bottom line is that bitcoins do not work as money, and by extension that they cannot work as a replacement for Patreon.<br />
<br />
At this point, I suspect that there might be a non-zero amount of readers going: why does any of this even matter? What is the connection between bitcoins and Patreon?<br />
<br />
The trivial answer is that there is no connection. The more interesting answer is that by juxtaposing these two things with each other, we find out something useful. On the side of Patreon, we have an actually existing real usecase in the world, which might very soon be in need of a replacement; on the side of bitcoins, we find an utter fucking failure to be even theoretically relevant to this usecase.<br />
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This has implications for the "currency" part of cryptocurrency. Given that I am not part of the bitcoin community, I leave it to those readers who are to grapple with these implications best they can.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-61363819730074242562017-12-08T13:18:00.000+01:002017-12-08T13:18:10.500+01:00The economic utility of dry feetPatreon has made an announcement about some upcoming changes to their fee structuring, and this has caused quite a stir. To understate it slightly, <a href="https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005631963" target="_blank">these changes</a> are somewhat unpopular and inexplicable to creators and patrons alike. I expect there to be continued discussions about these changes in the days to come.<br />
<br />
In a strange chain of associations, this made me think about the economics-related term '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money" target="_blank">helicopter drops</a>'. In short, a helicopter drop consists of giving everyone a one-shot amount of money, in order to stimulate the economy. The main component of an economy is people spending money on things, and they cannot spend money they do not have. Thus, ensuring that everyone has slightly more money than before would subsequently ensure that they spent more, which would have ripple-effects all through society, as the increased economic activity would spur even more economic activity.<br />
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Further along the chain of associations, this made me think about the many things we postpone to do due to a lack of funds. Not because it isn't necessary, but because we cannot comfortably afford doing it quite yet. By pushing these things into the future, we ensure that the money we do have can be spent on the things that are acutely necessary, rather than long-term necessary. A slight discomfort in the present is the price to pay for being ready to face the future, when the time comes.<br />
<br />
My <a href="https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Economic_Injustice" target="_blank">shoes</a> are an example of this. There are holes in them, and my feet get wet every now and again. They are broken, but it is not critical, and I can squeeze another month of use out of them if I mind my step.<br />
<br />
There are any number of similar examples, most of which we have stopped thinking about due to having gotten used to them. I suspect that a modest helicopter drop, in the range of some $5000, would be funneled directly into the equivalent of new shoes. It would not make anyone rich or change the fundamental structure of society, but it would ensure that people had less holes in their shoes. The benefits would be impossible to measure with econometrics, but they would at the same time be immeasurably tangible to those involved.<br />
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I do not know if this thought is useful to you, but here it is. Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-53469836149174384812017-12-07T05:04:00.001+01:002017-12-07T05:04:43.782+01:00Learning for uneducated peopleThe academic discipline of Education is caught in a weird place. On the one hand, the powers that be want it to be a handmaiden to the educational system, providing it with ever more refined and efficient tools. On the other hand, it is seen by other academics as a handmaiden to the educational system, and thus understood as a specialized local field of knowledge, akin to accounting; it is something that takes a certain degree of skill and knowledge to perform, but it does not translate into academic credibility.<br />
<br />
This might seem a subtle difference, and in some ways it is. It mostly depends into who you're arguing with at a particular moment. Which, as you might imagine, changes everything.<br />
<br />
When arguing with the powers that be, the issues that come up tend to focus on budgets, more specifically the cutting of them if particular results are not delivered on time. Be it in relation to the international measurements that are conducted regularly - such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment" target="_blank">PISA</a> - or some political debate touching upon education that rages at the time, there are always demands to give backing in some form. Questions such as "how can we teach our kids better so we will win the next round of measuring?" or "what do you have that can support our current political position on educational policy that we made up yesterday?" are frequently thrown our way, and not responding appropriately is budgetary bad news bears.<br />
<br />
When arguing other academics, two challenges emerge. One is to remind them that we exist, and another is - as mentioned - to convince them we're not just mere technicians and managers of the bureaucratic beast that is the educational system. Most attempts at either is usually met with annoyance, indifference, or some interesting combination of both which defy classification.<br />
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This peculiar state of things means that it is particularly difficult to assert the academic autonomy of the discipline. Part of being autonomous means other recognize you as such. The powers that be have no interest in that, given that they only ever ask for input in relation to nudging the educational system (or the discourse about it) in this direction or that. Other academics have no propensity to acknowledge it either, seeing as they do not interest themselves in the educational system, and thus their interest is effectively shut down. It is, as the saying goes, a tough crowd.<br />
<br />
Thing is. Education is not, in fact, about education. It is about learning.<br />
<br />
This difference is anything but subtle. Lowercase e education as an activity is something that takes place in a defined span of time at a defined location. It's something that happens in school. It's a process you go through, and then you are done. Sometimes you know more afterwards, sometimes you do not. It depends.<br />
<br />
Learning, though. Learning can happen anywhere at any time, and in fact does happen everywhere at all times. It is the main way human beings interact with the world: some sort of sensation happens at them, and is subsequently processed into memory. Next time this same sensation is encountered, the previous experience is used as a reference point for how to proceed. Learning occurs everywhere.<br />
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An example is someone starting a new job. On the surface level, one might assume that what they learn is how to perform that job - the logistics of getting it done and the terminology that goes along with it. But that is not all that is being learnt. The learning process also involves noting who the coworkers are, how they relate to each other and their work, which things are proper and which are not, which values are (implicitly and explicitly) endorsed, and so on in a long list of impressions and sensations. A new person in a workplace does not simply learn how to do the job, but also an entire way of being in the world.<br />
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Understanding how this learning process works allows you to better understand what happens when things go wrong. Or when things go right. If someone doesn't get with the program, then you can analyze the situation and pinpoint where in the process the mismatch happened. Conversely, if someone learns the ropes faster than expected, then you can identify the thing that went right and try to replicate it with future new employees.<br />
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The focus here is not on individual capacities. A "smart" person can fail to fit in, and a "dumb" person can learn the ropes at record speed, depending on the social circumstances of the workplace in question. Learning happens when sensations occur, and sometimes this sensation can consist of a social environment (such as a workplace) communicating that you belong here - or do not belong here. Getting the message is very much dependent on which message is being sent, and many people decide that a particular career is not for them after learning that they are not welcome within it.<br />
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These are the kinds of things we study in capital e Education. Yet this is hard to convey, since so many have gotten the message that Education is merely a handmaiden to the educational system. -Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-46716710080610440182017-11-29T04:45:00.001+01:002017-11-29T05:16:39.672+01:00The best book you ever readNo book is ever as good as that one you read as a teenager. You probably remember it - that one which you picked up and just couldn't stop reading, which then formed the basis of your emotional core for years to come. You read it once, and then probably several times afterwards, each time reinforcing its imprint upon your very being.<br />
<br />
How would one go about finding another such book?<br />
<br />
One approach might be to look at that first important book, to see if it has any particular qualities that distinguishes it from other books. It is easier to find things when you know what to look for, after all.<br />
<br />
Thing is. Upon returning to the book of one's youth, there is a non-zero risk that one might discover it to be less impressive than it is in memory. The years between then and now have included many things - books, experiences, life events, deaths - which put things in perspective, and changes one's outlook on things. There is a risk that, upon returning, the book turns out to be the most bland, generic, run-o-the-mill piece of prose there ever was.<br />
<br />
This does not diminish its value or the validity of your experiences. It does, however, draw attention to <a href="https://longersky.com/2016/06/07/small-economies/" target="_blank">the importance of context</a>. When a book is read is as important as what is in it: in the hands of a young person in search of meaning, any book can become an ontological and emotional foundation.<br />
<br />
If you happen to have kids of your own, the thought of leading them towards a similar book might have occurred to you. This, again, actualizes the question of how to find such a book, and how to introduce it.<br />
<br />
Simply telling them to read something might do the trick. Sometimes, life happens in straightforward ways.<br />
<br />
More often than not, though, it will be something unexpected. They will pick up a book, read it, and - wham - that's the one. There is no telling which one it is, but that's the one it is now, until they become old enough to remember that book they read as a teenager.<br />
<br />
The key, then, is to give them ample opportunity to stumble upon a good book. Keep your home well-stocked with good books, and allow access to them at all times. Play the odds. Make it more likely that the book they stumble upon is something by, say, Gloria <span lang="SV">Anzaldúa</span><span lang="SV"> rather than by - I shudder to think - Ayn Rand.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="SV">Life is full of surprises, strange turn of events and curious edge cases. Sometimes, it is no accident that we stumble upon them. -</span> Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-8021094935240205212017-11-16T17:42:00.001+01:002017-11-16T17:42:55.065+01:00Evolutionary psychology for the massesThere are a non-zero amount of people who proclaim to be adherents of evolutionary psychology. More often than not, those who are most vocal about this tend to follow up with the least interesting statements possible. Preferably about how some arbitrary gender attribute found today goes way back to primal times; for instance that women wear high heels because something something biology.<br />
<br />
This seems to me something of a wasted opportunity. There is a great buildup - the human organism evolved over millions of years to a very specific set of environmental and social circumstances, and this has implications for how it works today - and all that backstory is wasted on making an observation about the present condition that doesn't even hold water if you have more than a passing knowledge of history and/or fashion. You do not need to invoke millions of years of gradual adaptation to be wrong - there are more direct and efficient routes to achieve that end.<br />
<br />
A more interesting take is that the aforementioned gradual adaptation adjusted humans to a certain set of conditions, and that the modern circumstance ain't it. The disconnect between what is and what our evolutionary gestalt expects to be, is bound to create a not-insignificant amount of discomfort in actually existing human beings, and addressing this discomfort ought to be a non-trivial part of evolutionary psychology. If nothing else, it would be a more useful take than attempting to reinforce increasingly outmoded gender stereotypes.<br />
<br />
But then again.<br />
<br />
What could we expect from barely evolved monkeys? Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294858717729936108.post-52880451584099699892017-11-11T10:52:00.002+01:002017-11-11T10:52:20.070+01:00Small logisticsThere are a large number of small things that are easy to learn, yet which at the same time are utterly impossible to figure out. If someone shows them to you, them look like the easiest thing in the world, but if you have to speedlearn them on your own, difficulties ensue.<br />
<br />
A dramatic example of this is a young man finding himself in the situation of having to unclasp a bra. It is a very small thing indeed, and the logistics involved can be performed without much thought, and yet. Difficulties ensue. Possibly also a non-zero amount of fumbling.<br />
<br />
Similar (possibly, but not always, less dramatic) instances of small logistics occur just about everywhere, most of them having become so routine it takes an act of effort to notice them. Computer interfaces, what to say when ordering fast food, the art of performing an academic citation - these are all instances of small logistics where the knowing of how to get it done has merged into the back of one's mind. Once upon a time you had to learn these things, before they became obvious.<br />
<br />
It pays off to pay attention to these things. Not only do you become aware of what you are (quite literally) doing, but you also gain the opportunity to think about other ways of doing these very things. And, if you notice someone not quite knowing how to move things along, the insight into just what they need to learn for future reference.<br />
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It's the little things, as the saying goes.Sargothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14889992594644216887noreply@blogger.com0