It is now publicly understood that crisis situations are so many opportunities for the restructuring of domination. (13)
The Coming Insurrection. The Invisible Committee. 2005.
“It is for us, too, to recognize finally that civil defense, however conscientiously devised, is a cruel delusion, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, an a relic of wars already passed into history.”
Civil Defense for National Survival, Part 3, 2847; statement of Ms. Alexander Stewart.
“There is, however, another way of thinking about networks that divorces the concept from any specific form of organizational structure, and defines a network rather as an informal community of individuals who share common norms or values and this interact with one another on a nonmarket basis. Networks can be based on many different kinds of norms or values, from religion, ethnicity, professional training, common schools or employers, to simple friendships. People within such networks share information nore readily than those with no common norms of values; friends, for example, do not demand payment for information but exchange it reciprocally in proportion to the strength of the friendship.
“Understood in this fashion, networks are not an alternative to hierarchies but rather are typically overlaid on top of formal organization, and they are frequently critical to the latter’s proper functioning.” (22-23)
Fukuyama, Francis and Abram N. Shulsky. (1997). The “virtual corporation” and army organization. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
Debra Hawhee’s new book, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, is out! My copy should already be on it’s way and I can’t wait! Until then, here’s the product description from Amazon:
This is a sophisticated study of how bodies and language move and are moved by each other. Kenneth Burke may be best known for his theories of dramatism and of language as symbolic action, but few know him as one of the twentieth century’s foremost theorists of the relationship between language and bodies. “Moving Bodies” presents him as a major transdisciplinary theorist of the body. Debra Hawhee focuses on Burke’s studies from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s while illustrating that his interest in reading the body as a central force of communication began early in his career and continued to inform his work over more than six decades. Burke examined the human body as a participant in thought rather than as the mind’s binary Cartesian opposite, grappling with notions of physical form as a corporeal intellect, the mental and biological interwoven within one life. By exploring his extensive writings on the subject alongside revealing considerations of his life and his scholarship, Hawhee maps his recurring invocation of a variety of perspectives in order to theorize bodies and communication, including music, mysticism, endocrinology, evolution, speech-gesture theory, and speech-act theory, as well as his personal experiences with pain and illness. Hawhee shows that Burke’s goal was to advance understanding of the body’s relationship to identity, to the creation of meaning, and to the circulation of language. Her study brings to the fore one of Burke’s most important and understudied contributions to language theory, and she establishes Burke as a pioneer in a field where investigations into affect, movement, and sense perception broaden understanding of physical ways of knowing.
(via blogos)
NYT via Armchair Generalist
So, basically, what you’re saying is that anyone can attack anything anytime? Thanks for the clarification, NYT.
With summer quickly approaching, I finally purchased another motorcycle — a 1977 Yamaha XS360-2D. After schlepping it home from Buffalo in the back of Danger’s truck, I spent the next few weeks riding sporadically between bouts of wrenching on the bike to get it ready for the season. While I was doing so, I (well, okay, Root) fished my old, dogeared copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance out of the back of the bookshelf and gave it another spin.
I last read ZMM while sitting in an ambulance about ten years ago, right around the time I bought my first motorcycle, a 1982 Honda CB750 custom (that Doug’s dad still rides to this day). I read it over the course of a rotation (4 days) and then put it away. While I remember enjoying the book, I think I missed the point — either because I was too distracted or just not attuned to Pirsig’s argument-via-chautauqua style of writing. This time, however, I think I “get it.” In fact, I think I am going to assign it as the first reading in my Narrative and Technology course this coming fall because I am looking to follow two lines of inquiry in this class: how do technologies effect our ways of thinking about and telling stories, and how do we create and evaluate “quality” in multimodal, technologically mediated narratives?
If you haven’t already read ZMM, the central narrative revolves around a motorcycle trip Prisig and his son take across the western United States on a 1964 Honda Superhawk CB77, a bike only a little smaller than my Yamaha. During long stretches of riding and hiking, Pirsig meditates on questions about the “metaphysics of quality” — what quality is, how we define it, how we “know it when we see it,” and how the concept of quality shapes our worldviews.
The reasons why I want to start the class off with this book are many, but mostly it is because similar questions of quality have plagued narratives created with emergent technologies at least since Plato’s Phaedrus lamented the introduction of writing to ancient Greece . N. Katherine Hayles, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Lanham, and scores of others have written extensively on this problem as it relates to electronic literature and digital rhetoric, fields that concern the kinds of texts that students will compose over the course of the semester.
Pirsig is also a writer and teacher of rhetoric, a guy who speaks my language(s), so our concerns about quality are nourished by similar roots, I suspect. We both think in terms of systems, or, at least, find that the systems underlying our reality profoundly effect how we tranche-up the world based on our individual perspectives on, and relationships to, technology.
While at work I was thinking about this same lack of care in the digital computer manuals I was editing. Writing and editing technical manuals is what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew they were full of errors, ambiguities, omissions and information so completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any sense out of them. But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that “Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions — ” and so on. That’s it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual’s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
I’m trying to tread a fine line between writing about technology and writing with it — how we divide up systems into subsystems and how those subsystems contribute to individual notions of quality.
I’ll have more thoughts on this as they take shape, but I’m curious what you think about the idea. Right now, though, I’m going to go take a short ride before we get another ridiculous storm.
Flickr via Marzz13
Welcome!
After much hemming and hawing, procrastination, justification, explaination, and inattention, I have started blogging again. A few of you might remember that I blogged for a few years with Dr. Benjamin Robertson over at Semioclast.com (don’t go there, someone killed the blog about 5 years ago by snatching up the domain while I was in the hospital. Vultures.) and later at Semioclast.net. Semioclast was fun, but only tangentially related to what I was working on professionally. Honestly, it had turned into a steady stream of “look at this cool yoda video” posts.
JamieBono.com is an attempt at more focused blogging. That’s not to say that there won’t be some asides, though. This blog will follow the things that interest me professionally and personally (a line that, with each day, becomes increasingly blurry).
