Prayers Go Out (V Tech)

My heart goes out to all the students, faculty, and staff at Virginia Tech today. The events of 16 April are truly horrible and will impact the school and its members for some time. As you grieve and begin the steps toward healing, I think of you and hope for your future.

Vonnegut 1922 - 2007

We will miss him.

Rutgers, Imus, and Critical Consciousness

I was going to post some exploration on the language of cephalopods. But with the whole Rutgers women's b-ball-Don Imus-Al Sharpton thing, and teaching this week on the power of language and how students sometimes have to read into texts in order to understand the power differentials, I found something more pertinent. Here it is reprinted from CommonDreams.org:

Trash Talk Radio

by Gwen Ifill

Let’s say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather.

The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.

In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.

But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before.

I know, because he apparently did it to me.

I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.

Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.

It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

I was taken aback but not outraged. I’d certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.

It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.

Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don’t know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.

Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.

So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.

Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

Gwen Ifill is a senior correspondent for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and the moderator of “Washington Week.”

© 2007 The New York Times

Animal Communication

Has it really been that long since I posted? Wow! Lots has happened, though: a new job, house hunting (unsuccessful so far), another chapter done... now if I can just finish grading papers by tomorrow.

Until then, I was watching Nature again, this time about cephalopods, those foot-headed protoypes for Cthulhu. Anyway, some species communicate through rapid color changes in skin pigmentation. This reminded me of insects and pheremone use, not to mention elephant's ability to register infrasound frequencies. So, with other species, we have ample evidence of systems of communications that are radically different from our own. Or are they?

Applying Gibson's theory of perception, I have to ask if communication is really just an affordance. Since an affordance is some potential that exists in one's environment -- defined so that one's "perceptual array" includes one's own body -- then manipulating the body to signal meaning would be the basis for communication, at least the basic unit.

Of course, this puts the onus on organisms as meaning-making animals and I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate assumption. It implies intent. Even we humans sometimes communicate unintentionally. So, taking ecological perception one step further and seeing other organisms as part of the perceptual field, sometimes affordances themselves (crabs use other organisms and myriad insects see others as good egg laying sites, i.e., seeing them as locations with potential in the environment, not as "food source").

So, with this in mind, we might test whether or not organisms read rather than write. If they do, then the world is abuzz with (pun intended) and literally saturated with meaning. Organisms are still meaning-making but not as intentional. Derrida would be more right than even he might have claimed.

But this isn't really my point since putting this to any kind of testing would be difficult beyond compare. Rather, my point here is that this disrupts writing theory to a large degree, making visual script (just) one more system among systems and, more importantly, less a methodical means to transmit meaning as an elaboration of

Welcome and Wopila Wakinyans!

Thunder returned today, flying over as slow as geese.

Sage and cedar smoke adorn our spirit plate.

Real Virutal Worlds (RVWs)

I don't know if anyone else has yet used the phrase "real virtual worlds" (RVWs), but according to some folks at the2007 Game Developer Conference, something like this is about to happen because of what they see as a huge influx of corporate capital into MMO sites like WoW. Maybe there's another term for it, but it seems to me that, in the mid-range forecast still, with Web 2.0 (more here expounding on O'Reilly) and this economic shift, we are entering the the planning and early testing stages of our imagined futures. These are futures where we live in real virtual worlds, where the "real" and the "viritual" mesh ever more seamlessly and with less effort -- of either the physical or imaginative kind -- with each other. It sounds as if designers want daily activities like banking and shopping to soon be a matter of entering the "viritual" portal and performing these functions within an imaged space accessible by thousands.

The question this poses, of course, is just how close we will actually live up to the hype and horror of virtual reality. I doubt we're moving toward a Matrix-like dream state society, but I also doubt the visionaries who claim we're about to move into the wonders of full-body immersion experiences. As physical creatures, we're just not that smart. Look at the future visions of the twentieth century. We live in nothing like the worlds of imagined by H. G. Wells or Phillip Knowlan. We won't ever live in the world of William Gibson, either.

This isn't to dismiss these writers. In fact, it is to point out their importance and, in so doing, point out the importance of critical academic research about video games. SF writers, authors of graphic novels, producers of MMOs, even hypester-historians like Rheingold all produce the template -- the imaginative plans by which we shape these RVW technologies and our futures.

OK, but here is what I have been laboring to argue for many a year now. As we follow this path, we continue to loose sight of the physical consequences of our actions. Each of the virtual literacies upon which such a future and a design for society depends holds potentially devastating consequences for our physical bodies -- the real platform upon which all this depends. What use is virtual banking if we're all riddled with cancer? Seriously, the computer is a toxic beast! And they persist!

Part of the optimism in techno-ideology though is the unshakeable belief that humans are capable of overcoming their problems through technological advancements. Just look at the "non-toxic computer." The amount and kinds of chemicals that go into making computers and other devices is amazing. Add to that the entire production chain of making plastics, silicon chips, aluminum casings, power generation, battery production... well, the list goes on and on. Even if the computer itself has a low toxicity, it can still leave a huge toxic footprint through its manufacture. Let's not calculate the magnitude of this problem by simply looking at the number of computer users. We have to add in the servers, routers, cables, satellites, plus the systems that provide care and maintenance for the system itself.

My point is that all of this has an effect on the physical world. It affects not just "nature" by poisoning streams and lakes, seeping into groundwater, attaching itself to soil particles, and becoming airborne through dust, but in doing so, it also enters our most precious bodily systems. This is simply not on the radar of those pushing for ecological modernization who shift the debate from the ethos of the perpetrator to the ethos of the critic or who make changes within the system without changing the system itself.

Does this mean I'm selling my Mac, dropping my weblog, or ditching my minivan? No. But my Mac is almost five years old and will be recycled and I bike, bus, or carpool whenever possible, plus we use only one car for four people. The fact is that our society is organized around its technologies. Cities are set up to be car friendly and my career, like the careers of many in an information economy, pretty much determines that I use a computer or be left way behind. And this is critical, for perfection may be impossible. We are, after all, human and that means limited. We cannot live in such a way that we do no damage. Even vegetarians live off the lives of others. What we can do -- what we must do -- is teach others how to juggle what determines them with ways to resisting them. In the end, we won't ever reach the imagined future utopia, but with a bit of hope and luck, we won't reach the dystopia, either. Instead, we can use the original RVW, our imagination, far more wisely.

Gadamer, Games/ Play, Phronesis

Ahhhh.... finally some time to, well, work at my job! Being "on the market" can be fun, but not always a cakewalk. Still, my latest presentation got me thinking about the liberal educational aims of ethos and the relationship between rhetoric and phronesis. Within an ecology of language -- one that admits not just the social constructionist systems of discourse but also the physical systems of living ecologies -- one's ethos may depend less on abstract social values or principles of behavior and more on the regular maintenance of relations with both social and natural phenomena. Since the physical part of this whole thing is, ultimately, unable to represent its own interests in any social forum, the practical manifestation of that relationship must necessarily be poetic (I'm following Caruth and others here who have argued that language's inability to represent reality is a trauma with which we must all deal). So, Environmental Impact Statements can be said to be a form of poetry.

That's all well and good. But judgments about that poesis are still vexed by social systems of language and then how do we deal with naively Romantic versions of "wilderness" or utilitarian versions of animal rights? Aren't we still left holding the bag in its entirety because we are the only ones with the capacity of judgment?

Maybe... Rather than follow Kant here, we can suppose Gadamer offers us something with his concept of play and his rehabilitation of Aristotle's phronesis. While I might agree with HGG that we can choose our play, I would admit that he's right when he says in Truth & Method that

the self-presentation of human play depends on the player's conduct being tied to the make-believe goals of the game, but the "meaning" of these goals does not in fact depend on their being achieved. Rather, in spending oneself on the task of the game, one is in fact playing oneself out. The self-presentation of the game involves the player's achieving, as it were, his own self-presentation by playing -- i.e. presenting -- something (108)

and

Thus it is not really the absence of a fourth wall that turns the play into a show. Rather, openness toward the spectator is part of the closedness of the play. The audience only completes what the play as such is (109).

Of course, we see here an emphasis on ethos as performance -- as the performance of a relationship between other characters, props, audience, etc. This can be scripted (just look at the choice of colors and styles in children's clothes and toys - is there no more insidious marketing of binary gender relations that those aimed at the fourth wall of children?) or improvised (as when we learn a new discourse, culture, etc. and can't rely on internalized scripts). In different arenas, theaters, or situations we perform differently.

The task with human-nature relations, or more accurately with the social-physical relationship (which captures the "ideal" and abstract social semiotic systems as distinct from the always particular and potentially living physical systems which generate those ideas -- thus our physical bodies are one thing and our representations of them as gendered, raced, classed, able, etc. are something else entirely), is to not judge the physical according to the play of the ideal.

What we might be able to do, however, is see ideal playing as open to and playing for the physical. We thus establish a feedback loop or dialogic relationship between physical and social. Moreover, this feedback loop depends upon the phronesis of the performer -- one's knack at getting the physical to respond in a particular way.

Maybe this is as far as Gadamer can take us since we can see the scientific method as a kind of exploitative play or racism as a potentially worse play that exploits others. There is nothing here to guide judgment except "results" however those results are defined -- again, social and ideal. But, if we are trapped within paradigms of judgement that 1) are always social and thus 2) can never be commensurate with the physical (Caruth again), then 3) our judgments can never be "pure" but at best mere approximations or attempts at proper action. If this is the case, aren't we also involved in a play with our own capacity to judge? Given game theory's explanations of rational behavior systems, wouldn't goodwill (eunioa) and virtue (arete) be those qualities demonstrably suited for judging phronesis?