ecogradients

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[ecogradients]

Toward a Poetics of Measurement

Friday, April 12th, from 4-8pm at Teachers College (ZB214)

Hello everyone; please inscribe it into your appointment-registration devices: in observation of the 125th anniversary of Teachers College and the 9th issue of ecogradients.com, Toward a Poetics of Measurement will feature presentations/discussions of subversive intelligibilities and/as creative responses to the corporatization of education. Some refreshments will be provided by Teachers and Students for a Public Voice; presentations will begin at 4:30 sharp. Our featured presentations will include:

Gabe Turow, Fear is not for Man ~ on the antinomy between anxiety and education;

Patrick Scanlon, Interruptures ~ accidental curriculae & anti-assessment;

Deneb Valereto, Fear and Loathing in Academicism ~ intellectual emetics and epistemological parasitism;

Michael Kim, Hyperrealities ~ in the education of the returning postmodern veteran;

Paul McLean, If I could learn... ~ incorporation in the era of education.

Looking forward to seeing you all there ;)

Blake Seidenshaw

ecogradients.com

[ecogradients]

Measures Treasures: A letter from learner.

by ps scanlon

Dear Research Prof,

Part I: Research Problem

My progress in developing a research plan is at this point still vulnerable to the few currents in/on which I've been traveling. These are the streams that I alluded to in one of our assignments designating them as writing projects/performances in order express "who I was to do the research." In fact one of the points you made, I think last class,  concerned the benefit of this type of "multi-disciplinarian" research, or maybe specifically, historically, the research tradition in education, in that it allows for different modes of thought/practice like anthropological/psychoanalytic/phenomenological/biologically/physiological etc. to address the many dimensions of the human. There are a few specific people/ideas that I have been using in order to address the complexity of any educational situation whether formal or entangling the unintended mundane –stuff like crossing the street, or stepping on a small rock.

This mundane and fleeting correspondence regarding knowledge of self/world construction or assimilation has been explained best perhaps as abstracting (Korzybski and Moffett). Korzybski’s Science and Sanity (and there are certainly others, and other ways) investigated not only the manner in which people can symbolize off/with “raw” phenomena, but also some of the negative effects of the linguistic habits that operate often unconsciously, or always already during that abstracting process. His main critique, it might be said, was directed toward Aristotle who, although exceptionally brilliant, could not help but succumb to the “science” of his time while developing his highly influential works. Although the science has changed, what we know and how we know about the self/world, our language that mediates this knowledge remains still, based on old assumptions and so distorts and confuses, creates problems and even sickness.

Add to this research stream of Korzybski, a poetics informed by post-structural and psychoanalytic conceptions of language, a poetics around which I am personally constellated, and a neat research program becomes difficult to present. The difficulty though is not simply accidental; I do not feel overcome. In fact, I think that a healthy complexity, and/or desire to use different methods or disciplines may express an appropriate amount of respect, as well as the understanding that any learning situation requires at least an attempt toward the complexity, knowing of course that the real embodies a simultaneity that will always exceed a discipline or complex of disciplines. Even if one is not an expert at hammering or anthropology, s/he can still be informed/influenced by what the hammer can offer, or how to make use of it.

I had mentioned in my earlier assignment that I was interested in the manner in which grammar and syntax can determine attention and knowledge, even at times even before one approaches the “subject/object” of knowledge and/or attention. These concerns have been broadened and deepened in the art history class I have been taking, Origins of Modern Visual Culture. The professor’s intelligence and thoroughness in tracing out the “history” of attention, of how attention, over a number of centuries became a “thing,” both to cultivate and to master, and also a mechanism through which to control the increasing populations of Europe and the United States remains truly remarkable but also has me reconsidering the scope of my own research.

As a result of the situation described above, it seems that maybe you could assist me in setting something up to have your class address my approach at this point, to maybe take a small bite out of the larger scope of what I hope to study over the next years. And, I know stuff changes, but I've been with similar questions and issues for the last 15 years, if not my whole life. Underlying the work with language, poetics and attention is meditation, particularly Sufi practices. I realize it may in fact lie outside of the scope of my work at TC, for it may not be easily admissible in ED scholarship. Despite this “fact,” I am heartened that James Moffett somehow managed to discuss some of the more esoteric aspects to knowledge while utilizing a few different disciplines. And your work with hip hop has also been inspiring, in terms of what can be and should be and needs to be not only “included” or tolerated but come to occupy a more significant spot in the field of ed or ethnography etc. etc.

Part II: Problem of Research

One more thing on the importance of our last class with your friend/colleague, whose name I cannot at this moment recall: The class session, what I remember, and my subsequent thoughts might provide a sense of, the last paragraph actually, my obstacles and difficulty mapping out a sufficient plan for research. First, let me say how impressive he was as a teacher: funny, smart, formal, casual, relevant wit and his comments where specific in ways that demonstrated his desire and capacity to listen.

I am afraid I may not have been prepared to utilize him to the fullest, as I am very much still swimming, happily, in the various streams of scholarship facing me. And yet, some of my inability to take advantage of his knowledge involves a different set of beliefs on what or rather where to address the difficulties of school. As a formal method, I have no problem supporting his “type” of research (again, not sure what exact method it was, what to call it), and can say I am glad to know “it” is being done. In truth, I simply have not done the research on his research, at least not enough to express what he does or all the complexities of it. With that said, his method, or maybe the “method” itself (cause he was fantastic, sincerely), carries with it an immense amount of assumptions concerning one’s access to “what is going on” in the classroom. I am not sure if the method he employs is positivistic? Scientism? Maybe you could say more as to what I might be trying discern. Not only did it seem to have the authority and position to “measure” this and that, but seemed unaware of the assumptions or affects of subsequent beliefs and actions employed to address “what has been named.”

For example, and can I get personal for a minute here. Just before that class, I was writing to my advisor, who I am grateful for, and invigorated by, a response to my final project paper in his class last fall. There was an element of the essay being a work-in-progress, a state that he supported which is an important gesture of his I think. I wrote to him about how the shape of a spiral has been significant to me in terms of imagining the shape of my research in various classes and in terms of my dissertation progression. There is the thought that one may study Moffett for some months, and then Korzybski, and Gans, etc. and there is of course the overlap.

But more than this, there seems to be immense worth in the re-turn implied by the spiral. That one can leave Moffett without any sense of completion and move on, only to return after having understood one’s “important question” through a loop in Crary, through a concept of his. I focused on attention and grammar/syntax etc. and in Moffett found Korzybski who I was kind of reading simultaneously. In any event, the spiral of course has a number of significant lives in a number of significant spheres like, religion, economics, bio, anthropology, shells, mathematics etc. etc.

After writing that email which contained a form of my research, a loose and slippery device for to consider method, I heard our speaker, in reference to one of his students mock the fact that his method or research set up worked like a spiral. He was not being mean, or even perhaps wrong. It simply did not occur to his method and maybe him, that there was not only another way to “study” something, but also that a spiral might be an excellent way to conceive of research. Yes, yes, I am not naïve I understand that a spiral may not “fly” in his world, but even if he was not to allow for this curvy shape to have any life in his method, wouldn’t it still represent an important marker in how his student was thinking, and thus he might, if not approve, at least follow through with the implications of his student’s choice? And this lack is where I am directing my critique. 

I studied Tai Chi Chuan and would sometimes as my teacher about other related topics about which he would reply, “I know tai chi, if you want to know that I can help you with it. That is where my focus and expertise is.” I get that, as this metaphor may translate to our speaker. That makes sense to me that any method, be it meditation or sociological research is so absorbing that to doing it successfully may require one’s submission. HOWEVER, what I am objecting to is not the necessary devotion and subsequent “tunnel vision,” but the belief that this one method is superior to such a degree that other ways are to be mocked or not given any space/time, seems completely antithetical to learning, BUT, not to schooling.

And herein lies another of my issues: he seemed to be doing to “school” what school does to kids. Ultimately, I don’t care what he or anyone else does. Again, people should support what they believe in, and are passionate about, what reflects their beliefs. His belief though, or rather his method, is built on the belief that the real can be easily accounted for and that these measurements are certain enough to build whole structures of policy off of.

Again, let it be known, that I feel fortunate for his work and the way he teaches. I am afraid that I am a victim of English writing classes and their predilection for the argumentative essay. And thus arguing and “critiquing” are the methods that come easiest. But truly, this class was a moment for me, in which I got a lot of information to re-focus my questions. I say this because what I am saying has a personal tone toward my issues, only because of my lack of language for the method he taught. Also, though, with my ignorance comes also the ignorance of the real affects that that method has produced in terms of policy – yes policy, but also the improvements in actual lives of students and teachers and all those they interact with. Cause, if I can be crude, that shit he does works. I’m sure that I have even benefited and do benefit from the intensity and sincerity of that work, as a student and teacher and person. In a strange sense, although it works, it works like school works. Who can argue that school doesn’t work? But what does it work at? What is the true cost, to borrow a term from anarcho-primitivists that refers to the actual cost of “cheap” food or oil etc. 

He mentioned another student who he lovingly, wittily mocked for her set-up which I think had something to do with studying the relationship between African American frats and sororities with some maybe indigenous/political group in Canada maybe. In any event, he said, and he is perhaps correct, that those two groups have too much distance between them to make a useful study. And the whole time, I was thinking, there may be no better practice for my students and I to engage in than working to put disparate entities next to each other. One of the theoretical sources of what I am referring to is the poet essayist Lynn Hejinian who calls this activity “Radical Metaphor.” Radical Metaphor works by placing in relationship two entities whose relation is not easily known. As a result, what one knows or assumes to know about either or both entities is called into question which can expand and invigorate identities. In contrast, typical metaphor forsakes the genuine scope of each element in order to focus on one basic and recognizable relation.

I realize that studies are not simply playful activities, that they can benefit peoples lives and/or exclude others, but they require I guess, a certain respect. Yet, maybe what I am arguing for, even in research, is a poetic sensibility –one that may utilize the incredibly precise and complex affects of poetry: the precision of meaning making, the imaginative trajectories of thought, but especially the attention to language, that, to quote Lacan, “The words [can] mean more than I mean in using them.” The reason I use Lacan in my teaching and study, is the same reason that I use him in this critique. Without putting myself in a position to explain the interestingly convoluted world of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, what it seems our speaker and his method lacked, was the creativity and possibility that occurs from a lack of certainty. Our speaker’s method believed it had access to a whole range of “information” that I’m not sure it does. 

Now, the student that he mocked would have had to check the worth of her conclusions, of her ill-devised study. Could she base policy on that “unbalanced” study? Probably not. But! That does not mean that there is no worth in what she did. Who knows what unforeseen relationships might have occurred! Her complete rejection, a waste really, happened because the focus of what seems the whole field is positivistic Enlightenment?). What the field measures for and how they measure no matter what caution “research” gives to the capacity for one’s question to limit or in a certain way, even determine what one finds, still manages to ignore some fundamental assumptions about the real. And, wouldn’t you agree that this process of seeing worth ONLY for what the field’s myopic vision allows IS EXACTLY WHAT SCHOOL DOES?!!!

Perhaps I am being simplistic here, but a typical metaphor like, My brother is an oak. has the tendency to limit all the amazingly complex and interesting things my brother is AND the oak is in favor for the one “connection” that my brother is sturdy or strong. In Hejinian’s radical metaphor however, in a metaphor whose semantic proximity is yet to be determined, one finds that both entities actually become more significant, have more of a capacity to be significant or to be perceived in the actual significance (which includes what cannot be signified!). To say, for example, my brother is a spoon, (a statement that I imagine might represent an absolute abhorrent logic to typical research practices) may in fact encourage one to take my brother as they have never taken him before, BUT also the spoon! As if a spoon might have to be considered apart from its use-value or at least typical life.

The third point that struck me as maybe true, maybe useful advice, maybe even kind advice but once again employing an authority that is crude and arrogant concerned our speaker’s comments on the dissertation. He encouraged us to consider our dissertation/thesis in such a way that it allowed us to get it done. That, no one was gonna offer us automatic tenure cause of the ground breaking thesis or research we did. That these types of thoughts might, in a clever sort of arrangement, make us focus on a project that is doable, so that we can actually graduate. Once again, even the little I know of doctoral programs has me agree with him, and easily, and also, has me grateful for that bit of caution. He was funny talking about it, and even shared his own failure to heed the advice.

And yet, maybe it is just my major, Composition/English that affords me a different set of advice. For instance, I am reading – in a small group to help another advisor to prepare for a conference, and to help us study for comps – two people’s dissertations. And in fact, I can remember my MFA at Jack Kerouac School, when I first began to read a lot of  philosophy poetics all kinds of stuff, the excitement my friends and I (even teachers) when we would offer a book, “…You should check out bla bla by bla bla, it was her/his dissertation.” Perhaps I am youthful in regards to the tone and sense of purpose of what I am and will devote the next years toward? In any event, I could not have made it this far if everything I ever wrote was not imbued with significance and mystery and consumed my whole complex of attention. 

I appreciate your time and counsel concerning the dynamics of research alluded to above. And please accept this long ass email as a testament of my excitement and recognition of the particular manner of discernment that I am learning from you and from our class. 

Hope you are well,

ps scanlon

[ecogradients]

The following is a fragmentary rewriting of Martin Luther's famous 95 Theses undertaken by a graduate student at Teachers College, sometime in the early 21st century, but never completed due to lack of funding...

1) Our inspirational and “very dynamic” president Susan Furhman, when she said “We’re at a huge frontier when it comes to understanding learning”, willed that the whole life of students and faculty should be comprehensible and unproblematic to those with deep pockets.

(Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.)

2) This pronouncement cannot be understood to mean actual progress in the order of knowledge, i.e. normal academic protocol, which is administered by scholars in far less “dynamic” institutions.

(This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance, i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by the priests.)

3) Yet it means not individual acts of marketable scholarship; nay, there is not inward progress which does not outwardly work diverse mortifications of the intellect.

(Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh.)

4) The penalty, therefore, continues so long as taking one’s scholarly work seriously continues, for this is true self-deception, and constitutes our entrance into the global marketplace.

(The penalty, therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.)

5) The administrative faculty does not intend to dispense, and cannot dispense, any benefits other than those which it has usurped, either by its own connivance or with the assent of the board of trustees.

(The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.)

6) The administrative faculty cannot award any bursary, except by declaring that it has been awarded on Merit and by assenting to Merit’s self-evidence; though, to be sure, it may grant bursaries in cases reserved to its judgement. If its right to grant bursaries in such cases were despised, Truth would remain entirely unrewarded.

(The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God's remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven.)

7) Truth awards bursaries to no one whom It does not, at the same time, humble in all things and bring into subjection to Its vicar, the Office of Federal Student Aid.

(God remits guilt to no one whom He does not, at the same time, humble in all things and bring into subjection to His vicar, the priest.)

8) Academic procedure and censure is imposed only on those attempting to do something new, but according to procedure, once you are dead or tenured you are free to do as you would if you could.

( The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and, according to them, nothing should be imposed on the dying.)

9) Therefore the little humanist scholar in the faculty administrator is always kinds to us, because in its writings and decrees it always makes mention of “the human” and of “the tenacity of dwelling.”

(Therefore the Holy Spirit in the pope is kind to us, because in his decrees he always makes exception of the article of death and of necessity.)

10) Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those faculty members who, in the case of tenure review and dissertation defenses, reserve scholarly standards for the academy.

(Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for purgatory.)

11) This changing of scholarly standards to uphold the strictest forms of non-scholarship, post-intelligence, and market driven research is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while the Faculty Executive Committee slept.

(This changing of the canonical penalty to the penalty of purgatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while the bishops slept.)

12) In former times scholarly standards were imposed not after, but before the faculty member opened their mouth or set pen to paper, as tests of of a true and honest commitment to their vocation.

(In former times the canonical penalties were imposed not after, but before absolution, as tests of true contrition.)

13) The tenured are freed by tenure from all pretensions to scholarly achievement; they are already dead to standards of intellectual rigor, and have a right to be released from them in order to track down grants, honorary doctorates, and visiting lectureships abroad.

(The dying are freed by death from all penalties; they are already dead to canonical rules, and have a right to be released from them.)

14) The imperfect intelligence, that is to say, the imperfect integrity, of the tenure-seeker brings with it, of necessity, great offense to basic standards of personal and professional decency; and the smaller the integrity, the greater the offense.

(The imperfect health [of soul], that is to say, the imperfect love, of the dying brings with it, of necessity, great fear; and the smaller the love, the greater is the fear.)

15) This greed and amorality is sufficient of itself alone (to say nothing of other things) to constitute the penalty of perpetual obsequiousness, since it is very near to the self-loathing of askesis.

(This fear and horror is sufficient of itself alone (to say nothing of other things) to constitute the penalty of purgatory, since it is very near to the horror of despair.)

16) Ignorance, education, and self-satisfaction seem to differ as do discipline, pseudo-discipline, and job security (tenure).

(Hell, purgatory, and heaven seem to differ as do despair, almost-despair, and the assurance of safety.)

17) With scholars-in-training it seems necessary that self-loathing should grow less and integrity increase.

(With souls in purgatory it seems necessary that horror should grow less and love increase.)

18) It seems unfounded, either in law or common sense, that students should not demand fair and ethical treatment, which is to say, expect to improve themselves ethically and intellectually.

(It seems unproved, either by reason or Scripture, that they are outside the state of merit, that is to say, of increasing love.)

19) Again, it seems ludicrous to expect that students should be equally assured of their own intrinsic value, when we may be quite certain of the job market’s volatility and saturation.

(Again, it seems unproved that they, or at least that all of them, are certain or assured of their own blessedness, though we may be quite certain of it.)

20) Therefore, by “full development all young scholars’ research and teaching abilities” the Prophet means not actually “of all,” but only of those that are capable of making tuition payments and upholding strict standards of sub-mediocrity.

(Therefore by "full remission of all penalties" the pope means not actually "of all," but only of those imposed by himself.)

21) Therefore, those on the faculty committed to upholding rigorous intellectual standards are in error, who say that by demonstration of scholarly ability graduate students will be rewarded with recognition from professors and a future position on the faculty;

(Therefore those preachers of indulgences are in error, who say that by the pope's indulgences a man is freed from every penalty, and saved;)

22) Whereas the Prophet remits to students in graduate fellowships no scholarly standards which, according to the tradition, they would have had to demonstrate during their period as a student.

(Whereas he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which, according to the canons, they would have had to pay in this life.)

23) If it is at all possible to grant to anyone the remission of all scholarly and ethical standards whatsoever, it is certain that this remission can be granted only to the most hypocritical, that is, to the very fewest.

(If it is at all possible to grant to any one the remission of all penalties whatsoever, it is certain that this remission can be granted only to the most perfect, that is, to the very fewest.)

24) It must needs be, therefore, that the greatest part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and high-sounding promise of release from hypocrisy.

(It must needs be, therefore, that the greater part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and highsounding promise of release from penalty.)

[ecogradients]

Theater as Theory?

Chris Moffett

aestheticrelationalexercises.com | poisedmeditation.com

The question is not whether theory can be embodied in a practice or performance, whether theater is up to the task of doing theory. The question is what kind of performance, what kind of theater, has theory always been? Can we do theory with our bodies? Of course. Can we do theory without our bodies? That is, if we may say so, a theoretical question—a question for some body to ask while it is busy theorizing. What does this business entail? (And why does it elude us, so that we would have to remember, reclaim or reform it? And conversely why does it feel so odd to notice?) If we catch ourselves, in flagrante delicto, it is natural to look back, sneak a peak, as if to see where we tripped.

History through the Tiniest of Holes; tripped, or sprang?

Athena leapt from the forehead of Zeus, fully clothed and fully armored. The dark cavern of his skull was laid open to the light of day by the surgical blow of an ax, relieving the splitting pressure. He had eaten Métis, pure wild thought herself, but only Athena comes out, goddess of Wisdom. A dramatic proto-theoretical tale: old school, with axes. From skull to allegoric cave, Plato does nothing more than cleave open, yet again, this story of birth out of the darkness. Another c-section, laying out the scene for inspection. Skipping the too narrow opening, he threatens to rend the earth itself:

“Terrified, Hades, the master of those below, leapt from his throne, crying out, fearful that Poseidon who rocks the ground would tear open the earth, illuminating for mortals and immortals the abode below—grim, fetid, abhorrent even to the gods.”

The trap is now set, and despite the allegory’s dismal ending—as if we cannot see it—we embark on a long history of performing education by first recreating these hellish conditions. To learn to think entails navigating the transition between a dark interior and a lit exterior. We go to school to learn about the world. In a room in this school we might learn about Descartes, who, in order to think clearly, stuck himself in an even smaller room. Control the opening. Is this not the giddy promise of the camera obscura? To control the unruly world, just pass it through a pinhole. The voyeurism of knowledge. But this pleasure only works if one gets caught. One never sees an image of a camera obscura itself without the curtain drawn aside, a wall missing. The flooded scene of darkness. The image of the ruined image. Still we imagine the impregnable black box spitting out its forensic signs in the wake of worldly tragedy. A mechanical blind seer: prolific, indefatigable, cryptic.

“Matter triggers ‘vibrations or oscillations’ at the lower extremity of the cords, through the intermediary of ‘some little openings’ that exist on the lower level. Leibniz constructs a great Baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced with windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but on the other hand resonating as if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into sounds up above.”

–Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

“Endowed with their new semiotic powers, [inert bodies] contribute to a new form of text, the experimental science article, a hybrid between the age-old style of biblical exegesis ... and the new instrument that produces new inscriptions. From this point on, witnesses will pursue their discussions around the air pump in its enclosed spaces, discussions about the meaningful behaviour of ... a cheap black box ... standard equipment in every laboratory.”

–Latour, We have never been Modern

BLACK BOX, BLACK BOX

What are the recognizable constructs by which we assemble a theoretical discourse, assemble ourselves? Is it possible to make its theatrical structure apparent to ourselves, not by c-section, drawing aside the critical curtain, but by assemblage—by fruition and intensification? How do we find ourselves acting?

One experimental variation:

The audience enters the black box theater. Nothing is set up: there are chairs stacked at random and a pile of material against the wall. They do as they will.

I come in and begin clearing a space and setting up a black box in the middle of the space. Three walls go up, so that you can only see inside from one side of the room. A desk and chair are placed inside and illuminated as the house lights are turned off. The fourth wall is now raised, blocking direct view, but a ghostly image of the interior is now evident above the black box. Again the audience is left to do what they will.

I can be seen to sit down at the desk where I begin to play a recording: it is the sounds of the room from a moment ago. Over top of this I add a layer of semi- otic utterances accompanied by gestures: an apparent commentary. Variations will be added with each loop, quickly building to a wall of pure sound inten- sity, as the ghostly image inversely fades to black.

The sound oscillation abruptly ends....

Equipment:

Stackable chairs and a desk;

Loop machine, mic, and monitors;

Spotlight with barn-doors;

The box: heavy black fabric, five long tubes (pvc or metal), translucent fabric, cable/line/pulleys;

“A crucial feature of these optical devices of the 1830s and 1840s is the undisguised nature of their operational structure and the form of subjection they entail. Even though they provide access to ‘the real,’ they make no claim that the real is anything other than a mechanical production.... One reason for their obsolescence was that they were insufficiently ‘phantasmagoric’....: ‘the occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product...this outer appearance can lay claim to the status of being. Its perfection is at the same time the perfection of the illusion that the work of art is a reality sui generis that constitutes itself in the realm of the absolute without having to renounce its claim to image the world.”

–Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century

Pinhole photograph of classroom, Chris Moffett, 2009.

[ecogradients]

For ecogradients

From Cynthia Dantzic

  On the Relationship Between Growth (artistic) and Debt (mine):

  As usual, the seemingly enigmatic theme of this issue appeared  impenetrable at first, yet, on further reflection, and spurred by the passing into the great and unknown beyond of one of the iconic figures in 20th Century art at the age of 101, Will Barnet, the relationship between my own growth as an artist and the incalculable debt I owe to him, through his teaching, his work and his unflagging eloquence, made sudden sense.

On the morning of Saturday, the tenth of November this Fall, while I was helping to install the Annual exhibition of the Society of Scribes at New York’s National Arts Club. Will, who resided at the club for many years, passing by in his wheelchair, stopped to say hello and to see what I was doing. I had been a student of his long ago, and had remained in touch with him over the years, even including his work in a recent book, “100 New York Painters,” for which I had made his portrait, and showed a number of his major works, as his style of painting had grown through the decades.

  Often, when I had works in exhibitions at the NAC in photography, calligraphy or other mediums, Will would stop by and I would make a photograph of him in front of the piece. Recently it had been a large woodcut , “Do Shapes Create Edges or do Edges Create Shapes?” from a book called “What Can You See?”.

This time, I was delighted to show him a new work in Chinese calligraphy, and as he wheeled over to get a closer look, I thought I’d make a snapshot to record the event. Just one more in a continuing series, or so I believed. Will seemed pleased with the work, and said he’d try to come to our opening reception on Tuesday the 13th. 

  On Tuesday morning, the 13th of November 2012, Will Barnet passed away.

It may well be that the photograph accompanying this brief essay is the last photograph ever taken of him. There is no way I will ever be able to express the debt I owe to this splendid man who was my teacher, my inspiration and a major source of my own growth as an artist and as a teacher. Growth and debt, inextricably bound together, captured for a brief moment in this image.

  Cynthia Maris Dantzic

[ecogradients]

Statu Quo res erant ante bellum: “in the state in which things were before the war.”

by Michael Mallozzi

           Do not force feelings of any kind, least of all the feeling of conviction.

                         -Sandor Ferenczi, Notes and Fragments

It is not often enough acknowledged that the expert is always on the defensive.  Despite the best efforts by some to keep the professional class ‘honest,’ experts possess an endless array of secrets to keep them safe.  Nowhere is the organizational strength of professionalism more insidious than in the compulsory school system.  Innately, educators and administrators lay claim to some degree of truth.  They have certificates to sanction this claim and entire schools designed to ensure their competence.  Despite these claims, it is worth considering how they affect the process of learning?

When Noam Chomsky was asked how the intellectual class gets away with such a wide scale program of indoctrination of youth, he was quick to reply that they are not getting away with anything. He continued by stating that “…this is like hiring a carpenter and, when he does the job he was contracted to do, asking how he got away (italics mine) with it. In short, they function exactly as they are expected. Culturally, what follows is an alphabet soup of school ‘choice’ and alternative models.  It seems that the tragedy in education is that, despite it’s usual brevity, we actually have an attentive audience.  We must begin to account for the fact that “children’s attention is driven by something other than loyalty,” and to wonder truthfully, what this ‘something other’ may be?

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Thirty years ago, having nothing better to do with myself at the time, I tried my hand at school teaching. The license I have certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. I don’t teach English; I teach school- and I win awards doing it.

                                    -John Taylor Gatto, Introduction to the speech given on the occasion of being named New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991.

The following is an e-mail correspondence I had recently with two administrators from a Teaching College in Philadelphia, PA. I feel it has some potentially constructive elements and I am interested in some varied responses.  It is NOT meant to be an overt criticism of the administrators, as I believe they were relaying the best possible information they could provide, and they were in fact, quite cordial. However, it did bother me greatly, for regardless of intention, there is an underlying arrogance in what passes for teacher preparation in this country. As this exchange exhibits, it was fully impossible for me to be seen as an able bodied instructor willing to teach in the city of Philadelphia- A city with an appalling educational record.  Simply put, the criteria is the criteria.  

(**I have removed the names. MM is me & TC is teaching college.)

MM: Good Afternoon Dr.

I am interested in the Graduate Program in Education at       University.  I received a BA in History at Siena College with a Provisional Secondary Certification in Social Studies and taught in both private and public schools in New York for five years. I also completed all of my course work toward an MA in History at Buffalo State College. Unfortunately, I was unable to complete my Thesis. My studies had centered on the changing treatment of the Spanish-American War in high school history textbooks throughout the twentieth century and how the presentation of that war corresponded with ideological shifts in the country as a whole. I currently have 15-20 pages of that research. I am interested in earning a Pennsylvania Teaching Certificate as well as a Masters Degree in Education.  Specifically, I would like to use some of my current research to study curriculum development in the reshaping of a more complete national narrative in History Education. Any assistance you could provide would be greatly appreciated. I look forward to speaking with you.

Thank You,

Michael Mallozzi   

TC: Hi Michael,

Thanks for your inquiry.  I can see two routes to certification in PA for you.  First, if you want your certification, you would have to apply to Graduate Teacher Certification Program (the graduate advisor is cc’d on this email.  He will send you information about the program).  We can transfer in only 6 credits from your other graduate program, and wouldn’t take any history courses since this is an M.Ed.  This is standard practice across colleges and universities at the graduate level, and not just a rule.  In other words, you cannot come and pick up where you left off in New York.  Second, you might want to contact the PA Department of Education to see if there’s another route to certification since you hold provisional cert. in NYS.  They may know something I don’t.

Sorry, this probably isn’t quite what you had hoped. 

Feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.

Kind Regards,

MM: Dear Mr.- I exchanged e-mails with Dr. yesterday concerning the Graduate program in Education at              University.  She mentioned that she would include you on the e-mail and that you may have more information on a potential course of study.  If at all possible, I would be willing to meet to discuss these possibilities further. Any information you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

TC: Sure, Michael. What questions do you have regarding the program? I am going to attach our Certification Handbook to this email. You should take a look at it and get back to me with any questions. Sincerely, 

MM: Specifically, given that I’ve taught in New York State for five years, I am looking for a program in which I would not have to student teach again. In addition, I realize that the Praxis Test is content specific and given that I’ve completed a full course load of Master’s study with straight A’s, would my application be considered without this test.  I have also been working on research that was part of my Masters Thesis in History/Education. Given that the dead-line for Fall applications is April 1st, I may not be able to take this test in time.  Sincerely,

TC: Do you currently have teaching certificate? If so, you could simply apply for an out of state certification. If not, you would need to enroll in a teacher cert program and take the Praxis II in the content you are interested in pursuing. Does this help?

MM: Unfortunately, my certification has lapsed.  I would need to take the test but how about Student Teaching? If so, do you see any way around this? I have taught in some of the best public and private schools in New York State and I really don’t think I would be willing to student teach again.

TC: Unfortunately, I don’t see any way around Student Teaching or taking the Praxis. Because your certification is no longer valid, you would need to go back through the certification process. Sorry.

MM: I appreciate you taking the time.

        Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on MisEducation, p.17.

Adam Phillips, Conversation with Paul Holdengraber at the New York Public Library, February 25, 2013.

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down, p. 1.

[ecogradients]

“If I could learn…”

by Paul McLean

“For my people your (so-called) education is the rags of bondage.” – White Buffalo, modern-day Mayan prince, deceased

I have a 14 month-old son, Lachlan, who just today pronounced “two,” after a voice-prompt of “one.” His “two” is cute, though I couldn’t explain exactly how or why. Maybe it’s the timbre, or the singsong quality of his delivery, I don’t know. We repeated the sequence several times, just to confirm that the call-response was embedded, a patterned action. Lachlan says and seems to understand “bye-bye” now, too, in a complex way. You can see this all pleases Lachlan’s mother. She figures the boy is smart, and that is a nice reflection on her parenting prowess, and it all demonstrates how much good for him her love is.

We’re not (at the moment) charging Lachlan for our parenting or education services. We should probably be glad about that. Otherwise, he might expect us to willingly submit to evaluations. He might demand our efforts include securing him a job later. Lachlan might request to see our permits and qualifications. He might compare our approach to others’ and find us lacking. He might then decide he would do better in another household, with different, higher quality parent teachers. Lachlan might question our program’s cost and benefits.

Who knows? Maybe he does anyway. Because his vocabulary is small, he could be attempting to communicate all this sort of distressing stuff to us, and we might mistake the complaints and requisitions as Lachlan’s discomfort over a full diaper or a tooth coming in or an empty tummy or being too hot or cold, or feeling scared. I doubt it, though. For the most part, we keep our kid away from the Internet, and carefully monitor his various types of external exposure to people and information. Better safe than sorry.

∞

Lachlan most likely doesn’t realize it, but his parents are highly educated U.S. citizens saddled with enormous student debt. Both his mother and father took out loans to pay for our educations and are among a prodigious number of recession-affected college grads, whose prospects have been impacted significantly by the economic crisis that began in 2007 and continues six years later. [1] Most of us student debtors believed continuing education would improve our fortunes, because that’s the meme that pervades the realm, right? “It pays to be educated,” especially if one’s speaking of “human capital.” [2] Lachlan certainly won’t be privy to the meaning of that (IMHO) onerous term.

One big carrot that incentivizes the student loan business’s horse (debtor students) and wagon (educational marketing) is Return on Investment (ROI). [3] I’m not saying that’s what motivated Lachlan’s mom or me in our educational pursuits (it wasn’t). She earned an Art History degree, and I studied English as an undergrad, earned Masters in Digital Media and Arts Management, and am a doctoral candidate in a Media Philosophy program. We’re those dumb ones who chose academic trajectories in the Humanities. Poor Lachlan.

Business is what generates ideas like ROI and human capital. Lachlan doesn’t probably comprehend what “running education more like a business” means for him or his parents. Maybe we should ask a businessman, someone like billionaire Eli Broad, to explain it to Lachlan. [4] Or, then again, before we introduce Lachlan to Eli, maybe we should evaluate Broad’s other capital and “venture” philanthropic enterprises, and wonder whether this is actually the businessman Lachlan (or America) needs on the job of “fixing” our country’s education system. Lachlan, have you heard of AIG? Have you heard what’s been happening in the Los Angeles art scene, specifically, at LA MoCA or LACMA? Mr. Broad has played a big part in both debacles.

To my knowledge, Lachlan isn’t aware that education in America is undergoing systematic “reformation” on a massive scale. [5] He certainly can’t know that rich people and corporate giants are banding together to radically re-design the nation’s platforms for learning, and are spending billions to do so. Bill Gates is leading the charge, and Warren Buffett contributed substantially to the Gates foundation coffers. They’re not the only ones. The Walton family (Wal*Mart heirs), the DeVos family (Amway) and Michael Bloomberg and others have invested tremendous resources over the past decade in a campaign to wrest education from democratic, government-enabled processes and resituate it in the sphere of Wall Street-oriented Big Business. These titans of industry promote vouchers, charter schools, encourage the restructuring of school systems to make them operationally resemble corporations, attack teacher unions and practices like tenure. They inject management “culture” into all areas of administration, centralizing power from the top-down, while simultaneously disenfranchising students and faculty. I doubt Lachlan is thinking about how these and other portentous developments in education might affect his future (or his parents’ present). He’s presently pre-occupied with a toy truck his Grandmother sent.

“Perhaps this would all be less worrisome,” I’m telling Lachlan, as he’s pushing his truck (Made in China) across the carpet, “if our elected representatives were passionately defending public education against the robber baron-powered onslaught. Unfortunately, many of America’s politicians, from the top-down, are in the pockets of the ‘reformers.’ It’s bipartisanism at its worst. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are equally responsible for the selling out of America’s public school systems. Political operatives like Rahm Emanuel (currently Chicago Mayor) are in on it, as are governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey and Jeb Bush of Florida (correction: former governor, now author, and likely 2016 Presidential hopeful). Across the United States, political donations, advertising and lobbying efforts are aiding education-privatizers. The battlegrounds include teacher compensation, pensions, unionization and certification requirements, student and teacher testing programs, general and specialized funding streams, and curricula. The scope and scale of what’s at stake is vast. Trillions of dollars are in play. Tens of millions of lives are affected. The nature of democracy hinges on the way this plays out.“ Lachlan still hasn’t looked up from his truck.

∞

I don’t want to alarm him, so I stop and take a breath. You know, we’re doing what we can with Lachlan. His mom picks him up and sits him in his high chair, and feeds him a nice bowl of organic, nutritious mush. He makes happy noises.

I am thinking about Canada, about the Casserole movement that was so successful last year. I’m thinking about the fact that, in the U.S., bankrupting on student loan debt is almost impossible, since 2005, and that the UK outlawed such injurious legislation. I realize the media in America doesn’t report much on alternatives, and much of what it does report is skewed in favor of the wholesale reprogramming of the nation’s schools in the corporatized model. I shouldn’t be surprised. The media monopoly is corporate, and lionizes the super-rich. Okay, that’s my impression. Am I wrong, Lachlan? He’s chewing with his new teeth on an apple slice and staring at me, smiling, between bites.

I think tomorrow I’m going to start home-schooling Lachlan. His first course is going to be on class warfare and the redistribution of wealth by force or subterfuge. Specifically, we’ll consider what it feels like or means to be on the receiving end of that. We will get into history a lot. My excellent liberal arts education is going to come in very handy, because the pertinent concepts are often (naturally or artificially) abstract, and tough to comprehend, or intentionally incomprehensible. I’ll argue that just because you don’t natively understand something or someone doesn’t mean it or they can’t cause you harm.

I’ll explain to Lachlan what tyranny is and describe the many movements that have arisen to combat it, including the one that resulted in the establishment of the United States of America. I’ll try to explain what freedom is, and how many Americans have fought and died defending it. We’ll also explore how patriotism can be used to evil ends, how a democracy forged as a bane of tyrants might become a vehicle for misrepresentation, how a commonwealth republic can be corrupted by greed, avarice, sloth, lust (those “7 Deadlies” – which, I suppose, means we’ll need a lesson on separation of Church and State).

Lachlan may be curious as to why a few people always seem to want to be in charge of everyone else, want to possess more stuff than they need, and why they’re willing to do really evil things to get what they want. I’ll surely admit I’ve often wondered the same thing, and have yet to form a satisfactory answer to those questions. It could be that those few people share a common trait: they’ve had terrible educations, and rotten teachers.

I’m going to tell Lachlan about his ancestors, the McLeans, whose name my boy bears. The Scottish have always been keen on education. We’ve also been known as fighters. I’ll tell Lachlan about West Virginia, whose motto is Montani Semper Libre [Mountaineers (are) Always Free]. I’ll talk to him about his granma, who was a labor historian whose favorite subject was “Mother” Jones, and his granpa, who was a Green Beret and a doctor, and his Grand Uncle Bob, who is the funniest man alive, and a veteran who fought the Chinese in Korea, on Pork Chop Hill.

When he gets a little older, we’ll learn about the similarity between torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques.” We’ll study decisions like Dartmouth v. Woodward and the one commonly referred to as Citizens United. Lachlan will, most likely, be interested (as I was) in the American Civil War. I’ll teach him about the Emancipation Proclamation. And so on.

It’s my earnest hope Lachlan will eventually be able to discern the difference between free market capitalism and democracy. The former views slavery as good for business (labor costs low) and the latter cannot sustain unless slavery is abolished. Slavery is like a many-headed hydra, I will assert, and to defeat that beast is the work of heroes. Slavery assumes many guises. Sometimes it wears a suit and tie, and preaches globalism. Sometimes it wears a brimmed hat and carries a whip, and preaches racial Darwinism.  “Whatever the slave master’s appearance and rationalization, Lachlan, refuse his or her bloody commands and reject his or her false promises,” I’ll say.

Finally, I will share, maybe as an extra-credit lesson, my own theory, which is that mankind is entering a new perceptual era, and that the old masters, their descendants and minions will do everything in their considerable and burgeoning power to enforce upon humanity the old regimes of enslavement. “They will explain convincingly and fraudulently that property law extends to all aspects of the world, that extraction and exploitation are necessary and inexhaustible enterprises, that wealth is infinite and desirable and justified, etc. They will chart a course for you and all (excepting themselves) that is fraught with needless suffering, leads to inevitable exhaustion and malaise, and always favors the few over the many. That way is,” I will encourage my son, “not to be taken, tolerated or believed. “

Tonight, though, I’ll just lay him down with a kiss on his cheek and tell Lachlan, “I love you.” I whisper, “Remember John Henry.”

[Disjointed afterthoughts… I’m half-asleep, enjoying the quiet hours in the middle of the night, as Bushwick sleeps. …Still working on the lesson plan: “We’ll get to Zizek, in due time, or in true time, which Heidegger argued is 4 dimensional. Lachlan already knows 2. We ought to get round to 4d before too long, after our course in 3d printing. …Someday we’ll be free of Europe’s problematic affection for tyranny and its appliances, which infects all the wonderful realizations its great thinkers have given us over the centuries… or we’ll move to Finland, which has one of the world’s best education systems… The world is full of contradictions.” [8]

I doze off, listening to Lachlan’s breath.

∞

[1] “Recession recedes, but student debts worsen” by Peter Whorisky (Washington Post, March 22, 2013)

[2] “It pays to be educated” by R.A. (The Economist/Human capital, May 11, 2010, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/05/human_capital)

[3]“What’s Your College Degree Worth?” (Bloomberg Businessweek Special Report: “College ROI: Does It Pay?” http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/colleges_return_on_investment.html

[4] “Running education more like a business” [Interview with Kai Ryssdal, Marketplace (American Public Media, December 8, 2011)]

[5] “Michelle Rhee: Wrong again” by David Sirota (Salon, February 26, 2013)

[6] “Waltons Will Spend More to Privatize Public Education” by Diane Ravitch (National Education Policy Center, January 8, 2013)

[7] “The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working With the Religious Right to Kill Public Education” by Rachel Tabachnick (Alternet, May 6, 2011)

[8] “Trusting Teachers: The Most Radical Education Reform of All by Renee Moore (Teacher Leaders Network Center for Teaching Quality, http://www.teacherleaders.org/node/2564)

[Quotation]:

Imagine a country where no one evaluates teachers, no one evaluates schools, and individual schools' test results remain confidential.  You've just imagined Finland, which regularly bests all other developed nations in international assessments of student performance.

How can Finland pull this off without undermining quality?  According to Dr. Reijo Laukkanen, a 34-year veteran of Finland's National Board of Education, "We trust our teachers." 

Laukkanen also cited other reasons for Finland's success:  Ambitious national content standards guide teachers' work without stifling their professional judgment or creativity.  Aggressive, early and frequent interventions keep struggling students from falling behind.  And schools coordinate with social service providers to prevent disadvantaged students from slipping through the cracks.

[ecogradients]

Debt & Taxis: Call for Submissions!

Bill Gates recently released the latest of his annual letters, reporting on the status of of his massive philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The subject of the letter is ‘measurement’, and it begins by discussing the various challenges that the Gates Foundation has overcome in its attempts to improve health care globally, eradicate polio, and etc., with a focus on “innovations in measurement”. Gates confides in us that, despite the simplicity of the basic concept of effective measurement (“you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal-in a feedback loop”), he finds it “amazing … how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.”

"In previous annual letters, I've focused a lot on the power of innovation to reduce hunger, poverty, and disease. But any innovation-whether it's a new vaccine or an improved seed-can't have an impact unless it reaches the people who will benefit from it. That's why in this year's letter I discuss how innovations in measurement are critical to finding new, effective ways to deliver these tools and services to the clinics, family farms, and classrooms that need them."

The letter is a fascinating, if rather self-congratulatory (what else would we expect from such a successful entrepreneur?), and ultimately fairly shallow exploration of this notion (it’s only a brief ‘letter’, after all). It highlights at once the limit reached by the Gates Foundation in its attempts to ‘reward innovation’ with infusions of philanthropic capital –how to measure the effectiveness of these innovations?– and its pseudosolution: “innovations in measurement”.

Aside from its ironic reliance on anecdotal accounts (“Driving through the countryside, I felt the challenge Ethiopia faces…”), Gates’ argument for the importance of local measurement in global health care reform seems fairly straightforward. Hence our surprise at the letter's culminating 'hard right' turn into the ideological quagmire of ‘education reform’ (the primary domestic target of the Foundation's activities: “In the United States our foundation focuses mostly on improving education…”).

The abrupt change in direction almost lulls us into believing that the “new advances in measuring teacher effectiveness” touted in the letter will in fact “provide opportunities to improve education.” Why wouldn’t they? Gates’ aww-shucks manner helps to sell the rhetorical sleight of hand:

"I was amazed to learn a few years ago that over 90 percent of teachers get zero feedback on how to improve. A lot of the debate in education today really amounts to a circular discussion of how to implement tools to measure teacher effectiveness and whether such measurement is even possible. We know that if all teachers were anywhere near as good as the best, our education system would be fantastic."

Of course 'we all know' that our education system 'would be fantastic', if we could only find a way to weed out those ‘bad’ teachers! As 'circular discussions' over several decades of educational study have shown, this way of approaching the problems of education effaces their deeper socioeconomic stakes; the initiator of any rigorous engagement with educational thought quickly finds her-or-himself no longer considering discrete 'innovations’, but rather a history of astonishingly effective maneuvers in defense of an increasingly-embattled class structure, by a ruling minority that C. Wright Mills called 'the power elite', on a political-economic and sociocultural battleground. A recent article by Andrew Hartman in Salon discusses this dirty little secret of American ‘education reform’:

"Progressive educators since John Dewey have sold their wares as instruments of justice. And yet, education reform has almost always propped up the social order… Educational progress as measured by how well students stack up against conventional standards will always and inevitably reinforce the status quo. Most of the time, schools are little more than engines of social reproduction."

Specifically regarding the problem of ‘effective measurement’ in education, Hartman makes the excellent point that extending this kind of reasoning to social systems ignores the biases that accrue specifically within such systems:

"The need to incentivize the teaching profession is the most popular argument against teacher’s unions, since unions supposedly protect bad teachers. But, in a predictable paradox, by attaching their incentives agenda to standardized testing, the reform movement has induced cheating on a never-before-seen scale, proving the maxim known as Campbell’s Law: ‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’ In sum, the TFA insurgency’s singular success has been to empower those best at gaming the system."

So how do we distinguish between ‘real innovators’ and those who are ‘gaming the systems’ of measurement and evaluation? Especially given that those providing the bankroll for ‘innovative’ initiatives are precisely those who have managed to ‘game’ the economic system by leveraging monopolistic advantages to extract massive capital from volatile markets. Slavoj Zizek responds to Gates in the London Review of Books, highlighting the hypocrisy of philanthropic investment in the context of the overarching patterns of global economic ‘development’:

"According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World."

Is the same duplicity not present in Education? Don't children exist in a kind of 'third world' where the disciplinary 'management' of the labor of 'growing up' is increasingly dominated by the imperatives of an overarching, ecologically-toxic 'productivity' (guaranteed by any number of spurious measurements)? Should we as parents be so ready to subject our kids to this brutal logic of securitization?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ecogradients is currently accepting submissions in sound, video, text, and image, relating to the broad set of problems figured by the notion of Debt & Taxis: including the relationships between growth & debt; education and the status quo; death and the security state.

Please send all submissions to [email protected] by the deadline of March 15th.

[ecogradients]

Minding the Gap: through a hole in the Parisian sidewalk by Chris Moffett.  Above photograph by Jazz Meyer, 2012.

It turns out that the car sitting on the side of the road at 2am, with a lone occupant, was an unmarked police car. His partner materialized and converged quickly but smoothly on us, from our other side, flashing an indistinct wallet, and not so much identifying himself as embarking all of us together on an unexpected new course. Or, rather, ceasing to embark. We would have been on our way, the six of us having just hurriedly popped out of a Parisian manhole, one after the other, and eager not to loiter. Our two parties no doubt surprised each other.

There’s a grey area. There’s always a grey area. The Parisian boundaries of above and below are more porous than say here in New York where I recount this. Better if the street had been completely deserted, but that’s what distinguishes the surface, even in the wee hours of the morning, from the utility tunnel that we might have absconded back down. In the moment one is always sorting out the varying grayness, the complicit mix of light and dark. You can, for example, forget to turn off your headlamp as you hustle to put some distance between you and the pitch dark you emerged from. Above ground the forgotten headlamp only marks you as out of place amidst the glaring street lights. The beam contributes nothing, so that you don’t even realize you are still sending it out, signalling yourself out to the world. But even this oversight simple points to the array of options that constantly flow one into the other, even in the intensified pressure of squeezing through a hole in the sidewalk.

“What are you doing?” the officer sensibly asked in what would be a series of questions marking the rhythm of our engagement. This rhythm was inseparable from the physical dance involving the emptying of our pockets: “What is this?” “And in this pocket?” “Do you have drugs?”

Or was it that these questions were precisely not sensible, marking instead only the appearance of sensibility, like a headlamp left on in the light that renders its useless? We all know how this dance goes, even if we are winging it, uncertain of the outcome. What we are doing is exactly what we have in common now: we are all standing over the manhole that we were just caught coming out of. We are egressing. We are being busted for egressing. We are, collectively, cops and egressors. But what are we doing? Even in the moment, when wisdom would dictate a suitably vague and contrite blend of truth and omission, it is surprisingly difficult to say. Does one answer with practicalities, introducing a whole apparatus constructed around a singular raison d’etre?

“Well, officer, we are scouting tunnels, looking for a critical passage that will take us under the Sein. If we find it, then we can set out a couple nights hence on the journey proper, a complete traversal of Paris from South to North, underground. We’re pretty confident of the Catacomb section, but are trying to work out how to get from there into the canal system and eventually into the sewers in the North. And we pretty much exhausted this utility tunnel, so we were just popping up to assess where it gets us.”

Such forthrightness seems ill advised, but largely because it would be evasive, refusing to answer the officer’s question, threatening to highlight the chasm gaping under our feet, this void beneath the surface. Where do we find common ground? Is it not simpler, less precise: we are cataphiles (the colloquial term for lovers of the catacombs) and we are exploring, and we are sorry, and recognize that you have caught us at something, and yet we are no trouble. (Is this even more true? Have we constructed the larger story as a smoke screen to ourselves? And what if this masks an even more difficult possibility, that we don’t indeed know what we are doing?)

The law prohibits things that we collectively care to consider unfathomable. But in doing so the law must articulate them in the most technical of manners. Enforcers of this technical naming of what must remain unspeakable are in some sense cataphiles, able to move across the barrier of the surface of things, comfortable below ground. What is most worrisome is when the gap is welded shut, threatening to keep you on whatever side you are currently on, backed into a corner or caught with nowhere to hide. To get caught on the side of the unspeakable is the horror, and history is replete with examples of how this becomes physically or technically brutal. (We should imagine, perhaps, not Theseus slaying the Minotaur, but a labyrinth in which we are Minotaurs to each other.) Still, for the enforcer of the law, to move with facility between these spaces is to have an implicit or explicit sense of the absurdity of the technical. It is this which allows the technical to work. We have technically been busted, but this is only the starting point. It is no doubt illegal: there is, I am brought up to speed afterwards, a fine for being in the catacombs, and here we were exiting not these vestigial spaces of Paris’ past but its working infrastructure. And yet I also am told that there is a minimum amount for a fine to follow you once you leave the country, and whether or not that is true, it points to the kinds of calculations, both technical and felt, that will determine in large part how this goes. Having grilled us and emptied our pockets, one officer clearly looks to the other with a look that asks, how shall we play this?

But as clearly as our group’s immediate fate rests on one side of this calculation, and as much as that look was not meant for us, it also indicates the extent to which we are all in it together. How this night goes is up for grabs for all of us. And if clearly we were doing something that is in some small way unspeakable—is this not what drew us to it each in our own fashion?—it is also this which has for a moment brought us together. In this sense we have more in common with each other than with the pedestrian who will walk by, taking in the scene but not breaking stride.

Stride breakers. It’s a kind of litmus test: how much can you see in another by the way they choose to move down the street, or stoop to pass down a limestone tunnel deep underneath the street? Stooped over in such a tunnel, and finding a headlamp bobbing down the tunnel from the other direction, you may not know much about what this encounter will look like, but you do know that you will find someone else who also finds him or herself stooping down a tunnel. This is the strange camaraderie of the catacombs, or the catacombed camaraderie of strangers. It turns out, in fact, that the catacombs are crawling with people. While I have climbed down alone in the evening only to emerge late the next day having been company only to myself the entire time, it is just as likely that one will run into a whole panoply of people. On the weekend, one can run into old friends in an underground party, cross path with single file expeditions, trade some “cata-knowledge,” or exchange email addresses. Or you might, for example, find yourself part of a loose six person team of New Yorkers and an Australian, coming together for a strange task. You might even find yourself in the candlelight sitting across from the mysterious Lazar—unofficial and evasive spokesperson for the infamous group UX—who may have just embraced your comrades as long lost friends. Somehow going underground is a teeming, complicit affair, full of life.

Bradley L. Garrett in his dissertation on Urban Exploration, stemming from his participation in the legendary crew London Team B, writes:

Urban explorers, in the hacking tradition, hack or exploit fractures in physical architecture and social expectations in an effort to find deeper meanings and different readings in places even as they preference process over results. This practice, rather than being strictly oppositional, is actually quite celebratory; it is a method of affecting desire through unencumbered play that creates a meld between body and city, representations and practice, explorers and place and, of course, between fellow trespassers.

Can we trace it back the other way, back across the threshold of the sidewalk? The two officers were now unwittingly interwoven into our story, becoming part of the direction and telling of the story we were creating both in words and space. And we, no doubt, were not so surprising to them, tucking neatly enough into their narrative. For the most part, we each kept our stories to ourselves, as if mindful of the gap, the difficult space between what we preferred to imagine of the other and the other themselves. We stayed closer to a kind of ritualized enactment, a tactful standoff. In response to the one guard’s raised eyebrow, asking his partner how this should resolve, the other shrugs. We are off the hook. “Next time we’ll bring you in.” And then one last odd gesture. He points to the sky and says, “It’s going to rain. Very dangerous.” What are we to make of this gesture? A parting shot to suggest who has the last word, the appropriate knowledge, justifying all of this drama, since we had skirted every other concern? Or was it a show of concern, either out of actual concern, or as a way of bridging the gap, collapsing the power differential, as if to say, “we know, we know, but still…” What would it take to imagine this encounter not as not “strictly oppositional” but “actually quite celebratory”? What desire are we playing out together?

We did not stick around to mull it over. But the encounter would keep beat with other similar situations, either actual or potential. Two of our crew find themselves similarly caught in the act of emerging after leaving a food drop for our later attempt at a full traversal. These become somehow familiar to us, but part of what I think we felt is the way in which they skirt the surface of things, glancing off. They form a kind of virtual texture to the journey, an odd contrapuntal possibility that was so clearly interwoven, and yet foreign, absurd even.

Some days later, after over forty hours walking and crawling the underside of the city from one end to the other, we finally emerge out of manhole in the sewer system (where, in contrast to the utility tunnel we had been in previously, rain was indeed a terrifying concern, despite our precautions). It is lunch time, and our exit is just feet from the sidewalk tables of a cafe, forcing pedestrians to squeeze by or wait for us to emerge one after the other, six troglodytes caked in grime. We make haste, sliding the cover back into position, before hoofing down the street to leave the scene. Nobody stops us this time. We make it to a small Parisian park, where we collapse on the grass, exhausted. After some time, a police officer approaches our prone crew. I prepare myself as best I can with what little energy I can muster.

“You can’t be on the grass,” he says. “Pardon,” I say over and over in reply to his insistent gestures, but I can’t help but smile a bit.

[ecogradients]

OBSERVE is a crossing of dress and rituals associated with Hasidic Judaism. The project plays with appearances and attempts to blur what seems so clearly defined.

Questions: 1. In what ways is this art project an act of complicity between artists and participants, viewers and subjects, concept and photographs, and between identities? 2. All the OBSERVE participants are Jewish-- secular, cultural, religious-- but none are Hasidic. In what ways is the act of performing and documenting the appearance of a Hasidic Jew an act of complicity? Given their implicit exclusion from the Hasidic Jewish community, how do the Jewish subjects of these photographs engage in the dress and gender-bound rituals of that group? 3. What roles to sameness and otherness play in this project? 4. Participants take part in this performance on the project's terms. What are some of the terms of everyday performances in which we each take part?

[ecogradients]

Collide-o-Scopic Quotes by Blake Seidenshaw (photo by Stephen Andrus).

"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for."

-Douglas Adams, Speech at Digital Biota 2. Cambridge UK 1998.

"Argument remains inescapable.  When interdisciplinary work is conceived as part of the 'natural' generation and gravitation of fruitful inquiries that will be located in the disciplinary system, assumptions about criteria tend to be strongly disciplinary.  [...]  In critical interdisciplinarities, radical change is the goal.  The 'rhetoric of interpenetration' that is characteristic of critical interdisciplinarities does not simply enrich existing fields.  It constructs new criteria and replaces them.  It alters not only the products of research but the very procedures." 

-Julie Klein, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities. University Press of Virginia 1996, p.211.

"Encounterings do not produce harmonious wholes, and smoothly preconstituted entities do not ever meet in the first place.  Such things cannot touch, much less attach; there is no first place; and species, neither singular nor plural, demand another practice of reckoning.  In the fashion of turtles [...] on turtles all the way down, meetings make us who and what we are in the avid contact zones that are the world.  Once 'we' have met, we can never be 'the same' again.  Propelled by the tasty but risky obligation of curiosity among companion species, once we know, we cannot not know.  If we know well, searching with fingery eyes, we care.  That is how responsibility grows."

-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press 2008, p.287.

"When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust.  The implosion of electric energy cannot be met by explosion or expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and the flexibility of multiple small centers.  For example, the rush of students into our universities is not explosion but implosion.  And the needful strategy to encounter this force is not to enlarge the university, but to create numerous groups of autonomous colleges in place of our centralized university plants that grew up on the lines of European government and nineteenth-century industry." 

-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press (Fifth Edition) 1964/1997, p.70-71.

"Through the theories they embody, paradigms prove to be constitutive of the research activity.  They are also, however, constitutive of science in other respects, and that is now the point.  In particular, our most recent examples show that paradigms provide scientists not only with a map but with some of the directions essential for map-making.  In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture.  Therefore, when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions."

-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press (2nd ed.), 1970, p.121.

"The importance of dialogical action in human life shows the utter inadequacy of the monological subject of representations which emerges from the epistemological tradition.  We cannot understand human life merely in terms of individual subjects, who frame representations about and respond to others, because a great deal of human action happens only insofar as the agent understands and constitutes himself or herself as integrally part of a 'we.'  Much of our understanding of self, society, and world is carried in practices that consist in dialogical action.  i would like to argue, in fact, that language itself serves to set up spaces of common action, on a number of levels, intimate and public.  This means that our identity is never simply defined in terms of our individual properties.  It also places us in some social space." 

-Charles Taylor, "The Dialogical Self" (p.304-314), in David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Cornell University Press 1991, p.311.

"Neither natural nor human science forms a natural kind.  There are many interesting and important differences among the various scientific disciplines.  Paleontology and meteorology may be as interestingly different from one another and from high-energy physics as they are from macroeconomics or political science.  All have been shaped by a history of internal developments and interaction with other scientific fields and other social practices.  I follow Friedrich Nietzsche in insisting that 'only that which has no history is definable'; successful practice in the various sciences always has and will continue to escape the constraints and typologies placed on them by methodologists..." 

-Joseph Rouse, "Interpretation in Natural and Human Science" (p.42-58), in David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Cornell University Press 1991, p.46.

"The distinction between 'rationality' and something else has traditionally been drawn so as to coincide roughly with this distinction between inference and imagination.  We are being rational, so the story goes, insofar as we stick to the logical space given at the beginning of the inquiry and so long as we can offer an argument for the beliefs held at the end of the inquiry by referring back to the beliefs held at its beginning.  [...]  On this view, proto-Kuhnian suggestions that we might have to learn a new language to do history of science, or anthropology, or that we might have to invent a new language to make scientific or political progress, were thought of as 'irrationalist.'  In pre-Kuhnian times, rational inquiry was a matter of putting  everything into a single, widely available, familiar context -translating everything into the vocabulary provided by a set of sentences that any rational enquirer would agree to be truth-value candidates.  The human sciences were urged to get inside this context, while the arts were allowed to escape this requirement of 'rationality.'  The idea was that there was a rough equivalence between being scientific and being rational.  So being scientific is a matter of sticking within a logical space that formed an intrinsically privileged context.  We enlightened post-Kuhnians are free from this idea, but we are not yet free from what I shall call 'realism.'  This is the idea that inquiry is a matter of finding out the nature of something that lies outside the web of beliefs and desires." 

-Richard Rorty, "Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation" (59-80), in David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Cornell University Press 1991, p.63.

"Life expands and prolongs itself, in space and time, by means of little black boxes. What remains to be thought, then, is this propagation, pagus by pagus, plot or niche by area or site, page by page, individual by individual of diverse species, this invasion through distinct places; in other words, to meditate on the globality of localities, a summation which reveals the same paradox which sometimes supposes the universal of life is to be found in the singularity of place." 

-Michel Serres, Atlas. Paris, Julliard 1994, p.58.

"Conceived as an operationally closed system, modern society is world society.  It's function systems could never agree on regional, national, or cultural boundaries.  The system of science, the economic system, the system of mass media operate and observe clearly on a worldwide level.  But the political system nowadays, too, is a world system, segmented into 'states' to achieve a better fit between political power and changing conditions of public consensus.  [...]  But this does not mean that the social ends and begins at political boundaries -say, between the United States and Mexico, or between Germany and Austria.  Tourists enjoy (to some extent) legal protection and the staged authenticity of customs and traditions all over the world.  We can intermarry, whatever our national origins.  Conversion from one religion to another is possible, if religions care at all for an exclusive identity and membership.  But in spite of all this, the global system or modern society seems not to be able to produce one and only one self-description." 

-Niklas Luhmann, "Deconstruction as Second Order Observing." (p.94-112), in Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Stanford University Press 2002, p.107.

"The Charter of Transdisciplinarity:

Whereas, the present proliferation of academic and nonacademic disciplines is leading to an exponential increase of knowledge which makes a global view of the human being impossible;

Whereas, only a form of intelligence capable of grasping the cosmic dimension of the present conflicts is able to confront the complexity of our world and the present challenge to the spiritual and material self-destruction of the human species;

Whereas, life on earth is seriously threatened by the triumph of a techno-science that obeys only the terrible logic of efficacy for efficacy's sake;

Whereas, the present rupture between increasingly quantitative knowledge and increasingly impoverished inner identity is leading to the rise of a new brand of obscurantism with incalculable social and personal consequences;

Whereas, an historically unprecedented growth of knowledge is increasing the inequality between those who have not and those who do not, thus engendering increasing inequality within and between different nations on our planet;

Whereas, at the same time, hope is the counterpart of all the aforementioned challenges, a hope that this extraordinary development of knowledge could eventually lead to an evolution not unlike the development of primates into human beings;

Therefore, in consideration of all of the above, the participants on the First World Congress of Transdisciplinarity (Convento da Arrabida, Portugal, November 2-7, 1994) have adopted the present Charter, which comprises the fundamental principles  of the community of transdisciplinary researchers, and constitutes a personal moral commitment, without any legal or institutional constraint, on the part of everyone who signs this Charter.

Article 1: Any attempt to reduce the human being by formally defining what a human being is and subjecting the human being to restrictive analyses within a framework of formal structures, no matter what they are, is incompatible with the transdisciplinary vision. 

Article 2: The recognition of the existence of the different levels of reality governed by different types of logic is inherent in the transdisciplinary attitude.  Any attempt to reduce reality to a single level governed by a single form of logic does not lie within the scope of transdisciplinarity. 

Article 3: Transdisciplinarity complements disciplinary approaches.  It occasions the emergence of new data and new interactions from out of the encounter between disciplines.  It offers us a new vision of nature and reality.  Transdisciplinarity does not strive for mastery of several disciplines but aims to open all disciplines to that which they share and to that which lies beyond them. 

Article 4: The keystone of transdisciplinarity is the semantic and practical unification of the meanings that traverse and lie beyond different disciplines.  It presupposes an open-minded rationality by re-examining the concepts of 'definition' and 'objectivity'.  An excess of formalism, rigidity of definitions and a claim to total objectivity, entailing the exclusion of the subject, can only have a life-negating effect. 

Article 5: The transdisciplinary vision is resolutely open insofar as it goes beyond the field of the exact sciences and demands their dialogue and their reconciliation with the humanities and the social sciences, as well as with art, literature, poetry, and spiritual experience.

Article 6: In comparison with interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity is multireferential and multidimensional.  While taking account of the various approaches to time and history, transdisciplinarity does not exclude a transhistorical horizon.

Article 7: Transdisciplinarity constitutes neither a new religion, nor a new philosophy, nor a new metaphysics, nor a science of sciences. 

Article 8: The dignity of the human being is of both planetary and cosmic dimensions.  The appearance of human beings on Earth is one of the stages in the history of the Universe.  The recognition of the Earth as our home is one of the imperatives of transdisciplinarity.  Every human being is entitled to a nationality, but as an inhabitant of the Earth is also a transnational being.  The acknowledgement by international law of this twofold belonging, to a nation and to the Earth, in one of the goals of transdisciplinary research. 

Article 9: Transdisciplinarity leads to an open attitude towards myths and religions, and also towards those who respect them in a transdisciplinary spirit.      Article 10:     No single culture is privileged over any other culture.  The transdisciplinary approach is inherently transcultural.

Article 11: Authentic education cannot value abstraction over other forms of knowledge.  It must teach contextual, concrete and global approaches.  Transdisciplinary education revalues the role of intuition, imagination, sensibility, and the body in the transmission of knowledge. 

Article 12: The development of a transdisciplinary economy is based on the postulate that the economy must serve the human being and not the reverse. 

Article 13: The transdisciplinary ethic rejects any attitude that refuses dialogue and discussion, regardless of whether the origin of this attitude is ideological, scientistic, religious, economic, political, or philosophical.  Shared knowledge should lead to a shared understanding based on an absolute respect for collective and individual Otherness united by our common life on one and the same Earth.  

Article 14: Rigor, opening, and tolerance are the fundamental characteristics of the transdisciplinary attitude and vision.  Rigor in argument, taking into account all existing data, is the best defense against possible distortions.  Opening involves an acceptance of the unknown, the unexpected, and the unpredictable.  Tolerance implies acknowledging the right to ideas and truths opposed to our own. 

Final Article: The present Charter of Transdisciplinarity was adopted by the participants of the first World Congress of Transdisciplinarity, with no claim to any authority other than that of their own work and activity. 

In accordance with procedures to be agreed upon by transdisciplinary-minded persons of all countries, this Charter is open to the signature of anyone who is interested in promoting progressive national, international, and transnational measures to ensure the application of these Articles in everyday life." 

-Basarab Nicolescu, Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (trans. Karen-Claire Voss). Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, p.147-151.

[ecogradients]

Monadequacy--A Semantics for Symbiotic Software by David Backer

1. It'd be nice to have a semantics for symbiotic software. What makes a statement (or series of statements) true for us?

2. A statement (or series of statements, an 'account') is true if and only if it's monadequate.

3. This is a crazy word, 'monadequate'. But the semantic theory it carries isn't so crazy.

4. Take a domain of objects O at time T. When talking about O we utter statements whose predicates bind variables ranging over the aspects of objects in O at time T.

5. We assume that O, and every object in it, is infinitesimally complex. As Tarde says, "every thing is a society." This means that any object in O, and O itself, is a teeming profusion of aspects.

6. In other words: both O and objects in O are 'infinitesimally dense' such that, for any object in O or identical to O, between any two aspects a and b where ~(a=b), there exists a third unique aspect c, such that ~(a=c & a=b).

7. We call this is the monadic assumption. Any object we observe is a monad, which, following Leibniz, contains every other monad. (This is a non-chemical reading of the Monadology, following Tarde, Dewey, and G. Gordon Brown.)

8. This assumption is largely functional. We assume it to yield truth about social phenomena, particularly educative social phenomena.

9. For some class of people C, one subset of objects in C is each person's understanding of C's complexity at T+n. In other words, Each person in C has a certain understanding of C at T in some suture moment after T.

10. 'Understanding' signifies 'can talk about...' My understanding of x is the extent to which I can talk about x. This understanding may be true, false, neither, both, etc. It may not be knowledge, but it is more than perception.

11. A statement is monadic if it approximates C's infinitesimal complexity at T.

12. 'Approximate complexity' requires that there be no abstraction from the objects in C at T. Just descriptions of them and their behavior. That is, no simplification or reduction. (We typically call such approximations 'models', though most models don't approximate complexity. They reduce or simplify complexity via abstraction, eg. world spirit, collective consciousness, the State, the market, etc. Latour calls a series of statements that approximate complexity a 'trace', though not all traces are true in our semantics.)

13. A statement is adequate if it increases understanding of C for some or all of the people in C.

14. A statement is true if and only if it is both monadic and adequate, or monadequate.

15. Symbiotic software produces true statements.

[ecogradients]

What’s Eating Me by Pj Raftery.

“You’re a Pig!” chuckled my nine and seven year old nephews. Astounded and confused, I inquired where this statement stemmed from. “You are what you eat Uncle PJ! Duh!” they replied as I shoveled some more bacon into my mouth. Oddly enough their childish humor ignited a curiosity into my own eating habits. I recently lost my otherwise-healthy, nonsmoking sister to heart disease, which doctors believe was caused by dietary factors. There appears to be a correlation to the rise in severe health conditions such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, among a plethora of others, and the methods of our industrialized production of food. “We observed strong evidence of a causal link between CHD [coronary heart disease] and dietary patterns. Population-based cohort studies have demonstrated the protective effect of a quality diet against CHD and all-cause mortality, and these benefits are additive with other lifestyle activities aimed at improving health” (Mente, de Koning, Shannon, and Anand).

Being an omnivore sounds like having the best of both worlds. I enjoy my carnivorous cravings, “Mmmmm BACON!” I equally enjoy my daily dose of fresh greens and look forward to the cold autumn and winter days for some delicious butternut squash soup. However, I am uncertain of what kind of diet to pursue. Voicing my concerns with animal rights supporter Vanessa Cole has led to the idea of possibly becoming vegetarian, or even vegan. Would becoming vegetarian reduce my chances of acquiring a preventable disease or health condition? Since the conversation has started I have also been questioned on how I can eat meat, yet be an advocate against the inhumane treatment of animals, specifically Pit Bulls. Does my love of dogs constitute a valid motive for abstaining from all meat?

In “The Moral Instinct,” Steven Pinker introduces the concept of the “Moralization Switch.” “Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking”(Pinker, 34). Pinker also refers to the psychologist Paul Rozin who has studied the “toggle switch” between “healthy” and “moral” vegetarians. Unsure of where my morals lie on deciding on this new diet, I am curious to see if further exploration will give weight to one over the other. Which way will my switch flip, or will I stay an omnivore but become more self-conscious of my eating habits?  Unfortunately, the decision has become more challenging than expected. The age old question of, “What’s for dinner?” has morphed into a complex internal and external debate on morals.

This conundrum affects us all. There is a major disconnect between “us” and our “food.” “Many people are passionately opposed to puppy mills, yet still eat a hamburger from McDonalds. I think there is a pervasive ‘disconnect’”(Cole). Michael Pollan states, “The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check, either on the sentiment or brutality. ...nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians”(Pollan, Animal, 60).    

Health concerns have been placed on the back burner. However, recently there has been an explosion of documentaries, movies and books hitting the mainstream media to raise our awareness. Unfortunately, many of us do not have the time to sift through this information. With a brief look into our farming techniques and conversations with both healthy and morally conscious diners, I will attempt to locate a recipe for a well balanced diet.  

Picking up the critically acclaimed book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan sounded like the best starting point. Here Pollan attempts to follow his food back to its original source. Pollan commences with an in depth view into industrialized farming which constitutes a majority of the food we purchase and consume from supermarkets.  From following a calf, from birth to the dinner table, Pollan presents some disturbing facts for our viewing.

When pondering the life of a cow, we hold a preconceived notion that they spend their time moseying around a green pasture nibbling on grass all day. Unfortunately, after six months from birth this is no longer true. “Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and for half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth”(Pollan, Omnivore, 77). Although consuming grass is the natural ingredient for a cows diet, corn has emerged into the feedlot. By introducing corn the industrial farming business is forcing cows to go against nature and trains them to consume corn, which fattens them up quicker for slaughter and consumption.

Farms are no longer farms but CAFO’s, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. With the cheap prices of corn and the large demand for meat on the dinner table, large quantities of cattle are being corralled into confined spaces, “standing knee deep in their own waste” (Pollan, Animal, 63) and force fed an unnatural diet. These tight quarters also lead to unsanitary conditions in which severe ramifications have appeared. The cattle we are consuming are gravely affected by disease. Pollan states, “Most of the health problem that afflict feedlot cattle can be traced either directly or indirectly to their diet”(Pollan, Omnivore, 82). These health conditions “lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumenitis, liver disease, [as well as] pnuemonia, coccodiosis, enteroxemia, [and] feedlot polio” (Pollan, Omnivore, 83). To counter this rise in animal sickness antibiotics and hormones are being administered. “Most of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed, a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged (except in agriculture), is leading directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant superbugs”(Pollan, Omnivore, 84).

If the old saying is true then, by eating the All-American hamburger, in essence we are sick and suffering cows being unnaturally force fed by the lack of concern and greed of industrial farming. Does that hamburger or T-bone steak still seem as appetizing? Although this exploration has the capacity to make stomachs turn, cows are actually the lucky ones. In “An Animals Place,” Pollan states:

“...egg and hog operations are the worst. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their environment, at least don’t spend their eightweek lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. (Pollan, 63)

The “switch” has flipped. As Pinker states, “We all know what it fells like when the moralization switch flips inside us -the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause” (Pinker, 34). Feeling sick to my stomach, with a bad case of the dry heaves, I question my carnivorous habits. Cole states, “CAFO’s are Animal Concentration Camps! I think of the plight of farm animals as a holocaust” (Cole). Morals, as well as health concerns, have placed me on a crusade. Eating animals appears to be both morally wrong and contains severe health ramifications. Why would we partake in the intentional suffering of docile animals, forced to live in their own excrement, and eat their highly contaminated flesh? Nothing appears to be beneficial from industrial farming. Not only are the animals helplessly suffering, the American consumer is suffering as well. Pollan seems to be correct with his assumption that upon “looking,” “...we either look away or become vegetarians” (Pollan, Animal, 60). Although not having physically seen these conditions, can you unlearn this information?

Pinker also refers to Jonathan Haidt’s “morality sphere” which contains five points of interest; Harm, Fairness, Community, Authority; Purity. If we view the current system along Haidt’s five spokes of morality, there doesn’t seem to be anything moral about both the process and the practice of being a carnivore. Both humans and animals are being harmed. There doesn’t appear to be any kind of fairness to either species. The authority controlling the operation seems to have no regard for either species as well. Nothing looks pure about the entire operation. Both Pollan, Vanessa and now myself agree here.

Now had Pollan stopped there, the decision would a piece of cake. However, Pollan then takes us on a journey to “...a very different sort of farm. It is typical of nothing, and yet its very existence puts the whole moral question of animal agriculture in a different light” (Pollan, Animal, 64). "Polyface, where a half dozen different animals species are raised together in an intensive rotational dance on the theme of symbiosis” (Pollan, Omnivore, 127). Polyface farms is run by Joel Salatin and his family in the Shenandoah Valley. Here the animals live in a humane fashion and their diets are consisted of what nature had planned for them. Salatin, however, will not admit that his occupation is farming animals. When questioned his response is, “I’m a grass farmer” (Pollan, Omnivore, 127). In his intricate rotation of animals upon his main crop, grass, the animals feed upon it, excrete feces, which in return becomes a revitalizing manure to rejuvenate the growth of the grass. “It’s all a symbiotic, multi-speciated synergistic relationship-dense production model that yields far more per acre than industrial models” (polyface.com).

Here the toggle begins again. From a healthy perspective this appears to be a grand solution. The animals come across to be happy and get to “fully express its physiological distinctiveness” (Pollan, Animal, 64). With pastoral farming the animals plight of unnecessary diseases seems to be eradicated. Meat and byproducts would be contaminate and hormone free.  As Pollan suggests the price of meat may rise but it’s a price worth paying for the quality and safety of the meat. Yet, somehow despite this glorious sounding farm, I find myself still in a bit of a pickle.

Although Pollan makes a strong case for pastoral farming, Cole planted her seeds of thought. “While I think that ‘happy’ farming is a step in the right direction, I still find it to be exploitative, and unhealthy -- for the eaters and the eaten. ‘Happy’ cows still have cholesterol, they still produce the cancer triggering casein in their milk” (Cole).

Cole, however raises another concern. “If we farmed dogs on ‘happy’ farms, slaughtered them and wrapped them in cellophane, there would be a huge public outcry” (Cole). Knowing my love and concern for dogs, she states, “I do not understand how an ‘animal-lover’ can reconcile the act of consuming another animal with their [my] belief in animal welfare” (Cole). Pollan briefly touches upon this as well. “Half of the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig -- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog -- that becomes the Christmas ham” (Pollan, Animal, 60).

Which leads us back to Haidt’s sphere of morality. Here the lines of demarcation have become blurred. Is there an immoral harm being committed here? Pollan suggest not, since he did start his research while eating a “rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare” (Animal58), and his work appears to be a method for finding the healthiest way to stay carnivorous. Cole, on the other had, states, “At the age of 10, I knew it was wrong to hurt or kill another for my benefit, and you cannot eat meat without causing harm, so I promptly informed my mother that I would not eat meat again”(Cole). Should my love and concern for one animal extend to all? I certainly do not love all humans but yet feel that killing and murdering another is intolerable.

However, Pollan exposes hypocrisy within veganism. “The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky” (Pollan, Animal 110). If we did stop eating animals, what would happen to them? Farm animals have been domesticated for centuries. Would they be able to survive on their own? It appears that either way animals will placed into jeopardy. Is the “moral” answer to let them fend for themselves?

While contemplating this perplexing situation, I feel as stumped as Mick Jones and Joe Strummer of The Clash. “Should I stay or should I go” [Veggie]. “If I stay there will be trouble... [Heart Disease, Obesity, Diabetes...] and if I go it will be double” (Jones); not eating animals yet still consciously aware they are being harmed and slaughtered. The ability to come to a concise decision seems inconceivable at this precise moment. However, recognizing the severity of the situation, I do plan to engage in inquiring where my “food” comes from and what it is composed of. This process will most likely lead to a diet consisting of smaller amounts of animal products, perhaps eventually lead to vegetarianism, or even a vegan lifestyle. With all that said, I have but one last question. What’s eating you?

Works Cited

Cole, Vanessa, Personal interview. 21 Oct. 2011.

Jones, Mick, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Combat Rock (CD). Epic, 1982.

Mente, de Koning, Shannon, & Anand, "A Systematic Review of the Evidence Supporting a Causal Link Between Dietary Factors and Coronary Heart Disease."  Archives of Internal Medicine, 2009; 169(7), p.659-669.

Pinker, Steven, “The Moral Instinct.” New York Times Magazine.  Jan 13, 2008, p.32-58.

Pollan, Michael, “An Animal's Place.” New York Times Magazine. 10 Nov. 2002, 58-111.

Pollan, Michael, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: a Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2007. EPUB file. Nook.

n.p. “Principles” <http://polyface.com>. Polyface, n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2011.

[ecogradients]

“Look at it, this way…” by Cynthia Dantzic.

Unlike that elephant, seen uniquely from each of several positions by a group of blind individuals,

this fountain pool, in front of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, was seen from differing viewpoints by the same viewer, me, as I moved around its periphery.

It’s the same body -of water, not of an elephant- seen from a series of positions, only the light reflects uniquely from each viewing point.

So, here’s the question. Is it actually one and the same body of water?

How can the very same thing appear so different just by being seen from differing angles? Does the viewer actually affect the identity, the very nature, of the thing seen?

What then remains the same? The water? The reflections? The physical material of the water? Is there any unchangeable “there” there? (Thank you, Gertrude Stein.)

Remember, ”the camera doesn’t lie”. But can the eye? What does that water really look like? And, is this the same question as “How does the water look?”

“What does it look like” requires a comparison: look like what? A simple question, such as “What color is the water?” can be …unanswerable!

Well, as you can plainly see, in the end, when you look deep into the water,  or perhaps into any subject, the subject itself may ask…

A penny for your thoughts…

Want to put your two cents in?

(Yes, those are pennies under the surface…)

[ecogradients]

Prison Yoga by Peter Culley.

Robbie Norris teaches yoga at the Richmond Jail.

[ecogradients]

Every Day Yoga Dies by Spiros Antonopolous.

[ecogradients]

I Am The 99% by Jarrod Shanahan (Photo by Yossi Zur).

Hi, my name is Jarrod, and I am the 99%!

I am the meeting place of a breathtaking variety of dreams, desires, and impulses. Many have sought to form me in their image, to set me on an orthodox path, and to lay out my future in meticulous detail. But at present, my image merely reflects the unreconciled diversity of these bodies and aims, and is accordingly amorphous and inchoate and awesomely awkward. I am the premise for an unlikely roommate comedy that will never get past the censors intact. Some forces within me are willing to analyze every situation in its nuanced detail until the opportunity for action has passed and they can secretly breathe a sigh of relief. Some forces are bored with the repetitive review of every minor scruple and compel me toward unreflective action, possibly to my peril. Some offer an impossible yardstick against which I must measure my behavior, while others are satisfied to just get me all worked up and see what happens. Some want one specific thing and they want it eventually, others want everything and they want it now. Some desire a five year plan as a practical necessity, others scorn a five minute plan as the death of spontaneity. Some are really into repeating verbatim everything said by those around them, while others are more aristocratic in their tastes. Some see only the individual case, others only the totality, and both are thusly impaired. Some secretly aspire to seize power over all others, while others live for nothing more than the day when they will shut these megalomaniacal aspirations down. Still more yearn for quiet, the cessation of conflict, sleep, peace, man. Like it or not, I am a multitude, dissonance and dissimilarity pump through my veins, and sooner or later I’ll just have to learn to roll with it. Only a theologian or fascist or worse would consider the absolute resolution of all of this tension possible, let alone forthcoming, in anything besides my own organic death. But I must strive nonetheless for tenuous working resolution, and reap the hard-wrought fruit of compromise in a series of cautiously bumbling, self-aware steps and missteps across an unmapped terrain. My style is one impatient with itself. Without centralized rule I must constantly battle high pitched emotions and implacable libidinal urges, seeking to keep unified a body so dissonant, and so spontaneous, and so tenuously held together in its very tissue that its coherence for a mere second in time is a complete and utter fucking miracle. Yet, I believe this horizontal organization to be my chief strength, with which I arm myself against docility, complacency, and laziness masquerading as mature pragmatism, all of which menace my meandering path toward the unprecedented. For I embody the contradictions of the world which gave birth to me, I give them breath and a physical form, the aesthetic of which has been debated on the Internet. And I have therefore chosen to give voice to the insanity and schizophrenia of our rational world, a voice I offer in a mad gesture of desperation to hypothetical ears and against all odds, and must strain myself to shout in the face of sirens and snark and deafness and drumming.

I am short on sound bites when asked to account for myself, but this says nothing of the quality of my my own content. Instead, it implicates those who seek to parrot 144 words or less, tapping out transcripts like hung over court stenographers nodding their way half awake through a boring trial about taxes or finance something. If a self proclaimed analyst ever asks me to explain myself tersely and comprehensively, I will gladly do so in exchange for their analytical credentials. If only a meteorologist could ask the weather to explain itself! I am often accused of having few discernible goals save for the delusional and the utopian, but it is only by orienting myself toward the impossible that I will arrive at that which I can scarcely conceive of in my present state of consciousness, given the restrictions imposed upon me by my environment, upbringing, fears, desires, aversions, neuroses, vanities, fantasies, undeserved grandeur, and unwarranted self doubt. And what’s so wrong, anyway, with just compiling a big old list of things that I think suck and ought not to be? ...For starters, at least! When seeking to further discredit me, one may derisively point to my style of dress, my age, my educational background, my past behaviors, my employment situation or lack thereof, too much money in my bank account, too little money in my bank account, my deep rooted affinity with Bill Ayers, or perhaps my faintly foul odor, though this merely challenges me to force the discussion to the realm of ideas, where I have the high ground no matter how stupid my haircut or healthy my diet may be. And to clear the air, I begrudgingly acknowledge a very minor and marginal problem with substance abuse, which is pretty much under control and I’m trying to enforce the rule I have in place against it, so give me a break OK? Likewise, while acknowledging that my willingness to hang out with just about anybody has brought me, shall I say mixed results, I overall consider it a necessary first principle, though one which I must implement with discretion and be sure to never deprive myself of the ability to say “OK dude, you gotta go”. In short, I was once easily dismissed but that seems to be changing fast, and like it or not, I’m not going anywhere.

I am: one part peacenick, one part militant, one part jilted Obamaniac, one part actual maniac, one part eager Rousseauan, one part reluctant Hobbesian, one part hungry dude just looking for a sandwich, one part artist, one part laborer, one part spoiled child, one part wizend acetic, one part educator, one part pupil, one tiny part Ron Paul libertarian but I’d really like to get rid of that one part, one part layabout, one part frenzied industrialist, one part mad architect of impossible dreams, one part deviant destroyer of coherence and order, one part animal lover, one part carnivore, one part contrarian, one part true believer, one part nihilist, one part renegade spiritualist, and that’s all just one small part of me that comes to mind at the present! I am the bastard child of a world I now seek to dismantle and rebuild afresh. After all, who knows its dirty secrets better than I?

And of course I’m anxious to see how my history will play itself out, how I will develop and adapt, how my enemies will respond when they can no longer mock or ignore, whether I’ll squander my energy foolishly, or whether I’ll achieve the impossible. But this story will not play out today or tomorrow or the day after. I must not attempt to force the harvest of history by picking its unripe fruit. I must not mistake the morning I open my eyes on the possibility of a new day for the new day itself. For now and for now on I must work on myself with godlike patience and a sense of humor still more divine, keeping the rowdy kids in check, keeping the squares from making me square, telling the reactionaries to join me if they like but otherwise to go fuck themselves, and doing my thing, my own special way, like I did to get to where I am today. I am the 99%!