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Engl364 - Blog 6 - Virno - Jokes and Innovative Action

                The idea that Paolo Virno seems to focus on is that of rules and their inherent meaning which is inferred as opposed to truly defined. He gives the example of standing at a street sign and interpreting its meaning based on all previous knowledge by which he could use to understand what it was for and not necessarily interpret directly from it of itself.              He appears to be saying that rules are ambiguous in any given case in that they can be applied differently and still maintain some form of understanding. An example of this could be in seen in linguistics, evident especially in words that contain more than one meaning, words that are spelt the same but pronounced differently (i.e.: wind, as in ‘the wind blew’ and wind, as in ‘wind up your watch’) and vice versa (i.e.: there and their). This idea is also not limited to just words but can be demonstrated through anything ranging from sports to religion.              Through this theory he writes about the greatest interpreter of rules or rather the transformation of forms in order to extract different meanings, this being the joke. The idea of the joke is that it itself sits in a “no-man’s-land”, it is subject to its own form and context and generally intentionally inverts or contradicts itself entirely for its own purpose, which is precisely to create dilemmas through its application. Thus it seems to simultaneously invert and comply with rules, in that it is changing the commonly perceived rule, but complying with its own.               Within all this wordiness seems to lie the simple idea of things not always having one simple meaning of which it can be universally applied. There seems to be more of a constant development in what is being able to be interpreted within any given idea, item or situation.

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Engl364 - Blog 5 - Kittler - Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

             Friedrich Kittler’s main focus in his work Gramophone, Film and Typewriter seems to be on the way in which people navigate, interpret and systematize their thoughts and ideas. Also how these systems and means of navigation and interpretation are defined by the technologies by which they are communicated.              This idea is demonstrated through the history of writing technologies; how they work and how they have affected the people who use them, both in the time period they were used and the effects of which still carry on to the present time. Even the idea of this blog would be supportive of Kittlers idea of taking a priori ideas and communicating them through the fairly recent system of a written blog on the communication device that is the internet, possibly using images with the written text in order to further project an idea. This could also be further developed further in the form of the video blog, where the oral tradition takes over from the written and people once again communicate at a verbal level, albeit a digital one. However this does not limit the video blog to a verbal medium it can also often be seen to incorporate text as well, whether as side notes or corrections to what’s being said or as additional information for whatever the subject is being talked about.              By drawing on visual, verbal, and literary aspects the medium of blogs shows itself to be built of all basic systems of communication which is not only easily accessible for viewing, but also able to be made by anyone, anywhere so long as they have the mass produced tools for creating them. Through this mass production then a blog becomes highly iterable becoming its own system of communication and understanding in the modern digital age.

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Engl364 - Blog 4 - Rama - The Lettered City

             Angel Rama’s chapter “The City of Letters” from his book The Lettered City is predominantly focused on the idea of a group of scholars, placed as an integral part of Latin American society, who are the ones who set out all written things concerned with the Christian Empire, this network is referred to within as ‘The Lettered City’.              The men who run this network are known as the Letrados and their purpose was to basically maintain order (both at a political level as well as a public level) and refine both the Latin American cities and their inhabitants. They went about this process and continued advancing to the point where they tied in to almost all higher positions of society, sitting om par with both merchants and political figures.               The Letrados ultimately appear to hold the position as the ‘gears of society’ it would seem. That is to say that they are the ones who keep the great machine turning, both by pleasing the general public (although with more focus on the white inhabitants) through various forms of art and symbols, and also pleasing the political sphere with whom they could offer their knowledge to as intellectuals.                There seems to be a lot of manipulation going on with the way the Lettered City functioned. These individuals were placed on a sort of pedestal on which they were praised in the ignorance of the general public (most of whom were illiterate) as possessors of great knowledge, as well as distributors of fine arts. As well as this they were given a sort of status among the higher classes as well, especially considering they were often advisors to the politicians and rulers of the cities.                 Overall these seem to be people who became primarily concerned with power and were a kind or ‘figure behind the curtain’ in not only running the city in a written sense, but also through development, ruling in a literal sense.

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Engl364 - Blog 1 - The Surface of Design

             Jacques Rancière in his chapter ‘The Surface of Design’ from his book The Future of the Image talks about the concept of “communal space” which is created in many forms by anyone who designs something that an idea or intent is present within. This covers anything from architecture to literature to advertising and how these all not only present ideas, but often can contain similar or even the exact same idea, merely communicated through different mediums, often to different audiences but which cover the same communal surface. This in-turn affects not only the appearance of things such as paintings but also how its meaning can be construed by different people to mean different things during different time periods.              The idea of things representing different things to different people at different times in history I believe is where the idea of communal space really takes hold and creates new meanings. Through this process people are able to be inspired and inspire others in return, this can affect the entire society onto which the new idea is presented and completely reshape how that society is not only construed, by how in its operates in every aspect. An example of this that occurs to me is the Bible and how as a piece of literature it came to completely redefine the communal spaces upon which it was set, effectively writing history in the form we know today.              The idea of “communal spaces” also never seems to die, for as long as some work is built or made, someone else will find something within it which they are inspired by and the process seems to infinitely occur to that effect. This becomes especially relevant with more and more mediums becoming available in which these ideas can be expressed and by the freedom of people in modern society to be less and less restricted on who can create and distribute, especially with the advent of the internet.

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Engl364 - Blog 1 - "Letters of the Alphabet"

             I suppose if someone in Ancient Egypt suggested that hieroglyphics were not the correct method to go about explaining things in a written form, that instead they should work out a system in which the sound of a word should be codified, people would be just as disbelieving as they are today of the idea of the numbers superseding letters as the main form of written communication.              Yet it is along these lines that Vilèm Flusser writes in the chapter ‘Letters of the Alphabet’ from his book Does Writing have a Future. By “along these lines” I don’t mean he writes about Ancient Egypt and their writing systems, but instead of how the alphabet seems to be becoming more obsolete with the advent of computers, which takes the binary code of computer systems (whose form is numbers) and converts that to other forms such as characters and pictures to depict an idea. He goes on to say that basically the entire reason behind this swap between letters and numbers would be that humanity is merely getting tired of the logic based consciousness that brought about the alphabet and desires a new form in which it can communicate through writing.              This theory seems to have a solid ground on which it spreads its root, shown through the fact that even tertiary institutions worldwide are beginning to phase out subjects concerned with writing from their teaching curriculums and instead are focusing on business and scientific courses as ‘the future’.               However there seems to be a slight, yet crucial flaw in this logic, that being the ironically simply, idea of simplicity. Languages as wholes are very different from each other, what can be said in one word in one language may take a full sentence, or even an entire paragraph to communicate in another. With that in mind if you are unable to use a computer to simulate what you’re trying to say into a picture through binary code it becomes a massively difficult and completely vague endeavour to depict what you are actually saying only using pictures or numbers and that doesn’t even begin to cover how difficult translation would become. Ultimately this seems a massive reason in which letters, for the moment, are far from on their deathbed.

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Engl364 - Blog 1 - "Built Pedagogy"

             The idea of the University of Auckland’s business building as a “built pedagogy” presented by Stephen Turner and Sean Sturm in the article of the same title seems to reflect heavily on the entire society it situates itself in. The article itself focuses more on the idea of the business building being a deliberately constructed space used for the benefit of the University to manipulate its students into a certain style of learning. This in turn leads to a certain type of intellectual norm (or stereotype) within which new ideas can’t truly be formulated by those who study there, leading to a further manipulation once they have left, and in turn been constructed to work a certain way, in the employment dominated world. This whole idea seems to evoke the spirit of Giles Deleuze’s concept of “control societies” –an extreme form of capitalism in which the powerful few dominate and prohibit any sort of social climbing or action that could be construed as a threat to them from the masses.              While the business building is shown more as a summarisation of the Universities ideas towards how their students should act and interact in the article, I believe that could be taken further as a pedagogy to reflect the entire rest of society as a whole. There seems to be no lines between the different institutional stages of one’s life anymore, a person will move from primary school, to intermediate, to high school, to University, where they must be taught the proper procedures of how to go about a practice. This however is changing at a rapid pace as more and more time needs to be spent in these institutions in order to move on to the next and ultimately have the ‘proof’ to say you are entitled to speak knowledgably about a subject. Thus the ‘real world’ keeps getting closer, yet all one really ends up with is looking at it through a structured lens in which you can see freedom ahead, but remain trapped behind ultimately restricting your freedom of thought on what to write.