Carey, the Telegraph, digital time and the voice of energy

I loved this reading, because I think that Carey points out an important historical, social and economic moment that should be common knowledge, or at least taught more in schools, and that is is how our current system of time zones and coordinated timing of trains (and the stock market thereafter, most likely) came into being. According to our reading today is the anniversary of the first time people in the USA conceptualized the nation continentally in four time zones by matching major city clocks across these zones. I like how Carey writes about the telegraph as having such far reaching consequences in narrative style and human speech, in changing human thought to understand the possibility of instantaneous communication over a long distance. It probably isn't a coincidence either that when I type in "telegraph" into Google's search engine, the first item that appears in my browser window is a link to the UK newspaper, the Telegraph.

My father has worked for decades in the telecom industry and he spent his early career as an electrical engineer at Bell Labs before deregulation. I never tire of telling people how proud I am of his work- he was involved in the research and development of early frequency control devices, oscillators made first of quartz and later silicon, that control digital devices by stabilizing their electrical signals. In essence they act as clocks for digital devices, controlling the stream of 1s and 0s in our iPhones and computers, amongst other more sophisticated electronic devices and machines. I am (obviously) too young to remember the telegraph but I do remember early telephones developed by AT&T for consumer use that enabled people to see the person they were speaking to on a small screen above the keypad. I thought these machines were revelatory at age 7, and so did the people at the AT&T convention we attended, but consumers never wanted to buy $1000 telephones even if they could see their friends and distant relatives on them. Perhaps the 'transaction costs' were too high. Now, we have virtual teleconferencing capabilities and telepresence technologies that make use of the Internet, though the costs of these media is still prohibitive to some extent to the mass market (at least in the latter technology.)

I'm going to end this post by citing the lyrics to The Voice of Energy, a lesser known song/speech through vocoder by one of my favorite music groups, Kraftwerk. I have always been a fan of their playful yet obsessive engagement with technology, electricity, electronics, and communication. Carey says this, tangentially, and I agree- changes to synchronous/instantaneous communication technology depended largely on controlled manipulation of electricity, which dates back to the late 19th century- quite recent! Back to Kraftwerk, though- I think that their continued use of metaphors linking humans to machines is appropriate to our discussion here and also to Carey's notion of discourses of electricity and religious ideology:

Kraftwerk
 - The Voice Of Energy

Hier spricht die Stimme der Energie

Ich bin ein riesiger elektrischer Generator

Ich liefere Ihnen Licht und Kraft

Und ermoegliche es Ihnen Sprache, Musik und Bild

Durch den Aether auszusenden und zu empfangen

Ich bin Ihr Diener und Ihr Herr zugleich

Deshalb huetet mich gut
 Mich, den Genius der Energie
***

This is the Voice of Energy

I am a giant electrical generator

I supply you with light and power

And I enable you to receive Speech,
Music and Image through the Ether

I am your servant and lord at the same time

Therefore guard me well

Me, the genius of Energy

Imagined Communities

Benedict Anderson has me wondering how much of a "community" like the nation is in fact "imagined", that is, related to my presumption or belief that I have historical or social affinities with people whom I will never see. I find it hard to conceive of the "Nation" (the capital "N" is intentional"), a seemingly enormous and somewhat ambiguous entity, as a "community" in the first place, since the latter term carries with it connotations and associations of the local, of smaller, more focused boundaries and perhaps a different kind of social participation than the national, semi-abstracted scale of a representative democracy.

We see national symbolism around us, and systems of representation that reach into our personal and political identities. Even I choose not to call myself American for whatever reason, I can't escape the fact that identity by way of country of origin is linked to how other people perceive me and how I am recognized by my government (if I want to be legally recognized with attendant Constitutional rights.) Is national awareness a matter of social conditioning and construction like we said in class? Aren't nations a little too gigantic to be functional communities, if even imagined ones? Clearly Anderson is trying to do is change existing anthropological and sociological ideas of "community" from their roots in observed and rule-based structural analyses to something more psychological, attitudinal, and even technologically defined.

On another note, when I think about all of our discussions about technology, education, and life and literacy in the past versus the present, I always return to the same head-scratching paradoxes. We are living in a world where depending on the scope of our investigations of human patterns we can find elements (to name just a few) supporting the predominance of globalizing forces that reach beyond traditional "imaginings" of the nation, like the force of stock market, trading, and extensive trans-national currency systems and forms of governance/justice. On the other hand we are right to believe that the governments of nations instrumentalize the idea of the "nation" as imagined community to shape themselves and wield sovereignty over other nations or disputed territories.

It's so difficult to think about the importance of nationalism without thinking about globalization (and capitalism and colonialism) and all of these ideas turn into one giant historical game of Chicken and Egg, at worst. I do like how we are discussing these ideas from the lens of communication and media, and the entryway of print and language as central to the process of nation-building, identity politics, and popular culture. I also think our discussion about generational attitudes towards media is worth returning to for the last part of this blog: There is definitely a push and pull of different generations, from inside the family, to the makeup of institutions like schools and government throughout the world, to negotiate the influence of popular culture through music, television shows, movies, video games, and the technologies that transmit or mediate these elements. Do these products represent their home nations (or not), and how critical are they to establishing an imaginary collectivity and sense of "community" in their dynamics of language, space and time along the lines of what Anderson sees in print media? I see a strong demographic and ideological segmentation in the "imagined-ness" of the nation, and that even within one nation different groups will embrace or reject cultural products as representative of their nation. And because people have migrated and settled all over the world at this point, it makes analysis even more difficult. Think of the rejection of "Slumdog Millionaire" by many Indians all over the world and also in India- it was passed off by many for portraying India in a negative light, as an impoverished nation and full of the standard cliches pertaining to countries with regions and people in different stages of development. Yet what do the statistics of recent urban Indian poverty show? If the film was directed by an Indian person would it have been portrayed and received differently internationally, as "authentic"? Who can criticize national identity- the insider or the outsider? How do we imagine our nationality now in a world that is both nationalist and post-national, depending on who you ask and where you are and what angles you are comparing? Just some thoughts.

Elizabeth Eisenstein & Conjectures on Printing

I've heard the book that this article eventually becomes cited innumerable times, and I was happy to finally read the initial investigations. The little voice in me of proper historical method was first irritated that Eisenstein lacked much empirical evidence to back up her conjectures in this particular article, but it didn't matter later as the article developed and readers like myself could see how her project is twofold: one, to bring a revisionist angle to current accepted facts regarding history of printing and books, attacking generalizations such as "the book led to standardization in language and religious thought" and "the religious standardization of printing and language led to a demystification in texts and social practice"; and two, to bring questions of printing's "effects and consequences" into other fields of research, such as technology, sociology, the political economy of media, language, and theology/religion.

As Eisenstein says, the history of printing and its ramifications is "uneven", with differences in the kinds of social, religious and political impact depending on the scope of one's research. For example, Eisenstein brings our attention to how book printing had numerous distinctions for its first consumers, who themselves varied in demographics, and in what they perhaps wanted to read, what they could read (based on limitations in literacy and in government or religious-decreed access), and their level of access to books. Some other thoughts I gathered from this article (though it sort of conjectures a little too far into the present at the very end) relate to methodology: good historical research needs to constantly question assumptions and also that the printing of books is an example of an object of study where there is a clearly meta-communicative and meta-investigative level, especially for the historian. Books are not exclusively disposable commodities- they are objects that can be constantly re-circulated, and their content is in some sense another form of sociopolitical or socioeconomic value: books can increase one's skills, change or reinforce one's opinion, and bring about non-localized or localized solidarity.

The same is true today vis-a-vis more "immaterial" non-printed forms of content and their corresponding economies of information distribution and circulation, which are products and processes clearly linked to (and also divergent from) economies of book distribution. Regarding non-printed text, I think that format does play a huge role in distribution and in acceptance of content. How differently do we treat reading ancient documents in comparison to the windows we read onscreen? How does our attention change in relationship to these reading formats? How might our attitude change when we look at books versus computer printouts or flyers we get on the street? How might certain formats work well with specific kinds of content? I recall feeling a little disdain when I first saw the Kindle. Are children reading PC tablets or text on the iPhone as their versions of "My First Book"?

Victor Hugo & Frances Yates

In The One Will Kill the Other, Hugo links the the death of the symbolic power of buildings and monuments with the invention of printing and the mass circulation of books. He organizes his argument around what he imagines edifices and monuments to represent and even embody, namely, the rise of certain theocratic civilizations and the unity of ideas and people. With the rise of printing, however, comes the twilight of architectural innovation and the proliferation of endless derivatives of earlier forms of building. Conversely, in the world of human ideas, the printing of books allows for a multiplicity of opinion: even the possibility of dissent and revolution.

I found it curiously ironic that Hugo uses a/the book as a metaphor for both architecture and printing. He calls one the "Bible of stone" and the other, the Bible of paper" (180). That analogy reminds me of former ideas of the indisputability of truth in writing, which like architecture, was considered a sacred practice (think of the Mosaic tablets and rituals of the Freemasons.) Of course I can't speak of the emergence of the printing press without speaking about current ideas of computer and information technology, desktop publishing, and the Internet representing, for some, the death of the text as a fixed, non-editable "whole." I don't agree with ideas that books are dead, necessarily, or that they existed as some pure form of knowledge- the writing, editing and publishing of books have always been a messy affair, in terms of problems of translation, access, and distribution.

Yates credits the anonymous author of the Latin text, Ad Herennium, with first describing the historical technique of memorizing sequences of images and ideas in accordance with the mental placement of these ideas on selective locations. This technique was instrumental to orators and scholars who 'mentalized' knowledge with great effort, since they did not have the ways and means of conveniently writing their ideas down and bringing them around. People practiced generating ideas, remembering their sequence, and finally delivering their speeches convincingly; in some ways, they made their minds a kind of portable locus of patterns of ideas and images that could be easily expressed in speech. Yates even mentions how the art of memory had significant ethical value, and how Thomas Aquinas attributed the virtue of prudence to artificial memory.

The chapter reminds me of how much current literature in education stresses conceptual thinking over memorization of small details (or curriculum based entirely on memorization without understanding.) Memorization of ideas and words is still desired in many areas of study, including anatomy or other biological sciences, as well as in language acquisition. Also, memorization practices and techniques are still critical today to the performing arts (theater, music and film), though the techniques for music and theatre are more related to kinaesthetic and syntheaesthetic memory- bodily repetition- than merely mental imaginings to trigger a pattern of thought.

The Aeneid

Why did we read this text? I am failing to understand how the Aeneid fits in the broader scope of our course. Were we reading it as a contrasting text to the performed Homeric epic, and as Professor McClintock was saying in class, were we trying to consider it as a written poem (that would have been recited from time to time?) In what context did the Romans read the Aeneid? Did they read it in schools and have to memorize it? Were we reading it as a precursor to Francis Yates and trying to understand what poetic devices did for the memory and construction of abstract ideas? I want to avoid the banal answer of saying, yes, we read it because it's an integral part of liberal arts education. I found it rather difficult to extrapolate a sense of education based upon the several books we read. Were we speaking of education during Virgil's time or our own lifetime? Maybe our discussion questions were a little too open-ended.

I can read the text in the sense that I can appreciate it on its literary and historic merits; certainly, Virgil made an enormous contribution to poetic structure, the world of narrative ideas, our knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology, and also to Greek and Roman arts, ethics and military history. There are so many ways of approaching the Aeneid, yet for some reason I could neither engage with this text in the context of this class, nor in the context of my life! Maybe my attitude towards understanding this text speaks to how distanced I feel from war, even though we are currently still fighting one and "wars", whether real or rhetorically imposed, are going on all the time around us: the war on drugs, shadow wars, etc. It's interesting to think that wars in ancient Rome and pre-Roman times were not fought for an idea of "democratic freedom" but rather fought as a predestined activity fulfilling a desire for imperial expansion.

In my reading, I inclined to believe that Greco-Roman warriors thought that one good reason to conquer people was to enlighten them with "peace" and bring them out of psychological and philosophical darkness (the Allegory of the Cave comes to mind.) Virgil describes a Roman encounter with far-flung cultures at the end of Book VIII, and although the context is celebration, I find it rather depressing, and the procession described as somewhat funereal. Roman conquest spelt the end of some civilizations.

"But entering
the walls of Rome in triple triumph, Caesar
was dedicating his immortal gift
to the Italian gods: three hundred shrines
throughout the city. And the streets reechoed
with gladness, games, applause; in all the temples
were bands of matrons, and in all were altars;
and there, before these altars, slaughtered steer
were scattered on the ground. Caesar himself
is seated at bright Phoebus' snow-white porch,
and he reviews the spoils of nations and
he fastens them upon the proud doorposts.
The conquered nations march in long procession,
as varied in their armor and their dress
as in their languages. Here Mulciber
had modeled Nomad tribes and the Africans,
loose-robed; the Carians; the Leleges,
Geloni armed with arrows. And he showed
Euphrates, moving now with humbler waves;
the most remote of men, the Morini;
the Rhine with double horns, the untamed Dahae;
and river that resents its bridge, the Araxes."
(929-950)

Latour & Science/science

In "Why Political Ecology Has to Let Go of Nature," Latour argues that proponents of "political ecology" are correct in practice and not in theory when they take on sociopolitical and socioeconomic problems related to the environment. He has hope that they will drop their allegiance to a totalizing "nature" and the desire to instrumentalize science in service of political ideology.

Latour states that supporters of "political ecology" should not rationalize their actions according to a holistic idea of nature (and some even thinking of "nature" as something devoid from humans, or separate from humans), and take on a fragmented, more historically materialist perspective. "Nature" - and by nature I take him to mean the biological and physical world, not the "essence" of something, as per a more philosophical definition - is rooted in social relations and actions. He says, "Nature is not in question in ecology: on the contrary, ecology dissolves nature's contours and redistributes its agents." (21) Agents in this case may be non-human (Latour is one of the founders of ANT (Actor-Network Theory) and things like "rules, apparatuses, consumers, institutions, mores, calves, cows, pigs, broods"-- are all part of the problem. And the problems of nature and the political are interrelated and messy. The relationship is unstable, non-linear. He compares how we might now consider objects in nature as "risky matters-of-concern" that coexist with old scientific ideas, or objects that are constructed as "matters-of-fact".

What does this say about the human desire for scientific progress? Are our scientific endeavors still an attempt to take this idea of "nature" and harness it for our own? This seems rather 19th century, yes? What about the current desire to restore some sort of equilibrium? Was there never any kind of equilibrium to begin with? Is Latour speaking to the idea that humans can never agree on anything, including nature, and that my idea of "the environment" might completely different from someone else's, and perhaps both ideas are equally valid and worth investigating?

Education, Tradition, Argh

Reading Plato & Havelock was a reflective experience for me. I felt inspired to Google the Latin motto of Columbia University and found that Columbia's motto was "In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen", translated as "In Thy light shall we see light". Although this motto comes from the book of Psalms in the Judeo-Christian Bible, perhaps Plato's Allegory of the Cave is useful to think about as well. From Plato onwards we have seen this metaphor of education as light, as a beacon, etc. But for whom, and how do we educate? These questions were as urgent then as they are now. Not everyone then could be educated; people had to work. Someone had to bury the dead and bake bread and deal with a primitive sewer system. People had their places and class distinctions. They fought in the military and some learned how to be priests. They did a million things, with and without institutional or formal "education" as we might describe it. Mandatory education is a modern invention, and mandatory education for young people of even more recent origin.

Plato says that those in the light must not stay in the light. Yet- he insists in a Socratic idea of knowledge as the ultimate abstraction. The progression of cultivating philosopher-kings is such: they have to first learn about abstractions like arithmetic, and music, and then they will learn how to love knowledge, and then they can be socialized with other types of people in order to rule them, with love of knowledge and (to be extrapolated from this) some kind of commutative love for people. They can't learn poetry- because that would be the equivalent of us contemporary people learning in the classroom from telenovellas or other kinds of televised entertainment. If I continue with this analogy from a Platonic/Havelock perspective, I might argue that although there are history and science and other kinds of channels teaching us the ways of the world, we are ultimately not learning to think for ourselves if we engage in this medium or allow ourselves to be overwhelmed with the totalizing reality of these communicative instruments. This sounds familiar. We are not cognizant of what is virtue when we watch television or when we listen to Homeric epics, because when we do either one of those things, we are presented with a relativist portrait of virtue that we then imitate. (What is virtue, by the way?) Is that a good analogy? Hm. Are we trapped in cave-television where (true) knowledge evades us?

On the side of Butler Library the names of the illustrious dead Greek philosophers and poets are inscribed: HOMER< CICERO< ETC. (or maybe it is HOMER > CICERO >ARISTOTLE etc) As part of the Core Curriculum I had to read the works of these men, with the occasional woman and person of color added to our syllabus.

What are we preparing ourselves to do with education? Do academics stay in the light a little too long? Are we simply guilty of the same kind of oral-psychological mimesis as Homer when we read these "canons of Western literature/philosophy and thought"? Obviously I am overstating these issues; clearly, many of our legal, political and educational institutions have emerged from these principles and from many conflicting attempts to answer these questions. What about learning or education outside of the institution? Is there room in Plato's philosophy or Havelock's analysis of it for the autodidact? Why must learning be about virtue? Where do different systems of learning play a part in our cognitive and historical development? Isn't learning, for one thing, about self-discovery and possessing a greater appreciation for things like technological inventions or the human body or the rigor of Homeric poetry (and potentially trying to add to these worlds ourselves)? What of learning and practical applications of it, like helping sick people get better? Why do some of us continue, as Plato/Socrates did, to fetishize learning as something elite or conceive of it as something that requires an almost militaristic training? Learning and education: learning > education or learning < education. Please tell me.