Arnold Pouteau woke up this week and he was like "you know what the problem is? I haven't posted any really incredible photos of NYC to Flickr recently". And when Arnold Pouteau sees a problem, Arnold Pouteau creates a solution:
You can go right now and check out his photostream here. Or you can continue to not look at incredible photographs every couple of days. Makes no difference to us.
We're going to try to do these posts whenever (a) enough stuff piles up that we have to clean it out or (b) we find something that's time critical ("this course on rhetoric is starting next week...") The content will be a hodge-podge of relevant disciplinary stuff, stuff that's designed to make us come off as smart, and anything that seems like we might agree with it. So if it's about psychoanalysis or philosophy of science then it's almost certainly in. If the words "American Empire" or "Zionist colonialism" are in the syllabus, odds are no. We try to keep politics out of this blog, but there are certain privileges to running an aggressive and glib low-traffic vanity project.
We've got the first roundup after the jump. A lot of this list is drawn from Open Culture, although certainly not everything. Future updates will include even more stuff from university feeds, cultural blogs, etc.
Physics is sometimes taken as the "hard problem" for rhetoric of science - if you can find rhetoric in physics, which is ostensibly the least rhetorical of the sciences, then you can find it in the other sciences too. In that sense, bacteria might be the hard problem for scholars of cognition - if bacteria turn out to be irreducibly cognitive, then all animals are probably on a consciousness continuum from human consciousness to total unconsciousness. And wouldn't you know it:
Bacteria--and by extension unicellular eukarotes--have long been considered to simple, too reactive and too determined to be a member of the cognitive gang. However, Pamela Lyon argues that this exclusion is unwarranted. She suggests that bacteria are sensitive, communicative and decisive organisms and bacterial responses are more flexible, complex and adaptable than generally believed. In terms of re-defining cognition, Lyon argues that behaviour at the microbial level is precisely what must be understood in order to comprehend how more complex and specialized forms evolved and now function. Lyon claims that cognition is part of basic biological function, like respiration.
The link goes on to describe Lyon's case study of myxococcus xanthus. We don't have nearly enough game on philosophy of consciousness to even check whether there's work being done by conflating different senses of consciousness (which is where this paper is probably weak, if it's weak anywhere...) But it's a fascinating read, and there's even a short overview of some of the key terms at stake in the debate - always useful in that Wikipedia "what's the terrain of this argument" kind of way.
On one hand, we're always nervous about the "science doesn't work the way scientists think it works" narrative - it sounds too much like a setup for the inevitable "also, science is just another narrative" punchline, and is kind of trivial to everyone who's not a scientist anyway. That said, the recent work on pre-Darwinian species classification is a little tangled. Here's the most recent update on work in the field:
Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull. The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in general treated natural kinds such as species as being defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. That is, to be a member of a species, an organism has to have all the right properties. After Darwin, goes the story, "population thinking", which denies that there are such necessary properties. Polly (she prefers to be so called) argues that this was based on Mayr's hatred of Plato, Hull's reading of Popper, and Cain's dismissal of Aristotle. In fact, she (and I) think that systematics practice was not at all based on metaphysics, but on good empiricism and she terms her replacement view "the empiricism story".
There are a couple more references, but I'm going to make you click over to Evolving Thoughts to get them if you're interested.
Obviously this is in some ways an aggressively pro-science spin: "rather than being guided by metaphysics, good scientists were (of necessity?) sound empiricists". But there is a slightly different take that's a knock against the triumphalist "we're led only by the facts no matter how radical they are" self-image of the average scientist on the bench. The idea in this triumphalist narrative is along the lines of "what's the big deal in scientific revolutions - we're not changing how we do science, they are good science". More technically, the triumphalist narrative eschews the influence of categories of thought - it's the "science is driven entirely by data and results" narrative.
After the jump, why that narrative is incomplete. Plus some Peirce.
Make sure you stick around till the very end for the most spectacular dance party ever. When they finally launch their attack, will we even want to oppose their cuteness?
Incidentally, Spoon is reuniting with this insanely cool little thing on September 10th in LA for a Creative Commons fund raiser. Naturally tickets went on sale the same week we started quals, and of course they sold out almost immediately. If anyone has an extra ticket lying around that they'd like to get rid of - there are literally a dozen ways to contact us in the sidebar.
Jim Brown has a little blurb up over at The Blogora about a new Rhetoric and Composition Job Wiki. It's MLA-centric instead of NCA-centric, but the idea is certainly right - give people a place to post where their schools are in the hiring process, from the initial job posting through offers/rejections until an offer has been accepted.
Theoretical physics has actually been on top of this for about a decade, and they've got one of the more amusing disciplinary mechanisms for distributing job information (it's also kind of adorable in that MIT prank war, "awww... geeks are so cute when they try to be mischievous" kind of way). Before we get to that, though, we need to have a little chit-chat about a broader kind of NCA transparency.
For far too long, NCA attendance has been divided between two camps: the haves and the have-nots, the big R1s and the small colleges, the privileged and the disenfranchised - the people who know where the open bars are and the people who don't. This needs to end. First, there's the social justice angle. Fair enough: equality, old-boys network, etc etc. But also, listen: something has to be done about this - the lines and wait times at the open bars of a certain bi-coastal Saturday night party are getting insane. Just surreal. It's the perfect example of how asymmetries in market information cause dislocations that screw things up for everybody. NCA needs a better system for helping destitute graduate students locate food and alcohol on Friday and Saturday night. There are always departments that for random reasons - recruitment, hiring, welcoming, etc - have decided to give back to the community on any given year. It'd be churlish not to help them. Send us your school's party info (or really, anyone's info) - where, when, quality of food, degree to which the bars are open - and we'll post what we get. This nonsense should all be on CRT-NET anyway, attached to ever CFP.
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If you've never seen Chris Marker's La Jette, do it now. The entire thing is just under 30 minutes and we assure you that there is nothing you could possibly be doing that's more important than sitting down and watching the sublime brilliance that is this film. Don't put off watching it until you get home: what if you - God forbid - get into a car accident and die? Then you'll die having never seen La Jette, and your soul will stay empty and hollow for eternity. That's actually what the Bible says, chapter and verse. You can look it up. Nota bene:
#1 sign that you might be reading stab-your-eyes-out-to-make-the-pain-stop film criticism: the phrase "the Lacanian gaze" appears in something other than a footnote making fun of people who use the "the Lacanian gaze" in film criticism (#2, incidentally, is about the phrase "the feminine (m)other" and proceeds pretty much the same way). Not that there's anything wrong with talking about the Lacanian gaze. The concept is developed rigorously and robustly in Seminar XI on the Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psychoanalysis. The relationship it posits between corporeality, the scopic drive, and the real represents some of Lacan's most intriguing work. So the problem with a lot of Lacanian film criticism is not that it discusses the dynamic of the gaze, but that it... lacks something in the way of rigor.
Take the stereotypical setup of Lacanian feminist film theory: a male viewer watches a female actress on the screen, transforming her into a passive sexualized object. The critic then cites Lacan about the horror of the gaze - maybe even polemically conflates some technical and nontechnical descriptions of fantasy - and then done and done. We can't follow a ton of Seminar XI, but there's at least one thing that Lacan is absolutely clear about - "having someone look at you" is not the gaze.
Zizek has this line about how the amazing thing about Lacan is that scholars keep finding whatever they want in his work - in this misreading, Lacan becomes a proponent of a particularly banal kind of second wave feminist pop ego-psychology. The problem is not necessarily that this gets published - we need jobs in universities, where there are nontoxic crayons and rounded scissors, lest academics go out into the real world and injure themselves or others. The problem is that there is a ton of explanatory work that can be done by reference to the gaze, provided that it's firmly and rigorously linked to the rest of the Lacanian architectonic.
Part of the brilliance of La Jette is the way that it exemplifies the trauma of the gaze. The first clinical sequence - from where the whispering starts at about 4:30 to about 5:45 - perfectly displays the gaze as the sensation of being looked at from all sides without being able to find who is looking at you. A fuller explanation is after the jump, plus your required daily dose of Foucault bashing. Because around here, we make our own fun:
We've been reading some academic studies about the blogosophere and - deep breath - we think that quantitative analysis might have some problems getting at what's really going on. The problem has to do with studies that use links to evaluate trust and communication - because, well you've got to count something, right? You could use shallow natural language processing, but you still need to figure out who's being referenced - and that gets screwed up by nicknames, substitutions of authors for blog names, embedding of reference within urls, etc. To solve that you need to know something in advance about the domain you're studying - and that's precisely what scholars are supposed to pretend not to know (a little bit of methodological fetishism that, by the by, is not exactly unknown on the humanistic communication side of the spectrum either).
Even if you could overcome all that, it's not hard to figure out why natural language processing of the blogospere might run into problems. We suppose you could hand-code all the content. But then instead of studying the blogosphere you're studying how apathetic 19 year olds screwed up your data because they couldn't understand political content or sense ideological valence. Not that the equivalent doesn't form the basis of much day to day social scientific practice anyway, but whatevs.
The methodological problem is that linking and blogrolling are no longer "naive" - what linking signifies has now become reflexive. When Fred Thompson's campaign blog went live, Hot Air's Allahpundit drolled that while the content is pedestrian thus far but the blogroll is impeccable - minus the absence of MichelleMalkin.com, the home blog of A-list blogger and Hot Air owner Michelle Malkin. That topic provided more grist for the reflexive joke mill when her site was added a few days later. This rhetoric wouldn't present any real methodological problem as long as bloggers still used links as if they were naive. But - of course - that's not how the world works.
Omri Ceren is a PhD student studying Rhetoric at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.
