17 March 2000
17 March 2000
I have been very impressed with much of the work being done in our class by the class members with their personal webpages. I hope that everyone can at least see their own pages beyond the extent of the classroom, and think of these pages or levels or whatever they are--as somthing that will come to represent them in some context, personally. The Luddite in our psyche must cringe at this prospect, but i really think that if we can accept the web technologies as advancing our own presence in this world, more the better. The relative truth remains that the Internet is mainly a commercial venture--meaning that it is used for the gathering and trading of information, which is basically commerce in its most simple sense. The void that is transposed into a commodified space, remains a void unless some humanity is place there, or at least the closest representation of that. I am very excited about the prospects of this area--the tranportation of information about us, for us, by us for everyone, for die welt, as the Germans might say.
I have been falling far behind in keeping up with the interesting designs being done by my fellow classmates. This is due to the fact that i had to go to a conference in Baton Rouge and then i came back and had a pile of work to do and logistics to take care of for the upcoming Richard Rorty visit. But i seem to have kept on top of things "generally."
This journal is becoming more personal and not as much about what technology i am discovering and the methods being utilized. but i would like to take a few minutes to talk about an on going discussion in my mind about the idea or concept of "culture." I have had such a difficult time with this fuckin' word. Why must it be so completely elusive? why must it remain untouchable in meaning? Like all words in our post-post-structuralist world, there is nothing but text. Great. Fine. But if that is case, we are left with nothing much more than a piece of etching in the sand or screen. I don't like that prospect. If we take the best things of post-structuralism (or deconstruction, or whatever stupid word one wants to use)--the disintegration of metanarratives, the complete and utter destruction of binary opposites, the valueless sign-signifier combo floating in the Platonic aether--and combine them with some other ideas, i think we start to get somewhere. The main notion that culture tends to imply is the idea of grouping or some sort of belonging to something that is "bigger" than yourself. This might be true to a certain extent, but even that is becoming a grand metanarrative that is falling apart rapidly. This stupidity with "culture" has made itself most aware to me in my own English 100 class with its rubrical "autoethonography" paper that i had my students do. The overwhelming majority of the students reacted to this assignment and its emphasis on self-cultural analysis as something that is "outmoded." What i mean by outmoded is that "culture" itself, within the "white" American majority--of whom my class is mainly made up of--is a non-issue, something that is not subject to question, because as Foucault noted early on, those with power tend to disregard any notions of their own ability to look at the power they wield. thus a student from Palo Alto or Los Altos in the Bary Area, or someone from Beverly Hills is going to be very sceptical about "culture" except in its most generic ethnic and racial designations. But yet those from places like Oakland, or South Central are very cognizant of "culture" and for these people it has designations beyond the simplicity of ethnic and racial meanings. This is when the interesting thing occurs, because the stories told by these groups tend to make the "white" kids go "wow...i didn't know it was like that for you;" or, "is it really that way?" These eye-opening experiences or stories are not metanarratives that fall apart under "deconstruction" and the like. These are very real, very specific socio-economic structures that place value upon groups of people and structure them in certain ways. I would not like to go towards a Marxist analysis of this, but i think Marx was right in many of his notions of relations of production, means of production, class distinctions, etc that structure the way we view our world from our own little cubicle. What i disagree with Marx is his essentialism that human history is based upon this, the foundational point of departure from being an animal caught up in nature to being a culture-ized civilian in society.
My notions of culture now fall into one of two categories:
1. CULTURE: all of the things we do not have to do.
2. CULTURE: all the possible relations and groupings of humans according to looks, socio-economic class, religious affiliation, political affiliation, sexual orientation, geographic proximity, etc. These are things that can not be changed easily, or are things dogmatic in belief, or are beyond our control.
Please go and check out these two notions of culture. They are where i am at right now, and i hope, these are subject to revision and change, as i do not believe that anything as important and as elusive as "culture" should have a foundational or static meaning.
That is all for this week.
Onur is completing his mission of trying to think about too much very abstractly.
he is happy. He wants a scotch.