A Few Thoughts on Things, Equipment, Technologies (With Heidegger)

I know it’s quiet around here. I’ve been on the road and catching up. It might ramp back up as I am now getting back into writing (which in my case always begets more writing).

—

I’m currently wrapping up the draft of my “Is Music a Thing” chapter and dealing with smart questions posed to me when I took the chapter on the road this winter. In the chapter, I talk a bit about Heidegger’s idea of the “thing” which I get to through Zoe Sofia’s analysis of container technologies (which has been a key part of my argument about mp3s from the start). When I delivered it as a talk at NYU, Sofia’s framing dropped out a bit, and so then a very challenging Heidegger question emerged from Martin Scherzinger (or maybe it was the next day when we met in person at Columbia): why focus on a jug as my example of a “thing” (Heidegger’s example in “the Thing” essay) instead of a hammer (his example in Being and Time)? Wouldn’t the hammer example be more instructive since in that section, he argues that things reveal their usability only when they break down? The answer I gave at the time was I had made a choice of expediency, since I was after the container technology metaphor, and that was the line of inquiry I wished to pursue. But in going back through the passage in Being and Time — a book I have looked at a big but never really properly worked through — it is clear that he’s on to something in his section on things that drops out in the later “The Thing” essay. There is a strikingly Bourdieuan passage (yes, intellectual historians, I know that’s backwards, like calling Nietzsche a Foucauldian, but work with me here) where he argues that things don’t reveal their capacities to users in any kind of formal way. One comes to know a thing only through use. Now, for Heidegger, the essence still resides in the thing, which is then “revealed” to the user, but it is an easy leap to someone like Sarah Ahmed (in Queer Phenomenology), who read it back in a less essentialist fashion–that the qualities “inherent” in the thing are relative to the user. A hammer may be too heavy for me, but not for you.

(Of course, when my desktop computer broke earlier this week, I did not feel like it was “revealing itself” to me. I felt like it was screwing me. Instead of trying to fix it, I decided to kludge together a setup with my laptop so that I could keep writing rather than blow a day or more on troubleshooting.)

Also, in this reading I am really struck by the frequency with which Heidegger users scarequotes in Being and Time. The scarequote is a constitutive feature of so-called postmodern academic writing, so without knowing a proper genealogy, I can only ask: is the contemporary abuse of the scarequote–an abuse that surrounds us and seems to know no bounds–his fault?

Unreasonable Summer Goals, 2009 edition

I’m packed for ICA, which will be my last academic travel until maybe November. The comparatively long stretch at home has been a long time coming and I’ve had to turn down a few very tempting offers to make it happen.

Over the past year and a bit, my sarcastic “world tour” link turned out to be kind of true: I have had 3 “tours” that lasted 3 weeks or more: Europe in April 2008, Australia in August 2008, and New York-California-Cambridge in Feb-March 2009, with a whole pile of stops inbetween. I think I made 7 trips in winter 2009 alone, not counting my two May trips (Washington last week and Chicago tomorrow). And I ran the department.

But after workshopping pieces of the book and getting lots of useful feedback (including a smackdown or two, which is unusual but appreciated) it is time to settle in and get it done. And once it is off my desk, I have a pile of other projects waiting for me, including the long-delayed Sound Studies reader (still under contract with a very patient Routledge) and a pile of articles which is too scary to name here. Not to mention the two currently under review that will no doubt come back with lots of required revisions, if they are even accepted.

With about 20-30 pages of a chapter to finish plus conclusion cleaning and a bunch of finessing throughout, I am now aiming for an end-of-June finish to the draft. I am declaring it here to make it like a real deadline that I might even push myself to make, even though reviewers aren’t known for reading tons of manuscripts in July. It’s just a date. Of course as the whole thing has come into view I have a perverse urge to rewrite the entire front end (after all, the intro and first chapter are probably the most important parts of a book in terms of what people read), but first I will stop and get some feedback on the full manuscript.

But I have some other goals for the summer: I want to enjoy being here, spend lots of time with friends, get some regular exercise, take weekends off from all work (with an exception for writing if I am motivated, since writing makes me happy) and take better advantage of Montreal’s general awesomeness. And there are a few things around the house (both literally and metaphorically) to tend to. And hey, the design of sterneworks is starting to look dated. . . .

A Few Words in Praise of Public Health

Now that h1n1 has degenerated from a worldwide crisis to a party favor, people have been complaining about how various public health authorities handled the crisis, when the flu turned out to be a regular flu. While I’m certainly not keen on the paranoid behavior of Japanese bureaucrats who effectively shut down the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference (a real shame for the participants and a tragedy, as I understand it, for Japanese cinema studies scholars, who were hoping to use the conference to leverage their field in Japan), consider the alternative. With the outbreak of the virus, the press went into overdrive manufacturing fear and concern. If Public Health authorities had done nothing, and had it been a bad outbreak, they would have caught hell and rightly so. Had they done nothing and had it not been a bad outbreak, they still would have caught hell.

Public health gets much less press than hospital medicine, but it is a vitally important and underfunded part of the medical system. Because it is by its nature a bureaucracy–an entity that deals with the health of populations instead of individuals–it seems somehow abstract and ponderous. Yet public health measures, when they succeed, are to a great degree responsible for increased lifespan and the control of communicable diseases. When it fails, we get e coli poisoning in our food and cholera resurfacing in inner cities.

TV vs. Movies, Part 3000

Steven Rubio has a great post about a review of the new Star Trek movie that criticizes it for aspiring to being a television show (whatever the film’s flaws, I would be surprised if this were its problem). His objection is that the writer still assumes television is a vast wasteland while movies are still a bastion of high culture. But as Steven points out, it’s precisely the opposite. Even good films now lack the plot sophistication and character depth of the great long-form ensemble TV series like Intelligence or The Wire. Even art house fare that is supposed to be sophisticated, I often find lacking since the plot only gets two hours, and there must be a hierarchy of characters where the majority become more or less puppets in the psychodrama of the few; emotional content feels manipulative as character appear only to be tormented or rewarded; or worse, we are treated to pointless avant-garde experimentation. Meanwhile, even serious Hollywood has become so politically timid that most plots can be predicted from the first few minutes of the film. This was not always the case. Even cinematic closure is largely unsatisfying to me at this point. So I go to movies for special effects, mise-en-scene and cinematography, or maybe a good thriller, occasionally a good documentary or something really political–things that in fact harder to accomplish on the small screen. Past a certain point, I prefer if they just don’t try too hard on characterization or story telling.

Reconsidering the Barometer of “Placement”

A great post about what is occluded in the term “placement” over at the Edge of the American West seems really timely, given the bad job market this past year.

Mostly I just agree with it even though it’s more about history than Comm Studies. I would add that the placement statistic also reifies the idea that doctoral supervisors want all their students to become just like them — profs at research-intensive universities with grad students of their own. This has never been my philosophy as a graduate supervisor but when I am asked for placement data, I feel that such a philosophy is being projected on to me.

There is plenty of room for improvement in how professors talk to students about career options; and Universities’ (and departments’) own interests in promoting doctoral education are not usually clear to applicants or students. In an ideal world, conversations about careers are best had between mentors and mentees, since every case is different. But the problem is that such an arrangement renders a systemic problem a personal problem and it assumes that all profs are on the same page regarding these issues, when we clearly are not.

Someone’s got my number

I read more and more Montreal blogs — ones that deal with the city and with urban (and suburban) questions in general. I’ve got a postdoc interested in communication infrastructure and the US/Canadian landscape, and I’m reawakening to old interests in urban planning and suburban form as I start to get inklings of post-mp3-book projects.

My latest find is newurbanshapes, which has this fascinating post about Americans settling in Montreal (Anglos, scroll down for English). My favorite bit:

Why aren’t immigrants from America flocking to zones of Anglophone resistance, where they’ll supposedly be more comfortable and accommodated – able to use their native language and still pick up a few French words if they care to? Isn’t that, after all, what every English-speaker wants? [….]

The New American immigrants stem from a new breed of “lefty” (we’re assuming that since they’ve come and stayed here, they’re mostly on the “left”, a term I dislike, more on this another day) that is less universalist and more comfortable with particularity, the exotic, the conflicting, or even the offensive. They identify less with the individualist pretensions of the Canadian Nation, and are more attracted to “foreign cultures” which, in the East End, Saint-Laurent and Laval, with their foreign languages and strange ways, are more readily available. We’re assuming here that Québécois culture and language are the main draws — for the young and mobile American, there are plenty of other spots for taking in Chinese, African and Arab ambiance, whatever the case may be. Living next to people who complain endlessly about them and would like to have them dismantled in the name of “progress”, much like what happened in Louisiana, where you can no longer move to in order to learn and live in French, would prove to be a very unappealing option.

The writer underestimates the appeal of Canadian anti-Americanism for “lefty” Americans like me (though I confess to annoyance once or twice when it has been directed at me), but otherwise I’m right there with the analysis.

More on Sainte-Marie: Really Reclassified

Last weekend we wandered in and out of some of the attractions of Portes ouvertes design Montreal. There were lots of highlights: I was very impressed with the augmented reality work of Moment Factory. But recycling was big this year and a number of architecture, design and fashion outfits trumpeted their ecological approach. One such architecture firm, Rayside, had a pile of old plans on offer for visitors to take away, including a rather lengthy redevelopment plan for Saint-Marie.

They list the neighborhood as bordered by the river on the south, Papineau on the west, Sherbrooke on the north and train tracks east of Wurtele and Florian on the east. There are also maps of open and closed schools, empty blocks slated for development, and planned community facilities. There are plans to promote the history and unique local character of the area. Of course, the document is from 2006 so it is already out of date, but revisiting our old neighborhood yesterday as part of our design tour, we did see lots of new construction.

So I guess we should stop telling people we lived in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve for three years, except that it signifies better than Sainte Marie (when it signifies at all–if you want to know how social class and language interact, the small number of Anglos who have heard of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve could tell you a lot).