just what my joculum readers wanted, more interdisciplinarity

I intend to write a less jocular version of this for cross-posting to Counterforces, but my mostly literary readership here expects a jig or a tale of bawdry, even if they are polite enough not to sleep, so this rendition is full of consciously inconsistent diction:

Imagery in the 21st Century: Half-Assed Notes on Cross-Disciplinary Thought, Occasioned by a New Book from Oliver Grau


I remain frustrated by the growing realization that while “interdisciplinary” is the word with which to conjure in today’s trendy academic environments, nobody is ever interdisciplinary enough.

Of course, everybody (myself included) writes for specific audiences, but this is part of the problem. Each of the audiences possesses a perspective and a body of knowledge that all the other audiences would find beneficial, could it be but translated into their vocabulary and their set of interests. To complicate matters further, we are speaking (he said rhetorically) about a small percentage and mostly a not very influential percentage of the body politic; by and large, society runs on grossly oversimplified myths that wouldn’t have passed muster even in those blissful days of simplicity that we in the Euroamerican civilizations call the mid-twentieth century. Each of us thinks we are enlightened, or hip, or in the right because our myth is different from the ones espoused by those ignorant folks over there, but by and large they are oversimplified myths nonetheless. Even those of us who are quite advanced in our specialties run our daily lives on gross oversimplifications, when we don’t simply ignore as much as possible the topics we don’t find interesting.

This now-familiar outburst was elicited this time by the inconsistencies of a potentially quite important new MIT Press book edited by Oliver Grau, misleadingly titled Imagery in the 21st Century—it’s actually about the uses of visual images in contemporary culture, both high-elite and lowbrow-popular, and in contemporary academic disciplines, plus the implications of practical applications of the latter plus a few side trips towards psychoanalytic territory. What we ordinary-English speakers mean by “imagery” has nothing to do with it, any more than the “imaginary” of high theory has anything to do with what ordinary English means by the imaginary—except insofar as all human ventures are made-up enterprises that have real effects in the physical world—“imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”

So vocabulary is one problem—large parts of the book are written in an international English that, just as George Steiner predicted all those years ago, is evolving as a language of its own, with nuances and accepted grammatical constructions that are not quite those of American or British English—Commonwealth English, I would say, except that the Commonwealth has quite a few interesting variants within it, just as the francophone possesses sophisticated variants on French that would horrify the French Academy.

Another problem is that even the native speakers who write about images, and even more those who write about their digital production, frequently don’t have a very firm grasp of the uses of English. (I presume the same problem obtains in the Romance and Slavic languages, but I’ve never read any outcries about it from those quarters, because that is not the kind of problem that gets discussed very much cross-culturally.)

Put more simply, they not only have no sense of literary style, they get commonplace idioms wrong. And yet they are the only translators we have for the specialized disciplines in which more traditional literary types are utterly at sea.

James Elkins, who contributes an essay on “Visual Practices Across the University” to this anthology, is capable of clear and consistent prose, as well as a capacity to look at the multiple functions of visual images in academically acceptable discourse. Coming from a background in aesthetics and art history, Elkins has variously looked closely at the difficulties of establishing a truly global view of contemporary art practice (practice that, as any skeptical reader of art magazines can tell you, does not always make perfect), and more recently at the multiple approaches to the visual image in fields of investigation very far apart from art. In this essay, he suggests that “Like languages, visual practices come in families,” with “the same affinities [that] occur in natural languages.” Elkins takes the overweening pride of artworld theoreticians down a peg: “There is an often implicit claim among visual studies scholars that image interpretation is theorized mainly in the humanities, but if there is a preeminent language family here it would be medical semiotics. by contrast, the humanities own only a small number of ways of interpreting images.” As he concludes, addressing his most likely audience, “…the disciplines of art history, visual studies, and even visual communications remain focused on fine art, popular art, and unquantified images. …[T]he study of the visual is carried on mainly by people who are uninterested in science and engineering and that shows no signs of changing,… But what reasons do we have, aside the many habits of art, our attachment to the humanities, and our lack of engagement with unpopularized science and mathematics, to keep our distance from so much of the visual world?”

And that’s only one essay. The very next essay, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s elusively language-savvy “On Sourcery, or Code as Fetish,” sums up the difficulties of a related problem: “It seems impossible to know the extent, content, and effects of new media. Who knows the entire contents of the World Wide Web or the full extent of the Internet or of mobile networks? Who can expertly move from analyzing social networking sites to Japanese cell phone novels to World of Warcraft to networking protocols to ephemeral art installations? Is a global picture of new media possible?” Chun doesn’t answer either of these rhetorical questions, the second less rhetorical than the first, because she moves on to her actual topic: the present-day notion in new media studies that all since all of these phenomena rely on software, they can be reduced to this “visibly invisible essence.” Well, no, they can’t, and reading through Chun’s essay leaves me, at least, convinced that new media theorists may not be the best source from which to begin thinking about the real issues in the mindset necessary to write usable code, and the uses to which this code is put. Chun seems to get close to the issues in her discussion, but her ignorance of other ways of putting the question somewhat vitiate her discussion of the fetish of source code—in spite of which, her explications of the basics of what is fetishized (not the code itself but the notions lying behind it) may be helpful to those of us who are described in Elkins’ concluding exhortation.

There are twenty essays of at least this degree of complexity to go through, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be capable of absorbing them sufficiently to produce a comprehensive, properly critical review.

But the sheer amount of ignorance—not stupidity, simply unawareness—implicit in the choice of topics and of language does much to push me towards the notion that there need to be not only Conferences on Consciousness like the one I have tirelessly been proposing, but Conferences on the Products of Consciousness that will address the problems of producing metalanguages within which we can do a better job of understanding what it is that we don’t understand (to quote one of my favorite Charlie Brown cartoon strips).

Design and Time, on Counterforces

Instead of cross-posting as I often done in the past, I have posted my 2009 fragment about design and time on Counterforces. (The piece ought to be taken up again and expanded, anyway.)

http://counterforces.blogspot.com

Names of the Not Yet Lost

A post by Atlanta Contemporary Art Center curator Stuart Horodner has reminded me that I meant to comment on the selection of Philip Levine for the largely honorary post of United States Poet Laureate (unlike the United Kingdom Poet Laureate, he isn't expected to compose encomia about the resolution of the debt limit negotiations or the meaning of the 2012 elections or, in fact, anything at all except what he chooses to write).

Levine has been one of my favorite poets for half my lifetime but it has occurred to me that his work may not be known to my readers outside the United States. So here, from The Names of the Lost, is the poem that reduced Richard Hugo to tears when Levine read it long ago at Callanwolde, the Atlanta art center where both were the featured poets:


Philip Levine
And the Trains Go On

We stood at the back door
of the shop in the night air
while a line of box cars
of soured wheat and pop bottles
uncoupled and was sent creaking
down our spur. Once, when I
unsealed a car and the two
of us strained the door open
with a groan of rust, an old man
stepped out and tipped his hat.
"It's all yours, boys!"
and he went off, stiff-legged,
smelling of straw and shit.
I often wonder whose father
he was and how long he kept
moving until the police
found him, ticketless, sleeping
in a 2nd class waiting room
and tore the cardboard box
out of his hands and beat him
until the ink of his birth smudged
and surrendered its separate vowels.
In the great railyard of Milano
the dog with the white throat
and the soiled muzzle crossed
and recrossed the tracks
"searching for his master,"
said the boy, but his grandfather
said, "No. He was sent by God
to test the Italian railroads."
When I lie down at last to sleep
inside a boxcar of coffins bound
for the villages climbing north
will I waken in a small station
where women have come to claim
what is left of glory? Or will
I sleep until the silver bridge
spanning the Mystic River jabs
me awake, and I am back
in a dirty work shirt that says Phil,
24 years old, hungry and lost, on
the run from a war no one can win?
I want to travel one more time
with the wind whipping in
the open door, with you to keep
me company, back the long
tangled road that leads us home.
Through Flat Rock going east
picking up speed, the damp fields
asleep in moonlight. You stand
beside me, breathing the cold
in silence. When you grip
my arm hard and lean way out
and shout out the holy names
of the lost neither of us is scared
and our tears mean nothing.