Unlecture Week 7

So, after listening to Adrian talk about the death of context for half an hour, I wasn’t able to restrain myself, and wrote a post about why I disagreed with it. Here is what I wrote.

My initial reaction was to want to write a post about this immediately, but as the case was, I had a two hour class right after the ‘unlecture’, and was unable to. This might prove to be a good thing, as my possibly emotional, and probably unreasonable reaction has since been tempered and I’ll no longer be shooting from the hip, so to speak, and might be able to argue this point better.

 

In essence, I disagree on several different levels, with what was discussed by Adrian in the ‘unlecture’ this afternoon. I understand his self admitted (seemingly in a keen way) position as devil’s advocate for these slightly challenging ideas, and for that reason, I assume no personal offence will be taken. I agree with some of your more progressive notions; the death of the book other than that as an object of literary study and the idea that as producers and that we are not being paid for our product but for the experience had by the consumer when using the product. Today’s discussion, however, was different. Not only because it challenged long held preconceptions about the role of an author, but because it seems to approach the argument from a limited point of view.

 

The main notes that I took, to help me remember exactly what heresy you were promoting, was that it is impossible for the context of a work to survive, and that an author has no control of the interpretation of the work by the audience.

 

On the second point, to some extent, I agree. An author is not able to control how their work is read. A Muslim will read Dante in a very different way to a Christian. A report on the success of an agricultural technique used on a farm in New Zealand will be read by an Ethiopian in a very different way to a Norwegian. That is the nature of context. Everything is subjective, and there is categorically no possible way to have perfect communication. No matter how you say something, it will be interpreted in different ways by different people. Loaded language used by journalists will mean something different to me, than it might someone who hasn’t studied media. That is the nature of language. It is imperfect. Which leads to it’s own plethora of problems, none of which I have much room to discuss here.    

 

His other proposition, however, that context cannot survive once a work is published, or produced, is what I do have a problem with.

 

Context, is everything. To suggest that one should take a work as an isolated incident, removed from the author and the time it was published, it ridiculous, plain and simple. How can you possibly remove a work from it’s context. And I don’t mean that as, “How could you possibly, it simply isn’t right (morally) do disregard such a long standing tradition”, but rather, that it is not possible (literally). How can you achieve a higher objective plane where the context of a work no longer affects an interpretation of it?

 

I remember reading somewhere once, that to read and understand Dante, you have to be a Christian for as long as the reading takes, or at least, words to that effect. To understand the author, you must insert yourself into the context of the author, in order to best understand it. How, otherwise, would you be able to marvel at the Wright brothers achieving flight for the first time, if you refuse to allow yourself into the context that is a flightless 1903. For the whole of my life, flight has been very achievable and is done thousands of times every day across the world. Who cares if the Wright brothers did it 110 years ago? Because of the context. It is in the context of the event that flight had previously not been achieved by humanity, thus making it an enormous step forward for us as a species. It was the context, as was illustrated in an interesting YouTube video about who certain people are successful, that showed they were one of several teams attempting flight at the same time, and were by no means the most financially or materially supported. That similarly increases the significance of the event.

 

If context cannot survive with a work, why is it that only last semester, while studying Kafka, Linda Daley suggested to us that we read his diaries to better understand his work? And that to read more of his work, including his articles, autobiographical pieces, short stories, and other people’s accounts of him, would also help our understanding of him.”

This was unfinished, but I think the points still stand by themselves. After I wrote that, I had a chat with Eliot about what exactly Adrian might have meant, and he suggested that he might mean it more specifically in the context (HAH!) of hyper-text narratives. And with this, I would agree. That is the function of the hyper-text narrative. To remove the authors context in order to give more agency to the reader.

But still, while a reader might have 30 options as to where the story goes next, those 30 options are still somewhat a reflection of the authors own context. A hyper-text narrative written in 1890 in Texas (supposing there were any hyper-text authors in Texas in 1890) might write about an adventure across the south of the United States, and as the protagonist, you come across a seated black person on a packed bus. Your 30 options might then be variations on how you might remove him from his seat so you are able to sit down. That might be a perfectly justifiable course of action in the context of 1890’s Texas, but in the present context, we might struggle with the ethics of choosing the best way to remove a person from their seat, because they are black, from the 30 options presented to us. The context of the author then affects us today, when we read the work. We are unable to avoid our own context while reading it (as is the nature of context), but similarly, we are unable to avoid the authors context as the choices he gives us within the hyper-text narrative will inevitably be choices that seemed reasonable to him when he wrote the text.

Perhaps, as Eliot suggested, Adrian worded his argument rather too strongly, so as to best carry his point, and for that, I might forgive him. We are all prone to exaggeration on points that we believe passionately about, and as his passion seems to be the forward progression of media and cultural texts generally, it  makes sense that he might push his point strongly.

Thoughts on that?

Week 3 Reading: Bruce Sterling on design fictions

One of the readings for this week was an interview with Bruce Sterling, an award winning science-fiction writer, but also a vocal advocate of what is known as “design fiction”. He defines design fiction as being, “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend belief’s about change.” Sterling is appearing at a conference at Arizona State University, called ‘Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future‘, which serves to facilitate lecturing and discussion about what the future might look like.

I found some of the things said by Sterling to be quite interesting, especially at his mention of a legal case between technology giants Apple and Samsung. In the lawsuit, there was reference to an iPad-like tablet that was used as a prop in the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which you can watch, here. Sterling used this as an example of a design fiction that proved to be successful, 45 years later, as you can now walk down to your local electronics store and purchase one.

Another interesting observation by Sterling was in his response when asked what it was that made design fictions work so well. He replied quite reasonably, “Talking about a future gadget isn’t like talking about a future government or women’s rights in the future or other hot-button problems. Plus people are interested in things like that.”

A pretty reasonable statement to make, that electronic toys are more likely to grab people’s attention than social rights or political issues. Perhaps a reflection of people’s general exhaustion at the topic of politics, or anything ‘serious’, or maybe more a statement about the imagination within everyone that needs, at least occasionally, to be exercised.

 

Day 01: No sight of land

Well, I suppose after a week of wholeheartedly avoiding this blog, I should succumb and publish a first post.

In regards to the second ‘unlecture’, there did seem to be a slight contradiction in what we were told was expected in regards to this blog.

  • On one hand, we were unlectured about the possibility of going to jail on child pornography charges if we failed to or incorrectly set up our spam fliters (which would serve to delete hundreds of thousands of potentially criminal messages attempting to weasel their way into our online existences), and that we could serve as a platform for people with slightly different values to hurl abuse and hatred at each other (Justin Bieber tweens on one side, Slipknot fans on the other, ready to wage bloody war on the battlefield of the comments section).
  • But on the other hand, we must frequently and casually post on it, sharing and publishing whatever takes our youthfully enthusiastic fancy, and hope that it vaguely related to the course (a minimum of 5 times a week).

The crux of these two things being that we were responsible for whatever comments were posted on this blog, which, as Adrian reminded us repeatedly, is here forever and will remain as a permanent digital footprint of us.

I see the contradiction rear its confused head now, with half of my brain telling me, “Oh yes Nick, write on the blog! Look how eager Cat is when she sees another dog at the park! Why don’t you have that unreserved enthusiasm for life?” (Cat is my dog, a Kelpie, nearly a year old with enough energy to solve Pakistan’s energy crisis and still have enough left over to heat a 7/11 sausage roll.) The other part of my brain, however, is slightly more reserved, and tells me in a cautious but understanding voice, “You might want to pass university, but staying out of prison is also nice.”

The issue seems to be, that I am struggling slightly to muster enthusiasm for a thing that could land me in jail through no active behavior of my own. To which I imagine Adrian’s reply, “You are legally able to purchase a gun, join the army and kill people, vote for the leader of this country and drive a car, I’m sure you will be able to manage a spam filter.” To which I would agree, I probably can. But the idea is still somewhat daunting.

Then again, I suppose I’d rather be informed and safe than sorry and eating canned peaches from a mess tray in Port Philip Prison. I guess it has to be viewed like a high school sex ed talk in health class. It brings the worst possible result of a behavior into harsh sunlight for all to see, which serves to temporarily frighten us away from risk taking fraternisation (with the internet…), but most likely will never occur. Not, of course, to suggest that it will never happen, but that if you take the right protective measures (the buzzword, I believe, is ‘careful’), you can significantly reduce your chances of any wrong-footing.

Which seems like a reasonable unlecture to have to sit through, even if at the time my main thoughts were focused around Barry, the overweight, wife-beater sporting pedophile who would probably refer to me as “fresh meat”, and would be my cellmate for several decades after being convicted of child pornography for failing to correctly set up my spam filters on my RMIT prompted blog.