Status of Females in IT
101 Technology Fun
101 Technology Fun
Design Research Camp for girls in grades 6 & 7
July 18-22; July 25-29
LEARN HOW TO:
>> make robotic pets using Lego Mindstorms NXT and Pico Cricket
>> design computer games, websites and virtual worlds
>> be a technology co-researcher in a UBC study
>> edit and animate your own mini-movies
SUMMER FUN FOR FREE:
We welcome all girls in grades 6 or 7. Please note that space is very limited. Registration is complimentary. A nutritious lunch, snacks, and outdoor adventures will be provided daily. Location: UBC Education Building. Program: 9:00-3:30 (with supervision available until 5pm).
APPLY ONLINE: www.101technologyfun.com
101 Technology Fun is part of the UBC Research Project: HOW WE LEARN (Technology Across the Lifespan). The program is made possible with the enthusiastic support of Graduate Students and Teacher Candidates in the Faculty of Education.
If you are interested in a volunteer position, whether it be instruction, curriculum design, photography, videography, or what have you, please contact PJ Rusnak. Thanks!
If You Let Me Play
Chilling words spoken by tween girls in a Nike tv commercial, 1995:
If you let me play, if you let me play sports
I will like myself more
I will have more self-confidence
If you let me play sports
If you let me play
I will be 60% less likely to get breast cancer
I will suffer less depression
If you let me play sports
I will be more likely to leave a man who beats me
If you let me play
I will be less likely to get pregnant before I want to
I will learn what it means to be strong
If you let me play, if you let me play sports
A heartful representation of the Nike ad text (by Jason W):
Jason W's Tagxedo - If You Let Me Play
Go Font Yourself #2
One of my #1 websites to visit for designerly inspiration is: www.deviantart.com
Here are a few of my favourite typography art works!
Far away from myself
Beauty is hard to discover
It’s a lie.
gun by mou5e
Education is the most powerful weapon
Don’t worry. You will be alright. I am here to help you. Everything will be ok. We will get through this. I will never leave you. Don’t give up. I am here for you always. You are not alone. I will protect you. I understand you…
The complete text of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem.
What Lies Within by um0p3pisdn
Emerson’s: ”What lies before us, and what lies behind us, is nothing compared to what lies within us.”
As soon as I open my mouth to speak of any of this…
… My words just crumble as they leave me… Never ever to reach you…
What is Education For?
What is education for? Why do we educate? What are students really learning in our classrooms? Are we over-schooled but under-educated?
“Today’s children starting kindergarden this year will graduate in the 3rd decade of the 21st century, a world that will have challenges and opportunities beyond what we can predict, with new possibilities and problems that will demand creativity, ingenuity, responsibility, and compassion. Whether our children will merely survive or positively thrive in the decades to come depends in large measure on the experiences that they have in school” (OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture & Bruce Mau Design, 2010). How might we join school learning to living well and well-being? As the WALL-E Captain famously says: “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!”
What do we want our students to know, do, and be? What is best for our children to learn for the future, and how can they best learn it? How do we educate future innovators (beyond mere conformists or consumers) who are confidently prepared for the opportunities, responsibilities, and experiences of life? How might we encourage “goodness” as part and parcel of school “effectiveness”?
There are no shortage of questions about “21st Century Learning” in a world of increasing instability, uncertainty, inequality, and unsustainability. Statistics estimate that we will reach 7.5-10.5 billion people in 2050 unless a major catastrophe happens. 2.8 billion people in our world live on less than $2 per day. 1.3 billion live on less than $1 per day. 1.5 billion people will never get a clean glass of water today, tomorrow, or any day in their lives. 115 million primary school aged children don’t go to school. And how many millions will go to bed sick and hungry tonight?
The Dalai Lama’s Facebook status on Monday, March 7 is worthy of contemplating:
Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings. Among the major troublemakers society has known, many were well-educated and had great knowledge, but they lacked a moral education in qualities such as compassion, wisdom, and clarity of vision.
What is most important for students to know? How do we educate confident, happy, citizens who are committed to sustainability, social justice, and civic responsibility; who are technology-savvy; who have strong morals, cross cultural awareness, and respect for diverse others? How do we teach and learn about managing and ensuring a sustainable world? How do we minimize our reckless abuse of one another and nature? How might education be more relational, compassionate, and caring, such that we might learn how to love ourselves, each other, and the planet Earth playground that we share?
Reference:
OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture & Bruce Mau Design. (2010). The third teacher: 79 ways you can use design to transform teaching and learning. New York: Abrams Books.
Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future
This is a fascinating time to be an educational researcher. As I look around, I see so much knowledge, new and old, that can be used to make our world good (not just better, but good), with meaning, purpose, and joy for all. Diverse ways of knowing abound with energy, emotion, passion, creativity, intelligence, wonder, happiness, and hope.
Excited as I am by the opportunities for my work to contribute a small but positive difference, I am also concerned by the taken-for-granted, narrowly reductive, rigidly categorized, and solely analytical forms of thinking that are often privileged as scholarship with the greatest currency. As a grad student, the dominant melody line that I hear (over and over) reinforces the notion that I need to more-critically argue my research into existence, for what really matters most are the clear-eyed empirical distinctions that I am able to delineate.
Part of me agrees with the resounding ideologies ”out there, dominating and clanging” as I want my work to be valued by a diverse audience. Another part of me questions: how might I align my empirical research (on how girls learn by design) with core humanistic values that love and respect people and the planet? Empirical evidence is essential for figuring out how to improve the quality of education and life in a more-than-human world. As such, how might I attend to both logical/ factual/ analytical interpretation AND holistic/ relational/ empathic understanding? These questions are increasingly relevant as we move from the Information Age (researcher as knowledge-worker, a well-educated manipulator and deployer of rhetoric) to the Conceptual Age (researcher as meaning-maker, an activist for real-world problems).
As Daniel Pink (2005) writes in his best-seller, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future:
We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.
It’s undeniably difficult to embrace “goodness” and wholeness in research, including mindful expertise, ethical convictions, and felt experience, but I do believe that writing informed by both “heart” and “head” has transcendent worth. Conforming to well-established traditional research orthodoxies would allow me to bypass my current struggles with integrating and legitimating an evocative, empathic, reflexive, relational, inter-connected, and creative scholarship, however, a passage from Oprah’s Commencement Speech at Stanford University (2008) inspires me to keep leaning into my knowing and being:
“What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you’re supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know. The trick is to learn to check your ego at the door and start checking your gut instead. Every right decision I’ve made—every right decision I’ve ever made—has come from my gut. And every wrong decision I’ve ever made was a result of me not listening to the greater voice of myself.
If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. That’s the lesson. And that lesson alone will save you, my friends, a lot of grief. Every doubt means don’t. This is what I’ve learned. There are many times when you don’t know what to do. When you don’t know what to do, get still, get very still, until you do know what to do.”
A Methodology of the Heart
.
“Though this be madness,
yet there is method in’t“
- Hamlet (Act II, Scene II)
So I’m struggling with my research methodology. I stay up late every night reading about it, I fall asleep thinking about it, and I wake up still pondering its potential and possibilities. It’s all that I seem to talk about to anyone and everyone who will listen (an audience I fear is now limited to my daughter’s hamster as I’ve over-exhausted friends, family and colleagues with my “Hamletian” confusion and indecision). Research methodology has taken over my mind… and body (i.e., when I go jogging, I no longer enjoy the music thumping through my headphones – I merely hear a distant background noise for my whirring methodological madness). I’m stuck in an intoxicating space somewhere in-between the traditional disciplinary boundaries of research and story, seeking a fertile place of researchland where I can flourish in my co-constitutive roles of researcher, designer, teacher, learner, and creative being. Why am I trying so hard to integrate a “designerly” methodology? Can educational scholars be storytellers/ storymakers AND learning scientists at the same time?
During my passionate search for alternative research methodologies to traditional academic scholarship, a dear friend shared with me Ronald J. Pelias’ (2004) “A Methodology of the Heart: Evoking Academic and Daily Life”. Please take a moment to consider Pelias’ description of the “soulless” university life of academics (in which who you are is all-too-often equivalent to your CV):
Many scholars have come to understand that what they believed to be claims of truth were best understood as demonstrations of the inadequacy of language or as reflections of their own point of view and political interests. As such ideas took hold, their certainty peeled away from the academic tower like dead ivy. They felt nervous, shaken, unsure when or how to speak.
The crisis of faith appeared in academic circles when a growing number of faculty discovered that the university life was not what they expected or bargained for. They were teaching students who seemed more interested in grades than learning. They were working for administrators who seemed more concerned with the bottom line than quality education. They were going to endless meetings that didn’t seem to matter, writing meaningless reports that seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy, and learning that service seemed to have little effect on others’ lives. Productivity was the motto of the day, so they published article after article that no one seemed to read, particularly those who were the focus of the study. They wrote piece after piece on social issues, but none seemed to make any difference. They researched topics that got them promotion and tenure but seemed removed from who they were. They felt empty, despondent, disillusioned. They felt spiritually and ethically bankrupt.
Then some scholars began to recognize that the emperor and, for that matter, they themselves were wearing no clothes. They started to question why university life had to be that way, why they had to be removed from their work, why only certain forms of discourse counted as knowledge, why they didn’t feel more connected to those they studied, why their mind should be split from their body, why they had to keep their emotions in check, why they could not speak from the heart (p.10–11).
Pelias’ Methodology of the Heart has many followers who believe that any scholarship that “doesn’t break our heart just isn’t worth doing anymore” (p.9). Many more researchers object, however, as they feel intimidated by their passion and therefore use rhetoric to distance it in their work, as bell hooks (2000, xxvii) tells:
“Taught to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the site of learning, many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity means we will be perceived as weak and irrational”
To which Pelias (2004, p.7–8) responds: “I speak the heart’s discourse because the heart is never far from what matters. Without the heart pumping its words, we are nothing but an outdated dictionary, untouched… I don’t want to go places where the heart is not welcome. Such places frighten me.”
“Are you frightened by the truth?” mocks a Pelias’ critic.
“No, I’m frightened by what poses as the truth.”
Works Cited
hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. New York: William Morrow.
Pelias, R. (2004). A methodology of the heart. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Watch Digital Media Learners (PBS)
Digital Media: New Learners of 21st Century
This program examines how mobile devices and digital media practices can empower today’s youth to direct their own learning.
Watch the preview and view the full story on PBS, Sunday February 13 @ 10pm ET/PT.
Go Font Yourself!
Designerly Assignment #1: Go font yourself!
Take typographical elements (such as the words of a story or a favourite quotation) and bring them to life using “Artext” to reinforce and emphasize the meaning-making potential of your images. For example:
Obama's Deep Set Eyes of Hope
Amnesty International: Help us win the fight for a complete ban of landmines
Art is Breaking the Rules
Death by Topography
Stacy Benson Self Portrait
Helvetica Helbotica
From TRASH to TREASURE
How is YOUR heart divided?
Beautiful Life (by Nate Williams)
Check out this Pepsi TV ad using mainly typographic elements with animation, warm colors and upbeat music – connecting feel-good and energizing messages with the brand’s new logo replacing the letter “O.”
WhatTheFont for iPhone is a must have app for all my fellow typophiles (type geeks & obsessive font lovers). Get out your iPhone, snap a photo sample of the type in question (from a magazine, poster, web, etc), and the font will be identified in seconds. So far, I’ve found this app to be quick and fairly accurate. I recommend spending a couple minutes in Photoshop to lighten or remove the background noise and increase the contrast. What are you waiting for: get off my blog and go What The Font!
Star Wars Surprize
5 fav 5-letter words
TRUTH
“What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens” (Robert McKee, 1997, Story). Or, to put it another way: truth is what you believe about a fact. Truth is perception. Reality is fact. You may believe that your truths are the facts, however, others may disagree. In seeking truth, you need to get all sides to the story.
STORY
A Jewish proverb asks: “What is truer than truth?” The answer: story. This old adage implies that the stories we tell about ourselves, our lives, and our worlds can reveal as much as (or more than) the hard-evidenced facts. And the truth about stories? That’s what we are, that’s what we have never ceased to be, that’s what we simply become once more: human stories.
As old as humankind, existing in every society and in every person, story gives meaning to our lives: “our lives are story and our story is our life” (Baldwin, 2005, Storycatcher). We are all storytellers who, individually and collectively, lead storied lives. We understand the past in terms of our stories, just as we seek to understand the future in stories, often finding a hidden presence of our stories in others. Stories that are refusing to be still, wanting to be valued, and urging to be understood as, “our stories are the masks through which we can be seen, and with every telling, we stop the flood and swirl of thought so someone can get a glimpse of us, and maybe catch us if they can” (Grumet, 1987, O.I.S.E. Curriculum Theory).
WATER
Be like water. It just flows. Living energy that comes and goes, powerful and free.
JAZZY
Makes my world go ’round ‘n ’round with wonder, mischievous smiles and giggles.
DENNI
As my fortune cookie tells: “My beloved is mine, and I am his.”
What’s Your Passion?
Way Back Home
Danny MacAskill’s living life to the fullest.
Man and machine in perfect harmony.
Check out his mind-blowing front flip off Edinburg Castle. Oh yeah! The scenes on the beach with the backflip and telephone booth are also impressive… inspiring… passionate – an unparalleled work of art. The things this man does should not be humanly possible. Maybe Danny was born with two wheels attached (the “fused wheel syndrome”)? I’d love to be able to do anything as well as this man rides his bike.
Kudos to the cinematography shots as Danny journeys from Edinburg back home to Dunvegan in the Isle of Skye: stunning shots of a most beautiful Scotland. Read more and watch the interviews at http://www.redbull.co.uk/waybackhome
The Mind’s I
The Mind’s I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul is a radical exploration of mind/brain/body/soul in which editors Hofstadter & Dennett (1981) have arranged an enigmatic collection of provocative texts to problematize the nature of self:
- A Sense of Self
- Soul Searching
- From Hardware to Software
- Mind as Program
- Created Selves and Free Will
- The Inner Eye
“Where Am I” (chapter 13) is Dennett’s fantastical piece (reprinted from Brainstorms) recounting his highly dangerous and secret mission for the Dept. of Defense (in collaboration with NASA and Howard Hughes) to develop a STUD (Supersonic Tunneling Underground Devise). In short, Dennett’s assignment is to undergo an advanced surgical procedure: the radical separation of his brain from his body.
After the operation is deemed successful, a lightheaded Dennett gets really excited to take a good look at his brain – of course he is excited, wouldn’t you be?! Upon seeing his brain, floating in a mysterious bubbling fluid that looks like ginger-ale, Dennett wonders why his thoughts are originating from his body? Why is he staring at his brain-in-a-vat instead of believing that he is suspended in the effervescent fluid, being stared upon by his very own eyes? He tries and tries again to think himself into the sparkling vat, but to no avail. Riddled with confusion, he attempts to orient himself by giving names to things:
“Yorick,” I said aloud to my brain, “you are my brain. The rest of my body, seated in this chair, I dub ‘Hamlet.’” So here we all are: Yorick’s my brain, Hamlet’s my body, and I am Dennett. Now, where am I? And when I think “where am I?”, where’s that thought tokened? Is it tokened in my brain, lounging about in the vat, or right here between my ears where it seems to be tokened? Or nowhere? Its temporal coordinates give me no trouble; must it not have spatial coordinates as well?
Of course, this story isn’t (and couldn’t) be true. Dennett’s philosophical fantasy seeks to shake-up our unquestioned assumptions about the mind/brain/body/self (particularly to provoke the narrow-minded, no-nonsense, scientific view of the human soul). Dennett’s philosophical truths of “underwhelming significance” serve to make the strange obvious and the obvious strange, revealing perplexities with absurdity, such that we may be jolted to see throught our conditioning and begin to rethink our assumptions. Where is Dennett? His brain (aka Yorick)? His body (aka Hamlet)? Or is there no Dennett? Or is Dennett wherever he thinks he is (i.e., his point of view is also the location of his self)? If the sense of location is but illusion, then perhaps so is the sense of self?
In questioning his “essential Dennettness”, Fortinbras (Dennett’s new body, after the expiration of Hamlet) routinely flips an intentionally unmarked Master Switch that allows him to switch from Yorick to Hubert (his newly cloned brain) or vice versa. Every time he flips the switch, nothing happens. Dennett doesn’t have any idea where his self is. But he continues to flip in the switch, longing for the moment of understanding, and then, all of sudden:
“THANK GOD! I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER FLIP THAT SWITCH! You can’t imagine how horrible it’s been these last two weeks — but now you know; it’s your turn in purgatory. How I’ve longed for this moment! You see…
I’m not one to spoil a good story, so you’ll have to find the answer for yourself in Dennett’s text: Where Am I?
Ways of Worlding
My working definition for designerly ways of “worlding” in how we learn connotes a deliberate, sustained and immersive process of deeply embedding design methodology into teaching and learning environments —whereby creativity and design thinking are means of empowerment, reform and transformation— to synergistically connect learners, technologies, ideas and opportunities together to make informed change; to nurture students’ natural desire to design and innovate; and to build sustainable learning futures that have meaning and quality of life for all.
“Learners” are understood as systems thinkers assembling what assembles a world (HWL, 2010); “designerly ways” as how designers think, act, play, be, feel and work; and “worlding” as mindful participation in unfolding worlds within worlds —where world refers to the natural, social, material, virtual or spiritual world, or lifeworld— necessarily recognizing the interdependence of humanity with the more-than-human worlds that we are in and part of (Abram, 1996). Hence, “designerly ways of worlding” denotes learning through design (of things, events, solutions, communities, identities, futures, etc.) within a supportive community of practice and a range of meaningful contexts in which learners have productive agency to co-create the worlds in and around them (i.e., their design thinking and designerly ways matter) —with intent for developing a sustainable citizenship that joins learning to living in right reciprocal relationships to the worlds of others (and things).
Designerly ways of worlding prepares learners to become “world builders” or leaders of change who take initiative to solve complex problems (including education, health, quality of life and environment) using design thinking in-interaction-with digital media and technology. Learners are actively engaged, individually and collectively, in a design cycle of questioning, investigating, prototyping, evaluating and refining —an iterative feedback loop from which new knowledge grows out of, resolves, and creates design challenges.
Encouraging experimentation, sensible risk taking and moderate uncertainty (as in the process of design) offers potential for: (1) “unshackling the conditioning forces” (Arendt, 1958) that prevent learners from seeing beyond the status quo; (2) practicing a worldy criticism that doubts and challenges what is taken for granted; and (3) developing better informed and more meaningful relationships between selves, others and things.
Designerly ways of worlding in how we learn deeply integrates:
knowing (with doubt and discernment)
as doing (by experimentation and invention)
as being (creating and questioning)
as having (awareness and foresight)
as emoting (openness and sensitivity to difference)
as playing (with freedom and imagination)
—as essential to inspire renewal of wonder, possibility and responsibility.
Worlding
Worlding. Beings wonder about world(s) worlding in and around us, but do world(s) wonder about us? Waking. What is the “world qua world” (insofar as it exists)? Wondering. Is there a shared common world or rather, a boundless set of worlds within worlds— worlds for every human need? Waiting.
Wordling is a difficult negotiation without a tidy definition. Its multifarious and assembling character does not just continue or not end – it is deliberately unmade, a bringing-to-truth that is a disclosing into its own of the “nearest of all nearing that nears” (i.e., there will always be more worlding to take account of). There is not an essentialist, fundamentally superior or universal understanding of worlding that is wholly attainable (i.e., there will always be diverse perspectives and ever more primordial possibilities to consider). Worlding is always already a complex and dynamic assemblage of ever-renewing realities, sensations and perceptions through which we must constantly work our way through to hold open “the Open of the world” (Heidegger, 1971, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p.45).
Worlding was first popularized by Heidegger in Being and Time (1927). He turned the noun (world) into the active verb (worlding), a gerundive and generative process of world making, world becoming and (as he puts it) world “bringing-near.” For Heidegger, worlding is always meaning giving and already ongoing (i.e. never not worlding); worlding is how we experience a world as familiar; worlding is a determination of Dasein’s being (wherein the world belongs to Daseins’s existential constitution); worlding offers measurable standards of being (both authentic and inauthentic); and worlding is a constructivist process of the thinging world. In his work, Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes and closely associates worlding with terms such as: being, caring, clearing, gathering, nearing, lighting, opening, presencing, reckoning, thinging; authenticity, intentionality, mortality, potentiality, reality, spatiality, temporality; disposedness, everydayness, fallenness, thrownness; ready to hand (zuhanden) and present-at-hand (vorhanden); and many in-order-to’s and the for-the-sake-of-which’s.
Heidegger’s (1971) “worlding of the world” is always already revealed within the mirror-play of “the fourfold as One” (das Geviert) wherein the four mirrors of earth, heaven, divinity and mortality are everywhere reflecting the presence of each other, happening together, enfolded as a unified fourfold-whole: “By a primal oneness, the four — earth and sky, divinities and mortals — belong together in one” (Buiding Dwelling Thinking, p.149). As such, worlding is a dynamic referential responsiveness to the immensely dense “fourfold as One” network of associations, in which someone or something has a multitude of possibilities, locations or places to continue to be what it always already is (i.e., its worldliness).
Eighty years after Being and Time, worlding has evolved from its Heideggerian origin in “Dasein’s being” towards a new horizon of “ontological Design” (Fry, 1999); from the tangible “thinging of things” (Heidegger, 1971) to the intangible “televisualizing” (Fry, 1999) and “synthetic reality gaming” (Castronova, 2007). Wordling has been appropriated many times over, signifying: economic ontology (Thrift, 2008); imperialist processes and the colonial inscription of textuality (Spivak, 1985, 1990); everyday feminist international politics (Pettman, 1996); violences of heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity (Fadem, 2005); proprioception, kinesthesia and touch (Manning, 2007); geopolitical classifications of first, second, third and fourth worlds (OWNO, 2010); first, second and third waves of societal transformation (Toffler, 1980; Doerr, 2010); globalization (de Beer, 2004); global warring (Fry, 1999); prayer (Detweiler, 1995); secularization (Miller, 2009); enfleshment of God in the world (Hemming, 1998); right reciprocity between nature, humans and more-than-humans (Kohak, 1984; Abram, 1996); the socio-biological complexity of human extinction (Costa, 2010); situated practices of cultural studies (Wilson & Connery, 2007); enculturation of true craftsmanship (Risatti, 2007); the aesthetic realization of visual-musical works in new media culture (Rickert & Salvo, 2006); connecting beings together through online social networks (Tech Crunch Network, 2010); design-driven transformation of everyday life by everyday people (Berger, 2008); doing good design for sustainability and social justice (Berman, 2009); growth, development and change by design thinking (Brown, 2009); and designerly ways of teaching and learning (Rusnak, 2010).
Today’s task: A working definition for designerly ways of “worlding” in how we learn.
And in the stillness that stills, as I sit quietly reflecting its depth, may you, in mindful participation, feel welcome to join me in the unfolding of the “thinging of things” that is the worlding of worlds. There’s always the choice of digging deeper or going away…
Worlding Dolphin Made With Tagxedo
Courting the Promiscuous Learner
I am a digital addict. I am a living, breathing lover of digital life. I am not alone.
I am just one of a new generation of learners who lives in a time/space “alias” somewhere in-between the margins of reality and virtuality (or a synergistic combination thereof). The boundary that allegedly divides these two dimensions no longer exists as my real/virtual experiences increasingly crossbreed, converge, confuse, pleasure, play, and call for my attention in a long distance relationship with my future.
As a digital addict, I seldom go anywhere without a lifeline to my alternate existence. I simply get bored, restless, anxious, disorganized, and too far behind (you see, I’m much smarter and far more productive in-interaction-with my digitally expanded cognition). I’m constantly craving for more of my digital cupidities… more of my immersive design worlds, my gaming escapes, my networked publics, my digital daydreams… and more of my concupiscent digital love. Concupiscence is the addicting effect from which love of digital life is the cause. For from love comes concupiscence and from concupiscence comes life ♥ It’s a beautiful thing.
The problem, however, is that I’m a two-timer. Rather embarrassingly, I’ve been made aware that my incessant digital media engagement is putting some of my colleagues at unease. For example, I seldom show up to meetings as the supposedly “real” representation of my good ole singular self, ready for full-on F2F personal communication. Instead, I paradoxically appear as a multi-tasking hybridization of my real/virtual self (whatever that convergence might yet come to mean as the atoms continue to interchange). The salient point is that my attention is continuously divided between my colleagues and my computer — and I stand out like I’ve swallowed a neon sign.
To what extent is my two-timing behaviour rude, distracting and uncomfortable for others? To be more thoughtful and respectful, should I cut off the precious digital limbs I’ve nurtured, grown and love as meaningful parts of myself ? To what extent might divergent ways of learning exist harmoniously rather than opposed? To what extent do conformity and homogeneity replace plurality and freedom? To what extent has the real world always and already been a space of virtuality?
To what extent am I losing my grip on reality?
Technology’s breaking down The Wall…
Is technology breaking down The Wall…
or is it just another brick in “some mad bugger’s wall“?
Rogers Waters has only played the The Wall live, and all the way through, about 30 times, which includes the original 1980-1981 Pink Floyd tour and a special performance to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Why is he doing The Wall again, now?
What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?
I believe this is still a supremely relevant question and the jury is out. There is a lot of commercial clutter on the net, and a lot of propaganda, but I have a sense that just beneath the surface understanding is gaining ground. We just have to keep blogging, keep twittering, keep communicating, keep sharing ideas.
30 Years ago when I wrote The Wall I was a frightened young man. Well not that young, I was 36 years old.
It took me a long time to get over my fears. Anyway, in the intervening years it has occurred to me that maybe the story of my fear and loss with it’s concomitant inevitable residue of ridicule, shame and punishment, provides an allegory for broader concerns: nationalism, racism, sexism, religion, whatever! All these issues and ‘isms are driven by the same fears that drove my young life.
This new production of The Wall is an attempt to draw some comparisons, to illuminate our current predicament, and is dedicated to all the innocent lost in the intervening years.
In some quarters, among the chattering classes, there exists a cynical view that human beings as a collective are incapable of developing more ‘humane’ ie, kinder, more generous, more cooperative, more empathetic relationships with one another.
I disagree.
In my view it is too early in our story to leap to such a conclusion, we are after all a very young species.
I believe we have at least a chance to aspire to something better than the dog eat dog ritual slaughter that is our current response to our institutionalized fear of each other.
I feel it is my responsibility as an artist to express my, albeit guarded, optimism, and encourage others to do the same. To quote the great man, “You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”
Il faut croire!
.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT
THE SECRET IS ?
According to John D. Caputo, the secret’s secrecy is that no one knows and we are never going to know, which is not due to failure on our part as it is not even a matter of knowing. There is no Absolute Truth and we are NOT born into this world “hard-wired to Being Itself, or Truth Itself, or the Good Itself… and when we open our mouths, it is we who speak, not something Bigger and Better than we.” Dr. Caputo takes a non-hierarchical philosophical stance where the so called know-it-alls are not distinguished from the unknowns to conclude (without concluding) that, “We do not know who we are – that is who we are!”
The Absolute Secret keeps knowledge safely secreted away. Not only does not-knowing keep us safe, our lives are impassioned by the passion of not-knowing. Because we simply do not know, it keeps the door open for that which we don’t see coming or couldn’t possibly predict in the future. Not-knowing fuels our desire to know… not-knowing keeps hope alive as hope… and not-knowing keeps faith safe from knowledge. Security of knowledge is a great threat to faith: instead of seeing through the eyes of faith, the faithful begin to see things period (this is a danger of religious fundamentalism).
Caputo’s More Radical Hermeneutics (2000) is one of my most cherished texts. Caputo uses deconstruction, repetition, The Absolute Secret, and his own mischievousness to hound and harass hermeneutics, thereby uncovering: “prankster hermeneutics,” “parisian hermeneutics,” “yankee hermeneutics,” “devilish hermeneutics,” and “holy hermeneutics!” He describes his more radical hermeneutics as “a kind of intellectual fire department that arrives on the scene to douse the flames of essentialism wherever they flare up and threaten to consume us.” Essentialists are anyone who claim to be in on The Secret.
In There is No One Narcissism (1995), Derridia’s philosophical gymnastics also spin The Secret into a non-knowing:
“It is not a non-knowing installed in the form of , “I don’t want to know.” I am all for knowledge [laughter]… So, this non-knowing… it is not the limit… of a knowledge, the limit in the progression of a knowledge. It is, in some way, a structural non-knowing, which is heterogeneous, foreign to knowledge. It’s not just the unknown that could be know and that I give up trying to know. It is something in relation to which knowledge is out of the question. And when I specify that it is a non-knowing and not a secret, I mean that when a text appears to be crypted, it is not at all in order to calculate or to intrigue or to bar access to something that I know that others must not know; it is more ancient, more originary experience, if you will, of the secret.”
Je ne sais pas. Il faut croire!
Epistemological Love Song
by Thomas Crum:
“the night classes schooled by your handsyou resist definition and cursory descriptionlike naming a tropical storm, superficial labelssay nothing of your impact, like the wavesthat crash against my neck, chest, hipsleave me gasping on the beachthis is your great intrigue as you pull me closeras I slip deeper down the rabbit hole into subjective depthswhere my world becomes a Dali landscape, the great irony isI can’t get you out of my head as I try to get inside yoursfor my great pleasure is solving the mystery of you”
Philosophy originated from Greek philosophia “love of knowledge, wisdom” [philo "loving" + sophia "knowledge, wisdom"]. Thomas Crum waxes poetic about his love for knowing, words that resonate as true for bibliophiles like myself, but, what is love? Who feels that they understand the nature of love? What does it mean to love? We may think we know what love is, but like space, time, energy and being, love is one of those ineffable forces that we all intuitively know, yet find difficult to define or rationally understand.
Speaking to this paradox, the French philosopher Pascal wrote, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things…“
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between heart and reason, between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need, between self and other… Love unites us together and tears us apart: “Love is as much an object as an obsession, everybody wants it, everybody seeks it, but few ever achieve it. Those who do will cherish it, be lost in it, and among all, will never… never forget it” (Curtis Judalet). To put it another way, if you have not love, you have nothing.
Love by it’s very nature is Godly, unworldly and the most powerful of all anti-political human forces: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (I Corinthians 13: 4-7). Love never fails and always forgives, unconditionally – not up to a certain point, under certain conditions, according to specific criteria – for the only measure of love is love without measure (St. Augustine). Love is not a deal or a duty, but an unconditional and excess giving: the more love you give, the more love you will receive, come what may.
Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: “Who knows how to make love stay?” (Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980)
The Meaning of Life
Nothing can be known
There is no certain truth
There is no purpose or plan
Existence precedes essence
Nothing has meaning in life
Nothing is right or wrong, forbidden or required, good or bad
Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia: “I am myself and my circumstances”
And as Nietzsche proclaimed: “God is dead, and we have killed Him”
It saddens me that far too many people are experiencing life as empty, boring and meaningless. Living beings who are perhaps more descriptively called “dying beings” as they are lifeless, purposeless, valueless, soulless, aimless… How did this come to be? It’s like there is an out-of-control and almighty powerful “existential vacuum” sucking up all the meaning of life and leaving humanity empty, alienated, hollow, and just going through the motions in a will towards a nihilistic nothingness. Vacuumed bare of meaning, people try to keep busy and distracted from the anxiety and angst of meaninglessness. Our hedonist desires seem increasingly attractive as food, sex, drug, alcohol and material pleasures seduce us with instant gratification to fill the lonely despairing holes of emptiness. Ironically, however, we can never get enough satisfaction from substances and/or things, and our constant cravings serve to create bottomless craters of unfulfillment.
For Christians, the meaning of life is a clear truth: to know and to serve God. For followers of Jesus (like myself), most of the big questions are answered or at least addressed: where did we come from, why are we here, what are we, where are we going? As St. Augustine praised: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Religion provides a “source code” for the meaning of life, but what makes life worth living for those who refuse to believe anything which can only be known through faith? This is an important question to ask in a world where an existential vacuum is pervasive and ubiquitous because those who have a why to live for can bear almost any how (Nietzsche).
In Existentialsm is a Humanism, Sartre (1946) provokes: “Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.”
On the source of moral values, Sartre reasons that: “The existentialist… thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoievsky [Russia's most prominent existentialist] said, ‘If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.’ That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to… “Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.”
While I congratulate Sartre for his profound questioning on the meaning of life (or lack thereof), the existence of God, the origin of moral principles, and the responsibilities of human freedom, I find it paradoxical that he disregards God and universal moral principles in order to provide humans with freedom and dignity. Sartre is unequivocally certain that: “this theory is the only one which gives man dignity, the only one which does not reduce him to an object.” Ironically (and arrogantly), according to Sartre’s theory, I have no dignity or subjectivity unless I conform to atheistic existentialism.
Socrates made popular “the unexamined life is not worth living” but perhaps this wisdom is more modernly provocative rephrased as “the unlived life is not worth examining.” As Jean de La Bruyère cautions, “There are three great events in our lives: birth, life and death. Of birth we have no conscience; with death, we suffer; and, concerning life, we forget to live it.”
Not taking the meaning of life too seriously, Nietzsche tells: “And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”
May you be inspired by my favorite YouTube video on the living of life:
Santé et beauté pour tous (health & beauty for all)
