This page contains materials
intended to facilitate class discussion.
The materials are not necessarily the
same as the instructor's teaching notes
and are not designed to represent a full
exposition or argument. This page is
subject to revision as the instructor
finalizes preparation. (Last revised
3/6/07
)
Preliminary Class
Business
Presentations
Today: Judith Hicks
Next class: Marthine
Satris
Critiques
due this Wed.
Emblems for Today's Class
Place
W. Wordsworth, Poems on
the Naming of Places,
e.g., "To M. H."
Already
there was something
mysterious and homelike.
Nick was happy as he crawled
inside the tent. He had
not been unhappy all
day. This was different
though. Now things were
done. There had been this
to
do. Now it was done. It
had been a hard trip. He
was very tired. That was
done. He had made his camp.
He was settled. Nothing
could touch him. It was
a good place to camp. He
was there, in the good
place. He was in his home
where he had made it.
Albert Borgmann, from Holding
On to Reality: The Nature of Information
at the Turn of the Millennium (1999)
The
ancestral environment
was profoundly coherent
because of the regular
interplay of signs
and things. When
a band of the Salish,
some two hundred
or two thousand years
ago, moved from its
summer camp in the
Missoula valley north
to a winter camp
by the "Stream
of the Little Bull
Trout," now
called Rattlesnake
Creek, the distant
narrows where the
creek turns east
must have been the
first sign they followed.
Once they had reached
that area, a western
tributary to Rattlesnake
Creek would alert
them that they were
within a few hundred
feet of the campsite. Finally cairns, tipi
rings, or remnants
of brush and hide
shelters marked the
place where they
would winter, protected
from the punishing
east winds and just
a few hundred feet
below the level to
which game retreats
from the snow.
Natural signs disclose the more
distant environment, yet they do not get in the way of things. A natural sign,
having served as a point of reference, turns back into a thing, . . .
naturally and quietly. Thus the ancestral environment, however and wherever humans
moved in it, maintained a focal area of presence with a penumbra of signs referring
to the wider world. The
ancestral environment of the Salish was well-ordered as well as coherent because
some natural signs stood out as landmarks from among the inconspicuous and transitory
signs of creeks, rocks, trees, and tracks. Landmarks were focal points of an
encompassing order. (p. 25)
When
on the Tuesdays before
Thanksgiving only
about half of my
students in the large
introductory ethics
class show up, I
reward the faithful
with the promise
to reveal the meaning
of life. The announcement
is always met with
a ripple of laughter—a
mixture of incredulity,
curiosity, and good
humor. The meaning
of life, I say, cannot
be borrowed, bought,
or manufactured. It has to be discovered.
And how do you discover
it? Why, you use
the meaning-of-life-locator.
And what is that?
I then invite my students to search their experiences or aspirations for occasions
where they could affirm four propositions:
(1) There is no place I would rather be.
(2) There is no one I would rather be with.
(3) There is nothing I would rather be doing.
(4) And this I will remember well.
Examples of such occasions are a dinner at home, a camp fire in the wilderness,
or an evening's music, and for many of us it could be worship in a sanctuary.
The
suggestion in all
of this is that on
those occasions the
meaning of life comes
into focus.
Rebecca Solnit, from River
of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and
the Technological Wild West (2003)
In
the middle of the fight
on the Yellowstone
River, [Sitting Bull]
laid down his gun and
his quiver, walked
toward the white soldiers,
sat down on the grass,
and lit his pipe. Two
Oglalas and two Cheyennes
came and sat down with
him, and he passed
them the pipe as the
bullets whizzed overhead.
Reckless bravery
was required for that act,
which harks back to
the intertribal battles
where counting coup
and winning honor for
bravery were goals
as potent as killing
the enemy. But
it suggests an even
more powerful yearning
for a reprieve from
history and its
hectic pace in the
1870s. It was
as though through courage
and will the five men
stepped off the runaway
train of history or
even stopped it. Perhaps
in that interval they
had time to see the
grass clearly, to look
at the sky, to think
about where they stood,
in the landscape as
well as in history,
to remember their lifetimes
of roaming across such
grasslands, fording
rivers, following buffalo,
of living in what then
seemed to be the cyclical
time of the seasons
before the linear time
of history caught them
up. It was late
to be fighting railroads.
In 1872 the Oglala
Lakota leader Red Cloud
and his followers,
who had fought the
UP [Union Pacific]
so valiantly, had already
taken the train to
Washington to pursue
their rights by other
means. They ended
up in the gold speculator
Jim Fisk's box at New
York's Metropolitan
Opera. (pp. 72-73)
Even
the most perfect
reproduction of a
work of art is lacking
one element: its
presence in time
and space, its unique
existence at the
place where it happens
to be. (¶ II)
We define the aura of the latter
[natural objects] as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may
be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain
range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience
the aura of those mountains, of that branch. (¶ III)
During
long periods of history,
the mode of human
sense perception
changes with humanity's
entire mode of existence.
The manner in which
human sense perception
is organized, the
medium in which it
is accomplished,
is determined not
only by nature but
by historical circumstances
as well. (¶ III)
Earlier much futile thought had
been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question—whether
the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art—was
not raised. (¶ VII)
Marshall McLuhan, "The
Medium is the Message," in Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man (1994)
[orig. pub. 1964]
In
a culture like ours,
long accustomed to
splitting and dividing
all things as a means
of control, it is
sometimes a bit of
a shock to be reminded
that, in operational
and practical fact,
the medium is the
message. This
is merely to say
that the personal
and social consequences
of any medium—that
is, of any extension
of ourselves—result
from the new scale
that is introduced
into our affairs
by each extension
of ourselves, or
by any new technology.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The
Railway Journey: The Industrialization
of Time and Space in the Nineteenth
Century (1986):
The
empirical reality
that made the
landscape seen
from the train
window appear
to be "another
world" was
the railroad
itself, with
its excavations,
tunnels, etc.
Yet the
railroad was
merely an expression
of the rail's
technological
requirements,
and the rail
itself was a
constituent part
of the machine
ensemble that
was the system.
It was,
in other words,
that machine
ensemble that
interjected itself
between the traveler
and the landscape.
The traveler
perceived the
landscape as
it was filtered
through the machine
ensemble. (p.
24)
The landscape
appeared behind the
telegraph poles
and wires; it
was seen through them.
(p. 31)
Panoramic perception,
in contrast to
traditional perception,
no longer belonged
to the same space
as the perceived
objects: the
traveler saw
the objects,
landscapes, etc. through the
apparatus which
moved him through
the world. (p.
64)
As
the space between
the points—the
traditional traveling
space—was
destroyed, those
points moved
into each other's
immediate vicinity:
one might say
that they collided.
They lost their
old sense of
local identity,
formerly determined
by the spaces
between them.
(p. 38)
The regions, joined to each
other and to the metropolis by the railways, and the goods that are torn out
of their local relation by modern transportation, shared the fate of losing their
inherited place, their traditional spatial-temporal presence or, as Walter Benjamin
sums it up in one word, their "aura." (p. 41)
The
search for the
right frame called
for shrewd judgment
on Watkins's part. It often led him,
for example, to
round off the upper
corners of his
photographs when
he finally printed
them. . . .
Watkins was led
to this last step
because the wide-angle
lens he used in
these photographs
distorted the image
in its marginal
areas. There was
no question of
exact replication
here! Further,
Watkins turned
a defect into a
virtue by allowing
shots of the heights
of rock formations
to be overexposed
(his emulsion was
much more sensitive
to the sky, and
thus to these heights,
than to dark foliage),
thereby obscuring
the image in the
upper parts and
so contributing
to the impression
of a given formation's
formidable height. In this instance,
we observe how
a feature of Watkins's
apparatus that
is undeniably non-isomorphic
in its effects
(in fact, it is
manifestly distorting)
contributed to
a more vivid and
convincing sense
of the landscape.
(pp. 21-22)
Marc Augé, Non-Places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, trans. John Howe
(London: Verso, 1995) [orig. pub.
in French, 1992] (book
cover)
If
a place can be
defined as relational,
historical and
concerned with
identity, then
a space which
cannot be defined
as relational,
or historical,
or concerned
with identity
will be a non-place.
The hypothesis
advanced here
is that supermodernity
produces non-places. . . .
A world where
people are born
in the clinic
and die in hospital,
where transit
points and temporary
abodes are proliferating
under luxurious
or inhuman conditions
(hotel chains
and squats, holiday
clubs and refugee
camps, shantytowns
threatened with
demolition or
doomed to festering
longevity); where
a dense network
of means of transport
which are also
inhabited spaces
is developing;
where the habitué of
supermarkets,
slot machines
and credit cards
communicates
wordlessly, through
gestures, with
an abstract,
unmediated commerce;
a world thus
surrendered to
solitary individuality,
to the fleeting,
the temporary
and ephemeral,
offers the anthropologist
(and others)
a new object. . . .
(pp. 77-78)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,
or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:
Duke Univ. Press, 1991) (images
of postmodern spaces)
It
is not the least of
America's charms that
even outside the movie
theatres the whole
country is cinematic. The desert you pass
through is like the
set of a Western, the
city a screen of signs
and formulas. (p. 56)
It
is useless to seek
to strip the desert
of its cinematic
aspects in order
to restore its original
essence; those features
are thoroughly superimposed
upon it and will
not go away. The
cinema has absorbed
everything—Indians, mesas,
canyons, skies. And
yet it is the most
striking spectacle
in the world. Should
we prefer "authentic" deserts
and deep oases? For
us moderns, and ultramoderns,
as for Baudelaire,
who knew that the
secret of true modernity
was to be found in
artifice, the only
natural spectacle
that is really gripping
is the one which
offers both the most
moving profundity and
at the same time
the total simulacrum
of that profundity.
(pp. 69-70)
Long
before I left, I could
not get Santa Barbara
out of my mind. Santa
Barbara is simply a dream
and it has in it all
the processes of dreams:
the wearisome fulfilment
of all desires, condensation,
displacement, facility
of action. All
this very quickly becomes
unreal. Happy
days! This morning
a bird came to my balcony
to die. I photographed
it. But no one is
indifferent to his own
life and the least event
still has something moving
about it. I was here
in my imagination long
before I actually came
here.
Suddenly this stay
has become a sojourn in
a previous existence. In
the last weeks, time
seemed multiplied by
a feeling of no longer
being there and of living
Santa Barbara each day,
with its fatal charm
and its blandness, as
the predestined site
of an eternal return.
(p. 72)
Sue Thomas, Hello
World: Travels in Virtuality (2004)
[On
LambdaMOO:] Some people
try to make a map,
but the complexity
of the place always
defeats them. Some
even make models out
of wood or plastic
or clay, but this is
going in the wrong
direction—it's
impossible to physically
capture the multi-dimensional
nature of virtuality.
(p. 26)
The
seductive distractions
of cyberspace can in
part be explicated
by comparing the spatial
structure of focal
reality with that of
cyberspace. The structure
of electronic information
is in an informal sense
topological. Cyberspace
has a structure. Sites
are nested and linked
on the screen in a
definite order. But
there are no measurable
distances between them. Everything is equally
near and far and equally
and easily reachable,
and hence I easily
slip from the important
by way of the interesting
to the distracting.
In focal reality, some
things are near and
others far. The camp
fire is by the tent. It's a hundred paces
to the creek. The food
is suspended fifty
yards away and fifteen
feet off the ground.
The trailhead is fifteen
miles away. The candles
are lit on the dinner
table, but the food
is still in the kitchen
and the wine in the
basement. The mail
is down in the mailbox,
the concert will be
two miles from here. . . .
To say that the structure
of the cosmos is isotropic
is to say that it looks the
same in all directions. At
its largest scale it exhibits
no distinctive directions
and contains no special places.
Isotropy clearly contrasts
with the spatial structure
of a focal occasion. . . .
The world for the mobile
and the affluent is beginning
to look the same in all directions,
the same airports, the same
hotels, the same malls, one
and the same cyberspace. Thus the advanced global
culture mirrors to some extent
the isotropy of the universe.
The world no longer has
a central point, neither
on this planet nor in the
cosmos. Everyday life and
especially festive occasions
on earth still reveal traces
and recollections of focal
points, of the college we
attended, the place we got
married, the capital where
a new president is installed. It's the universe that impresses
radical pointlessness on
us. "The more the
universe seems comprehensible," Steven
Weinberg has memorably said, "the
more it also seems pointless". . . .
. . . we
should consider cosmic isotropy
as the ground state of reality
and the focal occasion as
the burst of meaning that
centers the universe morally
and therefore materially. . . .
The life we should aspire
to can be luminous, centered,
and clear—illuminated
by technological information,
centered on focal occasion,
and clarified by cosmology.
A focal occasion, thus rendered
responsible, can in turn
meet the distractions of
cyberspace with discretion
and the abstractions of cosmology
with concreteness. We're
then in a position to remember
it well.
