Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for Virtual Scholarship
Why do I/we note everything down?
I don’t know why I note down everything. Everything? It cannot be otherwise. Everything that I am apt to note down: everything that happens every day to one of us and that I can translate. Everything that is woven between us, and everything that is in preparation. Sometimes I am tired. For example for dreams. A voice whispers: don’t note it. I am tempted. I note it anyway. I obey. The notebook. It’s not fine work. I paint crudely. I follow the trail. (Cixous)
Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop (Barthes)
When writing, Derrida suggests, there is ‘a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself … Nothing intimidates me when I write’. Yet when he is just falling asleep – in the midst of a dreamscape - a panic of the subconscious sets in, “You’re Crazy to write this!”. Characteristically, Derrida then attempts to deconstruct this moment: ‘…in a certain way,’ he remarks, ‘I am more unconscious [when awake] than in my half sleep. When I am in that half sleep there’s a kind of vigilance that tells me the truth … when I’m awake and working this vigilance is actually asleep’. Yet, in noting everything down, when (in) writing, Cixous refers to a tiredness, ‘[f]or example for dreams’. What does she mean and how does this relate to the ‘truth’ of one’s half-sleep? Cixous would seem to be looking the other way. In obeying the whispering voices she seems to be responding directly to that same certain vigilance: just as Derrida’s subsconsious panic is like being scolded, Cixous is weighed down by all the dreams she writes…
I had been saying to you how I just couldn’t write here at the moment. I have lost my ‘voice’ I said. And we had been saying whether I was going to do anything ‘interesting’ with this afternoon of my own. I think I got it right when I said I can’t plan to do anything interesting, it will simply take me by surprise. I was going to tidy my desk and complete the correspondences sitting in my inbox, but in doing so… I happened to look at my copy of Seneca’s ‘On the Shortness of Life’, the one that was going to appear at the very end (beginning) of that article about blogging (about being a virtual scholar) and I just found myself opening up the various books I think link together (across the gulf of time, like that grand arc of time in Woolf’s Orlando). Although, underneath it all, it was your prompt that set it all off. So…
You can go to Technorati.com to see ‘what’s percolating in blogs now’ – all and sundry are at it and writing writing about everything and nothing (at the time of writing this blog is apparently ranked 4,696,975 – whatever that means!). According to eMarketer (May 2008), there were 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users) and 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%). Worldwide, Universal McCann (March 2008) report that 184 million peope have started a blog and 346 million people read blogs, estimating 77% of active Internet users read blogs. Fitting with Benjamin’s seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ the potential is for ‘the public’ to be the ‘examiner’ – for all of us to become the resident critics and experts. But of course, as we know from the ‘Artwork’ essay, that comes with the admonition that this ‘examiner’ is generally ‘an absent-minded one’. Nevertheless, as Zoe Corbyn reports for the Times Higher Education, in her article ‘By the blog: academics tread carefully‘ 9 October 2008, UK scholars too are slowly but surely contributing to these statistics – adding no doubt to the state of absent-mindness. Are we all now potential writers? And what does that mean anyway?
…which leads me to think back to Roland Barthes’ piece ‘The Writer on Holiday’ in Mythologies, which opens with the line: ‘Gide was reading Bossuet while going down the Congo. This posture sums up rather well the ideal of our writers ‘on holiday”. Perhaps there is a similar sort of posture we might idenitfy with all those that write blogs – whilst ‘going down the Congo’ or at least some form of being on the move, all these millions of ’writers’ are ‘on holiday’ – everyday is a potential holiday from the mundane. For Barthes, the point was to uncover a certain myth residing in the activity of the writer on holiday – the idea of being on holiday means that writing is then just another form of work (from which you need or deserve to take a break): ‘To assert that this phenomenon can henceforth concern writers, that the specialists of the human soul are also subjected to the common status of contemporary labour, is a way of convincing our bourgeois readers that they are indeed in step with the times’. So, if we turn this around, if we suggest the holiday is no longer a reified thing, but actually a constant possibility – we’re all on holiday, or certainly on leisure time, we’re all ‘in step with the times’ - we come to the point in which all of us as holiday-makers are writers (…with a few clicks of the mouse: welcome to your blog). So, instead of the writer being on holiday, it is the holidays (offered through hypertext) which make us all writers (should we choose to be).
But, for Barthes there always was a delicate twist:
What proves the wonderful singularity of the writer, is that during the holiday in question, which he takes alongside factory workers and shop assistants, he [must it be he?] unlike them does not stop, if not actually working, at least producing. So that he is a false worker, a false holiday-maker as well. One is writing his memoirs, another is correcting proofs, yet another is preparing his next book. And he who does nothing confesses it as truly paradoxical behaviour, an avant-garde exploit (Barthes)
…but, as we trace through our day by partly being at work, yet equally finding ourself on the phone to a loved one, or at home, but catching up on the work mail, we all seem to be false workers, false holiday-makers and perhaps also false-writers (after all anyone can write a blog)… yet we keep writing (to one another) and reading, maybe because we don’t want to be on holiday, because being on holiday is only ever a temporary location.
So what do we write about, now that there is all this time upon our hands? As Cixous might suggest, ‘everything that happens every day to one of us and that I can translate. Everything that is woven between us…’. But it is this need to translate that can lead us astray, or can be make for a thread, weaving between us, so that the translation becomes the original. We are writing our own trail. Equally the translation can simply get in the way – where do I start? No longer a blank sheet, but a blank screen. …yet if the words breathe life into ‘everything that happens every day to one of us’, then I suppose it makes sense we try to find ways around the white void of words.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.
[...]
If this myh is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, the proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of duing his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. (Camus)
In locating my copy of Camus’ book to write out this quote, I am thrown back some 13 years by a hand written message. To anyone else it is simply a birthday greeting, but to me it evokes all those (dark) whispering voices that were present even then – encircling me like thieves. I never knew how to note them down (and I suppose I still don’t). The temptations remain (some now much lighter, though no less engulfing): ’I note it anyway. I obey. The notebook. It’s not fine work. I paint crudely. I follow the trail’. I probably do need to make that trip by plane to see the person who wrote the note back then.
I always wondered why the rules were added in with pencil. I never did ask at the time (and the reason by now is surely forgotten). It always read like a inserted quotation and that is how it remains. Like everything ‘that is woven between us, and everything that is in preparation’…
Apparently, whilst I could never have discovered this with such ‘wikipedia ease’ back when I was given my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus, Pascal Pia (1903 - 1979), a French writer, journalist, illustrator and scholar (and close friend of Camus) is said to have expressed absurdist and nihilistic sentiments. At the end of his life, he claimed the ‘right to nothingness’, prohibiting others from writing about him after his death. Which would have worked had we all not had this compulsion, however crudely, to note everything down.
Along it came…
I bundled everything into my bag and soon it was heavy again. As ever it was a race against the clock. I checked to see I had picked up everything (the usual feeling, in such a hurry, of having forgotten something crucial lingered). But, I had all the bits and pieces I needed to read in preparation for teaching and of course Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude (the title set by R. in preparation for my trip to Bogota, the page quotas by our reading group of two!)… There was just enough time, I thought, to get to the library to get that book about blogging (again for teaching), which I’d not been able to get last week because of such early closing times.
I hurried up to the first floor and headed straight to the shelf location 301.231. I spotted it finally down on the bottom shelf and swiftly plucked it from its position. I was all but away again when I noticed a title along the thin tall spine of a neighbouring book: The Digital Film Event. Interesting, I thought and shifted the weight of my bag slightly to be on my way again. Yet, no I couldn’t quite leave it there for a ‘next time’ (and so allow it to be lost to those spaces of lost volumes that ever haunt me). I let my bag down to the floor to free myself to collect up this second book. The pages are glossy I thought. Pictures, some in colour. And what is this, a filmscript in the middle? Could not compute. I was definitely intrigued. Could be a red herring, maybe a little self indulgent (though who am I to talk!). But the back cover did it, ever aware of the ticking clock, my eyes skated over the top few lines:
FILM / VISUAL STUDIES / POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
Endless travel in cyberspace, virtual reality, and the dream of limitless speed: technology changes our sense of self. In her new book, Trinh Minh-ha explores the way technology transforms our perception of reality.
Yes the word travel appeared I thought, a good omen and cyberspace, which would seem to help knit together our wandering plans and the insistence with which I write this blog. Suddenly the book became such precious cargo. Still with little sense of what it actually contained (and what does it really matter when set against the inspiration it offered), I hurried down to the library desk as if someone might reach out of the shadows and take it from me before I had the chance to have it issued to my name… As I ran the book’s barcode through the machine I became aware of a whole host of new possibilities (if only I could write them down here as quickly as I thought of them). Only yesterday as I half described the plans (or at least their moods/modes) R. and I have dreamt up for my visit, you said to me (as you sat perfectly, cross-legged upon that massive bed) ‘…and you could do more films’. The suggestion startled me for a moment (but that is hardly new) and I think I gave a non-commital reply, but it went quick and direct to my other mind (the one that can’t function in real-time).
R. … I think we have been thinking too small. Let’s not just look to the films and books of Robinsonesque adventures (and other associated Species of Spaces), let’s make our own. In our ever best attempts to refashion Bovard and Pecuchet for the 21st Century, I think we ought to turn our hand to being media artists. We’ll go the whole hog and invent a globalised installation.
I have been writing this, trying to archive my thoughts, as I travel back on the train. As I step off at the station and enter the usual commotion of commuters, I sense all the connections in my head dissipate (a desparate feeling under the circumstances). Still, I hang on to these words saved. It could be a real turning point. I really sense it could be a turning point (something we must discuss during our next skype call). Of course in previous literatures, this remark, which issues as if literally ensconced in the hurlyburly of modern life, might seem to reveal a contrived attempt, or re-presentation, of the transient. Yet, since I am able to type and transmit these words upon my mobile phone, we can’t so easily judge one’s verisimilitude.
…and this simply all feeds into the ideas of the author of The Digital Film Event, Trinh T. Minh-ha. As the backpage blurb continues:
“We are all engaged in social rituals in our daily activities,” she writes, ” and by remaining unaware of their artistic ritutal propensity, we remain ‘in conformity.’” Her goal, as a thinker and an artist, is to transform our understanding of technology and speed so that we are able to “turn an instrument into a creative tool and to step out of the one dimensional, technologically servile mind.”
The paradoz that “stillness contains speed within it” is central to Trinh’s concept of the digital apparatus. With her signature amalgam of feminism, postcolonial theory, Eastern philosophy, and practical understanding of filmmaking, Trinh Minh-ha presents a much-needed advance in our understanding of the real in a technological age.
R. … welcome to The Letters in Red 2.0…
Walk-Through Library
It takes a very special pair of eyes to locate (from far far overseas) a tranquil spot amidst the maddness of a ‘Global City’ such as Tokyo. I’m very glad she did, as I was then able to go scouting for the location.
As it turns out the library of the Park Hyatt Tokyo is rather like a walk-in wardrobe: a glamorous moment in the confines of a relatively small space. Nonetheless, it was a pity, after much anticipation, to find the library was not ‘a room of its own’, but instead a decorative corridor on route to the lifts. Left to your own devices you’d probably be easily fooled by the photograph on the hotel’s website; as ever one must ‘learn to ignore what the photographer saw’. Needless to say I took the very same photograph – a ritual of the sightseer I guess (though this visit was always going to want to be a loving memento, the picture side of a ‘Wish You Were Here’ postcard).
As I arrived - dressed in just T-shirt and trousers – I was asked if I wanted my luggage taken. A little startled that my single bag could be construed as luggage, I must have let on to my lack of credentials. ‘Are you a guest here, Sir?’ – she asked. I had to be honest, but I pulled from my magic bag a printout of an email from the hotel saying how I was most welcome to visit. It was enough to get me in. The hotel’s main entrance and lobby is accessible from the street as you’d expect, but there is nothing more of the hotel until 41 floors up in the lift. Like Charlie in the Great Glass Elevator, I arrived into the hotel with a huge grin and with full recognition that this was not where I would normally be found.
I managed to wander about without causing any further suspicion and soon came upon the library which I had come looking for, but had not quite been expecting. I paced about the bookcases, looking in at the various and curious volumes contained. I caught sight of myself in the parallel mirrors, which gave an infinite set of reflections and I made an expensive call: an invitation to dinner (tbc), 41 floors up in the sky.
…finally I left for the now hum-drum streets of Shinjuku after many attempted goodbyes (like those false fades common to the pop songs of the 1980s, when the music just starts up again, sounding evermore fresh and necessary). The light was fading as I entered this more quotidian, yet alternative ‘library’; full, as it is, of a vast array of materials and media.
…and just as I had experienced the library at the Hyatt in the mode of hyperspace, it was perhaps fitting that upon one of the many ‘library’ shelves of the department stores I was finally able to locate more appropriate (virtual) luggage. Yet, like the books in the cabinets of the Hyatt, these too were behind glass, awaiting an affluent onlooker.
…but all is not lost. The trip has surely afforded me the occasion of a vacilador, which – as previously noted – Steinbeck describes as one who is ‘going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction’. The beauty of such trips would seem to be you come away with far more than you might expect. So, like Steinbeck, who goes in search of potatoes, ‘it turned out I saw almost more potatoes than I needed to see’ – for I got to my library and then its experience stayed with me over long-distance, as well as when I then fell back into the streets outside. As one result of my virtual visit, I have some new thoughts for the ‘Project’ supposedly unfolding here. Like quaint library index cards, I think the sections of the book (to come) should be divided by simple, single words. A sort of idiosyncratic filing system. One word can be ‘Library’ – to be filled out with various associations, manipulations and of course liaisons that occur in such ’neutral’ surrounds. Another, I suspect, can be ‘Fabric’ – just because it is simultaneously both such a tactile and textual word and because it seems various items under this label are already underway. ’Luggage’ (not baggage) might need to be another one…
Muzak Convenience – A footnote to ‘Supermarkets’
The fabled creator of the Letters in Red, our very own modern day answer to Monsieur Bouvard, has entrusted to me various folios of his unfinished writings. One piece, which we often talked about, was ‘Supermarkets’. As I wandered into Family Mart this morning, one of the many 24/7 convenience stores dotted about Tokyo, I had a wave of nostalgia for our various considerations of super spaces. Whilst the store I entered was but a slither of the size of the stores he would frequent, it serves I hope as a footnote, as a little way back into the subject.
I was just going in to pick up a few things for lunch. And whilst I would be alone for my lunch that day, it was R.’s sense of a lost time and space that I was really thinking about…
at that time, going to the supermarket on friday or saturday nights was his main hobby. alas, so many hours he spent slowly walking aisles, studying the prices of each item he might one day need […] having no commitments in general, he could have also gone shopping on sundays or any other day during the week and as many times as he liked, but in any case he did not need anything, his accommodation was fully catered.
Again the brand of an unravelled flâneury that has made such a mark on our collaboration comes through in this writing about the supermarket:
…it was pleasing to think himself comparable to those parisian gentlemen. however, unlike his famous 19th century colleagues (if colleagues is an adequate term) there was no novelty for him in the aisles as there was for the frenchmen in the arcades, no exotic goods were displayed (he had grown in a global time, bored with the international sameness of it all) … but beyond the disparity of the context, what probably marks the difference between him and the gentlemen were their motives [ …] his action was not a self-imposed one, he was not playing the idle, even his detachment from the crowd was not chosen. if there was something that could have related him to the flâneur, it was his ability to fantasise out of the ordinary: whilst walking in front of vegetables and meats, he would imagine ever new recipes and revolutionary cooking methods, he would also imagine he had someone to cook for. when he saw families and friends shopping together for the week or for a meal, he would imagine himself part of the group, and when the cashier asked him are you ok today? he imagined she really cared.
In Japan, of course, it is hard to detect any ‘bad faith’ as shop assistants usher you in with the distinctive call of irasshaimase and smile so sweetly when carefully wrapping even the most trivial of items you have purchased. But, of course, the same mechanics is in operation all over, in this ‘global time’. A time summed up by the phenomenon of muzak (noun [mass noun] trademark recorded light background music played through speakers in public places), the existence of which is seemingly ever more prevalent in Japan. What I really wanted as I entered Family Mart this morning was the opportunity to discuss this muzak. It has been on my mind for sometime since I have been here. I have a vision of R. and I wandering far and wide with various recording equipment, capturing the mixed aural economy of Tokyo and no doubt never actually getting round to do anything with these neatly captured sonics.
Think. Buy. Be.
Shinjuku: whilst not the most fashionable area of Tokyo, it does have its fair share of consumer cathedrals, above and below ground. As I wandered through the labyrinthine subways that lie beneath the opulent streets above, I came across the following advertisement:
Like the ‘Theory’ hoarding in Sendai, here again is a moment of theoretical collision. The blatant message to stop thinking and just shop seems, at least initially, the pure symptom of conspicuous consumer culture. However, look again and perhaps we can spot a deep flaw in the message. When we buy we are constantly thinking – imagining the product in relation to ourselves, to our other possessions, what it might mean to a loved one or more generally our peers. If we didn’t think we wouldn’t buy, we wouldn’t have an attachment to anything. There would be no desire. In this light, perhaps it is no real surprise that the person’s wrist and hand are silhouetted, almost disappearing. One might think of the overwhelming power of the ring in The Lord of the Rings! But it doesn’t work like that in reality – and arguably this advertisement is far from appealing because of its edict to stop thinking. It works better perhaps as a textbook example, since it captures both the obvious reaction (and rhetoric) of how the world is just descending into a mindlessness of shopping and yet, also brings to light (through the eclipse of the hand) the need for our active (and pleasurable) role in shopping.
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