Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:
"Modern" Versus "Postmodern"
Scholarly Authority
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas: Anthropological Conventions in the Use of "Hard" Versus "Soft" Models |
| One cannot move from the informal to the formal by formal means alone. |
| fortune, UNIX BSD 4.x |
| Past anthropological forays into the natural sciences have been motivated
by a search for tools with which to describe ethnographic settings in more "rigorous" terms. The typical result of these forays has been unsatisfactory - e.g. good descriptions of natural resource management systems were produced that contained but pale reflections of the principal subject, people and their activities. It is suggested here that these failures are due to implicit conventions in anthropology - in particular conventions pertaining to numerical representation - regarding what to observe and how. This is seen most clearly in anthropology's applications of computer science [Boone and Woods 1992; Fischer 1994]. There were early successes with simulation models in anthropology , in which the constructive semantics of kinship were played out over whole populations [Coult and Randolf 1965; Dyke 1981], food procurement strategies were reconciled with local ecology [ Ricci & Wilson 1978; Buchler & Fischer 1986], and tabla improvisations were related to the constituent "formulae" used by musicians [Kippen 1988a]. These successes were not followed up en mass, however, because the nature of early computer representations was not in a form easily adaptable to conventional forms of representation in anthropology [Fischer 1994:10]. This is consonent with other attempts to incorporate natural science theories, methods and models that have followed much the same pattern [see Bernard 1994]. Depending on the contstituency these failures are typically attributed to one of the following reasons: a) matters involving people are intrinsically "too complex" for natural science |
| derived methods |
| b) social scientists are too imprecise in their "measurements", too lax in their |
| methods, and lack any serious form of testable theory |
| I shall stand to the side and suggest another reason: natural science
methods were developed as a result of a process which aimed to solve problems that are different from those social scientists pursue. Without qualification we could argue that this is a variant of either a) or b) preceeding. That is, either a) social phenomena is intrincially too complex for natural science derived methods to apply or b) social scientists are asking the wrong questions, biting off more than they can chew. As a scientifically trained anthropologist, who is also a computer scientist, I propose a third reading: |
| Social phenomena are of a different order from the phenomena that natural science
has been successful in addressing. The failure to successfully adopt natural sciences methods has |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 44 |
| largely been because of a failure to address these differences rather than an intrinsic
barrier to adoption. |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 48 before that work was complete. Perhaps most significant to me though was his demonstration that an identical syntactic form could have a very large number of entirely different derivations for a single corresponding semantic form. That is, formally speaking, one did not require a deterministic one-to-one correspondence between the process of deriving one form from the other, and that this was not a defect, as the converse, multiple semantic forms for a single syntactic form (ambiguity), was often seen. I had also just discovered the work of René Thom on the use of topology, in the form of Catastrophe Theory, to formalise irregular, discontinuous qualitative systems. The major application focus of Catastrophe theory at the time was representing discontinuous phenomena, such as stock market crashes, and aggression, ignoring Thom's examples, which were too void of content to be truly useful scientifically, but demonstrated the possible scope - the origins of language, culture and the morphogenisis of the genome into an individual. Extraordinary stuff, for the moment lost on the trash heap of ideas because of the triviality of his followers. Perhaps the most interesting result of Thom's work was his 'proof' that any real processural phenomena could be described in at most 7 dimensions, and that any phenomena, real or imaginary, in at most 11 (which resonates well with the hypothesised 10 dimensions of super-string theory in physics). In other words he proved there was a finite limit of complexity to any process (for Thom worked in processes or structural unfoldings). It could be very complex, but there were limits. I saw Derrida much in the same vein, teasing out the implications of features of coded representation, providing possible motivation for tools to describe in more precise form those things that had been intractable. In particular I was taken by his gloss for differance, as an idea/structure that was the same but not identical. But again, what I saw as the most striking feature of Derrida's framework has gone largely unnoticed, and given the development of critical theory, contravened. Effectively in this work Derrida more or less demolishes the philosophical position of phenomenology, and in a later work "Of Grammatology", destroys semiotics and semiology, and attacks the structure of the symbol in general. To me, this work represented a basis for reducing the scope of semantic meaning, venturing forth into the territory of pragmatics, and beyond to the playing out of ideas in "real life" Thom's dynamical structural unfolding, Montague's meta- intensionality). From these ideas I assembled a montage for formalising ethnographic description which I have been adapting to research material ever since, most recently in the semantic denotation of ethnographic multi-media representations. However, I seem to represent an N of 1 in travelling along this particular vector, always a quality indicator of the common crank. Of these three, Montague and Thom have had virtually no impact at all in anthropology (although, though Thom has had some influence in biology and Montague in linguistics. Derrida, of course, serves as much of the base for motivating postmodernism. |
| or perspectutual unfoldings). |
| Michael Fischer 51 how there is structure to the non-linearity, and this structure constitutes a genuine encoding of the document, that is, an encoding of knowledge in addition to the material within. Both Banks and Biella focus on the 'freedom' for the user of multimedia, and are principally arguing whether this freedom is of value or not. An aspect that both ignore is that this freedom is largely illusionary. The use of links in a multimedia document represent an increase in authorial control, not an advance in reader freedom. For example, it is difficult to imagine much more freedom than a book affords. Although there is a linear order to the pages, the reader is free to look at the pages in any order, and parts of pages at will. Most books come with a device called an index which makes this non-linear use of the book easier. By processing the book through a concordance program, individual sentences can be utilised completely out of context. However, in a multimedia document the reader has no more freedom than a book, and in most cases much less. Not every thing is linked, and only material that is linked can be accessed from a particular point in the document. Access to other parts of the document is controlled by the author. The manner in which the author produces the links in part reflects the extent of knowledge the author controls relating to the content. Levels of knowledge might be represented from low to high as follows: |
| 1 | manually imposed links directly to other material. These links are
comparable to addressing a specific page in an index. |
| 2 | using classifiers to locate relevant links is the next level. This
is comparable to finding pages based on a keyword. |
| 3 | links derived from syntactic coding. Comparable to finding pages based
on simple formulae. |
| 4 | links derived from semantic coding. Comparable to finding pages based
on relevance. |
| 5 | links derived from pragmatic coding. Comparable to finding pages based
on intent. |
| Each of these levels implies a greater control and knowledge about
the material within. At present most multimedia is limited to 1 and 2. These consist entirely of fixed direct links, or links that relate to classified material. Because of the increase of authorial control it is essential that we be able to achieve at least level 4. With decreased access by the reader, they are prevented from using there normal skills in supplying these semantic links. This is currently possible, though not implemented as a multimedia model to my knowledge. The most common example of this in conventional computing methods is the expert system or knowledge-based system, where links between information is based on situational matching. A multimedia representation would essentially involve tagging the textual, visual and aural segments with propositions that interact with each other within the knowledge-based system to create relevant links. To accomplish this involves not |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 52 more computer technology, but the development of more formal means of describing non-textual media. Fischer and Zeitlyn (nd) approached this problem using multimedia based research tools to investigate a ritual called Nggwun, which the Mambila of Somié in Cameroon enact biannually to reaffirm the authority of the chief. A set of multimedia interviewing tools was developed in the field in response to informant comments and their prior experience of using such tools in other societies and working with Mambila. The results were surprising and unexpected. Informants had no problems in understanding the images on screen but, although they were happy to watch and commentate in great detail, our attempts to elicit choices of representative or salient clips met with failure. In response to this we completely redesigned the research protocol and ended up with some straightforward interview schemas in which respondents were shown a clip and asked what preceded it and what came afterwards. The results of using this protocol with a range of informants (both male female, senior and junior and with varying degrees of involvement in the ritual) were random. This led them to the conclusion that chronological sequence was more important for outside observers than for them as participants. Yet Zeitlyn has witnessed these rites on six occasions and clearly identified an observable chronological sequence. Consultants had no problem identifying what they were looking at and were able to discuss it among themselves without prompts. This is evidence that the negative results with respect to chronology are not artifacts of the interviewing process. These results pose an interpretative challenge: we must explain how the Mambila participants manage to organise a ritual every two years that closely resembles previous events, yet at other times are unable to say which of two components comes first. We also asked for verbal accounts of the ritual which contained some chronological sequence but were dramatically simplified. Whatever the eventual outcome of this investigation, the use of multimedia revealed information about the structure that linguistic and textual approaches had not on six prior occasions. It did this not by the simple consideration of ‘facts’, but by promoting a context within which the consultants could be observed trying to interact with situations with which they were well familiar, and noting the kinds of connections they made, did not make, and could not make. Their research was designed to evaluate the efficacy of multimedia assisted ethnographic research on the Mambila Nggwun ritual. The basic idea of the ritual is reaffirming the Chief’s authority, but like many rituals has a significance that extends its rationale. Our study was based on video and sound recording Zeitlyn made during the Nggwun of December, 1996. Zeitlyn had participated in six biannual Nggwun rites. On this occasion, at the invitation of the Chief of Somié, he was permitted to video the most private parts of the ritual. The video together with Zeitlyn’s experience provided an ideal circumstance to evaluate interactive multimedia as a research tool. They used video clips (with sound) as prompts for interviews, and worked through about 7 hours of raw footage on CDROM with local ritual consultants, selecting |
| Michael Fischer 53 twenty minutes of video which in turn was reduced to a set of clips totalling little more than three minutes. The rough edits were done on a Macintosh laptop which also provided a controlled multimedia environment for the interviews. Knowledge of exactly which frame or sequence a particular utterance refers to was recorded and appended to the interviews as an extra sound track synchronised to the video, and they recorded their informant’s interactions with the multimedia display, which was sued to reconstruct the interview sessions by ‘replaying’ them. They were particularly concerned with the process by which a ‘traditional ritual performance’ is understood, identified and/or invoked to serve in different social and cultural contexts by different participants of the rites. Fischer developed a set of multimedia interviewing tools in the field in response to informant comments together with his prior experience of using such tools in other societies and Zeitlyn’s extensive work with the Mambila. The results were surprising and unexpected. Informants had no problems in understanding the images on screen but, although they were happy to watch and commentate in great detail, attempts to elicit choices of representative or salient clips met with failure. In response to this they had to iteratively redesign the research protocol and ended up with some straightforward interview schemas in which respondents were shown a video clip and asked what preceded it and what came afterwards. The results of using this protocol with a range of informants (both male female, senior and junior and with varying degrees of involvement in the ritual) were random. Chronological sequence was more important for anthropological observers than for the participants. There is a clearly observable (and, over the past 10 years, stable) chronological sequence, but no person with sufficient knowledge to reproduce it. The Mambila had no problem identifying what they were looking at and were able to discuss it among themselves without prompts from us. These results pose an interpretative challenge: we must explain how the Mambila participants manage to organise a ritual every two years that closely resembles previous events, yet at other times are unable to say which of two components comes first. Verbal accounts of the ritual contained some chronological sequence but were dramatically simplified. Even the ritual experts who organise the rite and who have, in the past, given privileged access to the most secret parts gave highly condensed and reduced accounts. Verbally derived accounts of the synchronic and diachronic structure of the Nggwun rite are very partial, individually and collectively. However, chronological judgments appear accessible only through language and constituents constructed through language. Language supports the specification of arbitrary connections between structural constituents, in particular transitions between constituents, while sensory-based judgments are more likely to support only localised systemic transitions. That is, language can support revolutionary transitions, while other cognitive systems mainly support evolutionary transitions. No one individual has enough knowledge to reproduce the ritual, and collective accounts based entirely on verbal accounts are also inadequate. The ritual itself has a structure that is too complex and stable to account for by simple negotiation. This indicates that anthropologists need to focus more explicitly and systematically on how collective knowledge is integrated and expressed to reproduce social events and |
| • | If talaq is said three times in succession to the wife before two male witnesses |
| the marriage is dissolved, otherwise the marriage continues. |
| and apply this rule to the following information — talaq was
said twice to the wife before two male witnesses — we arrive at the result that the marriage continues. Simulations of this sort are nothing new to anthropologists — we do them all the time in our head or on paper to validate our analyses against data, to explore the properties of our models, or to extrapolate our models to new situations. Such simulation, predating computers, has been used in anthropology at least since the nineteenth century (Mulvaney 1970). Simulation, with caution and reservation, is used to observe rituals, ceremonies and activities, which for some reason cannot be observed in the ordinary course of fieldwork (Clammer 1984:72—3; Ellen 1984:274). Indeed, formal interviews and ‘set-ups’ (Jackson 1987:41) meet this sense of simulation to some extent. Finally, we practice simulation each time we ‘play out’ our models and analyses in our minds or on paper, testing against observed data, and evaluating the results. Anthropologists have been using simulation almost since the beginnings of the discipline. In the field, although it is most desirable to witness performances of ritual, preparation of materials etc. in person, this has not always been possible. More recently, since the introduction of computers, simulation has taken on another meaning; using computer models to explore social situations which could not otherwise be easily investigated. In its infancy simulation consisted of relatively |
| Michael Fischer 55 simple numerical models which were iteratively executed towards a cumulative result, moderated by the influences of other models as the simulation run progresses. The use of computers for simulation modelling were among the first encounters of social anthropologists with computing (Kundstater et al 1963; Gilbert and Hammel 1966), not only because simulation met more or less the conception of what computers did in the early 1960s, but also because anthropologists at that time were beginning to explore the use of more sophisticated models and attempting to apply a more systematic perspective to anthropology. Heretofore simulation has mostly been applied in a contextual way, though there are notable exceptions. By far the most important use of simulation in anthropology to date has been to evaluate the interrelationships between demographic structure and real or hypothetical social structures or cultural practices (cf. Hammel, Randolph and Coult, Dyke and McCleur). Simulation has also been useful in relating aspects of anthropology to policy (Nardi). Buchler and Fischer have used simulation to choose between different models of land allocation for horticulture in New Guinea, Fischer and Selby used simulations to investigate the relationship between cultural models for agricultural planning and crop yields. X (from Auckland) used simulation to investigate the dispersion which led to the Polynesian expansion. Furbee and Benefer ... New techniques for modelling became available in the late 1970s in the form of knowledge representation by expert systems. Fischer and Fischer & Finkelstein have done detailed work on marriage arrangement in the Punjab, Read and Behrens on literacy in, Kippen modelled tabla improvisation, Benefer and Furbee on the classification of land types, and more recently Fischer has been working on modelling the recreation of cultural traditions in the South Pacific. These new approaches have not been properly exploited as yet. In part this has been due to the accessibility to the non-specialist of both knowledge-based techniques and the equipment needed to exploit knowledge-based techniques. There was also the necessary period of basic research required to evaluate the applicability of these methods to anthropological problems. Thirdly, there are newer prospects which promise to make knowledge-based simulation much more relevant to the discipline and its applications. Simulation is the ideal platform to extend current knowledge-based methods to anthropology. As an actual model of cognitive processes KB models are not only unproven, but extremely unlikely. In terms of producing predictive classificatory behaviour that is comparable to those produced by actual cognitive processes, they are very successful. In particular Fischer's research demonstrates that a sufficiently detailed knowledge-based model produces classificatory results that are comparable to indigenous thinkers, and are acceptable to them. Although these models are not as yet satisfactory from the point of view of representing the actual structure of indigenous thought, they are nevertheless useful in two capacities. Firstly, as a more formal representation method for ethnographic data. Secondly as components in computer simulations. |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 56 The typical structure of a simulation is a number of models of different order, which interrelate at the level of their behaviour. For example, we might wish to produce a simulation to investigate different methods of distributing active knowledge about Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) in a specific community. We will have available to us demographic data, traditional and formal educational facilities and activities, epidemiological data relating to relevant diseases over time, outlets for distribution, outlets for notices, medical ethnography which relates indigenous thinking about disease, clinical interview records, self-treatment strategies, sources consulted for medical purposes, etc. And, of course, ethnographic data which relates to these and other issues, in lesser and greater detail. Some of these data can be represented using appropriate statistical procedures, linear programming models, and other numerical techniques. Others will be defined using algebraic or logical statements, represented in trees, graphs, lattices, or other systems. It would be an enormous task to a priori interrelate these data into a single formal system for analysis. Simulation can be used as a tool for exploring just these connections. While the formal description terms of each kind of data may be of different order, we can develop a simulation model to investigate the interaction of these models to the extent the models can a) generate behaviours/results, b) other models can use these behaviours/results in generating their own behaviours/results, and c) we can state a useful problem in terms of these interactions. Simulation is a kind of modelling which is useful for wide range of problems and situations. It has applications to both quantitative and qualitative problems with either very good data, or very little data. It has important implications for disciplines such as social anthropology which are basically non-experimental, providing a means of exploring problems which could never be observed to order. Simulation is not a panacea for all of our problems, but it can be an important tool for the social researcher aware of its limitations. Simulations are distinguished from other kinds of models more in terms of goal than form. Simulations are typically used for problems which are seen as complex and intractable, where no direct means of evaluation is known or the conventional means of evaluation is extremely difficult to execute, or which requires interactive decisions by the investigator during the course of the model. In social anthropology the most common (and successful) simulations have been based on the interaction of models of prescriptive or preferential marriage, incest or other social phenomena with either demographic models or ecological models (or both) (Kunstader et al 1963; Hammel and Gilbert 1965; Randolph and Coult 1965; MacCluer and Dyke 1976; Black 1978; Relethford 1981; Buchler et al. 1986). The fundamental idea underlying these simulations is to investigate the performance of social models in context with ‘well-understood’ models, including the ethnographic model of collection. |
| Michael Fischer 57 Although simulations can be quite abstract and analytic,most anthropologists tend to favour those which are fairly concrete. One reason for this is the emphasis of social anthropology on structural relationships between individuals. If you are investigating the feasibility of literal prescribed matrilateral cross-cousin marriage (c.f. Kundstater et al. 1963), then you must usually simulate a population as a set of people, not as a simple aggregate. Each simulated person must have at least a mother and father, an age, a gender, a marital status, and be subject to birth, marriage and death, and have, in some cases, a history. A simulation animates our models to produce data which we can use to evaluate these models. This is of course possible to do without computers, but is a very time consuming effort. Although most simulations have been applied to theoretical situations where simulation was most useful precisely because it was not possible to observe these directly. In the past few years simulations have been applied back to the field with promising results. Lansing (1991) describes a simulation which resulted from his fieldwork in Bali regarding the role of water temples and the rituals associated with these and the regulation and conservation of irrigation water for rice cultivation, and more controversially, their role in pest control. Although a large part of the simulation related to ecological parameters, the overall significance depended heavily on ethnographic data relating to how the water temples functioned ritually as well, and how information flowed from the water temples to the peasants who used irrigation water for their crops. It appears that among the results of the simulation project was providing a basis for reversing official policy towards the water temple system by the state and development agencies, which are now recognised by the state and ‘have regained informal control of cropping patterns in most of Bali’. (Lansing 1991:125) Kippen (1988) applied a novel version of simulation, using a production system/expert system (§«Simulate».2) to represent indigenous knowledge about improvising tabla music, animated this model, creating not a literal set of recordings, but an improvisational ‘performance’ by Kippen’s model; literally something new but conforming to a pattern which his expert consultants (tabla musicians) could make judgments about, criticise, and set a context for Kippen to elicit new information on which to base modifications to the expert system rules. In the past we could argue that there was no real way to produce a directly testable model. We can not yet produce formally provable models, but there is no reason, though, why at a micro-level, we cannot make statements about what we believe we know, and evaluate this with respect to what we think should be the outcome. Analysis should at least be subjectable to a test of the internal consistency of the representation, regardless of how we want to argue about the external reliability or lack thereof. Simulation can be defined in either a broad or narrow sense. In the narrow sense simulation is a model where we are attempting to describe the behaviour of a system by incrementally and interactionally applying a number of models against some starting situation. In the broader sense, it is any kind of computer model within which some structure is being modified along one or more dimensions. In the |
| Michael Fischer 59 The basic premise of a production system is fairly simple. A non-trivial production system consists of at least two productions, where one of both of the productions can use the behaviour of the other to influences its own behaviour. if x then y if y then z Production systems are generally non-deterministic (though special cases can be deterministic). This means that more than one outcome can result from a given state of affairs. This need not be probabilistic in the model system, i.e. one can generate all the behaviours. Only if possible outcome are mutually exclusive need probabilities enter into the derivation. The result is a model that is holistic - a given production can interact directly and indirectly with a significant proportion of the other productions of the system. A model that is non-deterministic - both with respect to the inputs (eg many different input states can result in the same behaviour) and the outputs (several behaviours may occur from a single input state). A model that is robust. Despite the holistic nature, in a properly redundant system productions can be modified without changing the overall character of the system, though its behaviour may be slightly different. This can be used to account for how each member of a society must have a different perspective and formulation of a production system which is consistent with other individuals. Computers are ideal systems for representing unfoldings. Computer programs always consist of some initial state of information and a method for transforming that information to another state. Declarative resolution logic is an approach to expressing this information structurally, and then unfolding these declarations to their consequences. A statement is represented by a goal and a declarative definition in terms of either other goals (which themselves must be "proved") or given data. In practice, one can either a) specify the goal, and then the goal is "proved" if it happens in the process of |
| unfolding, inconclusive if it doesn't, |
| b) find all the possible goals for a given definition for a give set of initial information |
| (e.g. all the goals that are "proved"), or |
| c) partially specify the goal, and get some results of type a. and
b). Goal1 IS PROVED IF Goal2 AND Goal3 And Goal4 example: harvest crayfish if correct season and recent rainfall Production systems are a conceptualisation of deriving global results from an arbitrary number of local productions. It can be implemented based on DRL. In a production system there is a global area where information, including relationships is represented. Production rules are simple declarative rule that can be of the DRL sort. A production system is used much less "intentionally" than a DRL system. |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 60 That is, you initialise the information, insert the rules, start the system going, and then monitor the global area to see what is happening in the midst of all these unfolding rules. The propositions search the global area to see if their goals apply, and if so post the consequence goals to the global area, thus creating the possibility that other propositions can "fire". One of the interesting things about a production system is that the rules can be of different orders and levels. For example: If we want to represent pearl farming in Manihiki with a production system we might do the following. Manihiki is a small atoll 3° south of the equator, more or less south of Hawaii. Recently cultivated black pearls have been introduced to the lagoon, which is well suited for this purpose. As such this is a new industry, so there is no indigenous system to replace, though it obviously replaces other indigenous uses of resources, in particular copra making, which is currently lapsed. To represent the overall process of pearl cultivation from a social and natural resource point of view we have to examine a number of different orders. To indicate a few of these: |
| 1) | social organisation |
| 2) | population flows |
| 3) | atoll politics |
| 4) | historical linkages to other atolls |
| 5) | resource exploitation skills |
| 6) | knowledge resources and their distribution |
| 7) | new skills relating to pearl cultivation and their distribution |
| 8) | external technicians with "secret" knowledge |
| 9) | markets, local and external |
| 10) | national politics |
| 11) | the lagoon and lagoon ecology |
| 12) | the atoll and atoll ecology |
| 13) | transport |
| 14) | supplies |
| None of these can be adequately discussed without reference to at
least one or two others. The resulting network of dependencies of these systems tends to relate them all, in good old fashioned holistic style for anthropology. In the production system we can have propositions (goals and consequences of the goals) of the following sorts: |
| a) | propositions whose condition goals and consequence goals are of the same |
| order, eg operate within the same domain. |
| b) | propositions whose condition goals and consequence goals are of different |
| orders, eg they translate results between domains. |
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| practice in Mayotte [comments on Knowledge and practice in Mayotte: local discourses
of Islam, sorcery, and spirit possession by M. Lambek (Toronto: Univ Toronto Pr, 1993)] Cultural dynamics. 9:2 pp 161-72. |
| Michael Fischer 65 At our last meeting I promised you some schematic and preliminary reflections on the word "deconstruction". What we discussed were prolegomena to a possible translation of this word into Japanese, one which would at least try to avoid, if possible, a negative determination of its significations or connotations. The question would be therefore what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be. I underline these words "possible" and "ought". For if the difficulties of translation can be anticipated (and the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation, and of the language of concepts, of the conceptual corpus of so-called "western" metaphysics), one should not begin by naively believing that the word "deconstruction" corresponds in French to some clear and univocal signification. There is already in "my" language a serious [sombre] problem of translation between what here or there can be envisaged for the word, and the usage itself, the reserves of the word. And it is already clear that even in French, things change from one context to another. More so in the German, English, and especially American contexts, where the same word is already attached to very different connotations, inflections, and emotional or affective values. Their analysis would be interesting and warrants a study of its own. When I chose the word, or when it imposed itself on me - I think it was in *Of Grammatology* - I little thought it would be credited with such a central role in the discourse that interested me at the time. Among other things I wished to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heidggerian word Destruktion or Abbau. Each signified in this context an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics. But in French "destruction" too obviously implied an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer perhaps to Nietzschean "demolition" than to the Heideggerian interpretation or to the type of reading that I proposed. So I ruled that out. I remember having looked to see if the word "deconstruction" (which came to me it seemed quite spontaneously) was good French. I found it in the Littré. The grammatical, linguistic, or rhetorical senses [portees] were found bound up with a "mechanical" sense [portee "machinique"]. This association appeared very fortunate, and fortunately adapted to what I wanted at least to suggest. Perhaps I could cite some of the entries from the Littré. "Deconstruction: action of deconstructing. Grammatical term. Disarranging the construction of words in a sentence. 'Of deconstruction, common way of saying construction', Lemare, De la maniére d'apprendre les langues, ch.17, in *Cours de langue Latine*. Deconstruire: 1. To disassemble the parts of a whole. To deconstruct a machine to transport it elsewhere. 2. Grammatical term... To deconstruct verse, rendering it, by the suppression of meter, similar to prose. Absolutely. ('In the system of prenotional sentences, one also starts with translation and one of its advantages is never needing to deconstruct,' Lemare, ibid.) 3. Se deconstruire [to deconstruct itself] ... to lose its construction. 'Modern scholarship has shown us that in a region of the timeless East, a language reaching its own state of perfection is deconstructed [s'est deconstruite] and altered from within itself according to the single law of change, natural to the human mind,' Villemain, *Preface du Dictionaire de l'Academie*." Naturally it will be necessary to translate all of this into Japanese but that only postpones the problem. It goes without saying that if all the significations |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 66 enumerated by the Littré interested me because of their affinity with what I "meant" [voulais-dire], they concerned, metaphorically, so to say, only models or regions of meaning and not the totality of what deconstruction aspires to at its most ambitious. This is not limited to a linguistico-grammatical model, let alone a mechanical model. These models themselves ought to be submitted to a deconstructive questioning. It is true then that these "models" have been behind a number of misunderstandings about the concept and word of "deconstruction" because of the temptation to reduce it to these models. It must also be said that the word was rarely used and was largely unknown in France. It had to be reconstructed in some way, and its use value had been determined by the discourse that was then being attempted around and on the basis of *Of Grammatology*. It is to this value that I am now going to try to give some precision and not some primitive meaning or etymology sheltered from or outside of any contextual strategy. A few more words on the subject of "the context". At that time structuralism was dominant. "Deconstruction" seemed to be going in the same direction since the word signified a certain attention to structures (which themselves were neither simply ideas, nor forms, nor syntheses, nor systems). To deconstruct was also a structuralist gesture or in any case a gesture that assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic. But it was also an antistructuralist gesture, and its fortune rests in part on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented (all types of structures, linguistic, "logocentric", "phonocentric" - structuralism being especially at that time dominated by linguistic models and by a so-called structural linguistics that was also called Saussurian - socio-institutional, political, cultural, and above all and from the start philosophical.) This is why, especially in the United States, the motif of deconstruction has been associated with "poststructuralism" (a word unknown in France until its "return" from the States). But the undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting of structures, in a certain sense more historical than the structuralist movement it called into question, was not a negative operation. Rather than destroying, it was also necessary to understand how an "ensemble" was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end. However, the negative appearance was and remains much more difficult to efface than is suggested by the grammaar of the word (de-), even though it can designate a genealogical restoration [remonter] rather than a demolition. That is why the word, at least on its own, has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what word is), and must always be girded by an entire discourse. It is difficult to effect it afterward because, in the work of deconstruction, I have had to, as I have to here, multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts, while reaffirming the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure. Hence, this has been called, precipitately, a type of negative theology (this was neither true nor false but I shall not enter into the debate here). All the same, and in spite of appearances, deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique and its translation would have to take that into consideration. It is not an analysis in particular because the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin. These values, like that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to deconstruction. No more is it a |
| Michael Fischer 67 critique, in a general sense or in Kantian sense. The instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgment, discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one of the essential "themes" or "objects" of deconstruction. I would say the same about method. Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be tranformed into one. Especially if the technical and procedural significations of the word are stressed. It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological "metaphor" that seems necessarily attached to the very word deconstruction has been able to seduce or lead astray. Hence the debate that has developed in these circles: Can deconstruction become a methodology for reading and for interpretation? Can it thus be allowed to be reappropriated and domesticated by academic institutions? It is not enough to say that deconstruction could not be reduced to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures. Nor will it do to claim that each deconstructive "event" remains singular or, in any case, as close as possible to something like an idiom or a signature. It must also be made clear that deconstruction is not even an act or an operation. Not only because there would be something "patient" or "passive" about it (as Blanchot says, more passive than passivity, than the passivity that is opposed to activity). Not only because it does not return to an individual or collective subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a theme, etc. Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs itself. It can be deconstructed. [Ça se deconstruit.] The "it" [ça] is not here an impersonal thing that is opposed to some egological subjectivity. It is in deconstruction (the Littré says, "to deconstruct itself [se deconstruire]... to lose its construction"). And the "se" of "se deconstruire," which is not the reflexivity of an ego or of a consciousness, bears the whole enigma. I recognize, my dear driend, that in trying to make a word clearer so as to assist its translation, I am only thereby increasing the difficulties: "the impossible task of the translator" (Benjamin). This too is meant by "deconstructs". If deconstruction takes place everywhere it [ça] takes place, where there is something (and is not therefore limited to meaning or to the text in the current and bookish sense of the word), we still have to think through what is happening in our world, in modernity, at the time when deconstruction is becoming a motif, with its word, its privileged themes, its mobile strategy, etc. I have no simple and formalizable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question. They are modest symptoms of it, quite as much as tentative interpretations. I would not even dare to say, following a Heideggerian schema, that we are in an "epoch" of being-in-deconstruction, of a being-in- deconstruction that would manifest or dissimulate itself at one and the same time in other "epochs". This thought of "epochs" and especially that of a gathering of the destiny of being and of the unity of its destination or its dispersions (Schicken, Geschick) will never be very convincing. To be very schematic I would say that the difficulty of defining an therefore also of translating the word "deconstruction" stems from the fact that all the predicates, all |
| My Postmodern Adventure |
| by Chip Morningstar chip@netcom.com 5-July-1993 "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." |
| - Donald Norman |
| This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the
world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale. It started when my colleague Randy Farmer and I presented a paper at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace, held in Santa Cruz, California in April, 1991. Like the first conference, at which we also presented a paper, it was an |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 70 aggressively interdisciplinary gathering, drawing from fields as diverse as computer science, literary criticism, engineering, history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and political science. About the only relevant field that seemed to lack strong representation was economics (an important gap but one which we don't have room to get into here). It was in turn stimulating, aggravating, fascinating and infuriating, a breathtaking intellectual roller coaster ride unlike anything else I've recently encountered in my professional life. My last serious brush with the humanities in an academic context had been in college, ten years earlier. The humanities appear to have experienced a considerable amount of evolution (or perhaps more accurately, genetic drift) since then. Randy and I were scheduled to speak on the second day of the conference. This was fortunate because it gave us the opportunity to recalibrate our presentation based on the first day's proceedings, during which we discovered that we had grossly mischaracterized the audience by assuming that it would be like the crowd from the first conference. I spent most of that first day furiously scribbling notes. People kept saying the most remarkable things using the most remarkable language, which I found I needed to put down in writing because the words would disappear from my brain within seconds if I didn't. Are you familiar with the experience of having memories of your dreams fade within a few minutes of waking? It was like that, and I think for much the same reason. Dreams have a logic and structure all their own, falling apart into unmemorable pieces that make no sense when subjected to the scrutiny of the conscious mind. So it was with many of the academics who got up to speak. The things they said were largely incomprehensible. There was much talk about deconstruction and signifiers and arguments about whether cyberspace was or was not "narrative". There was much quotation from Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, and the like, every single word of which was impenetrable. I'd never before had the experience of being quite this baffled by things other people were saying. I've attended lectures on quantum physics, group theory, cardiology, and contract law, all fields about which I know nothing and all of which have their own specialized jargon and notational conventions. None of those lectures were as opaque as anything these academics said. But I captured on my notepad an astonishing collection of phrases and a sense of the overall tone of the event. We retreated back to Palo Alto that evening for a quick rewrite. The first order of business was to excise various little bits of phraseology that we now realized were likely to be perceived as Politically Incorrect. Mind you, the fundamental thesis of our presentation was Politically Incorrect, but we wanted people to get upset about the actual content rather than the form in which it was presented. Then we set about attempting to add something that would be an adequate response to the postmodern lit crit-speak we had been inundated with that day. Since we had no idea what any of it meant (or even if it actually meant anything at all), I simply cut- and- pasted from my notes. The next day I stood up in front of the room and opened our presentation with the following: The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the |
| Michael Fischer 71 dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor. This bit of nonsense was constructed entirely out of things people had actually said the day before, except for the last ten words or so which are a pastiche of Danny Kaye's "flagon with the dragon" bit from The Court Jester, contributed by our co- worker Gayle Pergamit, who took great glee in the entire enterprise. Observing the audience reaction was instructive. At first, various people started nodding their heads in nods of profound understanding, though you could see that their brain cells were beginning to strain a little. Then some of the techies in the back of the room began to giggle. By the time I finished, unable to get through the last line with a straight face, the entire room was on the floor in hysterics, as by then even the most obtuse English professor had caught on to the joke. With the postmodernist lit crit shit thus defused, we went on with our actual presentation. Contrary to the report given in the "Hype List" column of issue #1 of Wired ("Po- Mo Gets Tek-No", page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them. Afterward, however, I was left with a sense that I should try to actually understand what these people were saying, really. I figured that one of three cases must apply. It could be that there was truly some content there of value, once you learned the lingo. If this was the case, then I wanted to know what it was. On the other hand, perhaps there was actually content there but it was bogus (my working hypothesis), in which case I wanted to be able to respond to it credibly. On the third hand, maybe there was no content there after all, in which case I wanted to be able to write these clowns off without feeling guilty that I hadn't given them due consideration. The subject that I kept hearing about over and over again at the conference was deconstruction. I figured I'd start there. I asked my friend Michael Benedikt for a pointer to some sources. I had gotten to know Michael when he organized the First International Conference on Cyberspace. I knew him to be a person with a foot in the lit crit camp but also a person of clear intellectual integrity who was not a fool. He suggested a book called On Deconstruction by Jonathan Culler. I got the book and read it. It was a stretch, but I found I could work my way through it, although I did end up with the most heavily marked up book in my library by the time I was done. The Culler book lead me to some other things, which I also read. And I started subscribing to alt.postmodern and now actually find it interesting, much of the time. I can't claim to be an expert, but I feel I've reached the level of a competent amateur. I think I can explain it. It turns out that there's nothing to be afraid of. We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this accusation. Defenders frequently counter with arguments about how what we do really is technical and really does require precise language in order to talk about it clearly. There is, I think, a substantial bit of truth in this as well, though it is hard to use these grounds to defend the use of the term "grep" to describe digging through a backpack to find |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 72 a lost item, as a friend of mine sometimes does. However, I think it's human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I'm willing to forgive him. The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me - marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers - none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it. Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in- crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called "better schools" (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don't know if this is actually true but it's a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves - occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risqué as to be newsworthy. What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands - an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected. What's more, it's not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness. In fact, one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment. A work need not be right, clear, original, or connected to anything outside the group. Indeed, it looks to me like the vast bulk of literary criticism that is published has other works of literary criticism as its principal subject, with the occasional reference to the odd work of actual literature tossed in for flavoring from time to time. |
| Michael Fischer 73 Thus it is not surprising that it takes a bit of detective work to puzzle out what is going on. But I've been on the case for a while now and I think I've identified most of the guilty suspects. I hope I can spare some of my own peers the inconvenience and wasted time of actually doing the legwork themselves (though if you have an inclination in that direction I recommend it as a mind stretching departure from debugging C code). The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gödel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties. Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the commotion that it has generated. However, like hack writers or television producers, academics will use a formula if it does the job and they are not held to any higher standard (though perhaps Derrida can legitimately claim some credit for originality in inventing the formula in the first place). Just to clear up the mystery, here is the formula, step-by-step: Step 1 - Select a work to be deconstructed. This a called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature. However, the choice of text is actually one of the less important decisions you will need to make, since points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance, although more challenging works are valued for their greater potential for exercising cleverness. Thus you want to pick your text with an eye to the opportunities it will give you to be clever and convoluted, rather than whether the text has anything important to say or there is anything important to say about it. Generally speaking, obscure works are better than well known ones, though an acceptable alternative is to choose a text from the popular mass media, such as a Madonna video or the latest Danielle Steele novel. The text can be of any length, from the complete works of Louis L'Amour to a single sentence. For example, let's deconstruct the phrase, "John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual." Step 2 - Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want, although of course in the case of a text which actually consists of text it is easier if you pick something that it really does say. This is called "reading". I will read our example phrase as saying that John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual. |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 74 Step 3 - Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. This can be either something which is described or referred to by the text directly or it can be inferred from the presumed cultural context of a hypothetical reader. It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman, good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. In the case of our example, the obvious duality to pick is homosexual/heterosexual, though a really clever person might be able to find something else. Step 4 - Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction. Since it's pretty much arbitrary, you don't have to give a justification for this assertion unless you feel like it. Programmers and computer scientists may find the concept of a hierarchy consisting of only two elements to be a bit odd, but this appears to be an established tradition in literary criticism. Continuing our example, we can claim homophobia on the part of the society in which this sentence was uttered and therefor assert that it presumes superiority of heterosexuality over homosexuality. Step 5 - Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. Pulling this off successfully may require a variety of techniques, though you get more style points for some techniques than for others. Fortunately, you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of word other games. You are allowed to use the word "problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it's not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it's just a convention of the genre). You get maximum style points for being French. Since most of us aren't French, we don't qualify for this one, but we can still score almost as much by writing in French or citing French sources. However, it is difficult for even the most intense and unprincipled American academician writing in French to match the zen obliqueness of a native French literary critic. Least credit is given for a clear, rational argument which makes its case directly, though of course that is what I will do with our example since, being gainfully employed, I don't have to worry about graduation or tenure. And besides, I'm actually trying to communicate here. Here is a possible argument to go with our example: It is not generally claimed that John F. Kennedy was a homosexual. Since it is not an issue, why would anyone choose to explicitly declare that he was not a homosexual unless they wanted to make it an issue? Clearly, the reader is left with a question, a lingering doubt which had not previously been there. If the text had instead simply asked, "Was John F. Kennedy a homosexual?", the reader would |
| Michael Fischer 75 simply answer, "No." and forget the matter. If it had simply declared, "John F. Kennedy was a homosexual.", it would have left the reader begging for further justification or argument to support the proposition. Phrasing it as a negative declaration, however, introduces the question in the reader's mind, exploiting society's homophobia to attack the reputation of the fallen President. What's more, the form makes it appear as if there is ongoing debate, further legitimizing the reader's entertainment of the question. Thus the text can be read as questioning the very assertion that it is making. Of course, no real deconstruction would be like this. I only used a single paragraph and avoided literary jargon. All of the words will be found in a typical abridged dictionary and were used with their conventional meanings. I also wrote entirely in English and did not cite anyone. Thus in an English literature course I would probably get a D for this, but I already have my degree so I don't care. Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up. That's basically all there is to it, although there is an enormous variety of stylistic complication that is added in practice. This is mainly due to the genetic drift phenomenon I mentioned earlier, resulting in the intellectual equivalent of peacock feathers, although I suspect that the need for enough material to fill up a degree program plays a part as well. The best way to learn, of course, is to try to do it yourself. First you need to read some real lit crit to get a feel for the style and the jargon. One or two volumes is all it takes, since it's all pretty much the same (I advise starting with the Culler book the way I did). Here are some ideas for texts you might try to deconstruct, once you are ready to attempt it yourself, graded by approximate level of difficulty: Beginner: |
| Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers this article James Cameron's The Terminator issue #1 of Wired anything by Marx |
| Intermediate: |
| Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn the Book of Genesis Francois Truffaut's Day For Night the United States Constitution Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock anything by Foucault |
| Advanced: |
| Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene the Great Pyramid of Giza Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa |
| Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas 76 |
| the Macintosh user interface Tony Bennett singing I Left My Heart In San Francisco anything by Derrida |
| Tour de Force: |
| James Joyce's Finnegans Wake the San Jose, California telephone directory IRS Form 1040 the Intel i486DX Programmer's Reference Manual the Mississippi River anything by Baudrillard |
| So, what are we to make of all this? I earlier stated that my
quest was to learn if there was any content to this stuff and if it was or was not bogus. Well, my assessment is that there is indeed some content, much of it interesting. The question of bogosity, however, is a little more difficult. It is clear that the forms used by academicians writing in this area go right off the bogosity scale, pegging my bogometer until it breaks. The quality of the actual analysis of various literary works varies tremendously and must be judged on a case-by-case basis, but I find most of it highly questionable. Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader's credulity and willingness to accept the text's own claims as to its validity. Looking at the field of contemporary literary criticism as a whole also yields some valuable insights. It is a cautionary lesson about the consequences of allowing a branch of academia that has been entrusted with the study of important problems to become isolated and inbred. The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is "epistemologically challenged": a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves. But the tangle offers a safe refuge for the academics. It erects a wall between them and the rest of the world. It immunizes them against having to confront their own failings, since any genuine criticism can simply be absorbed into the morass and made indistinguishable from all the other verbiage. Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are systematically ignored or discredited. This is why, for example, science, psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists fifty or a hundred years ago. The field is absorbed in triviality. Deconstruction is an idea that would make a worthy topic for some bright graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation but has instead spawned an entire subfield. Ideas that would merit a good solid evening or afternoon of argument and debate and perhaps a paper or two instead become the focus of entire careers. Engineering and the sciences have, to a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of crass commercial necessity. The constraints of the physical world and the actual needs and wants of the actual population have |
| Michael Fischer 77 provided a grounding that is difficult to dodge. However, in academia the pressures for isolation are enormous. It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge from the jungle on their own. I think that the task of outreach is left to those of us who retain some connection, however tenuous, to what we laughingly call reality. We have to go into the jungle after them and rescue what we can. Just remember to hang on to your sense of humor and don't let them intimidate you. |