Rene Magritte, God on Eighth Day (1937)
I love the tongue in cheek in this mutilating photograph. Am pretty sure that Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the liquidation of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction does not, in fact cannot jibe with Magritte’s very funny picture. I need to look more clearly into the religious or spiritual impulse in Dada and surrealism. In this photograph, God is so arch, so coy, so canny, withdrawn behind a crude image of the world.
I was not expecting to like as much as I did How We Became Posthuman Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics by Katherine Hayles. Assuming that Hayles’ book was more akin to Kurzweil’s “singularity” than it is in fact, I wasn’t going to read it. But Hayles gets mentioned so much, and by people whom I respect, that I gave it a go. Instead of leaving the body behind, the introduction of embodiment into the discussion of human-machine interactions is predicated upon a notion that you cannot separate minds, brain, and information from material and bodily substrate. The point is to insist that the world and its objects and subjects are interpenetrates of information and matter (p.14), that “bodies” are schematic and instantiated “embodiments” (pp.196, 202ff).
Less convining are these notes: [1] the posthuman is set up against a caricature of individuated liberal subjectivity presented as the isolated, disembodied, autonomous, decision-making conscious self of classical laissez faire capitalism; and also because [2] much of what is meant to be posthuman is based on claims regarding the “union” of human and intelligent machines (p.3), the emergence of the subject as an informational, material unit (p.11) submerged into data flows or code in which people and machines are part of single, inseparable system (pp.38, 46, 84). The body might be revealed as a construct open to radical change (p.85). What gives skeptical pause is the rush to proclaim the death of liberalism and the premature Good News of some new supersession full of promise, grace, and transformation.
By the end of the book Hayles will have walked back the more radical claims re: human-machine interfaces. There are limits, the author admits, to this human-machine hybrid. The union is not seamless, precisely because human beings remain and will always remain embodied, and conscious. There are just too many differences in the types of embodiment that distinguish aware and self-aware human intelligence from the intelligent machines, no matter how tight the symbiotic relations between them. We remain human-all-too-human (pp.283ff). If what it means to be posthuman is to transcend the so-called liberal subject, well then perhaps it never was the case that “we” were ever human to begin with, that we were never modern as per Latour, that the so-called liberal subject is as much a figment of the critical theorist’s own ideological imagination. Instead, posthumanism turns out here to have been a useful language game with which to rearrange and rethink what it means to be human under new technological conditions.
In the meantime, Hayles will have guided us expertly through first-generation cybernetics theory represented by Norbert Weiner between 1945 and 1960, and then second-generation theories built on the idea of reflexivity in which the gap between subjects and external environments are effectively closed, and then into third-generation theories predicated on the notion of virtuality. The discussion blends between science and cybernetic and information theory, on the one hand, and sci-fi and cyber-punk literature, on the other hand. The reliance on literature and the mixture of science with science fiction to flesh out the theory works to mixed effect, serving to both clarify and obfuscate what Hayles presents as the “emergence” of new subjectivities. In all fairness, this is a 1999 book, still flush, perhaps, with the first excitements of new media theory. I’m curious to see how the discussion takes shape in the more recent How We Think which pays a lot of mind to digital reading and other mental phenomena things online and technological.
The New York Times editorial page weighs in on a topic of interest over here at JPP: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-college.html?hp It’s so good, I thought I’d post it in its entirety.
Stanford University ratcheted up interest in online education when a pair of celebrity professors attracted more than 150,000 students from around the world to a noncredit, open enrollment course on artificial intelligence. This development, though, says very little about what role online courses could have as part of standard college instruction. College administrators who dream of emulating this strategy for classes like freshman English would be irresponsible not to consider two serious issues.
First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.
Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the record is not encouraging. According to Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, for example, about seven million students — about a third of all those enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center describes as traditional online courses. These typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students. Over all, the center has produced nine studies covering hundreds of thousands of classes in two states, Washington and Virginia. The picture the studies offer of the online revolution is distressing.
The research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses.
A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English.
Lacking confidence as well as competence, these students need engagement with their teachers to feel comfortable and to succeed. What they often get online is estrangement from the instructor who rarely can get to know them directly. Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.
Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid classes — those that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component — performed as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming.
The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access to education. But, so far, the evidence shows that poorly designed courses can seriously shortchange the most vulnerable students.
JPP is now following a new Jewish philosophy blog by Matthew Menachem Feuer:
http://schlemielintheory.wordpress.com/
in which Matthew avers:
Aristotle starts off his most cited book, The Metaphysics, with the classic line “All men by nature desire to know.” Oedipus also desired to know, but when he found out that he killed his father and married his mother, he cursed this desire. The philosopher doesn’t seem to have a problem with knowledge, but Sophocles, who wrote the play Oedipus Rex, does.
The reason: knowledge of origins is beneficial to a philosopher; tragic for a believer in myth and religion.
I suppose that the knowledge of the schlemiel falls somewhere in between. First of all, its good to know, in the most academic sense, “what” the schlemiel is; on the other hand, and contrary to popular wisdom about comedy, the path to understanding the schlemiel must inevitably lead through an encounter with troubling things.
Somewhere in Halakhic Man [sic], Joseph Soloveitchik talks about the blending of visual sensation and halakhic concepts. I like how these pictures came out. Fusing natural and architectural elements, the setting sun and close horizon points signal the physical closing in of a different dimension of temporal duration.
Imperialism and Jewish Society came out in 2001. I remember skimming it and liking the deflationary view of Jewish history in Roman Palestine, particularly in relation to the rabbis and the question of rabbinic authority. I like very much the highlighting of ancient Jewish society as urban. That’s where the action is, where things happen, where Judaism happens, in the cities. Sepporis (Tzipori) in the lower Galil gets a lot of attention here. Among its many virtues, there are three things in particular that draw my attention.
[1] Imperialism and Jewish Society should give pause to a lot of contemporary Jewish philosophers who, in my opinion, overinvest Judaism and Jewish philosophy in law and politics. In contrast, a deflationary view such as this one would present “Jewish law” as a marginal force in Jewish society in late antique Palestine with little actual impact on Jewish communal and political life. The rabbis like to pretend that they were in control of things, when in fact that control was determined, as per Schwartz, by local city councilors, rich Jewish magnates, the Patriarchate, which over time detached itself from the rabbinate, and, of course, by Roman authority. In the day, custom was king, not law, and that was true then, no less than today.
[3] The importance of art in telling and thinking about the story of Jewish life and religion. As presented by Schwartz, the synagogue and synagogue art play an important role in the re-constitution of Jewish society around 500 CE or so. As for me, I’m not entirely sure that the presence of Jewish art supports the lachrymose picture of the rabbis’ marginal authority, an argument that probably stands on its own. What the visual record suggests instead is another part of Schwartz’s thesis, one that takes sharper form in later work by him, namely that the Jews have always been a Mediterranean people. The picture it provides is one of Jewish life based on “riotous” “visual stimulation” full of color, figuration, and artificial illumination that mark out the passages between numinous terrestrial and celestial realms (pp.252-3).
[3] The idea of a “numinous Torah” takes shape in the 4th C. It suggests to me that if law is prosaic, then it’s not really law once it becomes holy. This was a point made by Franz Rosenzweig in The Star of Redemption, but one actually anticipated by Moses Mendelssohn in Jerusalem. More like a colorful ceremonial art or a glittering surface presentation, Torah turns into something more like art than like dull and practical law.
(a little apocalypse and very unreasoning)
Fascinating article in the New York Times Sunday magazine about young, tech savvy Republicans attempting to overhaul their party. Much of the story comes together in this account of a focus group of conservative would-be GOP voters, many of whom voted for Obama in 2012. The choice of words chosen to describe conservatives versus liberals says a lot about politics and culture at this current moment in the American zeitgeist.
About an hour into the session, Anderson walked up to a whiteboard and took out a magic marker. “I’m going to write down a word, and you guys free-associate with whatever comes to mind,” she said. The first word she wrote was “Democrat.”
“Young people,” one woman called out.
“Liberal,” another said. Followed by: “Diverse.” “Bill Clinton.”“Change.”“Open-minded.”“Spending.”“Handouts.”“Green.”“More science-based.”
When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”
As a self-identifying liberal, it’s nice to see one’s own ideological leanings represented on the right sight of the pendulum. But it causes me a great deal of worry about things that come closer to home, here at JPP, such as religion, Judaism, Israel, Zionism, and support for Israel. What would be the findings of a similar focus group organized around those more local points of interest? I’m pretty sure I know where the chips would fall.
It’s a hunch that suggests to me the pressing need to undo what I would identify as the damage done by extreme conservative tilts, supported in part by big neoconservative money, on the Jewish cultural scene. As conservative intellectuals begin to take stock, Jewish intellectual and institutional leadership might want to consider doing the same in terms of figuring out the lay of the land, especially as it relates to Israel and Zionism. The Jewish world to me seems like it too is in a bad need for some self-recreatation.
Appearing today online at Open Zion are my churlish remarks concerning the recent and much discussed inaugural speech at the Knesset of Ruth Calderon, a new parliamentarian with Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party. Here’s some of what I said:
Like her party leader, MK Calderon, in her speech, wants Judaism and Jewishness, wants to be herself all things to everyone. But to make matters worse, she drags the religion of Talmud onto the podium of the Knesset to highlight her political, now legislative devotion to promoting the unity of Jewish national Israeli culture….It’s not that I think religion or educators and the texts they cherish and teach have no role to play in society, even a political one. But not ensconced and privileged from inside [a legislative body]. Nor do I believe, not for a minute, that it is or should be, as claimed by the new member of Knesset, the state’s job to “magnify” and “glorify” the Torah.
You can read the entire article at Open Zion here, and the full English translation of MK Calderon’s address here.
Like a lot of people, many of my friends were excited by the speech, because it represents a woman, in Israel, asserting her ownership and authority as a secular woman with and over the Jewish textual tradition. And that is a very cool thing. But context is everything, because if it was such a radical move, why was there no outrage expressed by MK Calderon’s more conservative religious fellow parliamentarians? There was none. I think it’s a strange thing to teach Talmud in such a public, political space.
Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett has been working for sometime with the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw, Poland. One of the projects there is the restoration of wooden synagogue at Gwozdziec, which was destroyed by the Nazis (?). It’s an amazing project. Here’s some information that Barbara has linked me to:
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in collaboration with Handshouse Studio, is rebuilding components of an exquisite 17th-century wooden synagogue. This historic structure will be set within the stunning architectural space of the modern building being planned. The Museum is under construction on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto facing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument, and is scheduled to open in 2013.
http://handshouse.org/makinghistory.html
Volunteers paint details of a reconstructed 18th century synagogue roof in Warsaw, Poland. The roof is a reconstruction of a wooden synagogue that once stood in the town of Gwozdziec and which will be a key exhibit in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is due to open in 2014. The original synagogue was destroyed during World War II. Photograph: Czarek Sokolowski/AP
You can like the FB page of Gwozdziec synagogue project at http://www.facebook.com/gwozdziec
There’s this great blog about it: http://mcnorlander.wordpress.com/
Once upon a time, I might have felt more ambivalence about this kind of project. Now I think I better understand that a memory place like this cannot replace the past. It is what it is. What strikes me about this project as a work of memory is the brightness of light and color, and the myriad detail that make this such a painstakingly beautiful art of simulation.
