Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Peer Review.

"No you really should look to do a PHD." they say.

 So, after much humming and hawing...

I write it and it.... ho hum....

Well it sounds odd.

So much the better!

"Oh sod it!."

"Odd sod!"

 "OH! Haw haw haw!"

 So, I print out page after page of forms.

I struggle to write myself into their forms.

Is that really me?

"Oh who fucking cares?"

 I am missing the point.

I hadn't read the small print.

I am to be rendered procedurally immaterial.

"We don't accept paper, all applications must be in digital form."

I am an object in an inbox to be processed...................................................................(fucking slowly.)

Enough time to be able to think and to annotate my thoughts and find companions.

I wait.



I wait.



I wait.



I hope.........................................................................................................................................................

"Oh think of the wastage!"

 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I, or the executors of my will are to be left with page after page of forms and no ink in the printer cartridge.

"With regards to your application, we have the pleasure to inform you, you have been accepted on our doctoral program. It will cost you/your estate an arm and a leg."

Not hearing anything for the next eight months, I decide I better take things into my own hands.

I write an email.

"Er, what's going on with my application?"

 "Er, yes, we have processed your application, the commission has accepted to validate your experience. You can start applying to get on the doctoral program."

 So, good.

I wait.



I wait.

I wait.


I phone the appropriate number.

I listen to three of Vivaldi's four seasons...

Winter is coming.



"Er, hello, what's going on with my application?"

"Oh, yes, er sorry, there are a few issues with your application."

...................................................................................................................................................................
(more time passes)

More Vivaldi.

Winter is here.



 "Er yes, you have been incorrectly advised, you shouldn't have done a VAP, you should have done a VAE"

 "***********"
(exasperation, passive aggressive non-voiced swearing and insults)

 "So we will send you the forms in triplicate, and you will have to do an interview in front of a jury, who, if we are fortunate, will find you guilty to be charged: a few pounds of flesh, an arm, a leg, your other arm, and other leg, a fair amount of your adomen, oh and your buttocks (you sad fucker).

 Should you die on completion of the program your executors will receive the doctoral diploma with post-mortem as its annex"

 ...................................................................................................................................................................(more time passes)

Peer Review

So, I had just come back from an academic conference where I felt, for the first time, perhaps, accepted by my peers...on my terms.

I feel that I have a role...which I feel comfortable with...in the margins....no, for ever in their margins.

I spoke with my friend Teresa and we laughed about the absurdity of this system.

I spoke with my friend Terry and we laughed about the absurdity of this system.



I go and look back at what I have written.





I shall trust myself to find my way.




I decide that I shall feel my way through the woulds, to find the will that is mine.



I shall not tread the wood that is beaten out for me.

I can not.

That is not, has never been my path.

"Oh we have never had a case like yours."

I don't fit in their fucking forms.



Of course I don't.

I never fucking did.

Neither do you.

That's my point.

That's my role.

That's it.

PEER REVIEW

I peer around in the darkness, take a few deep breaths, a few steps and review.

I am still alive.

And fucking kicking.

Recognition


Just be assured that I am at peace.

"I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding - not even that - no.  Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy time, in us all."

Tennessee Williams Sweet Bird of Youth

Recognition.

Recognition for me, is a quest for harmony.

I have tried on so many costumes, played so many roles, that I find myself not so much naked but worn. 

If I be worn, I am not for the instant worn out.

If the truth be known, now my friend I am inhabited.

I remember the seduction of theatrical applause.

I don't know about you, but the applause only ever had meaning for me when it came as confirmation; confirmation of a journey, of an emotion, of a struggle shared.

There has to be...there has to be presence.

Recognition is perhaps in communion.


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Monday, December 4, 2017

Out on a limb without a leg to stand on.



It's 9:30 in the morning and this wasn't supposed to be happening.

I had other things planned. 

And yet.

Here I am live-blogging a process with all of it's pauses and....history. 
(he adds as an after-thought at 9:38)

Well I find myself leaving this twine of Ariadne. 

God knows why. I don't believe in God.

I come here and intersperse a line...forgetting why.

I take a few deep breaths. 

Other things jump in via DM.

10:34 I spend forty five minutes speaking with my friend Marcin over in Poland about two conference submissions.

I return to this page...to what had already been written.


9:38 


I read through it and come back to CFP's (I interpret that as call for publications)

I select "The Scholarly and the Digital." rather gingerly. 

Rather gingerly? 

Yes. 

The term "Scholarly" is not one that I would associate as one of my preoccupations.

But I suppose it is time to reassess that.

10:40

Indeed what does it mean to be "scholarly" in complex digitally saturated times.

How do we pull "this" together?

Who pulls "what" together?

This "pulling together"....

What if it means "pushing apart"?

What it it means "letting it flow"?

What if it means "constantly reassessing" boundaries?

What if "scholarly and the digital" "loosely, momentarily hangs together"?

What if we left the centuries built "church walls  of academia" to rediscover "an ambulatory perhaps heretical oralistic dialogue"?

What if we break down the altar to the written word?

What if truth is negotiable, context bound, often provisional but essentially timeless?

What is truth if more than love?

How can love be anything more than intensely personal?

I find myself returning to Jesse Stommel. 

He was in a sense my starting point here, when reflecting on a slide count: 73 slides for 30 minutes.

I found myself stripping away any hope that I might have had for a comforting, timed, rehearsed, linear script.  

I was out on a limb, without a leg to stand on.

I find myself returning to Jesse Stommel.

I plonk a quote here:

“Digital pedagogy is becoming, for me, coterminous with critical pedagogy, given the degree to which the digital can function both as a tool for and an obstacle to liberation.”
~ Jesse Stommel, “Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain”

Blimey, "(Un)Mapping... [(Un)Mining?] the Terrain?

Where is that link to the page I had?

I end up tweeting the link to myself from my phone.


"To queer Open is to imagine it as an emergent space always in process. Open Education is not confirmed by courses, platforms, syllabi, hierarchies, but exactly resists those containers, imagining a space for marginalized representation — a space that recognizes our unique embodied contexts and offers opportunities for liberation from them."

 Jesse's words above will accompany me in my reflection.

Fluidity in thought, in identity, in containers, in dialogue, in contexts, in scholarship.

Fluidity....I find myself connecting to #lesmauxdesmots.

There are those words which, if small, become battlefields.

LIFE, DEATH, 

 BE LONGING, 

i, I, MY, MINE, ME, YOU, YOURS, HE, HIS, HIM, SHE, HER, HERS, IT, ITS, THEY, THEM, THEIRS, WE, US, OURS.

RIGHTS, MEANING, VALUES.

LOVE, FAITH, HOPE, 

 Fluidity, scholarity, solidity...

I embed Jesse's keynote from Digital Pedagogy Lab's Vancouver 2017 iteration.

I prepare for more close reading, listening, watching and put this on pause to head towards a class. 11:30

 Click on more info to see video with all comments, log in to Vialogues to comment.














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Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Skin in the game.





“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”― Gilles Deleuze 

There were  25,000 results. 
I read them all. 
I made a synthesis. 
I compiled the bibliography. 
It would be my life.
It would be my life's work.
It would be my life.
My life.
My life.
My life.
My life.
26,000 results.
59,000 results. 


 It is time for taking stock.

 [I instantly feel alienated by the expression "taking stock". We are forever confronted by fucking commerce. The small print on the long contract. I write my age then delete it. Numbers are for ever an annoyance.]

I find myself here...

 I find myself inviting Deleuze, Arendt...he tales off.

 He rather wishes that they would go away.

 He notes how they, he are kept under tabs...

 He sees himself moving from here to preview. 

 He reviews his path.

 He thinks about deleting the photo. 

 He reasons that he will leave a blank space.

 He wonders how best to represent space.

 He finds a riddle, written by a student, on a black board. 

 He settles for that.


“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.” 
― Gilles Deleuze
I find myself grouping together lines of reflection...

 I barely glimpse them, I barely read them. 

 I rush on by.

 It is not the words that count it is the movement...
...an impulsion beyond.

 At times I come back and I think: "What the fuck?"

 At times I know why the answer is the fucking question.

 “According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.” 
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

 What explains this impulsion? 

 This colour?

 They appear little by little here, in interaction, dialogue with people, images, videos, quotes, tweets, scribbles, blog posts, clicks. 

 They order themselves here for orderly? consideration in a determined flow.

 It is the haphazard which reveals meaning.

 Old words pop up as chorus.

Those deleted rest as meaningful as those that remain.

 Those deleted rest as meaningful as those that remain.





Will they remain in peace?

 To be present. 

 Here.


 “This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.” 
― Gilles Deleuze
Takingstock.


I steal my words.




How is it I know that I am worn by the suit and not the other way round?



I am made anxious keeping up its appearance.

I walk down the street.
I am anonymous.
I belong.

I feel a longing, a dull longing.

Branded, a superior cut, I have a fine sheen.

I am made for measure.

Take a knife, slash, let me bleed.

Be careful not to stain, to bruise my flesh.

Skinned, tenderised, jointed.

Painlessly killed.

I cook, a Sunday roast. 



ROLL, ROLE, ROLLS, 

 BOXES, BOOKS,BORDERS, WALL.

CURTSIES,COUNTRIES, COFFINS, CALL.


DOLLARS DOLLARS DOLLARS.












Piles of stuff.
Elite parlour games.


Anyone for tennis?

 Scrabble

 What are you?

 The forgotten.

R. E. S. P. E. C. T.









OBJECTS. SUBJECTS.


“Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement” 









Academic form 


The evils of words ...

Finds new impulsion here...






 Netscape.
I had better get a quote in here from (on?) Deleuze and Guattari:

"The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is ‘striated’, or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad 
space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). (Massumi, 1988, p. xiii)"

Quoted by Sian Bayne.


“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” 

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Thursday, February 16, 2017

Hoarding disorder.

The kitchen sink couldn't be seen for piles of dirty crockery, cutlery, cooking pans, mountains of unopened vintage tins of baked beans, soup, green beans and peas, carrots, pineapple, pears, peaches, potatoes, corned beef and spam and Irish stew, and soup.

The bedroom was inaccessible for stacked up furniture, baskets of clothes.

Picture frames faced the wall.

All was layered by decades of dust.

Hoarding disorder.

"There is no question that the continuous acquisition of stuff is the backbone of American culture. According to Sandra Stark, of the Peer-Led Hoarding Response Team at the Mental Health Association of San Francisco, "Seventy percent of home-owning Americans cannot park cars in their garages because there's too much stuff; one in 10 has a storage unit." ... In San Francisco alone, nearly $6.5 million is spent by landlords and service agencies each year on hoarding-related issues, which include eviction and the removal of children or the elderly due to health and safety concerns. Hoarding has been identified as a direct contributor to up to six percent of all deaths by house fire."


All was layered 
by decades of dust.

Picture FRAMEs face the wall.

 "Though the problem is getting more recognition, researchers are still working on an effective treatment."

 Hoarding orderdis

There were  25,000 results. 
I read them all. 
I made a synthesis. 
I compiled the bibliography. 
It would be my life.
It would be my life's work.
It would be my life.
My life.
My life.
My life.
My life.
26,000 results.
59,000 results. 
I was determined to understand. 
I was determined to understand. 

"WHAT WE NEED IS TO MODERNISE."
They said.

"WHAT do we need to modernise the programme?"
They asked.
"What means shall we employ?"
They asked.

"Digital?"

"E-learning?"

 "ONLINE"
"UNDERLINE"

A teacher used an academic term which left a gap but didn't register.

It was met with silence.



I wI was determined to understand. as determined to understand. 
I was deter   mined to un der
stand.


"BEFORE we speak about what.  Couldn't we talk about the terms which frame our discussion"
 I asked?

I was met with silence.

“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free” 
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

They were so busy thinking about modernising. 

MODERN is NEW.
MODERN is BETTER.

“The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages.

As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive.

Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either.

School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics.

Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media--one of the technology's greatest achievements.

The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla.

Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by groups, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection. 

But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation.

 "Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only ambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.” 
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book



“It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.


This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines...

I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.” 


“A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.” 
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“When nations grow old the Arts grow cold
And commerce settles on every tree” 
― William Blake


HO are DING disOrder.

 The kitchen sink couldn't be seen for piles of dirty crockery, cutlery, cooking pans, mountains of unopened vintage tins of baked beans, soup, green beans and peas, carrots, pineapple, pears, peaches, potatoes, corned beef and spam and Irish stew, and soup.



The bedroom was inaccessible for stacked up furniture, baskets of clothes.

Picture frames faced the wall.

All was layered by decades of dust.

There were  25,000 results. 
I read them all. 
I made a synthesis. 
I compiled the bibliography. 
It would be my life.
It would be my life's work.
It would be my life.
My life.
My life.
My life.
My life.
26,000 results.
59,000 results. 
I was determined to understand. 
I was determined to understand. 
"the problem is getting more recognition, researchers are still working on an effective 

 treatment."
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