From the first chapter of William J. Mitchell's Me++The Cyborg Self and the Networked City
So we have gone from local habitation and mechanical subdivisionof time to a far more dynamic, electronically based, network mediated, global system of sequencing and coordination. The early moderns measured out their lives in clock ticks (and sometimes, as Prufrock lamented, coffee spoons); now, our webs of extension and interconnection run on nanosecond-paced machine cycles that areedging into the domain of quantum logic. The more we interrelate events and processes across space, the more simultaneity dominates succession; time no longer presents itself as one damn thing after another, but as a structure of multiple, parallel, sometimes cross-connected and interwoven, spatially distributed processes that cascade around the world through networks. Once there was a time and a place for everything; today, things are increasingly smeared across multiple sites and moments in complex and often indeterminate ways.
Biotechnology has emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alongside a variety of formulations of 'the ethical' and in this way biotechnology has become an ideological phenomenon swept up in structuring freedom and processes of designating living beings in a full and objective manner.
In his Biotech Fantasia in Borderlands Daniel Hourigan says:
As discussions from a variety of contemporary thinkers, including Habermas, Heidegger, Lacan, and Zizek, have shown, through processes of modernisation human beings have been able to master life through technology. However, bare life returns to haunt humanity in biotechnology. Biotechnology reverses the pre-modern problem of either externally encountering the thing-in-itself as an opaque essence or partaking in essence through a pantheism that relies on a divine order. In biotechnology we find ourselves firmly within the rawness of bare life, having the preconditions of our capabilities set by our genetic profile. The essence of bare life is thus dedifferentiated from the life-world because the macro processes of daily life are grounded in the micro relations of our genetic material.
The digital, wirelessly connected world that is still being built all around us. I see the new wireless technologies are making much office space in cities redundant. If you go into corporate offices today the private offices are closed and dark; the workers are out in hotel rooms or on the move. The wireless laptop culture is increasing the value of sit-down space just like this. Unassigned space, what used to be thought of as non-productive space, is actually where all the real action happens." The classic example is the coffee bar.
Mobile phones have become intimately a part of ourselves that they anchorus into the information society's digital infrastructure. New wireless technologies hold up the promise of navigating our way through cities in exciting new ways. Today's hand-held devices can be seen as extensions of the human body. This transformation has, in turn, changed our relationship with our surroundings and with each other.
In Me++The Cyborg Self and the Networked City William J. Mitchell says:
the unbelievably intricate diagram of Internet interconnectivity has become the most vivid icon of globalization. Now you get access by typing in your password, and IT managers dissolve the perimeters between organizations by merging their network access authorization lists. Today the network, rather than the enclosure, is emerging as the desired and contested object: the dual now dominates....Extension and entanglement trump enclosure and autonomy.Control of territory means little unless you also control the channel capacity and access points that service it..
From William J. Mitchell's E-Topia:
Once, we had to go places to do things; we went to work, we went home, we went to the theater, we went to conferences, we went to the local bar-and sometimes we just went out. Now we have pipes for bits-high-capacity digital networks to deliver information whenever and wherever we want it. These allow us to do many things without going anywhere. So the old gathering places no longer attract us. Organizations fragment and disperse. Urban centers cannot hold. Public life seems to be slipping away.
Mitchell says:
Maybe homes and workplaces, transportation systems, and the emerging digital telecommunications infrastructure can be reconnected and reorganized to create fresh urban relationships, processes, and patterns that have the social and cultural qualities we seek for the twenty-first century. Maybe there's another way-a graceful, sustainable, and liberating one. Two tentative cheers for the global village!
This is the wiki entry on Glaser's version of grounded theory. There's a lot of free access material around about Glaser, but not much by Glaser. In a way, that's not such a bad thing.
Reading Barney Glaser is like reading a televangelist's script or sitting through an Amway pep talk. On one hand that's appropriate because he does reject traditional academia's preference for obscure terminology, along with the main target which is how research is supposed to be done. On the other hand he's not much help if you're trying to convince an academic audience that grounded research is a good idea. For a start, it's called grounded theory (GT), but it's actually a method, only not so much a method as a methodological approach. Try explaining that in a way that sounds convincing.
Glaser is surprised that so few disciplines use GT, but a lot of his linguistic turns sound as though they come straight from Timothy Leary and 1960s psychedelic drug culture. He basically puts the beginner in the uncomfortable position of telling 'the establishment' that their establishment sucks.
The fundamentals of GT are Don't read the literature, Don't limit your data set, and Don't start writing until you've got something of your own to say. You collect your qualitative data and code according to what the data is doing, not what somebody else's pet theory says it should be doing. You take this inductive approach to the literature later on, the idea being that you compare your empirical work with theory to test for fit before your confidence is eroded by the authority of famous theorists.
Most grounded research is done in nursing and education where the realities of practice barely resemble the theory. Experienced teachers and nurses going back to uni for Masters have been living GT in their work, so their research amounts to doing what they already do, but more deliberately. Adding another purpose to their work. They already know what's wrong with the theory and how to prove their point. They also have the accumulated capital of experience behind them.
It strikes me that this is a sensible approach if the idea of research is to find out what's actually going on, as opposed to shoring up the ideas of others. Melissa Gregg at Home Cooked Theory blogged recently about a conference she'd attended where the great Stuart Hall inspired appropriate levels of awe. She argues that stature of such magnitude casts a "shadow over the efforts of scholars past and present to move the field forward, or in a range of directions even". The comments thread has some revealing things to say about this and the frustration this causes for the innovative, the less experienced, and particularly those of us from perceived intellectual backwaters like Australia.
In his Doing Grounded Theory Glaser calls it "theoretical capitalism" (1998:71), which wouldn't please Hall in the least. For all the mileage we've had from reflexivity, there doesn't seem to be much reflexing going on, or at least reflexing that has any real outcome. Maybe there's no problem at all - maybe these are just the grumblings of a few disgruntled wannabees? Sheer contrariness? Not the sort of attitude that'll get you that doctorate?
Gregg's post is printed out and pinned on the wall above my desk with Glaser's "just do it" scrawled across the top. I often wonder what the great and powerful Nike would make of it. Best not to think about what the great and powerful social theorists might say.
Betsi Beem reviews Sheila Jasanoff Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and The United States. There is no doubt that recent major breakthroughs in biotechnology have made a huge contribution to human life. So we have the notion of biotechnology as a way of "improving" us or our children goes right to the heart of the idea of altering human nature.
In today’s moral debate over biotechnology the optimists are led by libertarians like Lee Silver, Gregory Stock, and Ronald Bailey. The Huxleyan pessimists are led by neoconservatives like Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, and William Kristol, and by environmentalists like Bill McKibben and Jeremy Rifkin. Both sides make the exaggerated claim that biotechnology is heading us towards the abolition of human nature.
Since at least the early 1990s, critical theorists have referred to the death of Theory by which they mean French theory, by which they mean poststructuralism.
Those that try to criticize theory as "Theory" with a capital "t" create a strawman argument, in that poststructuralist philosophy has never been about creating the ultimate frame of reference, but wanted to open up philopsophy to other questions. It's the opponents of theory who end up trying to create a definitive platform from which to prosecute theory for foreclosing the Enlightenment project of modernity. Poststructuralism doesn't spell the death of philosophy or of Western civilization; rather, poststructuralism holds the door open to allow new questions to enter the unfinished project of modernity.
In Shane Gunster's 'Second Nature': Advertising, Metaphor and the Production of Space in Fast Capitalism there is a section on the sublime. Gunter says that in its most progressive guise, sublime experience marks a humbling revolt of the senses against imperialist Enlightenment and capitalist narratives that define nature as little more than raw material to be studied, transformed and exploited in the satisfaction of (narrowly conceived) human needs and interests.
Gunster then adds:
Yet as many commentators have observed, sublime experience ends with neither terror nor abjection, but more ambiguously with a mixture of fear, joy and delight, and its end result is often an invigorated and even empowered subject. In The Romantic Sublime, Thomas Weiskel (1976) argues that the sublime unfolds over three successive stages or moments. First, that which we perceive is fundamentally in accord with our intellectual faculties: there is an underlying harmony or congruence between the impressions of our senses and our capacity to give them meaning. In the second, this "habitual relation of mind and object" comes to a sudden end before an image, idea, sensation or experience that exceeds our understanding: we are confronted with a space or phenomena that is literally incomprehensible. The final moment involves a restoration of meaning through an intellectual sleight of hand: our lack of knowledge itself assumes deeper significance as expressive of a privileged communion with a transcendent and otherwise unimaginable other (22-25). Via the semiotic alchemy performed by the sublime, absence of meaning (or, more properly, experience of an object that overflows and disturbs the process of making sense) becomes the foundation for deeper forms of meaning laden with affect.
On this interpretation the sublime evolves as a privileged cultural and intellectual strategy for not only managing anxiety when confronted with powerful and dangerous forces beyond one's control, but also as a means of transforming experiences of fear and helplessness into opportunities for aesthetic gratification and the accumulation of cultural capital.
I've stumbled upon this text about postmodernism. I know very little about it. In the section on postmodern aesthetics it is stated that:
Postmodern aesthetics is marked by an emphasis of the figural over the discursive. What this means is that postmodernism values the impact of art over the meaning of art, and the sensation of art over the interpretation of it. Such an emphasis on the impact of art relates well to Heidegger's wish to hear words as if for the first time, to "let their elementary forces" rise through.
Such postmodern preferences, however, were first notably articulated by art critic Susan Sontag in the mid 1960's. Sontag claimed that modernism's favoring of the "intellect" in art, came "at the expense of energy and sensual capability". ...Again, this relates well to our discussion of Heidegger, who saw philosophy not as a means to learn anything more about being, but just to experience it, time and time again. Sontag believed that interpretation was "the revenge of the intellect upon art," and that a work of art should not be a "text," but rather another "sensory" product in the world... This focus of art as a "sensory" experience over and above an intellectual experience, led the way for postmodernism to favor the image over the narrative and the figural over the discursive (i.e. don't tell me about how happy you were, show me! don't tell me how brutal it was, show me!)
Jean-Francois Lyotard called for a renewed commitment to a sublime aesthetic that accentuates the inadequacies and limitations of representation rather than the yearning for fullness. Lyotard's sublime is calculated to discredit the Enlightenment faith in reason as a faculty that can grasp the world in its totality and legitimize political meta-narratives. There is still access to the experience of the sublime in postmodern society, where natural disasters are not a serious threat to everyday life. This should be viewed positively; the sublime moment is now a common occurrence: not dependent on a "nature experience." The sublime is no longer a rare and unpredictable natural occurrence, it is commonplace experience.
Jean-François Lyotard, argues that the `fundamental task' of Romantic art was to bear `expressive witness to the inexpressible.' It was through the figure of the sublime, Lyotard says, that Romanticism expressed the limits of its own powers of expression, and also faced the simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating prospect of that which lay beyond its grasp. For Romanticism, the sublime was - as the word itself suggests (sub-limen: up to + limit, threshold) - a figure of the limit. And in Lyotard, as in other key contemporary or `postmodern' thinkers, the sublime returns as a name for the dizzying moment in which the limits of thought and representation are encountered. This course focuses on the ways in which the question of the sublime connects Romanticism and postmodernism in a shared concern with the aesthetics and politics of `presentation' (Lyotard).
Dick Hebdige has argued that these theories stress the primacy of aesthetic experience and evacuate the aesthetic of any political intents or effects. Taking Lyotard's notion of the sublime as exemplary of this trend, Hebdige concedes that Lyotard's emphasis on the unrepresentable is "Politically nuanced" insofar as it militates against the terroristic and totalitarian potentialities of Enlightenment reason. But, Hebdige goes on to argue, Lyotard's aesthetic of the sublime precludes all political possibilities in its effort to guard against the dangers of political modernity. For Lyotard, the sublime must remain "the prerogative of art alone: the socio-political aspiration to 'present the unrepresentable,' to embody in the here and now the that-which-is-to-be, is deemed untenable" (65). Emphasizing the limits of language as a medium of human communication, Lyotard's sublime effects a wholesale retreat from sociality itself and from any project to define and actualize collective interests and values. Insistence on what is impossible within language tends "to seriously limit the scope and definition of the political (where politics is defined as the 'art of the possible')"
Linn Miller in her Belonging to Country — A Philosophical Anthropology says that 'belonging' has become an increasingly prominent term in academic and broader discussions about Australian national identity. Indeed, the question of who properly belongs to this country — Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal — is a highly politicised and contested national issue. Despite this:
there is very little attention paid to explicating or theorising the concept itself. One aim of this paper is to address this lack; however, a stronger focus is placed upon the belonging of Australia's non-Indigenous population — specifically, settler Australians. How legitimate are settler claims to belonging to this land? How accurate are those protagonists — both Indigenous and non-Indigenous — who deny the very possibility of such belonging?