Headpiece Filled With Straw

Theory Theory: A Designer's View*

By Thomas Erickson

Theory weary, theory leery,

why can't I be theory cheery?

I often try out little bits

wheresoever they might fit.

(Affordances are very pliable,

though what they add is quite deniable.)

The sages call this bricolage,

the promiscuous prefer menage...

A savage, I, my mind's pragmatic

I'll keep what's good, discard dogmatic.

Add the reference to my paper,

watch my cited colleagues caper,

I cite you, you cite me,

we've got solidarity.

(GOMS and breakdowns, social network,

use those terms, now don't you shirk!)

Clear concepts clad in fancy clothes,

bid farewell to lucid prose.

The inner circle understands

but we overlook the hinterlands

Dysfunctional we are, it's true,

but as long as we're a happy crew,

if strangers stare and outsiders goggle,

or students struggle, their minds a'boggle

(Dasein, throwness, ontology

ethnomethodology)

A pity 'bout that learning curve

but who's to blame if they lack verve?

A ludic take on structuration,

perhaps this causes consternation?

 

I see four roles that theories play:

They divide the world, come what may,

into nice neat categories,

enabling us to tell our stories.

(Info scent sure is evocative,

and cyborg theory's quite provocative)

Our talk in turn makes common ground,

where allies, skeptics may be found.

Prediction's theory's holy grail,

most that seek it seem to fail.

 

The world is messy, fuzzy, sticky,

theoretically 'tis all quite tricky.

Theories keep it at a distance,

cov'ring up the awkward instance.

(Objects, agents, actor networks,

banish life with all its quirks)

But when edges grate and things don't mesh,

that is when I think my best.

So let not theory serve as blinders,

welcome disruptions as reminders!

 

Oddly now, I'm theory cheery

I find I have a theory theory!

Neither holy grail, nor deep disgrace,

theory's useful in its place,

(Framing, talking, predicting, bonding,

evoking discourse--Others responding)

Like goals and methods, plans and actions,

theory's situated, not pure abstraction.

So make your theory a public way,

where passers by may pause and stay.

* Written upon reading a commentary for a special issue of JCSCW on Theory (Version 5)

Theory Theory, by Thomas Erickson.

Living in America

by Anne Stevenson

'Living in America,'
the intelligent people at Harvard say,
'is the price you pay for living in New England.'

Californians think
living in America is a reward
for managing not to live anywhere else.

The rest of the country?
Could it be sagging between two poles,
tastelessly decorated, dangerously overweight?

No. Look closely.
Under cover of light and noise
both shores are hurrying towards each other.

San Francisco
is already half way to Omaha.
Boston is nervously losing its way in Detroit.

Desperately the inhabitants
hope to be saved in the middle.
Pray to the mountains and deserts to keep them apart.

 

 

"Living in America" by Anne Stevenson, from Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems. © American Poets Project, 2008.  (buy now) 

Link: The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor | Living in America by Anne Stevenson.

warty bliggens the toad

By Don Marquis
From "archy and mehitabel", 1927.

i met a toad
the other day by the name
of warty bliggens
he was sitting under
a toadstool
feeling contented
he explained that when the cosmos
was created
that toadstool was especially planned for his personal
shelter from sun and rain
thought out and prepared
for him

do not tell me
said warty bliggens
that there is not a purpose
in the universe
the thought is blasphemy

a little more
conversation revealed
that warty bliggens
considers himself to be
the centre of the said
universe
the earth exists
to grow toadstools for him
to sit under
the sun to give him light
by day and the moon
and wheeling constellations
to make beautiful
the night for the sake of
warty bliggens

to what act of yours
do you impute
this interest on the part
of the creator
of the universe
i asked him
why is it that you
are so greatly favoured
 
ask rather
said warty bliggens
what the universe has done to deserve me

if i were a
human being i would
not laugh
too complacently
at poor warty bliggens
for similar
absurdities
have only too often
lodged in the crinkles
of the human cerebrum

archy

Blowin' in the Wind

By Bob Dylan

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
And pretend he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Villanelle for an Anniversary

I've always been far too fond of villanelles. Best make a category for it!

Heaney wrote this for the 350th anniversary of the founding of Harvard, I am told.

By Seamus Heaney

A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard,
The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.
The future was a verb in hibernation.
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

Before the classic style, before the clapboard,
All through the small hours of an origin,
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.

Night passage of a migratory bird.
Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward
By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.

Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.
Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine
A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,
The books stand open and the gates unbarred.

Among Schoolchildren

by William Butler Yeats

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading - books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage -
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Wanna get wonky?

Hee hee. This article in the UK Independent has no place on a poetry site, so of course I must excerpt it here, and link to the book on my book list, just to scare the bejesus out of all of you folks who find even the smallest suggestion of Language Poetry abhorrent (hey, I'm one of those...).

I'd like to think I predicted postmodernists would get themselves into this predicament the next time they (re)discovered fascists, and then I went and sort of became a pointy-headed type myself (not really), which means, in true postmodern fashion, this article below gives me a big laugh on at least 3 different levels.

Terry Eagleton: Culture and society

The man who 'sexed up' literary theory believes that postmodernism is dead. Christina Patterson talks to Terry Eagleton about love, sex, God - and the global crisis

27 September 2003

"You won't believe what happened last night!" Terry Eagleton announces, with a twinkly smile that is clearly something of a trademark. He had, it turns out, been walking along the Strand, after seeing Michael Frayn's new play, Democracy, when he was stopped by a young man with a Yorkshire accent. "Where's that David Blunkett?" the youth demanded. Eagleton suggested politely that he try the Home Office."No, no," insisted the youth, "the one in the glass cage."

It is a strangely surreal scenario, but somehow not surprising: the former Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford being asked for directions to the weirdest show in town, the sort of narcissistic, navel-gazing enterprise, in fact, that has been one of the triggers for his new book. After Theory (Allen Lane, £18.99) is an explosive follow-up to Literary Theory, the book that changed the intellectual lives, and curricula, of a generation of undergraduates. At a time (the early 1980s) when students of English literature were either battling with Beowulf or ploughing through swathes of opaque prose by literary theorists announcing the Death of the Author and the pre-eminence of the Text, Eagleton took the literary theoretical bull by the horns and, well, deconstructed it. With him as their down-to-earth and witty guide, thousands of students suddenly saw the postmodernist light. If all was not clear exactly, at least they knew why.

There was no such thing as clarity, only the "seething multiplicity of the text", hitherto obscured by one's hidden, and simplistic, assumptions. The advantage of this view, as he helpfully points out in the chapter on post-structuralism, "is that it allows you to drive a coach and horses through everybody else's beliefs while not saddling you with the inconvenience of having to adopt any yourself".

More than 20 years on, After Theory is not, of course, an attempt to redress the balance (a woolly liberal concept that Eagleton would hate) but a response to a crisis. The jacket bears the silhouette of a plane, a motif that could imply the book is yet another knee-jerk response to September 11 and the rise of fundamentalism. That is part of it, Eagleton admits, but the general issue is very much wider. Students today, he asserts, are engaging neither with history nor with post-structuralism. "What is sexy instead is sex," he announces, in the first chapter, on "The Politics of Amnesia": "Quietly spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies." Cast adrift in the stormy currents of postmodernism, they prefer to focus their energy on "the history of pubic hair" or the evolution of "Friends," a trend that Eagleton regards as "politically catastrophic".

Considering I did my dissertation on the online mostly lesbian fans of "Xena: Warrior Princess," and wrote the argument in native hypertext in a form impossible to reproduce in print (on purpose) (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation), I sure do know where I fall in the above picture Eagleton is painting. And that makes me laugh even more, because I do believe I was making an original argument involving VERY big ideas (which were centered on power and politics) on many different levels that most certainly did deliberately loop around recursively (see, I'm not PoMo enough to disbelieve that there is any such thing as an original idea. Hell, I used to get in trouble in grad school for putting too many original ideas in my stuff, overstepping, not paying enough homage to previous scholarship).

We are sitting in a minuscule office on the eighth floor at Penguin, surrounded by leaning piles of Penguin Classics. We'd been promised panoramic views over the Thames but the posh meeting rooms on the 10th floor have all, today, been colonised by Pearson. Our conversation in this cramped corner is, in more ways than one, a consequence of the Triumph of Capitalism. The entire building, with its vast, open-plan vistas and rabbit warren of tiny, glass-walled offices and spaces for meetings and parties, is a symbol of contemporary cultural production. Here culture is acquired, processed, marketed and launched, with sauvignon and canapés, before hitting the media and then the shops in its final incarnation as cash-producing commodity.

We have to of course get in our obigatory pseudo-critique of capitalism, as if being a postmodernist exempts one from being painted as an utter hypocrite with 3 homes and a 30-year career as an elitist Oxford don. But more on that below.

Eagleton looks back, he says, with "proper nostalgia" to a time when "there was a sense that culture was somewhere you could make a political difference". He even, astonishingly, expresses a long-standing regret at having turned down a job at the Open University. He went instead to Oxford, where he stayed for 30 years and which he left "without the slightest twinge or sense of nostalgia". Oxford gave him "a lot of freedom", but he never came to terms with its innate conservatism and unfriendliness. "When I came to Oxford some of the rather hostile vibes that I felt I was getting I thought were because I was a Marxist," Eagleton confides with a wry smile, "but were probably because I was from Cambridge."

If he really WAS a Marxist, he would have taken the position at Open University, or been like Paulo Freire in Brazil, teaching dialogically among the rural poor. It oughta be against the LAW to take a job at Oxford or Cambridge, or maybe even the Open University and still call yourself a Marxist. That's the problem with PoMo heads. They have embraced irony so fully they can't even muster up proper shame at their own hypocrisy.

It is certainly true that Eagleton has been "ill-served by his acolytes", those jargon-spouting, willfully obfuscating and, sadly, often not too bright purveyors of the kinds of arguments that prefer to loop endlessly rather than take the risk of any kind of original thought. Whoever bears the responsibility for this cultural mire - and only a conspiracy theorist could lay the blame entirely at Eagleton's DM-shod feet - there is, he believes, an urgent need for fresh, and more profound, thinking about the world we are in. "History now is such," he explains, "with the political drive from the right, that thinking small isn't really an option any more ... There are different ways of thinking big, or deep."

After Theory outlines just some of them. With his characteristic lucidity and wit, it charts the gains and losses of cultural theory and its refusal, or inability, to engage with the Big Issues: not just political, but moral and metaphysical, too. Unlike the vast majority of contemporary cultural theorists, Eagleton is not afraid to talk about love and death, or to reinstate the body as on object of frailty as well as a source of Californian myths of eternal youth.

Methinks he should be afraid. Or rather, I'm wondering, if one's theories are thin as water, if one doesn't become far more fearless than those who strive for greater substance. I'd wonder that, surely, if that wasn't what my professors used to say about me when I was off bird-walking across disciplines and theories in a single bound, being original and thinking big, and as a result, not paying enough homage to the entrenched canons of Great Ideas that had gone before me. Once again, I resemble the thing I'm criticizing. I must be having a postmodern moment too. Oh! The irony!

(all exclamation marks are provided exclusively courtesy of various Romantic Poets, and not postmodernists. Byron and Shelley always had a few to spare, so next week I'll have to post some of those in here just for equal time, to make up for the borrowing)

Chris