In the NY Times Deborah Solomon asks and writer Douglas Coupland answers:

How would you define the current cultural moment?

I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.

This is an appropriate anxiety for our time, and Alan Rusbridger talked interestingly about it in his state of journalism talk in the spring of 2006. Jay Rosen calls it “audience atomization” and he sees evidence that social media have created opportunities for it to be overcome. In order to think further, we can’t stop with this little quotation in Solomon’s usual “edited and condensed” NY Times Magazine Sunday interview.

Similarly, we can’t stop at the ending of the new Charles Peterson review essay about Facebook in the NYROB:

But most of us still know, despite Facebook’s abuse of what should be the holiest word in the language, that a News Feed full of constantly updating “friends,” like a room full of chattering people, is no substitute for a conversation. Indeed, so much of what has made Facebook worthwhile comes from the site’s provisions for both hiding and sharing. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that some things shouldn’t be “shared” at all, but rather said, whether through e-mail, instant message, text message, Facebook’s own “private message” system, or over the phone, or with a cup of coffee, or beside a pitcher of beer. All of these “technologies,” however laconic or verbose, can express an intimacy reserved for one alone.

Those are the fears; what are the hopes?

It’s a pleasure to catch up with Stephen Kuusisto’s blog, Planet of the Blind.* Some recent highlights:

We are listening for something; we’re trying to protect our souls. We want to know what words keep others alive; what words keep the soul reading. We want to make an ark out of this knowledge. But a poem will do. (“Poetry Singular, Plural Then“)

[It’s true; we should live as if something were at stake, as if our lives mattered, as if art helps.]

The plural poet knows that her audience “is” the world, the world in which words will find their utility; that words are much like the fallen acorns gathered by wintering animals, they must be carried away and become something beyond their first intention; that poetry lives in the bewildering weather of others, many many… (“Poetry Singular, Plural Then“)

[It’s true; good writing lives in and among the actors who we might mistakenly think of as passive because we call them readers.]

Then there is “Think Beyond the Label, Pilgrim,” which reminds us that we live partially in the discourses of our culture [and can break things open there from time to time] and quite a bit too in bodies that need jobs to pay rent and eat decently and like life and ourselves and others. Hurray for symbolic breakthroughs; hurray for decent jobs.

Those changes in discourse matter: think about the feeling many of us had in about 2002 that the press had stopped insisting that global warming was just a theory that one might readily dismiss; think of Frank Rich today in the NY Times saying how important it was this week that an American general said before Congress that it was just rather an ordinary fact of life that homosexuals had served well in the military all the decades of his career, and nothing much happened in the way of an uproar in the media. But one grim view of the end of the civil rights movement would be a person of entitlement thumbing his nose at a good number of fellow citizens and saying, “Sure, vote all you want. I still have a better house and job than you have, if you even have a job or a house. Who cares if you can vote?”

We live in the symbolic realm of culture; we live in houses and bodies supported by our jobs. We live in two realms of justice and hope for justice.

Footnote:

*S. K. and I were classmates, writing poetry in graduate school, so it’s not like reading the work of a stranger.

Stephen Kuusisto’s Planet of the Blind posting on being a writer sets out a contrast between the exceptionalism that tempts a writer to pull rank based on the special work he/she does, on the one hand, and the need for tribal meaning that actually tempts lots of people to write (or participate in other arts, too). The posting reminded me of an encounter with a doctor who seemed steeped in the exceptionalist attitude and another encounter with a doctor/writer who felt otherwise. I left this comment on Steve’s site:

I took someone to see a plastic surgeon once. The doctor had a huge collection of diplomas and awards in his hallway, and I saw that his M.D. degree was from the University of Iowa. He was there at the same time I was doing my own graduate work. Breaking the ice, I mentioned that we had been in Iowa City at the same time. I mentioned what I studied, and he said that he had been on the other side of the river, performing surgeries. A slight chill swept through the room, brought on by his tone of voice as he compared what I had been doing with his own lofty work.

Not in the mood to offend the doctor who was about to take care of someone who mattered to me, I let it pass, but I remembered meeting the surgeon/writer Richard Selzer back in Iowa City, and chatting with him in the hallway of the English-Philosophy Building, near the offices of the Writers’ Workshop, and getting the unmistakable impression that writing had deepened his life as a doctor in ways that he found very satisfying and that made him proud. He felt no need to pull rank– we were people who liked to write in order to make sense of our lives, having a conversation about it. Very nice of him, I thought. We had this common ground.

There is exceptionalism, as you say, and then there is tribal meaning. According to the one story, I failed to become the next great American poet and no dissertations will be written about my balanced compositions. According to the other story, I am almost always happy when I have been writing, and some of what I write reaches people.

As Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

In the same spirit, here is Kurt Spellmeyer setting up a chapter that considers perhaps the same contrast that Kuusisto offers:

So completely have professionals remade knowledge in their own image that most of us find it had, and possibly absurd, to seek knowledge fro anyone else. (Arts of Living 221)

The understanding of knowledge he describes seems so familiar that it is no surprise that experts often inhabit it without giving a second thought; the tone that comes from it helps to explain the great anger that boils up from time to time in our country over the ways of the powerful, their sense of entitlement, their satisfaction with things as they are, their control of public discourse and even common sense.

As in an earlier entry on Kuusisto’s writing, some fail to notice the opportunities for new knowledge embodied in difference. And then there is the matter of democracy.

Discussing an organization serving a large group of journalists, Jay Rosen recently said that they were “evolving from (what was essentially) a professional club to a community of concern.” (40:25 of Rebooting the News #38) Both versions of the group are probably motivated substantially by a shared concern about the portion of the world they write about (education), but in the second the concern for preserving the group’s authority has been diminished in favor of collaboration. The shared value of their subject matter comes more to the front; self-interest may recede. It’s an ethical distinction that may be easier to make in the era of powerful collaborative web tools. Also, the whole thing seems more relaxing.

“Embodied differences,” writes Stephen Kuusisto, “are the nerve of our nation’s body politic.” And I am tempted by that term, by the feeling that it must have a reach a good deal beyond the topic of disability as he considers it in a recent blog post. The post itself begins with the writer markedly under the weather, taunted by a demon that knows how to stir up self-contempt among the diminished and embattled. Yet there is work to be done back at the university: “We think about this [work] rather often for we are like a marble cutter of human rights: steady, habituated, working on an angel that still has no head.” The university knows enough to invite a diverse group to work and study there, but still finds them to be alien and inconvenient. Offering only a “grudging and minimal inclusion,” the faculty fail to notice “the kinds of questions that disability can productively promote.” When the customary discourse need not be stretched to reach as far as the other person — the history, the specificity of experiences and meanings the other person embodies — then people are barely in each other’s presence, intellectually and spiritually, even if they are gliding along the same campus path or breathing the air of the same seminar room. The risk of encountering another person can be dismissed quite easily from a position of relative ease and power — one need only never quite hear the spark of particularity in the words or read it on the face or in the tone. Never hearing the particularity of another’s speech, we are never influenced, we are untouched. As a result, there are words that might have enriched our deliberations we will never use, anecdotes that might have instructed us that we will never ponder, and questions we will never ask that might have extended the horizon before us.

Curiously, though, universities are very often models of generic speech, and you could drop many of the conversations that take place on one campus down onto another campus hundreds of miles away and not miss a beat, for a good deal of the work we do on campuses has to do with passing on languages rather than learning the local dialect. Very often a sociologist or an English professor spends days or weeks saying little or even nothing that has been shaped around the particulars of region or student body. The “embodied differences” don’t get a chance to impinge upon the rhetorics of our fields, usually. Students come to us to be acculturated, we think, and not the reverse. At our worst, we don’t even learn their names.

But for Kuusisto, as for Gadamer, differences are generative of meaning, or can be. Kuusisto says that “embodied differences are the source of considerable power in language and in self-awareness, the two things university instructors are most often hoping to foster, at least in those courses where reading and writing are paramount.” It is respectful to seek common ground and to appreciate difference, too. We grow smarter when we do.

Schools, however, don’t always manage it. In The Fire Next Time James Baldwin talked about a labyrinth of attitudes that keeps people from mastering or even acknowledging the complexity of their lives. Institutions are at least as good as individuals in this brand of failure. A passage from another Baldwin essay hints at the psychological barriers to understanding that accompany embodied differences, thanks to the workings of culture:

Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement containing seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible find this statement impenetrable. (“Fifth Avenue, Uptown”)

And so the angel has no head because the meanings of our embodied differences, which Kuusisto rightly calls “the nerve of our nation’s body politic,” are obscured and silenced when they challenge us to find their bounty.

PS. In the memoir and in the occasional blog post, there is also the fabulous image of the dog — the creature of optimism and hope that teaches the person rather than merely serving him. That’s why there must be serious training of the person before receiving a guide dog — there is much unlearning to do before the person can be ready to learn with and from another being.

If people are things, more or less, then we need not worry much about them; if we are teachers we need merely speak in their direction, test their recall, and so forth. The process can be almost entirely mechanical. But if they are people, watch out.

Stephen Kuusisto‘s 12/13/09 posting, “A Largely Lonely Triumph: Disability and Contemporary Higher Education,” however, exposes the cost of treating people as less than full members of the human community. Carefully picking quotations from a Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann, Kuusisto points to Keller’s loneliness and the awkwardness of most members of the college community in her presence. Keller herself found a metaphor for portions of the experience, saying that the instructors were as “impersonal as Victrolas” — people who had found largely mechanical means of relating to this student who they had an ethical obligation not just to educate but to treat decently and humanely.

Against what he calls an “Autocracy of the Victrola” that is commonplace in higher education today (see his list of linked examples), Kuusisto places the idea of culture: the webwork of meanings and rituals and agreements that make up civil life. He suggests that a cultural movement belonging to people with disabilities challenges the foot-dragging of academic culture, and that a better arrangement will require that the one culture be influenced by the other. He writes:

The issue of inclusion for people with disabilities in higher ed is a matter of culture: far too many colleges and universities fail to imagine that people with disabilities represent a cultural movement. (Let’s leave aside for the moment the powerful statistical urgencies represented by the finding that nearly 10 per cent of matriculating freshmen are self-identifying as having a disability.)

A cultural understanding of disability means at its very core that students or staff with disabilities are our children, our sisters, daughters, sons, fathers and mothers, our veterans, our colleagues. But it means more than that: an academic or curricular awareness of disability means that our nation’s institutions of higher learning will finally sense that what they “do” they do for all and with no oppositional and expensive and demeaning hand wringing. Such a position requires that disability services and academic culture–matters of curricular planning and cultural diversity be wedded as they should be.

With these words Kuusisto makes clear that the solution to the Autocracy of the Victrola is cultural, a process of connection and recognition and reconciliation, a process of learning akin to that required in order to be “wedded,” as he says in the closing sentence. None of us had better get married if we aren’t ready to acknowledge the experiences of others, or run colleges or stand at the front of classrooms or sign up to live in a dorm, I’d guess. None of us can contribute to the upkeep of our culture without that same skill, most likely, if culture is the webwork of meanings and rituals and agreements that make up civil life and if it is at the same time a process of connecting with and recognizing the identity of others.

Postscript. From another Kuusisto blog entry published on 12/11/09:

I say this not because blindness is a bad thing–far from it, for indeed I’ve been writing for over a decade now about the ways that blindness functions as a form of epistemology–all disabilities offer the normative world riches of mental diversity.

This is a brainstorming piece. Let’s contrast two historical events, not equal in scale or importance but, I hope, suggestive.

1. Otto and Elise Hampel were beheaded in a Nazi prison in 1943 after what was perhaps a fruitless series of protests against Hitler’s regime. Never previously involved in politics, they were moved to action by the death of Elise’s brother as a soldier early in the war. The two residents of Berlin, perhaps unable to find any other means of public speech or political organizing, hit upon the idea of leaving anonymous postcards calling for resistance in dozens of public places around the city. The city police and then the Gestapo tracked the postcards and finally captured them. Interrogations followed, with signed confessions. Thanks to the careful filing of the Gestapo, the story and many of the postcards that were handed in by frightened or patriotic Berliners, have survived. The novelist Hans Fallada wrote a fictional version of this story in 1946, called Every Man Dies Alone.

2. In October of 2009, a British company called Trafigura attempted to prevent the Manchester Guardian from reporting on its activities using a recent innovation of the British legal system called a super-injunction. Ordinarily, a British newspaper would be free to report on the activities of Parliament, but Trafigura secured a super-injunction that had the effect (though likely not the intention) of preventing the Guardian from covering a question that had been asked in Parliament about Trafigura’s actions involving toxic waste dumping off the coast of Africa. The Guardian’s October 13 daily audio report or podcast indicated that they were being prevented from reporting but could say little more. Editor Alan Rusbridger used his Twitter account to alert his many hundreds of Twitter followers of the cryptic “we cannot report” story on the Guardian’s site, and within 42 minutes one of those readers found the question asked in Parliament, linked to it, and announced it to the world. By the next day, Trafigura’s legal team backed down somewhat on the injunction, and the Guardian resumed reporting the activities of Parliament.

What to make of the two cases, in light of the changes that are caused by social media? Let’s look at platform, speed, reach, and response.

Platform. Hampel chose to leave postcards in public places around Berlin as a kind of broadcasting, perhaps the only kind he was able to imagine in those circumstances. It seems likely that a few hundred people may have seen the postcards over a period of months, but the only record is the listing of cards turned in to the police and the Gestapo. Rusbridger chose Twitter, where his account has about 7000 followers or subscribers who received his brief entry within moments of posting. In another few moments, some of his readers passed his “tweet” along to their followers, instantly multiplying the readership.  One of Rusbridger’s readers, actor Stephen Fry, has about one million followers on Twitter, so his “retweeting” hugely multiplied the spreading of the news.

Speed and reach. Presumably both Hampel and Rusbridger reached some readers in moments, but due to the multiplier effect of Twitter Rusbridger’s words spread around the world in a very short time. Hampel probably reached just a few readers with each postcard.

Response. The responses to Hampel’s words are mostly lost to history, with the exception of those documented in his Gestapo file, which clearly serve the purposes of the state apparatus in a time of massive injustice. Rusbridger’s words speak to a social problem not nearly as far-reaching as the one Hampel addressed, but his platform, Twitter, makes response instantaneous and painless.  As a result, a small movement was formed around the social problem he was addressing, and dialogue commenced, research was undertaken, new publications in Twitter and in other formats launched in response, and a significant social institution was made to take notice in less than a day. The platform’s speed, reach, and especially its ease of response utterly changed the social possibilities for writing a few words about a social problem.

For the two writers did not have very different goals, one might guess. But the platforms were radically different, and the social opportunities created by the platforms too.

Some traditional forms of rhetorical analysis (writer, intention, relation to audience, choice of medium, etc.) probably need to be updated in order to take into account these new possibilities.

The November 2009 issue of Harper’s commences with an interesting essay by Steven Stoll on the significance of the “Little Ice Age,” a puzzling period of cold that made things tough for many human communities for a few hundred years starting around 1300, perhaps. I refer to it here, though, not for its environmental implications but because there is a nice paragraph that might serve as a class model for organizing information as a  catalog or list. To provide context, I’ll include the sentence before and the sentence after the example paragraph:

Excavate the Middle Ages, and one unearths a geological event with enormous implications for how we think about and respond to climate.

Alpine people told of glaciers crushing villages. The growing season throughout northern Europe suddenly shortened by two months. Torrential rains and flooding at harvest devastated crops repeatedly throughout northern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vikings arrived in Greenland late in the tenth century, at a time when they could plant wheat, but around 1350 the last residents ate their dogs before disappearing into the ice that had engulfed the southern tip of the island. As late as 1665, Norwegian wheat fields yielded just 70 percent of what they had produced in 1300. Cattle died on snow-covered pastures; wine and olive-oil production shifted south. A general sense of scarcity impelled agrarian people outward. Thousands of Europeans migrated to North America seeking relief, only to find the same impenetrable cold. Travelers and naturalists suspected for a century what geologists can now measure: the Northern Hemisphere fell into a frigid rut around 1350 that lasted until the nineteenth century.

This so-called Little Ice Age was not an ice age. (7)

A few things to notice about it: All but one of the examples is offered within the confines of its own single sentence, even if the example is complex. (That makes for nice sentence variety, by the way.) The topic sentence concludes the paragraph, doesn’t it? And that topic sentence is set up in terms that allow the essay to continue by turning to the question of proper naming, the question of definition, which is surely an element of argument.

And it’s quite vivid. Nobody who filled out this form in an exercise should have trouble writing something of real specificity and even, perhaps, vividness.

PS.  Here is a prose poem (?) by Czeslaw Milosz that also stands as a good model of listing that turns into something more by the end of the paragraph:

Tomber amoureux. To fall in love.  Does it occur suddenly or gradually?  If gradually, when is the moment “already”?  I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags.  With a plywood squirrel.  With a botanical atlas.  With an oriole.  With a ferret.  With a marten in a picture.  With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny.  With a poem by a little-known poet.  With human beings whose names still move me.  And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “crystallization,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents.  Yes, I was often in love with something or someone.  Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.  That is something different. (“Falling in Love,” from Road-side Dog)

It’s interesting with this one to see that the catalog has a progression that we are meant to pick up on, reflecting the stages of the speaker’s life and leading to the distinction drawn in the final sentences.  Catalogs are shaped; Sears understood this long ago.

I’ve been thinking about the South Bend Tribune’s 9/30 editorial supporting area businessman Ibrahim Parlak in his years-long struggle to stay in this country. The editorial speaks of “the injustice and disproportionality of the federal government’s war on Parlak.” (Their link will expire on the 7th day.) Now if you wanted as a journalist or paper to really throw your weight behind this editorial, or even if you wanted to give readers and area citizens more information so they could make up their own minds based on a good amount of information–before writing their elected officials, say–how about posting the editorial with links and supporting materials? One keyword for bloggers is “generosity” but many newspapers actually hoard their archive, which may or may not be short-sighted, and they rarely link to other resources outside their own site.  But what if they “curated”–another blogging word–an archive of materials on Parlak’s case, gathering from their own stories and other resources until they had the best Parlak collection on the web.  They could, in that sense, essentially own this story, as far as the web goes, and they’d probably start to show up at the top of the Google listing for his name. Some obvious and a little less obvious aspects that could be developed:

• Post the editorial with links laced into the story.
• Post the contact information for appropriate government officials, including web links and phone numbers.
• Remind people that letters don’t arrive at Washington offices until they’ve been checked by some security agency–use email, web, phone, and provide those links.
• Wikipedia has a rudimentary article, as of today, that the newspaper could greatly surpass in an hour.
• The NY Times Magazine cover story of four years ago would be a valuable link.
• Check out at least a few good blog posts on the subject, including foes.
• Check out other regional newspapers for links: Kalamazoo, Chicago, Detroit, etc.
• Check out regional TV web archives for video.
• Try Flickr, Facebook, etc.
• Check out the support group’s web site and Parlak’s restaurant web site.
• Offer links to the current legislation supporting his case.
• And cut loose and open the paper’s archive for earlier pieces on the issue–why not?
• Etc.

Then invite readers to contribute their own links and insights to make the curated page even stronger. (Share the curating duties…) In time, surely a paper would have the most useful site on the issue, perhaps with a nice spread of perspectives and links to a variety of media and genres. And people would have shared in the work. Then if there is justice to be served, active citizens have the information they need to think it over and to speak up.

From an old blog posting, something that seems just right for teachers to turn into a mantra here at the start of the school year: 

We habitually underestimate our students. We habitually underestimate our students. We habitually underestimate our students.