From Word To Word

I read J. G. Ballard’s Myths of the Near Future this past summer, and I read it with the odd sensation that perhaps, in at least one sense, I was living in the near future of Ballard’s title.  After all, the book was first published in 1982, and I here I was reading it a quarter of a century later, in a time that might easily be called its near future, and yet, I found myself interested, not so much in the book’s future moment, perhaps now, but in its past moment, in the history of what produced it and informed its mythological future.  I intend to return to these ideas, I promise, but the book itself probably needs some introduction.

Myths of the Near Future is a collection of stories that could be most easily described as science fiction but that are far more concerned with ideas of memory and representation and history than with science per se.  Several of the stories have to do with a loss of memory, both personal and cultural, in the face of technological advances, particularly those that have taken the human race beyond the confines of its own planet.  Others explore how media technologies come to represent and to construct personal identities.  Much of this is very interesting.

It is Ballard’s commentary on history, however, that I found most arresting, particularly in light of his title.   His conception of history is centered around its function in producing the present.  “The whole process of life,” he says, “is the discovery of the immanent past contained in the present.”  It is not that the whole of the past that forms our present, of course, but that our present is entirely formed by the past, by the history that remains immanent in it, and that the whole of our lives consists in discovering this immanent past, because this is essentially the same as discovering our present, the same as discovering ourselves.

Ballard also notes how this conception of the past always anticipates a future that derives from our past and always recalls a past that projects itself into our future, making both of these categories less defined and discrete than they seem to be.  He says, “In our lives we try to repeat those significant events which have already taken place in the future.  As we grow older we feel an increasing nostalgia for our own deaths, through which we have already passed.  Equally, we have a growing premonition of our births, which are about to take place.  At any moment we may be born for the first time.”  The present, therefore, is a moment produced equally by the future and the past, by the ultimate future and past that is represented in death and birth, by a nostalgia and a premonition of both the past and the future.  The present looks, not only into the past as a series of moments, nor even into the past as  single moment, like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, who watches the refuse of history piled at its feet.  Rather, it looks both into the future and the past, watching the refuse of both come to surround and to produce the vantage point from which it watches.

In this sense, perhaps Ballard’s title for the book can be read as referring, not only to a future moment, but also, even especially, to a present moment that is looking both to the future and to the past.  Perhaps the word ‘myths’, traditionally used to describe the stories and the beliefs of the past, is implying this very possibility, modifying the word ‘future’ with a word that is associated most often with the past.   Perhaps it should be read, not as looking into its own near future, not even as looking into our near future, but as looking into the very idea of the future in a particular way, a way that sees the future as combining with the past in order to produce a present moment, like every present moment, so paradoxical that it can only be described by the language of a mythological future.

Today is tomato sauce day.  Actually, it is the first of what will need to be two tomato sauce days, which is apparently what happens when you have the assistance of two children under five years of age.  To this point, we have been harvesting and processing the basil, the oregano, and the garlic from our garden.  Our tomatoes, the very few that we have, are still too green, so we had to buy a couple of bushels from the market on Saturday.  I hope to start making the sauce this evening.

I have always loved this process.  I love cutting the herbs and digging the garlic.  I love stripping the leaves from the plants.  I love washing and chopping the ingredients.  I love blanching and peeling the tomatoes.  I love these things, not despite the fact that they are mundane, but precisely because they are mundane and because they therefore allow me a kind of solitude to think and to reflect. I have always found that it is theses mundane tasks, those that do not require my attention but that nevertheless occupy me physically, that seem to open a space for thinking.  It is weeding and kneading bread dough and processing vegetables and cleaning cupboards that permit me a kind of solitude in the midst of everything, an intellectual clearing in which there is nothing do but reflect.

Labour of this sort, therefore, is often more restorative for me than simple relaxation, because it takes me away from myself for a time, beacuse it forces me to confront myself for a time.  I am forced, not just to do the mundane task, but to think through it.  Though I do not set out to think, though I do not even know how to go about thinking, it is in these spaces that I find myself thinking nevertheless, that I find myself unable to do anything else.

At this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, we watched Voices of Iraq, which is comprised mostly of footage shot by Iraqis using the 150 digital cameras provided to them by the producers of the film, and which describes itself as, “Filmed and directed by the people of Iraq”.  This description was one of the reasons that I chose to screen the film, because it seemed to imply that the film was providing a more truthful and accurate account of the situation in Iraq simply because the footage was actually made by Iraqis, ignoring the enormous role that the producers had in shaping the film, both through the process of editing 500 hours of raw footage into 80 minutes of finished film, and also through the choices of which people were to be given the cameras. Though I expected to see evidence of this editorial influence, I was startled to see just how much editorial intervention there really is in the film.  Not only are there the unavoidable and mostly invisible choices of what footage to include and exclude, but there are also frequent and highly visible elements that are very clearly not shot and directed by the people of Iraq.

There are the written titles for the sections of the film , for example, which are usually just dates, relatively innocuous, but that sometimes include strangely selective references to the political situation in Iraq.  One such title informs the audience that the month in question  saw the return of Iraqi sovereignty, though the highly ambiguous and contested nature of this sovereignty is never mentioned.  Another claims that there had been a rise in bombings and beheadings in that month, attributing these things exclusively to Al Queda, ignoring the considerable role that local Iraqi militia groups were having in the escalation of violence in Iraqi cities.  These sorts of titles, though not necessarily false, are certainly partial, and they are almost certainly not the kinds of titles that everyday Iraqis would use to describe the events that were taking place at that time.

There are also several sections of film that, while perhaps technically filmed by Iraqis, are certainly not filmed and directed by the common Iraqi people to whom the film claims to be permitting freedom of expression after more than two decades of silence.  There are several lengthy clips from terrorist propaganda videos, for example, and there are also several clips of the torture and killings conducted under Saddam’s regime.  There are no similar clips from Iraqi cameras that have captured abuses by the occupying American and British forces, though these videos are freely available all over the internet, so the editorial choice to insert certain kinds of found footage and not others becomes an increasingly unavoidable question as the film progresses.

Perhaps the oddest editorial intervention, however, is the inclusion of western newspaper headlines.  These headlines almost exclusively imply positions that are opposed to the American intervention in Iraq, and they are consistently followed by footage that contests their claims.  Not only are these interventions highly biased, never including examples of conservative headlines being similarly contested, and not only are they manipulative, making the footage take a position on a Western media debate about which the Iraqi filmmakers themselves would not even be aware, but they are also entirely opposed to the film’s self-description.  Western newspaper headlines are in no way written and directed by the people of Iraq.  Nor are they related to the ability of the Iraqi people to express themselves freely for the first time in decades.  They are imposed entirely by a Western editorial perspective.

These kinds of interventions are a problem because documentary film already creates an illusory sense of verisimilitude, of reality, of accuracy, of truthfulness, and Voices of Iraq, far from signaling this problem as good documentaries should, presents itself as being even more reliable and truthful than other documentaries because it is filmed by everyday Iraqi people, and yet its editorial influences constantly undermine the Iraqi voices that the film claims to represent.  The film is a problem, not because it is biased, as all documentaries are, but because it makes special claim to being  less biased, to being more accurately reflective of the situation in Iraq, to being a way for Iraqis to express themselves freely.  It is a problem because it attempts to conceal rather than to confront the impossibility of its own claims to facticity and truth.

This does not mean, however, that Voices of Iraq is entirely without merit, because it does include some lovely moments of intimacy with the Iraqi people.  There is an older man who describes how he coped with the bombing of his city by waiting up, night after night, playing the piano.  There is a young man who performs a solo dance in a small courtyard.  There is the mother who is interviewed by her daughter about the torture that she has endured.  These kinds of moments are where the film seems, even if only momentarily, to exceed its own intentions.  Such scenes may not be more true than the rest of the film, but they are more surprising, more intimate, more human, and they are where the film finds its worth.

I have been encountering a certain assumption recently, one that I do not think is warranted, but one that is nevertheless prevalent among the people that I know, even among those that I respect.  The assumption is that new media in general, and social media in particular, have resulted in a less literate and less relevant public sphere.  David Eaves and Dave Humphrey have both written posts recently that touch on this subject, and I concur with both of them, but I think that the whole debate generally misses an important fact: that is, the public sphere has always been mostly illiterate and irrelevant.

Anyone who has had a conversation about politics or economics or any other public concern knows this to be true.  Most of what we say to one another about public life is uninformed, derivative, biased, poorly reasoned, and self-interested.  This is true, I would argue, even in much of the traditional mass media, but it is particularly true of the conversations that occur around the kitchen table and the water cooler and the bar stool, because these are the places where the public sphere is at its most informal.  This kind of conversation has not become more inane and uninformed due to the rise of new media.  It has always been largely inane and uninformed. The only difference is that a vastly greater portion of the public sphere is now expressed through mass media, because a vastly greater number of people have access to mass media through twitter and blogs and forums and wikis and other technologies.  The only difference is that the kitchen table and the water cooler and the bar stool have now found expression in mass media.

This is not a crisis.  At least, it is not a greater crisis than it has always been.  Yes, the public sphere is healthier when it is better informed and more articulate, but this healthier public sphere is not essentially compromised by new media, nor is it essentially enhanced by traditional media.  To create a healthier public sphere it is necessary, not to restrict public discourse to traditional mass media, or to any other form of media for that matter, but to foster increased engagement and concern with public life through every medium that the public in fact employs.  By all means, the public should be encouraged to use new media in ways that are increasingly informed and reasoned and articulate and to respond to new media critically, but this is true of traditional media also, now as much as ever.

I was visiting some friends yesterday morning.

There were peaches in boxes on the diningroom sideboard, waiting to be processed.  There were jars of freshly canned peaches on the kitchen counter.  There was bread rising in pans beside the stove.  There was basil drying in the oven.  There were trays of freshly flaked oats on the top of the fridge.  There was fresh coffee in the French press.

I suddenly discovered, in someone else’s kitchen, that I was at home.

As I wrote a few weeks ago in a post on teaching literature and teaching reading, I will be asking my students to learn a little differently this fall, to learn without essays, without exams, without traditional lectures, even without mandatory texts.  Instead, they will be going with me to a used bookstore, where they will buy five books of their own choosing.  They will then be responsible to read these texts and to blog their responses to this reading on their own blogs, which will all be aggregated with the class blog into a blog planet.  In order to provide a model of what this kind of reading and writing might look like, I will be reading and writing along with my students in exactly the ways that I am asking of them, but I would like them to have many such models, to see the many approaches that skilled and interested readers might bring to a text.

So, I am extending an invitation to you, whoever you may be, to read and write along with us this fall.   You may do so very simply.  You need only to read what you would be reading in any case, without even the very rudimentary guidelines that I have set for my students, and then to blog about what your reading inspires in you, whenever and however often you feel so inspired.  Just create a category for your responses, something like Literature or Reading or whatever, and then send me the RSS feed for the category so that I can include it in the blog planet.   Of course, if this seems like too much commitment, you can also participate just by adding the blog planet to your reader and commenting on the posts that interest you.

If you want, you can even accompany us on our trip to the bookstore, for which I will post details shortly, or you can join us for our open discussions, which will be held during two or three of our classes this semester.  I will also be asking some of you personally to make guest appearances in our class discussions, and if you would like to participate in some way that I have not yet imagined, just let me know.  I am willing to explore anything that might make the learning process more open and more accessible.

My hope, in this invitation, in you, in your participation, is that it will produce precisely this openness and this accessibility.  I want to turn the focus of the learning process away from the requirements of the institution and toward the passions and the disciplines of reading and writing in the world, a reading and writing that you and I produce every day.  I want my students to find themselves engaged with people who read and write, not because they have something due tomorrow, but because they find something valuable in the very acts of reading and writing.  I want them, not merely to join a class for a semester, but to join a community of readers for life.

If you are at all interested in being involved with this project in any way, please let me know just leave a comment here or email me at jeremylukehill@gmail.com.

Note:  This post has been changed several times to reflect some technical changes that I have been forced to make.

I made dandelion coffee yesterday.  Actually, I started the process some weeks ago when I dug up a number of dandelion roots, washed them, chopped them roughly, and left them to dry in the makeshift drying rack that sits on my front porch, but  yesterday I brought them in, roasted them in the oven, ground them, and brewed them, just like my regular coffee.

I chose to make the experiment yesterday because we were having some friends over for dinner, so I was sure of having some test subjects.  As it turned out, my mother-in-law also came home in time to have some, and several other friends came by in the evening, though by that time there was only enough for them to have a taste.  All told, I eventually had ten opinions on the dandelion coffee, besides my own, and all were more or less favourable.  My wife, who does not even like coffee, was quite enthusiastic, and most people thought that it was actually some kind of lightly sweetened coffee at first taste, suggesting that it had a hint of maple or brown sugar, though the predominate taste is as bitter as regular coffee or even more so.

I am not sure that dandelion roots will ever replace coffee beans in my morning brew, except perhaps in the greatest extremity, but it is certainly an interesting taste in its own right, and I intend to brew it more often.

This coming Saturday, December the 12th will be the next Dinner and a Doc, and we will be screening Voices of Iraq, which describes itself as being filmed and directed by the people of Iraq.  The film was shot in 2004 by people throughout Iraq who were given 150 digital cameras in order to document their everyday lives, producing over 400 hours of footage.  The purpose of this approach was to let the people of Iraq speak for themselves, a purpose that I would like to spend some time discussing, either at Saturday’s event or in a later post.

For further information about the film, you can read an interview with producers Eric Manes, Martin Kunert, and Archie Drury, or you can watch the trailer.  By way of preparing for a discussion of the film, you may also want to watch this video review, which raises some interesting questions about how the film tries to locate itself politically.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

I am at a loss for words, in a manner of speaking.

I am the program director at a children’s summer camp this week, so I am away from my reading and my writing, though I can steal moments, like this present one, in the crevices of my days.  There are many with whom I can speak, certainly, old friends, and we do speak, in the language of friendships and reminiscences, and I am pleasantly immersed in this many-sided conversation, this ongoing and interrupted and continued conversation, but these are a different sort of words than the ones that I use from day to day.  They are words that have little or nothing to do with a textuality, with the textual words that make up so much of my life, with the textuality that comes to inform so much of what I say and do.  These words that I find myself speaking here are oral, not purely, certainly, since such a world no longer exists, not for us, not for me, but they are oral even so, more oral than textual, surely, and I find myself, at times, lost in them.  There is no illusion of a certain path through them.  They put me in my place, but it is a place that is no longer what I believed it to be.  These words, this speaking, empties me and returns me to myself.  Perhaps they even save me from myself, for a moment.