contradiction

One of the greatest assets to hip hop culture is the recency of its appearance. The foundation for its development has been a democratic ethos that allows for the transformation and rewriting/mixing o f cultural texts. Brevity lends itself to transformation; new voices still could play a potentially significant role in historical development of its power. The remix and the graffiti paintbrush are two of the most durable elements of what can be identified as hip-hop culture; both take an otherwise static text and write over it while using the remainder of the original as a feature of the new message. Not just the text or message of the graff matters, but also the fact that it took over an otherwise public space and made it into a canvas. Every time someone writes about hip hop it puts cultural dynamism in potential crisis. The challenge is to develop a self-sustaining cultural practice that makes that crisis transformative but open to challenge in its own right. Writing about the culture of the remix has the potential to gloss over the role of writing in solidifying/tying down a practice (by committing an idea to permanence in a text), but also the layers of copyright, bureaucracy and technical knowledge which make that writing inaccessible and thus divorced from the culture it otherwise lauds. So, I think these things set out potential political goals for the dimensions of hiphop culture that focus on organized power: copyright law, technological empowerment, and the general transformation of our educational system towards a participatory model.

Duncan

Post from NYC

When I went to Georgia, I set out with a stable of tasks and habits I wanted to develop to get what I thought was the most out of my trip. I was leaving something entrenched, something I at least pretended to have a grasp on. Stepping away from home meant I embraced the things that let me feel independent – I focused on my interests and wrote less home (except for calling peteo which I did lots). I felt a sense of patience and calmness that let me wait out what I could see was a transition point. Now, coming to New York, I have a much different impression of myself and what going to school means. My original task, that I embraced in Georgia, of finding myself, I find nearly impossible to do in NYC. The streets I’m walking have been beaten out so many times before, in songs, in movies, and in general American pop-lore. Navigating a cacophony of humanity requires a steely competence that doesn’t wait, that already has a bearing on you and your appearance, and so demands a response. In a city where so many people live, coping strategies develop to sort out what you see in front of you: you identify styles and appearances, and potentially identify with particular adornment or gestures. The process develops visual communication in common between people, and that communication cannot be averted. That is the inevitability of style: you appear before someone else, sharing yourself irrevocably. You can be swept up and marginalized without even realizing it. I see this as one part of the urgency with which I want to approach living and learning in New York. The other part is the simple expedience of having only two years of school left. Instead of merely sticking to a path I know, I want to open more doors, and perhaps leave a few that way when I leave. Regardless, as a facet of the self critical stance I want to take with my time here, I have to remember I’m essentially on vacation. Until I get a job, I can’t say I’m making it or really living in New York.

Duncan

Wikifuror

So, the Wikipedia furor fascinates me. First, there was the initial backlash against the site, treating it as the downfall of knowledge and truth with the academy at its foundation: the problem was that just anyone could edit webpages, and well, it could just be anyone. The second wave concerns the project wikiscanner, which tracks the IP address of people editing Wikipedia pages, and subsequently identifies to the best of their abilities the identity of whoever edits. I think this has a few implications

One- understanding the death of the author may also require understanding cultural authorship. I don’t realize why direct corporate authorship of articles on Wikipedia matters so much. The author has died, indeed: it is impossible to identify any one writer as the authentic author of a work of the mind. To some degree, we always rely on the work of others to make ideas legible. However, that erasure of a single genesis point does not leave writing as a random process, floating in an ideological vacuum. Power relationships shape the meaning of ideas and how they are deployed, and it is a useful task to trace ideas employed in a work to a corporate or political source. Basically: with companies like Anheuser-Busch already controlling advertising and political campaigns both, who’s to say they aren’t authoring posts written by writers from other IP addresses? The person doing the typing matters less than you may think.

Two- The IP address as the new code for identity and authorship. To the extent that online discourse shapes political events and our understanding of the world, IP addresses are the one true link to individual agency remaining for analysis. IP addresses have several features that distinguish them from other forms of identity. They are explicitly regulated as on offshoot of corporate power. They are given out and assigned by companies with the power to reveal your identity, turn over records to law enforcement agencies, or really do whatever the crap they wanted. They function as a passcode: access is not denied at any point, but rather you trade in true anonymity and leeway for the ability of companies to track you. Part of that regulation and tracking involves implicit barriers to access established by class and race barriers. Other delineations of power involve technical knowledge: as an advanced and developed technical system, the Internet has running it an elite class of people with the technical knowledge to bend it to their will. That knowledge is the product of scarce and narrow education, as well as an acculturation into technical practice from a young age.

Duncan

today

I need to keep track of my thoughts right now, before I go to sleep. In a world where I felt anything was possible and I was capable of any act, today restored my faith in god. Not the god that sends us to heaven or hell, but the god that reminds us we are matter, but that nonetheless guides us in our interactions with other humans. Why trust a phone call to tell you anything? There are times you know, when you realize words mean something more than they should on their face, when wires hum with truth. That for me, is god: the mysterious openness to human catastrophe that lets us feel the unseen and the unknowable with the force of a gunshot.

This summer, I’ve felt at least two different kinds of disappearing time. One, brought on by the repetitions of a life that doesn’t seem to matter so much, that slips away on wheels greased by its own inadequacy. When people treat you like your time and person matters little, it’s hard to marshal the will to make it matter by your own accord, and so the days turn to weeks, waiting for something to put you back on track. Then there are days which feel fated by means of absurd tragedy. It feels like fate because you never had a chance to say goodbye, because you seem subject to something beyond yourself that never even hinted at letting you have control. Events of your life, that make it life, seem inaccessible and under the control of other powers entirely.

Greif endures: we are followed by our own ghosts. The most terrifying part of grieving is that it pursues you indefinitely. Loss doesn’t end, it appears in times and places you know not yet. There’s something about hurt that almost immediately becomes truth for me. There’s no denial, no wistful remorse, only the way forward. What seems impossible is the sense that you won’t ever take a breather. It doesn’t quite quantify, nothing adds up, because it won’t come to you except in unanswered gestures. You lose what seemed natural, part of ourselves that we never had to question before. Absence itself hurts, but absence without respite defines grief for me.

how do you do justice to someone’s memory? What justice do we owe to someone’s memory, and to unspoken desires? In fulfilling someone’s wishes, we hope to revive them. They animate again, becoming agent to our lives, acting on us as if surviving. Justice becomes the vehicle to our fears of permanence. Its as if those we have lost would have one more chance to speak, and we let them speak the words we would want to hear – of vindication if need be.

The reason words fail us is that they stand inert next to a radically changed future. They offer condolence, but have been used so many times before in so many ways, we can’t help but feel like we’re falling into cliché. They are the tracing paper onto which we sketch a pale copy of what we really feel. Words were made for a thousand other people at once, and don’t seem suited to where we stand, to what we’ve lost.

Dispel the rumors of healing and take each day to mean something intrinsically and eternally worthwhile. Seizing the day we too often take to be an endorsement of a petty recklessness which rather leaves us numb. Living to our fullest also means care for your relationships and care for the people that matter. Sometimes we forget our impermanence.

Duncan

Clarification?

When I wrote about my academic goals yesterday, I mentioned in passing the idea of aesthetics and its relationship to media systems. I wanted to draw out what I meant by this term to perhaps set me on a firmer course. TS Khun in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows that at the turning point of a paradigm shift, scientists are presented with two potentially internally consistent views of the world, each with different accounts of scientific reasoning and potential errors. One way that two mutually exclusive paradigms resolve themselves into a situation of normal science (where scientists and institutions practice science under the conditions established by a single paradigm, which is universally accepted) is through aesthetics. Basically, adopting one paradigm over another may make the practice of normal science more appealing, and so that particular paradigm prevails. I think this example clarifies what I mean by questions of aesthetics: the political and rhetorical forces that privilege certain internally consistent systems of knowledge over others. I think this is a question of visual form as well as more explicitly political questions. For the relationship of media ecology to aesthetics, I think my primary concern is visual – how does the internet transform the aesthetics of other visual mediums, etc. For the science example, scientific practice presumes a stable and immutable natural world as the object of its study. In conjunction with that, it privileges an aesthetic of permanence and stability, which creates a tendency towards singular, simple explanations of the natural world over more complex and seemingly arbitrary ones.

Duncan

New York

I’ve been thinking about what I want from NYU – I think much of my frustration with the trip (and I still just think of it as a trip…) has to do with the force of a place and people and the intellectual meekness with which I feel I am approaching leaving this life. When I talk about New York with people, I’m uncomfortable with the degree to which the city is mythologized as a place of maturation – a city living up to itself, and I don’t’ want to have to live up to Simon and Garfunkel when I move there. My way of coping has been to emphasize how I want to focus on school and my more explicit education at NYU. So, in the process of talking about what I want from moving, I’m compling a list of questions I want answered while still in school.

The power of reading as a social process in relationship to media systems. I think that the move for media literacy, the use of satire, and the transformation of consumption into an ethical process are connected by the transformation of reading skills into sources of social capital. I want to investigate these as a linked process that concern the dominance of certain media forms.

Media ecology and its link to social spaces in the city – do certain media forms validate or enable spatial structures of the city?

Media ecology and its link to aesthetics/persuasion

Gender and visual strategies. I want to study gender norms as a function of visual norms, and the assigning of intrinsic meaning to certain appearances. I think TS Khun hinted at this tendency as a function of Cartesian reasoning about the investigation of the world, but what do I know. Gestalt.

The difference between truth and meaning

I want to study visual rhetoric in general, but also to improve my reading of photographs and their persuasive tendencies.

Duncan

Back from the dead?

I find myself haunted by sunrise and pursued by sunset. More than anything I’m obsessed by the liminality of my life right now. Something about moving has made me feel ephemeral again, perhaps as if I never even lived here. Now more than ever I realize I have the power to remake my life. I feel as if I should assemble a list of demands, and agenda for the revolutionary vanguard party establishing my new constitution, my new consistencies and complaints. The trouble is that this summer has been as much a starting point as an ending point to itself. So much of what has gone on here has no reference point to the future. At the same time, I know from here I start to rebuild what I see of myself after Georgia, after debate, after I confront so many things which have haunted me for years. In a sense, I feel like this summer will be left behind as a moment of resuscitation – the seconds of blackout after concussion but before leaping back to life.

What I have done this summer. I’ve learned lists help

Rode my bike… a lot, more than ever

Got a job

Rode home at 5 am

Got lunged at by a rabid dog

Read 4 books by Don DeLillo

Drove to Atlanta in a day. Drove back in a day also.

Quit Georgia

Got into NYU

Bought a bike, twice

Sold a bike, twice

Learned how to have conversation

Didn’t do debate work

Felt heartbroken

Watched a sunrise from my street

Didn’t sleep at home a lot

Sweat out all the water in my body, probably 5-6 times

Went swimming in the greenbelt

Felt ambitious

Felt stymied

Became briefly nocturnal

Rode a bike through downtown Atlanta

Ate popsicles

Wandered through my mother’s childhood

Had intense conversations

Forgot

Learned to appreciate style

Fixed bikes

Met lots of interesting people

Lost faith in me

Gained faith in others

Listened to lots of rap music