Benjamin, Walter. (15 July 1892—27 September 1940)
Written in 1936, first published in English in 1968 in Illuminations (pp. 217-252), New York: Schocken Books.
Retrieved on March 27, 2009 from http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
Against Fascism, Benjamin finds a seed of politicization in art, in particular, film. While art appreciation was practiced personally as in a worship of cult, Benjamin states that masses appreciate art in forms of exhibition in the age of mechanical reproduction and articulates this change by saying "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art form its parasitical dependence on ritual...Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice--politics" (Part IV).
In parallel with mass appreciation in film as an art form, Benjamin gazes at the blurred distinction between author and public as seen newsreels and in particular, the cinema movement in Russia, where ordinary people were filmed and reality was established on the contrary to the Western capitalistic exploitation of the film.
In his argument that mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art, Benjamin stresses the power of film that turns the ordinary into the unconventional in the following:
"By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling...The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions" (Part XIV).
In his response to distracted audience of film, Benjamin argues that films with their shock effects--constant moving images that requires reviewers' heightened sense--put the public in the position of the critic, however, the public is an absent-minded examiner at first. By this Benjamin means that the film has a high potential to mobilize the masses but the achievement of the mobilization is not automatic.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
Public Education and Multicultural Policy In Canada: The Special Case of Quebec
Ghosh, Ratna. (2004). International Review of Education, 50 (5-6), 543-566.
[Through a historical and comprehensive review of the multicultural policies in Québec, Ghosh critically examines the policies reflected on education.]
In her criticism of rising voucher-like system in certain provinces, she contests that the provincial governments help private schools by subsidizing the cost of their tuition. Explosive immigration had a great impact on the government policy entitled "Bilingualism within a Multicultural Framework" in 1971. As to bilingualism, Ghosh criticizes that the Official Languages Act, which acknowledged French and English as the two official languages at the federal level in 1969 as an honor of of the "founding nations", totally ignored Canada's Natives. Multiculturalism, which was federally legislated in 1988, is rephrased by the author, "consensus within the rhetoric of a 'just' society where there is to be 'unity within diversity'. By reviewing four stages of the objects of multiculturalism, Ghosh pays attention on its interpretation from the recognition of diversity to the promotion of equitable participation of all Canadians after the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.
Ghosh, however, maintains multicultural practice in education has been negligible in Quebec such that the province has historically sustained the assimilation and the exclusion of the 'other' as a policy. Since 1974 when French became the official language of Quebec, the government's effort to safeguard French brought about intercultural education policy. Interculturalism, Ghosh explains, 'a Quebec that will be pluralistic in outlook, but Francophonic through its reliance on the medium of the French language.' In this pluralistic society, Ghosh states, "Fear of racial tensions and happenings is the least of their apprehensions. The real danger is perceived to be the threat posed to the French culture by the multiplicity and vigor of other cultural groups" (p. 559).
In her conclusion, she states that despite three decades of multicultural policy, discrimination against visible minorities, in particular, immigrant youth, still exists both at personal and at structural levels and racism is on the increase, thus multicultural education has failed.
[Through a historical and comprehensive review of the multicultural policies in Québec, Ghosh critically examines the policies reflected on education.]
In her criticism of rising voucher-like system in certain provinces, she contests that the provincial governments help private schools by subsidizing the cost of their tuition. Explosive immigration had a great impact on the government policy entitled "Bilingualism within a Multicultural Framework" in 1971. As to bilingualism, Ghosh criticizes that the Official Languages Act, which acknowledged French and English as the two official languages at the federal level in 1969 as an honor of of the "founding nations", totally ignored Canada's Natives. Multiculturalism, which was federally legislated in 1988, is rephrased by the author, "consensus within the rhetoric of a 'just' society where there is to be 'unity within diversity'. By reviewing four stages of the objects of multiculturalism, Ghosh pays attention on its interpretation from the recognition of diversity to the promotion of equitable participation of all Canadians after the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.
Ghosh, however, maintains multicultural practice in education has been negligible in Quebec such that the province has historically sustained the assimilation and the exclusion of the 'other' as a policy. Since 1974 when French became the official language of Quebec, the government's effort to safeguard French brought about intercultural education policy. Interculturalism, Ghosh explains, 'a Quebec that will be pluralistic in outlook, but Francophonic through its reliance on the medium of the French language.' In this pluralistic society, Ghosh states, "Fear of racial tensions and happenings is the least of their apprehensions. The real danger is perceived to be the threat posed to the French culture by the multiplicity and vigor of other cultural groups" (p. 559).
In her conclusion, she states that despite three decades of multicultural policy, discrimination against visible minorities, in particular, immigrant youth, still exists both at personal and at structural levels and racism is on the increase, thus multicultural education has failed.
Representing Reality: Issues ad concepts in Documentary
Nochols, Bill. (1991). Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
I. The Domain of Documentary (pp. 3-31)
"What films have to say about the enduring human condition or about the pressing issues of the day can never be separated from how they say it, how this saying moves and affects us, how we engage with a work, not with a theory of it" (p. xiii).
"We prepare ourselves not to comprehend a story but to grasp an argument. we do so in relation to sounds and images that retain a distinct bond to the world we all share" (p. 5).
"Our access to historical reality may only be by means of representation and these representations may sometimes seems to be more eager to chase their own tails than able to guarantee the authenticity of what they refer to" (p. 7)
"Dziga Vertov advocated in his writings and his films an active process of social construction, including the construction of the viewer's historical-materialist consciousness, and Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, foresaw the degree to which the image wold be placed in the series of the dominant ideology as spectacle and distraction but would also retain the explosive potential to reassemble time and space into whatever order one desired" (pp. 10-11).
---> Look into Vertov's notion of social construction!
Nochols defines the documentary from the point of view of the filmmaker, the text and the viewer. In explaining its institutional practice, Nichols sheds light on the limitation of reflexivity as follows: "Documentary may talk about anything in the historical world except itself (until we consider reflexive documentaries where this very presupposition becomes the object of scrutiny). It is hard to be reflexive if you have something urgent to say about a pressing issue, and for most documentarists the urgency of the said takes far higher precedence than the self-consciousness of the saying. This defines one of the classic traits of documentary at the same time that it helps explain why the 'discursive formation' (in Foucault's terms) remains somewhat underdeveloped and unexamined" (p. 17).
About a constituency of viewers, he says, "The documentary viewer employs 'procedures of rhetorical engagement' rather than the 'procedures of fictive engagement' that guide the viewing of classic narrative film" (p. 26).
II. Documentary Modes of Representation (pp. 32-75)
Nichols's topology of documentary mode provides a very useful tool to analyze many different types of documentaries.
1) Emerging as a counterpart of entertainment quality of the fiction film, expository documentary takes a voice-of-God commentary style. As often seen in evening news, the authoring presence of the filmmaker is represented through the VOG commentary or an on-camera voice of authority.
2) Agaist the moralizing quality of expository documentary, observational documentary (or direct cinema, non-fiction film, fly-on-the-wall style) --i.e. Fredrick Wiseman--tend to portray exhaustive depictions of everyday life with syn sound and relatively long shots, thus allowing viewers to have a vivid sense of comprehensive documentation. "Observational cinema affords the viewer an opportunityto look in on and overhear something of the lived experience of others, to gain some sense of the sidtinct thythms of everyday life, to see the colors, shapes, and spatial relationships among people and their possessions, to hear the intonation, inflection, and accents that give a spoken language its 'gain' and the distinguish one native speaker from another" (p.42). By emphasizing the absence of the filmmaker or an authoring agency, observational documentary "conveys the sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world" (p.43).
3) Interactive documentary, based on interview and interventionist tactics, makes the presence of the filmmaker more evident through interaction with individuals in present events. Nichols explains this mode predominated by verbal exchange, "The mode introduces a sense of partialness, of situated presence and local knowledge that derives from the actual encounter of filmmaker and other" (p. 44). As in Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, Nichols states, the interactive mode show many social actors but only through direct encounter with the filmmkaer. According to Nichols, a participatory dynamic in this mode take beyond the interview style employed in an expository text.
4) Arising from more self-awareness and dubious questioning of representation itself, reflexive documentary explores conventional documentary styles as well as structure, strategy, expectations and effects. In particular, by drawing attention to the film making process or its device itself, it poses to the viewers problems concerning film representation itself.
Nichols analyzes The Thin Blue Line directed by Errol Morris in depth. "Reflexive documentaries will employ such [representation of realism, unproblematic access to the world by means of acting style, narrative structure, and cinematic techniques such as point-of-view shots] techniques only to interrupt and expose them. The Thin Blue Line, for example, relies heavily on the conventions of the interview with its affinities for the conventional, but also draws attention to the tensions that arise when statements contradict one another...Morris dramatizes the quest for evidence, and underlines the uncertainty of what evidence there is" (pp. 57-58).
With an emphasis given to the encounter between filmmaker and viewer, the reflexive documentary, Nichols argues, prompts the viewer to a heightened consciousness of his or her relation to the text and of the text's problematic relationship to its representation itself. Here he brings the term, ostranenie, coined by the Russian formalists who made unfamiliar familiar and familiar unfamiliar through unexpected juxtapositions.
Based on epistemological doubt, Nichols maintains that "deformative intervention of the cinematic apparatus in the process of representation" (p. 61) thus taken-for-granted viewing conditions are subject to scrutiny such that "a thickened, denser sense of the textuality of the viewing experience is in operation" (p. 62).
In reviewing the reflexive mode in a historical context, Nichols affirms that this mode gained some ground in the 70s and 80s on the assumption that political urgency/radical transformation requires formal innovation and changes in the signifier. In parallel with this movement, Nichols mines into feminist documentary as another stream of reflexive mode of representation. Julia Lesage, in particular, recontextualizes domestic individual experience in a shared political domain and writes, "[These films] show experiences and to elaborate a strategy for making inroads in the public sphere" (cited p.64). Thereby Nichols redefines reflexivity: "Reflexivity, then, need not be purely formal; it can also be pointedly political" (p. 64). He recognizes feminism as a vital alternative discourse that documentary lacks: "The tools that documentary discourse lacked, feminism provided. It instigated a radical reconceptualization of subjectivity and politics that achieved through the programmatics of consciousness-raising an effect comparatble to that of reflexivity."
Thus, Nichols summarizes the bipolarity of reflexive strategies as formal reflexive and political reflexive. Thus he insinuates even expository documentaries may be seen as reflexive if they heighten viewers' consciousness. Now a question arise around films that open up formal awareness without political sense in viewer consciousness. He answers to this questions as follows: "We must attend to formal reflexivity since the content of the form, in Hayden White's phrase, is indeed decisive, but we must also attend to political reflexivity since the form of the content is equally critical.
I. The Domain of Documentary (pp. 3-31)
"What films have to say about the enduring human condition or about the pressing issues of the day can never be separated from how they say it, how this saying moves and affects us, how we engage with a work, not with a theory of it" (p. xiii).
"We prepare ourselves not to comprehend a story but to grasp an argument. we do so in relation to sounds and images that retain a distinct bond to the world we all share" (p. 5).
"Our access to historical reality may only be by means of representation and these representations may sometimes seems to be more eager to chase their own tails than able to guarantee the authenticity of what they refer to" (p. 7)
"Dziga Vertov advocated in his writings and his films an active process of social construction, including the construction of the viewer's historical-materialist consciousness, and Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, foresaw the degree to which the image wold be placed in the series of the dominant ideology as spectacle and distraction but would also retain the explosive potential to reassemble time and space into whatever order one desired" (pp. 10-11).
---> Look into Vertov's notion of social construction!
Nochols defines the documentary from the point of view of the filmmaker, the text and the viewer. In explaining its institutional practice, Nichols sheds light on the limitation of reflexivity as follows: "Documentary may talk about anything in the historical world except itself (until we consider reflexive documentaries where this very presupposition becomes the object of scrutiny). It is hard to be reflexive if you have something urgent to say about a pressing issue, and for most documentarists the urgency of the said takes far higher precedence than the self-consciousness of the saying. This defines one of the classic traits of documentary at the same time that it helps explain why the 'discursive formation' (in Foucault's terms) remains somewhat underdeveloped and unexamined" (p. 17).
About a constituency of viewers, he says, "The documentary viewer employs 'procedures of rhetorical engagement' rather than the 'procedures of fictive engagement' that guide the viewing of classic narrative film" (p. 26).
II. Documentary Modes of Representation (pp. 32-75)
Nichols's topology of documentary mode provides a very useful tool to analyze many different types of documentaries.
1) Emerging as a counterpart of entertainment quality of the fiction film, expository documentary takes a voice-of-God commentary style. As often seen in evening news, the authoring presence of the filmmaker is represented through the VOG commentary or an on-camera voice of authority.
2) Agaist the moralizing quality of expository documentary, observational documentary (or direct cinema, non-fiction film, fly-on-the-wall style) --i.e. Fredrick Wiseman--tend to portray exhaustive depictions of everyday life with syn sound and relatively long shots, thus allowing viewers to have a vivid sense of comprehensive documentation. "Observational cinema affords the viewer an opportunityto look in on and overhear something of the lived experience of others, to gain some sense of the sidtinct thythms of everyday life, to see the colors, shapes, and spatial relationships among people and their possessions, to hear the intonation, inflection, and accents that give a spoken language its 'gain' and the distinguish one native speaker from another" (p.42). By emphasizing the absence of the filmmaker or an authoring agency, observational documentary "conveys the sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world" (p.43).
3) Interactive documentary, based on interview and interventionist tactics, makes the presence of the filmmaker more evident through interaction with individuals in present events. Nichols explains this mode predominated by verbal exchange, "The mode introduces a sense of partialness, of situated presence and local knowledge that derives from the actual encounter of filmmaker and other" (p. 44). As in Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, Nichols states, the interactive mode show many social actors but only through direct encounter with the filmmkaer. According to Nichols, a participatory dynamic in this mode take beyond the interview style employed in an expository text.
4) Arising from more self-awareness and dubious questioning of representation itself, reflexive documentary explores conventional documentary styles as well as structure, strategy, expectations and effects. In particular, by drawing attention to the film making process or its device itself, it poses to the viewers problems concerning film representation itself.
Nichols analyzes The Thin Blue Line directed by Errol Morris in depth. "Reflexive documentaries will employ such [representation of realism, unproblematic access to the world by means of acting style, narrative structure, and cinematic techniques such as point-of-view shots] techniques only to interrupt and expose them. The Thin Blue Line, for example, relies heavily on the conventions of the interview with its affinities for the conventional, but also draws attention to the tensions that arise when statements contradict one another...Morris dramatizes the quest for evidence, and underlines the uncertainty of what evidence there is" (pp. 57-58).
With an emphasis given to the encounter between filmmaker and viewer, the reflexive documentary, Nichols argues, prompts the viewer to a heightened consciousness of his or her relation to the text and of the text's problematic relationship to its representation itself. Here he brings the term, ostranenie, coined by the Russian formalists who made unfamiliar familiar and familiar unfamiliar through unexpected juxtapositions.
Based on epistemological doubt, Nichols maintains that "deformative intervention of the cinematic apparatus in the process of representation" (p. 61) thus taken-for-granted viewing conditions are subject to scrutiny such that "a thickened, denser sense of the textuality of the viewing experience is in operation" (p. 62).
In reviewing the reflexive mode in a historical context, Nichols affirms that this mode gained some ground in the 70s and 80s on the assumption that political urgency/radical transformation requires formal innovation and changes in the signifier. In parallel with this movement, Nichols mines into feminist documentary as another stream of reflexive mode of representation. Julia Lesage, in particular, recontextualizes domestic individual experience in a shared political domain and writes, "[These films] show experiences and to elaborate a strategy for making inroads in the public sphere" (cited p.64). Thereby Nichols redefines reflexivity: "Reflexivity, then, need not be purely formal; it can also be pointedly political" (p. 64). He recognizes feminism as a vital alternative discourse that documentary lacks: "The tools that documentary discourse lacked, feminism provided. It instigated a radical reconceptualization of subjectivity and politics that achieved through the programmatics of consciousness-raising an effect comparatble to that of reflexivity."
Thus, Nichols summarizes the bipolarity of reflexive strategies as formal reflexive and political reflexive. Thus he insinuates even expository documentaries may be seen as reflexive if they heighten viewers' consciousness. Now a question arise around films that open up formal awareness without political sense in viewer consciousness. He answers to this questions as follows: "We must attend to formal reflexivity since the content of the form, in Hayden White's phrase, is indeed decisive, but we must also attend to political reflexivity since the form of the content is equally critical.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Concerning violence
Frantz Fanon. (1968). In The Wretched of the Earth (pp. 35-106). New York: Grove Press.
Fanon radically cries out for decolonization from the bottom up by criticizing colonial intellectuals and nationalist leaders on the ground that decolonization is the veritable creation of new men and is obtained only through violence.
"The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it" (p.37).
The colonized intellectuals, Fanon stresses, do not carry revolutionary actions because they are lack of "concrete conflicts" in which the people are engaged with (p.47). They are ingrained with the Western essentials, such as individualism, that colonialist bourgeois brought in. Related to this issue, Fanon points out that decolonization does occur in areas where movements for liberation are not mature yet smart intellectuals are found. These intellectuals demand a drive for nationalism. Fanon write they behave like an opportunist in this phase.
"They are insistent in their demands for the nationalization of commerce, that is to say the reservation of markets and advantageous bargains for nationals only. As far as doctrine is concerned, they proclaim the pressing necessity of naitonalizing the robberty of the nation" (p.48).
In reading the agressiveness against their own people of the colonized, Fanon finds a seed for motion grounded in their certain emotion.
"[The native] is always overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him. The native's muscles are always tensed...[W]e know that in certain emotional conditions the presence of an obstacle accentuates the tendency toward motion" (p. 53).
Fanon criticizes the ambiguity that the colonial elites have in term of violence by saying they are violent only in their words.
"The native intellectuals have clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world. He has used his affressiveness to serve his own inividual interests" (p. 60).
Observing the colonies' transformation from a source of raw materials to a market, Fanon asserts elevated elegance and lessened bloodthristy as a trend of today's wars of repression and examines relaxation of violence driven by the political leaders in colonial countries. They are progressive yet authorative and do not allow explosion of tension, which stem from the native's realization that nothing changed in spite of the nation's independence.
"In their speeches the political leaders give a name to the nation. In this way the native's demands are given shape... They avoid the actual overthrowing of the state, but in fact they introduce into their readers' or hearers' consciousness the terrible ferment of subversion" (p. 68).
"[A]ll parties are aware of the power of such violence and that the question is not always to reply to it by a greater violence, but rather to see how to relax the tension" (p. 73).
The influx of capitalism caters to this peaceful violence/co-existence. However, Fanon puts an emphasis on the single combat between the settler and the native, an armed and open struggle. This violence against the native in turn binds them together.
"The appearance of the settler has meant in the terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy and th petrification of indivisuals. For the native, life can only sprin gup again out of the rotting corpse of the settler" (p.93)
"Their destruction is the preliminary to the unification of the people. At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction...Yesterday they were completely irresponsible; today they mean to understand everything and make all decision. Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacitication." (pp. 94).
[His insinuated perspective about violence turning to political power needs more explanation. Otherwise it remains as a fantasy. Related to this, Chambers also asserts bottom-up decision making based on self-organization.]
Regarding the nationalist movements, Fanon argues that one common discourse against decolonization is that independence will bring socio-economic regression, thus demanded independence deserves poverty; in this given situation, certain nationalist leaders ask for enourmous efforts from their peple while others opt for economic dependency voluntarily.
Lastly, he regards the decolonization movement as the rehabilitation of mankind and the victory of man everywhere once and for all.
Fanon radically cries out for decolonization from the bottom up by criticizing colonial intellectuals and nationalist leaders on the ground that decolonization is the veritable creation of new men and is obtained only through violence.
"The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it" (p.37).
The colonized intellectuals, Fanon stresses, do not carry revolutionary actions because they are lack of "concrete conflicts" in which the people are engaged with (p.47). They are ingrained with the Western essentials, such as individualism, that colonialist bourgeois brought in. Related to this issue, Fanon points out that decolonization does occur in areas where movements for liberation are not mature yet smart intellectuals are found. These intellectuals demand a drive for nationalism. Fanon write they behave like an opportunist in this phase.
"They are insistent in their demands for the nationalization of commerce, that is to say the reservation of markets and advantageous bargains for nationals only. As far as doctrine is concerned, they proclaim the pressing necessity of naitonalizing the robberty of the nation" (p.48).
In reading the agressiveness against their own people of the colonized, Fanon finds a seed for motion grounded in their certain emotion.
"[The native] is always overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him. The native's muscles are always tensed...[W]e know that in certain emotional conditions the presence of an obstacle accentuates the tendency toward motion" (p. 53).
Fanon criticizes the ambiguity that the colonial elites have in term of violence by saying they are violent only in their words.
"The native intellectuals have clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world. He has used his affressiveness to serve his own inividual interests" (p. 60).
Observing the colonies' transformation from a source of raw materials to a market, Fanon asserts elevated elegance and lessened bloodthristy as a trend of today's wars of repression and examines relaxation of violence driven by the political leaders in colonial countries. They are progressive yet authorative and do not allow explosion of tension, which stem from the native's realization that nothing changed in spite of the nation's independence.
"In their speeches the political leaders give a name to the nation. In this way the native's demands are given shape... They avoid the actual overthrowing of the state, but in fact they introduce into their readers' or hearers' consciousness the terrible ferment of subversion" (p. 68).
"[A]ll parties are aware of the power of such violence and that the question is not always to reply to it by a greater violence, but rather to see how to relax the tension" (p. 73).
The influx of capitalism caters to this peaceful violence/co-existence. However, Fanon puts an emphasis on the single combat between the settler and the native, an armed and open struggle. This violence against the native in turn binds them together.
"The appearance of the settler has meant in the terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy and th petrification of indivisuals. For the native, life can only sprin gup again out of the rotting corpse of the settler" (p.93)
"Their destruction is the preliminary to the unification of the people. At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction...Yesterday they were completely irresponsible; today they mean to understand everything and make all decision. Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacitication." (pp. 94).
[His insinuated perspective about violence turning to political power needs more explanation. Otherwise it remains as a fantasy. Related to this, Chambers also asserts bottom-up decision making based on self-organization.]
Regarding the nationalist movements, Fanon argues that one common discourse against decolonization is that independence will bring socio-economic regression, thus demanded independence deserves poverty; in this given situation, certain nationalist leaders ask for enourmous efforts from their peple while others opt for economic dependency voluntarily.
Lastly, he regards the decolonization movement as the rehabilitation of mankind and the victory of man everywhere once and for all.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Revolutions in Development Inquiry
Robert Chambers. (2008). London, UK: Earthscan. (Copyright: Institute of Development Studies)
Chambers overviews a proliferation of participatory methodologies (PMs) without precedent in diverse areas and purposes by writing, "More and more consultants, facilitators, researchers and activists have become eclectic and innovative pluralists who devise sequences and combinations of methods to fit each case...What they do is new each time. At its best this is a performance, an art form. And what they do is often not named" (p.170), thus PMs evolve in a multiplicity and often without recognition. [It is notable that he mentions consultants, facilitators and activists along with researchers. The eclecticism of PM can be also found who employs this methodology and effectively blurs the boundary between research and activism.]
Chambers underpins three underlying theoretical dimensions of PM: 1) a paradigmatic shift from things to people, 2) theories of chaos, complexity and emergence and 3) creative and eclectic pluralism.
According to him, the paradigm of things fits the physical world, which is often top-down, centralized, standardized, simplified and reductionist, values measurement and its outputs are physical things such as infrastructure and reports. On the other hand, that of people fits the social world, which is bottom-up, decentralized, diverse, complex and inclusive, values judgement, and has outputs that are social such as capabilities and relationships. PMis aligned with people and process. Secondly, grounding in bottom-up logic based SOSOTEC (self-organizing systems on the edge of chaos) mode, Chambers stresses that participants can and often do make rules and guidelines through participation, in other words, they can theorize from their own practices. In emphasizing the pluralism, Chambers says, "the boundaries have become more porous and less significant. Pervasively the spirit now is one of seeking, finding, borrowing, adopting, adapting, cross-fertilizing and inventing" (p. 177). [As Kincheloe continued to stres, bricolage as methodologies becomes a necessity.]
In his reviews of the range of PMs, Chambers summarizes its commonality as follows: "[A]ll of them imply sharing and influce relationships, and all of them affect behaviour, attitudes and mindsets and these in turn become part of professional, institutional and personal change."
Chaos: Gleick, 1998, Chaos: Making a New Science.
Complexity: Waldrop, 1994, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.
Emergence: Johnson, 2002. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.
Chambers overviews a proliferation of participatory methodologies (PMs) without precedent in diverse areas and purposes by writing, "More and more consultants, facilitators, researchers and activists have become eclectic and innovative pluralists who devise sequences and combinations of methods to fit each case...What they do is new each time. At its best this is a performance, an art form. And what they do is often not named" (p.170), thus PMs evolve in a multiplicity and often without recognition. [It is notable that he mentions consultants, facilitators and activists along with researchers. The eclecticism of PM can be also found who employs this methodology and effectively blurs the boundary between research and activism.]
Chambers underpins three underlying theoretical dimensions of PM: 1) a paradigmatic shift from things to people, 2) theories of chaos, complexity and emergence and 3) creative and eclectic pluralism.
According to him, the paradigm of things fits the physical world, which is often top-down, centralized, standardized, simplified and reductionist, values measurement and its outputs are physical things such as infrastructure and reports. On the other hand, that of people fits the social world, which is bottom-up, decentralized, diverse, complex and inclusive, values judgement, and has outputs that are social such as capabilities and relationships. PMis aligned with people and process. Secondly, grounding in bottom-up logic based SOSOTEC (self-organizing systems on the edge of chaos) mode, Chambers stresses that participants can and often do make rules and guidelines through participation, in other words, they can theorize from their own practices. In emphasizing the pluralism, Chambers says, "the boundaries have become more porous and less significant. Pervasively the spirit now is one of seeking, finding, borrowing, adopting, adapting, cross-fertilizing and inventing" (p. 177). [As Kincheloe continued to stres, bricolage as methodologies becomes a necessity.]
In his reviews of the range of PMs, Chambers summarizes its commonality as follows: "[A]ll of them imply sharing and influce relationships, and all of them affect behaviour, attitudes and mindsets and these in turn become part of professional, institutional and personal change."
Chaos: Gleick, 1998, Chaos: Making a New Science.
Complexity: Waldrop, 1994, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.
Emergence: Johnson, 2002. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.
Friday, March 6, 2009
What can a woman do with a camera?
Jo Spence & Joan Solomon (Eds.). (1995). London: Scarlet Press
In the introduction to this book, Solomon writes we become who we are through contacting a welter of representations conveyed in images as well as our positions determined by our gender, race, class and sexual orientation, thus put an emphasis on creating our--in this case, women's-- own images to redefine themselves. To achieve this goal, she stresses photographing innermost feelings through an engagement of psychic reality that turns to wider political context. Within this context, her criticism about family photo album is insinuated in that we often deliberately leave out painful or shameful moment and preserve idealistic moments only. According to her, this practice only re-inscribes traditional values and misconception. (pp.9-14).
By boldly yet engagingly revealing her own secrets through her camera work, Spence maintains using cameras thinkingly is importance in constructing our own meanings of the world by scrutinizing the complexity of our own existence. In a sense, she sees her art as reflexivity: "I see my artworks as a kind of 'politicized exhibitionism' about particular psychic and social issues which have enraged me. In this respect I have used myself as a kind of case study" (pp.94-95). By delineating that some secrets are conflated with social taboo, Spencer places her public work in a political arena, which encounter two types of criticism: most of all it comes from the notion that it is rather narcissism rather than politically investigation. Besides, academics, which are so soaked in objectivism with suppressed subjectivity, do not acknowledge the endeavor made to such personalized language. (Jo Spence, woman in secret. pp. 85-96).
Grey describes an exemplary group work between a cultural studies team and young homeless in the mid 1980s in England. Her evaluation of the work is as follows: "[P]hotographs played a useful role in helping the young women and men to assert their sense of identity and place at an otherwise chaotic and sometimes disturbed time in their lives. Photographs presented positive images of an up-to-date self, a new person established in his or her own right at a distance from the recent past with its traumas of family upheaval and homelessness. The pictures located them in a new social context, amongst their friends and engaging in new interest" (p. 144). Here are some quotes from a comment made by a young homeless participant:
"I suppose it's a bit novelty to see yourself."
"I'd much rather not be interviewed on TV; not be asked, 'How do you feel about being homeless?' I'd rather someone gave me a camera and said, 'Show us how you feel.'"
"The aim of the exhibition was to challenge stereotypes of homeless people created through the media. I have the media, as it is now anyway. The experience of making the exhibition gave me a lot of confidence, especially now, seeing all the work I did for it. I appreciate doing that more than ever, and realize how it has helped me to get work now, as well as giving me experience then.For example, I'm doing a BBC video with a friend from the hostel. It's semidocumentary but a video diary as well.
I've gone from being a shy anti-social person who hated being in a hostel and classed as homeless to being this real radical youth who was just out on her personal mission to put the world straight about homelessness."(Claire Grey, give me a camera and i'll show you how i feel. pp. 143-152)
In the introduction to this book, Solomon writes we become who we are through contacting a welter of representations conveyed in images as well as our positions determined by our gender, race, class and sexual orientation, thus put an emphasis on creating our--in this case, women's-- own images to redefine themselves. To achieve this goal, she stresses photographing innermost feelings through an engagement of psychic reality that turns to wider political context. Within this context, her criticism about family photo album is insinuated in that we often deliberately leave out painful or shameful moment and preserve idealistic moments only. According to her, this practice only re-inscribes traditional values and misconception. (pp.9-14).
By boldly yet engagingly revealing her own secrets through her camera work, Spence maintains using cameras thinkingly is importance in constructing our own meanings of the world by scrutinizing the complexity of our own existence. In a sense, she sees her art as reflexivity: "I see my artworks as a kind of 'politicized exhibitionism' about particular psychic and social issues which have enraged me. In this respect I have used myself as a kind of case study" (pp.94-95). By delineating that some secrets are conflated with social taboo, Spencer places her public work in a political arena, which encounter two types of criticism: most of all it comes from the notion that it is rather narcissism rather than politically investigation. Besides, academics, which are so soaked in objectivism with suppressed subjectivity, do not acknowledge the endeavor made to such personalized language. (Jo Spence, woman in secret. pp. 85-96).
Grey describes an exemplary group work between a cultural studies team and young homeless in the mid 1980s in England. Her evaluation of the work is as follows: "[P]hotographs played a useful role in helping the young women and men to assert their sense of identity and place at an otherwise chaotic and sometimes disturbed time in their lives. Photographs presented positive images of an up-to-date self, a new person established in his or her own right at a distance from the recent past with its traumas of family upheaval and homelessness. The pictures located them in a new social context, amongst their friends and engaging in new interest" (p. 144). Here are some quotes from a comment made by a young homeless participant:
"I suppose it's a bit novelty to see yourself."
"I'd much rather not be interviewed on TV; not be asked, 'How do you feel about being homeless?' I'd rather someone gave me a camera and said, 'Show us how you feel.'"
"The aim of the exhibition was to challenge stereotypes of homeless people created through the media. I have the media, as it is now anyway. The experience of making the exhibition gave me a lot of confidence, especially now, seeing all the work I did for it. I appreciate doing that more than ever, and realize how it has helped me to get work now, as well as giving me experience then.For example, I'm doing a BBC video with a friend from the hostel. It's semidocumentary but a video diary as well.
I've gone from being a shy anti-social person who hated being in a hostel and classed as homeless to being this real radical youth who was just out on her personal mission to put the world straight about homelessness."(Claire Grey, give me a camera and i'll show you how i feel. pp. 143-152)
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
The Art Museum
Oberhardt, Suzanne. (2000). Frames within frames. The art museum as cultural artifact. (pp.1-38). NY: Peter Lang.
Oberhardt sees art museum as an artifact that resides in popular culture and takes Foucauldian discourse as its analytical framework. In this first chapter, in particular, she lays out her theorerical and methodological backgrounds through reviewing critical theories, Gramsci's theory of hegemony, Foucault's approach to cultural institution that produces subjectivities discursively and normalizes them, and critical pedagogy, etc.
While redefining popular culture, she criticizes Frankfurt theorians' eliticism that viewed mass culture as deception, which is aligned with Plato's disdain for art in general. Conversely, she argues, "Consumer-oriented text of mass culture are rich archives--they carry a range of discourses which permeate reading and viewing cole's livmmunities. These discourses are the resources used in constructing the everyday realities of all people's lives" (p.35). Her emphasis lays on consumers' their own meaning making, which may not be the same as intended by the museum curators or art creators. [I argue, however, this meaning making process itself is not free from power dynamics that intermingle with the system of art making and displaying.]
Oberhardt sees art museum as an artifact that resides in popular culture and takes Foucauldian discourse as its analytical framework. In this first chapter, in particular, she lays out her theorerical and methodological backgrounds through reviewing critical theories, Gramsci's theory of hegemony, Foucault's approach to cultural institution that produces subjectivities discursively and normalizes them, and critical pedagogy, etc.
While redefining popular culture, she criticizes Frankfurt theorians' eliticism that viewed mass culture as deception, which is aligned with Plato's disdain for art in general. Conversely, she argues, "Consumer-oriented text of mass culture are rich archives--they carry a range of discourses which permeate reading and viewing cole's livmmunities. These discourses are the resources used in constructing the everyday realities of all people's lives" (p.35). Her emphasis lays on consumers' their own meaning making, which may not be the same as intended by the museum curators or art creators. [I argue, however, this meaning making process itself is not free from power dynamics that intermingle with the system of art making and displaying.]
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