Implicit in some of the anti-declension narratives I read from people I enjoy, is an unwillingness to see a major trend of up or down in any terms, anytime. Maybe this is temperment, because I seem to have drawn different conclusions. I think studying Africa has shown me that sometimes suffering can increase, for long periods of time, maybe forever.
Ending only with cataclysm or redefinition as normal.
If we were to say, "decline from here, would look like this," would we be able to agree on here or this? One person can have answers, an aristocracy, a group of intellectuals, maybe a community, sometimes (horribly random but there you are) a race, a class, a gender, overall; rarely a nation; never a continent, nor the world.
My view of academics in the e-age is: wait and see. Teachers may learn what decline means. It is not hard to win bets as a pessimist.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Applied Science
A process of winnowing and sorting into bins. Sometimes the ease of argument is the giveaway.
Complex sorting mechanisms tailored to individuals: graduate school.
Complex sorting mechanisms tailored to individuals: graduate school.
Eschaton
There is an early modern European literature connected to Biblical scholars and ancient near east scholars. The consensus there is to accept Ernst Troelsch's modified "relative deprivation" hypothesis: in both ancient Jewish millenarians, and industrial-revolution-era proletarianizing millenarians, the community's "relative deprivation" spurred them into the hope fulled fantasies of salvation-on-this-earth that subsequently reentered Christian practice.
These were people who, relatively quickly, became relatively worse off than those around them.
Like all over the world, right now.
These were people who, relatively quickly, became relatively worse off than those around them.
Like all over the world, right now.
Summer Event
For any thinking adult who has children, keeping at bay the destructive, absurd, relentless fascination with commodities and acquisition is a very high priority.
Little children stand about, one hitting a pinata, but all the others focused on something . . . . off camera, something so compelling that like in The Village of the Damned the children's attention is over THERE . . . What is it?
"Summer is for children," the "Hello, I'm-your-doctor voice" intones. More and more children stare like the sun is exploding or a giant spaceship approaches. But it is in fact a car.
In the moment of realizing these connections, we are supposed to become the kids — "like a kid in a candy store" — and want the car ourselves. That is what the ad suggests it is up to.
But it is not. The watcher is really being asked to accept something new, a framework yet unnaturalized. It is too achingly wrong for small children to be lusting after new cars, too much of a gap with what we know.
The desire being evoked is really being invoked — by the hugeness of this gap: an emptiness at the core of the ad, that can only be filled by new desire.
* * * * * *
This is one of the new stretch of ads that has as its penalty for "working" a residual depression in the viewer. Thanks!
Little children stand about, one hitting a pinata, but all the others focused on something . . . . off camera, something so compelling that like in The Village of the Damned the children's attention is over THERE . . . What is it?
"Summer is for children," the "Hello, I'm-your-doctor voice" intones. More and more children stare like the sun is exploding or a giant spaceship approaches. But it is in fact a car.
In the moment of realizing these connections, we are supposed to become the kids — "like a kid in a candy store" — and want the car ourselves. That is what the ad suggests it is up to.
But it is not. The watcher is really being asked to accept something new, a framework yet unnaturalized. It is too achingly wrong for small children to be lusting after new cars, too much of a gap with what we know.
The desire being evoked is really being invoked — by the hugeness of this gap: an emptiness at the core of the ad, that can only be filled by new desire.
* * * * * *
This is one of the new stretch of ads that has as its penalty for "working" a residual depression in the viewer. Thanks!
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Getting There Via The Family
The Family is the big religious group that believes in free love, a spaceship with a giant golden pyramid in it, and lots of other things. They were in trouble before the FLDS in Texas, but they are still going strong.
It's like Frazetta-land as Heaven, except more tender, and minus the scythes.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
America/South Africa, 1908
We now have a better view of what was going on in the Reconstruction years while the British were busy holding meetings about how to administer the natives (1902-08).
From America, and especially Black America, came several streams.
There was the successful joint African Methodist Episcopal Church growth, spawning dozens of "Ethiopian style" (Bengt Sundkler, 1960) African Methodist (type) churches. There were the Gospel singers of 1892. There was Alexander Dowie in Chicago's Zion City, seeding healing churches at the millennium.
Engaging [God/Ancestor] directly bothered authority. Shouting out in tongues, possessed writhings, all-night-long "prayers," ran counter to job-related regularities. James Kiernans says that congregations were all about managing the tension between the collective and the destablizing individual communicant. This same contradiction and resolution played out on the national stage, between the NAD and the churches.
The heavy presence of black Americans: Jean Comaroff's (Body of Power) insight, repeated by Maxwell: these were communities with the same class predicament, being shoved aside by new modes of integrating production, losing their hold on the land, on both sides of the Atlantic — communicating and "converting" each other to a direct-access form of mobilizing.
John Higginson says that the IACs (Independent black Christian churches): "swept over both town and countryside in southern Africa once thousands of Africans were driven from the land by punitive forms of taxation and land enclosure."
In other words, after "conquest".
By 1900 the countryside was pretty much proletarianized. Sharecropping was already under pressure. From 1903 to 1908, the old regime on the land was restored to its pre-S.A. war mode, or extended in new ways. "By 1908 numerous African peasants [throughout southern Africa] found themselves squeezed beyond endurence." (Higginson, 58). In the same period parts of the South African countryside turned to pentacostalism suddenly, "whole native congregations" joining the Apostolic Faith Mission from 1908, "thousands" of new members appearing on the southern highveld (Maxwell, "Historicizing Christian Independency," JAH 40, 2 (1999), 249). There was Buchler, Le Roux (with "35" African preachers under him in 1909: Maxwell, 1999, 248), Mahon, and then a handful of American midwesterners, with experience gleaned from the interracial Azusa revival in Los Angeles, California, in 1906 — the Pentacostals, initiating the worldwide movement in South Africa (in Wakkerstroom and Doornfontein (Johannesburg) in (at first) a non-racial fraternity.
Eddies and currents continued to flow. Joseph Booth, a missionary for radical Adventist sects, was in Malawi from 1892 intermittantly. Pentacostals made rain, and founded "Pentacostal villages"; Watchtower people eradicated witchcraft and (Mwana Lesa) the chiefs' enemies, and whole villages converted to "Wa-Kitawala" (Watchtower) too. By 1908, Kamwana, Sindano, and other Watchtower representatives began articulating an ideology of liberation "in this world as well as the next" (Higginson "Liberating the Captives," in Journal of Soc. Hist., fall 1992, 60), and grew. And, some thirty or more "IACs" by 1910 (Martin West, 1972).
From America, and especially Black America, came several streams.
There was the successful joint African Methodist Episcopal Church growth, spawning dozens of "Ethiopian style" (Bengt Sundkler, 1960) African Methodist (type) churches. There were the Gospel singers of 1892. There was Alexander Dowie in Chicago's Zion City, seeding healing churches at the millennium.
Engaging [God/Ancestor] directly bothered authority. Shouting out in tongues, possessed writhings, all-night-long "prayers," ran counter to job-related regularities. James Kiernans says that congregations were all about managing the tension between the collective and the destablizing individual communicant. This same contradiction and resolution played out on the national stage, between the NAD and the churches.
The heavy presence of black Americans: Jean Comaroff's (Body of Power) insight, repeated by Maxwell: these were communities with the same class predicament, being shoved aside by new modes of integrating production, losing their hold on the land, on both sides of the Atlantic — communicating and "converting" each other to a direct-access form of mobilizing.
John Higginson says that the IACs (Independent black Christian churches): "swept over both town and countryside in southern Africa once thousands of Africans were driven from the land by punitive forms of taxation and land enclosure."
In other words, after "conquest".
By 1900 the countryside was pretty much proletarianized. Sharecropping was already under pressure. From 1903 to 1908, the old regime on the land was restored to its pre-S.A. war mode, or extended in new ways. "By 1908 numerous African peasants [throughout southern Africa] found themselves squeezed beyond endurence." (Higginson, 58). In the same period parts of the South African countryside turned to pentacostalism suddenly, "whole native congregations" joining the Apostolic Faith Mission from 1908, "thousands" of new members appearing on the southern highveld (Maxwell, "Historicizing Christian Independency," JAH 40, 2 (1999), 249). There was Buchler, Le Roux (with "35" African preachers under him in 1909: Maxwell, 1999, 248), Mahon, and then a handful of American midwesterners, with experience gleaned from the interracial Azusa revival in Los Angeles, California, in 1906 — the Pentacostals, initiating the worldwide movement in South Africa (in Wakkerstroom and Doornfontein (Johannesburg) in (at first) a non-racial fraternity.
Eddies and currents continued to flow. Joseph Booth, a missionary for radical Adventist sects, was in Malawi from 1892 intermittantly. Pentacostals made rain, and founded "Pentacostal villages"; Watchtower people eradicated witchcraft and (Mwana Lesa) the chiefs' enemies, and whole villages converted to "Wa-Kitawala" (Watchtower) too. By 1908, Kamwana, Sindano, and other Watchtower representatives began articulating an ideology of liberation "in this world as well as the next" (Higginson "Liberating the Captives," in Journal of Soc. Hist., fall 1992, 60), and grew. And, some thirty or more "IACs" by 1910 (Martin West, 1972).
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Wiki-Afripedia
The Wikidemocracy ensures that nothing one says about Wiki remains true for very long, but like N. Baker I like the idea of recalling periods of implication, two examples. I can't do links right now, sorry.
The first: I wanted to see whether the reigns of major Barolong chiefs existed in a reputable web environment. I found one Wikipedia entry for Barolong chiefs, which appeared to be a plausible version (there are several) of Barolong genealogy, except two chiefs' names were missing. The first was replaced with:
Fred Uh Want Mah Cookie
The second one was replaced with:
Bob Uh No Took Mah Cookie
I declined to rely on the entry after I had stopped laughing.
Secondly, "Chimurenga," a nice entry gives the leader of the Ndebele-oriented uprising comprising Shona as well as SeNdebele speakers, as named "Mlimo." This word means ancestor, and hovers about every major movement of the era on the subcontinent. The missionaries used it to mean "God."
At the time of the first Chimurenga, 1896-7, the New York Times announced in a headline:
KILLED THE MATABELE GOD
Burnham, the American Scout, May End the Uprising.
Pretoria, June 24 [1896]. — Burnham, the American scout, found in a cave in the Matoppo Hills the famous Matabele god Mlimo, the prompter and fosterer of the Matabele outbreak, and vainly tried to capture Mlimo alive, but, being unable to do so, killed him. It is believed that the death of their god will discourage the natives and lead to the suppression of the revolt.
Recent historians (I seem to remember) want to paint Mlimo as a conduit, a prophet, connecting people to a higher Power, to God, or to a local version of God, Mwali. The "high god cult" of Mwali, whether it is related to historical contacts between Muslims and Zambesi farmers, or Catholic missions with their martydoms and altars, or some pre-existing . . . because God is . . . because, say the believing historians, God is there.
So Mlimo (God/Ancestor) survives now not in the paper of record, but on Wikipedia as a "name," like "Fred" or "Bob." Which is it? Did he "think he was God," or was his name God? Or is this a misunderstanding . . .
Back to Wikipedia:
The same site gave the translation of "Ndebele" as "People of the Long Shields," which has no basis in fact: "Long Shields" is just descriptive of Nguni-style warriors in the field. "Khumalo," the ancestral name and the name of the chiefdom of Mzilikazi, was also said to "mean" "People of the Long Shields." How copacetic! All roads lead to Rome!
Ndebele comes from AmaDebele, which was a variant pronunciation of Ma-Tebele. Tebele is often paired with a junior version of itself, Tebeyane, say, in "twin court" pattern one discerns over much of the highveld and beyond in South Africa. There are chiefs of the past named Tebele and variants therein. Ma-Tebele "indicated" People of the Long Shields just as it did "Invaders from the other side of the Drakensberg." It means warriors are coming. Run.
The first: I wanted to see whether the reigns of major Barolong chiefs existed in a reputable web environment. I found one Wikipedia entry for Barolong chiefs, which appeared to be a plausible version (there are several) of Barolong genealogy, except two chiefs' names were missing. The first was replaced with:
Fred Uh Want Mah Cookie
The second one was replaced with:
Bob Uh No Took Mah Cookie
I declined to rely on the entry after I had stopped laughing.
Secondly, "Chimurenga," a nice entry gives the leader of the Ndebele-oriented uprising comprising Shona as well as SeNdebele speakers, as named "Mlimo." This word means ancestor, and hovers about every major movement of the era on the subcontinent. The missionaries used it to mean "God."
At the time of the first Chimurenga, 1896-7, the New York Times announced in a headline:
KILLED THE MATABELE GOD
Burnham, the American Scout, May End the Uprising.
Pretoria, June 24 [1896]. — Burnham, the American scout, found in a cave in the Matoppo Hills the famous Matabele god Mlimo, the prompter and fosterer of the Matabele outbreak, and vainly tried to capture Mlimo alive, but, being unable to do so, killed him. It is believed that the death of their god will discourage the natives and lead to the suppression of the revolt.
Recent historians (I seem to remember) want to paint Mlimo as a conduit, a prophet, connecting people to a higher Power, to God, or to a local version of God, Mwali. The "high god cult" of Mwali, whether it is related to historical contacts between Muslims and Zambesi farmers, or Catholic missions with their martydoms and altars, or some pre-existing . . . because God is . . . because, say the believing historians, God is there.
So Mlimo (God/Ancestor) survives now not in the paper of record, but on Wikipedia as a "name," like "Fred" or "Bob." Which is it? Did he "think he was God," or was his name God? Or is this a misunderstanding . . .
Back to Wikipedia:
The same site gave the translation of "Ndebele" as "People of the Long Shields," which has no basis in fact: "Long Shields" is just descriptive of Nguni-style warriors in the field. "Khumalo," the ancestral name and the name of the chiefdom of Mzilikazi, was also said to "mean" "People of the Long Shields." How copacetic! All roads lead to Rome!
Ndebele comes from AmaDebele, which was a variant pronunciation of Ma-Tebele. Tebele is often paired with a junior version of itself, Tebeyane, say, in "twin court" pattern one discerns over much of the highveld and beyond in South Africa. There are chiefs of the past named Tebele and variants therein. Ma-Tebele "indicated" People of the Long Shields just as it did "Invaders from the other side of the Drakensberg." It means warriors are coming. Run.
Cheaters
Today I have to write a letter for two students, both foreign, who have cheated by lifting passages from internet sources and deploying them, like strips of sod laid into a lawn, to make a faux-paper.
The difference between a faux paper and a real paper, between turfed and grown lawns, is, without the structural differentiation of printing-press text, going to be harder and harder to defend, fortify, define, maintain . . .
Are they less guilty or more guilty in the years to come? Is this a sensible question?
The difference between a faux paper and a real paper, between turfed and grown lawns, is, without the structural differentiation of printing-press text, going to be harder and harder to defend, fortify, define, maintain . . .
Are they less guilty or more guilty in the years to come? Is this a sensible question?
Monday, May 12, 2008
Identity Theft
The ads have strange voices coming out off peope's mouths, not their own voices. A substantial burgher, a man of color, speaks and the voice of a Valley Girl emerges: Yes, it is true! It is an epidemic: California girls are stealing working men's credit cards! Or the elderly white couple sitting around, and talking in a white southern trashy voice. Never, ever, a white businessman speaking in the voice of an uneducated black American urban thief.
Barthes. The message is: This is how your identity is stolen by these cards. The joke is: we viewers know that this is NOT the meaning of having our identity stolen. We don't talk with the voice of the corporately-imagined Other. We speak with our own, wounded voices. So we discount the message as parodic. Therefore we accept the lesser version, parodied before us: that the issue of identity theft is nonetheless somehow real in such terms.
Whereas in reality, Identity Theft does not exist. It cannot preexist the card. It cannot touch what makes us us. It is theft of money from a banking network.
Barthes. The message is: This is how your identity is stolen by these cards. The joke is: we viewers know that this is NOT the meaning of having our identity stolen. We don't talk with the voice of the corporately-imagined Other. We speak with our own, wounded voices. So we discount the message as parodic. Therefore we accept the lesser version, parodied before us: that the issue of identity theft is nonetheless somehow real in such terms.
Whereas in reality, Identity Theft does not exist. It cannot preexist the card. It cannot touch what makes us us. It is theft of money from a banking network.
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