+++BeginRant+++ (there’s a meta tag for you)
Again I feel like this is really about authority (like how could you not—it’s all over the page), but this section of the book felt a little more personal to me. I say this because of a particular passage on page 143:
“Deciding what to believe is now our burden. It always was, but in the paper order world where publishing was so expensive that we needed people to be filters, it was easier to think our passivity was an inevitable part of learning; we thought knowledge just worked that way.”
This statement was written in conjunction with the discussion about Wikipedia and social knowing, which to me sounded like an endorsement of superiority for an accumulation of knowledge that shakes out of collaboration versus a single knowledge based on scholarship and hard work. In some cases I do think that this argument has merit: collaboration is generally useful to achieve any real sort of balance in both academic theory and real world applications. I won’t bore you with examples but I think we have all had an experience where different individual’s ideas are put together and something new emerges.
My problem with this idea is that I think there are times when collaboration does not add to or enhance a work, but marginalizes and reduces the effectiveness of the work. I am of course referring to creative writing. One thing editors (yes, those authoritative authority appointed people in authority) have said for years is that the work coming out of an MFA program feels like it was written by a committee with no real artistic vision. The work feels like a string of authors blending the words and meaning until everything is watered down and bland. Weinberger said “every phenomenon of meaning will emerge from the miscellaneous,” but I reject that (172). I think that is some cases, probably more that I care to think about, the meaning is unintentional and so it is invalid for true understanding. I for one can’t stand the thought of seeing my work as a leaf on a tree of work that will ultimately mean nothing more than a statistic. Poetry, art, and peace in this kind of miscellany feel more like that authority it is supposed to save us from than any real truth. When everything is equal, nothing is exceptional, and to me that is a problem. But I guess it’s all in how you define truth. Maybe I should Google that…
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Cool. I picked up on this quote as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if "artistic vision" fits into Weinberger's ideas very well. Weinberger appears to be very focused on the organization of knowledge...but I'm not sure if his ideas transfer flawlessly to the creation of knowledge. I appreciate how Weinberger is very specific about certain examples (Wikipedia, stores, libraries, etc), but I feel that his examples aren't very concerned with the creation of "limericks" and "poetry" (page 172), just that they have a place when they are created.
P.S. Laura S. is Richard Samuelson.
ReplyDeleteWow. I hadn't even considered this sort of writing. Thanks for showing me a blind spot. I think that if I understand what Richard is saying correctly though, I agree. While fiction and poetry certainly do also create knowledge, I don't know if this is the sort of knowledge that Weinberger is talking about. Do you think that this same stifling effect transfers over to setting such as, for example, a wiki set up by the CIA to catalog reports in progress? (hint: read my post...)
ReplyDeleteInteresting thought here about creative writing being stifled by committess and collaboration. I can see how that can occur and have occasionally read things that do fit that appearance. In the classroom, you can also see that in group work, the peicing together of several people's voices and ideas and vocabularies. This is not always a bad thing though, if the goal was to construct something that takes into consideration several similar views and the students have developed higher thinking by discussing,cooperating, coming to a consensus.
ReplyDeleteI wonder about the passivity of knowledge, as you said, most of us took this position, waiting for knowledge to be chosen and they transmitted to us. I can see this in the high schools as students assume teachers to be the source of knowledge and passively wait to be told versus finding ways to hlep them construct their own knowledge, promote individual and original thought and discussion.
Perhaps opportunities like blogs, wikipedia posts, self publishing, huge amounts of access to any topic desireable, is creating better thinkers, better writers, promoting better learning, and developing a more curious, knowledge seeking nation. That can't be a bad thing.
When I worked at Southern Living, I was on the copy desk there. We used to call the articles we published, "Writing by Committee" because by the time they went to press they had been editing ad infinitum....
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