Saturday, April 21, 2012
Back Into the Swing
Thursday, December 10, 2009
That Didn't Last Long
Ah me, how sad. Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the classroom, along comes a nasty big financial issue and I have to leave the waves of student life to ... other students. Bugger.
Maybe next year.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Constructivist Pedagogy
In her paper Inclusivity and alignment: Principles of pedagogy, task and assessment design for effective cross-cultural online learning, (McLoughlin 2001), Catherine McLoughlin proposes that "assessment tasks need to be aligned with learning outcomes and teaching approaches".When watching the video (Constructive Alignment, http://www.daimi.au.dk/~brabrand/short-film/trivia.html ), I experienced a number of reactions. Irritation that there's still a need to consider such a practice optional; annoyance at the deadly tedious narration of Richard Raskin; disbelief that competancy-training might still be perceived as something beyond the pale of universities, and relief when the dreadful video ended.
Additionally, I reject the notion that there are only three types of teacher (A, B, C) and would argue for at least one more form (D), which builds upon the strengths of the previous three but which also mediates between the learning objectives of the subject material and the reality of a world in which such material is likely to be put into use.
Being a teacher today is not simply someone who stands up and yaks 200 students into a coma while collecting 17% super and the title of 'Aspro'. Being a teacher/academic (whatever job title one uses) means that we have the responsibility to not only make our efforts relevant, but to keep them effective both in the classroom and in the real world.
Anything less is an abdication of one's vocation and the culprit should go work in local government.
p.s. Argh!
Reference:
McLoughlin, C (2001). Inclusivity and alignment: Principles of pedagogy, task and assessment design for effective cross-cultural online learning. Distance Education, 22(1), 7-29
The Importance of Unrestricted Curiosity
I found John Medina's seminar on 'Brain Rules' quite stimulating. To some extent I suspect we've all been a little guilty of what he calls 'neuro-astrology' (I may have to steal that term), and that we permit change to fall into the too-hard basket more times than we should. But it's only when you listen to some of the empirically-proven data John discusses that the importance of these things start to hit home (Medina, Brain Rules, http://www.brainrules.net/).Listening to Mr Medina reminded me of Tony Buzan www.buzan.com.au for whom I have enormous respect. I've been a follower of Buzan's methods since the 1980s, and find that he and John Medina have a significant amount in common. I have been incorporating Buzan's methodologies into all my classes where possible (such as using mindmapping [radiant] structures as well as linear ones), and find that once I get past a student's learned reserve, they are happy to try new things with enthusiasm.
John speaks of the natural structure of our thinking abilities and goes on to illustrate how the way we work (in modern cubicles, sedentary and alone, often manacled to routine and boredom), and the way we learn/teach (routine followed by more routine and severely channeled), are almost guaranteed to debilitate our individual effectiveness.
Working in what John terms a "captive prison state" virtually ensures the way we think and use our capacity to learn is reduced and becomes less and less effective. It was also interesting to be shown how stress, or "learned helplessness" has a toxic potential to prevent us from even trying to find a different way.
And I guess that would be one of the two main points I garnered from John's talk:
1. we learn to forget there are different ways of doing things
2. curiosity is the greatest of natural teachers
These two things have reinforced my belief in the way I teach. Though I am required to provide my students with identical materials, information and instructional standards as any other class on any other campus, I am not forced to think the same way as any other teacher. If I can discover even one way of communicating information is a 'different' manner and if I can engage my students through the force of their own curiosity, then I am improving their chances of success. Not only that, but it keeps my teaching fascinating for me - every time I work with a student to overcome a learning issue, I am also learning from them.
However. An increased awareness of this potential also brings with it increased problems. If we know and believe that the way we currently teach/learn harks more to 19th-century isolationist Britain than to 21st-century globalised Australia (or anywhere, really), then HOW are we going to get our respective education systems to change? Do I need to leave academia and enter politics, get into the Senate and then pass an oodleplex of bills to ensure such change occurs?
Knowing that the current system is deeply flawed, and having some insight into potential change is one thing. Actually making that change take place is something entirely different.
How can we change the system from within?
Monday, November 23, 2009
Shakespeare Meets Cognitive Load Theory
Aristide and Lorenzo discuss cognitive learning
Aristide, A teacher, sighing.
In learnéd question am I taken with the measures of the mind. There seems too little space for musings brief as well as recall's lengthy histories. In close embrace such elements must joust, and find their mettled patinas dilute. Be it that the mind’s a finite store which cannot bone-cased walls extend? Is it but a cup scarce saved from overflow as drop by drop each thought brims full?
How does the white-beard sage full 'membrance of his greener follies keep? That one so aged can peer through Chronos’ veil and call on learning’s distant countenance? This query deep and murky lies, I cannot see beyond my eyes.
But sooth, Lorenzo arrives. Perchance he may bear a fresher crop from wisdom’s ancient grove. Greetings, Lorenzo. How goes the day?
Lorenzo, also a teacher
By heaven’s will, all is well, Aristide. I see by visaged shades you mourn the passing of the light. A good day?
Aristide
Fair, though trouble’s snatching fancies bind my brow with strangest thoughts. My mind unloosed seems cast upon a darkened sea of toothéd waves. My very breath is caught.
Lorenzo
Unmesh thy pounding brow, brave Aristide! There is a simple truth beyond the gloom of apprehension, pray, lighten your mind and share with me the burden of your detention.
Aristide, shaking her head
Wouldst thou might take this discomfort from my lacking wits and haul it, wrap’d in scholar’s silk and so enfeebled to Carlton pool wherein to sink it fathoms deep, for I am lost.
Lorenzo
But hist! Speak not such calamies! Perforce must I demand as jury that your penanced thoughts be set in greater light. Tell me what troubles you.
Aristide, thinking about learning techniques in her undergraduate class today.
Remember then t’ was by your own desire that on this subject will I speak, nor bind me not to silence when thy own thoughts cry folly in the echo of my words. (pauses, marshalling her thoughts)
How does the puling babe from out his mother’s learnéd womb decant the ways of men? And when are dimple-cheeked young maids full cognisant of older miens, that change and flow in keeping with the time? There is no rule, nor can be by accord, for all must come to learning by and by.
And by the rising of each searing sun will knowingness be scorched within, until the very thoughts of action and of chance be rendered into deepest charring ruts. There seems no rule to this but that of common visitation.
Yet should knowledge fruit full flavour only in the presence of its own, how doth the seed remember itself a tree? Upon what branch does memory take up the rein, or is each leaflet grown anew each day until the wearied sap of life descends into the earth? How does the morning’s leaf recall the evening’s bud?
Are memoried phantoms built within a place of chance, or chance a place where phantoms rest in thought? What unseen practice wraps the crumbs of whole experience as one? I cannot beckon every modest fact, yet hold an entire vision in a thought. How does this resolve?
In composition’s art do we recall, associated scenes bound by learning’s cabled vines to other views of worth.
In place of prior claim shall I givest this a name and call such fellowship schema, for by schemes are all great stories told.
Am I amiss, Lorenzo, or does reason balance such an argument?
Lorenzo
Yup.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Mark Pesce’s ‘accidental revolution’
Listen to Mr Pesce (‘Technological and Generational Factors’) for a little while and his natural charm and evident enthusiasm lulls you into agreement by soft-sell. Oddly, since I am already a huge advocate of moving our educative systems into the future, you’d think that listening to Mark would have me smiling and nodding in happy concert with his innovative vision.He had me ticking all the “yes, must do this” boxes with his identification of the ‘new’ normal, and the fact that people (both children and adults) are either living with or adapting to constant and exponential change. His enunciation of “co-presence” is clear; his Theory of Hyperconnectivity, and even the notion that those of us conceived before the Web are mutants and dinosaurs, is comprehensible. All this and more was a soothing canticle to the already converted.
Even when Mark started his damning dissection of the contemporary classroom, I was still hooked. His statement that students were forced to ‘unplug’ when they come to class resonated strongly as only yesterday I had to ask a student to choose whether to be in my class or to answer his constantly ringing mobile.
I think it was when Mark talked about the “hidden curriculum [which] is implicitly denying the new reality” that the first discordant note sounded, not that I actually disagreed with his statement, but because that comment struck me as provocation for its own sake rather than to instigate a change in the mindset of educational policy-makers. It was around this point I remembered Mr Pesce is a ‘consultant’ and it is in his professional interest to be as convincing as possible in order to maintain his potential market.
This being so, I listened to the remainder of the discussion with a little more objectivity and, while a great deal of what Mark was saying scored a bullseye, I was also aware of a growing sense of his reckless disregard for today’s reality. In his fascination with everything of tomorrow, his firm belief that today’s education system will go the way of the Dodo if it doesn’t change revealed a depth of naiveté that even I found jarring.
His argument that we are all change-agents is difficult to contest, and I am already one of those people who agree with the cliché that ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’. BUT there are ways and there are ways, and Mark’s headlong rush into the reality of the new was missing one very important feature: a transition.
I may be maligning Mr Pesce unfairly as I am not familiar with the body of his work, but if the rest of his material comes from the same stock as this talk, then he appears to be abdicating the responsibility of managing change while demanding its occurrence. In leaving the sticky bits to other people, Mark Pesce is giving us only fragmented wisdom. I can see why he condemns the education system, and agree that it’s not in a good way. I can also see the future he argues for, and I can’t disagree with that either. But what I need from him now is a serious examination of the concrete steps we have to take in order to accomplish the change from today into tomorrow.
How are we going to make such a change? Incrementally, by educational sector? By institution? State? Do we begin in the home where all social movement must be embraced in order to succeed? What about State and Federal politics and politicians? This change is going to cost, so who will pay? Voting for such a major evolution in education is akin to asking State politicians to vote themselves out of a job. I never thought I’d be demanding answers to such proletarian questions, but I am. Mark Pesce is playing Devil’s Advocate and that’s just not good enough in this kind of situation. I really like what he says, but find myself annoyed at the things he’s left out.
In the movies, such change would only need a neat fade-in on a rising sun, but as we are dealing with a monstrous systemic machine, a deus ex machina won’t cut it.
Yesterday's Tools for Tomorrow's Work?
I was in class yesterday and we were discussing the change in mass-media since the beginning of the 20th-century and how this change related to social evolution in general. It was clear that, while the group had no prior knowledge of the differences between Mode 1 and Mode 2 societies, the students had an instinctive awareness that there was a real and important difference. Not only that, but (after something of a history lesson), they were convinced that the transitional period between the two forms of social structure lay between 1918 and 1945. Significant dates indeed.- the advent of modern technology as evidenced (for example) in the development of the atomic bomb
- the complete social upheaval caused by women entering the industrialised workforce and thus emerging as a new economic force
- societies can never go back[wards]
Greg Whitby's discussion of 'pedagogical DNA' (Whitby, 21st century pedagogy) offers a concise but telling analysis of the exact difference between Mode 1 and 2 societies. M1 (yesterday) is hierarchical, rigid, and informed by grand narratives. M2 (tomorrow) is fluid, transitional, more a matrix than a solid form and consists of multiple levels all working independently as well as interdependently. This difference is so clearly visible in the way we teach today.
The second video (great soundtracks, BTW), was a short film from Tom Woodward and one which raised my eyebrows again as it was uncannily close to the ideas zooming around my head while watching the Whitby segment. Woodward examines (in brief) what he calls 'education translation' and with visual clues points out that we are still teaching the way our grandparents were taught, yet we are teaching students who may be working in jobs that have not yet been invented. How absurd is that? Though no recommendations were presented, the film was clearly admonishing the current educational and pedagogical systems.
The final piece of video (which has been doing the rounds for some time) was a fascinating ethnographic case study of a Kansas State University class (subject unknown). These young people had gone to a lot of personal effort in order to self-survey and construct a 5-min commentary on the divergence between academic 'reality' and real-world truisms. One example that resonated in particular was a girl who said that while she would read 8 books that year, she would also read several thousand web pages and a huge number of Facebook pages. This shows that our students are not troubled by the prospect of absorbing masses of information, but rather it's the format of the information we expect them to absorb which is troublesome.
I grew up with books, book and more books. The idea of having to spend my time learning from social networks and mobile phone downloads would drive me nuts. I'm not sure I could even do it. Yet by sticking with archaic pedagogical forms, I am demanding my students do exactly what I would most dread: being forced to absorb and learn in a format with which I have a limited tolerance. This cannot be the best way to teach for tomorrow.
Melbourne Cup Day
Hello from Melbourne. I write this on the afternoon of the big race where I and a few diehards are holding the campus safe from marauding Visigoths while the rest of the City parties at Flemington.
Yesterday I found a fabulous site - you have to go see this: http://www.wordle.net/
I think we should do this for all the important things in our life. I just input my CV. Wow.
Yesterday I found a fabulous site - you have to go see this: http://www.wordle.net/
I think we should do this for all the important things in our life. I just input my CV. Wow.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Cool for Cats
Shock horror.
I have taken the enormous adult step of enrolling in another university course. You'd think this was no biggie, but actually, for a teacher who thought her study days long gone, it's a bit of a departure from the norm of simply being a "teacher". I'm the one who's supposed to do the teaching, dammit.
Now that I come to analyse my decision, I'm pondering the possibility this may be my version of a mid-life crisis. While some men go out and blow it all on a ridiculous Ferrari or a 22-year old with sparkly lip gloss, and some women go out and splurge on the latest Salvatore Ferragamo frock or three days in the Blue Mountains with Sven, classic masseur and local Nordic god, it looks like my descent into madness comes with an annotated bibliography and a small but perfectly formed reading list.
Clearly, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous hormonal tantrums is insufficient for my inner masochist: I must now parade my senile moments in full public view and secretly hope for absolution in the form of an HD. Less than that and I may be drummed from the regiment. Like all the best heroes in narrative, I will endure my failings and temporary insanity in the hope that at some point before the sun sinks in the West, I will have beaten the baddie, located the treasure and saved the world. With appropriate Harvard referencing, naturally.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Mars Rising: Past and Future Aspects of the Red Planet
In 1966 a number of life-influencing events occurred. Indira Gandhi was elected Prime Minister of India. John Lennon told everyone the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. England won the World Cup. The Battle of Long Tan was fought and Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California.
But the most important thing happened on March 30th when, on the evening of my seventh birthday, I travelled to Barsoom for the first time. While the dashing John Carter and beautiful Dejah Thoris made the Rice-Burroughs narrative all the more exciting, it was the sensation of the cold red dust of Mars against my fingertips which had me reading my birthday present under the covers all night with a torch.
I had never before read a story that took me to another place like this story did. Perhaps that evening of my seventh birthday – in my eyes, surely the beginning of adulthood – was the first time I realised both the desire and ability to suspend my disbelief, for until that time everything in the world was relatively concrete and rational.
As the Barsoomian narrative played out for me, Mars became more than an unfamiliar place on the frontier of the solar system. At the ancient age of seven it suddenly represented the entire mystique of the unknown, those dark spaces where humans had never been, where the strangeness of the incredibly different met and engaged with the possibilities of the real. Though an Aries all my life, I was truly born under the aspect of Mars that night.
In this compulsion, I am not, nor have I ever been, alone. While Mars represents many things to me as a reader, a writer and as an inhabitant of the 21st century, recorded history shows it has held a positively transcendent fascination for many of this planet’s most enlightened and regarded figures. Mars is extraordinarily large in terms both physical and metaphoric. It is not simply a red dot in the night skies, or a chunk of cold rock orbiting the periphery of our scientific and cultural awareness. It stands proud as the reality and representation of historic and future importance in the span of our race. It holds and has held, enormous symbolic status which has led us through ancient wars and modern paranoia, to scientific exhilaration, and even, to future hope. Mars is all these things and more as it sails, just out of sight, waiting for us to catch up.
And the human race has been attempting to catch this heavenly body for a long time. While the first recorded descriptions of Mars as a bringer-of-conflict and the God of War rest in the late astral-theological system of Babylonian astrologers where Mars is known as Nergal, a thing of fiery destruction, the red planet is equally Mangala to the Hindi, Ares to the Greeks and Tiu in Old English. In fact to form a clear idea of just how many names there might be for this planet, and of the Earth-cultures from which each name stems, one has only to read the final book of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, where he links a dozen different names into a ritualistic anthem of praise[i], a fitting acknowledgment by his Martian colonists to the nations who gave them birth and who paid such early tribute to our solar neighbour.
But it was the Romans who put Mars front and centre on the celestial map. The Roman empire, its vast span predicated on the marching speed of the average foot soldier[ii], demanded nothing less than absolute obedience to the laws of the regime. A mortal emperor might not necessarily compel such dedication and so the Caesars assumed a godhead which would. According to legend, the God Mars sired the twins Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome and the ancient citizens of the city believed they were the children of Mars in many ways, military and martial law evolving into a Roman standard. Much of the training for the armies of Rome took place on Campus Martius, “the field of Mars”, and the month of March, the first month of the lunar year, saw the commencement of many military campaigns. A number of cultures maintain this tradition even today and initiate significant economic and political campaigns in March and April.
At its largest in the third century AD[iii], the Roman empire held political sway over the lands bounded in the far north by the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of England, to the sands of southern Egypt and the Sudan in the south. From the west, Roman authority held what would become Morocco all the way across the Mediterranean to the arid hills of Armenia and Mesopotamia. And these lands were not held by the imperial might of the Caesars for their lifetime, or even for several lifetimes but for almost a millennium, until the ousting of the last emperor, Romulus Augustus in AD476.[iv]
Given that the Roman empire was so influential for so long in those geo-political areas whose later industrialised cultures founded the science fiction genre, it cannot be denied that fundamental underlying connections of respect and wonder for the red planet should remain to this day. This astonishment of Mars has been bred into our bones. We could no more dismiss its resilient magnetism than we could breathe vacuum. The fact of its constant presence, of this red sentry at the gates of our space, has always acted upon human thought and evidence of this is all around us. This paper explores the omnipresent influence of Mars upon the Western weltanschuaang as the cultural and political inculcations of the West have ebbed and flowed. Martian inspiration has moved our imaginations and our armies in equal parts just as it has been incorporated into the ideology of freedom as well as the power of war to secure that freedom. Its presence has coloured our fears and our dreams; in equal parts it has become the archetypal icon of conflict, the seducer of science and the nebulous grail of hope. Through all of our history as a sentient species, the red planet has kept pace with us.
But the Roman Empire ended as did the shorter-lived dynasties which followed the rule of the ancient Caesars through to more recent times when Tsars and Kaisers still reigned over Europe. From a Postcolonial perspective, it is always fascinating to observe that while our various cultures have for some time decried the prospect of political empire as being inhuman and its mechanisms inhumane, we still support and relish economic empires. Mr Bill Gates, the “Czar of Microsoft”, has spent 30 years building an industrial and fiscal empire[v] at a time when “greed was good”[vi]. And like all empires, there is a cycle of purpose which suggests Mr Gates will most likely spend the next 30 years trying to give it away.
At the time of Mr Gates’ paternal grandfather’s birth in Washington in March 1891, Camille Flammarion had just published his work on Mars, La planète Mars[vii], and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was completing his seminal discussion of space travel by multistage rocket in Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices[viii]. There were still empires of all description: political, economic, cultural, social, emotional and even evidence of the early scientific form which would pave the way for NASA and beyond. Percival Lowell (also born in March) was about to set out his vision of the Martian surface in his book entitled simply Mars[ix] in 1895, based in part on the 1877 publication of Giovanni Schiaparelli – another March born – offering the world its first map of the Martian surface: a tantalising glimpse of what the Italian astronomer liked to describe as his ‘canali’[x].
Shortly after this, in 1897, one Herbert George Wells was writing the preface to his new novel The War of the Worlds. The story famously narrates the greatest invasion of England since the Norman-inspired Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned by the victorious French[xi] as a document of empire following the Battle of Hastings in 1066. There were many reasons why Wells wrote this story at this time and in the way he did. The British were at the point of establishing a colony in Nigeria and in so doing, gave rein to yet another example of accompanying violence and bloodshed. Wells, a Socialist, a scientist and Fabian reformist, was an adherent of the ideology of ‘creeping change’. As an early member of the Fabian Society which advocated gradual rather than revolutionary change, Wells used his writing skills to harass the British government’s imperial policy by describing the horrific notion of inverted imperialism where for once the English themselves were to suffer the viciousness of an invader’s antagonism. It is generally believed that Wells’ narrative was based in part on the dreadful experiences of the Tasmanian aboriginals decimated by the English in the colonisation of Tasmania in the early 19th century. In the novel’s preface, Wells quite specifically says:
We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction out own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and dodo, but also upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. (H.G.Wells, Preface to War of the Worlds, 1898).
This typical Wellsian reaction is paralleled in the opening lines of the novel, where he writes:
It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
But why Mars? Given the general scientific excitement surrounding the planet at this time, as well as its historical and mythological reputation, it is unsurprising that the red harbinger of war and violence would appear the perfect villain of the piece. Additionally, the previous year saw the publication of Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten (trans. Two Planets, 1971[xii]), in which narrative the Martians have not only landed, but have built strongholds at either pole in preparation for a project of global imperialism.
(work in progress)
References:
But the most important thing happened on March 30th when, on the evening of my seventh birthday, I travelled to Barsoom for the first time. While the dashing John Carter and beautiful Dejah Thoris made the Rice-Burroughs narrative all the more exciting, it was the sensation of the cold red dust of Mars against my fingertips which had me reading my birthday present under the covers all night with a torch.
I had never before read a story that took me to another place like this story did. Perhaps that evening of my seventh birthday – in my eyes, surely the beginning of adulthood – was the first time I realised both the desire and ability to suspend my disbelief, for until that time everything in the world was relatively concrete and rational.
As the Barsoomian narrative played out for me, Mars became more than an unfamiliar place on the frontier of the solar system. At the ancient age of seven it suddenly represented the entire mystique of the unknown, those dark spaces where humans had never been, where the strangeness of the incredibly different met and engaged with the possibilities of the real. Though an Aries all my life, I was truly born under the aspect of Mars that night.
In this compulsion, I am not, nor have I ever been, alone. While Mars represents many things to me as a reader, a writer and as an inhabitant of the 21st century, recorded history shows it has held a positively transcendent fascination for many of this planet’s most enlightened and regarded figures. Mars is extraordinarily large in terms both physical and metaphoric. It is not simply a red dot in the night skies, or a chunk of cold rock orbiting the periphery of our scientific and cultural awareness. It stands proud as the reality and representation of historic and future importance in the span of our race. It holds and has held, enormous symbolic status which has led us through ancient wars and modern paranoia, to scientific exhilaration, and even, to future hope. Mars is all these things and more as it sails, just out of sight, waiting for us to catch up.
And the human race has been attempting to catch this heavenly body for a long time. While the first recorded descriptions of Mars as a bringer-of-conflict and the God of War rest in the late astral-theological system of Babylonian astrologers where Mars is known as Nergal, a thing of fiery destruction, the red planet is equally Mangala to the Hindi, Ares to the Greeks and Tiu in Old English. In fact to form a clear idea of just how many names there might be for this planet, and of the Earth-cultures from which each name stems, one has only to read the final book of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, where he links a dozen different names into a ritualistic anthem of praise[i], a fitting acknowledgment by his Martian colonists to the nations who gave them birth and who paid such early tribute to our solar neighbour.
But it was the Romans who put Mars front and centre on the celestial map. The Roman empire, its vast span predicated on the marching speed of the average foot soldier[ii], demanded nothing less than absolute obedience to the laws of the regime. A mortal emperor might not necessarily compel such dedication and so the Caesars assumed a godhead which would. According to legend, the God Mars sired the twins Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome and the ancient citizens of the city believed they were the children of Mars in many ways, military and martial law evolving into a Roman standard. Much of the training for the armies of Rome took place on Campus Martius, “the field of Mars”, and the month of March, the first month of the lunar year, saw the commencement of many military campaigns. A number of cultures maintain this tradition even today and initiate significant economic and political campaigns in March and April.
At its largest in the third century AD[iii], the Roman empire held political sway over the lands bounded in the far north by the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of England, to the sands of southern Egypt and the Sudan in the south. From the west, Roman authority held what would become Morocco all the way across the Mediterranean to the arid hills of Armenia and Mesopotamia. And these lands were not held by the imperial might of the Caesars for their lifetime, or even for several lifetimes but for almost a millennium, until the ousting of the last emperor, Romulus Augustus in AD476.[iv]
Given that the Roman empire was so influential for so long in those geo-political areas whose later industrialised cultures founded the science fiction genre, it cannot be denied that fundamental underlying connections of respect and wonder for the red planet should remain to this day. This astonishment of Mars has been bred into our bones. We could no more dismiss its resilient magnetism than we could breathe vacuum. The fact of its constant presence, of this red sentry at the gates of our space, has always acted upon human thought and evidence of this is all around us. This paper explores the omnipresent influence of Mars upon the Western weltanschuaang as the cultural and political inculcations of the West have ebbed and flowed. Martian inspiration has moved our imaginations and our armies in equal parts just as it has been incorporated into the ideology of freedom as well as the power of war to secure that freedom. Its presence has coloured our fears and our dreams; in equal parts it has become the archetypal icon of conflict, the seducer of science and the nebulous grail of hope. Through all of our history as a sentient species, the red planet has kept pace with us.
But the Roman Empire ended as did the shorter-lived dynasties which followed the rule of the ancient Caesars through to more recent times when Tsars and Kaisers still reigned over Europe. From a Postcolonial perspective, it is always fascinating to observe that while our various cultures have for some time decried the prospect of political empire as being inhuman and its mechanisms inhumane, we still support and relish economic empires. Mr Bill Gates, the “Czar of Microsoft”, has spent 30 years building an industrial and fiscal empire[v] at a time when “greed was good”[vi]. And like all empires, there is a cycle of purpose which suggests Mr Gates will most likely spend the next 30 years trying to give it away.
At the time of Mr Gates’ paternal grandfather’s birth in Washington in March 1891, Camille Flammarion had just published his work on Mars, La planète Mars[vii], and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was completing his seminal discussion of space travel by multistage rocket in Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices[viii]. There were still empires of all description: political, economic, cultural, social, emotional and even evidence of the early scientific form which would pave the way for NASA and beyond. Percival Lowell (also born in March) was about to set out his vision of the Martian surface in his book entitled simply Mars[ix] in 1895, based in part on the 1877 publication of Giovanni Schiaparelli – another March born – offering the world its first map of the Martian surface: a tantalising glimpse of what the Italian astronomer liked to describe as his ‘canali’[x].
Shortly after this, in 1897, one Herbert George Wells was writing the preface to his new novel The War of the Worlds. The story famously narrates the greatest invasion of England since the Norman-inspired Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned by the victorious French[xi] as a document of empire following the Battle of Hastings in 1066. There were many reasons why Wells wrote this story at this time and in the way he did. The British were at the point of establishing a colony in Nigeria and in so doing, gave rein to yet another example of accompanying violence and bloodshed. Wells, a Socialist, a scientist and Fabian reformist, was an adherent of the ideology of ‘creeping change’. As an early member of the Fabian Society which advocated gradual rather than revolutionary change, Wells used his writing skills to harass the British government’s imperial policy by describing the horrific notion of inverted imperialism where for once the English themselves were to suffer the viciousness of an invader’s antagonism. It is generally believed that Wells’ narrative was based in part on the dreadful experiences of the Tasmanian aboriginals decimated by the English in the colonisation of Tasmania in the early 19th century. In the novel’s preface, Wells quite specifically says:
We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction out own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and dodo, but also upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. (H.G.Wells, Preface to War of the Worlds, 1898).
This typical Wellsian reaction is paralleled in the opening lines of the novel, where he writes:
It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
But why Mars? Given the general scientific excitement surrounding the planet at this time, as well as its historical and mythological reputation, it is unsurprising that the red harbinger of war and violence would appear the perfect villain of the piece. Additionally, the previous year saw the publication of Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten (trans. Two Planets, 1971[xii]), in which narrative the Martians have not only landed, but have built strongholds at either pole in preparation for a project of global imperialism.
(work in progress)
References:
Mars image: http://www.scitech.ac.uk/Resources/Image/Mars.jpg
[i] (insert pg no.)
[ii] as stated by Vegetius, during the summer months the soldiers were to be marched twenty Roman miles (18.4 miles/29.6 km), which had to be completed in five hours. http://www.roman-empire.net/army/training.html . Last viewed 30/11/07.
[iii] Map of the Roman Empire at its largest extent may be viewed online at: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/maps/basicmap.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[iv] The earliest time Rome could be said to possess an empire was approximately 260BC. Romulus Augustus was deposed in 476AD, an approximate span of 736 years: http://www.roman-empire.net/diverse/faq.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[v] “Microsoft Czar Bill Gates is Celebrated for Business and Charitable Achievements” http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-12/2005-12-19-voa47.cfm?CFID=155308021&CFTOKEN=65844448 . Last viewed 17/11/07.
[vi] The words of Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street (1987), and said to be based upon the activities of real-life corporate raider, Carl Icahn. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[vii] Flammarion, C., La planète Mars, et ses conditions d'habitabilité, 2 vols. Gauthier-Villars et Fils, Paris, , vol. 1, p. vii. (1892)
[viii] Tsiolkovskiy, K. E., "The Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices," in Works on Rocket Technology by K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, M. K. Tikhonravov et al., eds., NASA translation TT F-243 (Washington, 1964). See also, A. A. Blagonravov, ed., Collected works of K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, vol. 3, Reactive Flying Machines, Faraday Translations, NASA TT F-237 (Washington, 1965). The paper, published in Vestnik vozdukhoplavania (Herald of Aeronautics) in 1911, is described in a subtitle as "A Summary of the Works of 1903."
[ix] Lowell, P., Mars, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, USA (1895)
[x] A term used by Schiaparelli (March 14, 1835 – July 4, 1910) to describe features observed on the surface of the planet: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/canali.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[xi] Often attributed to William's wife Matilda, the Bayeux Tapestry was more probably commissioned by William's half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux for display in the Bayeux Cathedral.
[xii] Kurd Lasswitz Two Planets, trans. Hans H. Rudnick, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, USA, 1971.
[i] (insert pg no.)
[ii] as stated by Vegetius, during the summer months the soldiers were to be marched twenty Roman miles (18.4 miles/29.6 km), which had to be completed in five hours. http://www.roman-empire.net/army/training.html . Last viewed 30/11/07.
[iii] Map of the Roman Empire at its largest extent may be viewed online at: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/maps/basicmap.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[iv] The earliest time Rome could be said to possess an empire was approximately 260BC. Romulus Augustus was deposed in 476AD, an approximate span of 736 years: http://www.roman-empire.net/diverse/faq.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[v] “Microsoft Czar Bill Gates is Celebrated for Business and Charitable Achievements” http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-12/2005-12-19-voa47.cfm?CFID=155308021&CFTOKEN=65844448 . Last viewed 17/11/07.
[vi] The words of Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street (1987), and said to be based upon the activities of real-life corporate raider, Carl Icahn. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[vii] Flammarion, C., La planète Mars, et ses conditions d'habitabilité, 2 vols. Gauthier-Villars et Fils, Paris, , vol. 1, p. vii. (1892)
[viii] Tsiolkovskiy, K. E., "The Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices," in Works on Rocket Technology by K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, M. K. Tikhonravov et al., eds., NASA translation TT F-243 (Washington, 1964). See also, A. A. Blagonravov, ed., Collected works of K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, vol. 3, Reactive Flying Machines, Faraday Translations, NASA TT F-237 (Washington, 1965). The paper, published in Vestnik vozdukhoplavania (Herald of Aeronautics) in 1911, is described in a subtitle as "A Summary of the Works of 1903."
[ix] Lowell, P., Mars, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, USA (1895)
[x] A term used by Schiaparelli (March 14, 1835 – July 4, 1910) to describe features observed on the surface of the planet: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/canali.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[xi] Often attributed to William's wife Matilda, the Bayeux Tapestry was more probably commissioned by William's half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux for display in the Bayeux Cathedral.
[xii] Kurd Lasswitz Two Planets, trans. Hans H. Rudnick, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, USA, 1971.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Empire and the Future
We are all products of the historical imperial project, though not necessarily artefacts of a deterministic history. Since almost every extant society today can look back at moments in time when they were subject to empire in one form or another, it would be foolish to assume our imaginations have not been conditioned, in some manner, by this experience. We are the products of our societies; our deepest and most private values have been informed by an historical presence or absence of political and economic power. We are not required to be proud of our societies or even like them very much, but it is essential we become aware of who we are and why we are this way in order to ensure our future does not repeat the past mistakes of abusive power-manipulation.
But to be consciously aware of and continually objectify all social development even within our own small part of the global culture is an impossible task. We are too close to the picture and can see only details when what we really need to examine is the more general design and frame of the image. And to do this we require an inverse telescope: a tool with the ability to capture the quantum image and locate it within the greater representation, and with the additional ability to transpose images at will. There are many such mechanisms in current use: everything from divergent political systems and educational philosophies to the world of the Arts and even the daily news reports. But these devices are restrained by the human ability (or inability) to embrace the contemporary and initiate change. The smallest elements of the image such as minor legislation or the regulation of a banking system may evolve comparatively quickly, but the more complex aspects of social development can take years, decades, to develop, as has been witnessed in the fall of the USSR and the decentralised emergence of the former Soviet states. And even these developments, major though they are in relation to our current perception of global society, are still only references of the contemporary or, at best, the near future. Clairvoyance is not an attribute our species enjoys, and therefore all we can extrapolate from the near past and today is what is probable tomorrow or next year. To explore and investigate what might be of importance to us in fifty, one hundred or even one thousand years hence, we have only our imaginations as guide, and often the best of these futuristic imaginations are given voice through the experiments of SF.
Many SF texts deal with the purely fabulous: worlds where dragons become domesticated[i], or where an expanding humanity encounters weird creatures[ii] only to discover the fantasy of the Other is reduced to the political realities once again. These are works that liberate our imaginations, which enable us to play with power and the results of that power and which permit us the extravagances of Homer and Carroll. These narratives are fiction in one of its unalloyed forms, exceeding even the magical realism of Voltaire and Márquez, as perfect utopia is created and the hero is always victorious. Then there is the other side of SF: narratives that look back into the past of our various cultures and define a differing Weltanschauung from which a single potential future is extrapolated and investigated. Though many SF texts bear a similarity to others, each of these literary investigations is sufficiently different to affect a slightly different result, and it is through the intellectual amalgam of these results that we may see something of the possible far future here and now in the contemporary. As well as Asimov’s vision of cities encased in steel, the Dune novels of Herbert, the spindizzy-powered cities of Blish; Macleod’s The Stone Canal, Orwell’s Animal Farm and Heinlein’s Red Planet are all examples of experiments in the purely imaginative.
Nor does SF's inescapable intertextuality diminish the function of a single text, for just as scientific development builds upon the discoveries and innovations of earlier generations, so too does SF incorporate and adapt worthy elements from preceding narratives. An example of this is Shelley's monstrous creation of 1818 where both her monster and her science inspired numerous related works about the dangers of the Promethean impulse. In more modern works we see a reiterated concern of both the creation of biological and non-biological life, such as Edmond Hamilton's The Metal Giants (1928) in which an artificial brain goes mad turns against its creator, and Ursula Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) which explores the existence of clones on a mining planet. In turn, Clarke's Imperial Earth and Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? invoke a more socially 'acceptable' approach to cloning or artificially conceived life as they engage with narratives of imperial exclusivity and the human biological imperative to maintain both bloodline and the notion of 'Home'. Banks extrapolates this concept still further and incorporates the design of artificial life into his multi-sentient Culture. The clear intertextual inheritance in SF is not only useful in the genre: it becomes essential if authors are to explore concepts to their fullest. And as Shelley's prototype continues to evolve into the ambiguous potential of artificial life, so too have authors of SF taken the basic precepts of an archaic political system and dissected its possible nuances for the generations ahead, taking the classically moulded shape of ancient empire and evolving it into the form of meta-empire.
It is almost impossible to ascertain when writers first began incorporating the idea and ideals of power and imperialism into SF. Was it De Bergerac's Histoire Comique des États et Empires de la Lune of 1657, or perhaps De Grainville's Le Dernier Homme of 1805? Certainly George T. Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871) established the notion of the 'future-war' at a time when Britain's own empire was about to destabilise and two of the world's greatest SF writers, Wells and Verne, were only beginning to explore the different uses and abuses of power in such dystopian works as The Time Machine: An Invention (1895) and Maître du Monde (1904). However, it must be remembered that these early authors lived in imperial times. Secure in their Western lifestyles, their respective countries holding massive colonial dominions, it would seem only natural for them to manifest aspects of imperialism in contemporary narratives. US writer Jack London's most formidable work, The Iron Heel (1907), speaks even further of political dystopia as his 27th century scholars unearth a 20th century fascist oligarchy and an account of the proletariat's epic revolutionary struggle against the State.
It is on these early beginnings that more modern writers such as Asimov and Heinlein lay the foundation of increasingly ambitious empires. In Asimov's case, the definitive version of the galactic empire is produced: an enormously complex organisation which, thanks to his innovative philosophy of 'Psychohistory', spans years in terms of time as well as distance. But whereas the Asimovean experiments entirely escape the realism of physics, Heinlein makes use of known science, positing an extrapolation of peripheral theoretical physics and allowing his characters to explore not only different dimensions, but also how their cultural and political mores might be adapted in those new and uncharted regions.[iii]
But to be consciously aware of and continually objectify all social development even within our own small part of the global culture is an impossible task. We are too close to the picture and can see only details when what we really need to examine is the more general design and frame of the image. And to do this we require an inverse telescope: a tool with the ability to capture the quantum image and locate it within the greater representation, and with the additional ability to transpose images at will. There are many such mechanisms in current use: everything from divergent political systems and educational philosophies to the world of the Arts and even the daily news reports. But these devices are restrained by the human ability (or inability) to embrace the contemporary and initiate change. The smallest elements of the image such as minor legislation or the regulation of a banking system may evolve comparatively quickly, but the more complex aspects of social development can take years, decades, to develop, as has been witnessed in the fall of the USSR and the decentralised emergence of the former Soviet states. And even these developments, major though they are in relation to our current perception of global society, are still only references of the contemporary or, at best, the near future. Clairvoyance is not an attribute our species enjoys, and therefore all we can extrapolate from the near past and today is what is probable tomorrow or next year. To explore and investigate what might be of importance to us in fifty, one hundred or even one thousand years hence, we have only our imaginations as guide, and often the best of these futuristic imaginations are given voice through the experiments of SF.
Many SF texts deal with the purely fabulous: worlds where dragons become domesticated[i], or where an expanding humanity encounters weird creatures[ii] only to discover the fantasy of the Other is reduced to the political realities once again. These are works that liberate our imaginations, which enable us to play with power and the results of that power and which permit us the extravagances of Homer and Carroll. These narratives are fiction in one of its unalloyed forms, exceeding even the magical realism of Voltaire and Márquez, as perfect utopia is created and the hero is always victorious. Then there is the other side of SF: narratives that look back into the past of our various cultures and define a differing Weltanschauung from which a single potential future is extrapolated and investigated. Though many SF texts bear a similarity to others, each of these literary investigations is sufficiently different to affect a slightly different result, and it is through the intellectual amalgam of these results that we may see something of the possible far future here and now in the contemporary. As well as Asimov’s vision of cities encased in steel, the Dune novels of Herbert, the spindizzy-powered cities of Blish; Macleod’s The Stone Canal, Orwell’s Animal Farm and Heinlein’s Red Planet are all examples of experiments in the purely imaginative.
Nor does SF's inescapable intertextuality diminish the function of a single text, for just as scientific development builds upon the discoveries and innovations of earlier generations, so too does SF incorporate and adapt worthy elements from preceding narratives. An example of this is Shelley's monstrous creation of 1818 where both her monster and her science inspired numerous related works about the dangers of the Promethean impulse. In more modern works we see a reiterated concern of both the creation of biological and non-biological life, such as Edmond Hamilton's The Metal Giants (1928) in which an artificial brain goes mad turns against its creator, and Ursula Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) which explores the existence of clones on a mining planet. In turn, Clarke's Imperial Earth and Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? invoke a more socially 'acceptable' approach to cloning or artificially conceived life as they engage with narratives of imperial exclusivity and the human biological imperative to maintain both bloodline and the notion of 'Home'. Banks extrapolates this concept still further and incorporates the design of artificial life into his multi-sentient Culture. The clear intertextual inheritance in SF is not only useful in the genre: it becomes essential if authors are to explore concepts to their fullest. And as Shelley's prototype continues to evolve into the ambiguous potential of artificial life, so too have authors of SF taken the basic precepts of an archaic political system and dissected its possible nuances for the generations ahead, taking the classically moulded shape of ancient empire and evolving it into the form of meta-empire.
It is almost impossible to ascertain when writers first began incorporating the idea and ideals of power and imperialism into SF. Was it De Bergerac's Histoire Comique des États et Empires de la Lune of 1657, or perhaps De Grainville's Le Dernier Homme of 1805? Certainly George T. Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871) established the notion of the 'future-war' at a time when Britain's own empire was about to destabilise and two of the world's greatest SF writers, Wells and Verne, were only beginning to explore the different uses and abuses of power in such dystopian works as The Time Machine: An Invention (1895) and Maître du Monde (1904). However, it must be remembered that these early authors lived in imperial times. Secure in their Western lifestyles, their respective countries holding massive colonial dominions, it would seem only natural for them to manifest aspects of imperialism in contemporary narratives. US writer Jack London's most formidable work, The Iron Heel (1907), speaks even further of political dystopia as his 27th century scholars unearth a 20th century fascist oligarchy and an account of the proletariat's epic revolutionary struggle against the State.
It is on these early beginnings that more modern writers such as Asimov and Heinlein lay the foundation of increasingly ambitious empires. In Asimov's case, the definitive version of the galactic empire is produced: an enormously complex organisation which, thanks to his innovative philosophy of 'Psychohistory', spans years in terms of time as well as distance. But whereas the Asimovean experiments entirely escape the realism of physics, Heinlein makes use of known science, positing an extrapolation of peripheral theoretical physics and allowing his characters to explore not only different dimensions, but also how their cultural and political mores might be adapted in those new and uncharted regions.[iii]
References:
image of Lunar footprint from www.nasa.gov/
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Names
What’s in a name? My name. Your name. Nickname. Namesake. A rose by any other name; Nom de guerre; Nom de plume (as in ‘the nom de plume of my aunt is Dansla Jardin’). Forenames; Surnames; Stage-names; Pseudonyms; The Man with No Name[1]. Names don’t simply say who we are, they tell us a great deal about the cultures who use them and how that culture has been influenced by external factors. And just as we’re supposed to grow in resemblance to our dogs, It’s always been a bit of a worry to me that we might grow to become more like our names - a genuine issue when you consider we don’t usually pick them for ourselves and even more so if you happen to be called 'Hitler'. Names are our parent’s and parental-culture’s way of keeping tabs on us long after we have moved on and away.
In 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale) was published. This posthumous epic gave us such items as the linguistic sign, the signifier, the signified, and the referent[2]. A name is a linguistic sign of a sort: it indicates the sound and meaning of the word which has come to be accepted as the personal – indeed, intimate – identifier of you or me. “Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully. “Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: “my name means the shape I am—and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.”[3] This name-sign (or symbol) is of course an utterly artificial thing. It does not occur in the wild and you can’t buy one in a shop, although you can inherit them, and names are frequently handed down from parent to child even unto the seventh generation and beyond[4]. Names, though artificial, are also fairly organic creations and often morph according to the tenets of contemporary fashion. The etymology and history of proper names is quite fascinating. One needs only explore the depths of ‘Kylie’ (which, depending upon your information source might suggest either a type of boomerang or a small Scottish cow), to see that present-day names are not necessarily connected to their beginnings or in many cases, to any semblance of reason.
Take ‘America’, for instance. The name-symbol ‘america’ comes from the early medieval Italian form of “Henry” [5]. Amerigo Vespucci was the Italian explorer who christened the continent of America (from Americus, the Latin form of his name). So why not call the place the ‘United States of Henry’? Well that’s because a country is too big to have only a personal name – a national moniker demands a certain element of grandeur and magnificence as well as a noble estrangement which all sounds rather posh. However any parent who calls their child ‘Equatorial Guinea’ is in for trouble during the school years. As for the Welsh toponym of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch[6], it’s always a difficult matter to assess names from a different language and one of the reasons we tend to stick to what we feel comfortable with.[7] And why do we insist on calling our children by any specific name? Why not allow the child to choose their own name when they are old enough to understand the point of it all? We could opt for a childhood name and then an adult name just as the Pope does on his ascension. Besides which, I always wanted to be called David. I think it’s a gorgeous name. The velvet vowel-sounds and the soft thud of the final ‘d’ make it quite luscious to my ears. Unfortunately the West is not yet able to separate the sound from the signifier and Johnny Cash has long advised against a ‘boy named Sue’. I don’t think a girl called David would go down terribly well in Melbourne[8] and the notion of a feminised suffix is cringe-making.
But names are also designed to intimidate, hence the virtual title of “Victoria Regina Saxe-Coburg”, or the young Danish prince’s Christian Valdemar Henri John, or even Dickens’ “Volumnia Dedlock”. And there are some glorious spoof-making websites where you can design your own name: http://www.masquerademaskarts.com/memes/peculiartitle.php .
American suffragette Lucy Stone refused to take her husband’s name upon their marriage and, in 1921, founded the Lucy Stone League[9]. The league made a huge issue of this practice as part of the effort for women’s rights. The League’s motto is “My name is the symbol for my identity and must not be lost.” So what’s a name all about these days? Does it really matter what we call ourselves or what we’re called by (sometimes) witless parents? In our postmodern social order where everything is transient and superficial shouldn’t we rethink the meaning and power of names? We change everything else about ourselves – career, location, marital status, so why not then our names? What is this sacred cow that we drag around, that we hold close and shelter from the storms of cultural fashion even if we hate the bloody thing? Our name is a thing of great power and influence and yet we appear too terrified to consider any alteration unless we’re compelled by some antiquated ritual or perhaps fall under the sinister cloak of a witness protection program.
Perhaps it’s that we – within our various societies – are simply too lazy to consider changing the names we were given at birth or sometime thereafter. Perhaps we consider it an insult to our parents or an affectation which brands us as self-obsessed. Given however that self-obsession appears to be de rigour until one reaches middle-age, then why not? The only social bloc for whom a constant changing-of-the-name would cause a genuine and major problem is the government. It is by our names and by those fiddly little tax file numbers that we are neatly catalogued and tracked. The Human brain cannot place indiscriminate values on an endless series of numbers, but it can immediately assess the likely personage of one Reginald Kenneth Dwight. Middle aged, British connections, English-speaking. Interestingly, the aspiring musician, Elton Hercules John, felt the same and promptly dumped it. Are we limited by the names we bear? Can we change the way we behave or the way society permits us to behave if we cease being conventional? Is the power of our name powerful enough to move us towards (or keep us from) the sort of person we want to be? If we had the chance, would we be a Bloody Mary or a Harvey Wallbanger[10], a Plain Jane or even an Uncle Sam?
References
[1] Clint Eastwood’s character in A Fistful of Dollars, Dir. Sergio Leone (1964).
[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Ferdinand de Saussure, (accessed: 2 January, 2007),
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9065908/Ferdinand-de-Saussure
[3] Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Macmillan, London (1872).
[4] According to the Danish rule of patrilineal primogeniture, the 2005 addition to the Royal family has no surname. Prince Christian will eventually become King Christian XI, the seventh monarch in the royal Glücksborg family.
[5] Which in itself comes from the Germanic name Heimerich which meant "home ruler", composed of the elements heim "home" and ric "power, ruler". This name was introduced into Britain by the Normans. It was borne by eight kings of England including the notorious Henry VIII, as well as six kings of France, seven kings of Germany and various Princes of Industry including automobile manufacturer Henry Ford.
[6] Literally "The church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio's of the red cave". The Welsh are a romantic if somewhat enthusiastic people.
[7] Although the current trend for more ‘made up’ names is proliferating with a new generation of Aqualeenas, Rymons and Makaidens.
[8] Named after Lord Melbourne, British PM of 1842. Had the town been named after the gentleman’s pre-aristocratic designate, I’d now be living in the City of Lamb.
[9] Current details of the Lucy Stone League may be seen at: http://www.lucystoneleague.org/
[10] Not the cocktails.
In 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale) was published. This posthumous epic gave us such items as the linguistic sign, the signifier, the signified, and the referent[2]. A name is a linguistic sign of a sort: it indicates the sound and meaning of the word which has come to be accepted as the personal – indeed, intimate – identifier of you or me. “Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully. “Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: “my name means the shape I am—and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.”[3] This name-sign (or symbol) is of course an utterly artificial thing. It does not occur in the wild and you can’t buy one in a shop, although you can inherit them, and names are frequently handed down from parent to child even unto the seventh generation and beyond[4]. Names, though artificial, are also fairly organic creations and often morph according to the tenets of contemporary fashion. The etymology and history of proper names is quite fascinating. One needs only explore the depths of ‘Kylie’ (which, depending upon your information source might suggest either a type of boomerang or a small Scottish cow), to see that present-day names are not necessarily connected to their beginnings or in many cases, to any semblance of reason.
Take ‘America’, for instance. The name-symbol ‘america’ comes from the early medieval Italian form of “Henry” [5]. Amerigo Vespucci was the Italian explorer who christened the continent of America (from Americus, the Latin form of his name). So why not call the place the ‘United States of Henry’? Well that’s because a country is too big to have only a personal name – a national moniker demands a certain element of grandeur and magnificence as well as a noble estrangement which all sounds rather posh. However any parent who calls their child ‘Equatorial Guinea’ is in for trouble during the school years. As for the Welsh toponym of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch[6], it’s always a difficult matter to assess names from a different language and one of the reasons we tend to stick to what we feel comfortable with.[7] And why do we insist on calling our children by any specific name? Why not allow the child to choose their own name when they are old enough to understand the point of it all? We could opt for a childhood name and then an adult name just as the Pope does on his ascension. Besides which, I always wanted to be called David. I think it’s a gorgeous name. The velvet vowel-sounds and the soft thud of the final ‘d’ make it quite luscious to my ears. Unfortunately the West is not yet able to separate the sound from the signifier and Johnny Cash has long advised against a ‘boy named Sue’. I don’t think a girl called David would go down terribly well in Melbourne[8] and the notion of a feminised suffix is cringe-making.
But names are also designed to intimidate, hence the virtual title of “Victoria Regina Saxe-Coburg”, or the young Danish prince’s Christian Valdemar Henri John, or even Dickens’ “Volumnia Dedlock”. And there are some glorious spoof-making websites where you can design your own name: http://www.masquerademaskarts.com/memes/peculiartitle.php .
American suffragette Lucy Stone refused to take her husband’s name upon their marriage and, in 1921, founded the Lucy Stone League[9]. The league made a huge issue of this practice as part of the effort for women’s rights. The League’s motto is “My name is the symbol for my identity and must not be lost.” So what’s a name all about these days? Does it really matter what we call ourselves or what we’re called by (sometimes) witless parents? In our postmodern social order where everything is transient and superficial shouldn’t we rethink the meaning and power of names? We change everything else about ourselves – career, location, marital status, so why not then our names? What is this sacred cow that we drag around, that we hold close and shelter from the storms of cultural fashion even if we hate the bloody thing? Our name is a thing of great power and influence and yet we appear too terrified to consider any alteration unless we’re compelled by some antiquated ritual or perhaps fall under the sinister cloak of a witness protection program.
Perhaps it’s that we – within our various societies – are simply too lazy to consider changing the names we were given at birth or sometime thereafter. Perhaps we consider it an insult to our parents or an affectation which brands us as self-obsessed. Given however that self-obsession appears to be de rigour until one reaches middle-age, then why not? The only social bloc for whom a constant changing-of-the-name would cause a genuine and major problem is the government. It is by our names and by those fiddly little tax file numbers that we are neatly catalogued and tracked. The Human brain cannot place indiscriminate values on an endless series of numbers, but it can immediately assess the likely personage of one Reginald Kenneth Dwight. Middle aged, British connections, English-speaking. Interestingly, the aspiring musician, Elton Hercules John, felt the same and promptly dumped it. Are we limited by the names we bear? Can we change the way we behave or the way society permits us to behave if we cease being conventional? Is the power of our name powerful enough to move us towards (or keep us from) the sort of person we want to be? If we had the chance, would we be a Bloody Mary or a Harvey Wallbanger[10], a Plain Jane or even an Uncle Sam?
References
[1] Clint Eastwood’s character in A Fistful of Dollars, Dir. Sergio Leone (1964).
[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Ferdinand de Saussure, (accessed: 2 January, 2007),
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9065908/Ferdinand-de-Saussure
[3] Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Macmillan, London (1872).
[4] According to the Danish rule of patrilineal primogeniture, the 2005 addition to the Royal family has no surname. Prince Christian will eventually become King Christian XI, the seventh monarch in the royal Glücksborg family.
[5] Which in itself comes from the Germanic name Heimerich which meant "home ruler", composed of the elements heim "home" and ric "power, ruler". This name was introduced into Britain by the Normans. It was borne by eight kings of England including the notorious Henry VIII, as well as six kings of France, seven kings of Germany and various Princes of Industry including automobile manufacturer Henry Ford.
[6] Literally "The church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio's of the red cave". The Welsh are a romantic if somewhat enthusiastic people.
[7] Although the current trend for more ‘made up’ names is proliferating with a new generation of Aqualeenas, Rymons and Makaidens.
[8] Named after Lord Melbourne, British PM of 1842. Had the town been named after the gentleman’s pre-aristocratic designate, I’d now be living in the City of Lamb.
[9] Current details of the Lucy Stone League may be seen at: http://www.lucystoneleague.org/
[10] Not the cocktails.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Beginnings
“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things, of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, of cabbages, and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings."[i] Oh, Mr. Carroll, how prescient you were.
"Go West, young man," said Horace Greeley[ii] and sent several waves of the hopelessly romantic hurtling into the murky unknown of California’s 1850 Gold Rush. But what sends off today’s romantics? More importantly, what are the contemporary gold rushes? Everything appears to be hurtling somewhere these days – whether it’s bits of digitised data along P2P receptors, or people, scurrying between life at home and life outside. Between the beginning of the day and the end of it, everything’s fast fast fast. And what for? Where are we all trying to go?
Recently I’ve been catching myself looking at the strangest things for no good reason at all that I can think of at the time. The smallest something – a sound or a flicker of awareness (akin perhaps to L. Ron Hubbard’s hypothesis of the human engram which “contains a running record of all these perceptions: sight, sound, tactile [sic], taste, smell, organic sensation, kinetic sense, joint position, thirst record, etc.”[iii]), sometimes an odour or a fleeting sense of recall has stopped me. And in trying to latch onto that momentary sensation of something important, I’ve been formulating all sorts of odd ideas. Since there is a vast shortage of odd ideas in this jaded existence of ipods and boutique drugs and postmodern food supplements, I felt it might be nice to share some of them.
But where to start? Long time listener, first time poster. Having decided to attempt a Boswelling [iv] (possibly a Custering) of everyday weird stuff, where does one begin? I believe inspiration may be sought in the vine although only Australian vines since an old Breton proverb warns me “God knows what will happen to women who drink wine, girls that speak old languages, and suns that set too early.”
Mmm. Sun's going down. Make mine a Shiraz, garçon.
References:
"Go West, young man," said Horace Greeley[ii] and sent several waves of the hopelessly romantic hurtling into the murky unknown of California’s 1850 Gold Rush. But what sends off today’s romantics? More importantly, what are the contemporary gold rushes? Everything appears to be hurtling somewhere these days – whether it’s bits of digitised data along P2P receptors, or people, scurrying between life at home and life outside. Between the beginning of the day and the end of it, everything’s fast fast fast. And what for? Where are we all trying to go?
Recently I’ve been catching myself looking at the strangest things for no good reason at all that I can think of at the time. The smallest something – a sound or a flicker of awareness (akin perhaps to L. Ron Hubbard’s hypothesis of the human engram which “contains a running record of all these perceptions: sight, sound, tactile [sic], taste, smell, organic sensation, kinetic sense, joint position, thirst record, etc.”[iii]), sometimes an odour or a fleeting sense of recall has stopped me. And in trying to latch onto that momentary sensation of something important, I’ve been formulating all sorts of odd ideas. Since there is a vast shortage of odd ideas in this jaded existence of ipods and boutique drugs and postmodern food supplements, I felt it might be nice to share some of them.
But where to start? Long time listener, first time poster. Having decided to attempt a Boswelling [iv] (possibly a Custering) of everyday weird stuff, where does one begin? I believe inspiration may be sought in the vine although only Australian vines since an old Breton proverb warns me “God knows what will happen to women who drink wine, girls that speak old languages, and suns that set too early.”
Mmm. Sun's going down. Make mine a Shiraz, garçon.
References:
original illustration by John Tenniel, 1871
[i] Lewis Carroll, "The Walrus and The Carpenter" from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872).
[ii] Horace Greeley is usually credited with this phrase but it belonged to John B. L. Soule and first appeared in 1851 in the Terre Haute Express. It is usually quoted only in part, the full phrase being: "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country."
[iii] An Experimental Investigation of Hubbard's Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics) by Jack Fox, Alvin E. Davis, and B Lebovit Psychological Newsletter, 1959, 10 131-134.
[iv] "[James Boswell] is, and he will remain, an astonishing person. His predilection for romantic disguises, his readiness to assume gravely the most unexpected characters, his rippling good nature, his extravagance and folly and weakness, his odd piety, his awful glooms, his alternations of revelry and solemnity..." C. E. Vulliamy, James Boswell, 1932 biography (CVJB, p. 1).
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