Dialog/Curating
Curating
I will let this dialog to stand as it is for a while, but I intend to pull it apart to make two dialogs, one on "Curating one's life" and the other on "Leisure." But for a few weeks I will work on other things before returning to it with a fresher sensibility. Should anyone have comments on the current version, however, those would be very helpful in the rewriting.
V 1 — You know, R, I worry you are exaggerating the importance of easy access to cultural resources through digital media. Check out an airport newsstand. Amidst all the schlock, you can find a "good" book or two for about the price of a sandwich.
R 2 — That's right, V. That's part of our fast-food ethos — carry it on with your sandwich, speed-read it on the plane, and chuck it in the trash while dashing for your luggage. We want to establish a different sort of presence for primary cultural resources, something like Slow Food for the mind.
V 3 — Yeah. But we seem to have too much access and with social media every passing thought becomes public — in a chaos all utterances are mute. How are you going to fix that?
R 4 — Slowly. Very slowly. And since I'm old, you're going to fix it, you and your children, and their children. But we should begin to fix it now, and I think you've identified how we need start.
V 5 — I have? I simply restated a famous quip. Everyone is spewing everything out into the public, creating a chaos in which nothing has significance. How does that identify how we should begin?
R 6 — We need to stay steady in the surrounding chaos that presses in on us. Starting to thrash about, tweeting anxiously to followers, just adds to the nonsense. We cannot calm chaos by trying to act on it. Its churning complexity far exceeds anyone's ability to control it. The clatter of the take-way disrupts deliberation. A clash of contending conclusions reduces reasoning to a rat-a-tat-tat of bullet points. An ecology of thoughtlessness steadily spreads thickets of random memes.
V 7 — Don't stop there! We need a straw to grasp!
R 8 — Instead of trying to act on and through the chaos, we can and should disengage from it, we can and should create a place for the self expression and thoughtful discussion of possibilities. Questions, not conclusions. A growing understanding, not certainties. There, as we reason, we can cross out the bullet points, ignore the take-aways, and efface the emojis in order to act with alert judgment on what seems, all things considered, the better alternative. That course might expand into a stable sphere of meanings, as we, one by one, add our capacities for disciplined communication together, enlarging its scope and power, diminishing one by one the thrashers in the chaos.
V 9 — I see how the extrinsic incentives of public life drive the eager excesses, the urge to make a point, whatever it might be. But I have to say, I'm nevertheless a little ambivalent. We live in representative systems of governance and as citizens we have duties of active participation and we live in free enterprise systems and marketplace incentives work to correlate production and consumption efficiently and effectively. Or so I'm told. Don't we have to play along to get along?
R 10 — Perhaps. Up to a point. But as in all things, we must judge, what is enough. Each has to take conventional expectations into account and decide what to do. But don't confuse the realities in theory with how they actually operate. As best you can, take all the sectors of experience into account, for actuality does not conform to the limits of our specialties. The chaos is not simply political, simply economic, or social, or technological, or artistic, or cultural. And in proposing to disengage from the chaos, I don't mean to suggest that we can somehow physically escape from it. It is a question of how we direct our attention, how we use our intelligence. We can withhold attention from the chaos, judging it devoid of significance. Instead of it, we can recognize a universe of cultural resources, comprehensive yet selective, and work out their uses vis-à-vis our own first-person experience of our lives. Let's curate the resources with which we form ourselves and learn liberally.
V 11 — Doesn't that risk creating a kind of orthodoxy, one which will become sterile and uncreative?
R 12 — That could happen, but it will be unlikely if we keep it unbounded and open. A universe of cultural resources implies a selection so copious that any person or group can at most claim substantial understanding of only a small part of it. We place far too much importance on needing to share a few canonical sources. Thinking thrives as we bring differences into interaction.
V 13 — Hmm. OK, but a lot of what we encounter in the chaos comes to us seemingly grounded by authoritative study, tests of comprehension, retention, agreement, willingness to act, effectiveness demonstrated with careful control for confounding factors. But what we're saying, I guess, implies that I have to be sure that the grounds the studies control for are ones that coincide with the grounds of my intention. It's all in the recognition that to begin we just have to begin. We could keep weighing why and why not forever. By beginning, we see what starts happening, and then having begun, we can decide to continue or stop pr adjust. Possibly as others see the emergent results, they will opt to join in, and some may drop out. So let's begin — we can't keep going unless we begin!
R 14 — Right. And that's what we're already doing! We are starting to organize resources for study as a copious, cumulative sampling of the cultural resources achieved by our predecessors, which all persons now hold in common. In sampling them, we should illuminate the value that specific resources have in supporting a person's lifelong effort to form and fulfill her human potentials. Let's develop procedures through which contributors to A Place to Study can expand and winnow the sample of resources for study. As users of the place, we build by continually assessing how various works we put on it support our self-formation and liberal learning as users of it. It should be a recursively circular effort.
V 15 — I'm eager, but I do have one more question. When I first expressed some skepticism about the idea of access, you said something about "a different sort of presence for primary cultural resources." Did you have something special in mind in using presence rather than access or availability or something else?
R 16 — Yes. Significant educative resources work through their presence, especially the resources facilitating liberal learning. These resources don't make a difference in life through a one-shot encounter. We all learned that even a good vaccine needs recurrent boosters or revaccination after a time. Important cultural resources need to be at hand, on your mind, easy to bring into your attention. They will be different resources for each person, but whatever they are, they have greatest value through their continuous presence. A Place to Study should become a cornucopia of resources enabling persons to choose and nurture the presence of the specific ones each selects as they conduct their lives. A cultural work becomes valuable as a person becomes familiar with it, knows it's there, available to use whenever needed — at times a comfortable retreat, a source of illumination in perplexity, of calm in anxiety, and of solace in sorrow. Each should make their choice of such works with personal care, not the inertia of convention.
V 17 — Yeah. I guess that's why a couple semesters of Western Civ didn't actually have the influence on me and my friends touted for it. It was another of the requirements to get the degree.
R 18 — We can now make the resources supporting self-formation and liberal learning into a continuous, dependable, free and open presence for everyone, lifelong wherever they are. Of course we cannot ensure that anyone will make use of that presence. But throughout history up to now the possibility of these resources having a presence in most persons' lifeworld simply did not exist — it took time, effort, a good deal of money, and yes even power to assemble them into a collection in the everyday world of a person's life. Now we can, all of us, do it for ourselves.
V 19 — OK, I'm with you. But you know how you keep saying, to begin, begin. Well I don't see much actually beginning to give all these resources of liberal learning a real presence on A Place to Study, not to mention a ubiquitous presence through A Place to Study. Let's get substantive.
R 20 — You are right. We need to shift more attention to meriting more of a presence in people's lives. At the same time, we don't want it to come about because we have hyped it really well. Most people these days lead over-crowded lives, or so it seems to me. In a very literal sense, we are pre-occupied — inertly occupied with all sorts of stuff prior to any considered choice. It comes about through the requirements of work, keeping up in our accustomed way with entertainments, social obligations, the desires and compulsions of consumption, by the churning cycles of what we call news, style, and responsibilities. They can seem overwhelmingly necessary, but with care, each can prune them back. What do we need to do to attain a substantial presence for the resources of liberal learning in all that?
V 21 — Well, I'm still pretty young and I have my doubts how solid all that pre-occupation actually is. A lot of people recognized that they could live without of it during the Covid lockdowns. And I think that a lot of people are realizing that quick and easy tools of self-expression can dumb them down personally and have powerfully problematic public effects. Let's be ready with something worthy, something truly worth the while, the time spent, as people back away from their preoccupations and begin to think about how they want to use their time and energy.
R 22 — Yes, that's the sort of presence A Place to Study should have at the ready when a person disengages from the press of preoccupation and looks about with the sense that she can choose how and why she spends her effort. A Place to Study won't be the only possibility, but let's make sure it's a worthy one.
V 23 — You know, I see that disengagement happening a bit already. I'm the kind that talks to a lot of people from a lot of situations. I didn't come from half way round the world in one long plane ride. Wherever I go, I meet persons who are looking around, thinking about what they want, persons of different ages, at the top, at the bottom, in between. So you can actually say, we've begun. Now we have to ask, as we always will, "What's next?"
R 24 — Well, you understand how we liken A Place to Study to a city and we recognize that both visitors and residents are important to the life of a city. Now as you say, we have a few people coming to our prototype to look at work in progress and discuss it and sometimes they add comments, which are very useful. But for the most part, they check things out as proto-visitors, and you and I are sort of proto-residents. Now I think to attract an actual flow of visitors, one sufficient for A Place to Study to become self-sustaining, we need a hardy group of pioneers, some initial, actual residents in our new city, who can get substantive, as you put it.
V 25 — Right. Lots of visitors aren't likely to come to a city that lacks residents unless it's some picturesque ruin on the UNESCO World Heritage list. We can keep prototyping but to get substantive, we need pioneering residents eager to join in building A Place to Study. So let's ask ourselves, what will be important for them to be ready and willing to do?
R 26 — Good question. My initial response may seem a little strange. But for a while we need pioneering residents who are ready and willing to go slowly. It's a common mistake in the digital world to jump into coding things too quickly, before really figuring out what you need to code and why. That can make for huge problems down the road.
V 27 — Well, it may seem strange to those who don't contemplate the collateral damages that follow when college dropouts rush to combine some clever code with grandiose ambition. We need pioneers ready to work thoughtfully in a cooperative group to create A Place to Study as part of the digital commons without the normal incentives that enforce a sense of discipline on an assemblage of workers. We can't just say, "Let's head west and see what happens." We need to warn off those both who just want to go as easy riders for a while and those who want to join the megarich.
R 28 — Yes. And we need to recognize and deal with, to live with another tension. The cooperative group needs to be self-directing, yet it will need to be cohesive around some fundamental aspirations.
V 29 — I think I understand your concern, but can you spell it out? I can imagine the situation arising in which a number of initial residents begin to think that some developmental necessities will be hard to bring off relying only on volunteered effort. We already made anticipate an exception with respect to building and maintaining the technical infrastructure required by the project. What do you think should be fundamental?
Topic
Choosing powerful
tools
R 30 — We should accomplish what you call our "substantive work" through voluntary effort, and the level at which we pursue that effort should be at or very near the top attainable within the public domain.
V 31 — That sounds good, but can you explain it some relative to practice. In particular, I'm not sure what the qualifier, "attainable within the public domain," actually means.
R 32 — Take a big limitation, that of copyright. The digital commons is, and for some time, will be significantly limited owing to copyright law. Copyright practices rest on the idea that by giving authors and/or publishers an exclusive right to copy the expressions of ideas for a specific period, the law will institute a positive incentive for the creation and dissemination such ideas. Copyright law makes very clear that the ideas are common property not subject to private ownership, except for certain limited exceptions. The length of time that the copyright exception lasts has been highly variable, usually getting progressively longer in response to well-healed lobbying, but that may change and there are fair use exceptions that we should use as fully as we can. Nevertheless, despite its obsolescence in a digital environment, copyright law will circumscribe the digital commons for a long time.
V 33 — I expect more subtle obstacles of this sort will make themselves felt and we will have to be ready to work as well as we can in spite of them. I'm wondering if there are things we should guard against up front that are not so much obstacles, but rather potential deflections. For instance, I worry about potential pioneer residents who have worked in academe. They may skew how they work with resources on A Place to Study in an overly scholarly direction.
R 34 — That's for sure! I'm a living, walking example. I've made a number of prior attempts at initiating something like A Place to Study without actually understanding myself how subtly different it needs to be. As an academic, I had that "contribution to knowledge" in the back of my mind. When questions that come from life intersected with those from the current state of my subject, I'd write too much to cite and to be cited, giving things a patina of scholarly authority, which to most people is dull pedantry. I wanted, yes, a wide audience of general readers, provided I reached my peer group of specialists on the way. That doesn't work. Academics volunteering as pioneering residents on A Place to Study need to embrace writing and study in a frame quite different from that of their scholarly training and practice.
V 35 — Can you say more about how that frame differs. It seems pretty clear to me that we want to avoid the rhetoric of scholarly authority, but I also have the sense that A Place to Study should not be a showcase for the popularization of knowledge. How would you describe the rhetoric most appropriate to A Place to Study?
R 36 — You mention knowledge with respect to the rhetoric of both scholarship and popularization. Knowledge is of course important here. But we primarily seek insight and understanding here and for that we need to integrate what we do not know as a positive element with what we think we do know as positive elements in seeking insight and understanding. I think it generates a rhetoric that complements knowledge with intuition, filling gaps where our knowledge does not cover important aspects of a matter. That makes it tentative, but nevertheless, it serves as the "animal faith" on which we act as independent agents.
V 37 — That's food for thought! Much of which we'll have to hold for some other time. But it makes me realize that going outside the normal structure of educational incentives requires more than a pro bono service going without the normal benefits. It entails weaning oneself from the behaviors the incentivized roles reward and elicit. That goes not only for academics, as you call them, but for the others, for students, if that is what we should call aspirants within formal education. And I imagine it will affect all the forms of activity for which persons are trained and work within — executives, lawyers, bureaucrats, soldiers, public servants, technicians, even a cleric. Actually, very few of us have experience expressing ourselves as persons, saying what we think without the aid and limitation of one or another formal role shaping our thinking and acting.
R 38 — Going without the normal incentives requires a many-sided effort. And as we talk, I'm seeing some ironies. We call it school and talk about what it might be like without all the normal incentives that structure the institutions and behaviors within it. But school in ancient Greek originally meant leisure and what one did in leisure, thinking, talking, discussing things, was probably somewhat like what you and I are trying now to do. Maybe all the incentives we worry about aren't so normal. Their absence was the material condition making school possible, σχολή, leisurely discussion.
V 39 — Cool. But the material actuality of that leisure sat, comfy and complacent, on a political economy that restricted citizenship and used slaves widely.
R 40 — Too true, but I don't think that made leisure a bad thing. It shows that in the ancient world the conditions for its practical possibility were unjust, undesirable. And that's been the case right up to the present. All along leisure has been a way of life open only to the members of a restricted class and small elites. The leisured life is one in which people think and act relatively free of external incentives, the attractive and compulsive forces constraining action into external conformity to predetermined behaviors. It is a life of chosen intents, not one of forced response.
V 41 — Yeah. As an undergraduate, a passage by Karl Marx caught my attention. It spoke about what might become possible ere the division of labor loosened and stopped from slotting persons into exclusive lines of work. Then it would become possible for any person "to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."[1] We're sort of saying a good part of the cultural conditions necessary are changing substantially. What people have for so long contemplated as mere possibilities are fast becoming actualities. Everyone in a sense is becoming a member of the leisure class.
R 42 — In a manner of speaking. I think historically, however the leisured class was constituted, it curated the way of life for the society of which it is a part. Its members defined the options and managed the incentives that would shape the various activities that everyone in the social whole sought to pursue. That's what those comfy and complacent Greeks were doing in their city-states, and it is what leisured elites were still doing, whatever ruling ideology they may have used to legitimate it, right up to now.
V 43 — Wait! You're not saying, are you, that the first residents of A Place to Study will define everything for everyone else? That doesn't sound like you at all.
R 44 — I hope not. You were just saying, I thought, with the digital transformation, everyone is becoming so to speak a member of the leisure class. That's not something happening through A Place to Study, but something happening through the massive introduction of digital communications throughout the world, affecting everyone. Everyone is finding themselves in an unprecedented situation in which they have some significant leisure. In principle, assuming a connection to the Internet, we all have open access to the cultural resources that have served to define the leisure class historically. We're starting A Place to Study because the material conditions limiting leisure in the digital commons are changing deeply, rapidly, and significantly. I think the logical course of this transformation is actualizing conditions of leisure for everyone, and the chaos we have been speaking about is arising because none of us are very adept at even recognizing these powers we are using, not to speak of understanding how to use them effectively.
V 45 — OK. I sense we are beginning to form a very tentative outline or schema of what is going on. But we are going to have trouble saying it very clearly because appearances are confusing. I'm going to try to sum up what we've been saying, or perhaps better attempting to say.
Historically, roughly up to now, material conditions constraining communication have limited leisure to a relatively advantaged class, a leisure class, that has been able to make and effect choices shaping the purposes and uses of cultural resources characterizing the whole society. Now, digital communications are actualizing the material conditions in which everyone can and should, and significantly does participate in making and effecting the choices hitherto made by the leisure class, but that's happening with very little self-awareness or self-possession in the process. We are initiating A Place to Study as a place where anyone can study how they can best shape their purposes and uses of cultural resources within the emerging society where everyone engages in doing that. What we do we do as if it actualizes the conditions of leisure for everyone and it remains in fluid self-revision as long as it remains evident that it falls short for some persons in actualizing those conditions. That sets a criterion for ongoing self-correction.
Topic
New patterns
of curation
R 46 — I think that works for now. Let's see what it might signify for the prototying of A Place to Study. We've observed that a leisure class curates a way of life, both its own and that of the society of which it is a part. Increasingly everybody is performing that function, whether or not they fully realize it.
V 47 — Over all, I take it, this broadening of who curates the conduct of life has been leading to the cacophony of voices that we started discussing. Some might say that that shows that must people are not cut out for exercising leisure autonomously. We are objecting that the broadening that has been taking place has been leading to chaos because the cultural tools effecting the broadening of leisure have been deficient, and that's why A Place to Study and projects like it are important.
R 48 — Yeah. Asking us all to curate the complexities of contemporary life with a set of emojis, sets us all up for serious failure. Let's start the design and construction of A Place to Study with some basic principles. To curate originally means to care for, to take care of something. We are saying that all people are coming to possess the material conditions for taking care for their way of life, for exercising agency, for deciding what they, personally and as members of collectivities, can and should choose to try to do. No one, singly or together, can flat out say what is to be done, even in their most personal sphere of action. We all continually cope with circumstances about which we are largely ignorant. Whatever control we exert, personally or together with others, will be imperfect. But however imperfect, it is a function of how well we communicate, first off, first and foremost, with ourselves.
V 49 — Humph. I was going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and suddenly, "hunh?" What's this, first off communicate with ourselves?
R 50 — It appears to me that we have no direct knowledge of our actual thinking. Yet we have great need for self-possession in the conduct of our lives. Our actual thinking takes place well below the level of consciousness and becomes evident to us as intentional, controlled behaviors take place, among them the flow of feelings, urges, drives, our conscious awareness, our uses of language, gesture, our physical movements in our immediate circumstances, and all the mediated activities we engage in our cultural surroundings. Thoughts occur to us, ideas come to us, reactions happen, speech takes place.
V 51 — I'm not sure yet that I understand your concern. A thought occurs to me and I take it from there. That seems pretty straight forward.
R 52 — Not really. You do have to take it from there, as you say. But you also have the basic problem, the one at the base of all communication: knowing the message received was the message sent. The thought that occurs to you was the message received. You don't know what your cognitive capacities sent. That's the primal ignorance at the base of everything.
V 53 — So you're saying that as all persons start to possess the conditions requisite for leisure they need to start attending to the reflexive dimension of communication, curating their cultural activities, taking care for how well their understanding of them represent the opaque actualities from which they spring. When I hear Donald Trump speaking, I get the impression he has no idea what he actually thinks, the words come out mouthed as a speech coach has trained, the sense loosely determined by some visceral emotions and a lot of hearsay.
R 54 — Too true. And it's emblematic of weaknesses to which we are all susceptible. If we look at what curators do in museums, they take care to ensure that what we understand from a work of art or from a cultural trace or artifact from a bygone time represents what we think it represents as soundly as possible.
V 55 — OK. So we all should work on the integrity of what we say, seeing to it that it represents our thought fully and accurately. The leisured components of a society are those who care for the integrity of its communications practices. Those may be mumbo jumbo, but those with leisure not only do the mumbo jumbo, but have the perspective and power to say its being done right. And I guess things get messed up for a society if the leisure class get caught up exclusively in doing the mumbo jumbo like everyone else and not making sure it is done right. And now the leisure class is becoming everyone, which now means we, everyone, is becoming responsible for both curating the communications powers and for using those powers of communication in conducting ourselves in our lifeworlds. We must maintain and perfect them sufficiently to do the job, and at the same time we must use them to get the job done. The old two-class arrangement is giving way to a two-sided challenge for all.
R 56 — Ah hah! The leisured, self-reflective side of cultural communication gives us the freedom to cultivate and put in motion the activities through which we substantively conduct our lives. But it doesn't yet seem to be working very well.
V 57 — That's true, but let's be more concrete. Through its period of growth, Facebook had as its motto, "Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." People thought that that was huge and more than a billion piled into it, essentially a leisured resource for self-cultivation. But relative to the fullness of human sensibility, Facebook's giving them the power to share the barbaric gesture by which the Roman crowd signaled death or life for the gravely wounded gladiator falls far short in making the world more open and connected. The resources for cultural curation in Facebook and other social media are fundamentally inadequate. Starting over, what can and should we do?
R 58 — It should start, I think, with something like the challenge Matthew Arnold laid down some 150 years ago — "culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits."[2]. Working with resources commensurate with Arnold's challenge would seem closer to what would enable a leisured people to curate their prospective way of life.
V 59 — Well put. To curate a more open and connected world we all can and should join to promote the integrity and adequacy of our communicative capacities, extending achieved capacities for self-possession and self-expression, without pretending to know what those are in their fulness, but striving continuously to disclose and improve them to the best of our abilities. With respect to our humanity, we are all like the athlete who does not know how fast he can go but repeatedly tries to run a better race.
- ↑ Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part 1, A, 4 "Private Property and Communism."
- ↑ Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869), Preface, ¶3