The classical model of education is that you read lots of books and then wow the lady of choice with your erudition. Poetry, quotes and other passive knowledge is supposed to spill from your mouth, converting the woman into a quivering mass of worship. Yes, well, it's really like getting yourself a set of tools and some instruction manuals, and expecting to become a professional DVD repairman by showing your customer your tools and quoting the manual.
The only worrying thing is that sometimes it works, people are fooled by someone who quotes knowledge at them without realizing they should check the ability of the person. Here in Poland there is a lot of trust invested in certificates and qualifications, despite the equal knowledge of how easy it is to forge such things, the level of corruption and the sheer experience of qualified people not knowing what they are doing. The trap is that most people have no real idea of how they can test for quality themselves, they have been sold on the idea that 'someone should do it who is qualified to do so'. duh!
Poland has a high rate of alcholism among artists, partly because it is a nation taught to have faith in authority and qualifications, imagine how tough it must be to say 'look at this river!' and to get the reply "Yes, it is 1200 km long and serves the 3 primary industrial ports of the nation.', when you meant 'feel it, breathe it, think about your relationship to it, touch it, taste it, watch it flow'. A philospher once observed that if you put your foot in a river one day, and then repeated it the next day then it would not be the same river, yesterday's water have long flown. To the classicalist, though, it is still the same 1200 km long river, nothing has changed - unless a new specialist comes along and remeasures the river and states it is actually 1201.2 km long..
Monday, November 24, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Writing: More Basildon than James
Back when I was still living in the UK, I had a place near the new town of Basildon, created largely in the 1960's and with a reputation seemingly more based on the under-age pregnancy rate than on reality. I rather enjoyed my time there, and the town centre including some architectural elements I became almost proud of - not including the town square which became a miserably bleak prairie in winter, hardly encouraging the casual shopper. Basildon, though, has no apparent links with that brand of letter writing paper available almost everywhere while I was growing up of Basildon Bond, the poor man's posh paper, staid and blue, everything that James Bond wasn't.
Today I would like to explore reading and writing, those core elements of any school program, although from many a pupil's perspective, chore components might be more apt. Why do we need to learn to read and write, isn't the power of speech enough? The two prime arguments for it seem to be, and fair enough arguments they are, their use in the workplace and the ability to expand one's imagination through the reading of books. What, though, if these reasons were based on an arbitrary reality and in holding them we were slowing or preventing the development of human culture? And what, while we are at it, has the non-brothers Basildon and James have to do with it?
Writing is dominated by the intelligentsia, the middle to upper IQ people and propounding the belief system of this group, the beliefs of lower IQ people are generally quashed, their systems of belief discarded like an empty hamburger box. One of my best and oldest friends, while we were still at university, had authoritarian right-wing views, and he believed, for example, that people who were unemployed were essentially lazy. He was the product of a middle-class farming family, middle class at least in views and intelligence if not in money. This is a good example of not understanding how other people think, a common phenomenon we all fall for sometime or other. How much people can be different I showed in my James Bond Theory. If you think it is difficult to understand people from other cultures around the world, how much less do you understand people with a lower or higher intelligence? We often think of geniuses as being a little strange, but how strange are we to them, and how strange are people of middling intelligence to those of low?
Assuming that we have our ideas of learning and culture, how do they compare with those of other intelligence levels? Is what we feel to be interesting or useful an alien imposition on the culture of others? Perhaps we are not even right about ourselves? If you are an authoritarian, then now or soon you could be getting a little warm under the collar as I threaten what you hold dear, but bear with me.
If we just examine reading on its own for a while, we read to learn what is happening in the world, to do our jobs, to expand our imagination or simply for pleasure. A great deal of our reading is entirely passive, it leads nowhere because we do little beyond absorb it or pass it along. We absorb ourselves in pleasure and knowledge, and feel we understand the world better because we have widened our ability to compare what we see with what we know. However, while we absorb and share, what are we adding? Do we let ourselves become nothing more than a culture consumer, in our appreciation of 'great' books we become nothing more than the owner of the latest mobile phone, pair of shoes, video game or car? All are nothing more than the products of other people's minds. Going to art galleries if you do not create your own art is consumerism of the educated classes.
So, at last, we come to Basildon Bond. One of the battle cries of sections of the educated classes is that culture is deterioating, because people do not write letters any more. Who wrote them in the past - well, the educated classes, so if the educated classes no longer write letters, is this the fault of the illiterate or the semi-illiterate, or even the literate? If we go back a step to a time before reading and writing were available to the masses, what did people do then? Did language and culture crumble?
When there were no books available, what were the choices? The very fact that we have language in an advanced form, and in a form that has hardly changed since the advent of literacy, suggests that we were doing somerthing with it beyond grunting across the field. How about telling stories, stories are hardly a product of the literate age, we can be fairly sure that the day the first cave painting was made, someone somewhere was telling a story. Most of those stories have been lost, as a normal loss as new stories replaced old, but this proces has accelerated with the advent of the printed word, where standard versions of traditional or new stories have mown down the infinite variations that once existed. Remember I said that reading the 'greats' was nothing more than consumerism, well, just as manufactured products largely replaced their individual handmade counterparts, so the printed book has replaced the hand craft told story, words repeated precisely as the stamping of a machine.
In a world where we sell the idea of the printed 'greats', is it any surprise that many people do not write letters? Why write letters when anything you write is going to be compared to a standard 'great'? Other forms of letter writing content, such as gossip and my-life, has transferred to other more convenient forms of comunication, such as the telephone, something more closely resembling individual human communication than the learned third person style that is writing.
Let us assume that we all start writing letters, what are we prepared to sacrifice in order to give us the time to write all these letters, plus read all the incoming including those to family that are intended to be read by a number of people? How long before you run dry on ideas or get bored with endless letter opening and start to simply scan the contents as you do with endless reports at work? Most of what anyone would write would be gossip and about-me, to create anything more adventurous would require more time and there is no guarantee of anyone reading it, like creating a painting that never gets hung. There is always the question, like painting, whether you have the ability to produce writing beyond the gossip or informational level, and if you cannot then why the pressure to write?
Reading and writing are largely taught as a way of communicating information, despite what one's own memoroes of schooling may be, the fact that so few people engage in it as an art. There is very little left in the way of individual story telling as a respected part of culture, stories swopped at work, at home or at the local bar are mere informalities. Reading itself is a way of gathering knowledge and pleasure, and writing a way of distributing, but for most people the addition of original thought is minimal outside of recording professional opinions. The value of reading and writing to different segments of society is little understood, and certainly not part of the common core of written work. What, then, is all the fuss from the educated reactionaries?
Today I would like to explore reading and writing, those core elements of any school program, although from many a pupil's perspective, chore components might be more apt. Why do we need to learn to read and write, isn't the power of speech enough? The two prime arguments for it seem to be, and fair enough arguments they are, their use in the workplace and the ability to expand one's imagination through the reading of books. What, though, if these reasons were based on an arbitrary reality and in holding them we were slowing or preventing the development of human culture? And what, while we are at it, has the non-brothers Basildon and James have to do with it?
Writing is dominated by the intelligentsia, the middle to upper IQ people and propounding the belief system of this group, the beliefs of lower IQ people are generally quashed, their systems of belief discarded like an empty hamburger box. One of my best and oldest friends, while we were still at university, had authoritarian right-wing views, and he believed, for example, that people who were unemployed were essentially lazy. He was the product of a middle-class farming family, middle class at least in views and intelligence if not in money. This is a good example of not understanding how other people think, a common phenomenon we all fall for sometime or other. How much people can be different I showed in my James Bond Theory. If you think it is difficult to understand people from other cultures around the world, how much less do you understand people with a lower or higher intelligence? We often think of geniuses as being a little strange, but how strange are we to them, and how strange are people of middling intelligence to those of low?
Assuming that we have our ideas of learning and culture, how do they compare with those of other intelligence levels? Is what we feel to be interesting or useful an alien imposition on the culture of others? Perhaps we are not even right about ourselves? If you are an authoritarian, then now or soon you could be getting a little warm under the collar as I threaten what you hold dear, but bear with me.
If we just examine reading on its own for a while, we read to learn what is happening in the world, to do our jobs, to expand our imagination or simply for pleasure. A great deal of our reading is entirely passive, it leads nowhere because we do little beyond absorb it or pass it along. We absorb ourselves in pleasure and knowledge, and feel we understand the world better because we have widened our ability to compare what we see with what we know. However, while we absorb and share, what are we adding? Do we let ourselves become nothing more than a culture consumer, in our appreciation of 'great' books we become nothing more than the owner of the latest mobile phone, pair of shoes, video game or car? All are nothing more than the products of other people's minds. Going to art galleries if you do not create your own art is consumerism of the educated classes.
So, at last, we come to Basildon Bond. One of the battle cries of sections of the educated classes is that culture is deterioating, because people do not write letters any more. Who wrote them in the past - well, the educated classes, so if the educated classes no longer write letters, is this the fault of the illiterate or the semi-illiterate, or even the literate? If we go back a step to a time before reading and writing were available to the masses, what did people do then? Did language and culture crumble?
When there were no books available, what were the choices? The very fact that we have language in an advanced form, and in a form that has hardly changed since the advent of literacy, suggests that we were doing somerthing with it beyond grunting across the field. How about telling stories, stories are hardly a product of the literate age, we can be fairly sure that the day the first cave painting was made, someone somewhere was telling a story. Most of those stories have been lost, as a normal loss as new stories replaced old, but this proces has accelerated with the advent of the printed word, where standard versions of traditional or new stories have mown down the infinite variations that once existed. Remember I said that reading the 'greats' was nothing more than consumerism, well, just as manufactured products largely replaced their individual handmade counterparts, so the printed book has replaced the hand craft told story, words repeated precisely as the stamping of a machine.
In a world where we sell the idea of the printed 'greats', is it any surprise that many people do not write letters? Why write letters when anything you write is going to be compared to a standard 'great'? Other forms of letter writing content, such as gossip and my-life, has transferred to other more convenient forms of comunication, such as the telephone, something more closely resembling individual human communication than the learned third person style that is writing.
Let us assume that we all start writing letters, what are we prepared to sacrifice in order to give us the time to write all these letters, plus read all the incoming including those to family that are intended to be read by a number of people? How long before you run dry on ideas or get bored with endless letter opening and start to simply scan the contents as you do with endless reports at work? Most of what anyone would write would be gossip and about-me, to create anything more adventurous would require more time and there is no guarantee of anyone reading it, like creating a painting that never gets hung. There is always the question, like painting, whether you have the ability to produce writing beyond the gossip or informational level, and if you cannot then why the pressure to write?
Reading and writing are largely taught as a way of communicating information, despite what one's own memoroes of schooling may be, the fact that so few people engage in it as an art. There is very little left in the way of individual story telling as a respected part of culture, stories swopped at work, at home or at the local bar are mere informalities. Reading itself is a way of gathering knowledge and pleasure, and writing a way of distributing, but for most people the addition of original thought is minimal outside of recording professional opinions. The value of reading and writing to different segments of society is little understood, and certainly not part of the common core of written work. What, then, is all the fuss from the educated reactionaries?
Monday, November 10, 2008
Shadowland Poland - death by cheap comparison
Watching any kind of review of Polish music, television or film here in Poland is often a sad affair because no one has ever achieved anything original, everything and everyone is 'in the style of'. This is a pity on two fronts, because there are many original people and productions, and people really would like to feel good about what is original. What is more, it must be quite annoying for the artists themselves, to be forever compared with other people, imagine what it must feel like to be called 'the Polish James Dean' simply because it is the 1950s and you are a risk taker, where is the space for your original work if you are forever compared to someone else. Do not bother to ask his real name, it is not important, for he was the Polish James Dean, that is all you need to know.
Alright, I admit that if you bind some printed paper together and put it in a cover, it is convenient to call it a 'book'. our experience of books is quite wide and we understand that a book can be many things and are written by many different authors, and as a consequence we know that you cannot open one randomly and be able to predict its content or qualities. Is it a children's book, 19th century literature or an advanced guide to some aspect of physics? However, there are not many James Dean, actor, around, it is pretty much defined in our heads what he is, and if you compare someone else to him your expectancies from the comparison are a lot more limited than saying he is 'like some book you have read'. The very act of naming to some degree excludes that object or person from being other things - once you call something a 'fire engine' you have pretty much excluded soft, fluffy bunnies from your mind, which is the purpose of naming anyway - distinguishing one type of thing from the rest of the universe. It is an extremely powerful tool, and like any such tool, they work best when you need all that power and work least well when the power is not required. The Polish James Dean is like a little nut - fine until someone hit him with a damn great sledgehammer. Now he is squashed on the floor for us to examine, and can never grow into anything else. One squashed nut looks pretty much like any other, they give no indication of the potential they once held, and this is a responsibility we all have when we describe other people and things.
When a field of human endeavour, in this case the assessment of artists and their work, is peppered with comparisons to other work, it is time that the kind of people making the assessments are reviewed, for they are demonstrating a strong lack of ability to assess quality on quality's terms. Comparisons, like counting, is the refuge of the unable or the underconfident, neither group being high on my list of 'hmm, yes, they are the kind of people I would trust for an opinion'. I can easily train my computer to count things, and with a lot more effort get it to compare things, much in the way of speech recognition software. With such an assessment tool anyone could compare any one thing or person in a particular field with another - we could use it to hunt down all the James Deans! Using such a tool we could create a database of all the typical forms of art, classify them, and hence classify all artists and their work in one huge database, and then forever more we could always find something we like, and we would even know how much it was worth.
The only fly in this ointment is that while I am similar to my brother David, and often think and do things in the same way as he does, sometimes we are not the same, we are often very different people. None of us are identical, and none of us even remain the same from moment to moment, year to year, and what we are depends on who is viewing us - how I see myself is not how you see me as me-me and you-me are two different people. If we take this idea a little further, if I am ever changing and ever different in this way, the work i produce will also be different. I spent ten years taking photographs of thousands objects and people in Lublin, and then this year I took 75 pictures of myself, 75 pictures that barely resembled any of the thousands of preceding ones, 75 pictures that changed my view of myself forever. In terms of photography, I had jumped ship.
Once categorised as a 'photographic recorder in the style of X', what chance would my 75 new images have? Even if they were accepted as being different, would I become 'Trevor Butcher, artist' or would I remain 'Trevor Butcher, photographic recorder in the style of X, oh, and he also made some art'? What would have happened if I had made the 75 images before publishing any of the thousands of other images?
If your description process involves direct comparison with limited interest concepts, you reduce the impression you give down to a shadow - and if enough people do this to a nation then it becomes a nation of shadows. Nothing is real, everything is copy. Quality description requires you not only to consider how you judge the object of person, but how the greater society will do the same. If you know that I am an engineer, husband, recorder and artist, make sure you know which one you are describing and assess how the description will be received.
Although it might be harder to find more basic ways of description, by doing so we give ourselves greater opportunity to say more. Once you have defined an actor as the Polish James Dean, there is little else to say about him, the reader would be better served reading about James Dean than anything else you have to say about the Polish actor in question. There is a risk that more basic description can be more difficult to understand, but that only begs the question 'what level of flawed understanding do you wish to propagate, the easy James Dean shadow or some harder level that is closer to the reality?'
Society's views are shaped by all of us, and change must start somewhere. I hope that this is one place where society in Poland will start to take a more responsible attitude to how people and their works are viewed, that people look for better ways to evaluate. Poland, a nation where people like bank managers still believe that possessing a driving license is permission to drive in any desired manner, deserves to learn that believing in the shadows of James Dean is like illuminating one's library by burning the books it contains.
Alright, I admit that if you bind some printed paper together and put it in a cover, it is convenient to call it a 'book'. our experience of books is quite wide and we understand that a book can be many things and are written by many different authors, and as a consequence we know that you cannot open one randomly and be able to predict its content or qualities. Is it a children's book, 19th century literature or an advanced guide to some aspect of physics? However, there are not many James Dean, actor, around, it is pretty much defined in our heads what he is, and if you compare someone else to him your expectancies from the comparison are a lot more limited than saying he is 'like some book you have read'. The very act of naming to some degree excludes that object or person from being other things - once you call something a 'fire engine' you have pretty much excluded soft, fluffy bunnies from your mind, which is the purpose of naming anyway - distinguishing one type of thing from the rest of the universe. It is an extremely powerful tool, and like any such tool, they work best when you need all that power and work least well when the power is not required. The Polish James Dean is like a little nut - fine until someone hit him with a damn great sledgehammer. Now he is squashed on the floor for us to examine, and can never grow into anything else. One squashed nut looks pretty much like any other, they give no indication of the potential they once held, and this is a responsibility we all have when we describe other people and things.
When a field of human endeavour, in this case the assessment of artists and their work, is peppered with comparisons to other work, it is time that the kind of people making the assessments are reviewed, for they are demonstrating a strong lack of ability to assess quality on quality's terms. Comparisons, like counting, is the refuge of the unable or the underconfident, neither group being high on my list of 'hmm, yes, they are the kind of people I would trust for an opinion'. I can easily train my computer to count things, and with a lot more effort get it to compare things, much in the way of speech recognition software. With such an assessment tool anyone could compare any one thing or person in a particular field with another - we could use it to hunt down all the James Deans! Using such a tool we could create a database of all the typical forms of art, classify them, and hence classify all artists and their work in one huge database, and then forever more we could always find something we like, and we would even know how much it was worth.
The only fly in this ointment is that while I am similar to my brother David, and often think and do things in the same way as he does, sometimes we are not the same, we are often very different people. None of us are identical, and none of us even remain the same from moment to moment, year to year, and what we are depends on who is viewing us - how I see myself is not how you see me as me-me and you-me are two different people. If we take this idea a little further, if I am ever changing and ever different in this way, the work i produce will also be different. I spent ten years taking photographs of thousands objects and people in Lublin, and then this year I took 75 pictures of myself, 75 pictures that barely resembled any of the thousands of preceding ones, 75 pictures that changed my view of myself forever. In terms of photography, I had jumped ship.
Once categorised as a 'photographic recorder in the style of X', what chance would my 75 new images have? Even if they were accepted as being different, would I become 'Trevor Butcher, artist' or would I remain 'Trevor Butcher, photographic recorder in the style of X, oh, and he also made some art'? What would have happened if I had made the 75 images before publishing any of the thousands of other images?
If your description process involves direct comparison with limited interest concepts, you reduce the impression you give down to a shadow - and if enough people do this to a nation then it becomes a nation of shadows. Nothing is real, everything is copy. Quality description requires you not only to consider how you judge the object of person, but how the greater society will do the same. If you know that I am an engineer, husband, recorder and artist, make sure you know which one you are describing and assess how the description will be received.
Although it might be harder to find more basic ways of description, by doing so we give ourselves greater opportunity to say more. Once you have defined an actor as the Polish James Dean, there is little else to say about him, the reader would be better served reading about James Dean than anything else you have to say about the Polish actor in question. There is a risk that more basic description can be more difficult to understand, but that only begs the question 'what level of flawed understanding do you wish to propagate, the easy James Dean shadow or some harder level that is closer to the reality?'
Society's views are shaped by all of us, and change must start somewhere. I hope that this is one place where society in Poland will start to take a more responsible attitude to how people and their works are viewed, that people look for better ways to evaluate. Poland, a nation where people like bank managers still believe that possessing a driving license is permission to drive in any desired manner, deserves to learn that believing in the shadows of James Dean is like illuminating one's library by burning the books it contains.
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