More about Zerstreutheit. It’s a special and pernicious kind of distraction which William James thought the direct opposite of attention.
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, Vol. 1, pp. 403-404.
OK, I confess: I got that from Wikipedia (art. ‘Attention’)
Here’s someone pretty far gone:
Ich kenne einen Kollegen, der so zerstreut ist, da? er in einer Dreht?r f?nfmal im Kreis l?uft, bis ihm einf?llt, ob er rein oder raus wollte.
I have a colleague who’s so distracted [zerstreut] that he goes five times round in a revolving door before it comes to him whether he wants to go in or out.
Does English ‘distraction’ capture the semi-pathological quality of this condition? Everyone is distracted from time to time, whereas what we’re talking about here is an endemic scatteredness, a more-or-less constant, habitual flickering between objects of attention.
How do you create a wireframe? The process begins with a dialogue. Together, you and your developers determine what needs to be done to translate your business successfully into a website. Nobody knows your business better than you, so you will be doing most of the talking – your developers will be listening ?
The wireframe should consist of words – no images – transcribed by your attentive developers based on what you say. In wireframing, you use aural senses (talk/listen) to determine what the site should do. You defer the visual senses (look/feel) to storyboarding, where you attend to how the site will appear. You cannot “see” how a site will work until you first “listen” to what the site should do!
Participants are reminded to bring their ears to the meeting. A multi-user interface will be set up between ears and mouths. Afternoon tea will be served. BYO ‘teeth’.
‘The End of White America?’ bawls the cover of this month’s Atlantic, superimposed on a close-up of Barack Obama. The article is by Hua Hsu, a Professor of English at Vassar, whose list of specialities includes ‘philosophies of race and ethnicity’, those being amongst many things over which English department people now exercise a casual mastery.
It’s not the old fear of being swamped by Others that we learn haunts white Americans, it’s the absence of a white ‘culture’. The idea of culture at work here may be epitomised by the article’s description of Hip-hop as ‘transformative’. Poor white kids, they got no music of their own. The message from the new discipline of White Studies is that ‘whiteness’ is in trouble. As one academic puts it, young white Americans ‘don’t have a culture that’s cool or oppositional.’
Over at Stuff White People Do (not to be confused with Stuff White People Like, a much bigger deal) there’s a large chunk of Hsu’s article and an interesting and mostly literate set of responses to it. Several posters make the obvious point that ‘culture’ is not just about the present, not just about what’s popular and not just about consumer choice. But this reminder doesn’t make the issue go away.
One of the posters clarifies:
I didn’t mean to suggest that there is NO white culture, but the culture that PLDs or YWAs (white suburbanites to me) grow up in is not saturated with Mahler, Ibsen, Picasso, or Einstein; contemporary US white culture is about reality TV and celebrity gossip. This is what the people I work with and grew up with talk about and how they live, and it’s what I ran away from long ago. When YWAs talk about not having a culture, it’s the active day-to-day that they’re referring to.
Older readers might sigh a little and think back to the hipsters, The White Negro, Leonard Bernstein throwing a party for the leadership of the Black Panthers. But in the 1959s and 1960s white envy and emulation of certain black styles was confined to a relatively small group, mostly people in the arts and their followers. What we’re looking at here is a much bigger crisis of confidence.
The household I grew up in wasn’t exactly saturated with Mahler and Picasso. My mother read nothing, my father read books on accountancy and magazines of science fiction. In his youth, he had read Shaw and Wells, but there were no copies in the house. My own hungers led me to literature and to music and by my early teens (spurred on by social envy, a useful emotion) I had a working understanding of what culture was: it meant Mahler and Picasso, and Beethoven and foreign languages and travel and a crowd of similar things that were not available at the touch of a button, things that were scarce and difficult to get hold of, that had to be sought out and paid for and laboured over until understanding arrived. Portrait of a lower-middle-class boy on the make, desperate for cultural capital, or the natural development of someone gifted and receptive to works of art, someone who once exposed to a few samples could not live without more: ein gebildetes Mensch in the making. Yes, and a second-hand European and all the rest – but I’m not trying to tell the whole story here.
Later I came to recognise that science and technology were also, in this formative sense, a culture. They are also, and I put this point neutrally, descriptively ‘white’ as well as whatever we are to call the Chinese empiricists (‘yellow’ anyone?) and the Indian mathematicians, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). For science as science is colour-blind.
Well, that’ll have to do – notes towards a thesis. In ‘whiteness studies’ we have yet another pseudo-discipline founded on nothing more than a parochial prejudice.
We hear a lot about the travails of newspapers, but this article in The New Republic details a fast-growing crisis. If enough majors collapse – the Los Angeles Times has halved, the mighty New York Times faces a debt crisis – we could be deprived, not only of the printed article, but the skills, experience and institutional strengths on which real news depends.
‘Real news’? Isn’t it all just a medium of social control? Ever hear of the Web? To which there are easy answers: yes, it’s real. For example, over 200 people died in the Victorian bushfires. But don’t take it from the press: go count. No it’s not just a medium of social control unless, like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and most arts graduates from the 1980s, you regard the entire society, including all its opposed elements, as one gigantic and malevolent System. As for the Web, I’ve yet to encounter a convincing, comprehensive news site unconnected with a newspaper. Drudge, the Huffington Report etc are parasitic on the grunt-work of trained, full-time journalists and editors.
Here’s a chunk of the New Republic piece.
These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism. This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and–particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels–the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country. Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.
Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny. Other than news aggregators such as Google News–which link to articles from publications that still derive most of their revenue from print–the most successful news sites are oriented to specialized audiences. No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.
Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict.
The situation in Australia is a little better, but the decline is here, too.
Correspondence from Miss Bridgette Shantelle:
Buy a degree! – The new way of earning a degree
To buy a degree is quite easy these days. Nevertheless most students just sit around in their usually boring local University classes, wasting money. Why would you do that?
I have always been puzzled by the cult of Lacan within literary circles.
The extreme, the dazzling implausibility of the ideas themselves is matched by the bottomless lack of evidence for them. Take the ‘mirror stage’ for example, the one idea everybody knows in Lacan.
Lacan began by describing an experiment called the ?mirror test? which his friend, the French psychologist Henri Wallon, had performed in 1931. Wallon had compared the reactions of human infants and chimpanzees to seeing their reflection in a mirror. He found that at around the age of six months both humans and chimpanzees begin to recognise that the image in the mirror is their own. However, Wallon claimed there was an important difference between the subsequent reactions of the human infant and the chimpanzee. The human infant becomes fascinated with his reflection, and leans forward to examine it more closely, moving his limbs to explore the relation between image and reality. The chimp, on the other hand, quickly loses interest, and turns to look at other things.
Lacan used this observation as a springboard to develop an account of the development of human subjectivity that was inherently, though often implicitly, comparative in nature. Human subjectivity was only understandable by contrasting it with that of our nearest relative, the chimpanzee.
This is by Dylan Evans, a Lacanian apostate, now a Darwinian. My only reaction to this proposal has always been the same – Huh?
Not so (at first) Evans, who went so far as to practise Lacanian psychotherapy. His undoing came when at last he found a place where people asked the right questions.
I returned to the UK in 1997 to take up a place in the philosophy department at the London School of Economics, a college of the University of London. The atmosphere there could not have been more different from that in Buffalo. The department of philosophy had been founded by Karl Popper, one of the
giants of analytic philosophy, and his influence was clearly visible. The qualities admired in writing here were clarity and concision, not empty rhetorical flourishes and baroque digressions.
And above all, people demanded evidence. No matter how obvious (or how weird) your opinions seemed to be, they were worth nothing unless you could back them up.
That’s when I began to realise, with growing alarm and shame, that I had never really asked myself what the evidence for psychoanalysis was! I had simply been carried along by the panache and stylistic flourishes of two great wordsmiths – Freud and Lacan – without pausing to ask the most important question of all: on what evidence did they base their far-reaching claims?
Shhhh.
