Pleasure & Learning

So, first a suggestion of five, often overlapping, "motivating forces": pleasure, survival, obligation, strategy and habit. I'm sure you can find ways that all of these support learning in some ways, but I'm going to zero in on pleasure for the moment.

Another disclaimer - I'm thinking about the question of "what motivates learning?" in general to some extent, but mostly drawing on preparation for an academic career.

Now, to get even more schematic, let's go to three kinds of pleasure that could go along with learning -

1. Autonomous Pleasure
The pleasure that is often figured as most ideal. It is the pleasure that arises spontaneously from the activity of learning. It is the immanent pleasure of the learning experience. It is like the pleasure of loving.
2. Social Reward
This is the pleasure that comes from social feedback loops as the learner masters or accomplishes something. It is the pleasurable reception of a goldstar, an A-plus, a field-trip privilege, a fellowship, a vigorous applause at the end of a presentation, a sense of respect and admiration from those around you.
3. Tension and Release
The pleasure that comes only after completing a stressful project. This resembles one of Freud's models of sexual arousal and satisfaction - that the initial stage is one of excitation, a stimulus whose contact causes a condition of tension that is unpleasant as well as pleasurable (as evidenced for Freud by the desire to linger in that state of tension rather than immediately move to orgasm). Writing a paper can be like this.

Compassion and Scholarship

One way to think of ethics is as self-consciously endorsed explanations or guides for behavior, at least intended behavior. Like any behavior we tend self-reflect upon, scholarship has its ethics. Yet discussions about the ethics of scholarship seem to be rather rare or narrow, even though you might think academics are just the sorts who ask such abstract questions regarding everyday activity. Perhaps scholars in general are loathsome to critically examine their own practices and routines beyond "method." Talk about "academic integrity" usually boils down to a rather simplistic set of laws about not fudging data/facts or plagiarism.

But certainly there are a lot more ethical questions we can ask about scholarship. For many there is an implicit ethic that the scholar tries brings to the fore those experiences that tend to be most marginalized or purposively hidden or excluded from public view. That's certainly a principle that guides me in what I'm looking for while reading as well as thinking about my own work. Yet I think this ethic would be more robust if scholarship was more often seen as something that can be guided by an ethic of compassion. Compassion, to me, is a good-willed curiosity oriented towards the unknown or the other. Compassion is a response to a confusing and undeniably cruel world that affirms a faithful commitment of goodwill to what might be a groundless existence. Compassion need not rule out all suspicious or revolt against oppression, though I think it does place goodwill and care first.

More than anything, an ethos of compassion might make academic dialogues more comfortable spaces to be for people of different knowledge backgrounds. My guess is that one cause of anti-intellectual attitudes is the well-known tendency of academics is to either take the potentially condescending attitude towards someone as a student or pounce on perceived ignorance with scorn and quick judgment. An ethic of compassion may help us work out a cooperative ethos rather than making so many academic discussions sounds like rounds at a debate tournament.

Environmental Energy

According to various media sources, from advertisement to health magazines to co-op newsletters, energy comes from certain consumables, from protein shakes, ginsing supplements, low-carb diets, wheat-free non-dairy raw-foods diets, or if you really want to unleash the beast without delay, you can get yourself a carbonated energy cocktail. From other sources, you might hear that exercise is really the way to go, and that its squats and swimming and ab crunches several times a week that will really get your juices flowing.

Images of either food or exercise as the sources of energy makes it seem like energy is something that people store up in their individual little tanks to later fuel biological engines. Now, I believe diet and exercise can help people feel more energetic. I've started putting a least one organic carrot in all my lunches, and I try to get to the gym a couple times a week. But as someone really seeking more energy, I've turned more of my attention to energy as something that comes from interaction with my environment. I'm trying to ask myself specifically what are the situations: simulate, inspire and call forth my effort. This energy can come from interactions with art, nature or architecture (a little credit to feng shui). But more than anything, individual energy is social. Even something as mythically lonely as writing, I see as largely motivated by networks of social energy. Without some sort of positive social feedback, it's hard to imagine that most anyone would be motivated to produce anything they do beyond what's necessary for subsistence.

Research Identity Statement

I'm in a class where we're been asked to write a statement on our research identity in terms of: 1. our disciplinary/scholarly affiliation (media studies, rhetorical criticism, etc)
2. our method (historiography, comparative, social science, etc)
3. why were're interested in our topic.

I'm still fumbling around trying to find the topics that really inspire me, and the above template presupposes a fixed "identity" and compartmentalization that doesn't really fit the kind of way I'd like to talk about my work. Yet, still I found this a very helpful exercise - it's pointed me towards refining some research questions and thoughts on approach.

Here's my statement as-is:

I am a media studies scholar investigating the role that media technologies and institutions play in cultural shifts and ideological transformations. I am particularly interested in contemporary activists and critics of neo-liberalism and their relationships with media institutions. Some of the questions I ask include: What groups of people do these activists try to influence and through what media do they communicate? What role do media institutions play in constructing the possibilities for such communication? How do certain practices of activists groups that fall outside the normative uses of mass media, such extralegal media appropriations or creating alternative media sites, affect relations between activists and media institutions? Through this research I seek to articulate the kinds of media practices that have been or might be successful in affecting cultural transformation. I am also seeking ways to participate in cooperative research/praxis projects with media activists.

Imagine all the bloggers . . .

When I was in an AmeriCorps program based in Denver, I heard an interesting story about a fellow corps member, Chris. He was on another team and I knew him only slightly as a sharp and somewhat enigmatic guy, but what I learned intrigued me even further. Chris was a writer and kept a prolific journal. What made his journal-keeping practices peculiar was what happened whenever he finished a volume -- he would go to the phonebook in Albuquerque, Tulsa, Milwaukee, or wherever his team was located, choose a random address, and send the lucky household his journal with no return address. He wouldn't even make a copy for himself. All his most intimate observations and accounts of feelings and experiences would end up in the possession of a complete stranger. I speculate that odds weren't too good that most of his journals avoided the fate of the graveyard of most modern things, the landfill. Yet I can only try to imagine the joy of those curious few who unexpectedly found the eccentric mind of a 22 year old in their mailbox one day. Perhaps some of them are still waiting in hopeless suspense for a sequel that will never arrive.

This was in 2002, before I had heard of the blogging phenomenon. At the time it was still possible for me to believe there would be something powerfully transcendent about diary sharing. Earlier that year I had been writing in my journal in a coffee shop in Albuquerque, a city I only planned on staying for a few weeks for a project, when I saw a young woman furiously writing in hers. She wrote in an unusual pattern, from bottom to top. Like me, she would pause between bursts of writing and look up with an expression on the stretched-out moment of hesitation before a sigh or smile. With the same passion, but different end in mind, of a sudden erotic desire, I wanted to read her journal. I wanted to propose a swap for an hour – what could possibly be a more intimate moment between two people who would never see each other again? But the standard social inhibition and concern about the creepy appearance of such a proposal, snuffed out another potential experience.

Now however if I want to peer into other’s minds and lives in such a way, I need not wait for a random journal show up in my mail or until the moment seems just right to make such a proposition at a coffee shop. I can simply do a random search on livejournal or scores of other blogging sites. Of course, blogs will not be written with the same lack of self-consciousness as diaries (and diaries themselves always presume some form of presentation and performance; while “public” and “private” are too bluntly overzealous as clear and distinct categories, it’s fair to say that the shift from diary to blog moves in the direction of public consciousness, tho perhaps also as something more ephemeral). Optimistic and pessimistic fantasies of where this shift could lead

- Imagine this utopia: Everyone in the world is a blogger (yes, there is no digital divide in this utopia). People write in their blogs as they do now in diaries or journals. In the first phase of this utopian transformation, all blogs are anonymous. Through random and strategic searches, you can swerve through the inner-most thoughts of all people, crossing boundaries of age, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. Your empathy for the diversity of the people of the world becomes immense. You hear the intimate testimony of those who have been victimized as well as the guilt of those who have committed the crimes. You live in two worlds - one where people keep up all the fronts of confidence, certainty and absolute rightness as they do in terrestrial social life, then there is the blogosphere where all that is suppressed in terrestrial life is displayed most prominently

- “Private” diaries and journals were the last holdout where people could develop skills for articulating and reserve space for telling their most idiosyncratic, vulnerable and socially alien impulses and thoughts. Blogs may cover the same topics as diaries did in the past, but now under the gaze of social judgment. In the blogosphere, the defenses of wit and stylistic imperatives of the social must never be let up on, and thus these rules dig themselves deeper into our subjectivities. The truly idiosyncratic and socially defenseless imagination becomes submerged even deeper in the sea of silence.