Metablog

In keeping with the discourse of our last seminar, I thought I'd write a few, slaphazard thoughts about learning, education, pedagogy, etc. and the role that blogging has played so far in our class and to some extent our learning, at least from my perspective. I'm going to unashamedly announce that I'm all for this plural, dialogic type of learning for a few reasons. I should also probably admit that I'm very distrustful of mainstream, topdown schooling. If anyone has some spare time, read a few chapters of John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education. It probably has little relevance in this space but 'tis interesting at least.

One of the more interesting points raised in last week's seminar was that by our teacher/lecturer Melissa Hardie. Basically she mentioned that there was a tendency in this season's class to write in more academic, formal style. Which is probably true, my blogs so far, apart from a few exceptions, have been in some ways formal, if at least a bit more personal(mind, I don't think simply by using pronouns and inserting yourself into what you write makes it any less formal or academic, at least in terms of circulating ideas). What I will say though, is that the Internet in all of its forms is a site of social performance. That is, we upload pictures and comments and essays and hyperlinks in either the knowledge or the hope that someone will look at them. And like all good performers we perform to our audience. Which is each other and the teacher. Therefore I think the micro-environment these blogs occupy encourages us to write in a formal, albeit friendly, style. At least that's my feeling, one great thing is the kind of liberation you get writing these blogs. I think also though, and I know I've certainly felt it to begin with, there's a kind of performance anxiety (not in the sexual way but if blogs make you feel that there's probably some deeper psychological trauma happening somewhere) happening at an intellectual level. As someone mentioned in class, you can say throwaway sentence to sound well-informed safe in the knowledge that everyone will forget by the time you've stopped speaking, assuming they're paying attention to begin with. With a blog your thoughts are there, more or less permanently, present until you delete them.

Those are more or less my big (and probably unoriginal and ungood :P) ideas on blogging and how it works. Seeing as this is a blog on networking, and educational networking (although there are times when I think the whole point of being at University is to accumulate piles of nepotism to expend later when you graduate and need coin) and I am in a free associative mood, here's a link to Zadie Smith's review of The Social Network. Not that Facebook is a big part of this course so far, but we quite easily could have had single discussion group for this subject as opposed to seperate, disparate blogs. I'm glad we didn't mind, but that could quite easily have been an option.

Modernity, Vertov & The Priveleged Machine

One thing that struck about Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera and the modus operandi of the kinoks' manifesto was the unflinching priveleging of machine above man. I found something dehumanising about it all to be honest, particularly with statements like the following: "In an art of movement with have no reason to devote our particular attention to contemporary man....The machine makes us ashamed of man's inability to control himself....For his inability to control his movements, WE temporarily exclude man as a subject for film."  There just seems something odd with this "precise study of movement" Vertov seeks to achieve with his film. Particularly considering that the human figure is featured throughout the entirety of the film either on screen or implicitly behind the camera it seems to be a fruitless task to attempt to make some sort of robotic, perfectly precise form of movement. Maybe it's just that I find the repetitive labour of "saws dancing at a sawmill" aesthetically boring. I do think Vertov succeeds at one level however, mainly through his technique. The extreme manipulation of human figures, for example in the middle of the film when the camera is held on an image of an old woman, in an aesthetic sense transforms those figures into visual-machines manipulated and, in a sense, programmed by the film-maker. Or the images of the band at the beginning of Man With A Movie Camera frozen in time until the film-maker pushes a button. I think the angular style deployed by Vertov and the constant and quick juxtapositions of human figures and industrial machines blends the two, but it left me feeling disconcerted and, frankly, cold.

There was also something incongruous about the celebration of "the delight of mechanical labour" apparent throught Man With a Movie Camera. Vertov's use of Dutch angles and low-shots of various factories and machines gives them a sense of grandeur, elevating them literally and metaphorically. I think it's perhaps a class thing; it seems very easy and self-interested to aggrandize the repetitive toil of the factory worker from behind a camera lens at the top of a skyscraper. Vertov indeed was part of the agitation-propaganda arm of the Communist Party and this jingoistic sense of national pride which permeates the film, through the triumphant images of Soviet sportsmen and women and the slow zooms of Lenin and Marx towards the end,  made me feel uneasy. However, the early 20th Century was a pinnacle for the idea of the nation-state, so I suppose context should be taken into account. Still, in my viewing of the film I couldn't help but notice that the subtle overtones of nationalism were incongruous with the opening images of beggars and children waking in the street; I suppose for a son of Jewish intellectuals Romanticizing the simple life of a street urchin, at least through the visual art of cinema, comes rather easily. 

So I'll leave it there with a final question for anyone who happens to read this. Do you think that dehumanisation, on any level, is a symptom of modernity?