repost rewrite rethink

today I'm revisiting a lot of old writing-- not really for any reason, just because. I always think there's possibilities for remix in a lot of those old notebooks. my 13- 18- and 24- and 37-year old selves wrote a lot. mostly questions. in retyping it, I get to half-remember the past and half-imagine it through a bunch of differently-colored lenses. what if it weren't my past self writing, but an excessively introspective character in an epic science fiction novel?

who knows what will become of it. 

on top of the notebooks, there are these digital writing spaces too. so many of them.

for randomness and miscellaneous academic commentary.
for studying abroad.
for an independent study course.
for studying abroad again.

who knows when I shall next get to go abroad. in the meantime, I can continue sifting through old posted snippets from myself, re-framing and remixing them however I might feel like it. present me has new thoughts to add. and editorial scissors with which to cut things up.

 

I failed to take any photographs of all the signs I noticed in Edinburgh eight years ago now, so all I can give you are brief descriptive sketches of the plain sandwich boards propped up under glossy window grates or simple laminated sheets of paper zip-tied onto open window shutters, all declaring "wet paint" and implying "please don't touch or smudge or disturb this area."

in Cockburn Street there was a man on a ladder, with bucket and brush, putting in a few lines of bright pink detailing behind the words "Pie"and "Sky" above a shop door. he was not accompanied (when I saw him at least) by any printed "wet paint" notice. his presence (and the ladder's) was enough of a warning, and perhaps the height of his hand-painted sign would exempt it from the need of any other.

all these signs, linguistic or not, are a subtle and temporary form of crowd control. I have noticed plenty of other methods, less subtle, but presumably almost as temporary, for reasons beyond wet paint: airport hallways halved by plywood enclosures, whole streets closed off and walkways blocked by aluminum fences or orange cones. during my time in Manchester, a makeshift sidewalk diversion over/around a new tramway construction site seemed to shift several feet every time we walked that way. men in orange vests and hard hats milled about, posted signs instructed cyclists to dismount and take especially care. having recently read and written about Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, I started breaking all of these situations down using three technological categories: the material (the fences, the ramps, ladder, paintbrush, the strewn-about tools), the social (our training in walkways, the significance of orange vests and brawny workmen, our polite obedience to posted notices), and the literary (the language and color of the posted signs themselves).

where else, how else, might we reverse engineer this three-ingredient recipe of material, social, and literary technologies? they seem to be everywhere. technical and professional writing combine them all in the most diverse ways whenever machines/tools/material tech + groups of audiences all need to work together using language and rhetoric.

because not everyone understands everything about everything. an obvious claim to make, right? 

obvious, and perhaps even truer in our massively global and ultra-specialized 21st-century times. modern life involves (could we even say depends on?) some things being mysterious to some people but not to others; specialization allows us to safely ignore a lot of stuff in favor of becoming an expert in a more manageable amount of stuff.

and with specialization and globalization come standardization. rules. expectations. conventions. if someone else is making all the nuts and bolts and screws, we better make sure those bits are all some sort of proper, expected size, so the everything everyone else is an expert in can fit together with the slice of everything that I am an expert in.

 

such standardization, according to Andrew Feenberg, author of all the essays in Between Reason and Experience, is a black-boxing process-- a way of bundling up a lot of decisions and values and maybes so we can hide them behind a curtain. once an Official Standard forms, it tends to become an unquestioned, unexamined packet in the three-ring-binder of the Way Things Are. it becomes infrastructure. it becomes almost invisible.

it's fun to look around at all networks and all infrastructure-- and even bigger things like paradigms and ideologies-- as black boxes. these background standards and expectations are at work in and on the way life happens (or doesn't), but we don't often notice them, much less look inside them. that's someone else's job. I don't need to think about or questions that stuff too much-- especially if some complicatedly venerable, official, voted-on ruling put it there. once that happens, it’s settled. the chosen system becomes dominant and invisible. so easy to ignore. or forget entirely. or lose without even realizing it, even when it seemed so normal and essential once upon a time.

I inherited a sackful of various craft things from my grandmother a few years back when we moved to Arizona; among the familiar crochet work and skeins of cute yarn was a yellow plastic tatting shuttle.

tatting is about to become a lost art, probably. I have made only the barest attempts to un-black-box it for myself. it is one among many, many summer craft projects (as you may be able to tell from my instagram lately).

how much do I need to know to be inside the black box? even if you spend hours on YouTube trying to learn how to tat... will it ever mean that you really get it? thinking and watching are not the same as experiencing, doing, being.

 

does the antique spinning wheel I acquired last week count as a black box? to me two weeks ago, I think it did. I've learned a whole bunch since then-- reading diagrams for terminology, watching videos for processes and techniques, and of course interacting with its material pieces to get a feel for how they work. I am climbing inside the no-longer-black-box of old spinning wheels. it's pretty fun.

but I can't climb into every black box I happen to notice on the side of the street, can I?

 

so I continue to wonder. when does it become our job to un-black-box the world around us? and when can we leave the black boxes alone to trustworthily feed us electricity or news or legislation? I can't answer that for anyone. I hope people take all the opportunities they can to question the things that seem to have been settled and handed down, especially if they were handed down to you by some complicatedly venerable, allegedly sacred, self-professed moral authority. there is value in asking "how did it get to be that way?"

 

here's an example: NPR's Throughline podcast tracing how abortion even became the never-ending political crusade it seems to be today. very much worth a listen.