A carnival of gaffes

But let’s look at this hunt for errors from a more technical perspective. Or a more technological one, to put it otherwise. Or just from another perspective, pure and simple.

The example of the book reviews of last week doesn't make for an isolated phenomenon. Take a look at YouTube. It’s packed full of vigilant watchers who see mistakes in films and take great pleasure in sharing their findings. Best Fails. Greatest Mistakes. Funny Goofs. These are the titles that entertain the generation of faults: our generation.

Little they seem when regarded in isolation. But greatly they weigh when put together.One sees them and one criticizes. Or on the contrary, one sees them and one revels in the rise of all marginal genres, of which the fail is one of the most popular. The question remains at the centre of all this: What’s it with the hiccup, with the glitch, with the malfunction? What makes them so appealing, so exciting?

Possible answer: Maybe the lure of the power that’s crushing under its own weight. Or maybe something more technical, more, how should I put it, of our time.

The age of the non-expert

We need to see that things are changing around us, and in many regards. Formerly accepted methods, in knowledge as well as in technologies, have been falling short of their grandiose promises. They can no longer provide recipes to go by. They can no longer provide recipes, full stop. The world isn’t working the way it used to. Top to bottom is not the right trajectory anymore. Hierarchies (which are the very essence of traditional power, based on dissemination from above, on weighing down on the subaltern and on legalizing the utterance of the few against the argument of the many) are obsolete now.

Yes, this constant hunt for errors is the result of the new reality in which the non-specialist rules. It is the result of Web 2.0. The consumer turned into producer, the user turned into a manufacturer – these things have helped immensely the trend.
When the video cassette, and then the DVD player, were invented, they were praised primarily for one quality: the user's ability to go back and forth, a magical act permitted by the rewind and the fast-forward functions. That aspect has been immensely improved and further facilitated by Web 2.0, with its YouTube offspring and all the adaptations that ensued from it, which allows anyone with an internet connection to play with video or music files to their heart’s content. Add to that things like Netflix, or Igloo, and the picture becomes sharper. Access to mistakes is one of the many possibilities opened up by this unrestrained access to everything.

The more, the better

The issue is related, of course, to the general trend taking place in the online universe, where creativity has taken a sharp turn from creation to curation. Like all artists who take pride in their work, YouTubers find their own reserves of pride in the mashups they produce. Keeping things together is more important than pointing them out in isolation from each other. That's why the great hunt for mistakes is one that takes place in an ecosystem of its own, with cases upon cases making up the little universe of failures-on-record.

Source: Warren Fyfe

This seems, indeed, to be the case: the issue of recording, of having things on record, preserved (curated) in an effort to make a case for something. We seem to have learned rather well the techniques of argumentation taught to us as early as primary school: if you want to be credible you need to amass proof. The more, the better. Accumulation shows us the way, and this feels uncannily familiar. We must have seen it in another form, somewhere else. Maybe in the utilitarian logic based on the argument of quantity?

Errors can provide this reassurance of large numbers when they come about invasion-style. And by the looks of it they do seem to take up quite a lot of space; a lot of the generous space offered by the Empire of Data.

Going viral means growing fast

But there seems to be something else behind this abundance of failures, behind this carnival of gaffes.

Logic of nature: when abundance becomes apparent it generates movements of its own, interests that tip the ecosystem towards particular phenomena, to the detriment of others. Translated into human language, this theorem finds its materialization in the logic of profits. As long as the hunt for errors remains a local issue, it raises an eyebrow or two but nothing more. When the tendency becomes visible, though, when it goes viral, it calls for action. In that case, producing a piece of art riddled with errors makes perfect sense. Satisfying the pleasure of the hunters brings home the need to be in the limelight. In other words, there’s a lot to be gained from being talked about online. Good or bad, it matters not when the accountants start counting hits and data traffic. The most important thing now is to be seen, to be watched, to be shared, to be watched again, and to be shared and shared and shared ad infinitum. Value is nothing. Presence is all.

The fault in our stars (a narrative paraphrase)

There’s a pleasure we seem to take in looking for gaffes, for slip-ups. And that’s what I want to think about this week.

Source: Why to Read

When I started posting my book reviews on Zero to One I also started searching the net for others’ impressions on the same books. I simply want to know where I’m sitting compared to others. Something reviewers in general do, I’m told. It gives me/them a good feeling to know. Or so it should. What I’ve noticed, among other things, is that most book reviewers (and not just the anonymous bloggers that inhabit the vast expanses of the online desert, but also the ones who write for big papers and enjoy big audiences) take much pride in making known their dislikes. Especially their dislikes. And I don’t want to be trivial. I’m not accusing any of these reviewers of vanity. I’m only taking note of this trend.

Texts need space to breathe

There’s something essential that needs to be said, especially about prose writing: novels, essays, that kind of stuff. Not everything a writer says must be perfect! A lot could but not everything must, not everything can. I don’t know how many readers expect every given line to be the equivalent of a Mona Lisa to be put in a gilded frame and sent off to the nearest Louvre. But there seems to be quite a few of them out there who’re asking precisely for this.

Things, however, don’t work that way. They’ve never worked that way. Texts need breathing spaces. There are passages with a role as simple as their name suggests: they’re made to facilitate passage. That’s all they need to provide. Not explosive metaphors, not kerosene-like imagery to fire up one’s mind. If a book is good enough it will have plenty of those throughout its pages. But books, mind you, are not continuous displays of brilliance. Fueled on good ideas, which come always at intervals, books in general are made up of fits and starts. The reader has to be shaken out of their state of habituation with the text; they need to encounter surprise; they need to find gems strewn between parts made of base metal. There’s a good part here, another good part there, but most of what’s read is made to carry the plot, to fill the pipes that traverse a text.

Kernels and satellites, two elements of any narrative

Seymour Chatman has put together a whole theory of narrative structures, which is predicated precisely on this play with joints and juxtapositions. According to this theory, stories are made out of narrative blocks that follow upon each other. Within these blocks there are two crucial components, something that Chatman names, translating to a certain extent from Barthes, kernels and satellites. The terms should be pretty self-explanatory: kernels are cores, nubs, hearts, essences, while satellites are adjuncts, appendages, accessories. Think of kernels as the main actors in a film and of satellites as the supporting actors and the extras. The former make the limelight; they carry the message of the film’s narrative, they get the awards and the applause. The later are not so swell but they’re the mass that enable the protagonists to shine. In spite of their uncompromising differences, none of the two is possible without the other. In order to be the lead role one needs minor characters to wander around and fill the screen. At the same time, without the alpha character the minor ones have no reason to be.

When Chatman describes his theory in Story and Discourse, he makes it as clear as possible that the structure of a narrative requires a skeleton (a scaffolding, a framework, a pretext; something like the hardware of a computer) and the flesh that comes upon it (matter that makes the connections, a tissue, a context; a software, if you like).

“Kernels are narrative moments that give rise to cruxes in the direction taken by events. They are nodes or hinges in the structure, branching points which force a movement into one or two (or more) possible paths. Achilles can give up his girl or refuse; Huck Finn can remain at home or set off down the river; Lambert Strether can advise Chad to remain in Paris or to return; Miss Emily can pay the taxes or send the collector packing; and so on. Kernels cannot be deleted without destroying the narrative logic. In the classical narrative text, proper interpretation of events at any given point is a function of the ability to follow these ongoing selections, to see later kernels as consequences of earlier.”

To Chatman, kernels are some kind of signposts. They signal where the story could have become something else. They are also nubs where the story turns out to be hanging on mere threads. It’s with kernels that one becomes aware of structure as such. Satellites, however, are context-dependent; they are peripheral elements, the role of which is to cover the kernels, to make them invisible so as to create the illusion narratives are famous for.

“A minor plot event – a satellite – is not crucial in this sense. It can be deleted without disturbing the logic of the plot, though its omission will, of course, impoverish the narrative aesthetically. Satellites entail no choice, but are solely the workings-out of the choices made by the kernels. They necessarily imply the existence of kernels, but not vice versa. Their function is that of filling in, elaborating, completing the kernel; they form the flesh on the skeleton.”

To put it otherwise, in Twitter-like terms, strictly speaking a novel’s plot can be shorthanded into one sentence fairly easily. The essence doesn’t take much space. What happens beyond it is what comes as a surplus to the framework on which the novel is built. All that meat covering those bones is there to make the transition between the skeleton’s parts possible. Without the connecting tissue, the kernels would remain isolated, visible, ugly.

Navigating with satellites

I’m going to exaggerate here, but truth is we need to take these things (the fits and starts of stories) as what they are, so as not to demand a shining armor from something that’s meant to be rags.

With poetry yes, things are different. From poetry we have the right to expect perfection, because poetry is precisely the quest for faultlessness. In a poem, every line and every word must be taken seriously. The distinction between kernels and satellites is irrelevant in most of the poetic genres (with the unsurprising exception of the so-called narrative poetry, whose very title says it all). A poem is a kernel in itself. It can be read in isolation, even when the reader is aware of the poet’s oeuvre and where they can make the necessary connections between different poems, between different themes.

But the point of this post was to bring about the issue of the guilty pleasures we experience when we come across imperfections. The danger of exercising this pleasure is easy to identify: if one moans about the parts that aren’t that essential (which, unfortunately, happens very often – or at least in a lot of the cases I’ve seen so far) one risks missing the point. The point, i.e. the kernel. Outside the point one navigates with the satellites; one looks at the secondary; one looks at what could be taken out without affecting the structure.

Let’s do something wrong!

Last week I talked about garbage – the waste of writing, the stuff that’s condemned never to be encountered by the reader. But there were things that went unsaid in that post: my own garbage, of course. The part I took out was about mistakes: writing, reading, and the way mistakes intrude to mess them up. Or do they, really?

In order to arrive at these mistakes, I think I need to take the usual detour, which will prove to be of some importance later on. Critical reading: that’s what I’m thinking of. The two things go hand in hand, don’t they? Critical attitude and reading. Only a type of reading that is critical in nature can bring to light that which we take to be a mistake. Do you remember your years in high school or college, when you had to produce an argumentative essay? What was the thing that you were most likely to do? Read the original text with the intention of finding a flaw in it. A flaw serious enough to warrant the grunt in your response. A mistake that could not go untreated.

Source: JTM Games

That kind of reading, which placed critical unrest before and above everything else, was meant to develop one’s ability to judge. So they said, remember? But there was something else at work as well. Through the cultivation of this critical spirit, you were being trained into the profession of academic reading. It made sense, didn’t it? You were in school, not in a factory. You had therefore to learn how to read, write, and think the way schools read, write, and think.

But schools teach almost always through mistakes. Remember your teacher’s comments on the margins of your essay? That’s what I mean.

The critical profession

Critical reading is characteristic to the academia the way cleaning a pipe is characteristic to plumbing. What I mean by this is that it only makes sense to exercise your critical abilities if you read with an academic mind, or in order to impress (we say ‘interact with,’ or ‘find a channel of communication with,’ but it means the same thing!) another academic mind. That's like saying that you can only clean a pipe if you have the authority vested in you by the profession of plumbing. Once escaped from the confines of the academia, your reading turns into something else: something that is no longer limited by the predicaments of that profession. Once you’re outside of school, you discover that reading can take place without rules and neat margins; you discover that it can be full of garbage. And you like it, in 9 cases out of 10; the way you like not knowing what could cause a pipe to block. Ignorance is bliss, as they say, and the saying seems to be equally applicable to readers and plumbers.

All this has one major reason: being an academic is a profession, and critical reading is the major outlet of this occupation. (As for the plumbing profession, I'll let the knowledgeable ones say it in their own words.)

Let’s see if that makes sense.

When the professionals of critical reading are asked about the practicality of their profession, they spit scorn back at you. And that is precisely the response of a professional, since all professionals spit scorn when it comes to questioning the purpose of their actions. There is always a literal, fundamentalist, dogmatic reference to the letter of the profession (to what constitutes its purpose, to what warrants its lunacies, to how important it is in the context of human experience).

Based on this, one thing needs to be said: professionals are not flexible. Why? Because they are bound by their guild to defend the territory of their profession and to scorn all attempts at defamation – of which the world is full, since the world is made up of other professions too.

Mistaken?

Yet there’s another thing about professionals: they tend to have words of criticism to utter about others in their own line of duty. And this is where we get closer to what I wanted to talk about: mistakes.

I have spoken to plumbers who, instead of giving me the straight answer about what had gone wrong with the drainage in my house, spoke about the insufficient professionalism of the plumber who did the job before. To professionals, there’s always something to criticize in the past of others. Not their own past – let’s be clear about this: always the past of others. The past in general is always flawed with them. A true professional lives in a continuous present, where the only thing that’s worth the penny of everybody’s attention is their present practice: the way they perform here and now. This immediacy of professionals is due, I believe, to the fact that they are task-driven. They don’t just choose what’s next. They don’t do what they want, but what needs to be done – what the world requires of them.

Source: Boomer to Gen-Y (and Gen-X)

But what’s very, very important is that the task itself depends on something bad having happened before. Let’s admit it: without a mistake there’s no task; without something wrong there’s no need for something good to be done to right it. Without an incomplete story there cannot be a sequel. Without a wrong theory there’s no need for a scientist to test his own. Therefore, the past has to be bad. Whether they succeed or not, the actions of a ‘fixer’ are expected to lead to an improvement, to a change in the wrong course of things. That’s why the intervention of a specialist, insofar as they are fixers-of-things, takes up an almost heroic aura.

Hunting for errors

Similar to plumbing, critical reading has its own professional fief. Academics will think of their work as significant in the present, while at the same time highlighting the insufficiency of their predecessors. In an academic dissertation or peer-reviewed article worth their title, there is a very clear demand for the assessment of previous work, which is expected to appear as incomplete. It is within the gap left uncovered by the predecessor that academic readers place their own performance. In this regard, the academic reader is by definition a fixer: a plumber of texts, a professional promising to provide the actual way of doing things.

The major task, here as in the case of plumbers, is to find that mistake, that shortcoming. An academic who writes his or her article is demanded (by professional rules, by peer-reviewing eyes, by colleagues and readers) to drill a hole into their field of expertise and plant inside it the seed of their own argument. In order for that seed to catch roots, it has to enjoy the photosynthesis of a well-discovered mistake.

Source: Odd Job Nation

Not long ago, I read a seemingly innocent article with a seemingly complicated title: “Promotional(meta)discourse in research articles in language and literary studies.” To take it to its nitty-gritty, the article is about how academics pitch themselves by downgrading others. It talks about “boosterism” and “self-advocacy” – two terms that speak for themselves. These may be only self-marketing techniques, the way they’re usually employed by professionals (doesn’t Pepsi thrive on showing how different it is from Coca Cola?). But behind the whole marketing thing, behind the pretentious assertion that irreverence is necessary if what you want is progress, lies the truth of The Mistake: this unavoidable engine that stands at the roots of everything.

Everything, really – you may ask? Of course, I say. Think no further than Adam and Eve and you’ll see what I mean.