Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 19:54:58 -0600 From: Wynship Hillier <whi-AT-wenet.net> Subject: Re: Wynship's proposal Shawn P. Wilbur wrote: > Wynship, > > I guess i need to know more about how you envision this list functioning, > in terms of organization and goals. As i believe malgosia said when you > first approached the collective, we are most interested in lists of > limited duration and with fairly clear - if open - goals. We're also > concerned to see some thought put in in advance about the "rules of play" > and any special needs that we might have to provide software tools for. I'm a rank beginner in the area of running e-mail discussion lists and am hoping that you will, being experienced enough at this to be tired of it, have some suggestions. One thing I would like to do is require that the entrants read a list of works and submit an essay demonstrating some appreciation of them before being included in the list. This list would include some "basics" as well as authors more closely devoted to the subject matter. That would deter misunderstandings based on sheer ignorance which occur so often on these lists, and would hopefully contribute to the quality of the discussion. I think that the list would have to be advertised for some time before it started, such that enough interest could be found to have an adequate constituency at the beginning, and that it would be thereafter "closed" to new membership, at least until the next "round". > I'm afraid that, as opposed as we are to certain contemporary regimes of > utility, we still have to ask "why this list? what do you expect it to > accomplish?" And we have to ask you to do a bit of engineering of your > anti-engineering list. Let's call it desoeuvrement, rather than anti-engineering, firstly. The latter smacks of a sort of Neil Postman-style Luddism, and, as you pointed out, has metaphysical connotations. I see one of the major possibilities of the Internet being that of a sort of penny university, where people can attend lectures and become educated without the exorbitant monetary expenditure entailed in formal university study. Therefore, I would see this list as approximating a graduate seminar, where the participants can be expected to have appropriated a particular body of work in common, some of the participants have completed advanced study, and those people meet regularly over a specific period of time to discuss a certain work or range of works. Because of the egalitarian nature of e-mail lists, the discussion might have a more Frerian nature, meaning that we would be learning from each other and not just from an acknowledged authority. But the idea entails assigned reading and the completion of an assignment. In a discussion group I attended at Stanford University, each participant was asked to lead the discussion at the beginning of one of the meetings, by providing a summary of the material read that week (during which they would have devoted particularly careful attention to it), and formulating at least two questions about the work. Perhaps the focus should be, as it was there, on a particular work rather than a particular topic, which would dispense with the problem of misunderstanding the topic and arguing about its meaning or validity, which seems to have consumed much of the discussion on this list. So, rather than desoeuvrement, a reading of _The Space of Literature_ or _The Inoperative Community_ or _Visions of Excess_ or even _The Malady of Death_ would be the subject of the list. I know this has been tried without success, so again I defer to your greater experience as to how it might better work. I think that, if as much work were put into its production and advertisement as an academic seminar, that it could work. It would work even better if we could find an actual professor to head it up. Perhaps all of these ideas work against the dynamic of the internet, but I think it is time to exploit some of its more banal properties (i.e. very cheap telecommunication). In fact, we might want to compensate for the excesses of the Internet by allocating "post-points" each week. Every week, everyone gets a fixed number of post points which are used up when messages are posted to the list. Every week, you start over again. This will require that people economize in the number of their postings. They could also be used to incent people to economize on length. Perhaps some participants would get more points if they can demonstrate knowledge of more of the relevant works. Perhaps others would be cut from the list if they fail use a number of their points. Naturally, this would entail screening the messages, but I would be willing to do this once per day. > I also have a few specific concerns about how your fairly specific > reading of quite a number of texts and hegemonic discourses will > translate into a discussion dynamic for the list. I can't say that our > little proto-discussion here has been a smashing success. Can you tell us > whether you're looking to create a space where the possibility of > something like "anti-engineering" is put on the table for the full range > of explorations, or whether you have in mind the joint exploration of > some much more limited thesis? Judging from the results that the "full range" approach has produced on this list, I'd prefer the more narrow context of discussion, as described above. At Stanford, we were given 50 pages or so to read each week from a book, one book per quarter. That seemed to work well enough. Wynship Hillier, Incorporated by Wynship Hillier, President
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