Who was Klaus Mollenhauer?

Posted on June 9, 2012 by friesenn

I’ve been working on the introduction for the translation of Klaus Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections (more info about the book here). Through the generous of Alex Aβmann, I’ve gotten a hold of some interviews and a photo (right). Some of the most interesting info is posted here:

We had a grand 8-room apartment… [and this] family household was at times overrun by escaped youth from [their imprisonment in] state “homes.” [While] my wife addressed some of their deeper insecurities, and answered their ongoing calls for breakfast, I would speak with student leaders about pedagogy and politics. [At other times, a young] Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin would carelessly burn holes in our upholstery with their cigarettes…[or] other young guests on LSD or hashish, lying around and listening to my music, would catch sight of me and ask: “What’s he doing here?”

Through this openness and activism, Mollenhauer would develop a favourable reputation among 1960’s activists as an engaged supporter of their sometimes radical attempts to throw off the shackles of previous generations. Indeed, the two troubled houseguests mentioned by Mollenhauer by name –Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin—were later to join Ulrike Meinhof (who Mollenhauer also knew) to form the militant Baader-Meinhof group or the Red Army Faction (RAF), which was later responsible for killings, bombings and a prominent political assassination in West Germany.

Mollenhauer’s thought and career is marked by a deep concern for social justice, and also by a profound tension between the inheritance from the past and the needs of the present..

.For more, see the introduction thus far (pdf).

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Phenomenology and Practice

Posted on May 10, 2012 by friesenn
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Classroom Screen Literacies

Posted on May 10, 2012 by friesenn
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Forgotten Connections

Posted on May 10, 2012 by friesenn
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(Re)Inventing the Internet

Posted on May 10, 2012 by friesenn
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What's the Learning in 21st Century Learning?

Posted on May 5, 2012 by friesenn

Preparing an abstract for a presentation at SFU’s Ed. Summer Institute, and have been inspired by Diskurse des Lernens(Discourses of Learning) by Käte Mayer-Drawe. Here’s my translation of a page from the introduction:

Learning begins… where and when that which is familiar loses its utility and that which is new is not yet useful: “when the old world is, so to say, abandoned, and a new one does not yet exist” (Mead). Its path leads not from shadows to the light; instead it brings one into the twilight, at a threshold between no longer and not yet. From a pedagogical perspective and in the strictest sense, learning is an experience. This is the central thesis of this book. As simple as this may sound, its implications are both subversive and anachronistic. Disruptions, difficulties and other inadequacies are unpopular, because frictionless, high-speed accommodation within a stress-free atmosphere is the ideal of our time; and in this context, a pedagogical theory of learning that focuses on inefficient uncertainties can have particular meaning. In a time where [instructional] technologies are used for the production of members of a globalized society, there is no room for any lack or absence. Accumulation is the decisive keyword; accommodation is the successful action.

It is the dictatorship of the machine which also determines our view of learning. Machines generally have nothing to gain when they enter into difficulties. Difficulties in this sense are only interruptions which must be eliminated. Maturana and Varela speak of perturbations, which bring about or resolve change, and which are themselves “determined by the structure of the perturbating system.” The structure of the organism determines what happens. Indeed, we are not absolutely different from machines, but we diverge decisively from them in that we profit from indeterminacy and that difficulty and loss actually makes us more knowledgeable. We know of the pain of thinking. “The unthought hurts because we’re comfortable in what’s already thought” (Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 20). (Mayer-Drawe, 2008, p. 15).

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CTheory – Jailbreaking the Perfect User Interface

Posted on April 18, 2012 by friesenn

Just published a paper on CTheory.net titled:

Doing with Icons makes Symbols; or, Jailbreaking the Perfect User Interface

Here’s a sample: “Mediation and technologies of mediation, whether the sign (Vygotsky), the symbol (Piaget), or the mirror or signifier (Lacan), all play central roles in accounts of human development and activity. They are not simply metaphors enabling, say, a particular conception of memory, perception or language — as is the case for Plato’s wax tablet, Descartes’ camera obscura or Chomsky’s computational “language organ.” Instead, media form the organizing principles for the psyche and its functions overall; they provide the pivotal moment for maturation and humanization — the point where human development allegedly diverges decisively from the animal to the human. But in these contexts, media are not simply the basis, cause or source of psychological phenomena; they are inextricable from and in a sense even constitutive of them.”

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Dewey's Cosmic Traffic: Politics and Pedagogy as Communication

Posted on April 11, 2012 by friesenn
Dewey’s cosmic traffic
[slideshare id=12240322&doc=deweyscosmictraffic-120401024713-phpapp02]
View another webinar from Norm Friesen

This is a set of slides and audio recording from the Media Transatlantic IV Conference in Paderborn. (Richard Cavell and I hosted Media Transatlantic III at UBC in 2010). (Apologies for the less than perfect audio.)

Here’s a draft version of the paper and below, an extended abstract:

Given the appearance and reappearance of this notion of transaction, interaction and communication across his writings, Dewey can be said to be an important and early contributor to discourses on “traffic” as an event and as a medium. His wide-ranging and gradually evolving thought offers an opportunity to see how various issues can be configured in terms of dynamic flow and circulation. These issues include the development of technical media that were profoundly reshaping nearly all aspects of everyday reality in Dewey’s time. Among these technical media are the railway and telephone, as well as the mass media of radio, film, newspaper and other print forms. As one would expect, Dewey frequently portrayed these as facilitating ever an ever-widening gyre in a larger, generative economy or medium.

At the same time though, Dewey was forced to address far-reaching critiques of communication in the political arena, which saw new media as distorting and blocking effective communication. In this presentation, I focus on Dewey’s remarks on media and circulation in both his 1927 book, The Public and its Problems, and in two early works, “The Primary-Education Fetich [sic]” and “Lectures vs. Recitations: A Symposium.” As McLuhan perceptively noted, “Dewey” was in effect “reacting against passive print culture [and thus] surf boarding along on the new electronic wave.” Through this examination, I show how Dewey is indeed, and perhaps unwittingly, riding along an electronic wave that was just beginning to well up in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Special Issue of Techné on my Article "Dissection and Simulation"

Posted on March 30, 2012 by friesenn

Robert Rosenberger (Georgia Tech) has put together a special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology based on my article on Dissection & Simulation: Transparency or Encumbrance? (draft).

This special issue contains articles or responses by Don Ihde, Albert Borgmann, Estrid Sørensen, Darin Barney, and Rosenberger himself, as well as my own response to them.

Available here are Rosenberger’s introduction and my own reply to the various responses:

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Friedrich Kittler’s “Forgetting:” The Whistler at the Gates of Morning?

Posted on March 22, 2012 by friesenn

I’ve tracked down a copy of an early paper by Kittler, titled “Forgetting” (1979). The translation appears to be quite good, except for the unfortunate rendering of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn as in the title, above. But this actually proves Kittler’s point: Despite the insistence of hermeneutics on the integrity of the work and of the author’s communication through it, the hermeneutic “work” was in Kittler’s time (and much more clearly today) overshadowed by the database, catalogue, archive, and algorithms of translation and organization. Increasingly, these are the only means of access, persistence, organization and retrieval for these works –via online catalogues, full text databases and the ubiquity of Google queries:

The person who draws up catalogues does not understand them any more than the person who uses them. A book list, a representation of the keys on a typewriter, or a telephone book do not constitute sentences, but statements. Catalogues are statements which make statements manipulable. And if the most frequently printed and the most frequently used books today are tables, inventories, circuit charts which only schizo[phrenic]s write or read from front to back, then [how can] hermeneutics, without question, takes as its point of departure that subclass of books that some people still write or read from front to back.

Kittler further argues that these books and instruments are imperfect, providing flawed representations of the information they organize –pointing the user to missing files or records, deleted Web pages and dead domain names. Forgetting, in other words, is one of their key functions –and it appears as similarly indispensable in the methodology outlined by Kittler in this remarkable piece.

From: Discourse. Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Nr. 3, 1981, 88-121

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