Cities' loss

The world lost a great lady yesterday. Urban theorist Jane Jacobs died at the age of 89.

I read her most famous book this past semester, Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her thesis is that the path to a vibrant city life can't be planned and developed in a sterile academic thinkers' context. Rather, in order to understand how a city should be, planners must pay attention to the everyday lived reality of everyday city-dwellers. She showed how and why a vibrant street life is more important than parks, why bars and restaurants that operate into the wee hours are vital to the health of a neighbourhood, and why large apartment buildings surrounded by green space do not work.

Her writing is down to earth and her style sparse, uncomplicated. And she loved Toronto just as much as I do.

RIP Jane.

Crossing the finish line

I wrote and finished my last exam at 10:49 this morning. So I’m done. And not done as in just finished this semester, but done as in finished this degree entirely.

Wow

Getting a degree was a dream for me, for as long as I can remember actually. I wanted to be the first person in my family to do this and it would seem I have. Never again can I be passed over for a promotion because I don’t have a uni degree, or told I can’t be hired/shouldn’t be hired just because I don’t have that piece of paper.

Of course when I started it, I had no idea it would consume me so, would become my new raison d’etre. Although, I suppose those who know me well aren’t that surprised, for it isn’t like me to settle for the easy stuff. Once I figured out that I was good at this whole academic thing and that
here was a place where I could make a living out of everything I’m good at – writing, presenting, mentoring/teaching, selling, thinking big thoughts, deconstructing social life, observing humans.

But as of today, April 24, 2006, my BA in Sociology at Concordia is finished. Completed. Done. Over in all but the formality of conferring the piece of paper on me at a ritual in June.

Wow.

Now what?

Marxist invasion

You know you're reading too much social theory and doing too much academic style thinking/writing when every time you open your mouth to speak, one of the following phrases or words pops out... :

That's just instrumental production.

It's all about alienation of your species being!

Yeah but the patterns of sociality don't lend themselves to that analysis.

Capitalist production within patriarchy says...

I think I need some brain down time....

Women and work

What is it about Lent and Easter that brings all the stories about women's lives out into the popular media?

Over breakfast this morning in the Montreal Gazette, I read that Canadian women are increasingly rejecting the workforce, despite a 30-year record low unemployment rate of 3.9% and strong demand for workers of all ages and stripes. Then Arts & Letters Daily tells me about this Economist article which states that women are the new power of the global economy. While the obvious tone of the Economist article seems positive and affirming, the underlying message is still that women bring their situation on themselves.

End of the real and the social

I got asked today what I'm working on right now (the person knew I had a bunch of stuff due in the next ten days). I'm researching theory for a paper for my senior contemporary social theory course (This would have been a required sociology course had I actually stayed around another year to do an honours degree so I took it because, well, I'm weird...nahhh just a self-professed theory geek).

The question:

Baudrillard talks about "the end of the real". What is the importance of this idea in for modern social theory?

As I delve into various Baudrillard writings and look at some of the analysis and critiques of his ideas, I find that the original notion I had on how to answer this question may hold up but there is another, more interesting way to approach it, albeit potentially more dangerous in terms of getting a good mark.

I know that the stock answer for this is that the death of the real is a standard postmodern position. The pomo view sees the real as Reality, an objective bit of fiction posited by the Enlightenment project. Along with the death of truth and subjectivity a la Foucault, the grounds on which the real was advanced were based in the desires and agenda of the E project: the need to establish a rational, liberal set of values that humans could strive to embody in their lives. Thus, along with Truth, Reality and Subjectivity comes Reason, Logic and the big one, Science. The latter work together to create and maintain the ultimate metadiscipline that wraps up all of these into a nice logical metapackage of thought and practice.

Postmodernism argues that the Holocaust is an example of how the modernity project never really got off the ground. The overt rationality and aims of science are illogical and irrational. In the strong pomo position, the argument is that the Real never was real; there is no objective reality, there is only situated and contingent subjectivity. Therefore, attempting to understand and describe that reality is simply an exercise in promotions of second, third and fourth order simulations and interpretations of simulations.

But! I see a more interesting explanation within Baudrillard for the question. Given that the question asks me to relate the death of the real to modern social theory, the more intriguing response would be to ground it in the illusion that there is a social around which one can theorize. Baudrillard argues that the social doesn't exist, never existed. Given this, the inferiority complex that the field of sociology suffers as it attempts in vain to scientize itself becomes understandable. Because not only is science not really scientific, but the social isn't really anything anyway. If there is no actual science around which to theorize, nor a society within which to situate analyses and arguments, then any attempts to create social theory as master narratives, as both environments and tools of scientific discourse, are deeply and profoundly deluded.

So the death of the real means not only the death of the social, but a complete negation of the social. If the real never was, then any theorizing about a society within it is useless posturing and dreaming. No society = no theory possible about it. It all becomes a collective and collaborative dream/nightmare.

Postmodern geek gear

While taking a break from understanding Baudrillard's concept of the "end of the real" for a cultural theory end-of-semester paper, I came across this laser keyboard. It is projected onto any flat surface, turning the surface into a keyboard.

How appropriate a piece of geek gear, given my topic!

Policing my style

Perhaps it is because I'm in the thick of writing a paper and I know that four more must follow this one. That might explain why any discussions of language, vocabulary, style and usage are interesting and relevant-feeling to me right now.
That might be why, then, that Howard Richler's Speaking of Language column in today's Montreal Gazette jumped out at me as a "must read" and then got me thinking about my real and perceived transgressions vis-a-vis the subject of the column.

The column is about the misuse of the phrase "Thanks to"... and Richler eloquently argues that it is a phrase that is getting overused. But worse -- it is being used wrongly.

Since you can't read the article without buying the paper itself (paper or digital), I'll reproduce the relevent part of it here.

(Usual copyright and disclaimers apply)

Ursula Chautems wrote: "I wince whenever I see the expression 'thanks to' in recent texts. Two examples from The Gazette are: 'Thanks to an increase in taxes, residents' disposable income has shrunk'; and 'Scientists say that the hurricanes may have redrawn the coastal map permanently, thanks partly to human attempts to control the forces of nature.' But I really flipped when I read in a major Canadian women's magazine, 'Thanks to a bout with breast cancer, she had to temporarily abandon her job.'

"I wrote to the editor-in-chief and asked her how such a thoughtless sentence could have been tolerated. She informed me that like other newspapers and magazines, they conformed to the style book which, as she told me, lists 'thanks to' as possible substitutes for 'due to' and 'because of.'

"I wrote back and told her that a style book had no brains and could not be expected to differentiate between emotionally charged expressions and that the people who followed its rules so blindly obviously did not have the necessary brains either to ask themselves the simple question: 'What is there to be thankful for?' before writing 'thanks to.' I mentioned as an example that I myself was a breast cancer survivor and that this ridiculous way of writing had really hit a nerve, when 'because of ... breast cancer' would have been the obvious alternative and would still have been sanctioned by their universal God, the style book.

I wonder whether editors and writers are grabbing the shortest expression they can find in the style book without examining its effect on their text. What exactly is that all-powerful 'style book' that appears to be the ne plus ultra of modern editors and writers?"

I'm self-conscious about this now. Makes me wonder...if I write here, "Thanks to Richler, I'll be paying closer attention to my use of the phrase from herein"...am I doing what he is disparaging? Or am I correct?

Oh! The things I think about when I am procrastinating from what I'm supposed to be thinking about...

Gestures (mis)interpreted?

As I attempt to extract myself from the apparently infinite amount of thought and theory written on the topic of modernization, industrialization and economic development in the Third World, so that I can actually get on with writing my term paper on the topic, I'm struck by the sheer quantity of it all. It would seem to me that no one person would ever be able to read everything good and pertinent to their areas of interest and expertise!

And it is here then, when my own in-built tendency towards collaboration clashes with the hierarchies built into academia. Upon discovering an article that a colleague would appreciate, my natural tendency would be to forward a copy of it or at least a link to it to the person, with a little note explaining why I think this might be useful to them. As a collaborative tactic, this always seemed appreciated in business, back when I was a working professional in the corporate world.

Yet, as I have discovered, there are a lot of academics, professors and students alike, who take this as an affront to their capacity to cope with the knowledge available to them. No matter how humbly and gently I write that little accompanying note, the responses I get back almost invariably demonstrate that my truly altruistic gesture has been taken as one of three types of apparently deliberate (on my part) insults:

1. Implication/insinuation that the person can't cope on their own without my help, and so outrage ensues.
   
2. Dismissal because they've already read it, of course, why wouldn't they have? (How little I know!)
   
3. Misunderstanding as to why this thing even applies to them, because their area of research isn't that at all (as I would apparently know if I'd paid any attention to them at all).

When this is compounded by my almost Pavlovian desire to share equally with people in all strata of academia, including my own professors in existing and past courses, the resulting state for me as I attempt to decide what to do is one of profound confusion, desire and care.

So as I sit here tonight, reading an amazingly rich and cogent account of modernization, development and aid history and concepts from a rather obscure little Human Geography journal Geografiska Annaler, I am struggling with my own compulsion to send the link to it to my professor and explain why I find it so powerful and necessary. What if he misinterprets my intent?

This, then, is politics of academia that I have to start learning to manage, even in such seemingly simple collegial gestures.

Grup is me

So here I am, heading into April, 2006, the last month of my undergraduate degree. I have ten or so more assignments and tests to do, then it's over. Done. Finished. Completed. One more checkmark on the list of accomplished dreams in my life.

Next up? Grad school. Okay yes my 38th birthday then grad school.

It got me to thinking - given my soon-to-be new age, school and city, do I equally have to present a new me? At the age I'm about to be, is it time to start looking it? I always said I'd never cut off my hair into one of those short haircuts women all over Canada do sometime around their 35th birthday. And I haven't.

But when I look into my wardrobe these days, one year post-retirement, I really have to laugh. What a difference a year makes. There is not a suit in sight. I don't know when I last wore pantyhose, and I think I may own one winter skirt, a short green corduroy thing that hasn't left my closet since the day I found it at Old Navy for $5 and brought it home and hung it up. My wardrobe is a consistent blending of a dozen pairs of jeans and corduroy jeans, along with a few dozen short and long-sleeved t-shirts in white, blue, green, brown and black. Throw in some sweatshirts, a bunch of yoga pants and workout wear, all the requisite socks and undies and bras... then peek on over at my collection of sneakers and flipflops in all the colours of the rainbow, and it quickly becomes clear to anyone that the closet belongs, not to a business professional, but rather... to a teenager?

See, that's the thing. I dress young. I feel young, so I dress young. And I'm told it works on me. But how much longer can it work? Being on campus every day, I am certainly influenced by what I see around me. And so I buy what I know. I'm comfortable being casual.

Again, does that need to change?

According to Adam Sternbergh, over at New Yorker magazine, the answer is a resounding "not necessarily". And it doesn't have to change because, apparently, there is a name for a person like me, in their late 30s, who's chucked over the corporate world to go out and find a better life for myself, that involves travelling and summers off and being passionate about one's work. Oh and a wardrobe full of jeans and tshirts.

There is a name and an entire socioeconomic class coming up. They're grups.

And Grup is me too. In a way. Probably. We'll see....