The Banana Peel Project

There’s no right way to do intellectual work. The ages-old dichotomy between reason and intuition or logic and passion or whatever is another one of those binaries that we’re taught to accept and love, but it’s just not there.

First, check this excerpt out:

The definitions and examples offered here are by necessity simplifications; there is a place for power in the study of communication and culture just as there is a place for semiotics in the study of social force. This requisite abstraction of the three perspectives, however, serves to illuminate what is perhaps their most important aspect: The lack of a straightforward set of negative definitions, or the lack of a clear set of criteria by which to determine what each perspective is not, suggests that the perspectives are not useful as analytical bins into which we may casually toss theories or methodologies. Rather, it is far more useful to consider them as axes, united at a common origin (the communication of information) but each with a distinct set of questions, along which to trace evolving research paradigms.

My own interests bridge the domains of cultural and symbolic communication. My own analytical perspective is strongly rooted in cybernetics, a tradition that seeks to understand technology in its role as an extension of the human mind. Technologies of simulation hold particular appeal for me as objects of study, as their rapidly expanding deployment in scientific and popular cultural settings pose a variety of questions about the symbolic correspondence between experience and reality, the role of material technologies in constructing meaning, and the way that science is communicated in popular culture. My developing understanding of simulation is rooted simultaneously in Baudrillard’s concept of the map that precedes the territory (the notion of “hyperreality”) and in a more practically based appreciation for the distributed processing of supercomputer simulations and the imaging techniques of neuroscience. I therefore see no difficulty in aligning my interests along two of the three axes discussed in this paper: communication and culture and communication and the person.

As I have tried to make clear, the three “components” of the communication curriculum are not “components” at all in the sense that they are neither mutually exclusive nor entirely overlapping. They may all address the same question while viewing it from varying orientations with respect to scale, methodology, and causality. As such, though at this point I am unable to locate my own work along the axis of social force, the nature of the three-dimensional system that I have described here is such that it is inevitable that I will find useful questions about the communicational aspects of simulation with respect to power structures and institutional arrangements. The triple axis of social force, culture, and the person is therefore ultimately a defense against reductionism and false dichotomies—as long as we remember that its dimensions are inextricably interdependent.

Doesn’t it just make you tingle inside? This is passionless, boring, painfully extracted though meticulously arranged high academic nonsense.

Now, read this.

They get at the same point. But one is rich in metaphor and art; the other is painfully articulated by reason and linearity. The longer I spend reading and writing stuff like the above frigid excerpt, the more I find myself unable to say or think what I mean.

I hope to Galileo’s God that there’s room in the hallowed halls of academe for risky beauty.