Tag: Education

Monday November 6, 2017

Can words get ahead of themselves? “Yes, they can, if one is ‘charged,'” mutters a fiction who another fiction says has no authority here. What about this universalizing thought about the universalization of consciousness? Can one migrate through portals? Is that what we’re reduced to? Is that what we lived through — a mere reality show? You show up in a place, you perform your part. They’ve turned us into mere functional selves — so it’s in our interests to resist. On a short run yesterday, I encountered white arrows painted onto street tops, symbols of unknown purpose left by aliens. Squirrels met me along my way. All, pausing to study me, found me nonthreatening enough to resume foraging for nuts amid piles of leaves. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith provided welcome accompaniment with tracks from her new album The Kid.

Daphne’s orange body appears as an icon, trailing my every move. In “dogged” pursuit — get it? How will I maneuver myself through the remainder of my days? I feel tapped out, emptied of ideas. Capitalism nullifies. It numbs my senses and desires. I have to seek out alternative sources of intensity, like Amon Düül II’s Phallus Dei, or Aase Berg’s Hackers. I become obsessed for a time with Astra Taylor’s ideas about unschooling. I ponder ways to promote student-directed learning in my classes, despite the grade-oriented confines of today’s corporate academy. The problem, of course, is that by the time students reach me, they’ve already spoiled. It would be like offering fresh fruit to a bunch of rotting vegetables: what would be the point?

Friday October 6, 2017

I sometimes pray silently to the equivalent of a program, a ghost in the machine, in hopes that it will take pity on me by unlocking invisible doors onto other quadrants of the game-board. And it does, language leading me to Ian Bogost’s “The Metaphysics Videogame.” Finally — a theorist of videogame ontology. Weed is a kind of rhetoric that delivers its arguments not with words or images or programs but through chemical reprogramming of neurons. It alters perception so as to dodge any system the General Intellect might try to impose onto Being. I wish to operate free of rules devised by others. This is why I’m writing and blogging. Games too often feel to me like a distraction from whatever aspect of Nature is described in terms like grounded, earthy, and wild. My fellow Marxists don’t take the Romanticist theory of Nature as seriously as they ought to. Even if just for the sake of personality and mental health. I like sunlight. I like sitting outdoors. Dr. Andrew Weil takes me on a “sonic journey to where healing happens.” Profound states of relaxation lead listeners down into a realm Weil calls “the Deep.” Of course, it’s all just schmaltzy classical music. A total betrayal of psychedelia’s revolutionary beginnings, the latter co-opted and, in true bait-and-switch fashion, replaced with something tacky and false. I want videogame theorists who, rather than trying to sell me on games, are instead able to help me better understand how videogames have influenced the way I think. The warring halves in me cause my ego formation to vacillate back and forth between an outdoor nature associated with public pools and summer camps, and an indoor nature associated with comic books, paperbacks, and videogames (but also movie theaters, roller rinks, and malls). Against both of these natures stood the culturally imposed tedium known as “school.” That boredom I experienced in classrooms as a kid makes me deeply cynical about my profession. If corporations weren’t the ones funding it and shaping the content, I would happily watch Viceland’s “The New Classroom” and say, “Yes, we should all integrate VR technology into our classrooms.” But really I’m more of a back-to-the-lander. I like to sit in the woods and read books.