Techno-Culture, Speed & Slow Movement

Hello friends,

Ten years into a century thus far characterized chiefly by the catastrophic failure of global economic and political systems, deepening ecological anxieties, and slow-motion social crisis, the only sector of our collective cultural myth of Progress still vibrantly intact is the technological - a project which, in vivid contrast to the systemic failure that seemingly prevails at nearly every other level, continues to charge forward at breakneck speed. Since the late twentieth century, prompted by the all-but-exponential growth of machine intelligence and global information networks, and by the still largely obscure but increasingly profound-seeming implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists alike have postulated an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed in a sudden explosion of technological development. This moment of transcendence, it is supposed, is at most only a few years off; indeed, some say, it may have already begun.

What is 'Slow Movement'?

The slow movement advocates a cultural shift toward slowing down life's pace. It began with Carlo Petrini's protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome in 1986 that sparked the creation of the slow food movement.

Why is this happening?

What is wrong?

What are we searching for?

The one thing that is common to all these trends is connection. We are searching for connection. We want connection to people - ourselves, our family, ourcommunity, our friends, - to food, to place, and to life. We want connection to all that it means to live – we want to live a connected life.

The slow movement advocates a cultural shift toward slowing down life's pace. ... The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail's pace. It's about seeking to do everything at the right speed. 

Like the hours and minutes rather than just counting them.

This desire for connectedness is not new. Traditionally, in times past, our lives were connected. Most traditional cultures still have these connections.

Cultures with connectionThese people are connected to their culture, to people, to place and to their lives.

It is not so long ago that the extended family was a real live entity with the extended family often living under the same roof. Children grew up knowing their cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and other relatives. These children felt connected.

It is gives examples of ways to live slow and be part of the slow movement. It points out the areas of our life that have become disconnected. We are often unaware of just what it is that isn’t ‘right’, we just know that something is ‘not right’.

Time to rethink prioritiesThis website tells you where the disconnections lies and, more importantly, it shows you how you can reconnect. It provides you with tangible, easy-to-do steps to becoming a practicing slow mover, and member of the Slow Movement. You will find the sanity you so desperately crave.

Now, let’s illustrate through the example of 'Reading Books'.

What better way to be part of the slow movement than to have a good read. The Slow Books movement is about getting back into the love of reading good books. Few people these days spend time each day reading for sheer enjoyment.

Thinking about living is not the same as living.

Here is the secret to subtraction. It doesn’t matter what you remove. What matters is that you stop adding it back.

Melissa Camara Wilkins asks:

“Why do so many of us feel so trapped? Why are we settling for lives measured in units of busyness and defined by who has the most stuff?”

When we have time for leisure we tend to fill that time with physical activity or with passive TV viewing. We often have difficulty justifying sitting down and reading a good book, even to ourselves. The pace of our lives and the expectations we place on ourselves result in a life filled with ‘have to’ activities, and very few quiet enjoyment-only activities.

There are many benefits of reading regularly; reduction in stress levels, increased creativity, inspiration and motivation, entertainment and a good laugh, and broader perspectives and more open mind.

Thank you.

Duality of NATURE

Nature v/s Human Nature


Hello friends,

Does the idea of “nature” provide any kind of ethical touchstone to guide and to limit human impacts on ecosystems or the biochemical basis of life?  And does the idea of “human nature” similarly provide any kind of moral structure to govern our use of biotechnological means to alter human beings?  Many would say no to both questions too quickly, just as many others would too quickly say yes. I believe that we must take a more complex and nuanced position on these fundamental questions. To argue against something—such as hu¬man applications of biotechnology for enhancement of traits—because it will change human nature or is unnatural implies that we know what human nature is, when surely human nature is amorphous and slip¬pery at best. The difficulty of pinning down human na¬ture is one reason that attitudes about nature cannot be plausible unless they are limited and complicated.

Stevenson writes about the duality of human nature – the idea that every single human being has good and evil within them. Stevenson describes how there is a good and an evil side to everyone's personality, but what is important is how you behave and the decisions you make.

This blog explores and reveals the invisible, inviting the viewer to look beyond the seen to appreciate the beauty and mystery of the unseen.

EVERYTHING IN NATURE HAS AN EFFECT ON YOU AND YOU HAVE AN EFFECT ON EVERYTHING IN NATURE

Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language. It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms.

Nature of nature

Nature of 'It would certainly be very interesting to know nature of nature itself. The way I am referring here, it suggests as, "Nature" is referring to the great outdoors, not a characteristic of something else. Bonus: The phrase "the nature of nature" is legitimate English. The first "nature" is using the second definition, whereas the second "nature" is using the first definition.

Human Nature

Duality of Human nature refers to the dual human nature of human beings. This can be seen in everyday life, for example when we meet people who seem to be kind and friendly, were as in reality they could be manipulative and sly. In "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" this is seen in a very extreme way.

Human nature is a bundle of characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, which humans are said to have naturally

Another way of thinking about the moral relevance of hu¬man nature is to see it as a logical requirement of (human) moral¬ity. Francis Fukuyama takes this approach. Fukuyama is also the clearest case of some¬one opposed to enhancing human nature who rests the argument on an overarching theory of human nature. Fukuyama famously claims that human nature “is the sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, aris¬ing from genetic rather than environmental factors. Thus, humans are distinguished by an overall set of traits, rather than by any one trait; Fukuyama does not attempt a complete list. In fact, the set would have to be somewhat indeterminate, if only because any at¬tempt to specify “fundamental facts” tends to be in-determinate. Further, the set will consist of ranges of traits rather than precisely specified traits. Because traits are a function of environmental as well as genetic factors, the set of traits “arising from genetic factors” will be unstable; “normal human height,” for example, can change over the generations due to changes in diet. None¬theless, out of this overall general understanding of the range of traits pos¬sible given the human genome emerges what is distinctively human, which Fukuyama calls “the hu¬man essence” or “Factor X.” This is not itself a trait but an emergent property that depends on the entirety of human traits. Thus, though Fukuyama holds that human nature is definable, he does not hold that we can easily articulate human nature:

Most people think that they are separate from nature or at the most a part of nature. This thought limits your potential considerably. Nature is a single unit, and because of this, everything that constitutes it are whole themselves and therefore possess the unique ability to

function as individual units. This is why you can influence something or somebody other  and even vice versa too.

This aspect of life has to be remembered in every word you speak, in every thought you have and reflect in every action you perform, because you are essentially creating while speaking, thinking and working. It is important to bring all three in harmony. You cannot say something butt think something as 'Harmony is essential.'

Similarly, remember that you are being affected by the space around you as well. Hence it is important to collect yourself in silence and meditation. Or else you will think that you are in control, but something else may be going on.

Thank you.

Feminism: Elaine Showalter and Gayatri Spivak

Hello Friends, 

While talking about ‘Feminism’ many people take this as it is rebel of women as anti-man. No, it is not so. They are not able to grasp very basic idea of feminism. Not only is that but this also problematic for them we are talking so loudly about feminism. Certainly they have made feminism a slippery term, with the lack of deeper significance and actual findings! Though feminism has widely spread, it is deeply influenced by patriarchy and it just because we are living in society which is patriarchal and thus, patriarchy is also encoded into the language itself and if language is patriarchal then the very voice of feminism will also be patriarchal without any doubt.

As we know, feminism was started as political movement as to ask for economic equality and political equality and then come to literature and widely spread. So, let’s have ideas about feminism of Eline Showalter and Gayatri Spivak.

Elaine Showalter described her ideas towards feminism in her essay “Feminist Criticism in Wilderness”.

Elaine Showalter: Towards Feminist Poetics

In gereral, “Towards a Feminist Poetics’ is one of the well-known names in the field of criticism and particularly in the field of feminist criticism.  In this essay she tries to analyses the field of feminist criticism frm the different point of views and suggests some changes required to make the field more effective. She discusses…

A self-proclaimed “practical deconstructionist feminist Marxist,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar who continues to add to many academic disciplines. She is known mainly for her work in post-colonial studies, but has also influenced Marxist, feminist, postmodern, and globalization studies.

Spivak is the first woman of color to be bestowed the title of “University Professor of Humanities” at Columbia. She has taught at several distinguished universities and has eleven honorary doctorates. She made a name for herself in academia at the age of 25 when she became the first person to translate Jacques Derrida’s dense and complex post-structuralist work, “Of Grammatology.” She is also known for her theories of alterity and strategic essentialism.

Her most famous piece, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, looks at the way certain classes of people are treated in India and critiques how intellectuals like Foucault and Deleuze view these people. Like much of her academic work, she uses the concept of deconstruction in this piece to examine the truth behind intellectual positions such as post-colonialism and post-structuralism. In other words, she considers and “deconstructs” specific theories related to schools of thought and how they affect discourse in order to understand the way in which they intersect with each other.

Specifically, in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak deconstructs the concept of silencing or giving a voice to “the Other.” Spivak argues that the inherent goal of post-colonial studies — to help create a platform for the Other — is problematic for several reasons.

In order to understand what she is deconstructing, readers must first know the meaning of “the Other” and the “subaltern.” The first phrase began as a psychological distinction between “self” and “other.” Then, Edward Said used it to refer to the binary relationship between the “West” and “non-West”. In this definition, the non-West is seen as “the Other.” In post-colonial studies, this concept of the Other specifies a sub-group called the “subaltern native” which has been specifically oppressed by colonizers.

Video for better understanding: 

One of the most outstanding historical developments of the twentieth century was the gaining of national independence from imperial rule by most of the formerly colonized countries. Yet, rather surprisingly, many of the leading contributors to postcolonial theory, including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and others, tend to minimize the significance of national independence and take a dim view of the nationalist movements, leaders and ideologies that struggled for it.

Thank You.

Work Cited:

Sheber, Victoria. “Feminist Theorist Thursdays: Gayatri Spivak.” FEM Newsmagazine, FEM Newsmagazine, 23 Feb. 2018, femmagazine.com/feminist-theorist-thursdays-gayatri-spivak/.

Barad, Dilip. Elaine Showalter: Towards A Feminist Poetics: The Summary.

Newton K.M. (1997) Elaine Showalter: ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’. In: Newton K.M. (eds) Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. Palgrave, London

Doran, Christine. “Postcolonialism, Anti-Colonialism, Nationalism and History.” International Studies, vol. 56, no. 2–3, Apr. 2019, pp. 92–108, doi:10.1177/0020881719840257.

Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. Viva Books, 2011.

Digital Humanities

 Hello friends,

What is your answer if someone may ask you who you are? The answer may be quite simple is ‘Human’. Now question is that do we have humanity and if yes then what is humanities? We consider humanities is something which distinguish humans among other social animals. Does it really true? Because in which era we are living is the age of information, knowledge and rather of virtualization and digitalization. In this very present time, we should be very careful that humanities are also digitalized and that’s why as digitalization has brought advancement it has also brought more affects. Now-a-days human styles and cultures are also been replaced by digital humanities.

It would be more surprising to know, Computers can writer better poems rather any humans! Human has invented technology, but what if the technology is able to replace human itself? Now, it is the question which needs solution at this very tremendous situation of clash. From last several years we are thinking that will technology be capable of replacing teacher or not? We can answer to this question that what is the role of teacher in the class? If teacher’s role is to provide only knowledge than teacher will definitely be replaced by technology! For this we must know the difference between knowledge and teacher and thus we still need teacher in the class along with the technology not to explore information but for knowledge.

What is Digital Humanities?

Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to the 1930s and 1940s in the pioneering work of English professor Josephine Miles and Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa and the women they employed. In collaboration with IBM, they created a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas' writings known as the Index Thomisticus. Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards.  In the decades which followed archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad array of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied emerging computational methods to transform humanities scholarship.

‘People who say that the last battles of the computer revolution in English departments have been fought and won don’t know what they’re talking about. If our current use of computers in English studies is marked by any common theme at all, it is experimentation at the most basic level. As a profession, we are just learning how to live with computers, just beginning to integrate these machines effectively into writing- and reading-intensive courses, just starting to consider the implications of the multilayered literacy associated with computers.’

—Cynthia Selfe

In "What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?" Matthew G. Kirschenbaum explains why the emerging field of digital humanities finds its institutional home, most often, in English departments. Kirschenbaum suggests that:

·      Since the inception of the computer, text has been easy to input into computers and easy for computers to manipulate. Computers have therefore been a part of English studies for a long time, particularly in the areas of stylistics, linguistics, and composition.

·      In the 1980s and 1990s, the personal computer and the development of the commercial web gave rise to experimental writing (hypertext fiction) and scholarly efforts to digitize and archive canonical text (such as the Rossetti Archive). The study of hypertext fiction and digital archives has been conducted largely from within English departments. 

·      The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in e-books, e-readers, and massive-scale textual digitization projects, reinforcing the close connection between digital technology, reading, and textuality (6)

What is doing in English Classroom?

DIGITAL PROJECTS BY ENGLISH FACULTY

1. Bent Not Broken: A Family Remembers the War in Liberia and Sierra Leone
2. Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society
3. 18thConnect Workshop
4. Praxis ESOL, Educational Testing Service
5. The I Witness Holocaust Archive

Work cited:

“Digital Humanities.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Feb. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities.

“Grand Valley State University.” Digital Humanities and the English Department - Department of English - Grand Valley State University, www.gvsu.edu/english/digital-humanities-and-the-english-department-278.htm.

Matthew , Kirschenbaum. “PDF.”

Hamlet & To His Coy Mistress

Cultural Studies in Practice:

Hello friends,

Earlier we discussed about introduction of cultural studies and five types of cultural studies. Now, Let’s have a deeper insight through cultural studies in practice.

Ruchi Joshi’s blog on ‘Introduction of cultural studies’

Ruchi Joshi’s blog on ‘Five types of cultural studies’

Cultural Studies derives from the structuralism and post-structuralism, it tries to read everything in power structure within the power itself.

Marginalization is a slippery term, is used to define unequal power relations. If we are saying that now we are successful in abolishing of marginalization, colonialism and even in other social hierarchies, let me be very clear, we are merely in illusion. Marginalization and colonialism exists even today but the problem is that earlier we were able to distinguish this social turmoil and social evils which supports to power structure that are hierarchies, class and class systems of society. Marginalization still operates us in newer way. How? If we look at the HAMLET by Shakespeare if we ever want to study two characters who are marginalized, then suddenly two characters take place are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Even if we ever wished to perform the play and we need to cut down some of the parts of HAMLET hardly any other name will spark to us rather than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

As we know, both the characters are marginalized and even neglected too in the play by Shakespeare as thus also by even Hamlet! It would be surprising to know lens of Cultural studies says that both the characters are marginalized and pawns also in Tom Stoppard’s absurd play ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.’  Though the whole play is narrated through the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they are at the periphery.

Here, Derrida is piping relentlessly in my mind that

“Center is paradoxically within the structure and outside it…the totality, has its center elsewhere.”

Now, let us expand our response to HAMLET by looking at a related cultural and philosophical manifestation from the twentieth century. In Stoppard’s version, they are even more obviously two ineffectual pawns, seeking constantly to know who they are they here, where they are doing. What there they ‘are’ at all may be the ultimate question of this modern play. In short, a cultural and historical view that was Shakespeare’s is radically reworked to reflect a cultural and philosophical view of another time – our own.

Thus, we allude to the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns, the little people who have been caught up in the corporate downsizing and mergers in recent decades- the effects on these

Literature is criticism of life & mirror of society but it proves right only when it reflects x-ray image of reality and also of society. As Warner says,

‘History is textual and text is historical’ Major cultural concern of ‘To his coy mistress’ is to study implied culture versus historical fact.

How do we understand the ‘speaker’ in ‘To his coy mistress’?

We know that the speaker is knowledgeable about poems and conventions of classic Greek and Roman literature, about other conventions of love poetry, such as the courtly love conventions of medieval Europe, and about Biblical passages. 

Jules Brody studies.....

‘implied reader of this poem distinct from the ‘fictive lady’ – he would be ‘able to summon up a certain number of earlier or contemporaneous examples of this kind of love poem and who could be counted on, in short, to supply the models which Marvell may variously have been evoking, imitating, distorting, subverting or transcending.’    

-‘The Resurrection of the Body: A New reading of Marvell’s ‘To his coy Mistress’

Why do we infer all these things?

We can say that the speaker and listener like poet Andrew Marvell – are highly educated persons – those well read, whose natural flow of associated images moves lightly over details and allusions that reflect who they are – and expects listeners and readers to respond in a kind of harmonic vibration because the speaker the speaker thinks in terms of precious stones, of exotic and distant places, of a milieu where eating, drinking, and making merry seem to be an achievable way of life.

What does it ignore from the culture?

·        It does not think of poverty, the demographics and socio-economic details of which would show how fortunate his circumstances are.

·        It does not think of disease as a daily reality that he might face.

·        It shows that wealth and leisure and sexual activity are his currency, his coin for present bliss.

Historical realities, a dimension that the poem ignores

·        Disease

Real and present disease

What has been called the ‘chronic morbidity’ of the population.

·        Syphilis

Syphilis and other sexual transmitted disease were as real a phenomenon in Marvell’s day as in our era.

·        Plague

More ominous, more wrenching, in its grasp of mind and body of the general population

Thank you.