This post was the methodologies section of my initial dissertation proposal in the Spring of 2015.
It would be hard to identify all of the voices that continue to shape the manner in which I am approaching the performance of this dissertation. Mostly, I am trying to practice a medium for writing and reading that creates spaces for a polyphony (thanks Justin Barber for reminding me of the fecundity in this word) of emergences. One of the deep suspicions undergirding the questions in this project is the tendency of the codex to shape human reading, and therefore human thinking, toward closure.
If questioning the codex (and other media technologies) is one of the operative values of a proximate bible, and if we grant that the dissertation genre is codex par excellence, then it makes sense for me to experiment here with media technologies otherwise than codex.
Undoubtedly, you will see myriad places where my thinking and my writing slip into performing codex (e.g. closure, totality, fixicity, stability). I can only hope those moments will provide ample opportunity for dialog and growth.
A few of the major influences on my methodologies in a proximate bible are the entanglement of production and reception in Timothy Beal’s notion of cultural history, the life of the fragment in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Michel De Certeau’s infinite interplay of strategy and tactic in The Practice of Everyday Life. All three remind us of the critical value of use in the meaning made of material objects.
The complex interplay of production and reception in Beal’s cultural history of bible has challenged me to compose a proximate bible in a public online space to foreground engagement (reception) as an always present part of the production process. I will compose and curate with the native cloud application Evernote and use the integration with postach.io to “publish” posts to the web.
The reason I put publish in quotes is to note the strange adoption of this decidedly print term into the standard vernacular of writing for the web. Postach.io even uses the tag published as the trigger to push a note from a private Evernote notebook to the related public webspace. Yet, it is important to note that I can edit a note at any time and these changes will immediately sychronize to the web. So, this writing for the web is radically more flexible than print publishing. For more, see my related post Published?.
Postach.io provides an embeded discussion space at the bottom of each post using a seemless integration with one of the most ubiquitous online discussion engines available - disqus.
The behind the scenes integration of these three different tools to create a platform in which we will perform a proximate bible already signals some otherwise-than-print material practices at work.
My committee will use this disqus space to participate in the project along the way to share their comments, suggestions, ideas and questions. From time to time, I will also share links from a proximate bible on social media channels such as twitter and facebook to encourage others to participate in the construction of this space. These discussion areas are as much a part of the production of a proximate bible as anything I “publish.”
All comments shared in the disqus space in a proximate bible will be moderated. Moderation will allow my committee members to make suggestions that they do not want to perform in public space and will facilitate the filtering out of dehumanizing or spam posts.
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project brilliantly performs the proximity in Emmanuel Levinas’s statement about Hebrew syntax where “words coexist rather than immediately being co-ordinated or subordinated with and to one another” (Gary D. Mole translating Levinas, Beyond the Verse, 130). In a literary world often dominanted by the totality and linear coherence of the whole, Benjamin’s literary montage methodology explores the potential of the fragment (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N1a,8).
The bits and memes and apps of our present new media landscape seem to share Benjamin’s valuation of the fragment. Holding these two sensibilities together, I will collect artifacts of varied types–text, image, video, etc.–and use them. In this use, I will make other fragments for people to encounter and use. Intentionally, the space of a proximate bible will allow these fragments to cohabitate, coordinated only by the timestamp of each post’s creation or a chance mention of a post in another. My hope is that people will make their own paths along these fragments, stopping while something catches their fancy and moving on in any direction that strikes them. Undoubtedly, themes and patterns will emerge, but these will be shaped by the uses we make of the fragments more than a predetermined outline driving us toward a thesis.
Yet, in order to even begin the process of exploring, sometimes we need a path. As this graphic from Ben Higmore’s slideshare presentation “Michel De Certeau’s Poetics of Everyday Life,” ilustrates so well, De Certeau artfully describes the infinite process of interaction between strategies (structures) and tactics (uses) in the everyday practice of meaning.
Much like the streets in a city grid offer a structure that walkers of the city can use in ways that may challenge the intention of the city planners, I will build some defined pathways through the fragmented space of a proximate bible. Each of the three material bible experiments in this project–scoll to codex to kindle, (re)placing the veil, and facing the deep will offer an explicit path through their essential posts. Not all of the curation or composition related to these experiments will be included in the paths, but I will build a strategic thread through each space of inquiry as a place begging for tactical motion or use.
Following De Certeau and Higmore’s graphic, here I link strategy and place as indicating structured ‘proper’ location. Yet, I am still grappling with the difference between place and space in De Certeau and other thinkers who deal with human geography such as Tim Cresswell, Jacob Kinnard and Edward Soja. For now, I tend away from De Certeau’s articulation of space as practiced place (The Practice of Everyday Life, 117) and align more with Cresswell’s opposite suggestion of place as practiced space (Place: A Short Introduction, 11).
All this said, I am practicing a dissertation methodology that creates and participates in an ongoing community of inquiry and takes seriously the fact that medium matters.