HW 35 - Cool Paper Rough Draft

By Tuesday 9am please post a rough draft of a 2-4 page (1000+ words) analysis of cool. I strongly encourage you to pick a sharp and interesting angle/thesis/primary-target and also to cannibalize your own and others' best thoughts to build the paper.

Please see the outline assignment for more suggestions and information.

Punctuality is important, if you finish this draft by the due date it will enable your triangle partners to provide suggestions and feedback well before the final draft due date.

Semester Exam Information

The semester final exam provides an opportunity to earn a 65, and avoid credit recovery, to folks who can demonstrate mastery of course material despite failure to produce adequate work. It will be offered Wednesday the 27th at 9am in room 605.  

On Tuesday night, at the latest, a list of people who've earned the chance to take the exam will be posted on this blog.

To earn the 65 you need to achieve a 65% or higher on the multiple choice exam.

It will include material from the whole semester - drawn largely from the following three blogs:

Andy

John

YuXi

My theory is that we've learned a lot, and that much of our learning has been shared online and with each other. I don't think my thoughts are the only ones that matter. So to demonstrate mastery of the content, you need to be able to show that you understand and can apply the concepts and information from the course from my blog and two outstanding student blogs.

Sample questions:

Which of the following can be considered a prehistoric representation of reality?

a. photographs

b. block printed novel

c. language

d. telescope

Ryan, the protagonist of John's cool story, successfully inspires the physics class to;

a. learn

b. do their own experiments

c. dance

d. defy the teacher

The take home relevance of Merchants of Cool, according to YuXi, is that;

a. kids are stupid

b. kids aren't stupid

c. corporations are evil

d. corporations aren't evil

I invite you to submit questions (must include the multiple choice options) for possible inclusion in the exam.  So far, no one has done this, which strikes me as particularly strange since it would significantly improve your chances of passing.

Hair Resources

Hair and tattoos provide examples of the physical embodiment of positional images of cool. In other words they physically signify the specific "who" of the heroic personal narrative and also claim a certain audience for attention, approval, and connection (and another audience for defiance, controversy, etc.).

Hair chapter from the Body Social. Password protected with the four letter name of the unit.

NYT article about 4 year old suspended for long hair

HW 34 - The Cool Pose and Various Approaches to Life Rooted in Class, Race, Gender, Age, etc.

What's cool, as has been (too) often pointed out, varies from person to person and from culture to culture (the kind of first thought as last thought that thuds like a frog dropped from a tall building or a first thought that sparks other thoughts like a bushfire in Australia).

For instance the Central American kid who lives in East LA and joins a gang rather than the few afterschool opportunities - or a Black kid who lives in a housing project and buys Prada shoes rather than saving for college - or the Asian girl who spends hours reading manga and tattoo magazines instead of feminist books - or a white rich kid who decides to join a fraternity rather than a social justice club at college - or the immigrant boy who gets crossed up between wanting to make his parents proud and wanting to be cool at school and finally decides to become a doctor after all.

Are there patterns to our understanding of what's cool? Do some of us get cooler cools than others? Could coolness be a contributor of racial or class or gender marginalization? Does coolness compensate in some cases for worse job opportunities, earlier death, and higher suffering? Is coolness a consolation prize that marginalized peoples pilfer from the Cultural Carnival after they lose the ring toss for the better prizes?

How does our position in our culture determine what will look achievable and cool (heroic and attention-worthy) on our given cultural maps? How does our sense of cool further mineralize our current position in society?

To get at these questions please read the following pieces -
A poem by Gwendolyn Brooks (be sure to listen to the audio), an African-American poet

An op-ed piece by Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist of African heritage
A brief summary of "Learning To Labor" by Paul Willis (also of African origin, according to contemporary scientific theories, but not in the way people usually mean, English white guy)

How does our enactment of cool for the audience of our immediate social circles (ala Goffman) lead us to our major life choices, limit our options, and imprison our bodies (ala Foucault's gaze)? Is coolness an important factor of the sometimes startling choices made by people in disadvantaged situations? Should we blame the people who make the choices or should we change the choices offered to them (or both or neither)? What paths is coolness leading us down, and should we get our maps out again, and maybe even try to make new maps?

Please write a 3-6 pararaph analysis of this phenomenon drawing on the texts above and your own observations and experience. Due Wednesday January 13 8:30am.

HW 33 - Cool Paper Outline

We've got 3 more days of Phase 3 of the Cool Unit - where you're being taught new information, concepts, and skills. After that we'll move to Phase 4 - where you attempt to integrate what you've learned into powerful and relevant insights and understanding. To help you prepare for the transition, please make up an outline of a cool paper. The most important parts:
a. a thesis or central idea
b. a collection of sharp insights and major points
c. a collection of evidence from previous assignments, class notes, and other research

The outline should be posted by 8:30am Monday, January 11. The rough draft of the paper should be posted by 8:30am Monday, January 18.

Your goal eventually will be to write a paper that explores one or more angles of coolness - it doesn't have to be, and shouldn't be, comprehensive. It should be colorful, lively, include your own insights and observations, as well as the most powerful insights you've collected from your brainstorming, interviews, stories, research, class sessions, readings, film clips, and guest speakers (Matt Fried and John Fanning).The paper willl end up ~2-4 pages in length.

For the outline you need to choose a thesis/central-idea to start with. You can change it later. I encourage you to identify your own angle/thesis. The following suggestions could be used, or could serve as orientation and inspiration.

1. If we realized X we would play the cool game a lot differently. We'd do more of Y and less of Z.

2. Coolness - as a heroic internal narrative and the successful command of attention and social significance - is a basic human need. We need to be cool - what are the best ways for us to do that, individually and collectively?

3. As Goffman (and maybe Shakespeare) argued, our sense of self is but a shadow of our character. And that character is merely an attempt to meaningful integrate our performances in the scenes we've been cast in. So, really to be cool, in the best sense, would be to become a director (or scriptwriter) rather than just an actor in the drama of our lives - as shown in the short stories we wrote. Otherwise we'd have to remember that a black sheep is still a sheep! Unfortunately, most characters' experience in institutions, families, and peer groups disables this power of transformation.

4. Coolness is a social disease whose etiology consists of consumerist attempt to adorn a basically meaningless/unfulfilling life. The cool epidemic can be ameliorated with proper public health measures such as banning advertising to children and schools systematically helping students form positive and powerful identities as distinct and admirable 'heros' rather than allowing them to remain as interchangeable seat-warmers who need to pierce themselves to seem interesting, as in the present situation. That requirement that schools help students become heroic would also mean greater interaction with the community, a focus on helping students develop unique areas of study, and support for experimentation and discovery.

5. Coolness is a tragic trap that appears to solve problems of meaning and significance but only worsens them, as demonstrated by Tolstoy and my own experience.

6. If we could become more aware of death and aging - by systematic visits to senior centers, hospitals, hospices, and funerals - by discussion and philosophy and theology - we could free ourselves from the triviality of the cool pose.

7. We're stuck in a culture of celebrity worship, status obsession, and pervasive mediocrity and meaninglessness. Frankly, a truly heroic life and abundant attention from others won't be available to 98% of people - since almost all of us are trapped in meaningless jobs in a meaningless rat race watching meaningless TV shows. Facebook friends, unique tattoos, new apps on your iPhone, clothes from a hip store with semi-nude workers, vacations to exotic places, and a big screen TV provide some relief from what would otherwise be a grey hopeless misery.

8. Different perspectives on cool reveal the different life chances available to sectors of our society. People aren't dumb - generally we'll take the coolest option we're offered.

HW 32 - Tattoos & The Presentation of the Self

Almost all of us want to be liked, admired, influential, attractive (external cool) and to feel significant and even heroic (internal cool).

We have developed many methods, as explored in HW 31, to mask, manipulate, costume, adorn, and aggrandize the self. These methods allow us to influence how we view ourselves and how others view us, which Goffman observed as core to human interaction, and to deal with our hollowing sense of meaninglessness.

Tattoos were previously associated, in the U.S., only with often-violent subcultures (sailors, soldiers, and gang-members), but hoppped and skipped into many other subcultures before finally jumping into the mainstream in the last 5 years - as seen in blogs by Sarah, Matthew, Brandon and on Miley Cyrus' skin, and in the gossip press.

Tattooing seems to me a potentially revealing aspect of "cool" for the following reasons;
1. Its 'hot' now.
2. Good example of cool paradox #2 - stand out while fitting in - edgy but common (tattoos in general are trendy, but yours is unique and the story behind it is meaningful and dramatizes some aspect of WHO YOU ARE that you will share with anyone who stands still or, better yet, you could mysteriously refuse to share something that you make others look at!).
3. "Self-expression" as "self-presentation" (inner to outer).
4. A powerful instance of the mind/body dichotomy in our culture - on one level the tattoo represents the inscribing of the inner on top of the outer (outer skin as mere sign space for the inner personality/narrative-self). But from another perspective it indicates the primacy of the body - the physical becomes the site of the "real" and "permanent" self. Interestingly, the process is the piercing of the outside layer from the outside to engrave an image from the inner mind (usually received from the outer world) that will shine through the outer layer. The discord between these two levels - outer-inner - provides some of the power of the act.
5. Death and, more broadly, impermanence shadow our sense of self. The tattoo might be seen as an attempt to claim permanence - it might not be a coincidence that one of the archetypal tattoos has been an anchor! I associate this desire for bold acts with lasting consequences with the immortality projects of the hero's quest.
6. Tattoos have, in various cultures, been associated with rites of passage, with performing particular roles, with claiming certain ranks, proclaiming particular self-concepts. These seem to be human needs! Shakespeare's quotes (Macbeth, As You Like It) come to mind. And how do these archetypal images get translated into the modern hero's journey? Tramp stamp on the 18th birthday! Some Norteamericanos choose tattoos from one or more 'exotic' cultures - does this demonstrate a perception of a lack of magical meaning in our culture?

A tattoo can be seen as a fairly durable signifier - a decoration or artistic alteration of the body. Some traditions hold that tattoos separate us from G-d - who made our bodies holy and wouldn't want for us to make them wholly or partly inked-holey. I think of the decision to tattoo oneself as related to the tagger's decision to spray-paint a tree or a wall - which reminds me of dogs peeing on fire-hydrants. And as the dog's best efforts are diluted by rain, the tattoo fades and shifts and wrinkles and eventually decomposes with the rest of us, which seems sort of reassuring, ultimately, to me.

Should we resist this trend - this puncturing of the flesh for self-expression in others eyes? What does tattooing signify to you? Is it heroic/artistic/bold-self-expression? Does a tattoo signify to you a brave individual challenging vanilla conformity or a sheep pushing forward for branding to pledge permanent allegiance to her particular flock? Why do so many people make so many different stories to explain basically the same action? Does NOT getting a tattoo also now become an attempt to become special? What do you think of the gendering of tattoos - the male tricep tatto and the female ankle tattoo? What does this perforating trend reveal about larger stippled processes of "cool" - of our desire to seem heroically special - an important actor in a meaningful drama?

Please write 3-6 paragraphs exploring tattooing as an instance of cool. You can use the questions directly above for inspiration, or make your own. You should examine several of the hyperlinks above. For maximum credit, as usual, please edit for flavor and sharpness as well as spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Include your own experience, the insights and experience of others you know, images, and outside research!

If you absolutely have no interest in tattoos, pick another external bodily modification - plastic surgery, hair extensions, piercings, make-up, lifts, high heels, body-building, etc.

Due Thursday January 7 at 9am.

Where We're At Right Now

The Syllabus:

Unit 1 - Digital completed.

Unit 2 - Cool - We're finishing phase 4 (integration) - all that's left is the art project. We will finish the unit around the end of the semester.

Units 3 (School) and 4 (Other People) still planned and on schedule.

Assignments:

There will be no additional required assignments over the break. An extra credit opportunity appears below.

The paper - which will be an exhibition-style integration of what you've learned about coolness in 5-10 pages - will be due in rough draft form around January 13 - feel free to get a head start. The art project will also be similar to the assignment in the Digital Unit - so you can also start thinking about what you want to do with it (Four Tet on Being Popular on Youtube could be a model).

Grades:

Assignments 21-25 have been completely graded for all sections and (extremely late by now) new versions of that work will not be graded.

Assignments 26-29 have been completely graded for section 1, 2, 3, and 4.

All sections have been graded. If you didn't have 37 posted I used 35 (or if that was missing 34). Grades available Tuesday.

Extra credit must be completed by the first day back to school, 4th of January.

I will update this part of this post as I complete each section of grades.

Extra Credit 1 - Tolstoy Cool

For extra credit please read The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy and write a 3-6 paragraph post that answers one or more of the following questions;

a. How does Ivan's quest for status, advancement, prestige, and generally the approval of others endanger his chance to live a more meaningful life?

b. Schwartz is the "cool" character in the first part of the story. Please analyze him.

c. Ivan, as almost all of us, bases his efforts in life on the map provided by his culture. The culture values "the easy, agreeable, gay and always decorous [ ...] life, approved of by society and regarded by himself as natural." What map has been provided by your family, subculture, culture? What are the main destinations and goals and plans in your life? What should the tone of your life be, according to the map you've been provided?

d. Ivan transforms in the last part. What does this process show about the worthiness of the map he was provided? Should he have lived otherwise? How?

e. Please compare The Death of Ivan Ilyich to A Christmas Carol - specifically the character of Ivan to the character of Ebenezer. If you don't want to read Dickens, you can use your knowledge from a film version. Dickens' work came out in 1843 and Tolstoy's in 1886. Tolstoy called Dickens the greatest writer of the century and had his portrait hanging on a wall, and Scrooge might have been the inspiration for Ivan Ilyich. Do the stories share the same moral? How do tone and emphasis differ in the two parallel stories?

f. Please discuss and analyze any other aspects of the book, of your choice, that relates to our sense of lostness, the source of our lostness, and our attempts to either cover up or fill that emptiness through heroic life and/or the approval of others.

Details:

The essay counts up to 10 points, same as a regular assignment, so the option to change the dividend as usual but without changing the divisor. You may choose to do two separate essays for a possible total of 20 points. Due January 1, 2010 at 9pm.

If you seek wisdom before dying, this book could be a helpful source and will also help you catch references among educated people.

http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/WorldeBookLibrary.com/deathivan.htm

HW 31 - Exploring Methods of M,M,C,A, & Aggrandizing the Self

In class Friday we shared insights from HW 30 and brainstormed and discussed various methods that we and others use to mask, manipulate, costume, adorn, and aggrandize the self.

HW 31 will eventually include several parts.

Part A - which should be posted by Monday 8:30am, is to ask (respectfully) someone who is using one of the strategies we identified to describe how they came to be doing it. If you want more interesting answers avoid putting them on the defensive, as much as possible. Many of the answers will be variations on, "Because I like it, it's for me, not for others." What do you think about the answer? Post the method, the story of your question, his/her answer, and your insights about that answer.

Part B - Repeat Part A but for 2-3 aspects of your own performance. Due Tuesday Dec. 22, 8:30am. Please simply edit the original HW 31 to include the new material, rather than making a separate post.

Shakespeare quote 1 - All the world's a stage ...
Shakespeare quote 2 - Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player ...
Facebook article - Great quote - “You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.”

HW 30 - Psychological and Philosophical Theorizing of Cool

The goal - to enrich your understanding of "cool" by exploring the existential layers underlying this often desperate performance.

Please research several sources (famous philosophers and psychologists and social theorists) to elaborate a 400+ word theory (or a hypothesis) on one of the three following questions in bold. Due Friday, Dec 18 at 8:30am. (As a point of reference, this assignment is 540+ words).

Cool can be viewed as a major attempt to fill the emptiness inside of us with an internal heroic mission (sense of purpose, meaning, self-knowledge) and external validation (attention, approval, admiration, love, popularity, fame).

How does this emptiness feel? Phenomenologically describe the sense of absence using your own introspection and the writings of famous others. If it is a hole - what sorts of shapes fill this hole? Is it a lock with only one key? Or is it a stomach that will accept whatever chewed up substance drops down into it?

Whence this emptiness? What are the sources of this sense of meaninglessness but also of the need for a sense of meaning? Empty means its not there but also that its missing! Do you agree that humans seem to overwhelmingly share a sense of emptiness, or a hole that needs to be filled (perhaps by honor, or story, or heroism, or love)? How do we come to be this way? We've talked about the Myth of the Fall, of Freud's theories of separation from the mother, of Becker's theory of the fear of annihilation in death, of Lacan's theory of the division between consciousness and physicality.

How does cool relate to our attempt to live in relation to this emptiness? In addition to external validation and a personal heroic role - are there any other routes to coolness? How should we evaluate and enact the possible routes to coolness? Where should we put our emphasis - our best efforts?

For instance, Schopenhauer argued "what distinguishes mortals is determined by three fundamental aspects. They are;

1. What one is: the person in the broadest sense. Inclusive of health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.

2. What one has: property and possessions in every sense.

3. What one makes as a presentation of oneself: under this expression should be understood, how the person is perceived by others, therefore how others present him to themselves. That means their opinions of the person, which collapse into categories of glory, status, and fame."

(quickly translated by andy from here)

Does Schopenhauer thereby offer a guide for how to deal with our mortality? What do the Stoics say? The Cynics? The Marxists? Foucauldian post-structuralists? What about Frankl's concept of the "existential vacuum" or "Sunday neurosis". What do religious prophets advocate (Buddha, Maimonides, Jesus, Mohammed, etc.)? What about religious/philosophical traditions like Zen or Vedantism?

Please explore theoretical responses to these questions. For instance you can google:

• frankl existential vacuum emptiness
• sense of emptiness -
• buddhism origin dukkha
• genesis fall humanity
• if you google - freud separation mother - you might end up at a site from Purdue which explains how the "self" is a response to the situation of the baby having to deal with mom and dad.

Gather insights from at least 3 sources of famous people's thoughts and then organize them into your own (evolving) thoughts on the topic. Feel free to concentrate primarily on one source and your own response.

HW 29 - Merchants of Cool

We watched most of the episode "Merchants of Cool" from Frontline on PBS (2001) on Wednesday and Friday.

If you missed one of those sessions, you need to watch it on your own - official site is here - but its also on google video and here.

Please address one or more of the following topics in 3-6 well-written and insightful paragraphs. Use evidence from the video, from Matt Fried's Tuesday presentation, and from other sources.

• Of course the corporations manipulate us while pretending not to, so they can make more money off of us. Of course we actively seek commodified coolness while trying to claim "self-expression" and "being ourselves", so we can feel a sense of importance and gain attention and approval. So what?

• What specific manipulation techniques work best on the specific insecurities and emotional needs of young people, according to Merchants of Cool?

• Should advertising to young people be banned? Up to what age? Or all ages?

• Is it evil to help the corporations to manipulate the minds of young people for the sake of profit?

• Should Rage Against the Machine or Mos Def have refused to play the corporate game to prevent their revolutionary music becoming a source of capitalist profit? What if that meant that they would gain far fewer listeners?

• There was a quote like, "Girls are taught (by Britney Spears type media) to flaunt their sexuality even though they don't understand it yet." Was what was done to Britney Spears wrong? Was it a crime? If so, who are the criminals? Why did she go along? Why did millions of teens eagerly consume this image leading to billions in corporate profits? Does this sort of image lead to loveless performance of alienated hyper-sexuality in the name of cool?

Due Sunday, 13th of December at 9:00am.

HW 28 - Informal Research - Internet, Magazines, and TV Shows

Please identify five or more sources of insight into "cool" in our culture. Internet sites might be the easiest - often a good idea to start with Wikipedia - but you're welcome to use TV, movies, magazines, newspapers, or other sources of popular culture.

Please make an annotated bibliography of 3 or more sources - each should include correct MLA citation, a very brief summary of most important points (2-4 sentences) and a very brief analysis of the utility of the source for particular topics or arguments (3-5 sentences).

You could do worse than using this as a model (but shorter and sharper - one mini paragraph for summary, an additional mini-paragraph). Actually, use the following as a model -

Andy's Model:
Viren, Tom et al. "How To Be Cool." http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Cool. WikiHow, n.d. Web. 2 December 2009.
This article, compiled and edited by many authors, attempts to provide advice of how to become cool. It contains a list of suggestions, additional tips, and warnings. Many of these tips will be familiar - "Be yourself" and "Be confident" - and others less so "Find a way to love learning."

This short guide deserves reading for its helpful simplification - in the introduction it reduces coolness to being confident, unique, and on friendly terms with everyone. The copious suggestions, tips, and warnings also reflect a variety of the dominant perspectives about coolness - which seems to primarily be understood as being admired and liked by the masses as an authentic and friendly and socially-adept human being.

Your goals with this annotated bibliography include figuring out some more about cool using others thoughts, finding out what others mean when they talk about being cool, and identifying resources worth coming back to (or not worth coming back to) for yourself and your triangle partners when writing your end of the unit papers.

Due Tuesday, December 8 at 8:30am.