Connections

He trains like this: experiencing the mind I will breathe in, he trains like this: experiencing the mind I will breathe out.

(Because of the long breath (etc.) there is mind-consciousness.)

"One key difference between Star/Wenger on the one hand and Engeström on the other has to do with the nature of boundaries. In the community of practice view, boundary objects exist to effect translations or initiations.  In Engeström's view, attention is drawn to boundaries that remain in flux (via an ongoing process of co-configuration) or which are blurred (e.g. by a blurring of consumer and producer roles)."

The various conceptions of human ecology (Star, Engeström, etc.) bring to mind McCalla, writing on "The Ecological Approach to the Design of E-Learning Environments: Purpose-based Capture and Use of Information About Learners". McCalla's idea is in some ways reminiscent to what Slavoj Zizek calls the fantasy of total recycling:

"(It is often said that the ultimate products of capitalism are piles of trash – useless computers, cars, TVs, and VCRs ... : places like the famous "graveyard" of hun­dreds of abandoned planes in the Mojave desert confront us with the obverse truth of capitalist dynamics, its inert objectal remainder. And it is against this background that one should read the ecological dream-notion of total recycling – in which every remainder is used again – as the ultimate capitalist dream, even if it is couched in the terms of retaining the natural balance on Planet Earth: the dream of the self-propelling circulation of capital which would succeed in leav­ing behind no material residue – the proof of how capitalism can appropriate ideologies which seem to oppose it.)" -- January, 2008, The Prospects of Radical Politics Today, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol5_1/v5-1-article3-zizek.html

"This is the true utopia, the idea that a legal order can make recompense for its founding crimes, thereby retroactively cleansing itself of its guilt and regaining its innocence. What lies at the end of this road is the ecological utopia of humanity in its entirety repaying its debt to Nature for all its past exploitation.  In effect, is not the idea of 'recycling' part of the same pattern as that of restitution for past injustices?  The underlying utopian notion is the same: the system which emerged through violence should repay its debt in order to regain an ethico-ecological balance.  The ideal of 'recycling' involves the utopia of a self-enclosed circle in which all waste, all useless remainder, is sublated: nothing gets lost, all trash is re-used.  It is at this level that one should make the shift from the circle to the ellipse: already in nature itself, there is no circle of total recycling, there is un-usable waste. Recall the methodological madness of Jeremy Bentham's 'Panopticon' in which everything, up to and including the prisoner' excrement and urine, should be put to further use. [...] This is why the properly aesthetic attitude of a radical ecologist is not that of admiring or longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather that of accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material which serves no purpose." -- Living in the End Times, page 35

What we are envisioning with PlanetMath is from one point of view, a utopian ideal of "encyclopedia as complete instruction", bringing to bear all of the questions and comments of students into one integrated panoptic, an organized junkyard of all of the qualms and quandries that people encounter when they think about mathematics, with a spare part available and ready to fit any need.

He trains like this: gladdening the mind I will breathe in, he trains like this: gladdening the mind I will breathe out.

(Because of the long breath (etc.) he knows his mind is one-pointed and unscattered, and gladness arises in the mind.)

Can we also argue another point of view that says that PlanetMath is something other than the utopian ideal of a circle? Our first clue comes from one of Zizek's favorite subjects, psychoanalysis. Perhaps it is not so much a matter of reusing junk (no detail to insignificant to be interpreted) but a matter of cultivating mind, supple, creative, responsive. PlanetMath -- as mirrored or embodied in its software -- could just as well be thought of as a Deleuzian "nomadic war machine", built via the infamous process of tinkering or bricolage, which doesn't really excuse it from claims of utopianism, but does give a (potentially) different point of view to the capitalist one, since the nomad machine is happy living in and returning to the Mojave...

My point being that "construction of the subject" is part of what is going on here. How does a subject exist and function? It is not by integrating every last bit of "knowledge" -- we also forget, for example. Sometimes we forget in such a way as to become non-functional -- neglecting to think or pay attention, for example. Is the subject constituted by talking with many people? Or in relative isolation? With one trusted counsellor? Or with frenetic multi-media mumbo jumbo? Quite a lot depends on this.

= Recommended Reading=


 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_of_Production "Marxism merely strengthens political economy’s basic propositions, in particular the idea that self-creation is performed through productive, non-alienated labor. [...] Baudrillard proposes to liberate workers from their 'labour value' and think in terms other than production."
 * the book in question
 * http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html Related, and has particularly to do with the idea of "connections"
 * da vinci's todo list