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in today's class, terms were argued about. the terms are rather large and people argued about how to make them more precise.

first we discussed "usefulness," hotly contested in class. oscar wilde says, "art is quite useless." wilde was an aesthete, part of a moment that said that art should have no purpose other than to be beautiful. but wilde also lived at the beginning of the industrial revolution (he died in 1900) and people's values were changing in accordance with technology's capabilities (except baudelaire, read his outraged 1860s essay on photography). technological innovations have clear uses -- trains get you somewhere farther and faster so you can visit relatives or vacation spots sooner with less hassle, so perfecting technology is about conforming it to a clear idea of use: "if i want to get somewhere faster than i can now, what can i build?" (i'm sure no one thought quite like that, but you get it...) wilde is contrasting this type of use he finds base with art's purpose for the soul and for intellectual (*and* contemplative!) exploration. in a sense, art is useful to every soul, but calls it useless to separate it from such a simple, goal- or product-oriented view. wilde is calling art useful by calling it useless; he is just saying that this pragmatic word is not appropriate for 'art.' i tend to agree with him on this. so if i'm asked how an idea is "useful" to me i don't know how to reply. you could say that an essay is useful in the way it theorizes a history of an art movement, but that's as close as i can get.

i also do not see useful as remotely the same word as generative, so i'm not sure how that came up in class. i see the word 'transplantable' as separate from both of those words, too.

another interesting contention in class was over the meaning of the word "reality." i see reality as a very ambiguous term. on one hand, even if "there is no reality," there truly is some kind of communal experience in the world. we can agree that we go to bryn mawr, that we know the way around campus, we can agree with zadie smith that we have grown up in a "postmodern world" (though we don't have to disdain that as much as she does, and pop culture is rather neo-modern, or as some philosophers say, like sebastien charles, hyper-modern), etc. however, the opinions we draw about this world and the way we choose to conceptualize or understand this world are very different and depend on our beliefs about many philosophies -- and this ambiguity drives much of the curiosity in the humanities. what was 18th century french society and how did their authors and historians view it? how can we view it now? what is the best way to create a history of video art from the 1960s to today and how can we interpret existing histories? the humanities draw much of their intellectual vigor and creativity from interpreting and arguing about what reality means. so i absolutely cannot see it as "the external world." what's that?

we also discussed "error" more. people cannot be errors because we are all capable of living in contemporary society; we cannot brave the elements but our brain power allows us to understand and *use* (yeah, i'll use use this way) the survival systems in place (we wear clothes, live in air conditioned houses, etc.). what killed our ancestors doesn't kill us. that doesn't make us weak, it makes us contemporary. also, organisms that are unfit and die are not "errors" because they are part of the evolutionary process -- some species replace other ones. that's evolution running smoothly, so the word doesn't apply!

i am looking forward to prof dalke coming back from her conference and explaining to me how they distinguish between the words "contemplative" and "intellectual" (remember in class she contrasted the "contemplative way of looking at the world" vs the "intellectual" one) because right now, in full indignation mode, i find that offensive. it seems to come from that strain of thought that believes that intellectuals are "locked up in their own little world" and are "isolated" from "real issues." as you can tell by my abuse of the quotation mark, i don't see any of that as true. it implies that being intellectual means not being creative, when this is the opposite of what is true. hmmm, we'll have to see...