Representation

y por las calles la sangre de los niños
corría simplemente, como sangre de niños.

and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

-Pablo Neruda, Explico Algunas Cosas (I'm Explaining a Few Things)

Reproductive health?

I missed this story last month, and it seems to have been resolved for now, but what these people been smokin'? The POPLINE database "provides evidence-based information on reproductive health and family planning".

"Controversy arose this week when librarians discovered that they could no longer use the word 'abortion' on POPLINE, a reproductive health database maintained by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)."

Confused librarians quickly emailed the POPLINE admins. (Note for the non-librarians: a "stop word" is a word that the database ignores when it appears in a search query--usually things like “a”, “an”, and “the”.)

"Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’. This is the broader term to our ‘Abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields. Also, adding ‘unwanted w2 pregnancy’ in place
of aborti*. We have a keyword Pregnancy, Unwanted and there are 2517 records with aborti* & unwanted w2 pregnancy."

Bwa?

And also, I might add, ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’. For realz?

After a librarian-led kerfluzzle, the Dean restored access and explained the matter thusly:

"It is our understanding that USAID, the federal agency that funds POPLINE, is restricted by law from funding any abortion activities or supplies. In February, a search by USAID officials found two items in the POPLINE database that advocated for abortion. Because they were advocacy materials, they did not meet the criteria for inclusion in the database. The agency informed POPLINE administrators who removed them from POPLINE. POPLINE administrators also found and removed from the database five other items from the same issue of the same magazine, for the same reason: They were advocacy materials and did not meet the criteria for inclusion in the database. POPLINE administrators took the additional step of temporarily restricting "abortion" as a search term while the database was examined for other information that might not have been consistent with USAID guidelines."

(Note the creepy fact that the guv'ment has agents who scan publicly accessible information for ideologically questionable materials. The volume of information is such that this must be very expensive, involving many staff, full time. It can't be just an automated scanning program, since it takes human judgment on what constitutes "advocacy".)

The key issue seems to be the Siljander Amendment to the annual Appropriations Act, which is paraphrased by USAID as:

"No foreign assistance funds may be used to lobby for or against abortion."

The list of offending articles, all from "Abortion Magazine":

• How can the human-rights system work for women?


• The importance of teaching human rights.


• Human rights in Latin America: From discourse to reality.


• An interview with Monica Roa.


• Abortion is a human-rights issue.

Sigh.

RIP Robert Rauschenberg.

You changed the way we looked at art. And chickens. (Wikipedia,PBS)

Trick of the light

Multistable perception phenomena are fascinating. They're also a rare inescapable element of either/or in a world that I generally try to see in both/and terms. Percieving the image one way excludes seeing it the other; you can switch back and forth, but you can't see it both ways at the same time.

This sort of thing is also a reminder that it's important not to forget actual cognitive capacity when theorizing about social systems. We may live in a world built of words, but we're still made of meat. Our physiological makeup always underlies our abstract reasoning, and often reveals itself in surprising ways.

That's the key observation of U of C authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their new book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. They argue that if personal decisions are influenced by perception and environment, then everything from cafeterias to highway interchanges can be designed to guide our decisions in socially useful ways.

A local example: the irregular spacing of lines on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive causes drivers to feel like they're going faster, making them more likely to decrease speed when approaching a dangerous curve. Simple, effective, and cheaper than either traditional deterrent (traffic tickets) or educational (more street signage) methods.

The book has a companion web site containing excerpts, interviews, and a chance for readers to submit their own examples of "nudges" they've encountered. The U of C has also posted a video interview, where the authors talk about the Lake Shore Drive example.

It's all a little Big Brothery, I suppose, but not in any way I can put my finger on. Unlike, say, the Big Brothery-ness of CCTV cameras, where the greater regulation of public areas could lead to a dampening of free public expression, legal or otherwise--and then it's hello Pleasant Valley zombie-town. I guess in both cases, the reaction one has to this kind of government paternalism depends on how much one trusts the Man. And I'm pretty ambivalent about that: Big Brother scares me, sure, but I'll admit to having a lot of respect for Mustapha Mond.

Obfuscating Art

Many people have apparently been criticizing the Whitney Biennial for meaningless and unreadable text.  But the examples this article gives seem clear enough to me:

"Bove's 'settings' draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings."

Certain artifacts from a given period of history are so commonly encountered that they lose much of their meaning: e.g. Dorothea Lange's photos of Depression-era farm workers.  Does anyone look at "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children." and see it as a meaningful object, part of a network of other meaningful objects, anymore? I'd say it's mostly just used as shorthand for "The Depression."  So by combining such images/objects in interesting ways, an artist might allow them to be seen again as complex and meaningful.  Meanings that were "latent" in the image/object can again become evident when it is perceived outside its common context.

 ". . . invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial . . . inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion."

Is florid, but I think relatively clear. The artist creates absurd juxtapositions of things which are confusing, but hint at meaning.  The meaning never becomes fixed or obvious, but remains tentative and provisional. Is it this? Maybe this? The viewer is encouraged to participate in discovering or constructing the sense of a piece.

So were those bad examples? Or are the critics being philistines?  Or am I more generous to obscure language than most people?

This whole kerfluffle reminds me of that award for bad philosophical writing a few years ago. Judith Butler's "winning" passage...

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

...is complex, sure, but I don't think it's unclear.  It uses jargon, but it uses it to avoid being six times as long.  There's a LOT of information in that very short paragraph. In texts written for other scholars in a given field, jargon is perfectly acceptable--even necessary. Professional shorthand makes for more readable texts, by reducing length and distilling meaning.

There's something to be said for encouraging clarity, especially in an educational context. But to sacrifice complexity for clarity is to aim discourse at the lowest common denominator.  And to expect high-level professional communication to be immediately understandable by a non-professional is ridiculous.

One shouldn't have to work to understand sentences. Clarity of structure and grammar is always desirable. And it's certainly tempting, as a writer, to try and hide one's own confusion by writing obscurely; this is something any critical reader of difficult texts should be aware of.

 But there's absolutely nothing wrong with having to work to understand complex concepts, and in many cases complex concepts can only be efficiently expressed using complex sentences.

Do we really want all academic writing to read like Dr. Phil? That would be more of a tragedy that a few overzealous writers turning out impenetrable prose.