Cogs lately, 3

These art deco cogs are from the main lobby in downtown Chicago where ACM (Associated Colleges of the Midwest) has its offices. I captured these after Friday evening meetings and thought of them Saturday morning when the ACM Vice President invoked pejoratively the expression "cog in the machine" into his opening talk for a day of workshops for us ACM-Mellon postdoctoral fellows. The cog may be pejorative mostly today, but in the era of serious art deco the cog was an object of delight in engineering brighter futures. These cogs are still highly polished and illuminated in the foyer, yet largely repressed when people can pass them daily and wield the pejorative cog in their discourse.
"Cogs lately" is therefore my attempt to display the repressed that hangs out all the time in plain sight.

Cogs lately, 2

This large cogwheel was in a shop window on Broadway in New York City just south of Madison Square Park and in the same block as the Uniqlo Pop-up store. Purple Japanese fashion and a cogwheel in the same block: talk about the concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh!

Cogs lately

Cogs sprouting everywhere! Really, attune your vision to cogs and you will notice them proliferating as if they were spilling out of Kafka's machine at the end of "In the Penal Colony," when the inscription-punisher breaks down and cogs spill out of its mysterious interior like clowns from a Mini Cooper...

These cogs comprise the window display at the Duty Free Shop in the Detroit airport. Paired with Penelope Cruz no less. Clearly there's a designer in Detroit with the highest taste!

Three Levels x 2

When I find myself inhabiting a 3-story building, I cannot resist mapping the building’s stories onto Freud’s triad as well as Lacan’s.

In this case, Valders Hall of Science has three stories. In the basement, where Id is constructed and hangs out, there are the physics labs, closed and locked doors assigned to individual professors who push around fundamental particles.

On the main floor, classrooms and study areas, the physics department proper, and cabinets of taxidermied nonhumans, the preservative chemicals of which whisper gently to the olfactory organ when you pass by them and their glass eyeballs. In Hitchcock’s Psycho, the taxidermied animals were aside from the home structure, in the office of the motel—here the Biology department is in the attached new building. When I walk past the cases of dead nonhumans, I consider why they are installed at the level of the Ego. This is largely how we move as objects through the world of objects, imagining those other objects as not quite so privileged as we are, yet we are compelled to observe them—they dazzle us gradually as Emily Dickinson, the em-dash mistress—put it. The world is a group of specimens behind a glass screen. This is the balanced ego alive.

Upstairs: Psychology and Environmental Studies. My office is here at the level of Superego. Ecology making its meaningless demands and the psyche striving to make meaning of the meaningless and meaninglessness.

In the Lacanian register, I suppose the particle physics basement is the Imaginary, the main floor of class rooms and communal study areas is the Symbolic where we socially transform the Imaginary into the Symbolic. And up here in Psych and Environmental Studies, we wrestle with the Real, that unrepresentable remainder.

Freud's letters

I have self-prescribed a daily dip into Sigmund Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess, likely a result of Peter Galison's discovery that Freud gained a crucial insight into linguistics of repression by self-observing letter writing practices under conditions of strict censorship.

Only a few letters in, I am struck by how Freud always uses a piece of the precious compact space to talk about his first daughter, Mathilde. These are touching moments, attesting to the multiplicity of life when one is a researcher, writer, husband and father. As I desperately miss the physical presence of my own first daughter, Sofia (Chofi), Freud's letters provide a gentle and subtle comfort.

But there are little oddities like: "I have at the moment a lady in hypnosis lying in front of me and therefore can go on writing in peace..." 28 May 1888.

Liberal Arts Education and Critical Thinking

Last weekend I was in Chicago for an ACM (Associated Colleges of the Midwest) workshop related to my current Postdoc post. A daylong multiplicity of conversations about what a Liberal Arts education and Liberal Arts institutions are and how we, as Postdoc Fellows recently graduating from R1 universities are making the transition. Quite an engaging opportunity for concentrated thought and exchange about what we do, might do, and why!

Still under the influence of OOOIII, I was struck by the one unanimous element of the day: Critical Thinking is a primary (and unexamined) goal. At OOOIII, numerous people were raising fundamental questions about the era of "Critical Thinking"--in relation to the Kantian knot as well as concern over this particular and singular model of how we think about thought as well as change. All of this on the heels of a good and brilliant friend's reader remarks on one of my essays that really pushed me to try articulating what ideological criticism really offers in the way of change--not a binary of action versus thought, but a question about our belief in critical thinking and critique: When do we meet the quantitative shift to the qualitative? When will there be just the right amount of critique to change things?

I don't have my answers. I feel like I'm just opening this area of thought, and it's like riding inside of a Percy Shelley poem: one second your in the cosmos observing the music of the spheres, then you're looking at nanocogs, or maybe you are a nanocog.

Disorientation like standing underneath Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate and looking up while moving slowly in a circle.

Mate Afternoon

The fall equinox descends and the sky darkens early. The clouds veil all the stars from view, removing the illusion of endless distance and space, turning the lifeworld into a claustrophobic intimacy. It could be enough to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer get the blues. But, put on some Roberto Goyeneche (maybe "Naranjo en flor"), take in a round of good mate and some aromatic black walnuts, and you'll feel right as rain, as the Oracle once said.