Unfinished: Brian Eno and Konrad Glogowski
Pair this Konrad Glogowski…
I no longer view the texts produced by learners as definitive pronouncements or conclusive statements on assigned topics. Texts are tentative attempts to construct knowledge and, if they are produced within a community of inquiry-oriented peers, they will lead to further knowledge building and meaning-making. […]
So, teaching, the way I see it, is what Michael Oakeshott refers to as “unrehearsed intellectual adventure” (Oakeshott 1962), it is an “unending conversation” (Burke 1941) which teachers enter with their students to show them how to participate and construct their knowledge amid a choir of voices. This conversation does not end with the unit test or the final exam.
…with this Brian Eno…
In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that “interactive” anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is “unfinished.” Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a “nature,” and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable - the “nature” of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more “primitive” than ours take this entirely for granted - surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place. Does this make clearer why I welcome that African thing? It’s not nostalgia or admiration of the exotic - it’s saying, “Here is a bundle of ideas that we would do well to learn from.”
Finishing implies interactive: your job is to complete something for that moment in time. A very clear example of this is hypertext. It’s not pleasant to use - because it happens on computer screens - but it is a far-reaching revolution in thinking. The transition from the idea of text as a line to the idea of text as a web is just about as big a change of consciousness as we are capable of. I can imagine the hypertext consciousness spreading to things we take in, not only things we read. I am very keen on this unfinished idea because it co-opts things like screen savers and games and models and even archives, which are basically unfinished pieces of work.
…and more Eno.
That’s an interesting question. The effect of highly accelerated careers could be this: Ideas are put out into the public sphere much earlier, and less completely formed, than they would have been in the past. This is an invitation for other people to cherry-pick those ideas and finish them in various different ways. I think this makes culture a more widespread conversation, the result of a host of untraceable contributions webbing together to produce new things. It erodes the image of the artist as a lonely genius and puts us into a more “folk music” situation, where anyone can have a go and ideas spread out in all directions.
Everything is a Remix deserves mention here too, as does this question posed by Sam Anderson while writing about David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King:
What does unfinished unfinishedness look like?
Life.
