Notes - 11.13.12 - Jess

• ·      Ellen – updates on the syllabus; we’ll come back to the beginning by the end of the class;
• ·      Amy – choose something and re-read it rather than scanning it; the experience of re-reading is important; need to integrate it into new work; for Tuesday the 4^th, we’re asking you to write an abstract for a paper to come (presumably based on the work we’ve done in this class);
• ·      Ellen – Kelly, Iris and Ming – you are welcome to produce an abstract that fits your particular professional discourse;
• ·      Amy – do a final review of your blog; do this in preparation for your abstract; as part of that, go back to some of the course blogs and see your favorite contributions and interjections; final review and curation of your own blog; on the last day, we should meet at Nick’s, have some snacks, some collection of treats, for a celebratory end to this class in a different performance venue;
• ·      Ellen – be done with your personal blog by December 4^th; my sense is that the abstract is meant to be a written account of future work as specific or broad as it needs to be; go back over the course blog, cull what you think is personally meaningful to you, and integrate it into your personal blog, your zone of content curation; use this as the ingredients for the abstract, which you will post on the course blog and your personal blog; what are you committed to think through in the future?; this is a useful exercise to do it across all your courses; you do need a place to offload these ideas; good mental hygiene across the academy;
• ·      Amy – hone and condense this (300 words); this should not be a rehearsal of every great thing you’ve thought; this is the next project, the next step of research, this is what I imagine I’ll find, this is why it’s important, etc.; let’s talk about the election but also about the historical museum trip, the Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, wherever we’ve been in the last week or so; let’s start by noting the way in which Cody clearly outlined the terms of his investigation as ethnography; the community he was in had clear allegiances, limits, identity, even a flag; those of you who didn’t frame your experience ethnographically, I would love to hear how you would frame it now; it’s important for all of us to recognize our various identity markers left right and center; let’s talk about where we can articulate this work that we did as ethnographic work;
• ·      Dorothy – I was alone all day, so it would have been an auto-ethnography, but I think when you do social media/Internet based work, it’s important to note your self-curated communities, you have selected the people you choose to see things from; at the end of the day, you haven’t made a group choice, but a one-by-one series of choices, perhaps an explanation of the community you have devised would be beneficial;
• ·      Ellen – that was Courtney’s project, right? To locate these affiliations within a corporate structure; I thought about this in relation to Jennifer’s too – identifying yourself within voter demographics is locating yourself in a wide variety of places; gender, ethnic background, nation heritage, age, education, marital status, gender identity - - so many categories, so it’s interesting to see where and when we’re dominant; at least that’s where we’re told it’s interesting;
• ·      Derek – for mine I was really specifically looking at college/graduate students and people who worked within that community, and thinking about it being located in the history center where we went; I didn’t do what Cody did, which was great, but to make it more explicit that it was the Bloomington graduate community and associated people you might run in to, would locate visitors more clearly and then it being kind of a left-leaning community in general; in the house while we were watching the returns, I put in that there was a moderate Republican, which there wasn’t, but a few of the people there have moderate Republican parents, and I feel like people turn into their parents; their conservatism is latent;
• ·      Courtney – what evidence do you have?
• ·      Derek – I have no evidence per se…
• ·      Ellen – this brings us back to the history center; you take the photo and re-enact the content of the photo, but that doesn’t really follow it carefully; some people were inserted that weren’t there; the difference between the factual and potential was skipped over on Friday; I was struck by the creative museology of many of our exhibits in that they were not particularly epistemologically concerned between the difference of fiction and fact; this is not a critique, but an area of intrigue for me; what counts as experience and what counts as event? Any thoughts?
• ·      Dorothy – one thing that stuck out was Derek’s and what we all collectively did, which is the idea that there is something like a community; the idea that a community actually exists is something that needs to be proven before you do any ethnographic thing on it; community is a subject that needs to be proven beyond “this is a group of people together”
• ·      Ellen – the spur to fiction for Derek is a move towards a more varied experience; I completely understand, the same logic as the history center, but the question is, how can we do that? How can we curate that which is not our experience? Cody’s blog can be documented since things actually happened, but his experience is relatively rare among the groups in terms of the curated phenomenon; Kelly, your experience was fabulous, imagine all these people, this set of beliefs, you’re just about to script the scene for us, you’re offering up an interesting fiction on actual historical events; there is a relationship between events and theatre, but that’s what I’m particularly interested here – what are the logic for improvisation
• ·      Derek – the only thing that was fabricated was the presence of the moderate Republican, everything else was exactly the same; the reason I chose to do that because the people I was with were discussing how their parents would react, and that could be embodied in a person in the room; also, on our campus, there are a minority of conservatives, and I think that deserves some recognition; since the election I’ve heard about racist incidents that happened; one friend of mine was told to “Go home”, and another classmate had the “n” word yelled at him while he was walking down the street, here in Bloomington; I don’t know how you would integrate something like that; how do you define community?
• ·      Dorothy – I get told racist stuff here all the time; it’s normal, most people of color think of this town as very racist; some people’s experience of being here; the necessity of representing the different view, I like the idea of ghosting the parents, but it’s important to remember that you are representing the liberal campus, but your experience of this campus;
• ·      Andrea – We were talking about the epistemological grounds of what we’re doing and how it can relate to the living photographs; I thought we could take Facebook screenshots and that archive that’s been created on Facebook as a resource similar to the photographs we encountered; you could feasibly create a scene in which those particular people interact, say similar things they posted on Facebook or other things online; this could be a way in the future of recreating this like the photograph;
• ·      Amy – where do we want to draw the line between theatre and performance and the museum?
• ·      Whitney – That’s where I want to go; Berlant’s need to feel historical in some way in trying to re-create these things; there’s a level of symbolic-ness when we re-create these events; how that logic helps to structure our sense for how our reimagining has to work in a different register;
• ·      Jennifer – we didn’t know that 9/11 was historical; we had to re-create that historicity then, but with election day, we were sent out with the intent that today was historical; I bought too much bread at the grocery store trying to find things that were happening; this desire to feel historical just didn’t happen;
• ·      Ellen – isn’t that important to archive? History is not historical; lots of people said that something was happening, but not around me; Justin, your view was right there;
• ·      Justin – anything beyond the folder becomes point of view and I backed away there
• ·      Jennifer – when I was on Facebook and trying to feel historical, but my friend is working on the campaign in MD and saying that it’s feeling historical, but not me; if you’re so caught up in it, or you’re not feeling it and you miss it;
• ·      Amy – I was struck by Ming’s post about this; this seems different than feeling historical, a longing for drama that is absent, which is potentially problematic and has tremendous ideological weight because there is a desire to be where the drama is, and you don’t need to change it; there was something upsetting and unsettling to me about that;
• ·      Ming – I was thinking what we were talking about boredom, and Iris, you were talking about not being transported, I was thinking about what happens when you’re away from the action; am I supposed to recreate this for museum goers? How do you even start with that; I wanted to ask you, Ellen, would you re-define boredom in affect?
• ·      Ellen – I think that when we turn away to our carefully culled information to fictional avatars that are in the experience that should be happening; this is very interesting psychological dynamic; it’s hard to do what Ming or Justin did and say “This is all I’ve got”; the history center was interesting in that there photographs are relatively quotidian; this thrill ride of history is what Amy was talking about – you get the mood of a moment, you can get some influction or some feeling for what it might have been like to experience a relatively indistinguished day in a place and moment where you weren’t; what does get marked are events that are out of the norm; I applaud the center’s desire to document these quotidian events; this project was hard because this election day was marked, how do you get people to be immersed in this experience without deviating from the facts, the idea of curating this event is that it’s a historical moment; without creating an alternative future
• ·      Ming – I’m fascinating by what we should be fascinated by; where am I getting this information, that this is an Important Day, when there is no one here at this building; we depend on historians to put an exciting spin on mundane facts; if there was a historian looking back, it would become historicized and exciting;
• ·      Dorothy – we’re saying that the event is somewhere else, as if your feeling is not valid of this historical event; how could someone feel what I was feeling that day?; something is happening right there because you’re alive;
• ·      Amy – the exercise is to practice as scholars taking different perspectives; simultaneously acknowledging that there is nothing happening right now, maybe elsewhere; it’s a luxury to be bored and to feel like it doesn’t matter to me; as scholars we have to get good at taking these perspectives; we find a voter pamphlet from 1602, and it was quotidian back then, but it becomes worth something and we make lots of conclusions from it; is it about your identity or community as you want to label/delineate it; how do you make something that doesn’t look interesting to you, actually interesting? Analyzable? Worthwhile? Let’s question our privilege here.
• ·      Dorothy – Did everyone feel that way?
• ·      Sara – I had a funny experience with that; my boyfriend’s mom worked for the Obama campaign and knocked on doors in swing dates; living in Indiana, I was not asked to do any such thing, but I would get texts asking me to make phone calls; I thought it was funny that she was asked to do one thing while I was asked to do another; this campaign made us feel that things were happening “over there”, not here in Indiana; I guess I did feel like there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot over here going on;
• ·      Amy – your postscript about your mom calling was so interesting, such key data for looking at an ethnographic community; I can’t think of a community where someone would know me or call my mom; that’s a very different experience from Justin’s absentee voting experience;
• ·      Justin – if I voted in my precinct, my parents would get a call, definitely
• ·      Andrea – I felt a little bit like nothing was happening at all, it was all synthetic; the way I experienced Election Day was entirely through my computer screen; my life went on before and after the election without much change; kind of like a birthday, but you’re going about your life same as always;
• ·      Whitney – can we connect this to heritage (pg. 149) in the Kirschenblatt-Gimblett? there’s a sense here that we missed out on the “real” election day? or the real excitement that we want to get back to? Heritage created by exhibition; how do we make that connection? If we’re trying to get back a sense for what Election Day is “supposed” to be, is this making something of election day?
• ·      Dorothy – this is really interesting for me to hear, though I didn’t vote for political reasons, it was a big deal to us to get a black president a second term
• ·      Amy – why didn’t you vote?
• ·      Dorothy – I didn’t support either candidate, but I supported a black candidate.
• ·      Sara – Why didn’t you vote for blackness, if you supported that?
• ·      Dorothy – I don’t vote for drone strikes. It was a big deal, but in a different way for me.
• ·      Whitney – There seems to be a structured sense of it that the phrase “election day” garners that doesn’t actually occur on the day – it’s not quite the sensation
• ·      Ellen – I think it’s a difference between historically consequential and eventfulness in Berlant’s view; that’s an important distinction; it’s important to know that the election was happening elsewhere, it was true; there’s something going on historically that we can document as fact, then the feelings relating to that; this moment is ghosted by the previous moment, for those of us feeling the power of the election in 2008; the hope for a second version had already been deflated by pundits, and the waiting for the concession speech, it was impossible to recreate a second or surrogate version of the same thing; I’m not trying to say that this is somehow not complex – it’s unbelievably complex;
• ·      Jennifer – there was an added weirdness to me, because my grandma did this very assignment when she was 14; she wrote a poem about the election day (FDR) and I’m going to read it; the weather was muddy, Hoover was so depressed, we had to take a buggy to vote; they were very poor in a rural community, south central Illinois; the lack of happenings in my day contrasted with this passage from my grandma; this is not as good as my grandma’s poem, this ethnography;
• ·      Ellen – who knew we were so unoriginal?
• ·      Derek – I think your grandma’s poem, especially about the chili and the mud, gets at what Whitney was saying and I did in my post, trying to document the day, it’s average, it doesn’t feel like anything special, and there’s this sense that it should feel something special, but it really doesn’t; it’s weird because in other places, it’s not a work day, Election Day is not a work day; that has a big effect on it; if we changed the way election day is handled…
• ·      Justin – corporate entities tell us it’s important, Daily Show and Colbert Report went live, Dancing with the Stars was moved, etc.;
• ·      Courtney – I wrote about the evening because that to me is what Election day is; it’s the fun of finding out who wins that gets me; the two different sides of the day;
• ·      Jenna – this is kind of how Facebook was using the election, you could watch about who voted, who bragged, you could kind of be in the moment
• ·      Sara – you could see how many people with your first name voted for Obama
• ·      Whitney – my polling place was reminiscent of why the day was so important; the kids had done so much preparation – coloring flags – you’re being set up, at the age of 6 – 10, to feel something about this day’s importance; it’s exciting event where you get to draw on big paper;
• ·      Derek – then your hopes and dreams are dashed…
• ·      Sara – they did 10 – 15 minute devised plays on the election, it was fun and special for them;
• ·      Iris – my dad mentioned why we vote on Tuesday – you couldn’t go into town on the weekend, you get there on Monday, vote Tuesday, get home Wednesday, and so on; the fact of people going on horseback seemed to give it more importance
• ·      Kelly – I’m still registered in Brownsburg, and I forgot how much of an event it is for my family; they had a lot more to lose in this election than I did; I didn’t know how to curate that personal moment for me; how do I display this personal moment?
• ·      Iris – the museum session ends with breakfast, you talk about your feelings…
• ·      Amy – almost everyone’s post commented on the connections within your social network and the lack of connection, or desire to not have any connections online or family or what have you; it’s a very visible moment for those relationships, and right now, incredibly contentious;
• ·      Ellen – your story, Kelly, would easily be an oral history, being referenced 20 – 30 years from now in an archive; to me, the history center, my first experience was alienating (I had not been forewarned); many of you imagined that you should make use of these amenities like we saw in Indianapolis; Courtney’s version of her archive/exhibit or Kelly’s narrative suggest that less complex versions of documentation might help us document this easier; maybe those things weren’t so easily integrated into the forms we saw in Indianapolis;
• ·      Ming – you talked about privilege, can you explain more?
• ·      Amy – I’m just saying that as Americans voting, there’s just baseline degree of security and privilege not necessarily historically or geographically universal; I’m defining privilege very broadly; we’re able to sit on Facebook and relatively speaking, that’s of historical note and we don’t see it because we’re in the midst of it;
• ·      Jennifer – this reminds me of the article by Geertz on cockfighting and Dorothy’s comment about how Geertz makes it a dramatic moment; different people find different ways of telling history appealing; you might want to go to an active experience or a passive one; it depends on how you want to experience history
• ·      Ellen – is it clear why the history center why they made those choices they did? We heard from Dan, the director, that this is the only place where you can walk into a photograph; their claims of the value of performance/interaction, particularly for youth, that we need to attend to; the digital makes many of the same claims; it’s valuable to think about when and where we instrumentalize performance as a mode of historical gathering; what’s valuable? what’s shaky? these are all questions we need to be attentive to because they’re not being called out; theatre is the way Dan went into this, but many people in history, they deliver the antithesis of theatrical performance; the complaints of Kirschenblatt-Gimblett of the curation of heritage; I was surprised that some of your blogs really embraced the theatrical; sometimes these were literal exaggerations, maybe surreal, this is worth talking about what the value of fiction in the midst of history; it needs to be documented even if it’s not drawn out of categories of experience not understood to be documentable;
• ·      Jennifer – I could think of very few objects from the Election that would go to a museum; tactile things didn’t show up very much; it seems like we had to go to screens and actors to remember the election
• ·      Whitney – a lot of times, decisions are made by the interests of the creator, curator
• ·      Sara – I was upset with myself for not being able to create interesting exhibits like you all; I felt that so many of the exhibits interesting to me, the only people I could talk to that would highlight what I want to display share my beliefs; those who don’t see it would think I was overreacting; it couldn’t communicate to my desired audience and I had to go back to an archival representation of it; I felt very hesitant to do some of these events;
• ·      Kelly – I thought about that in the prohibition exhibit;
• ·      Dorothy – It was sponsored by the Indiana Beverage Association
• ·      Kelly – this is obviously a biased view, this exhibit, they all have a dramatic irony, which is very interesting; the election is waiting to happen, just like the exhibit
• ·      Ming – I found this whole conversation to point to the myth of historiography, that any info we get isn’t curated by someone; history is not a performance, not an act of curation, this is a myth I buy into unconsciously, until I discuss it;
• ·      Ellen – I was struck by Kelly’s phrase about how to “jar” up the election; what do we do about a digital event? many of you addressed this indirectly; there’s going to be an age gap between audiences that walk into the center and feel at home in this twilight zone that mingles historical records and improvised performance, and those who have opinions of what is decorous in history; Dorothy, your post was very interesting because it seemed to me to be very performance based;
• ·      Dorothy – I did take those screenshots afterwards, but I saw them on the day
• ·      Ellen – would it make any difference to retroactively grab sixteen images?
• ·      Dorothy – I was thinking of the term of ethnographic in a folkloric way; very literal representation of what I saw that day;
• ·      Amy – I was struck by the juxtaposition between the artifact and the performance; my liberal bias aside, the republican math wasn’t adding up but they performed “momentum”; the whole kind of Karl Rove interaction was so much this performance of a narrative and a performance that they were all expecting, and the background of artifact of Nate Silver’s math; that to me was a performance leading up to the election of anticipation and this complete narrative of a surprise victory that everyone played to, even as the artifacts were saying completely different things; the embarrassing collision of performance and artifact;
• ·      Dorothy – individual perspective is important; a lot of people in my circle know that the math doesn’t matter, and I was surprised that the math did matter;
• ·      Ellen – some of us sat through the Gore election, and we woke up to a Bush victory; long terrible painful decline into a topsy-turvy land; I was watching Karl Rove have his meltdown and precedent told me that it would happen again; everything on the map could change or shift beneath our feet; all that digital displays feel to me like a charade now; I still have those jittery moments, “Are the numbers still right?”
• ·      Sara – the delay of the concession speech was terrifying; we will not sleep until the acceptance speech comes in;
• ·      Ellen – it does bring out this issue of “elsewhere” outside of geography, offloaded into a digital/virtual zone, how do we fully claim it as our experience? how are we ever sure of it?