Personal Blogs

Review of:

Lewis, Marc (2015) The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease Melbourne & London, Scribe Publications

The value of this book can’t be under-estimated and should not be dismissed. Its target is the biomedical model of addiction – the disease model – and its success as a book for me was to further clarify the slipperiness of the term ‘biopsychosocial’ common to contemporary discussions of the aetiology, maintenance and the structuring of supportive interventions in addictions. My background in social work was an early attraction to the term ‘biopsychosocial’ as a means of bridging the divide in the debate between biomedical and psychosocial theories of addiction. However, in practice, this bridging tended to further bolster the biomedical model and relegate psychosocial intervention to a secondary role both in specialist intervention team structures and operations. Such teams often continued to be headed by a psychiatrist.

This for two reasons (although these reasons are solely the product of a retired practitioner’s reflections on past experience):

This feature is, of course, in part a product of institutionalised state health providers and less apparent therefore to Lewis in the USA, where the biopsychosocial is conceived as somewhat apart from the biomedical model. In his book, the 'bio' in biopsychosocial is a merely the name of organisation of a knowledge of embodied systems and is much easier to pit against a biomedical system that is essentiall run for profit. 

I tried to draw this distinction in the following figure.

In the figure, the biomedical merely occupies the same terrain as a conceptual biopsychosocial model but it interprets that terrain differently – through the lens of qualified and exclusive practice. Any realistic understanding of that figure will, of course, readily admit that there will be a trade between the biomedical and conceptual biopsychosocial but that both need to be kept distant in our thinking, at least at the level of theory and intervention planning. As Lewis shows, some descriptions of neuronal activity can describe change in neurobiological and neuroanatomy in terms other than ‘disease’ and can make legitimate analogy between the features of socially validated and socially invalidated learning. 

Thus while the life-processes in the life of a ‘junkie’ are seen now as best described in arcs of ‘recovery’ from a deficit position, the processes involved in falling in, and out of, love and learning literature or neurobiology are seen as ‘normative’ learning processes. Yet all these processes can be described throughout the nested processes shown in our circular system set in the figure above. For Lewis, given free reign and dominance, the biomedical (even when it imports and colonises aspects of the psychosocial) retains interests that are solely its own – those of professional exclusiveness and top-down control of the person experiencing learning through addiction. His stories of the horrors of treatment centres ring so true to me from my working life (p. 212) - although that is not to say I didn't see islands of good personal practice.

One sign of the difference in the way the biopsychosocial is conceived in Lewis is the Birmingham Reach Out Recovery (p. 214) intervention in which a large part of the intervention was fuelled by consulting groups of former addicts who worked with each other to socialise and increase access to support. Often that support appears little less than avenues and ‘recovery-friendly shops’ for the ‘addict’ to build on and generate new story from their old stories, stories which appear to have got stuck in 'now-appeal' as he calls it. That this is more truly biopsychosocial, Lewis argues, is seen in the deficiencies of time and professional personnel controlled CBT and even mindfulness interventions that measure input and output but do not generate motivation or change (in themselves). The stress is on narrative (I can see the biomedical teams now developing training for nurses in ‘narrative therapy’ - indeed it has been happening some time) but not narrative aimed at 'therapy' as such but in generating motivated movement in the stalled neuroplasticity in the brain of the addict (locked into what Lewis call ‘now-appeal’).

This (from a neuro-scientist) is now conceivable because neuroscience, unlike the sterile discipline of cognitive psychology, has freed itself from a merely cognitive and merely behavioural interest – its interest in those brain processes called emotion and drive would have shocked Skinner, Pavlov, and Beck. Now no-one dare write about psychology without recognising ‘Descartes’ Error’ (Antonio Damasio).  

So this book genuinely revels in all its centre parts on biographical (and some autobiographical), stories of addiction that are a long way from the mechanical nature of the Jellinek curve. Its bookend chapters are helpful though with definitions of brain anatomy and processes that can be understood by anyone – and while this book can replace no textbook accounts for a learner in higher education, it can make their limitations and gaps clear to both pure scientists and practitioners: pure science, that is, which is not still married merely to positivism. Look for instance at the genius of the everyday science explanation of the anatomy and function of the Orbito-Frontal Cortex (p. 82). If you are a beginning learner (or even if you began a whole ago) you can learn a lot from that.

I love this book.

Steve

Burnside, John (2017) Ashland and Vine London, Jonathan Cape.

Some writers seem, when you have grown to love their writing, to be continually writing the same novel – a novel that does not exist in the past or present but is ever emergent in the future. Some of the same issues get raised and some iconic landscapes – For Burnside it is deserted snowscapes – but what emerges in each outing is truly new, liberating for its reader and writer because it allows one’s history to resonate in a new place, as if it belonged there. The major theme is of ‘Elsewhere’.

This describes the scene of Burnside’s novels, a place that is hard to locate but exists nevertheless though always as immanent, if on occasion emergent. In this case what has emerged is a truly great novel that absorbs itself in and articulates American experience in ways that very few novels do – whilst keeping its foot ‘elsewhere’ in time and space. It is not only Burnside’s own novels and life -experience (as we have it in his multi-form memoirs) that we have here – in the animal prints in the snow and the patterns they suggest - but also a bricolage of literary traditions that might seem miles from each other in purpose and form. Hence American Road novel can meet up with the thematic and purpose of Iris Murdoch’s search for a temporal solace that might enable us to give up hopes of ‘elsewhere’ as a place outside human time: a false heaven known to be so because all heavens are false. Even a short novel like this can, at this point in Burnside’s career bear a weight of metaphysics (p. 335):

These excerpts necessarily hide the novel you read because generically this novel is impossible to classify: bildungsroman, spy thriller, political novel and war story. All of them make part of the ‘manifold narrative that yet is more, since its patterns are yet to be realised. In this uncertainty, I felt a pressure I have not felt before so strongly in Burnside on the everyday experience of gender and sexual identification (though it is clearly there at the mythic level in A Summer of Drowning (another novel that took me by storm). I think this is perhaps because this novel of rediscovery of the memory of a whole family so clearly charts the mix of the political, the personal and the liberating so clear to us now in the accumulated ‘happenings’ and self-disclosures of the seventies, lead inevitably from the USA, the ‘Forgotten History of America (p. 9).

Hence this story, which sort of hangs around a central theme of love between two women (still tentatively suppressed by other narrative accidents, resonates elsewhere in difficulties in locating together notions of self and gender that make one whole.  I have not (maybe through insensitivity but I don’t think, if so, it was that alone) in Burnside before.

For instance, I had troubled ambivalence about ‘sexing’ the primary narrative voice from the beginning of the novel. I missed something perhaps but there was (for a gay follower like myself of a novelist not usually working anywhere near the arena of gay writing) something like a frisson when I hear the narrative voice speak of having moved on from being ‘with a girl …, a beautiful dark-eyed Minnesotan called Ruth …’ (p. 6) to a ‘an arrangement, mostly tacit, but an arrangement nevertheless’ with the novel’s dark-heart, almost a parodic romantic male lead:

In my eyes the chance that this mirrored my own youthful crushes was a potential about which I was only later let down from (horrible deposition) lightly. Right or wrong about this effect, it is entirely possible a consummate artist like Burnside could have planned it, so much does it shadow the central story of Jean and Lee, a story we only get in full in the novel’s final chapter.

This novel, though short, reads like an epic, like the cult films its characters so often watch. Burnside was on the Booker panel that shortlisted Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (though I wouldn’t dare to blame him for that), an American novel of enormous size and pretension  which was at the time widely mistaken for ‘epic’ qualities, whose outcomes could be more nearly satisfactory in a very short story. Sometimes I wonder, though Burnside began Ashland and Vine well before that point, whether he, a master in my eyes, is showing the novice debut novelist how an apprenticeship to epic value is truly to be won – by locking time and space into a shorter space and working within it. If he was, he has proved himself, as indeed he has if he wasn’t aiming to deliver that lesson.

A novel that can tell the story of My Lai amongst narratives that encapsulate other histories that add up to a notion of the USA and yet totally involve you with its heroine and her break from booze to some sort of apprehension of passing time and history is a very great novel indeed. Burnside’s finer points continue to be missed by Booker panels however, so I can only hope that this time he will be rewarded in that way. A novelist who can write a short novel about so much and yet also attempt to discover within it why and how we tell stories in the ways we do (and sometimes don’t) surely has his reward ‘elsewhere’ but that may be to take metaphysics too far.

But I feel like finishing, since I’m trying to avoid spoilers, with a taste of its grasp of tale-telling, history and the search for personal and communal meaning. Its subtlety is typical – so much so that it might still go unnoticed how narrative and historic space and time coincide as a form of looking back to the forgotten and forward to its potential yet to come. I know Burnside continues a prophet of the left – however defeated we may seem.

I hope you find that as rich and impressive as I do.

All the best

Steve

Here is an exercise I am aiming to use to teach skills in multimodal literacy for the purposes of reflection & learning - with apologies to the great Charles Fernyhough for mangling his lovely text in Slide 1. In Slide 2, the categories in the coloured boxes are ones introduced in the particular Block of the course textbook (Turner et. al. 2015). The TMA that learnrer are preparing for requires them to reflect, using concepts from the textbook block on 2 diary entries about their personal experience AND on a multi-media object.

This exercise tries to combine diary-like writing (even if of a very high ordedr in the original) with picture.

Slide 3 is one I use that is of a lesser order for contrast.

All the best

Steve

Monica Bonvicini: Exhibition Gateshead BALTIC Visited 28/12 16. Below: Bonvicini (2014)

Geoff & I attended this exhibition (click here to open BALTIC website in a new window) with no prior knowledge of Monica Bonvicini and with little expectation that we would enjoy the experience. But what we found was better than enjoyment. It strikes me the best that can be achieved in viewing art is not enjoyment but the ability to ‘experience’ the ‘experience’ as an effect of the bodily senses, emotions and cognition – which is to find no difference between these categories whilst the experience remains that – just an experience.

Analysing experience is different but it happens simultaneously with ‘experiencing’ in the best art. This experience is not easy to put a name to –Freud called it a ‘sublimation’ and a defence against more primal ideas, but continuing to use the word is to expect the word ‘sublimation’ in a post Freudian context to do a lot more work that it is used to doing. The word is insanely elitist in association – a thing of high art.

What Bonvicini does is to take something basic, every day – in this sense alone ‘primal’ – and ask us to experience it anew – ‘queered’ by previously unexplored contexts. She links two senses of the ‘primal’ – what is basic – the ‘room’ or ‘space’ we live in throughout different phases of living – home, work, and leisure – and ties it to the ‘erotic’. The wall of the Baltic (an old flour mill – designed like ‘Mother’s Pride to satisfy) yells in large letters ‘SATISFY ME’, challenging the institution within or its temporary inhabitants – guests like ourselves – to begin to query on our intellect, senses and emotion what ‘satisfaction’ artistic institutions claim to give and the nature of the experience itself. We see those words again, printed on a dining table in a space mimicking a dining room / space. Who or what is satisfied here – by what? Spread out along a table the words call to be penetrated by experience but of what precisely would ‘satisfying experience’ consist.

Elsewhere hammock like swings mime the mechanism of sado-masochistic ‘pleasure’. The themes of ‘construction of space – architecture plus painful work – merge with those of deconstruction and pleasure. It is a complex disturbing experience. How better to see than by reading the completed questionnaire pro-formas adorning a whole wall in which construction workers answer questions about ‘how well do you get on with gay workers who work alongside you?’. Suddenly it seems a sensible question to ask: is traditional architecture and its probing tools inescapably heterosexist and ‘masculinist’ (if we look long enough we find a form completed by a woman who is a lesbian and a construction: ‘I only know me and I get on with myself just fine!’ she says. Plenty of those tools and chain-mail (‘male’) constructions and illusions of construction and disappearance get experienced as you pass them by in all their tarry or silvery/glittery hardness.

And then a repeated image of a pair of pincers embroidered differently in 200 different small frames show pincers (created in this most feminine (traditionally) mode such that gender, sex and sexuality all come to the fore. These hard pincers variably have to come to terms with the soft materials that construct them – woven images where mimesis of hard metal deconstructs into twine surrounding pincers – but in multiple ways. Twine that binds the pincers open (partially or wholly) or shut, twine that merely decorates and softens, twine that hardens and rigidifies a tool meant to be flexible.

And a hard wall – huge – called ‘Weaving’ (masculine / feminine in contrast even here) made of a collage / bricolage of regularly cut (but of varying sizes) rectangles containing pictures of soft body parts – legs especially. This is a work that literally absorbs the gaze in a very embodied manner.

There is too much of great wonder here. We bought two books on her and left in a daze to glance through at our ease and hopefully – perhaps – to return.

Did the artist demand the signs for the exhibits – ‘Do not Touch’ with the insistence that these sets of leather, chain and tar aggregations of construction materials and tools are vulnerable (easy to sustain damage) from our tentative touch. In this sense the ‘exhibition’ queries itself and its artists through the construction of a notion of art itself as ‘untouchable’ – as separate from the body, while miming it. Coming back from a visit to the toilet I passed the entrance door again where a young woman, a custodian of the Baltic, stood near the ‘Do Not TOUCH sign. AS I passed her towards the exit staircase a man heading to the toilet I had exited passed by both of us. He said very loudly to the woman and to an audience, of which I constituted a part: ‘Does that mean you’ in as cheeky a Geordie accent as I have heard. Nothing in that was meant to be threatening. But art makes us see and perhaps absorbs contingent experiences like this, into its orbit of reflection so that we are reflexively compromised by the meanings of the art itself.

Or at least that is what I thought. As we left and walked back along the Tyne, I had to hold Geoff’s hand.

All the best

Steve

Bonvicini, M. (2014) Self-portrait from 'Monica Bonvicini: Bio' on Bonvicini website. Available from: http://monicabonvicini.net/bio/ (Accessed 28/12/16).

Matthew Griffin (2016) Hide London, Bloomsbury

It is difficult to over-state the significance of this novel either as a transformation of the niche quality of the male gay novel but also of the metaphysical novel –exploring the experience mortality torn free of false hopes of salvation or eternity.

The title indicates the rich themes. It is a novel in which things are hidden – not least the central relationship (a marriage if there ever was one) between Wendell and Frank that is forever disguising its meaning in fear of the disgust and retribution of others – perhaps even from their introjections in these men’s (especially Frank’s) lives. But ‘hide’ is also that we bear in common with the animals – skin and covering hair, and a thing of great importance to Wendell, a retired but still practicing, in every way, taxidermist – resurrecting skin to a notion of its contents.

What skin covers or hides is very much the topic of the novel at its most painful – I cannot even bear to recollect the fate of Daisy, the dog representing in part the love of the two men for each other (their baby p.203) – but our inattentive disgust at bodily effluvia and slippery inner organs or matter released is a constant in the novel. In Frank’s bodily deterioration – to a collector of his own urine and faeces to other secret or dark interiors which people in the novel variously find disturbing, even potentially disgusting like the inadequately sized implements Frank fills with urine and sometimes faeces or ‘secrets’ so deep no-one knows their contents:

There is a moment where Frank and Wendell hold hands together under the skin of a deer as the work on it, feeling its edges tremble ‘with surface tension as they stretched wide’. That is a precise description of the prose here as if gives away its themes just below the ‘hide’ (a passage in which the word ‘married’ does a lot of work):

This novel strains to comprehend mortal love like no other while being enmeshed in selves, bodies, communities and changing social mores and ideologies. The moving passages refuse to hide what sustainable love must mean – which is to confront pain, waste and death. In a novel almost where what is spoken of as ’sex’ is absent, physical love is experienced when Wendell clears the ‘mess’ off of Frank’s now odorous body. This passage is painfully beautiful that shows him handling Frank’s ‘privates’:

As in The Winter’s Tale the search for love is confounded by the search for grace. If grace exists, it is still, cold, statuesque. Love lives when it cares and remembers, compares and remains:

That kiss recalls the one given to the dying Daisy which captures the dog’s saliva (a tense moment of disgust and passion) at the corner of her mouth, a kiss for Frank who like ‘each man’ has ‘killed the thing he loves’.

Read this book if you can. I write about it in the hope I can lose some of the visceral nature of the memories it leaves in me.Biut it really is worth it. Pain or no pain!

All the best

Steve

If you have a chance go and see this play at the Live Theatre at Newcastle (just across from the Sage). CLICK HERE for details in a NEW WINDOW.

I went (TODAY) because (now an old man ruined by psychology and psychologists) I was once a raw Literature student in London. Since then, I have loved Harriet Martineau. Known as a 'bluestocking' in the nineteenth century and a classic bore (Thomas Carlyle's comment is used in the play), she was the intellectual equal of George Eliot - even worked with the latter on the Westminster Review under Eliot's editorship and was writing work on Comtian theories of social change (and the peasantry) when Eliot was preparing Romola.

Her causes linked always to her feminism but never stopped there, such that she was a grew into an international anti-slavery campaigner. She wrote for children to bring to them an international idea (Feast on the Fjords) as well as adults and was resuscitated in her novel Deerbrook by Virago, the feminist publisher in its heyday.

But she also lived in an upstairs room in Tynemouth (for 5 years I believe but I'm going from a poor memory) where she wrote - Life In a Sick Room. Convinced she was dying, some theorists link her role as an invalid (like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's) to the invalidity once the damning judgement of the worth (outside vapid ideals) of women's lives in the nineteenth century.

This play's Martineau has a lighter turn (though equipped with the same ear trumpet). It is a feel-good play (almost an adult pantomime as the play once self-consciously jokes) about values of social justice, life and transformative learning. Class, race, gender (all get mixed) - the beautiful symbol for instance of Beulah, a cross -dressing young woman whose memories span her mother's enslavement passage (in a memory reminiscent of Turner's Slave-Ship) to A London that was changing though Tynemouth was not. Funny - it therefore sanitises white racism in humour in order to emphasise a positive youthful changefulness and hope. For a time, in the clog dancing passage for instance, I believed it all possible - and still want to do.

This is a play to cheer us up in Brexit Northern England. See it, please. It is a joy!!!!

All the best

Steve

Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration, the everyday. A Free and wonderful exhibition at Palace Green Library in the City of Durham 5^th November 2016 – 26^th February 2017

For information about the exhibition and how to get there, click here. For an online version of the curation of the museum select this too.

See especially the wonderful audio-visual installation based on participation by people who hear voices and see visions by Victoria Hume. This is available on the online version. However, experiencing the simulated recorded voices and sounds on the screens, in the context of a university building corridor on which it is placed, mixed together with the contingent voices and sounds of the learners conversing as they pass you on their way to their studies, the sounds of the café nearby and so on – is UNBEATABLE.

Curation is an art – selecting materials and placing those ‘objects’ in space and time is always part of the multimodal experience offered and facilitated by a true exhibition. All of these factors are included in this great exhibition, which is not only academically multi-disciplinary but experientially multimodal – a continual integration and tense separation of auditory, visual, kinetic, and tactile experience. Yes tactile – as you brush against the banners, for instance bearing the words of ‘voice-hearers’ on both sides you experience not an exhibit but also complex relationships to it as you turn your body and parts of your body to assimilate, if never quite accommodate the experience that surrounds you.

The space contains multiple pathway and niches – in one you may stop and sit and write, touching the material by which to get ‘heard’. Two others places sport a round black rug in positions at which you experience what ‘hearing voices in the head’ MIGHT be like – created by suspended auditory equipment well above your head. These simulations help you not only to experience but to experience in context. Hearing the kind of voice that motivated Samuel Beckett,  you gaze at his words and artefacts that memorialise him and his art. Compare that to the chance to don headphones and, momentarily escaping the curation’s multiple pathways, hear the VOICE of Virginia Woolf in both ears.

You don’t just see exhibits you begin to understand what it means to see ‘exhibits’, which is to hear, feel, touch both as sequential and sometimes integrated experiences. Yet you enter the curation through a most ‘conventional’ portal. Displayed in the requisite cases are copies of an ancient Chaucer and Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’ side by side (although I would have loved to see Chaucer’s translation of the latter too). Read the text that introduces it though and begin to see what the rest of the exhibition forces you to see. Chaucer’s verse in Troilus and Cryseide mimes, or attempt to do so, some of the multimodality of experience we miss if we merely SEE text.

And the space defies conventional hierarchies. The hegemony of science (cognitive and / or neurobiological) is in the exhibit but not dominantly. It is present in three small video-slide installations in a pathway at the back of the exhibition. They provide a coherent narrative of neuroscience that is reaching out to other disciplines, through the thought of Vygotsky on the origin of speech in external dialogue and its journey through the child’s private speech to inner speech, being transformed as it travels (in part by abbreviation). Next to this is an exhibit on the phenomenon of childhood experience and the ‘imaginary friend’, facing its literary expressions in children's literature.

Around the corner are exhibits on the asylums, including the soft jackets which replaced straitjackets. No obvious constraints but long sleeves so that ‘patients’ lost use of their hands (a version of the liquid cosh of largactil). Prepare yourself for real suffering.

There are other traditional ‘rare’ pieces in the exhibit. An original drawing by Charles Dickens of the podium he designed in order that people would hear and ‘see’ (in his energetic gestural communication) in his ‘readings’ the characters he claimed to see and hear (such as Nancy as she is murdered by Bill Sikes). Similarly the religious reliquary which takes up the theme of mystical experience of voice-hearing and its translation, as in Shakespeare’s depiction of Joan of Arc, into fearsome metaphors – of witchcraft, black magic and sorcery.

And there as well is Marius Romme and the texts and persons by which a Hearing Voices network began to be born in the Netherlands. In Britain, the great Ron Coleman (whose teaching as nurse and voice-hearer I remember through its reflection in training on the ‘normalisation’ of hallucinatory experience when I myself worked in mental health services) features. The exhibition includes a letter to Ron from Community Integrated Care (a charity I once worked for) – a remarkable exhibit.

But most of all people who hear and see voices both curate and become a presence in this exhibition – asked to record that on noticeboards as they pass. And what we might we see in that is that ‘hallucination’ is not merely pathological but on a continuum of experience, where the issues that make experience into what we recognise as ‘hearing’, ‘seeing', ‘touching’ get made into problems to be thought about as well as experienced. I’d like to call it ‘multimodal metacognition’ (so tainted with the notion of ‘abnormality’ is conventional psychology’s take on synaesthesia).

But burble on no more, Steve. Do see this exhibition!

When I went with my husband, I had an interesting experience – people seeing the entrance and corridor exhibits skirted the entrance to pass it by, although it was clear that these people were tourists out to see Durham's sights. My worry is that the biggest exhibit of this exhibition might be stigma against the very portents associated with ‘mental illnesses’.

To go and see is to take a step against such stigma. To begin to understand – and experience the beginning of your understanding – is a step further.

All the best

Steve

© Steve Bamlett

This blog relates to a problem I confront in myself in imagining the process of understanding and complying with any possible Assessment Guidance relating to Multimodal Assessment. The ‘musings’ here relate to the problem and how to formulate a personal response and feedback to learners should such a task ever be set.

It may form part of formal research on the topic of multimodal assessment.

The Problem as I see it.

Imagine that a learner is tasked to provide a multimedia project (in PowerPoint or some other multimedia carrier platform) that uses multiple media to illustrate some everyday experience that they have recorded and reflected upon. In the same product, they are asked to ‘analyse how the way you have illustrated the experience’ can be connected to ‘psychological theories and research’ in part of the curriculum.

This assessment task is both innovative and potentially transformative in its educational potential, but as it stands it feels to me that it might result in less than clear outcomes in summative assessment for putative learners, tutors or marking moderators.

The problems are, for me, as follows:

1. The distinction between i) products that are multimedia and, ii) analyses of them that are necessarily multimodal.

   1. The terms aren’t always distinguished but it is appropriate to do so here, such that ‘media’ covers material objects which employ a particular mix of ‘modes’ of communication and representation (visual, auditory, gestural) but may privilege one, as radio, for instance privileges the auditory.

   2. Media are not culturally stable however, either synchronically or diachronically. The modes used in ‘newspapers’ vary over a number of diachronic and synchronic domains.

   3. Mode emphasises the conceptual tools through which communication and representation is afforded. One medium will certainly carry multiple modes in any of its realizations. Even a ‘book without pictures or conversation’ (such as that imagined by Alice) can be read multimodally. Written text is also distributed spatially and often uses modal variants – of font and emphasis in text, for instance.

   4. Whilst you can produce a multimedia product without any cognisance of multimodality, you cannot analyse it without the latter, since any language of description requires awareness of the affordances of visual or auditory or connectivity (hyperlinkage) modalities

2. The level of multimodal literacy required.

   1. Such literacy is not a given but will vary both in quality, quantity and metacognition across a large learner group varied by ranges of age, employment, social, economic and other variables. Not all the trends of the appropriate literacies can be gauged or predicted and will be open to unhelpful assumptions (such as the effects of a ‘digital generation’).

   2. The language of description of ‘the way you have illustrated the experience’ available to each learner.

   3. The existence of an emergent potential ‘language of description’. The most sophisticated but pedagogically usable one is that in Bezemer & Kress (2016: 76 – 78). It urges the analysis of ‘multimodal’ across 4 semiotic principles: framing, selection, arrangement and foregrounding.

3. The level of awareness of appropriate language of description in assessors, the assessed learners and the variability of the gap between assessors and assessed learners across the possible combinations of interaction between both groups in the pedagogic (and assessment) process.

I tried to imagine visually the tension I see between what Bezemer & Kress see as fundamental to multimedia meaning-making and an assessment criteria.

Let us imagine, for instance that an assessment criterion is the clarity of the exposition of the experience recounted, later reflection on it and the way in which a multimedia representation on that is linked to curricular content. I imagined Fig A.

 Figure A imagines Bezemer & Kress’ components for a language of description as sandwiched between the learner’s awareness that a project has been set and the assessor’s awareness that the clarity of this product’s communication is to be tested.

As with, any other sandwich it can be assessed without analysing its contents – in terms of the assessor’s culturally modified and professionally orientated taste.

Fig B complicates the picture a lot. I have made two intellectual leaps here. I am, in line with relevant theorists, naming the product of multimodal production process, a text, which does not imply the modality of written language. A photograph can be a text. I use this term to relate ‘text’ to its circumambient contexts.

Fig B insets out TEXT (fig A) as the product of a process of composition that possesses DESIGN and RHETORICAL VARIANTS – different affordances in each of its modes for telling its story. That text is influenced by many contexts. I include 3:

1. The Culture which prescribes the resources and their conventional readings.

2. The Teaching and Learning Context, which covers learning in the context of a number of teaching media (not all being human), and

3. The context of the Prescribed Curriculum which includes the social construction of the discipline of Psychology as well as institutional and societal  or governmental requirements.

Our project replaces the potential duality of text in facilitating assessment of both a material outcome of learning task AND the process of the text’s composition revealed in decisions about the use of variable affordance within and between the relevant modes used in it. Only the latter can yield sure ‘signs of learning’ (Bezemer & Kress 2016: 54)

Having felt that, I found it said in an early article by Molle & Prior (2008:557), although in a different context, that of English for academic purposes.

All the Best

Steve

Bezemer, J. & Kress, G. (2016) Multimodality, Learning and Communication: A Social Semiotic Frame London, Routledge 

Molle, D. & Prior, P. (2008) ‘Multimodal Genre systems in EAP Writing pedagogy: Reflecting on a Needs Analysis’ in TESOL Quarterly 42 (4). 541 – 556.

I have just read this great book by Michael Scott. 

Michael Scott has in the past changed my life (a bit at least). I saw his TV series on Greek Drama and that hooked me - and as a result I completed a PG course in Greek Drama to test the ideas - they remained relevant and telling. His last book on Delphi was equally fascinating , especially if seen as part of the whole history of the means cultures, nations and global commonalities use to predict political futures for themselves.

This new one breaks new boundaries because it self-consciously sets out to show that the only reason we see ancient cultures as irrelevant to a global political economy is that  we have used paradigms that imported nationalism or cultural monoliths into the picture that weren't necessarily the best approach to those cultures - even when there were more useful - as in Ancient China - they stop us seeing the significance of what happens to Chinese culture in the late ancient era post Confucius. 

The most stunning section is the one on the co-molding of religion and the state in the first to fourth century AD. Illuminating though on so many things and makes you want to read more history of this sort. The assessment of the Emperors Constantine and 'apostate' Julian enthralled me.

There are insights throughout - no doubt many that will be questioned and critiqued from other perspectives - but that makes it all the more interesting.

All the best

Steve

Reading Multi modality

SDK228 The Science of Mind employs a ‘Map’ of the sequential and domain Structure of the module in order to locate within this map, the Learning Activities on the module.

This Map offers access and structure to those activities:

·       ACCESS because icons representing activities are one way of accessing them;

·       STRUCTURE because the activities are multiply coded;

o    By spatial location and letter code as equal segments of a four segment circular structure. Each of 3 segments relate to a sequential discussion of three mental health diagnoses, with an introductory segment introducing concepts common to all 3.

o   By spatial location within 3 colour-coded 2-dimensional levels of a concentric ‘doughnut’ rings. The colour code has a key indicating the conceptual domain represented by each coloured ring.

The illustration above shows the result of a learner choosing the ‘free roam’ version of the map. Alternatively the learner can choose to restrict their access for the time being to one of the segment areas. They can be chosen without regard to the sequence in the module.

Above is segment 3. All Activities are coded as ‘A’ (for Addictions). Roaming the mouse cursor over each activity (numbered 1 to 4) raises a simple explanation of the activity’s contents, which also justifies its colour-coded domain location. The number of activities roughly follows a path from the inner ring (yellow for ‘Symptoms’) to the outer one (blue for ‘Treatment’), with the orange ring (for Biology) always (IF ACTIVITIES ARE PERFORMED IN NUMERICAL ORDER) intermediary between ‘symptoms’ and ‘treatments’ domains. It could be considered that sequencing of activities privileges biological explanations of biopsychosocial material in the other domains. The figure also shows the manner in which activities are explained in pop-ups – provided the Activity is not selected by a mouse or key click.

Activities can also be selected for access from the drop-down menu shown as open above, as well as outside the MultiMedia Map from the Sequential Course Outline web page, organised by recommended week of study order.

Choosing the ‘Interactive Brain/ label and icon shown in the upper right of the picture above accesses a rotational animation offering the illusion of a 3-dimensional tour of the brain and its classic means of division (hemispheres, gross anatomy, cortical lobes and various ‘sections’). The picture shows the brain highlighted by colour codes for he lobes. The rotational aspects and feature highlights are contained in a spoken narrative synchronously accompanying the progress of the animation. The animation narrative can be paused and the temporal location of any screenshot opportunity noted. File tabs take learners from a general tour, to animations on external and then internal 3-D cartography of the brain and thence to demonstrations of neural pathways associated with particular neurochemical messengers and their functions.

This blog picks a great example of the use of visual material to discuss literature (Ruffell (2011) on Aristophanes) and then offers a visual as a critique of Aristophanes' Acharnaians.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this book as a genuine step forward from the classic themes of postmodern criticism (such as playfulness or the carnivalesque) and postmodern precursor-theorists such as Bahktin. The theory is applied much more meaningfully here than elsewhere (Platter 2007, for instance) because the book illustrates, at length but ever so clearly, a thesis: that classical Greek comic art proposes the 'impossible' (a realm of absurdist anti-reality) as a means of re-interpreting social reality and opening it up to the possibility of change. 

It is, in short, about how a particular audience was asked to engage with theatrical representation as a means of understanding the worlds they themselves 'improbably' represented (the world of Athenian participatory or direct democracy). 

It is the first text I know to use connectionist networks to describe the function and operation of a play’s structural themes (see p 187 for an example on the polis and oikos connections in Knights). These networks are used in psychology to describe the patterns of 'association' that explain human belief in the meaningfulness of cognitive representation without invoking the 'folk psychology' of belief, thinking, perception or memory themselves. Comedy, he concludes, ‘may not be able to change the world, but it can certainly shape our perception of it and with that comes the potential for change (429).’ 

Acharnians is studied throughout and its importance seen. However, much that is said about other plays (such as Knights) is transferable (even the network diagrams and I have therefore attempted such an adaptation of his visual method here).

Steve

I had intended not to read this out of pure prejudice – until shocked out of those prejudices by the admiration of another reader. So read it I did – although being of no more than a novella’s length, reading it turned out to be not so taxing a demand anyway. And I am pleased to have done so. It is not a novel I overly like or would choose to read for itself but it is exceedingly well written and that is worth something. There is a concentration and attention in the prose to the rhythms of speech (direct and indirect) that is that of a prose master from the outset – a peculiar mastery of sentence structure that attends to sense, music and mimetic effect all at once. Writing of this QUALITY is unusual and beautiful. Yet, as I say, my admiration remains at the level of the superb technical achievement that this represents for a novelist.

Sometimes I feel that about Henry James and I certainly feel the pressure of this model on Strout. It opens:

There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.

This is, believe it or not, almost all of the plot in a nutshell. Yet it is also an introduction to the writer’s focal technique. For me the rhythm of the sentence balances on ‘There was a time’, in such a way that the sheer triviality and ordinariness of its function is overbalanced by the pause on ‘time’ a good reading of the sentence demands – such that time itself and its quality becomes the real and true subject of the novel. ‘Time’, thus focused upon and made significant, is the content and vehicle of reflection and the internal somersaults of attitudinal approach time for reflection facilitates. The novel becomes about (and again we sense Henry James) how we read the meanings generated by our contexts – persons and places (even the Chrysler building) – when the give and take of each other’s ‘time’ between persons is necessitated and freely accepted by them.

Nothing much happens but that Lucy learns about the meaning of her mother’s (and later her father’s) actions and mode of being in the world by both unlearning attitudes that blocked receptivity in both  and learning to listen and read human situations (however apparently trivial) more carefully. This is and was the requirement of the ‘great tradition’ of writing as conceived by F. R. Leavis. Hence when this writer claims a desire to ‘report what happened one day’ (p. 105) we can expect of ‘reportage’ of extremely subtle discrimination In which the ethical nature of even very minor exchanges – about even more minor incidents (a cat jumps on a table in the recollected event) – is fully exposed and experienced by readers. The talk around that incident is itself about ‘coming to the page without judgement’ – about the cooperation of reader and writer in discerning the values inherent in all exchanges of communication – intended, unintended and those midway between the continuum of levels of ‘intention’ in meanings emergent as ‘understandings’ from an interaction.

And this writer knows that is what she is doing – like a consummate master – and tells us:

…: Always that telling detail. What I mean is, this is not just a woman’s story. It’s what happens to a lot of us, if we are lucky enough to hear that detail and pay attention to it. (28)

Here a writer instructs about how to write and the only means by which such writing is validated – the luck that ‘detail’ is picked up and attended upon by a reader of equal capacity to the investment in the writing. Hence, a rather trivial ‘story’ becomes instinct with released meaning but only as the result of an interaction that is itself of some quality. Truly great writers know this. They do not work by structures at the macro but at the micro level of the story.

And then we see the larger meanings of the book in understandings of the experience of oppression and prejudice – of those, for instance, who have experienced AIDS, on one hand, and anti-Semitism on another. And perhaps most telling, this is a novel about less examined vulnerabilities but ones of great importance to democracies of people from the lowest social strata of otherwise privileged groups – this is a novel about ‘white trash’ in a way I have not seen explored so sensitively before. But it is primarily about art, whether in a novella like this or the Metropolitan Museum of Art) as an avenue to a specialised kind of human knowing (86f).

As I have aged, I have begun to see such views of a transcendental function for art as suspect by virtue of the elitism they apply. But I am not so sure that I am correct – now!

As for the Booker – well it should and may be a contender but that hardly matters. This is so superbly ‘fine art’ that prizes hardly seem to matter.

All the best

Steve

Sometimes you just have to admit that there are some seriously good novelists (to say nothing of their seriously sweet novels) that are not for you. A.L. Kennedy has always been one of those novelists to me and though I tried it and admire it, I cannot read it through and scanned too often to claim that I have read this novel.

Perhaps it is because I find novels about relationships between the well-heeled but tragic London middle-classes hard to take, however serious the underlying themes – as these most definitely are. Such novels are needed, have and deserve a strong and committed readership though and A.L. Kennedy clearly WRITES very well indeed. Any number if quotations would show this.

Plus, this is a novel that makes serious claim to innovate – although again perhaps in an arena I find (in novels if NOT in other media) unpalatable. I am a great fan of multi-modal communication and of the functional grammar of such forms of ‘making’ (see the scholar M. Sindoni for an example of the kind of analysis I mean). However, I prefer my literary effects (and here is a serious self-limitation) confined to normative written syntax – that does not mean normative grammar – else one would exclude favourites like James Kelman. I don’t mean poetry either – that would exclude the wonderful Tom Leonard.

But in novels, I don’t want many effects to be carried in the grammar of spatial location, text-chunk size (although Sterne did this in the eighteenth century - Fielding did it too in Joseph Andrews), font-size and font-style as is clearly the self-conscious case in this novel. Sometimes major effects are carried ‘wittily’ and pertinently in font variation (103 – 5, 175), others – especially of font size are more subtle at evoking register changes (see pp 48 – 49). I dislike the over-use of italics in this novel to register consciousness changes within character though – they creak like old-fashioned stage scenery.

There is aching agony even in Kennedy’s long stretches of ‘witty’ (perhaps in the sense it is used in Metaphysical poetry criticism) prose. It reminds me of her skills as a stand-up comedian and the seriousness available to skilful use of shaggy-dog stories too. It reminds me that Kennedy is a seriously good tragi-comic actress and of the gestural embodiment that she captures in some vignettes – that WONDERFUL story of the baby blackbird trapped in a mistress’ improper garden netting with which it opens, for instance. There are endless varieties of ways in which human pain (in experience or empathetic projection) are beautifully and seriously conveyed.

But all these wonders I see but cannot feel – am I trapped in a moment of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ or are these artistic techniques not as grounded as I want (even demand them to be) in something more than a passively tragically-humorous take on human dilemmas. If anything, I want the kind of generic play in the Gothic elements of Mossfegh’s Eileen or McGuire’s The North Water, that show us that self-consciously constructed worlds can be reconstructed.

They thus offer us opportunity for difficult kinds of re-engagement with our worlds and our perceptions of them. At bottom – I can’t but feel that this is just another, if VERY CLEVER, heterosexual romance novel, in which a couple measure changes in themselves primarily against each other – whatever the possibility for other kinds of social engagement arising from these changes.

That puts me off – whatever my empathy with the writer’s politics. Of course, these opinions aren’t much intended to be read by others or likely to be so, but it is possible that that may happen. I can but apologise in that event – the failure to appreciate here is very probably ALL MINE!!!!!!

All the best

Steve