<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Saul, The story you relate through Bell's work is told in multiple ways in the films of Adam Curtis, where the liberal (white) self, following the "dream of freedom," falls into the trap of a game-theory driven economic system. </div><div><br></div><div><div>On Dec 9, 2009, at 1:14 PM, Saul Ostrow wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Baskerville, 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; ">Personally, I believe that this is what is replicated in most cases both here and in the class room when we seek to engage in theorizing cultural critique and its practices without the benefit of self-reflexivity, which leaves them vulnerable to their subjectivities and good intentions.</span></span></blockquote></div><br><div>The hardest challenge here is that many of us are apt to mistake the self-referential for the self-reflexive. "It's just my perspective," the student says, and the conversation is supposed to be closed. </div><div><br></div><div>This is built in at the visual level through the ways in which gestalt theory is taught to freshmen in art school. In the traditional applications of Bauhaus design education, it's enough to recognize the multi-stable nature of figure/ground - but one doesn't have to actually acknowledge all the possible perspectives. As Ihde points out, many of the traditional visual illusions used to demonstrate visual subjectivity don't ask the viewer to consider her own body in space. He finds other, overlooked and simultaneous reads in some of the more well-known multi-stable images and diagrams, ones dependent on imagining one's feet on the same ground with the diagram.</div><div><br></div><div>Toward the end of acknowledging the need for reflexivity in these critiques, I should add that where I perceive my students as locked into a cybernetic sensorium, I don't see a way out that doesn't also require a great deal from me. Instructors will have to perform/adopt new views as well, and risk living by different rituals than those which write the limited subjectivities we fight. In the current economic climate, where more is already expected of those of us with jobs, and less jobs are available for those of us without, risk sounds like a tall order, I must admit.</div><div><br></div><div>Kevin</div></body></html>