This series was inspired by an offhand comment by one of the hosts of the Origin Story podcast (which I quite like). They have an 2022 episode titled “Woke: The word that splits the world.” The host read Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 book, Illiberal Education: the Politics of Sex and Race, and made this comment about it during minute 22: “Considering that Dinesh D’Souza is now a lunatic, the book itself [is] not anywhere near as wild as you would think.
Although “political correctness” (in its modern meaning) was occasionally used prior to 1990, that was the year it went mainstream. On campuses, the name apparently took hold strongly and swiftly at the beginning of the 1990-1991 academic year (starting in the fall). Word spread in the media, probably most influentially with an October 1990 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein. It got a big boost when then-President George H.W. Bush said, in a commencement speech at the end of that academic year (May 1991):
This is third in a series examining the evolving rhetoric used by those who believe “political correctness” is a threat to Western, especially American, civilization. (I’ll call that “anti-PC rhetoric” for short.) We’re now up to 1990 with Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education. I’m working from a scan of the 1991 paperback edition. I believe it’s the same as the 1990 hardcover, except for the addition of an epilogue.
My project in this series is to document the history of the rhetoric of attacks on “political correctness” (“anti-PC discourse” for short), to show how it evolved over time. The last post was mainly about the 1984 Bennett Report. This post is about Allen Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind (wikipedia, archive.org, pdf), which both increased the heat of the rhetoric and introduced new tropes. Closing was not expected or intended to sell well, but it became a surprise bestseller, selling nearly 500,000 copies in hardcover and a similar number in paperback.
While writing a podcast episode on deconstruction as a method and an idea, I got sidetracked into doing a “close reading” and deconstruction of Chip Morningstar’s 1994 essay “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything”. It seemed to me that (1) the essay comes from a time when attacking “political correctness” in universities was popular, and (2) it used several common tropes of such attacks in a pretty revealing way. So I wanted to link Morningstar’s essay to those tropes.
Consider a yellow coffee cup. It’s sitting on your desk. You periodically grab it to take a swig. How might this work in the brain? Perhaps there’s a mental map of the desktop, with the cup represented in that map. In this telling, you might think that you look at the cup to fix its exact position, then direct your arm to reach for it. In Being There, Andy Clark speculates differently, using something he calls a personalized representation.
In episode 41, I list five principles for reducing the cognitive load of Doing the Right Thing in a workplace. They involve shifting work onto the environment or the body. The rough idea is you get pushed into doing the right thing rather than having to decide to do it. The principles are: Favor direct control links from perception to action. Prefer composite values over atomic values. Avoid primitive obsession.
TLDR: This is a teaser for an upcoming Oddly Influenced episode. I hope it will interest people in being interviewed, and let them judge whether their experience maps onto – or comments on – the theory proposed in Michael P. Farrell’s 2001 book, Collaborative Circles. I’m looking especially for people involved in early Agile teams. I’m also hoping to do some interviews about Context-Driven Testing. ---- Collaborative Circles develops a theory of creative change, basing it on influential groups like the French Impressionists, the “Ultras” group of US first-wave feminists, the early psychoanalytic circle (specifically Freud and Fleiss), and so on.
The very first episode of Oddly Influenced was about Star & Griesemer's idea of "boundary objects." That's proven to be a fairly hard concept to pin down, and I did at best an average job. Fortunately, I'm rereading Étienne Wenger's book Communities of Practice to prepare for episode 21, and he adds some useful words. A difficulty with the boundary object idea is that it's tied up with "meaning," not the most self-explanatory word.
This is an addendum to podcast episode 20 on Orr's Talking About Machines, about copier repair technicians. Orr uses Levi-Strauss's idea of "bricolage" as a way of talking about what makes a good copier repair tech. Broadly, bricolage is the process of rummaging through a whole bunch of things (ideas, experience, tools) you've collected to see which might help you reach a goal, then assembling the pieces you've found (possibly tweaked) to actually reach the goal.