The Administrations of The Infinite

Written by: Artxell Knaphni on July 8, 2014.

Terence Blake has posted a link, on Facebook, to this article: “In a MOOC Mystery, a Course Suddenly Vanishes”
Though I realise there are more specific and ‘immediate’ (anthropically appropriated ‘immediacy’ of the internet, lol) concerns ensuing from this, I feel that a theoretical intervention could be of value here.

“A massive open online course on making sense of massive open online courses”
“So far, the course has produced chaos rather than clarity.”
“All the videos, forums, and other course materials mysteriously vanished from the website last week.”
“The professor was behind the deletion, according to Coursera.”

What is a ‘course’? Is it a ‘way’, a ‘route’, through the information deluge of ‘cyberspace’.
The ‘cyber-‘, in cyberspace, has connotations of ‘piloting’ and ‘navigation’.
In cyberspatial realms, where information can be decontextualised to varying degrees, the ‘pilot’ faces the challenges of recontextualisation. That is, what is to configure the gathering of information, the ‘learning process’? This introduces the notion of ‘principles of configuration’ or ‘frames’. What guiding principles are to be relevant? This entails the teleology of ‘purpose’: what is the desired ‘objective’? Usually, in a ‘course’, the ‘goal’ is to achieve a sufficient degree of familiarity with the ‘course’, the ‘information journey’, to the extent that one can demonstrate, not only ‘knowledge’ of the journey, but can communicate this ‘knowledge’ to others, in ways amenable to the social roles and functions reserved for those who can do this. For this, accredited standards of ‘expertise’ are produced, and so forth.
So, the objective here, essentially, is training for teamwork, as it were. The ‘objectives’ are specifiable, usually consisting of a mimetic ability to reproduce accepted standards of demonstrable ‘expertise’. Such specificity is not so readily available in a “course on making sense of massive open online courses”. For the simple reason, that such a course involves ‘stepping back’, so to speak, from the modes of ‘sense production’ particular to ‘objective’ disciplines, into a realm prior to any such objectification. Usually, socioeconomic demands being what they are, this realm is configured as a scenario in which a ‘subject’ chooses a mode of ‘objectification’ according to ‘personal’ preferences and abilities. Such a process is an invitation to inhabit, or help constitute, an ontological system: ‘What do you want to be?’ ‘Sally is an artist, engineer, etc..’

However, because of the decontextualised nature of ‘cyberspace’, the degree of abstraction from the flow of ‘background life cues’, as it were, is greater. The increased abstraction enables a space wherein all possible ‘objectifications’ render as pure possibilities. Such a space, being conducive to ‘pure’ intellectual consideration, enhances the range of considerable possibilities to infinity: the task of navigating the infinite is endless, without final objectification. It is essentially the task of a writer. One is being asked to author one’s own life as an object in a general ontological system. Given this scenario, it is understandable that “he talked of feeling “lost” and in over his head”. For him, it could only be that “the course has produced chaos rather than clarity.” How can he author the life of another, without being a dictator? Hence his ‘experiment’, he has to get them to author their own lives, to pilot their own destinies, to navigate charts they choose. All he can do is facilitate that process.

Given that the initial scenario is that of ‘pure intellectual abstraction’, given that considerations of ‘personal emotion’ are indispensable to authoring ‘one’s life’: his attempt to elicit ’emotional responses’ is understandable as a reintegration strategy (“I pushed people to express emotion.”).
His ethical qualms occurred, because he felt the strategy was an ‘intellectual manipulation’ (“i mean ethics as in when you perform an experiment. i just did a few and feel uneasy about what i have done.” “I got trapped.” “I pushed people…” “And over the weekend things changed.”). Trying to democratise the situation, he offers the recommendation to “Help the others!”.    
Realising that the essence of the “course on making sense of massive open online courses” was to reintroduce the ‘active individual’ who constructs ‘senses’ relevant to themselves: realising that this entails a self-motivation that could not be taught: realising that the ‘spell of passive recipience’ that internalises formal discourses was not sufficient to form a fuller learning experience, that an animating context of self-motivation was necessary: realising that the ‘spell of passive recipience’ can only produce ‘confusion’, if faced with the essentially unformalised task of choosing from infinite, formal possibilities, he offers: “First step to #unlearn is to be #confused.”

 As the so called ‘world’, ‘itself’, dissolves into its ‘own’ possibilities, as one ontological habitat or another, pronounces its wary, self-interested, structural verdict at every step of an abyyssal dissolution it tries to objectify as ‘elsewhere’, but which its very actions essentially constitute, the lecturer’s predicament is truly that of everyone and every ‘objective’.

Thr’s an intrstng stry I rd, whn I ws a yngstr. It’s an apt cmmntry, smhw, on th mystry of th vnshng crs. lol

‘Ms Fnd in a Lbry [FULL TEXT]’. http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html.
‘MS Fnd in a Lbry – Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia’. Accessed 3 October 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry.

PS. Th ‘mssng’ “Rx” drwr could symbls mssng ‘slf-mtvtn’? Wht, exctly, is slf-mtvtn?