purple motes

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A mosaic showing seven men dressed in classical garments in a classical setting was buried in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 GC.  The mosaic probably dates from the early first century BGC and probably was a copy of a late-fourth century Athenian painting.  Commonly described as depicting Plato's Academy, it also represents an archaic Greek tradition of seven wise men. This tradition was widely discussed in fourth-century Athens.[1]

The men in the mosaic are engaged in a scholarly dispute.  Three men look at another diadem-wearing man on the far left, who seems to be reading a scroll that the mosaic artist was unable to represent.  Two other men follow a third  figure pointing to a globe in the center.   All of the first group hold scrolls.  Moreover, the figure on the far left is standing next to an opened box in which the scrolls would fit.  None of the second group hold scrolls.  Written texts thus seem to be an important aspect of the men's oral dispute.[2]

The Socratic Method as currently understood is associated with oral questions and responses.  The mosaic suggests that, perhaps as early as the late-fourth century BGC, studying texts was an important, and perhaps controversial, aspect of oral school teaching.  The Socratic Method that Plato institutionalized in his Academy apparently co-existed with social, textual study.

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Notes:

For the image above, I've cropped the mosaic's border to focus on the action.  The full image is shown at higher resolution at the History of Ancient Rome website.  The mosaic, which is held in Italy's National Archaeological Museum in Naples, is on display through March 22, 2009, at the U.S. National Gallery's exhibition, Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples.

[1] The city on the upper right and the olive tree in the middle (small green leaves, black olives) allude to Plato's Academy in Athens.  The catalog for the Pompeii exhibition at the National Gallery states that most scholars agree that the figure in the middle (highest figure) is Plato.  But the supporting evidence for this view is meager.  On the dating of the mosaic, see Westgate, Ruth (2000) "Pavimenta atque emblemata vermiculata: Regional Styles in Hellenistic Mosaic and the First Mosaics at Pompeii," American Journal of Archaeology, v. 104, n. 2, pp. 255-75.   On the Greek scene that the mosaic represents, see Elderkin, G.W. (1935) "Two Mosaics Representing the Seven Wise Men," American Journal of Archaeology, v. 39, n. 1, pp. 92-111. Id. associates the mosaic with a painting of Demetrius Phalereus at the Athenian Lyceum and dates its composition between 317 BGC and 307 BGC. An alternate theory places the painting at the sepulchral monument of Isocrates, erected about 338 BGC (id. p. 100). On representations of the seven wise men, see Richter, Gisela Marie Augusta (1965) The portraits of the Greeks. [London]: Phaidon Press, pp. 81-82, figs. 314-320.  For the earliest citation of the seven wise men in Greek literature, see Plato, Protagoras, 343A.

[2] The box might also be an allusion to the cista mystica, a sacred chest used to house snakes in the mystery cults.  A similar mosaic, dating to the second century GC and found in Sarsina in Northern Umbria, now the Villa Albani, shows the figure on the left holding a snake.  See Richter (1965) fig. 319.  or Elderkin (1935) Plate XXII.B.   Note that the figure on the left is the only figure wearing a diadem.  Interpreted as a cista mystica, the box, diadem, and scroll suggests other-worldly knowledge, in contrast to the central figure's pointing to the world.

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Many workers in entrepreneurial, innovative, and initiative-oriented positions take holidays about this time of year.  Bureaucratic work allows no such change.

The telephone system must continue to connect calls, the mail must continue to be carried, light must continue to shine, wind must continue to blow, and the government must continue to function.  Similarly, the records, forms, and documents that have been created throughout the year must be sustained and preserved.  Bureaucrats do that.

Day in and day out, bureaucrats are always ready to answer the call.  Bureaucrats save the world.

elberry at The Lumber Room discusses his difficulties with job interviews. The most important point is how he got his present job: "No one else turned up for the interviews and i’d already been doing the job as a temp for 6 or so months, so they gave it to me." Being there is the most important responsibility in bureaucratic jobs.

esr at Armed and Dangerous asks, "Open Source - Can It Innovate?"  This question is a crucial determinant of open source's bureaucratic potential.   Sadly, there's some indication that it can, but I would suggest a fuller study of the matter.  More importantly, the safe choice is obvious:

Corporations exist to mitigate investment risk. The large and more stable a corporation is, the more resistant it is to disruption in its practices and business model including the unvoidable short-term disruptions from what might be long-term innovative gain. Net-present-value accounting therefore almost always leads to the conclusion that innovation is a mistake.

Don't make the mistake of innovating. Go with the largest and most stable corporation you can find, or even better, a major multi-national, multi-lateral, mult-purpose cooperative.

xkcd provides useful instruction on understanding flowcharts.  Bureaucrats find flowcharts particularly helpful for planning flipchart presentations.

Dave Taylor's business blog at intuitive.com presents a bureaucratic presss release announcing a new release of the fighting game Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe.  Dave wants something more visually engaging.  But press releases are designed for newspaper journalists.  When's the last time you show a visually engaging newspaper?

Joe Wikert has suffered business book breakdown.  He laments:

So much of what's out there seems to be either a simple restating of the completely obvious or 4 pages of insight buried in 300 pages of filler.  Why is it so much easier (and significantly more rewarding) to find greater value in a 2- or 3-screen online article than a business book?

Joe really needs to understand better modern business.  The business of business is bureaucracy.  Business books write it like it is.

In the Worcester College Record for 2008, Provost Dick Smethurst reports "the defeat of the bureaucratic Joint Resource Allocation Mechanism proposals."  We regret that Oxford will not be joining the modern age of bureaucracy.

The Little Professor, who is a literature professor, sympathetically and insightfully affirms bureaucracy in her review of "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge."  She highlights two claims from this outrageous article:

1. "the themes emanating from development policy documents – the official texts produced by multilateral development agencies, government planning offices, and NGOs – can often be rather starkly contrasted with those of fictional writing on development" (4)
2. "fictional accounts of development can sometimes reveal different sides to the experience of development and may sometimes even do a ‘better’ job of conveying the complexities of development than research-based accounts" (7)

From being highly underdeveloped, appreciation for reading and writing fiction is now quite advanced. Fiction that is published and becomes popular, or even just attracts some notice, is only a very small share of the fiction currently produced in the world.  We suspect that that the publishing industry, retail markets, and human nature significantly affect the content of fiction that attracts attention.

Moreover, stammering, mumbling, and rubbing your toe on the ground can also convey well the complexities of development.  But the point isn't to convey complexities; it's to produce large volumes of documents.  No one does that better than bureaucrats.   There are three authors of this 17-page document: David Lewis, Dennis Rogers, and Michael Woolcock.  They are a Reader in Social Policy and a Lecturer in Urban Development in the Department of Social Policy and the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics, and a Senior Social Scientist with the World Bank’s Development Research Group.  These are respectable bureaucratic positions.  I would have expected better from their holders.

That's all for this month's Carnival of Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival's regulations. Past editions of the Carnival of Bureaucrats can be found on the Carnival's category page.

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My eyes and nose are raining on my navel.
I’m sneezing thunderstorms.
How's the weather around you?

The inside of my nose itches.
The outside has tissue burns.
How's your tan?

My head feels like a cantaloupe
that's gotten moldy.
I hope you’re feeling well.

I've got a cold. My room
is cold. Winter is coming.

I’m thinking of you.

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To prepare for lectures he gave about 880 years ago, Hugh of Saint Victor painted an extraordinarily intricate, multi-color teaching aid on the wall of the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris.  The painting was probably about 4 meters tall and 4.5 meters wide.  It was "the most complex single work of figural art from the entire Middle Ages."  Called the Mystic Ark, it placed a neo-platonic macro/microcosm into a God-centered understanding of creation.  Unfortunately, neither the painting nor any copy or drawing of it has survived.

However, one of Hugh's students wrote a 42-page verbal description of the Mystic Ark painting.  That description is a dull, matter-of-fact, non-literary text with "bare, utilitarian, even hurried description."  It is not effectively organized, step-by-step instructions for duplicating the Mystic Ark.  It contains no illuminations or drawings of any parts or aspects of the painting.  Verbal descriptions of paintings were apparently so little valued in the Middle Ages that no other such descriptions longer than a single sentence has survived.  Nonetheless, the student's verbal description of the Mystic Ark became a highly popular text by medieval standards.  Eight-eight manuscripts of it have survived across nearly nine centuries to the present.[1]

With years of research and painstaking effort, Conrad Rudolph, professor of medieval art history at the University of California, Riverside, has visually reconstructed the Mystic Ark.  Rudolph synthesized the textual description with relevant images that have survived from the period, place, and culture of the text:

Rudolph digitally reconstructed the painting using hundreds of individual images from a contemporary work of art, images that range from signs of the zodiac, celestial choirs and a map of the inhabited world to the biblical stories of the Exodus and the Ark of Noah, the arrival of Jesus Christ, and the Last Judgment. The stylistically consistent images were then painstakingly recombined digitally – cut up, flipped, altered, joined – over a period of nearly eight years... . [UCR Newsroom]

The U.S. National Gallery of Art commissioned a full-sized, digital printing of the Rudolph's reconstruction.   The print was first displayed on December 14, 2008 for Rudolph's lecture at the National Gallery.  I attended that lecture and took a picture of the reconstructed Mystic Ark with my portable digital camera. That copy is displayed at the top of this post (a better, higher-resolution image, courtesy of Professor Rudolph, is here).

Factors other than the absence of digital cameras help to account for the popularity of the verbal description of the Mystic Ark.  The Mystic Ark concerned knowledge of major importance to the elite of its time.  The painting of the Mystic Ark was huge.  Because it would have cost far too much in parchment to paint on parchment, the Mystic Ark could only have been painted on walls.   Hence a painting of the Mystic Ark could not be transported  and exhibited elsewhere.  Because the Mystic Ark has important, intricate details, a scaled-down painting or drawing of it would have obscured  lessons and arguments that it sought to teach.  Thus its specific content precluded cheaper, smaller-scale visual reproductions.  A verbal text was much cheaper to copy than was a large-scale wall painting.  For gaining knowledge of the Mystic Ark, a verbal description provided considerable value leverage.

The verbal description of the Mystic Ark also served personal and political interests. Among monks and cannons striving for places in hierarchies of knowledge and status, having a master or other teacher visually recreate the Mystic Ark showed that person's authority.   The imprecision of the verbal description accentuated the visual recreator's authority.  The verbal description of the Mystic Ark thus served personal and political interests as a writerly text.[2]

At the same time, the intrinsic connection between the verbal description and the painting signaled knowledge beyond an endless stream of man-made textual arguments.   In his Didascalicon: De studio legendi (1128), which was written about the same time as his lectures on the Mystic Ark, Hugh affirmed the unity of knowledge.  He declared that reading and meditation are the two principal activities by which a person advances in knowledge, and he set out comprehensive instruction on the activity of reading.   The unity of knowledge assured that even a crude verbal description of the Mystic Ark ultimately led to the same knowledge as the painting of the Mystic Ark.  Shared confidence in the unity of knowledge supported broad demand for a politically potent verbal description.

The Morgan Picture Bible provides an interesting counterpoint to the painting and verbal description of the Mystic Ark.  Monastic readers dedicated to life-long study probably would consider the Morgan Picture Bible to be an extravagantly expensive device useful only for instructing the inattentive and illiterate among the rich and powerful.  However, like the painting and text of the Mystic Ark, the Morgan Picture Bible asserts the unity of knowledge. The Mystic Ark emphasizes the unity of salvation history and the natural order of the cosmos.  The Morgan Picture Bible, in contrast,  emphasizes the unity of salvation history and personal, bodily experience.

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Notes:

[1] The statements in this and the previous paragraphs have in the past been a matter of considerable scholarly debate.   I assert them based on Conrad Rudolph's convincing recent arguments in his ongoing work on the Mystic Ark.   He described his work in two recent lectures at the U.S. National Gallery of Art: on December 14, 2008, "Time, Space, and the Progress of History in the Medieval Map"; and on December, 15, 2008, " "Cosmic Politics: Hugh of St. Victor’s 'The Mystic Ark' and the Struggle over Elite Education in the Twelfth Century."  See also Rudolph, Conrad (2004) "First, I find the center point": reading the text of Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 94, pt. 4. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society.  The quoted phrases are from id. pp. 1-2, 76.  The dimensions of the painting are Rudolph's estimates, based on his extensive work in reconstructing the painting.  The page count for the textual description is for a modern critical edition.  The textual description of the Mystic Ark orginally did not have a proper title, but it is now commonly titled The Mystic Ark.  To avoid confusion between the text and the painting, I explicitly specify either the textual or painted Mystic Ark.

[2] Such interests also motivate scholars to take a much more active role in organizing texts.  Developments of tables of contents, summaries, consistent chapter and verse numberings, indices, new page layouts, alphabetic indexing, and other such information technologies were quite dramatic with the rise of scholasticism from about 1140 to 1240.  See  Illich, Ivan (1993) In the vineyard of the text: a commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   The agency of readers has become a major strand in the ironic, essentalist narrative of post-modernism.

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Art collections and art exhibitions tend to focus on things that can be collected and moved -- artifacts.  Yet digital technologies and the Internet make particular human creative efforts potentially available to everyone, everywhere.  Unlimited Edition, a juried show that opened on December 12 at the Arlington Arts Center, highlights "works that explore mass production, marketing, and commodification."[*] The show poignantly displays economic, social, and environmental circumstances of creative production and circulation.  It's one of the best modern art shows this year in Arlington, a must-see show for everyone interested in art and society.  Admission is free.

Unlimited Edition's most impressive aspect is best appreciated on a sunny afternoon when few other persons are there.  Just inside the main entrance, in a near frame of monumental wooden stairways, one looks up to see in the middle of the raised main hall Cynthia Connolly's Bicycle Postcard Rack.  It's positioned like an ornate fountain in a stately, historical building.   The deep, narrow view behind the sculpture leads through a bright, double-frame with a fringe of outdoor brick to end in a baroque, sun-yellow stained-glass portal.  No mere photograph could capture the effect of being there.  No other art exhibition could integrate place, history, and human creativity like this.

In striking contrast, Alexis Granwell's and Josh Rodenberg's solo exhibitions in rooms off the main hall lack radiance.  The two small rooms, with dull-white, newly painted walls and grey, institutional carpet, overwhelm the formal contrasts between Granwell's and Rodenberg's works.  The rooms diffuse to those works a common sense of cheap construction and clutter.  A cold, glossy, high-ceilinged space would have shown much different art.

Susana Raab's photographs in Unlimited Edition display the familiar bizarreness of human interests and entertainments.  My favorite among these photographs is entitled The Unfortunate Result of the Demise of the Public Phone Booth.  This photo shows a man in a Superman costume stepping out of a portable toilet.  With head turned ninety degrees to his direction of step, he looks directly at the camera taking his picture.  By the way, Arlington County possesses one of the few remaining public phone booths in the greater D.C. metro area.   I enjoy collecting photographs of phone booths, and I would like to add The Unfortunate Result of the Demise of the Public Phone Booth to the humorous section of my collection.  But Raab is limiting copies of her photograph to fifteen and selling them for $800 each.  I can't afford to spend that much for a copy of an image.

Krista Birnbaum's digital prints of weeds and garbage are magnificent.  Trash Pile with Weeds is a monumental print that conveys depth of space and time.  Happy Meal Wallpaper arranges weeds and garbage like a classical Chinese landscape.  I can think of no better advertisement for McDonalds than falsely believing that more Happy Meal detritus would generate more such landscapes.

Other works in Unlimited Edition address more conventional interests.  Carolina Mayorga's Leeps-teek seems to me overwrought, as does use of lipstick in general.  Christine Bailey's series of untitled black-and-white photocopies reminds me of bureaucratic work.  Joannie Turbek wraps for mailing pieces of porcelain birthday cake for her work, The Good Friend Project.  She apparently was swapping the site of her project when I attended the gallery.  She snatched away my naive enthusiasm for a rust-etched metal table top by authoritatively informing me that it was not part of the exhibition.

The most conceptually challenging work in Unlimited Edition is Kathryn Cornelius's ReDOIT.  Cornelius's work offers reflexive artistic critique and subtle but daring social commentary.  I missed the opening-night performance in which she, present in the Chairman's Gallery via webcam, executed in her studio instructions persons interested in her work sent to her via Twitter, email, and through an on-site keyboard.  The day after her performance, the Chairman's Gallery showed just two large, dead, wall-mounted screens separated in the corner by a dead keyboard.  This work provides an unsettling expression of digital art.  The unlimited editions of our electronic age are as transient as its power supply.

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Unlimited Edition, juried by Kriston Capps, Martin Irvine, and Welmoed Laanstra, is at the Arlington Arts Center through January 17, 2009.

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Note [*]: This is the description on the postcard for the show.  An Arlington Arts Center blog entry states that the shows explores "marketing, mass reproduction, and commodification in art."  The exhibition website states that the show explores "the relationship between consumption, mass reproduction, marketing, and art."  Mass reproduction might excite some more than mass production.  Whatever.  Who reads this stuff anyway?

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A whirl, light,
and within an opened
plane stands every bookspine.
Multitudes offer typed
fellowship, windows cross
blare and vanish.

Remember the white
box below the mirror.
The velvet compartments
that folded out,
stone rainbows with hinges,
frozen stars and clasps,
touching pearls.

Remember the mirror,
and off to the side
a single greying photograph
of mom and dad at their wedding.

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Ninety-five years ago, on December 19, 1913, AT&T Vice President Nathan Kingsbury sent the U.S. Attorney General a letter in which AT&T agreed to allow other companies to interconnect with AT&T in order to provide long-distance telephone services. This Kingsbury Commitment was the beginning of access reform in the U.S.

The U.S. access reform centennial is now only five years away. Access reform, along with related intercarrier compensation issues, remain ongoing regulatory concerns in the U.S., in the U.K., and in many other countries around the world. More appreciation for the long history of access reform might help to inform current policy analysis.

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