by JEFFRY ST. CLAIR
The scientists say
It will all wash away
But we don’t believe any more
Cause we’ve got our recruits
And our green mohair suits
So please show your I.D. at the door– “Sin City,” Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman
The sidewalk is so hot the soles of shoes are melting, leaving faint footprint traces on the concrete. On this late June afternoon, the air temperature is 112 degrees in Las Vegas and considerably hotter down in the mirrored chasm of the Strip.
The merciless heat works its spell, luring the hordes into the cool labyrinths of the casinos, where even Ariadne could get lost amid the flashing neon, the hypnotic swells of electronica, the eerie moans of the losers at the tables.
Inside is right where they want you. That’s where your pockets get picked on high-tech slots (the funniest machine: KISS; the creepiest: the Joker, featuring video of Heath Ledger), Cirque du Soliel shows (at $155 a ticket) or extravagantly priced and barely digestible food prepared under the trademark of the omnipresent Mario Batali.
We came here for the American Library Association’s annual conference, where my wife Kimberly and her colleagues at Portland State University’s Millar Library are slated to receive a major award for innovation. After enduring the tedium of 1001 PowerPoint demonstrations on subjects like “Threshold Concepts” and the bibliographic perils of e-publishing, normally prim and sedate librarians are primed to cut loose for a week of licentious abandon in the desert. Las Vegas offers a celebration of the uniquely American version of the Id, a perpetually uncoiling knot of simulated desire with strobe lighting and a cheesy soundtrack.
What is a Threshold Concept, you inquire? Good question. I sat through a rather opaque and intellectually arid hour-and-a-half presentation by three leading practitioners of the theory and remained baffled, as did, I’d wager, many of the librarians in the hall. If you distill it down to essentials, a Threshold Concept seems very similar to what we used to call in philosophy seminars on the intractable (ahem) theories of Wittgenstein “getting a friggin’ clue.” But clarity is not the surest path to tenure.
The philosophy propelling this new trend in “knowledge management” is even more ominous than its mystifying nomenclature. In an age of Google, Edward Snowden and Wikipedia, some academic librarians feel that their tenuous position as gatekeepers of knowledge is under siege. The theory of Threshold Concepts seems to provide a last desperate shot for librarians to reassert their role as information power-brokers, herding naïve students and guileless library patrons toward “authoritative” and “credible” sources of news (such as the New York Times, naturally.) It’s the latest reactionary counter-attack on the man who swung a wrecking ball through the brittle pretensions of the profession’s old-guard: Michel Foucault. In The Order of Things, Foucault exposed the repressive political engines driving the classification and regulation of knowledge and the arbiters of “worthy” texts have been on the run ever since. (More on this at a later date.)
Many of the 12,000 or so librarians who converged here during a week of pitiless summer sun seem displaced, wandering aimlessly down De Chirico-like corridors, looking at Google maps on their smartphones. Perhaps they are scanning the dreamscape for a bookstore. They will search in vain. Here the only books are kept by sports bookies, those exacting archivists of accounts that must be paid.
…
Nevada is fast becoming a Tea Party sanctuary, but Vegas remains a solidly union town of culinary, hotel and casino workers. But even this is beginning to change. You can see the future on the gaming floors of the Bellagio and the Venetian, where more and more operations are becoming automated. The real surprise for me was the number of virtual black jack tables, where dealer avatars with distracting cleavage run the games on widescreen monitors. The human players, perhaps visually sedated by years of video gaming, sit silently at the tables, clinging to a desperate faith in the fairness of the casino’s poker algorithms. Call it an Homage to Catatonia.
Counterpunch for more