On Taste
Every few years, I’d come across an idea, or a theme, so to speak, that is the one thing that changes everything for me.
Telling Stories and Intro to Media were the two classes that became the defining memories of my freshman year in college. And in a way, they’ve defined my entire college-hood. Contrary to what their titles suggest, these two courses are classic Yale offerings that are half-quirky and embody the essence of what one might call “lofty intellectual bullshit.”
I wouldn’t say I have a thing for lofty intellectual bullshit, but there are things buried in that Roland Barthes reading on Einstein’s brain, or that Hayden White reading which brought me to tears because I couldn’t figure the fuck out how to come up with a point of “tension” in the essay, or John Peters’ stream-of-consciousness lecturing about zero being one of the greatest logistical media in history, or Melody Jue’s imagination of a civilization built up in deep ocean — — that got me. That jumped at me. That surprised me. Made me uncomfortable, tick, and dream of them at night and think of them when I was eating hotpot with Mom.
Ezra Klein defines those things as one’s “taste.”
As an unqualified CS major and soon-to-be graduate, I unfortunately did not develop my own taste in CS until fairly recently. But what I didn’t realize when I was younger is how I’ve always had a taste for something. I love the weird. The mundane and the hidden. The material. I love meaning. Or hidden meaning in mundane, material things. I guess you do have to have a certain taste in order to enjoy a class like Intro to Media; it really is that kind of intellectual or unintellectual bullshit for most people. How many people take a media class to learn about fire, dolphins, vampire squid, doors, calendars, numbers, geometry, and clouds? I certainly wasn’t expecting it and was thrown off even just during the first lecture.
I dropped Intro to Media halfway through that semester because I was on the verge of becoming insane, struggling to theorize the ocean “as a milieu without which the human condition will not come to be” because I was out of my mind and chose Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media to write my book review assignment on. But this class manages to come back to me again and again — — being a practice of making familiar things strange, exposing their hiddenness, turning them on their heads, imagining their failures, and seeing the world in a kaleidoscope. This class is one of those things that change everything.
Just now, as I was doing some CS work to get ahead of tomorrow’s schedule… Levy’s Meditation on a Receipt — — a little essay and one of our class readings that captures the essence of what this class is about — — somehow found its way into my mind again. Three years later. And I will always marvel at how something as every day as a receipt mediates and ties together so many threads in human history.
I had always wanted to retake Intro to Media. When I finally got the chance this semester, I was told John Peters had gone on a sabbatical and would not be teaching it. Intro to Media is the epitome of layers of taste embedded within and without. Being a mandatory class for film and media studies majors, this class has always prioritized media philosophy over more concrete discussions of telecom media. In a way, the course is already a stand-in for Yale’s taste. But when John Peters was teaching, he also added his own taste (and genius) to it, steering the focus to elemental media such as fire and clouds and the ocean and so much more. Drilling home the idea of strange-making. And while the definition of “media” has always been murky, he wanted us to take away the idea of media as mediators of space, time, and power and almost turned it into a class mantra. Read his book The Marvelous Clouds to understand what I’m talking about.
The taste of Intro to Media resonated with and helped develop mine. Over the course of my college career, I’ve had a few more opportunities where I subtly and unsubtly stumbled upon classes that more or less shaped or brought out my taste. I will always be grateful for them.