I'm not a real blogger. I don't do the same kinds of things as these folks lauded by Peggy Noonan. But I might someday, although with my own twist.
I've been taking it slow(er). Peggy's direct: "I've been attacked. Too bad. If you can't take it, you shouldn't be thinking aloud for a living."
No doubt.
February 21, 2005
Why Disability Studies Matters
By Lennard J. Davis < ahref="mailto:info@insidehighered.com">>mailto:info@insidehighered.com
You know there is something wrong when 100 of the major film critics in the
United States say that Clint Eastwood's film Million Dollar Baby is a great
work and every disability scholar and activist rails against the movie. The
film continues to garner praise and awards -- a Director's Guild Award for
Eastwood, seven Academy Award nominations, as well as Best Actress
and Director Golden Globes -- while in Chicago and Berkeley people using
wheel chairs, service dogs, and red-tipped canes organized protests at
which they held up signs that read "Disability Is Not a Death Sentence" and
"Not Dead Yet."
I'm kinda liking this Lerner dude's take on the evolution of subjectivity through modernization. Seems to me like a way of describing factors that go into the construction of a post-structural self - one that is adaptable to both deep structure (say, culture) and structure more palpable to perception (such as microsocial interaction).
Briankle assigned us a terrific book: Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing, by Darian Leader. (Another pro and a con critique are posted here, scroll down.)
I'm interested in the way Leader describes the difference between looking and seeing. One may look and not see. Simply, this is perceptually similar to hearing but not listening, however Leader is really dealing with consciousness and what it means to know that one is being looked at without ever knowing for sure what (who?) is being seen.
Sam was still pretty under the weather today, but the staff is sure he's just got a tenacious bug. He's still on oxygen, and they're going to put him on a second round of antibiotics. Sam said he's been "up" and "down" since last week. He was in bed when I arrived with pepperoni pizza; I could hardly understand a dang thing he said while he was laying down. Once he was up, it was better, but his speech really improved when Tom Zopf showed up after I'd been there an hour or so.
I did call before going to check on whether or not pizza would be a good idea. Kevin said Sam hadn't been eating very much. Sam said he usually doesn't eat very much. Tom said and its a good thing too, about time Sam lost some weight! :-)
"I was really impressed with your latest blog posting. Lots of self
discovery going on there."
"How do admissions of psychological/emotional vulnerability contribute to getting people to move to action? It's very easy for people to say, "Ah ha! I knew it wasn't about the department; she's having personal problems and using the department as a scapegoat."
Probably this is what Stephen's been on my case about - does acknowledging the personal (what he has been defining as "private" and labeling "psychological") move people to action? ? Perhaps not, but maybe it depends on what kind of ìactionî is desiredÖ
I am so jealous of anyone who's already done with Paula's paper! And, I'm kinda....having fun (!) re-reading Mumford (1963) after Chris made more of it legible to me with his presentation yesterday. :-)
I'm just over half done with the paper. I'm enjoying what I now see as a merger in Mumford of the material and the ideological, to wit:
"...instantaneous personal communication over long distances...is the mechanical symbol of those world-wide cooperations of thought and feeling which must emerge, finally, if our whole civilization is not to sink into ruin" (241).
The recordability of such instantaneous personal communication is one example of "the new permanent record" which "suggest[s] a new relationship between deed and record, between the movement of life and its collective enregistration: above all, they demand a nicer sensitiveness and a higher intelligence. If these inventions have so far made monkeys of us, it is because we are still monkeys" (245).
;-) Gimme a banana!
So did our favorite son tonight! It was sweet. :-)
I looked up some of the things Enoch either shared info from and/or suggested we read:
The Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio seems like an intriguing read. The author, Antonio Damasio, has been interviewed by The Harvard Brain and for some publicity from his publisher.
Stephen and I hashed out some clarity via Habermas regarding our "flurry" about where to draw the line about what should and shouldn't be part of a shared blogspace.
Habermas puts the public sphere in the zone of the private, for starters. This is linked to capitalism as the condition of possibility for a public sphere, because it was the transfer of the economy out of the household that initially allowed non-royal and non-divine elite/privileged persons to come together to exercise their faculties of reason.
We are in full-fledged storming in COM352. The "trust" thread is amazing. And I'm jazzed about the co-researcher's thread too. But it's all good. :-)
This is the crucial stage - storming - when the needs/desires for control drive the tussle. The tricky part is that it isn't just their jockeying, but mine as well. For me, the challenge is to ride this through on the basis of the structure of assignments and expectations...and practice using my burgeoning recognition of how to turn discourses toward the positive rather than perseverating on the negative or symptomatic.
Roland Barthes may be beyond me, but his critique of myth is fascinating.
Physis "was the Greek word for the material cosmos we sense and measure and attempt to predict."
Here's the quote in question: "[I]n the contemporary bourgeois society, the passage from the real to the ideological is defined as that from an anti-physis to a pseudo-physis." From The Bourgeoisie As A Joint-Stock Company. "Antiphysis" is linked to "the real"; and pseudophysis is linked to "ideology." I get the latter, but not the former. :-(
Anne Potter and I will present soon, at the internet conference Supporting Deaf People Online, about a hypothesis we've been developing over the last three years. Our paper, The Interpreter and INTERRUPTING: Cultural and Group Dynamics, introduces some distinctions that we think are important, but we might be the only ones who think so! So, the discussion at this conference will really be a "test" of the hypothesis. Do others agree or disagree? Is this conversation worthwhile and useful?
Hypothesis: There is a pattern in the way interpreters and Deaf people talk about interruptions that shows a bias toward INTERRUPTING as an outcome of cultural difference, instead of as a typical feature of intercultural interaction.
My buddy Carole is a gem. This afternoon she told me she'd never met anyone like me and wonders how my life will turn out. So do I! We were talking about the things I do. I keep trying to figure out what it is, actually, that I "do." :-) And why! Since what I do often results in distress (for me and for others, to varying degrees and intensities, situationally). Is there something I bring that is actually an "asset", and if so, what is it? Am I misusing or misapplying it? Are there other ways to "use" it than the ways I currently know?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I've actually had a few wild perceptions of being potentially able to alter reality - especially time - (and no, I wasn't under any influence), but they always seem ... out of ken. Not real. But here I am reading Mattelart for Paula's class, and he quotes McLuhan...
Participants and actors ìseek to program events rather than to watch themÖthese ëeffectsí appear before their ëcauses.í At instant speeds the cause and effect are at least simultaneousÖ.this dimensionÖ naturally suggests Ö the need to anticipate events hopefully rather than to participate in them fatalisticallyî (1974, in Mattelart p. 125-126).
Sam's ok, but he didn't look too good when I got there. Hooked up to an oxygen tank and his face looked drawn, tight, like he'd aged a lot in the past two weeks. I diddled around with replacing the battery in his Bose remote before sitting down and checking in. He just about lunged for his standard hazelnut black (we always have this issue about letting it cool down enough so he doesn't burn himself), so I knew he was "ok" in general, but I worried something "big" had happened. I said,
"Looks like its been a rough couple of weeks since I've seen you?"
"Yeah."
"Sonofabitch."
"Sonofabitch."
~ David sends this gem along:
Interview with Carol Padden and Tom Humphries.
They've got a new book out, and their old one is still a classic, Deaf in America. Tom is credited with coining the term, audism, to describe systemic discrimination and prejudice against deaf people.
You never know what might happen if you stay late in the computer lab!
If you've missed out on how Jeff Gannon burned Bush, a woman formerly known as an esteemed colleague of the COM dept discovered several porn sites of this wanna be reporter who apparently was paid off by the White House to ask Bush questions that would make him (Bush) look good. Turns out Gannon is not a reporter at all, but an online porn figure. PLENTY can be found by a google search, but none of you will beat the stiff competition of our colleague's wit: "My husband's is bigger than his." A hard job indeed. As John Aravosis said, quoted in the Washington Post story linked above: "The larger issue is how did someone like this get access to the White House."
ah, now I get it! Slow processing time, and I needed a few repetitions of the feedback in different ways. :-)
It seems there are actually TWO aspects of me emailing Michael about the overenrollment policy to which folks reacted. One aspect is how I did it - based upon what anonymous characterized as my "misunderstanding". I have some historical insight into this now (below). The other aspect though, the one which may (?) have lasting repercussions, is the fact that I emailed him at all.
And I've been on such good behavior!!!
I had a revelation about "normative" this evening. For me, norms are the things people actually do, which frequently doesn't coincide (to varying degrees) with what people say they should do - their "rules." Interpreting is my easiest example: people set up a communicative rule to take turns. But the norm develops such that there are overlaps and interruptions. Watch Steph's head implode! :-)
To conceive of "normative" as the ideal image someone holds is counterintuitive from my typical usage. I would use the term "prescriptive" to describe a theoretical viewpoint that implies things ought to be a particular way. And why this matters in research (watch me speculate) is because if I believe things ought to be a certain way, then my methodology and findings are going to reflect a comparative judgment (even if it is covert) on any deviation between how things "are" and what I think the "ought to be."
David Kreuger sent this article, Deaf patients challenge hospital interpreter system, to the DeafVermont list.
Problems with the video relay interpreting have lead to community organizing and a legal challenge. Some hospitals using VRI have been reluctant or refused to hire live interpreters when needed.
Article By PAMELA WOOD, Staff Writer for The Capital, Annapolis, MD
I'm still crossing my fingers for the second half of the funding, but it's kinda looking like a "go". :-) The abstract posted on the Anthropology webpage has an outdated title but the gist of the study is the same. (It's a downloadable pdf, not a link.) I've got housing arranged in Brussels, my roundtrip ticket is purchased, and if I can just get the final permission to get into "the booth" at the European Parliament all will be golden. (Oh, did I mention hoping I get that grant?) THEN it will be ... isn't there some rare metal more precious than gold?
I think this is what group relations people call parallel process. As grad student reps, we have to make a "group decision" that "represents" a larger body than just us three.
My students are starting to look at how they make decisions in small groups.
I examine how I make decisions in groups.
Starting at the mid-level (structurally in the organization), the parallelization occurs "downward", but does it also occur "upward"? I.e., are "we" reflecting a decision-making structure that pre-dates us and perhaps is hierarchically/structurally "imposed" upon us?
The next part is about me - intrasubjectively, but with bearing on intersubjectivity (although I don't go into role).
dilemma! So, we have this grad student meeting and one thing we don't discuss collectively is whether or not, and if so, what exactly, to tell Michael (and/or any of the committees) about it!
As "representatives", do we have an obligation to report something (rather than nothing)? Does the job responsibility (especially of the Graduate Studies Committee Rep) privilege a loyalty (for lack of a better word) to the grad students or a shared, mutual obligation both to graduate students and to faculty/administration?
The three representatives are "left" with a decision to make about what to convey. Do we make this decision among ourselves? Hold off until the next meeting (March 25)? Assume that the "silence" on this topic means there is nothing yet to share?
was a hit, as far as I can tell. :-) The dozen folks who came drank a lot of vodka, sniffed a lot of bread, and ate a lot of pickles. Not to mention the pelmeni, potatos, spiced carrots and cabbage. What else could one expect?! Oh yes, there was the candy and dessert, and Olga drew herself to win the doorprize (I dunno, maybe she rigged it somehow?)! Talk was loud and animated, and I even got to have some lengthy discussions with several different individuals. It helped that the trip to the Russian grocer in Westfield yielded easily and quickly prepared traditional foods. Folks stayed late to watch "The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming," which was a pretty silly flick but still got quite a few good laughs out of us.
This op-ed is an interesting response to Lawrence Summer's recent sexist remark about women in science and technology. I like their use of temporality as the real issue, that such comments have a retroactive effect of pulling people's attention toward the past instead of focusing their gaze on the future.
~ from Ximena to the social justice list
Well, I'm jazzed. :-) Eight students from the small group communication class have decided to be co-researchers for a next stage of this project. They facilitated small group discussions of their own and peers' reactions to the Teacher's Body Presentation I gave at NCA last year.
The initial first impressions/first reactions to my appearance appear consonant with the data collected before. Maybe people think the only responses "worth" reporting are the extremes? For instance, I've yet to come across a reaction that could be characterized as "neutral."
According to Lippmann, if other human beings' behavior "crosses" mine, is "dependent" upon me, or is "interesting" to me, then that's a rough definition of the boundaries of "public affairs" about which one may have "public opinions" (29).
Lippmann's summary of reasons why people wind up with disparate pictures of events, issues, etc that require some kind of decision-making seems relevant. Why do "the pictures in peopleís heads" lack correspondence with "the world outside?" We all have limited access to facts through ìartificial censorship, the limitations of social contact, the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of [peopleís] livesî (30).
(btw - 15 (!) people attended the comm grad stduent meeting yesterday but you'll have to wait for the minutes to find out what's what.)
Stephen has been arguing, I'm starting to think, for a blog composed of or otherwise enacting representative Public Opinions, while I have been arguing for a site for the expression of representational public opinions.
At least our debate has been carried out in public (apparently -?- generating an impression that one or both of us is "really mad"?)
"Until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts." Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 13.
I did attend a party last weekend. For someone who just turned in his Master's Prospectus! All 60-some pages of it! I was one of the first to arrive and almost the very last to leave, sans the one who stayed to sleep on the sofa. Again.
Good music, good food, good people. Dancing. Me and Blondie "know the routine." :-) Wish I had the moolah to hire that soup man. {sigh}
between the Ancients and the Moderns is described by Joseph M. Levine as, "how far to imitate the classics and how far to risk the freedom to innovate."
However, another view, by Rosen, argues that "the quarrel that is significant is not between ancients and moderns but between philosophy and sophistry, for the continuous attempt of Western civilization to prevent playfulness from degenerating into frivolity constitutes the unity of historical experience."
Here are some additional links to authors with an online paragraph or so of commentary on the Quarrel, including Schiller: "Antique poetry now is equated with the naive mode of perception (naive Empfindungsweise). Naive poets live in inner harmony and unity with nature, and their works of art are produced spontaneously and in the absence of poetic self-consciousness. The poetry of modernity, on the other hand, is sentimental in outlook (Schiller's German term is sentimentalisch rather than sentimental). Sentimental poets are self-reflective and skeptical of inspiration, they are apprehensive of the psychological abyss that dissociates their own age from antiquity, and they feel their cultural and moral self cut off from the harmony of senses and from the union with nature that they ascribe to the writers of antiquity."
Vico defines philology as "the doctrine of all the institutions that depend on human choice; for example, all histories of the languages, customs, and deeds of peoples in war and peace" (in Labio, p. 47).
The academy is an institution; rhetorical discourse is an institution. War is an institution. Peace is not. How does one exercise choice that invokes an institutionalizing of peace without negating half the human experience (aggression, desire, passion....in short, sensation itself)?
The general thrust of class discussion on Day 2 seemed to be toward identifying the traditions of
Dewey - Habermas
and
Heidegger - Derrida & Levinas.
I appreciated Paula's mode of eliciting what we thought to build toward this knowledge rather than just telling us, but now I want to "just be told!" Does anyone have a sense of which category these different strands of theorizing belong to, and why? The four overall categories Paula identified in the syllabus are: liberal, marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theories of comm and media theory.
My guess {gulp} is that Dewey-Habermas are "liberal" and Heidegger - Levinas, Derrida are "marxist."
I was warned. So are you. The following poem is "personal" and may even be considered, by some, "private."
Of course, I come to disbelieve the utility of these concepts more and more. They are a convenient boundary to locate meaning in the other, distancing self from responsibility and foreclosing awareness of co-construction. Nonetheless, my own culpability reeks.
Explanation seems warranted. I expanded upon my possibly cryptic response to anonymous about object/subjects of study and consent during a continuing debate with Stephen about Reflexivity's potential to become a collaborative, shared blog (involving more authors).
(Apologies in advance for a) comment spam, I can't seem to get them deleted and b) a lot of "overlap" in the earlier posts of "everything" going on - it took a while before I started trying to categorize.(
These links take you to few of my ruminations on what Reflexivity "is" for me, and some of the issues/problems I've tried to take on, such as
I think you may be right, Stephen, that there is "no one else" reading at the moment, your critique that my writing is too blurry ("linguistic meanderings") is well-taken and consonant with other recent feedback. However, its also, I think, in part constituted by the intersubjective condition of talking outloud to myself. I think that tends to occur on Reflexivity when there is a dearth of "audience" or at least when it seems to be so.
You're also accurate, I think, in characterizing your discourse as an expression of "perhaps white / straight / male / educated" power. It is. I return to the thread on "separate knowing". And a bit Habermasian at that. I appreciate much in your critique, of all that I have not made clear, and I twinge a bit that I'm such a slow learner in this regard, but the construction of meaning occurs between us, so if you feel "psychologized" its 50% your doing. If we're having a moral disagreement (and I'm not sure we are, it was presented as an hypothesis), it has to do with acknowledging the presence of the psychological, of which "desire" may be our most tangible expression.
This may be one of my new guys. The blogpost cited before (The Pinocchio Theory is a great summary of Tarde that winds up exactly where I've been trying to be, believe it or not! (I loved Ripley's as a kid.)
This article by Bruno Latour about Tarde is about interrupting repetitions - think problematic moments! (and Latour looks interesting in his own right: Making Things Public).
Wikipedia shows his work turned to unsavory purposes (Le Bon) but also taken up by others who may be less scary....I'm not sure yet, because Mattelart lumps him in with the psychopathologists and (despite dysfunctionality) I really don't think humanity is hopelessly pathological, but more investigation is on the horizon. I wonder if I can get the Encyclopedia Brittanica article on him from school?
OK, so history repeats itself, right? This is what I thought reading the last section of Mattelart's chapter 2 (p. 48-52). How to reach a wider public than those I already have regular contact with? Newspapers, serial stories, and feuilletons were used to do it in the mid-19th century, blogs may be one of the 21st's equivalents. I have to say I am drawn to Cesar de Paepe and his notion of public service:
I'm thinking, only on p. 30, that it makes sense to me why so many intellectuals commit suicide. The quote by historian Douglass McKie suggests a hands-off policy from government toward business until business goes bad, when a moral discourse is invoked. The blatancy of fear-based policy decisions in the relations between nations is no less today than it was then.
I'm puzzled by this though: "The tension between the logics of negotiation and those of security/insecurity was too tangible to render credible the first efforts to construct a system for regulating international relations" (30). Meaning it was so real that it couldn't be faced? Or accepted as requiring significant, deliberate, and direct mediation? I'm not disputing Mattelart's judgment, but wondering about the intensity of denial, and how that still plays out in so many ways and places.
~ by Rebecca M. Townsend, Ph.D.
"Post-Social Security ìreform:î picture a 35-year old couple going to a convenience store on payday, putting part of their paychecks toward their Social Scratch Tickets.Ý Social Scratch Tickets have replaced Social Security cards. While still resembling the old cards, they now have a small gray bar workers scratch when they retire. Fast-forward to retirement: the couple eagerly scratches off their tickets.ÝìTry Next Time,î each card reads.Ý Workersí wages no longer help seniors.
Carsí safety belts protect us during crashes. Social Security cards are safety belts, not scratch tickets. Mr. Bush wants us to gamble on senior citizen safety. If we make $90K/year or less, we part with a small percent so seniors donít starve.ÝIím tired of Mr. Bush only looking out for those who only look out for themselves. You might NOT be a winner with his scheme. To ìante upî as Mr. Kristoff (2/5/05) would like, why not lift the $90K cap? Share the wealth, don't squander it."
Ý
Aha! A reference for something I've been struggling to explain: "logical confusions we find ourselves trapped within (like flies in a fly bottle).
If I'd read this about three years ago maybe I'd not have dug myself in so deep! No doubt the "therapeutic discourse" runs through and out of me.
Before I get on with that though, I found characterizations of Briankle and Stephen that seemed to good not to share:
Briankle: ìno one in the Heideggerian inheritance has any time for information exchange.î (17)
Stephen: ìA cheerful sense of the weirdness of all attempts at communication offers a far saner way to think and liveî (30).
that Michael Peter Smith himself really found Reflexivity or has his own little software engine checking out who's been reading his book? He added a comment to this post from last fall. :-)
He posted the URL to his website. His earlier book, Transnationalism from Below might be useful for my research project on interpreting.
I still have some. :-) They suggest that all I need to do is get pregnant and change my "funny" hair style and everything will be good.
I thoroughly enjoyed the yummiest meal I've had in weeks, great company, and lots of laughs.
Well. A friend teased me yesterday, "How goes the war, General?" And I was feeling quite optimistic because I had just gleaned some info about how things "used to be". Also, Phee's comment about the shock and dismay of reading "an attitude of suspicion and antagonism" was helpful. I will reiterate again that I was reporting what I'd heard. Then I woke up to the comment by "anonymous", who certainly reflects more than just his/her own opinion. I'm sure anonymous is absolutely correct that I am "in" my "report", as noted, with "an unavoidable effect on the things that we observe". (I've been thinking I should have taken a journalism class as this has the feel of investigative reporting....with qualifications. I'm not out to get anyone and I don't have a specific desired outcome in mind beyond surviving questioning departmental norms as I've experienced them.)
There have always been at least two student discourses in the department since I've been here, which could be roughly glossed as a generally satisfied one and a generally dissatisfied one, sometimes engaged by the same individual and sometimes "located" more strongly, respectively, in certain people and not others. I've been exposed to both, and have been frustrated that there hasn't seemed to be an outlet or avenue for addressing the disaffections on a systematic basis. There are avenues for addressing individual complaints or concerns, which sometimes "work" and sometimes don't. However, I learned yesterday that there used to be a mechanism for systematic concerns that may just need our recognition to be reinvigorated.
Na na na na boo boo! You're just as tragic as me and you want to be remembered just as much! (No one performs like you do intending to be forgotten.) Obviously you haven't taken a peek at the pic under "Seriously" (on Reflexivity's Main Page) for a while. Please do, and imagine me blowing you a raspberry.
Hunju prefers Merleau-Ponty and that would be nicely synergistic for me, since my first encounter with phenomenology was through a popular rendition based largely upon M-P's work.
Also, it's Max Scheler (not Schuyler), and this looks interesting: On Feeling, Knowing, Valuing.
"I don't think you should send any more emails, its bad for your health."
"Please do! Take on some more issues!"
"You're going to crash this whole department and next year they won't hire any of us back!"
"Kudos!"
"It's not good for you to stick your neck out by yourself."
Wow.
Here's my thinking (finally) for the critical phenomenology with Briankle:
Problem 1: what's the difference between epistemology (ways of knowing) and phenomenology (consciousness)?
Problem 2: the role of perception. How is perception articulated/understood within these two fields?
This is how Enoch Page framed the course, Anthropology of Consciousness. His critique of academia is based upon a combination of personal experience and a theorizing informed by Gregory Bateson. I haven't read any Bateson, but his name has been mentioned occasionally in COM, and now I know I need to read him.
I missed it! Off to a great start! :-) Rumor has it, though, that Paula was warm and friendly (counter to scuttlebutt about a certain degree of inaccessibility).
Our Aussie colleague missed it too - I didn't hear from her yesterday, so I hope that means she's en route. Does anyone know?
I know several of you said "hello" to me and I apologize for being so immersed in my own drama of proposal deadline that I wasn't expressive of it being good to see you again. It is good to see you again and I'm looking forward to some passionate engagement about the differences between liberal, marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theories of comm and media theory. Do you know how to tell the differences among them? I am pretty sure that I don't - at least not as often as I'd like (and no where near the ideal of "always").
