March 2005 Archives

Working on making friends at livejournal.

Becky sends this. It's a good one. We are at risk, if not in an immediate personal sense, in the kind of historical one that catches up to individuals.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

What's Going On?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 29, 2005

Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.

We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous.

But it's also true of the United States, where dangerous extremists belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and wield great political influence.

I've heard this term, and maybe used it once or twice. Hoping I had it "right". :-) did you know there are many different techniques? After reading this explanation, I'm not sure I've used it correctly OR understood it right. Alas!

I think I had it sortof backwards - more of a "putting together" rather than a "taking apart." Might these be two sides of the same spinning coin?

It's an ad, but it's getting around...wonder how it will change in a few days?

It incorporates animated ASL, which I haven't seen before.

Exoteric - Esoteric. Are these in opposition or in conjunction? This is one theme in Enoch's class on consciousness.

Another is number. I can only find definitions on the www that privilege its material, conventional construction. From this view, 1+1 can only equal 2. Another view, that of sacred geometry, poses a different answer.

I read a piece James gave me from opendemocracy.net today, and now this link included in the AoIR list's debate on universal ethics, Think Again: Civil Society makes some of the same points. This is one of the macrosocial themes I think my research will speak to, the other is transnational citizenship - transnational referring to individuals who have family and business ties to two or more countries and citizenship referring to legal status and political rights (as it is now, there is not much choice in this, one's "nation" is typically inscribed at birth and usually limited to one country).

don't I wish. I want to re-read the book of that title by Robert Penn Warren someday because I remember being affected by it, deeply, yet recall no details or any of hint of why. The sentiment the title invokes has, however, always stayed with me, and I remember it most at those moments when I'm most aware of feeling like there is not enough time. But then, the title isn't implying there's enough "time", is it? Just enough world.

Kathy sent this link to the game, Nomic, the point of which is to change the rules. Maybe I'll get to play it this summer? I think it could be fascinating to observe/participate in a setting in which one cannot rely on the rules staying the same. Could be quite the mind-f*ck, eh?

Of course, I'm all about changing the rules. :-) No wonder I stress folks out so much, sometimes. But I like certain rules to stay the same too - so the art of change, perhaps, is flexing with the flow of each other's static and fluid rule systems?

Extra travel day if I purchase by March 31.

Also, if my mind/eyes don't deceive me, and Air France flight from Strausbourg to Budapest for 99 euros would make my day. Have emailed oh please universe be merciful and grant this deal!

What's up with livejournal?

I'm a gonna find out . . .

Kathy sends this link to Nassira Nicola's thesis Signs of Conflict: Language, Power, and Bilingual Deaf Education in Montreal.

I say, hey! congrats Nicola! I'm not a livejournal member (yet) so can't comment on your site, but have downloaded your paper and will even read it one of these days...

here's another one.....for the rss that used to be and will hopefully someday be again!

TerraNova

At least for awhile, on first glance it's rather tech-sophisticated...

And Radhika is trying to encompass cyberspace it seems - http://www.livejournal.com/users/cyberdivalive. How does she manage it all?

I think Sam convinced the staff at Eden Park to go along with an early April Fool's Day joke - there is no physical evidence that he fell on his head last week! Actually, there is the tiniest reddish patch right in the center of his "headfore" (as Hannah used to say) at the hairline, so it does look like maybe something happened. He loved Mangeca's tease about the Margarita's. :-)

They did not run conventions like Fantasm in my day! Or, maybe they did, but as a teen in the 70's I missed the connections or clues at the Star Trek centered cons I attended. Not at all as wild as museumfreak.

I did wear vulcan ears and a long nose to junior high school one April Fool's Day....

:-)

Briankle was in a rare mood last night - he inquired about my oh-so-close-to-psychological thoughts. Well, he asked me to "say something" at a moment when I was thinking about my own theoretical problem - of trying to enact a consciousness premised upon an epistemology that accepts the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics. (btw - I'm not very good at it.)

Radhika asks if one can be liminal, really, ever - "in any context."

If time is, then existence is pertually liminal, always becoming, what Enoch called "the dissident now."

Now is described as "dissident" to emphasis the notion of existence continually coming into being (in a quantum mode, and/or in keeping with ancient mystical epistemologies) against popular "commonsense" linear conceptions of temporality.

Enoch challenged us to problematize desire. Is it possible that desire itself is an evolutionary cause? Did fish grow legs over millenia because of desire to leave the water? Or small mammals wings from desire to fly? Or humans consciousness out of desire to understand?

Here are some quick results of a google search:

David just added a destination to my European travels this summer, Molvania. I'll go there after Budapest, and before I head to Brussels. I'm sure I'll be able to find some interpreters there to be part of my research, even though they seem more invested in pop culture than citizenship and transnational identities. :-)

I beat Raz at ping pong tonight. I'm sure it was an aberration. He took revenge swiftly, beating me three straight and I never got out of the single digits (well, maybe once). :-) That young woman he hangs out with kept saying something about his "masculinity"....??? (gasp!)

I was surprised when I won but I think our favorite young man was downright shocked! He'll deny it of course, humble guy that he is. :-) I won't go into the details of the other young man at ABC who thought he had a chance at stealing his girl away from Raz. That was the most amusing part of the evening!!

Hello everyone. This is a quick one just to let you know that I'm sorry the comment feature wasn't working when I sent out the last long posting about Sam. It is is working now. You can comment here, or return to that long one and comment there.

fyi, also, Sam is ok, but he fell out of his wheelchair earlier today and did take a trip to the hospital to get checked out. Everything seems fine except for a bump and bruise, and he's back at Eden now. I think this is the second time it's happened; he leans forward for something and gravity pulls him right on down.

I'll see him Saturday and will, of course, let you all know what's what.

Review of Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with J¸rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori.

We (thankfully) postponed Habermas for a week, and I'm trying to prep for Mass Comm this afternoon - have finished Gramsci and now onto Althusser, which I did read before (last year, Li gave it to me thinking it might relate to the mentoring project, hmmmm. :-)

There's a section here that has me thinking back on the private-public debate between me and Stephen (last entry February 21).

Althusser writes: "The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its 'authority'" (1971, 137).

Paula told us we could selectively choose two days in which we did not complete the readings. Here comes the first of mine, regrettably on a heavily foundational day. :-( But.

And. Other things have taken precedence. I hope at least to get through Gramsci on Americanism and Fordism.

Spent hours on Hall (enjoyably so).

Liminality. Who will I be? Who do I want to be?

In LinguaMoo I want to be rewind. (I wanted to be endless reflexivity but it wouldn't accept that - I think I needed an underscore. Oh well. rewind is better.)

In pmc2 - a different space. How do these relate to each other? LinguaMoo is e-theory...experimentation and application of/with theory (or so I gather...)

pmc2 is ... for play? Or, perhaps, for plurking? (although I wager such is welcome in LinguaMoo, too).

Matter does not exist, according to George Berkeley, "one of the three most famous eighteenth century British Empiricists" (along with Locke and Hume), who utilized "strictly empiricist principles in defence of the view that only minds or spirits exist."

Motto: esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived.

Careen says:

"You're not outside what you want to be inside of."

I'm holding this despite all evidence to the contrary! ;-)

Well. Anne and I debriefed yesterday. It was quite a ride! We've got our action plan and to do lists. We did decide its worth going back next year and trying again, but would like to recruit more Deaf to be involved. And I know I need to pay attention to register - academic jargon is not accessible!

Stuart Hall is good for many things. :-) It's hard to imagine what would have been different if I had read him earlier (besides everything!) - but I'm content. My epistemological path (how I learn and continue to come "to know" things) has been what it has been. Just fine. :-) Lots of opportunity, growth, development, fun and challenging people . . . wishing it were different would be a waste of time and energy. And, in truth, it's really ok.

So, check out what Hall says about discourse. This may well tie in to the RID presentation this summer which is starting to percolate in my mind...

Dang. Have I had metonymy all wrong? Hall describes is a linguistic term in which a part is substituted for the whole inadequately because, as a one-sided or single moment it can never provide or capture a process (or object or event or . . . ) holistically, in all its dimensions, moments, and aspects.

I've been considering it alternatively as a representation or symbol in which the whole enacts itself within the part.

"It was in 1964, when Paul Baran introduced his work on "distributed
communications". That's were it started to become reality.
http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/RM3420/RM3420.chapter1.html

BTW, the graphic there is quite good also to understand the shift within
societies from centralized to de-centralized to (more or less)
participatory ones. So, technology is influencing the shaping of society
and also the other way round.

Best,
Laurent" [to the AoIR listserv}

Careen gave me a load of guidance the other day. I have framed it (epistemologically) as preparation for the vernal equinox today, although I've been catching whiffs for the past two weeks.

"It is the moment in time that will always be the signature that validates a shift from dormancy to regeneration. It is the moment when the curtain rises on a new performance of natureís metamorphosis."

The precise moment when day and night were balanced at 12 hours each was at 7:33 this morning (EST). Which is awfully dang close to when I woke up! :-)

and what to call the medium of interaction enabled by technology...

New Yorkers for Fair Use's brief in the Grokster "P2P
Filesharing" case:

We ask the Court:

Did the Court of Appeals rightly conclude that the doctrine of
contributory copyright infringement cannot be used to prohibit
the Internet?

http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/20050301_fsf_nyfu.pdf

We put the same question to the Federal Trade Commission at their
recent "P2P Filesharing" workshop:

http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/ftc/

Last year, we pulled many voices concerned about the Internet
together at the Internet Commons Congress:

http://www.nyfairuse.org/icc/

Seth Johnson
New Yorkers for Fair Use

[CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc

I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or
distribution of this incidentally recorded communication.
Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so
far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in
ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of
exclusive rights.

Interesting NCA paper, on Reading Identity Politics through Marx.

Critique of Althusser and also of Foucault: A Lover's Discourse: Using French Social Thought for Media Criticism.

ìHow we come to speak ëspontaneouslyí, within the limits of the categories of thought which exist outside us and which can more accurately be said to think usî (30).

Through language, "the same social relation can be differently represented and construedî (36).

Stuart Hall. The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees. 1986.

According to Raymond Williams.

I'm trying to find the full text of a quote excerpted and ellipsed by Stuart Hall (1986). The closest I've found is:

one of these days I have to follow up and deal with my sheer clumsiness - www.replacements.com.

Internet history.

thanks to the good people at AiOR, particularly Mag. Laurent Straskraba.

The new AoIR website is cool (well, those parts I can access while getting my paid membership processed). It's run on an opensource software called drupal.

I had an idea about the blog, about creating an internal "door" to a second blog (or some such) where I could write the more intrapersonal, subjective "oh just me" stuff. Maybe if folks wanted to read that they'd have to join and get a password for access? And the rest of Reflexivity would remain pretty much as it is....

Do-able?

I just finished an amazing team interpreting job with someone who does healing work as well.

Interesting, as we were hanging out before the job began, she asked if I was tired....turns out she had read my energy as "withdrawn."

Working with James (we are going to get this piece published!) -

"According to Husserl, intersubjective experience plays a fundamental role in our constitution of both ourselves as objectively existing subjects, other experiencing subjects, and the objective spatio-temporal world. Transcendental phenomenology attempts to reconstruct the rational structures underlying - and making possible - these constitutive achievements."

and

I saw Sam last Saturday....five days ago. It took me four days to think about what I wanted to say, and I've been flat out so - finally - here I am. A lot has happened, Sam's friend and neighbor Elaine Dixon died after several days of being in critical condition from an accident, she was hit and run over by a car. Some of Sam's good friends have arranged for him to get to the funeral this Saturday, bless them. I know its important to Sam.

He's having a rough time. He won't admit it, probably, but here's my suspicion. The reality of the decay of the speech center and fine motor control muscles that produce speech is here. His mind is still as sharp as ever, but its harder to tell because it takes him so much effort to speak. Folks have to be more patient than ever, adjusting to his speed, and reading very small cues. I gave him a hard time about not giving cues sometimes when he thinks what he wants is so damn obvious any fool would get it (!) - but folks are trying to be respectful and be sure. I said he's gotta give us those cues even when it seems obvious to him.

The conference was fantabulous. But I am toast! The hosts, Direct Learn Online Conferencing did a tremendous job. So did all of the presenters and participants.

Some links:

Center for Excellence for the Study of Sign Language Interpreting at RIT.

International Congress on Education of the Deaf

There are more that were posted in the actual papers, I'll dig 'em all out and post them here soon.

Now, I'm off to the gym and then a yummy Mexican dinner - my reward!

Supporting Deaf People Online has been pretty much taking up my entire life the last three days, but it's pretty cool. Anne and I have a lot of fascinating discourse to think about.

One downside is fewer deaf participants than I remember from last year. :-( Really thought there would be more.

BUT - the collegial environment and quality of discussion has been, I think, phenomenal. I'm really pleased we were able to present, and quite satisfied with the result. I think I even made some new friends! Always a happy thing. :-)

This clip from the "Museum of Media History" reminds me of that book (by David Mamet, but not the famous playwright?) I couldn't finish because it was too weird. Actually, the concept wasn't weird, it was an illustration of what historians do, trying to piece together the (or a) "story" about something that happened when only bits of the archival record remain.

According to John Laprise's posting to the AoIR list, the clip "presents a great futurist history peering at where the Internet is going." The art of it is (given my newfound "understanding" gleaned from Darian Leader) the empty and confused (poorly transmitted) places, the passages of temporal (mis)transmission that (en)force silence and waiting. Anticipation and impatience fill this time-space of nothing, capturing that which we don't usually perceive - the headlong rush of activity and momentum.

Should we be surprised that the Bush administration and media outlets have sidestepped or otherwise ignored the law regarding disclosure of government funding of television programs? Donna sends along the activism:

StopFakeNews provides information and an email to send to the FCC and also to the Justice Department. The story, Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News, ran in the NYTimes yesterday.

Donal held up his own very well last Thursday, when a handful of us met to continue discussing the merits of the debate between these two titans. Click and scroll down for a summary of our last (the first) discussion.

The way I see it, the basic conflict comes to whether one assumes race, gender, other social identities, are always relevant to communication or not. Donal recognizes that they could be, but reserves the ideal that they may not be and proceeds on the assumption of either possibility. Fiske assumes they always are, and its just a matter of how we bring our epistemological frames to bear that determines whether or not we can identify their inflection(s) on the communicative practice.

A dozen COM department graduate students descended upon the bargaining session between our union (GEO) and the university administration's team this past Friday morning. First, we were bluffed into the wrong room, thus arriving late (not our plan) but perhaps the late en masse entrance was a precursor to the tension that erupted periodically throughout the session?

Passed along by Becky Town Meeting Townsend.

Here is an excellent primer on Foucault.

The author, John Haber, poses Foucault vs Sartre: "For Sartre, a self-assured fighter who violently distrusted revolutionaries, alienation is normal. For Foucaultóa homosexual who died of AIDS in the midst of composing an ambitious, unfinished History of Sexualityóaccepting normalcy as others define it is out of the question."

This "light, little book" that Briankle assigned us for pleasure and a change of pace is striking me heavy. It's fascinating, and fun, as some of my colleagues have said. And... its full of resonance for me - so many overlaps with my last relationship and the extended circle of "friends."

Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing, by Darian Leader, has taught me more about art (to which I've "come late", as I once said to the FP, not all that long ago) than anything else I've ever read or heard or discussed.

Ward Churchill is an angry man and, if one can read through/past the accusatory outrage, he's got a compelling and deeply disturbing argument for why Some People Push Back. He's about to lose his job, it seems, at the U of Colorado. An open letter of protest is making the rounds, email criticalthinking@pitzer.edu to join signatories such as Henry Giroux, Immanual Wallerstein, and Allen Wood among many others.

I never read Hunter S. Thompson, but the tributes to his "gonzo journalism" valorize his anger. What made his anger acceptible - even laudatory - while Churchill's is denigrated?

One of my classmates said this today, describing an experience she had during meditation ("sitting") when she felt the two lobes of her brain widely separated by "the void" of the universe. Of course it sounds like a drug trip, illustrating the subsequent conversation we had about the academically-sanctioned search for causality - as if a knowledge of material causality is the only worthwhile epistemology.

Honestly, I don't know where I am, except that I'm suspended amid a triangle of the near nihilist, the unitarian universalist, and the cosmic multidimensional spacetime traveler.

No, I'm not joking! :-/ Meanwhile.................................. sigh

Erin, a.k.a. Betty Crocker, put on an amazing spread. For the first time, there were hardly any leftovers! ! ! We chowed! Lynn was especially in heaven over the tuna casserole. (The secret is mayo.) Elizabeth's green bean casserole was delish, and Flora's vegetarian chili and cornbread well enjoyed.

Bill (or was it Bob?) called me Sally. I'm not sure if that's a reference to any particular 1950's housewife or gourmet....? probably not, since the German Chocolate Brownie bars were a bit "chewy", as folks said. (But the Hoosier bars were perfect, despite the accusation from my Indiana buddy (tsk tsk, calling to throw me off in the middle of the soiree! tsk tsk - not!) that we were "making stuff up." Ruth was right though, that we weren't drinking Bud and watching basketball, but the Nebraska folk would be watching football....so - no universals in midwestern land!

Fab flyer designed by MichaelJDeLuca.com. WeeHaaaaa! ;-)

John sent this paper critiquing functionalism, and it coincides nicely with the discussion I (mostly missed) today among some of the departments' social interactionists. "Holism on a grand scale is difficult, if not impossible, to verify, but the way systems work is not." Donal argues, I think, that systems can be understood from the inside out...maybe this is what Bakhtin refers to as centrifugal? A centrifugal forces pushes things away from the center. Donal often uses the term "cohere", so he's arguing that the discourse around a certain practice is centripetal (a pulling inward). But what if the pulling in is in reaction to, or predicted upon the condition of possibility that other discourses are pushing out?

David's motivation to get us social interaction folks talking with each other is very welcome. :-) I still have to finish reading Donal's response, but the gist of this dialogue in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1990-1991) is framed two ways. By Philipsen, as an example of two different ways of doing ethnography, and by Fiske, as consensus vs conflictual applications of social theory. Fiske is cogent on several of the questions I have about Donal's approach, but there is also something quite compelling about Donal's insistence on approaching ethnography with one's assumptions bracketed. While I lean toward the conflictual versions (surprise? - not!) I also think they carry a huge risk of reifying the very thing they seek to change.

I'm just wondering. Are Koreans always late or is it just HUNJU?!!!! I can handle it though, because I am getting The Best tutoring on philosophy a person could possibly wish. :-) We had an awesome talk about the first two chapters in Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology. It's pretty complicated stuff, but fascinating. Sheer downright absa-tooting-lutely fascinating. Folks are welcome to join us, if you want, we're reading fairly big chunks every two weeks then meeting to hash out understanding. Today we went over the Intro and the chapter on Brentano. It's wild to imagine being back in the day just figuring these things out, like how to separate and/or integrate and/or comprehend the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. "Objectivity-for-subjectivity" is the formulation that stuck in my mind... meaning (if I can wrap my head around this one more time)....whatever we experience or perceive as objective is always already conditioned by subjectivity...the question is "how the world comes to appearance in and through humans," or, as Husserl put it: "how does objectivity get constituted in and for consciousness?"

Oh dear. I am going to worry this one for awhile. Why is it staying on my mind? (Attachment?) :-)

Iím talking about the damn tree. Itís still falling. Making noise. Iím reading about Franz Brentano, who invented descriptive psychology and inspired all kinds of folk, including Edmund Husserl. The book is Introduction to Phenomenology. The discussion Iím just now reading is about intentionality.

A spoken language interpreter in the European Union, Miguel Gomes, wrote about his experience working with sign language interpreters at the 2003 European Disabilities Forum.

He does a nice job of using himself as the foil to provide some education. It does seem like the working conditions of even conference-level sign language interpreters is in need of some support. Working solo all day? Wait until the rash of repetitive motion injuries hits! It'll happen eventually, don't you think?

The hosts of DeafNation say 1.1 million viewerswatched parts of the 20th Deaflympic Games held this past January in Melbourne.

(I really like the logo.) :-)

The 21st Deaflympics will be in Utah in 2007. And it looks the 2009 Games will be in Taipei.

Oh, don't mind me, I'm just excited. RID has put up the website with info about this summer's biennial conference in San Antonio. Of course, I wouldn't mind being there now (not that a snow day is such a bad thing), but it'll be gorgeous in July, too. :-)

Eileen's and my workshop is the very last one (alphabetical order, go figure!) on p. 19 of the pdf. But you can read it here...

Merleau-Ponty uses this term to describe the inevitable and inextricable intertwining of consciousness with being. The phenomenological challenge he undertakes is to describe this mutual imbrication of selves and the world.

There is a medical reference, the optic chiasm, and a literary reference. Most simply, it means "an intersection or crossing of two tracts in the form of the letter X", and is reference to form.