January 2007 Archives

I received many of these photos of daily life in Tehran in an email last fall.

Whatever our political-economic competition, I resist the path to war. Religious difference is an excuse, a justification, mere rationalization cloaked in moral self-righteousness. To alter the apparent inevitability of another war, we - as "a people" - must begin to create new bases for the global economy. It is up to us to shift the PPF from guns to butter.

The Production Possibility Frontier is a graph of the most efficient way an economy can produce goods and provide services. In a recent college classroom, the basic benchline diagram (at the macroecnomic level, such as global and national economies) is plotted between military expenditures ("guns") and domestic expenditures ("butter"). Interestingly, the links I'm finding with a general google search for "production possibility frontier" on the Internet give the example of two domestic products. What a subtle convenience! Let's just pretend that only the domestic matters! This is what drives consumerism - if we spend, the economy will grow. However, this is only half the equation, or - more realistically - less than half. "Wine" and "bread" is the (everyday living domestic) part that is currently dependent on the other, on the "guns" and bombs and armored uniforms and tanks and military expenditures generated ad nauseum when the US goes to war.

There are more roads to peace than there are to war. We must find the will to choose them.

Linked from UMass' Social and Behavioral Sciences newsletter is an article that quotes one of the people who interviewed me for the STPEC writing teacher position. The article involves the German language program at UMass plus links to other articles on language education in the US, its point being the need for small humanities programs to collaborate in innovative ways with each other.

As always with the start of the semester, there are myriad new interpreting jobs, new groups, new group dynamics. I remain of the opinion that one strategy for creating the possibility of bilingual/bicultural interaction is to be more overt and open about issues and challenges we face - as interpreters - trying to maintain open flows of communication between two languages and across two different modes of perception (auditory and visual).

A common problem in groups that are mostly non-deaf (thus, communicating with spoken English) is creating "space" for the deaf person's vision-based interjections. While it is politically-correct for interpreters to talk of "process time" (while our brain is absorbing meaning, unpacking its linguistic wrapper, and rewrapping it in a new wrapper), the felt experience of people in the group is that of a delay, of waiting, of a lag between modes. To what extent can interpreters mediate this dimension of time, and to what extent can - should? - we encourage the group to figure out how to do inclusion considering the unalterable fact that these modes will sometimes come into conflict?

The most common way this "problem" shows up is when non-deaf people are talking and turn-taking at their usual pace, with anticipation of when someone's turn will end and someone else can begin - often leading to overlaps and/or simultaneous utterances from two or more speakers who negotiate (through volume, persistence, surrender) who will continue to speak and who will wait. When a deaf person wants to get in on the action, their signed comments often intersects with someone's speech - the deaf person has SEEN a pause in the interpretation indicating a turn-exchange and jumps in. If the interpreter voices naturally for the deaf person - asserting their right to participate in an unmonitored, spontaneous conversation - it could be taken as the deaf person (or the interpreter!) being rude, impolite, or inconsiderate.

I admit to being frustrated numerous times in my "early" career (!) with non-deaf people who simply would not make room for deaf people to participate. It isn't that I would LOOK for opportunities to break into voicing, but I thought of the act of "interrupting" a non-deaf speaker less as an interruption of an individual's talk and more as an intervention into an oppressive group dynamic. Ok, ok, I've gotten easier over the years and no longer consider these situations the best mode for cross-cultural instruction. But I do wonder, where is the line between the time and turn-taking boundary that we can manage to maintain as smooth a flow of communication as possible, and the responsibility of all the participants in a communication situation to make sure everyone can contribute?

Case-in-point: a deaf student asks (in sign) a question of a teacher. The interpreter voices it (in speech), interrupting the teacher's response to another student's question. The teacher responds to the deaf student's question.

De-brief: something about the interaction felt bad/wrong/off to the team interpreter, the interruption was too harsh or otherwise not positively representative of the deaf student.

Question: Do we interpreters solve this on our own?

Result: In this instance, the interpreters approached the teacher, who encouraged the interruptions because that is the style of all the students in the class. The teacher took the responsiblity to decide when to ask for a more formal turn-taking system (such as raising hands), and when to let the give-and-take continue.

Outcome? More questions. :-) Is this a concession to "the hearing way" of talking in overlaps, or is it an act of inclusion? As inclusion, the deaf student's voice is embraced as importantly as any other's - meaning the interpreters should be less concerned with finding "the right moment" and more concerned with getting the deaf voice "out there."

What do you think? :-)

John's doing a load of instruction online these days, check out these ASL 1 samples.

Benjamin forwarded this info on Deaf video: the street finds its own uses (again) along with more discussion here.

There are loads of links at the first site above, and more if one keeps scrolling through the comments (an interesting discussion - the only objection I've had so far is the post about written forms of ASL and comparing it to the Chinese ideograph system...need to think on why this bothers me - stereotypes both ways? about ASL, and about Chinese?

CecilyS (msg #9) posted two links, one for and another for a Deaf blogger, ridor9th (writing in English). My friend (btw!) Amanda reviews books and movies. She also sent a link about the Power of Media for the Deaf in Finnish Sign Language with English subtitles.

There's much to investigate here (some rainy day?).... Def/Deaf Poetry, a wikisite and corporate site on sign-writing (apparently not originating from within the Deaf community; seems different from the system that friends of Steve Nover were working on some years back), and the gamble by "Making Light" to categorize Deaf videos by key without knowing the language also intrigues me.

Although January isn’t quite over, the winter break is. The spring semester of interpreting, teaching, and writing begins tomorrow. How have my bones handled the gift of reflection? Evil Kachina suggested the following theme:

I remember my story not as my own, but as a member of a family. Three families, actually, the biological one in which my brother and I basically raised ourselves, a chosen one which I lost, and the encompassing ‘family’ of humanity. The weaving of these three seemingly separate tales shifts from loose to tight, compacted to disbursed, distinct to conflated.

When I was working on my Master’s degree (Social Justice Education) in the mid-90s, a professor challenged me once about how far accessibility and inclusion could go. Would the scope of my own action be reduced each time I met someone with a kind of disability that I had not encountered before? I struggled with the vast expanse of non-disabled privileges that I took so much for granted: should I give them up in solidarity? Must I plan events with strict restrictions on the non-disabled, thus enabling conditions of welcome for people with disabilities?

Focusing on the physical is crucial (we are talking basic needs), but an exclusive focus on the material is limited. As siblings growing up in a ‘wannabe’ upper-middle class household, my brother and I were well tended; as consciously-living (thinking and feeling) beings we both needed more nurture than we received. That absence, those gaps, have re-appeared in strange forms over the four decades of our existence, manifesting most profoundly in our intimate relations and core sense of self. The contemporary philosophy of mutual constitution, of the pervasive and constant interplay of “self” and “environment” (relational and material), of the social/linguistic (see online) co-construction of reality, teaches that there is no linear cause-effect relationship between “who I am” and the context of what, where, when, with whom, under which conditions…there is no ‘story of me’ that makes any sense outside of the places and people populating the experience.

How does one become when the conditions for becoming are not ideal?

My current strategy, developed over years of trial-and-error (and some days it definitely feels like mostly error!), is to keep stretching my perception of the context. I think of it as a matter of adjusting the degree of focus – at what level of awareness, which range of conditions, can I find an environment that supports me being the kind of person I seek to be? Sometimes the lens must be narrow, small, even pinpoint: ”In this stressful moment, what can I say/not say that allows the conversation to continue?” Other times, the lens must be broad and encompassing: ”How much credibility do I allow mass media accounts of politics and everyday life in the Middle East before I travel there?”

The continuum of adjusting focus applies to family life, too. The immediate intimacy of present relationships (actual and felt) constitutes the closest focus: who can I be when interacting with lovers, ex-lovers, children, the extended members of their families and all of our closest friends? A few degrees removed, the biological family is that ‘container’ where I spent the early (some say formative) years of being human. When I can make connections between present behaviors/emotions/reactions/interpretations and patterns from my vaguely dim past, then I believe I gain more capacity to free myself from habits and instincts that no longer serve. I expand the range of choice concerning what it means to be a person, to be a self, to have ‘a story’ that is uniquely my own.

Extending the lens of my awareness to humanity, to the species of homo sapiens, the phrase that leaps to mind today, is 'the human race'. This label strikes me as more meaningful than 'the human species' because all of our large-scale social (corporate, political, educational, religious) institutions are premised upon notions of competition, scarcity, and hierarchy. We have inherited a social world built by our forebears as a race. The global system of interconnected technologies and money flows is running as fast as it can: we (as a species) are in such a hurry to get … somewhere. I recognize this as a social metonymy for my own life. My parents were moving up, seeking to advance their socioeconomic status. The effort and thrill of (apparent) success distracted them from some of the tasks of childrearing. I inherited the need to rush. “Here” was never sufficient; “there” was going to be better. My chosen family suffered my impatience.

It has taken years to interrupt the pell-mell, hellbent race to elsewhere and elsewhen, to find the people and places that call me to an other self, to build the structures, conditions, and skill at shifting focus to the most conducive level for becoming other than who I was originally constrained to be. Now, instead of telling the story of an existence, I can begin to tell a story of life.

"In his novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson uses the term [actually a name from mythology] Nam-shub to indicate a self-replicating meme." I am truly enjoying this novel. The plot involves a neurolinguistic virus - language that causes physical changes to brain cells: a radical version of the co-construction of meaning.

At the root of this tale's "philosophy of language" is binary code (computer programming is all done in 1's and 0's). Stephenson plays the mind-as-computer analogy to the extreme, suggesting that the insertion of a certain meme (Enki's nam-shub) into language altered cognitive functioning. In other words, that this "speech with magical force" (p. 211) introduced a disease into human thinking. Maximizing complexity, the argument Stephenson presents is that religious belief is the carrier of this disease.

So, what is a meme? The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene): "A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to MUTATION, CROSSOVER, and ADAPTATION" (Glossary based on Flake); a "viral encapsulated idea, with built-in feedback loop" (adapted from "a broad theoretical model of human communication, which [Weaver] defined as 'all of the ways by which one mind may affect another'; premised upon Shannon's foundation of "electronic signal transmission and the quantitative measurement of information flows"; and (originally) "a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); 'memes are the cultural counterpart of genes'" (Princeton WordNet).

Dawkins' original definition (focused at the level of the gene) has been expanded to apply to a wide range of cultural phenomena, including a particular use in blogging. I have to challenge the deliberateness of someone "post[ing] memes on a daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis" because it implies a guarantee that whatever is posted will be picked up. As I understand Dawkin's sense, what makes a meme a meme is precisely its operation at a level "below" or "pre" consciousness - at the genetic level. The question might be the extent to which such changes can be (if ever?) intentionally co-constructed through increasing attention to consciousness at the level of, say, the synaptic connections of the brain's neural net.

My aunt likes Byron Katie and a method of self-inquiry "based on four questions and a process called a "turnaround."

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it's true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?

The fifth step is not a question, but a kind of "trying on" by turning the statement/belief around into it's opposite and interrogating this version with the same four questions.

(I'm guessing she made her own wikipedia entry :-), as it still needs to be "wikified" - brought into alignment with standard formatting.) I'm intrigued by a juxtaposition of language (in the form of internal, conscious thinking) and an assumed external "reality" of other people's subjectivities (based on the examples given at the wikipedia site).

I can relate to what she says about her life before "The Work": "...instead of seeing what was happening, I was placing conditions on what was happening..." Yes, this is familiar. :-) But, I'm skeptical of the assurance with which she asserts that there is a "what is" when it comes to other people and their perceptions, emotions, and interpretations of "reality."

Katie's formula opens up possibilities, certainly. It provides a way of testing and demonstrating the power of language to invoke different realities, by which I mean, realities different than those we have previously enacted. More precisely, her method is a means for altering one's own identity through a process of investigating how one understands "reality" and learning to make choices for interacting with the terrain.

A second conference is being planned for Dialogue under Occupation in Birzeit, Palestine.

"The focus of "Dialogue Under Occupation" is the ongoing exploration of dialogue and discourse in areas of the world experiencing occupation. Dialogue is intended in the sense that understanding of differing perspectives comes through dialogue. Discourse refers to the types of talk that the various stakeholders involved in occupation engage in (e.g., political discourse, media discourse, public discourse)."

The first conference was a phenomenal success. It clearly established a strong foundation for a conversation to be built and sustained over time. My fascination is with the identities (of participants and especially presenters) that will be maintained, changed, created or re-created through the processes and practices of the conference(s) as event.

Li (the dawg*) gave us a whole ten hours to scramble for his farewell party. A curious lot we were, Comps Man, Mystery Man, the President, the Party Pooper (ok ok, maybe it was still international jet lag), and Strange Minor Bridge - CommGrads spanning four cohorts - and a professor (mentor, landlord, friend). A group of multipurpose all around good people; (or, as SMB insisted, people who have no other friends and therefore had no conflict with such last minute planning.)

We exceeded the carefully-specified boundaries (4:20-6:20). Then the moment of goodbye. I felt sad. :-(

Qiao and I went back to the house to bid farewell to the Big Stomach (a.k.a. Chow Hound) and Qun.

We did not beat the six-hour record set one verbose evening back-in-the-day, but I did stay until midnight. Was it me, entertaining the baby? Them, taking care of me? :-) For every and any reason, it was good to linger.

Next stop: Chong Qing.

_____
*Dawg = another meaning for a friend, an acquaintance..."What up Dawg!"

1. n. a title for your friends, see "homie." 2. a guy who goes with all the girls, even if he has a girlfriend. A tramp. "Jimmy's such a dawg! Look at him over there with those hoochies."

With certain inflections (according to Demers): "How dare you!"

Well, they say it's a revival of pre-christian Greek paganism: Zeus makes a comeback in Greece.

Of course I appreciate the ecological focus, and the emphasis on persons not nations. What a dilemma, though, to select and deploy symbols with the intention of invoking a sense of the sacred. Especially in these ironic times when the excesses of the "haves" are dangled so wantonly in the faces of the "have nots".

I hope I'm nominating one or more of my outstanding Communication peers, mentors, colleagues or adversaries (!) for the Prince Asturias Award.

Why not? :-)

One pitcher of beer at the Moan and Dove, coming up!

I can't say I'm sad the Patriots lost to the Colts. The Broncos have always been my team, the other teams that have piqued my interest tend to be newer franchises and random underdogs.

The Colts will get my support in the Super Bowl against the Chicago Bears. Maybe I'll even watch.

Laura hosted our first training on Friday – we’re an eclectic bunch. I wish I could snoop on everyone’s classes, great topics. :-) The most humorous moment was when I was asked, “Who is a Dark Ally?” “Someone who is friends with a person who wants electric sparks to fly out of computer keyboards to keep students in line.” A colleague's (teasing) comment brought to mind the image of the Y2K bug. (Not only an interesting bunch of characters, but a range of pedagogies as well!) :-)

Blackboard is much fancier than it used to be. (I didn’t ask, why does the University say we’re using WebCT but the software itself says Blackboard?) I made a start at designing (“building”) my course and learning about the range of options. I’m excited at the potential of being able to return to what students’ have written in order to examine our own (online) processes of interpersonal communication. Hopefully, by learning to recognize ourselves, students will develop the skills to recognize differences and then – instead of writing the differences off as “misunderstanding” – be able to strategize about repairs, accommodations, and other strategies for communicating, interpersonally, across a range of differences: cultural, socioeconomic class, gender/sexual orientation, etc.

In addition to personalized, technical support, the text, recommended by Associate Dean Dr. Robert Feldman, is useful. Much of it is elementary (crucial for first-timers!). For me, it is a refresher as well as a resource. I’ve gleaned some new ideas from the authors (Susan Ko and Steve Rossen), as well as a ton of intriguing links.

For instance, it’s about time I started playing with constructing my own webpages, perhaps through Composer. The ideas for audio might be dated (Labtec) – podcasting isn’t mentioned. I think Todd’s recommendation of Gcast beats the options in the text. There are streaming options (I already have QuickTime, but not Producer and RealSlideShow), I need to confirm for myself that these are what one needs to use to generate the video that one might upload to, for instance, youtube. I want to check out the animation tools also – another skill that would enhance the video presentations I do on sign language interpreting (so visual!) Not to mention online virtual labs and simulations. hehehe

Watched The Last King of Scotland last night. Strong Minor Bridge thought it was a mild depiction of the horrors Idi Amin wrought on his country in a mere nine years, enough to rank him with Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot as the worst dictators of all time. As a character study, I wondered about the historicity of the role of the Doctor as the foil for showing Amin's volatile and manipulative nature. The character of Dr. Nicholas Garrigan in the film is a fiction, however there was a real "white rat" (as opposed to the "white monkey" Garrigan is labeled in the film), Bob Astles.

While there is no doubt that Forest Whitaker is brilliant as Amin (absolutely creepy), I was intrigued by the portrayal by James McAvoy of a young, naive, and very "white" Dr. Garrigan. What is that element in human character that is so prone to worship, so heedless of cautionary warnings, so bent on idealistic vision that hard evidence fails to convey meaning? How frightening to be pulled so far "in" as to be unable to escape, yet how consequential. The lines concerning racism in the film are compelling: all of them point to the power of "whiteness" as an unconscious (in Garrigan) and deliberative (as experienced through the lens of "blackness" or "Africanness") force.

I've been thinking about assigning this zine to the students in Section 71, starting soon at a university near you.

Written by Christy C. Road, it is much more gritty than the selections in the Text-Wrestler.

One of the students in last fall's class loaned his copy to me. Thanks Dave.

Selected quotes:

"...we could talk about other things. We could talk about our formative heroes selling out, and about cast aside neighborhoods. We could talk about dismay and how its sometimes followed by deliverance" (Nine).

"Death was a difficult concept. I couldn't really talk about it, I could only think twice as hard.......I grew to see my friends and I as young and powerful, but not quite invincible. For once [when I found out Desiree had died], I didn't need invincibility. I realized that as real as our hurt is - fearlessness can be just as real. Invincibility was an attribute we entertained; as radicals, as manic-depressives, as optimists, as romantics, and as young people with whirlwind dispositions and fucked up experiences. But a boundary exists between what's true liveliness and what's unreal. What's tactical thrill and what's naive idealism. I never saw myself teasing or pressing a fingertip towards the edge of that boundary; not then, not ever. 'I'll be an idealist or a pessimist', I thought. Until one day, Desiree taught me about the difference between truly living and just staying alive. While you're truly living, you face danger's coils with spirit. You create emotional weapons and valiant tact. When you're just alive, you choose an unreal outlet to avoid distraction, whether the distraction is too positive or too negative. You wallow in mediocrity and evoke simplicity. Denial makes sense to you" (Fifteen).

I've had a few interesting gigs lately. Each job was for a large "small group" - 20 or more persons but with the expectation of interaction, not just one person giving a presentation. One group had a minority of Deaf persons (roughly 20%) and the other group had equal numbers of Deaf and non-deaf participants. Both groups were composed almost entirely of people who knew sign language - even the non-deaf participants (varying degrees of fluency).

There were two noticeable differences between the two groups. In the former, with the minority of Deaf persons, the dominant language was ASL: interpreters were hired to provide access for the very few non-ASL users - essentially a "one-way" communicative arrangement. In the second group, which was half-and-half, interpreters were needed to provide communicative access both ways - from the visual/gestural to the auditory/spoken and from the spoken/auditory to the gestural/visual.

Several dynamics "flowed" from these distinct demographic and linguistic configurations. Maintaining a steady flow of communication back-and-forth "across" the language difference - the auditory and visual channels - was most challenging in the evenly divided group, however with strong facilitation a surprising amount of equity was established. The ironic part, from my vantage point, is that this group included non-deaf people with little knowledge or personal experience with the Deaf community and/or interpreted situations. "Typical" meetings like this, when non-deaf persons call upon the Deaf community to share information, do not often evolve into such lengthy and detailed discussion.

I say that the success of the half-Deaf/half-non-deaf group is ironic because it included non-deaf members with little to no prior experience. The irony is in contrast with the other group, where almost everyone signed and the participants are all familiar with interpreted situations. This is the second noticeable difference between the two groups. In the uneven group - uneven demographically by Deaf and non-deaf status and also uneven linguistically in that ASL was the dominant language and voicing into English was an event that occurred "on the side" (so to speak) - was the extent to which this experienced group failed to take into account the access needs of the persons requiring interpretation.

I've been observing this dynamic for some time, now. This group is not unique, rather, they are typical of groups who have functioned with interpreters for many years. Somehow, the (old) messages of interpreters to "ignore me", "do your own thing," "don't change anything, we'll take care of it" (and messages to this effect) have become ingrained in practice such that the habit of NOT "paying attention to the interpreter" is so deep as to be outside of awareness.

I've been playing with how to rephrase that kind of advice for non-deaf folks using interpreters for the first time (not to mention trying to find ways to talk about this with members of the Deaf community)....the thing is, it isn't that we interpreters need people to pay attention to us-in-ourselves. What we need people to pay attention to is if the communication is working, by which I mean (and possibly others would disagree): Are relationships being built across the language/culture difference?

I finally registered for Critical Link V, did I already say I get a whole half hour to present on the question of whether or not interpreters are Guardians of Social Justice? The Program looks amazing.

The main task of the presentation will be to summarize a critical discourse analysis of interviews with spoken language interpreters at the European Parliament.

I've heard this phrase twice in three days: in a movie trailer (wish I could recall which one) and about someone's roommate's casual neglect of dirty dishes.

Nice to be reminded. :-)

What would have been Alec's 14th birthday passed a few weeks ago.

According to Diane M. Hoffman (working for the American Institutes for Research, Iranians conceive of an "inner self" and an "outer self" which "does not presuppose any necessary conformity between inside and outside; the two can, and in fact often do, coexist in mutually contradictory fashion, without leading to what many Westerners might experience as an uncomfortable dissonance" (1989, p. 36, Ethos).

The article, "Self and Culture Revisited: Culture Acquisition among Iranians in the United States," piqued my imagination regarding the "culture acquisition" of delegates, staff, and interpreters at the European Parliament (EP). Hoffman describes "a dual learning process, involving, on the one hand, knowledge acquisition - a learning about culture - and, on the other, a 'deeper' sort of learning that involves the internalization of another cultural set of values and meanings. This second form of learning involves the inner self and affects the individual's sense of cultural being; it is identity-impacting" (38-39).

Coming in March to a PBS station near you:

Quoted in full from an email by the Justice for All moderator and passed along...thanks!

PBS Documentary Explores 200 Years of Deaf Life in America

"Through Deaf Eyes," a two-hour PBS documentary exploring nearly
200 years of Deaf life in America, will air early next year. The
film was inspired by the exhibition, "History Through Deaf Eyes,"
curated by Jack R. Gannon of Gallaudet University.

The documentary will air nationally on PBS on Wednesday, March 21
at 9 p.m. ET (check local listings).

The film presents the shared experiences of American history
family life, education, work, and community connections - from the
perspective of deaf citizens. Interviews include community
leaders, historians, and deaf Americans with diverse views on
language use, technology and identity.

Bringing a Deaf cinematic lens to the film are six artistic works
by Deaf media artists and filmmakers: Wayne Betts, Renee Visco,
Tracey Salaway, Kimby Caplan, Arthur Luhn, and Adrean Mangiardi.

Poignant, sometimes humorous, these films draw on the media
artists' own lives and are woven throughout the documentary. But
the core of the film remains the larger story of Deaf life in
America -- a story of conflicts, prejudice and affirmation that
reaches the heart of what it means to be human.

Major funding for "Through Deaf Eyes" is provided by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
PBS, The Annenberg Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Arts. Private individuals have also contributed to the funding of
this project. The extensive outreach campaign is funded in part
by Sign Language Associates. Outreach partners are the National
Association for the Deaf, Gallaudet University, the National
Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of
Technology, and California State University-Northridge. As part
of the outreach campaign, numerous local organizations, some in
association with their public television stations, will mount
events and discussions exploring the issues raised in the film.

A comprehensive Web site, found at http://www.pbs.org,
accompanies the film. The site includes interviews with the deaf
filmmakers whose work is featured in the documentary, while also
inviting viewers to submit their own stories, photographs, and
films. These will become part of the archival collection of
Gallaudet University. A companion book is being published by
Gallaudet University Press.

Source: PBS
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/soundandfury/culture/deafhistory.html

This sentiment haunts The Jacket, a film about consciousness. Although no plausible physical mechanism is provided for time travel, we witness the lead character adapt proactively to the most improbable scenario: discovering himself in a future timespace in which he has already died. Instead of engaging a futile struggle to avoid what has been foreordained, Jack uses the forays into the future to identify, strategize, and act to change elements in his present that influence the unfolding of time for others. The physical fact of his own death cannot be undetermined, but the trajectories of others’ lives might be shifted just enough to lead to (at least potentially) more satisfactory, less painful unfoldings.

“I know the difference between reality and delusion,” Jack asserts. “I’m not delusional, the real events that have happened to me are crazy.” ("Quote" based on memory.)

The craziness of real events is a theme in the other film I saw last week, Children of Men. Although it seems too far-fetched to be believed that all women might become infertile more-or-less simultaneously, that “reality” serves as the backdrop for the dissolution of society in the face of events too dramatic (apparently) to be managed on the human scale. While viewing the movie, which depicts an escalation of immigrant-baiting and an intensifying police state in England, I kept thinking about institutional and interactional fallout from global warming. Given the existing gaps among socioeconomic classes – globally (between countries and regions) as well as internal to national populations – the spread of anomie seems quite likely. Such chaos can conceivably be countered by cumulative acts of individual and collective consciousness such as that demonstrated by Jack as he moves between wearing and not wearing the jacket, back-and-forth in timespace, discovering a way to maintain the continuity of his be-ing.

The combined image of possibility presented by juxtaposing the two movies reminds me of Shemaya, who recently gave me her take on global warming. “It’s dramatic change,” she said, “just like disability. You’re going along, having your life, and suddenly things change drastically.” Dramatic change requires adaptation and issues of survival. I agree with the parallel of the microsocial experience of disability with the macrosocial event of weather-disrupted institutional systems; the distinction of scale seems relevant. The challenges that confront the newly disabled to retain, maintain, and reconstruct a social world fit to live in are magnified by the scale of cooperation required to shift major global societal flows.

Drita tried to curse me the other day when I told her I have been anemic. She knew about the car (new oilpan, loose starter wire - thanks, btw, to my new friend Nicole for trying to jumpstart the sucker at midnight after bowling) - and was wondering about the third breakdown. "Oh no, I'm done! There's also the laptop!" (new hard drive) Relieved that I was on the tail end of drama, Strong Minor Bridge tried to get in a fourth, "Isn't there some relationship stress or something?" Ha! ;-)

Can't find a free weblink tracing the origin of this superstition...but there is A Dictionary of Superstitions for a rainy library day.

Time (change) vs Information (fixed meaningfulness)

I have been witnessing a fascinating discussion in the course on Cultural Codes in Communication which is helping me identify tensions between the transmission and ritual views of communication in interpersonal, communicative action (an element of group dynamics). The events in this class unfolded with the routine assignment of a solid piece of ethnographic research demonstrating one particular way of “culture talking about itself” (Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact 1990 p. 1). (Find review via JSTOR.) The article is about the problem of recognition - how it is that persons are recognized as being of ‘this identity’ or belonging to ‘that group’ ("On Being a Recognizable Indian Among Indians"). Somehow, some students in the course understood that the authors were positioning themselves as authorities in determining, applying, and bestowing “recognition” of membership. If I had been teaching, I would have been tempted to return to a more careful reading of the text to show this is not the case, but to do so would have been to perpetuate a debate of “my” meaning versus “your” meaning (a style in the form of the transmission model) and done nothing to educate the class about the crucial differences between the transmission model and ritual model.

So, instead of returning to the article and finding the quotes that would counter accusations against the credibility of the authors, such as (I can’t resist!):

“Pratt, who collected most of the data, is an actively participating member of the Osage tribe. In becoming a participant observer of matters that he was already participating in, he did little to alter his usual activity, other than taking notes and becoming somewhat more focused in his attention…his questions were questions that he might well have asked as part of his ordinary pursuits” (47).

What are the matters that Pratt was already participating in? “On frequent occasions, the issues of recognition become a matter of discussion and ‘folk analysis.’ That is, Indians discuss the obvious Indianness, or lack of it, of a candidate Indian” (47).

The teacher, instead, invited a guest speaker to criticize the text and then facilitated a discussion among the students themselves, establishing the roles, identities, and practices necessary for an actual dialogue to take place in the classroom. Here, I’m talking about both the change-over-time occurring in any group as people become familiar with each other and the topic/task at hand, and also about the way the group learns to handle conflict and disagreement. Because difference was invited in, welcomed, and respected, a back-and-forth debate within narrow lines was avoided; instead, a broad-ranging investigation of the problem of recognition was actively engaged. [See here for a Hegelian lens, and here for a work by Paul Ricoeur.] The students are handling significant questions with depth and mutual regard.

I am gleaning some hints for my own research framing and problem-posing. I will gather as much “naturally-occurring speech” as I can, but most of my data will be interview-based. I need to learn to “hear” the transmission and ritual views in operation. I had the flash as I began to write this entry that there is a relationship (a metonymy?) between talk conducted within the epistemology of a transmission view of communication and dialectics, and talk conducted within the epistemology of a ritual view of communication and dialogics. It will take my lifetime to investigate potential ways that the transmission view shapes communication-in-the-present differently than the ritual view, and how tensions between these two views (when they are both present) play out in the process of negotiating meaning. They may contest or complement each other . . .

Four spares in the first five frames…makes one wonder! But the real return was Luscious, now married with a shaved head and bit of weight gain: “Blissful!” Lava bowled with the grrls, which seemed to enhance his performance - until Jinglan’s transformation by gender and nationality into Mr. “Bring-it-on!” Linus. I won that game. :-) A firsttime bowler, Jinglan got directions about aiming with the arrows from Marcus…she rolled the lightest, softest, straightest balls. Later in the evening there was some hilarity concerning Marcus’ management of heavy balls . . . I was confused about the joke of pulling fingers (from Children of Men, highly recommended), and Lava had me pulling on his threads . . .

Anuj bowled, according to a pal, “in his customary fashion.” Nicole and I complemented each other, bowling in adjacent lanes, “you got what I missed.” She wondered how I know this group, I explained that after two years I had apparently passed some kind of test. “Or he thought the group was appropriate and worthy of your time.” ahem

Luscious was full of advice for me: “If you’re going to err, err on the left. Bowling right-handed, if you hit the gutter at least you went through the middle!” Not only is marriage blissful, he’s loving fulltime school and proved it by recommending we all ought to read Words That Work. He was intrigued by the NPR interview he heard en route. Other sales pitches were made in search of a daily morning massage.

All-in-all, quite a satisfactory reunion. :-)

As I’m going about formulating a frame for my dissertation research, it becomes clearer that it matters where I draw the line between what will be “in” the project and what must remain “outside” of it. I always knew this, but the difference now, perhaps, is a better sense (?) of what is do-able, particularly in terms of promising an outcome. I don’t mean predicting a particular or specific result, because I do not know, now, the answers to my research problem. I do mean guaranteeing with some assurance that the problem is significant and the results of rigorous examination will be worthwhile and beneficial to the narrow field of language and interpretation studies as well as to (I hope) a broader social science. But I cannot say how the leap from the subfield of interpretation to larger fields will occur. Probably there are several possibilities. I don’t want to foreclose some by too close an interest in others. I cannot see any of them; I only intuit that the connections will become evident.

That penultimate goal must wait. I have been learning a different kind of trust the past few years and I must continue to exercise it. My mind is quick on a few things (sometimes too much so), medium with most, and just plain slow with others. Within my consciousness, a vague sense of understanding floats around definitive knowledge for a long time before it suddenly congeals into sharp coherency. Formulating the kernel of research into the institutionalization of interpretation and language processes has been like this: I've written nearly a dozen papers seeking clarity, all of them “promising” but insufficient. Then, last week, while taking notes of a lecture by my (!) cultural codes instructor, a foundational structure leapt into view. I apprehended what my intuition has been telling me lo-these-past three years.

My interest in epistemology (how we come to know what we know), cognition (more precisely, neuroscience), and perception (haphazardly categorized as “phenomenology”) suggests to me that understanding the productive effects of discourses might influence particular, relational communication choices. I’m going to have to wean myself away from the popular science literature elucidating what specializations have come to accept as knowledge. I resist, for just awhile longer. For now I relish the odd sensation of perceiving new synapses making new connections. There have been several specific time periods throughout doctoral coursework when I’ve experienced understanding snapping into view – ”Aha! – in a cascading sequence of minor revelations. ”No wonder,” I sometimes think, “some of my colleagues think I’m such a dweeb!” :-)

I wrote a while back about thin-slicing. I have nearly finished Gladwell’s book on rapid cognition. He spends a chapter discussing the face, linking the ability to discern emotional expression as akin to mind-reading: in his words, “the physiological basis of how we thin-slice other people” (213). Face recognition and object recognition are usually handled by two different parts of the brain, respectively the fusiform gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus (219), but more interesting to me are two things: the interplay between voluntary and involuntary facial muscle responses, and the evidence that simply making certain facial expressions generates corresponding physiological states.

All of us can control our expressions to varying degrees, but people exert this control only after our faces have involuntarily displayed our emotional reaction. He describes several examples, including a slow-motion microexpressions of Kato Kaelin looking like “a snarling dog” during the O.J. Simpson trial (211), the smirking double-agent, Harold “Kim” Philby (211-212), “I’m a bad guy” Bill Clinton (205-206), and a psychiatric patient, Mary (208-209), citing research from Paul Ekman, Silvan Tomkins, Wallace Friesen, and Robert Levenson (singly and in various combinations). “We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses. But, often, some little part of that suppressed emotion – such as the sense that I’m really unhappy even if I deny it – leaks out…Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. Bur our involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings” (210).

The above is based on a summary of research findings that there is a finite number of meaningful expressions and most, if not all, of these are intelligible – as in understood to express similar emotions – across cultures. These findings are gathered in a tool created by Ekman and Frisen called the Facial Action Coding System, now used by computer animators and applied in various kinds of psychological and social research (204-205).

The second point, more fascinating than the first (categorizing is cool, but inducing change is cooler), involves a claim by Ekman “that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind” (206, emphasis in original). They tested this claim rather ingeniously. Through some casual experimentation they discovered they could induce the physiological indicators of distress and anger: “As I do it [move specific facial muscles into particular facial expressions],” said Ekman, “I can’t disconnect from the [autonomic nervous] system. It’s very unpleasant, very unpleasant” (207). Two different teams of researchers documented that the pathway of internal emotion stimulus and facial emotional expression works both ways. “These findings may be hard to believe, because we take it as given that first we experience an emotion, and then we may – or may not – express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process” (208, emphasis in original).

Claims made by Gladwell are contested by Posner.

Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame) interviewed the late President Gerald Ford back in 2004. I remember Ford for pardoning Nixon, an act which incensed my father. My introduction to politics was seeing the movie, All the President's Men, when I was thirteen. I don't think I had seen too many movies yet, as I recall feeling quite grown up on the way to the theatre. :-)

Ah, did you know that the identity of "Deep Throat" was made public last May? FBI agent W. Mark Felt. Slate argues that there's a movie, Dick, that got the Watergate story more "right" by depicting the "essential banality" of Felt's association with Woodward.

Returning to Ford, it is interesting that he says he would not have gone to war with Iraq, and also that he criticizes his own former staffers, Rumsfeld and Cheney. I'm most intrigued, however, by his admission of "an act of cowardice" in dropping Nelson A. Rockefeller as his Vice-Presidential running mate in his 1976 re-election campaign.

What is the difference between politics and counterintelligence?

Politics (2 selections): "social relations involving authority or power" (PrincetonWordnet) and/or "Politics is the process and method of making decisions for groups. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions including corporate, academic, and religious" (wikipedia).

Counterintelligence (one selection): "intelligence activities concerned with identifying and counteracting the threat to security posed by hostile intelligence organizations or by individuals engaged in espionage or sabotage or subversion or terrorism" (answers.com).

My correlation? Counterintelligence is the work of political figures to ensure the security of their own power.

This short video (sent by Steve, thanks) details some of the facts of Saddam Hussein's official association with the US federal government as a CIA operative.

I view it for the first time having recently seen The Good Shepherd, a movie about the origins of the Central Intelligence Agency that is as depressing as one can imagine. Forget honor and all noble callings. The ethic instilled and operationalized is simple: trust no one. Ever. Those who aren't malicious or playing both sides of the game (not enough adrenalin just playing for one?) will also let you down through naivete or sheer stubbornness.

Octavia Butler wrote in the Xenogenesis series that humanity's Achilles heel is the need for hierarchy. Her science fiction saga takes seriously the notion that aliens could defeat us - not militarily (moot) but socially. I wonder if a concurrent need for intrigue hastens the spiral of violence that our governments cannot find the will to break.

The FPA at UMass still has last fall's deadlines, but it gives me a target.

Step 1: contact Prof. Amanda Seaman.

This one does seem like me, eh?

Nine full grants "are available to U.S. graduate students for study on topics related to the European Union. Grants are tenable in any of the Member States of the EU. Awards are offered to graduate students and advanced doctoral candidates with clearly-defined projects that require the student’s presence at EU institutions in any of the Member States of the EU or at academic institutions within the EU specializing in EU affairs. Preference will be given to projects tenable in two Member States of the EU."

I'm observing a colleague teaching Cultural Codes of Communication. Homework for the first night included reading James Carey (foundational) and a series of questions, including what might be of interest for students to explore in this course. I've already snatched a quote from the Carey article for teaching this spring (!), and my brain is in high gear concerning my prospectus. Wow. Did I intuit that observing this class would provide some structure and motivation?! :-)

I've also got the blog on my mind. As a mechanism for transmission - it (I) seek to disseminate information, but not really. I've always hoped it would be more dialogic than monologic. It is true that through the blog, I organize certain symbols in a more-or-less personal attempt to impose order on my experiences. Blogging has become - for me - a ritual that positions me to/with the world in a certain way. I've noted several times over the past year or so that a function of writing publicly as I do is to write myself into being. By projecting a certain performance of self, of identity, into the public sphere (invoking accountability among other things), the effect doubles back, enabling me to better live up to the ideals I espouse.

It isn't as simple as that, though. The words I write, the symbols I use, become me - rather, I become the sign of the words (see p. 12, referencing Burke). Carey says, "We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced" (p. 16).

Finally, I better understand some of the unease about my blogging "real life" (as perceived, experienced, and interpreted by me), because my writing establishes a context which also positions those whom I mention in particular roles or even identities. It may be a matter of establishing a "history of order" on a minute, microsocial scale. For years, colleagues and I have debated the way my blogging "endow[s] significance, order, and meaning in the world by the agency of [my] own intellectual processes" (Carey, 13). We (or at least I) was confused with the positioning of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. into roles relative to "the blog": of being readers, nonreaders, commenters, noncommenters, advocates, and/or adversaries. That was a limited view.

I keep recalling a friend who said, "If I don't read it, it's not there."

I am thinking, at this moment, that much of this kind of framing is with the transmission model of communication uppermost in mind. Surely I am taken with the ability to transmit my words across spacetime. Maybe the tension could be better explained through an overlay of the ritual lens? The transmission model is premised upon control as the goal of communication: control over distance and control over people. I resist the accusation of power-mongering, but ritually....what sharedness is at risk?

The review by Steven Shaviro intrigues me.

...but it is happening somewhere. Look carefully at the poster.

What is "it"?

To see more images, go to http://www.walker.ag, pick your language, then "work", then Amnesty International. There are posters in China, Iraq, Liberia, Myanmar, and Sudan.

Shared via email from David, thanks.

Gosh - those eastern Europeans are just getting in everywhere!

Romania and Bulgaria celebrate EU membership

This adds a new wrinkle to potential research I might get to do there . . . again . . . someday . . . perhaps . . . one hopes! I'll raise my glass, and also hope language is one of the factors that keeps uniformity at bay.

My friend Tumbleweed shares her New Year's Eve story with a quote from Sherman Alexie about the impermanance of electricity. The juxtaposition struck me, as I watched An Inconvenient Truth on New Year's Day. Not only does electricity masquerade as stable lightening, the physical basis of life on earth may be projecting its own impermanence.

I've wondered before about stubborn insistence of people (often enough, including myself) to retain social roles and traditions even in the face of persistent and evident harm. It does take time to break socialized habits, and judgment about which to break, where, at what times (when) and with/against whom requires a good ol' long time to acquire. At least so it has been for me (and I'm not claiming to be an expert, although I'll bet my trial-and-error list beats most).

The future is built both on what we deliberately imbue with meaning and on that which we refuse to address.

I'm stealing Julia's wish for the New Year, reminding me of the sentiment:

2007, here we come!