A Place in Space: November 2006 Archives

"How do you start a conversation?" Steve asked as we settled down to lunch in the Ugly Hookah Cafe. I had been torn over which group to join - the friends I'd met the night before (who I had just dubbed "peaceniks") or these men who had clustered around the military officer who had just presented at the Dialogue under Occupation conference. "It's always random, isn't it?" I asked. "I like that, the theory of random," said Kalawai'a. Steve continued, "one just needs a pretext."

These graduate students in political science from the University of Hawai'i seduced me. I did not resist. They let me sit at the head of the table! Kuhio supplied notebook paper for me to take blog notes, declaiming, "If I'm going to be quoted, I want to be sure to speak sentences that don't make sense." The conversation included a preview of Keanu's presentation about the Hawaiian Kingdom (there's nothing like rubbing shoulders with a celebrity's cousin), some discussion of the morning's keynote by Tove as well as her question challenging the motivations of the military in taking on social agency roles that seek to mitigate some brutalities of occupation, and otherwise getting to know each other - primarily through humor. :-)

While munching, scribbling, and laughing, I compared the vibe with that of my dinner companions the previous evening. I can hardly describe my excitement when it dawned upon me that Robert was the Phillipson whose work on language policy in Europe was part of my grant proposal for preliminary dissertation research on "Multilingual Democracy: Community Interpreting and Transnational Citizenship." I could hardly contain my sense of good fortune when he expressed curiousity in my research and invited me to join the dinner party. I didn't meant to embarass Tove with my comment about hanging out with famous people, "I'm no good with that talk," she murmured, but come on! Her work has been embraced by linguistic rights activists within the Deaf community for years. Shelley whipped out the flyer for her new book, Dialogic approaches to TESOL: Where the Ginkgo Tree Grows, as I tried to place the familiarity of her name, then Ruth walked up to join us too. [Available for download, an article on "The European Union in Cyber-Space: Multilingual Democratic Participation in a virtual public sphere?"] I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. :-)

Once Larry remembered where he'd parked the car (!) and after a tightly-packed (cozy) ride, we enjoyed an outstanding Mexican meal including my first glass of horchata. Conversation ranged from defending multilingualism, through international politics (pleasure at US election results and glee over Rumsfeld's resignation, the end of Merkel's honeymoon, Putin's scariness, the recent murder of a journalist covering human rights violations), and some ins/outs of getting published. Shelley and Ruth shared notes about becoming radicalized via the student movements of the 60s, while Tove informed us that the food composing an average American dinner table has traveled 1500 miles. Laughter, comraderie, and passion characterized the conversation. (Where is that photo Robert described as "suitably compromising"?)

The last conference where I enjoyed myself this much was in Aalborg, Denmark over a year ago (August 2005): Discourse Nexus 3.0. It is not a surprise that critical discourse analysis is the common theme; those who practice it are undoubtedly 'my kind of people.'

This morning I am feeling grateful for these folk and our shared experiences. You've taught me much and shown me hope: a happy combination.

Background music: Ben Lee, "Begin"

The One We’ve Got by His Balls accused us of a) not knowing what power is, b) not knowing that we don’t know, and c) certainly not being able to trace its definitions.

“Are you going to blog this class?” I said no. I lied. Sortof. I meant "no" at the time. Things change, although I am still not going to blog “the class.” I’m gonna blog me in the class. Hot damn it feels good to be able to measure my own progress in de-piousification! (Yeah yeah, it’s been a long time coming. FYI – it’s not about you!) I’m still as self-righteously intent on reproduction as I’ve ever been, however I am much clearer that I’m interested in the cultivation of skills rather than duplication of choices.

Durkheim on power: the result of multiple actors behaving consensually. Social justice language, which typically frames (all) interaction in the dichomotous terms of oppression based upon social identities, understands this power in terms of collusion. My own frame of group relations broadens the basis of collusion from stereotypes of identity to include the huge range of roles (socialized, resistive, psychological, interactional) that persons take up in groups. I'm in mind of those who argue that WAR (conflict) is the most sophisticated form of social cooperation.

The tricky art of critical discourse analysis offers a means by which to trace the patterns of cooperation/collusion in conflictual social interaction. Durkheim's distinctions among force, authority, rule, and control add a framework for making sense of particular junctures in a group's discourse when the moves of cooperation/collusion can be brought into view.

Force: going along with the general will rather than one's personal/selfish will. "Durkheim, following distinctions made earlier by John Stuart Mill, used the idea of forced versus natural division of labour to illustrate an aspect of social power. The hierarchy of society is natural if individuals tend towards occupying the positions that they are best suited to. It is forced if there are barriers to people entering positions other than their abilities." (Hierarchical power)

Authority: "the right to enforce obediance." Authority is legitimized by law.

Rule: the functional harmonization of law and morality in society. Robert Merton says, "Functions are those observed consequences which make for the adaptation or adjustment of a given system, and dysfunctions, those observed consequences which lessen the adaptation or adjustment of the system. There is also the empirical possibility of nonfunctional consequences, which are simply irrelevant to the system under consideration."

Control (gleaned from the wikipedia site on Durkheim): how social order is maintained (based upon Durkheim's 1893 work The Division of Labor in Society). Control theory has grown from Durkheim's study, Suicide, published in 1897. Control theory brings to mind Tuckman's stages of group development.

Tove wasted no time sending me a link to a newsletter with several articles about linguistic rights and a pdf with info about submersion - a subtractive educational methodology that has been studied extensively in regard to indigenous and minority students. Without doing more than a quick skim right now, the first thing that strikes me are questions about the definition and categorization of "indigenous" and "minority".

Meanwhile, after reading about linguistic imperialism, Amanda sent a link to a blogpost on Sinhala Sign Language, used by the Deaf community in Sri Lanka. "Sinhala Sign Language (SSL) does not differentiate among “who?” “what?” and “how?” The sign for all three is simply shaking your fist."* A lively discussion ensues after this concerning the ethics of introducing foreign signs to accomplish the functions these lexical items serve in English and American Sign Language (among others).

I suppose this is a smaller scale example of the Karnataka decision on English instruction in Kashmiri schools? Or perhaps it is an example of a different order - pidgenizing a language is a different change strategy than blatant replacement. The Karnataka decision is also opposed; obviously the question of mother tongue or English instruction is volatile. The debate has been going on for a while. A "map" of the language policy terrain was provided in 2002.

I'll need to do more reading and thinking before I can wade further into this, but it is striking to me how politicized language is in this Indian state. I know that language is complicated throughout India (largest number of official languages of any country, right?) Why is the language contest so overt in this instance? What other factors have conspired to bring mother tongue, Kannada, and English into the academic and political limelight?

(FYI: A "fist" of one kind or another has shown up in three contexts within the last four days.)

I made many quick decisions based on brief encounters during this conference - about people's character, ambitions, and intentions. Reciprocally, many of the people I met made similar judgments about me, particularly in regard to "being blogged." This was "thin-slicing" in action.

One of the examples used by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink, on the ways our unconscious makes rapid decisions based upon accumulated experience is the fist produced by Morse Code telegraph operators. '''Fist'' refers to the individual style in which a ham operator transmits Morse code.' Gladwell relies on mathematical modeling from John M Gottman ("The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models"), who describes two
possible states in a relationship: positive emotion override or negative emotion override.

I haven't come across anything yet that addresses cultural constructions of emotion, and marital relationships are obviously not the same as those between friends, colleagues, or acquaintances. I do wonder, however, at the extendability of the basic dichotomy (and hierarchy) Gottman poses of five "positive" to one "negative" emotions for a successful relationship.

There was a great deal of affection evident among various groupings of people at the Dialogue under Occupation conference, and a few serious splits. Some people's "fists" became evident as the conference unfolded into the second, third, and fourth day. I'm extending the metaphor of the Morse Code fist to refer to ways I witnessed certain emotional reactions when ideas were questioned, disagreed with, or challenged. In other words, how did scholar/activists manage conflictual discourse among ourselves? What kind of dialogue was enacted under the terms of our own 'occupations'?

I am wondering if the splits I observed can be mediated by choosing discursive strategies indicative of positive emotion override. I don't mean bullshit hypocrisy (which I did not witness), but rather a 'positive' valuing of discursive engagement with those who hold counter-view, perspectives, and experiences than our own. The 'emotion' triggered by these differences might be 'negative' on its surface (or even its depth), e.g., anger, pain, perhaps even threat or fear (which I did not sense personally directed but seemed omnipresent in a vague way). Can a 'positive' overlay transform initial gut 'negative' reactions? Is there value in examining those 'blink' moments of unconscious thin-slicing?

Can we develop a discourse of critical engagement premised upon interrogating our own accumulated experiences? I propose that by doing so we can collaboratively tease out some of those instant thin-sliced convictions based on environmental conditioning and move more productively into a joint ethics that can be more effective in promoting the large-scale institutional changes many of us hope to effect.

(That is a mouthful!)

[Tangent: Pavements as Embodiments of Meaning for a Fractal Mind]

“How do you foresee the transition?”

A U.S. military commander asked this question after watching Keanu Sai’s presentation on the occupation of Hawai’i: “American Occupation of the Hawaiian State: A Century Unchecked.” I was moved to laughter throughout these three presentations today and the talk and video last night.

The evidence is irrefutable and the argument elegant. The process, however, is going to take some time, as Hawaiian Nationals negotiate “the paradox of being tied to [their] own identity.” Kalawai’a Moore (“The Discursive Struggle over Hawaiian Identity and Subjectivity “) detailed the discursive collision of subjectivities shaped under terms of “colonization” with the emerging knowledge that colonization was a deception to cover up illegal occupation. Kalawai’a revels in the postmodern irony of using state theory and the status of Hawaiian Nationals to break out of an Oppressive-Resistance relationship. :-) He invoked Lyotard’s concept of the differend as “a case of conflict between at least two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments" (Lyotard, 1988:xi).” In the Hawaiian case the referents have been broken: “the referent evoked is now the system by which states measure their own legitimate existence and validate personality under International Law.”

While Kuhio Vogeler compared the prolonged occupation of Hawai’i with that of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (“Prolonged Occupations: Hawai’i and the Baltic States”), I was reminded of Farida Vis’ presentation yesterday (“Resisting Occupation: The Palestinian Suicide Bomber and the Western Print Media”). Kuhio was speaking of path dependency (the tendency for initial policy choices to persist: policy/practices can change with much political pressure), and Farida emphasized how the Israeli media machine is always first out with stories concerning events in the Middle East, necessarily framing any response that comes next as a reaction “to” or “against” the version already disseminated. Kuhio’s discussion of path dependency and critical junctures (after the fact, one can argue there must have been sufficient force to produce movement away from equilibrium/inertia because a change did occur) also had me thinking about this conference as a discourse event. I’ve been doing that already – although somehow I do find myself realizing these things after the trajectory is set in motion.

I told Tove at the start of today’s lunchbreak that I’m a troublemaker, she assured me that meant she would like me. :-) But, I qualified, “I make trouble in all directions.” Tove’s urgency to make change effective now is vitalizing: I am inspired by her clarity of vision. Children and their parents should be informed about the long-term effects of mother tongue medium instruction, which is more effective at ensuring fluent acquisition of English than early educational exposure to English. This is a slightly different issue than Rakesh Bhatt’s insistence that learning English early will not have an adverse effect on mother tongue fluency and linguistic persistence (“Colonial Dis-course, Alter-native Ideologies, and the Politics of Linguistic Nostalgia”). I was pained, listening to Tove and Rakesh’s debate, because I sensed more areas of agreement than disagreement. It seemed to me that Rakesh “heard” Tove saying Kashmiri children should be denied English, which is far from her point. She and Robert were both arguing for the best possible conditions for teaching English to them (and anyone).

Socioeconomic class definitely is at play within the (microsocial) debate and the (macrosocial) realities. Those without material and tangible resources want and need hope and skills now: a little is immeasurably better than nothing. Rakesh wants to respond to that need now, and – really! – so do Tove and Robert. There is a definite difference between the careful construction of language policy and local solutions to immediate needs. Perhaps, however, the two approaches do not need to be mutually exclusive?

I watched with dismay as the “peaceniks” broke off into a huddle after Fred Odisho’s presentation on “Discourse During Insurgency/Counterinsurgency: The Importance of Achieving Communication Superiority in Gaining the Support of the People.” In the front of the room was another huddle – all men, most of them big – talking with this Iraqi military officer. I joined the huddle up front. “You’ve got guts,” I said to Fred, “an army man coming to talk in a nest of peaceniks.” He gave me a wink, “Someone’s got to do it,” he said, “otherwise people only get what CNN gives them.”

I’m not convinced that the academics gathered here only get their news from CNN, but it was obvious to me that here was a split in the conference body. Ruth opened the questioning of Fred, his father Edward (“The Iraqi War: A Typical Example of Cultural and Linguistic Dis-course”), and Russell Zanca (audio report May 17) (“Losing Hearts and Minds in Iraq? Cultural Competence and War”) wondering how it is that people who are otherwise so smart could have made the mistakes detailed in this panel. Tove continued: ” are we as researchers, in some way supporting the occupiers to become “nice occupiers” through training in intercultural communication?”

I took her question seriously. I share her frustration. Every time I hear someone mention Iraqis killed because they didn’t understand English and thus couldn’t follow directions, I am reminded of similar tragic incidents with police and people who are deaf. One can’t “stop” or “raise your hands slowly” if you don’t hear the words. Tove invited me to join the gang for lunch...I hesitated over whom to join because I had already been engaged in banter with the Hawaiians. These were the guys I’d observed in “hypermasculine homoeroticism” with the Iraqis. NO! Not really, but it is a good line, isn’t it? :-) (Not my line, alas, hence the quotation marks.) I told Ruth I was going "to infiltrate the enemy."

The blatant gender division (five-on-five) was disrupted only by (husband) Robert in the peacenik huddle and the comment by a woman in the audience who had noted that the military might explicitly want not to promote intercultural understanding because such capability humanizes the enemy, making them harder to kill. In this regard, she suggested that intercultural training conducted by/for the military is actually quite subversive. Is this as simple as men vs women? I don’t think so, but gender is difficult to dismiss completely. Tove’s morning keynote addressed “Kurds in Turkey and in (Iraqi) Kurdistan – Comparison of Educational Linguistic Human Rights in Two Situations of Occupation.”

Perhaps it is not surprising that a champion of the Kurds might be drawn into conflict with champions of the Iraqis? The Hawai’ians, meanwhile, made identifications with the Iraqis on terms of literal occupation while recognizing the “legal brief” being constructed by Tove to present a case for the violation of Kurdish linguistic human rights. These political scientists, Kuhio, Keanu, Kalawai’a, and Stephen (I think he’s honorary, and an actual lawyer, of some kind, not above bribery), kept my pen flying as they discussed international law’s definitions of insurgency, occupation, sovereignty, genocide, and human rights.

I'm not satisfied with the presentation; it was too shallow. The one question I received basically asked, What’s the point? Specifically (paraphrased), “what is the connection between the media artifacts analyzed by your multinational, multilingual team and the reflexive summary of group process?” I had thought (albeit vaguely) that I was enacting “polycentricity” by folding two presentations (two "centers") into one, tacking back and forth between both. The question confirmed my ‘read’ of the energy in the room. The 'depth' of meaningfulness I perceived while brainstorming with my colleagues and constructing the powerpoint slides was not translated into full potential by my delivery.

Dang.

This situation is an example of me doing my best to ‘fly by the seat of my pants’, with less than optimal results. However the experience itself is doublesided (at least). On the one hand, I’m embarrassed to have let down my colleagues by not appearing at my best on our behalf. :-( On the other hand, I’ve stretched myself into an extended zone of being, reaching for something I cannot quite yet grasp. In this act of seeking, I understood better what it was I attempted to do. I actively resisted the monocentric desire of theoretical academic discourse by refusing to provide only a definitive description of an abstract ‘external’ object (the interaction that we constructed among four accounts of the Israeli military’s forcible removal of settlers from Neve Dekalim, a town in the Gaza Strip surrendered in August 2005 to Palestine). To the extent that I did provide selected details of our media analysis, I enacted polycentricity by ‘bouncing’ among the layered and diverse “centers” evident in the intersection of
a) a sociopolitical event,
b) media texts (four) about this event,
c) subjectivities (four) engaging in mutual knowledge construction about the event and its associated media,
d) within a particular epistemology (critical discourse analysis),
e) comparing and contrasting written text in four languages,
f) combining online textual interaction (online versions of the four newspaper articles, a socialtext webspace, email, skype)
g) with face-to-face verbal interaction using a lingua franca (English).

In other words, (and this came clear to me while listening/watching Simon Faulkner present “Re-viewing Occupation: Art, Photojournalism and Israel”), I attempted to perform a work of discursive art within (under) the occupation of the form of academic discourse - “conference paper presentation” - whose “proper” focus is theory, not practice; abstract analysis not application.

Ironically, I had intuited the (potential) performance quality of this presentation last week. I had not, however, clarified its purpose. Or, even more precisely, even as I articulated certain purposes – negotiating parameters with my colleagues, confirming understandings, and coordinating intentions – I still did not comprehend the meaning of what we set out to do.

Taking the best possible interpretation of outcome, I wonder if a learning might be that the enactment of polycentricity is a state-of-being of just this kind of uncertainty? What I found myself doing throughout this presentation (and the entire process with my colleagues) is continually turning Bakhtin’s notions of centrifugality against centripetality and centripetality against centrifugality in counter-movements to those expected from sheer momentum (tradition, expectation, dialectics). If I can become more conscious and deliberate regarding when to flag this for audiences and interlocutors, and when to let such turnings be what they are, perhaps I can enhance the performance of this art in everyday dialogue. Ultimately (!), such practices may lead to more theoretical clarity, bringing “the point” of Decentering Conflictual Discourse into focus.

Proposal:

Utilizing critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the discourse of transaction in headline stories in four different languages – Finnish, Swedish, Persian (Iran) and US English – regarding the 2005 Israeli pullout from Neve Dekalim in which Jewish settlers resisted relocation. A textual analysis yields themes (indexes and icons) that are intertextual.

Intertextuality, as conceptualized by Fairclough and Foucault, refers to the way that statements always reactualize other statements. Each newspaper account generates its centering effect (Threadgold) in both horizontal and vertical ways (Bahktin) along the dimensions of time, space, place, and motion. For instance, aggression is attributed to different actors and along opposing trajectories in the Persian text than among the three western versions – which also have some significant distinctions from each other. The stories reported in these four online newspapers thus work interdiscursively to replicate and perpetuate a global, monocentric discourse of perpetual conflict. According to Irvine, interdiscursivity is “a specific semiotic effect [that] must be created in practice” (2005, p. 72). Most interesting, the examination of these media accounts reproduced similar interlinguistic dynamics among the four researchers, whose national identities align with the languages and newspapers chosen.

Such social metonymy highlights the challenge of decentering dominant discourses: the same referents can be treated differently in various national and/or media discourses yet still work to generate an overarching monocentric discourse. We argue that simultaneous attention to the workings of ideology at all levels - including our microsocial interactions with each other - enables the recognition of polycentricity and the interruption of interdiscursively monocentric repetitions. Such analyses and the linguistic options they support can contribute to the decentering of present discursive hegemonies of conflict and occupation.

I'll (attempt ! to) present on behalf of Ehya, Jussi, and Karin, of Dexus Nexus 3.0 (August 2005), on Wednesday Nov 8 at 3 pm in the "transaction" thread of Dialogue Under Occupation: The Discourse of Enactment, Transaction, Reaction, and Resolution, hosted by Northeastern Illinois University.