A Place in Space: December 2006 Archives

I've either witnessed or participated in a few intriguing discussions about light in recent days.

Dr. Demetria Shabazz analyzes the built-in ideology of television technology that, as one example, uses fleshtone as the standard for establishing the light spectrum while filming. The producers don't start from any fleshtone, however. Instead, the industry has chosen those in the orange/red zone, not yellow or brown, hence producing an aesthetic of identity, or - an aesthetic representation that produces certain kinds of identification. Dr. Shabazz illustrates this point with an analysis of the 1968 television series, Julia, which presents an ambivalent character through the presentation of Diahann Carroll, who is literally "white-washed" through the lighting (as well as through the discourses surrounding her performance). Diahann Carroll broke ground, cracking open television for subsequent shows such as Cosby. (I kept thinking about Nichelle Nichols' role in Star Trek, a few years previous, as a groundbreaker for Carroll.)

I wanted to follow up more on the notion of polysemy - hoping to take it further than how audiences take (and make) different meanings about Julia/Diahann Carroll (or is it how they make meanings about Diahann Carroll/Julia?!) because (as an effect of the cause of how she is represented) to the situatedness of audience members (viewers) as a factor in the construction of meaningfulness (in this case concerning race and gender, obviously, and probably also heterosexuality - and class, etc., the list goes on!)

It isn't only what one is looking at (and how the object of sight is presented) but also where one is looking from that contributes to the construction of meaning.

Case in point, some of the students from the class I just taught, College Writing, have gotten excited enough to generate their own anonymous discussion forum (we'll see how long it lasts!) focused on writing. The primary designer and I have been discussing the color scheme (the look), because I want to be sure the site is as accessible as possible to people with vision impairments. He tried to convince me that his first choice of orange text on a black background is less straining to the eyes over time because these colors are in the lowest wavelength of visible light. (Black text on a white background is among the most visually-straining because of the high contrast - I guess I'm just used to this form of strain: if I gave myself more time the orange/black would become "normal," too.)

Then, there's all the info about light that I learned interpreting a Botany class: not just photosynthesis, either....the tickle of something else won't cohere right now. Darn. See how meaning slips? It isn't just the fact or the exposure to the fact, it is the retention, repetition, and use to which 'the fact' is put. The biochemistry of light first became real to me during a conversation with a stranger on a flight to an American Sign Language Teacher's Association conference. Steve is an organic chemist who works with the effects of light on carbon molecules.

It seems to me that light works in a parallel fashion as language. (Ah, the botany lessons return - about the relationship between the colors we see as the frequencies of light not absorbed by particular pigments in the leaves. Maybe I'm all confused (certainly wouldn't be the first time!), but isn't this how language works? We absorb certain elements of what is said (those "sound frequences" that we "hear" - and process! or, in the case of the Deaf, that which penetrates vision and captures attention), missing additional elements whose absence figures in to the meaning which is acted upon . . .hmmm, yes, as I "write out loud" - it isn't even so much that meaning is made (as in fixed in some kind of stability) but that meaning is assumed as a basis for further action. The assumptions can sometimes be identified retroactively through reductive (reflexive) processes and then (!) meaning becomes more fixed and/or more rigidly contested (for purposes of fixing). The fluidity of meaning-making is vanished as competing discourses seek to impose their sense upon whatever-has-happened.

Posts regarding the conference this past November (2006), in chronological order (most recent last). I still have some notes I've been planning to write up and add to the archive. (We'll see if/when I get around to it...perhaps soonish?)

February 22: Dialogue under Occupation (DUO)

November 4: Decentering Conflictual Discourse (DUO)

November 9: Polycentricity (DUO)

November 9: Turning disagreement to dialogue (DUO)

November 10: Independent Nation of Hawai'i (DUO)

November 12: Thin-Slicing (DUO)

November 13: Language (DUO)

November 29: "Begin" (DUO)

December 15: "Shovrim Shtika" (DUO)

"Unlike many other habitants of the earth
we chose not to be born, live and die in the same town
and hang out with the same people
from birth to death,

so sooner or later we will move on and
who knows where we will be next.
We will be spread around in several continents,
hanging out with totally new people."
Dr. Zeynep Delen

"Fidelity is a notion, that at its most abstract level implies a truthful connection to a source. Its original meaning dealt with loyalty and attentiveness to one's duty to a lord or a king, in a broader sense than the related concept of fealty."

The movie, High Fidelity, details one man's existential process of developing "the quality of being faithful" in his life and relationships, playing on the metaphor of musical "accuracy with which an electronic system reproduces the sound or image of its input signal."

While the birthday boy of honor declaimed, "This movie is not autobiographical!", there were occasional resonances felt by at least some of the invited guests. ahem The movie capped an elegant evening of surprise, spirits, fancy dress, festive chatter, and a live woodwind duet.

As proclaimed by the primary event organizer, Dr. Zeynep Delen:

This conference on pedagogy next April is definitely a place I wish I could be, but instead I'll be in Australia at Critical Link 5: Quality in Interpreting: A Shared Responsibility. I suppose I should not complain? :-/ (But when they finally get transporter technology, Beam Me Over Scottie!)

I submitted two proposals, they accepted one called "Interpreters: Guardians of Social Justice?" Meanwhile, the selected papers from Critical Link IV (held in Stockholm, 2004) are actually being printed (finally!) I don't know where my piece is placed in the dang thing, but it is my first attempt at the kind of combination of theory-generating research and practical intervention that I hope might become "my thing." :-)

The dirt path beckons. I infer comrades in search and pursuit of the potentials of slippage.

Institutional wieldings of strategy threaten everyday tactics. “There’s no moral high ground” among those exercising tactics. “Who’s got the will?” to perform “on stage”?

I don’t want to compete against the tactics of my friends. As in all good fantasy, I throw myself into what it seems I am called to do, trusting others (who I may and may not know) are as fully engaged in their own diverse callings. I want to influence change in directions I cannot predict. I want to live in Phelan’s zone of doubt, where I know that my relationships with others matter – that I matter. Ouch. There’s the rub, eh? A psychological crux playing itself out in sociorelational terms: the embedded trajectory of what-has-been-inscribed dueling with the conscious striving-to-act-beyond the imposed boundaries of experience and discourse.

(Maybe I really am psychotic.)

Breaking the Silence: Fighters tell about Hebron" is an effort by former Israeli soldiers to describe the dehumanization they experienced through mandatory military service in Gaza, Hebron, Bethlehem and other places, where they manned checkpoints, participated in patrols, and otherwise took part in the war.

(Paraphrased from Yehuda Shaul and Dotan Greenvald in the conference program booklet, Dialogue Under Occupation: The Discourse of Enactment, Transaction, Reaction, and Resolution, 2006, p. 9)

We graduated from wine to tequila. Attempts to generate shame (who did the reading?) have risen to new lows. The double bite of ideology iterates us in the ass, interpellating proper academic subjectivities.

I perceive an intersection of horizontal timespace trajectories coalescing in repetitive (synchronic) vertical time. Early debate about electoral strategy is one discursive template: boundaries were drawn between those advocating the old form and those promoting a new one. Do ‘we’ promote and support a straight white man for the next president or do we risk the challenges of ‘selling’ a new (different) body? Does the body matter so much more than the words? Are any/all words ineffective if uttered from an other? Since the midterm elections, silence. The urgency has passed. Advocates for the old form were wrong, the most narrowly conservative candidates did not win anywhere. Promoters of the new form have not pressed the advantage.

Then, a storm: do we understand power? Who has it; who doesn’t? Why? More significantly, how are our respective powers used, to what ends and effects? The old form reasserts itself. Now bodies do not matter, only words. Threats and intimations of accusation ricochet from mouths alternatively iterated by gender(ed) performances, an undercurrent of national cultures is left unspoken, the hierarchy of US-based race and ethnic dis/privilege invoked. But it is all (so we are told) a tangent: bodies do not matter this much, only our facility with rhetoric.

We revisit our norms. It seems we must choose: either we continue the debate or we return to the standard academic form. It seemed the old form won? Compelling personal testimony (via email, "Re: Start reading!" 19 November 2006, emphasis added) delineated the parameters:

”This idea of "the job market" makes me want to pee myself… thinking about how I wasted valuable time in this PPC class telling stories about myself--attempting to convince others I'm witty, or sensitive, or intelligent--not to mention trying to evade my advisor's Flying Love Pumas and other unspeakable Bakhtinian acts of defilement, instead of directly engaging the readings. My feelings after class are too often akin to the end of "The Graduate": that was vibrant and exciting, but now what do I do? Or more specifically, will this help me get through my comps? Will this help me publish a paper, or get a job?”

With fear so firmly established, what else could be done except “engage the readings directly?” No counteroffensive was raised, although the challenge of actually doing the reading was issued. It seems to me the issue at question is the amount and degree of participation we are each willing to commit. New forms confront us with unfamiliar, less and/or unpredictable outcomes; old forms maintain parameters within which we navigate in order to control the extent of personal engagement. The shift from professorial riff to peer-guided interaction was stark, evidenced by my impressions upon entering the room after break (quote at top of entry).

Was it my imagination, or was resistance to this new form less than before? Perhaps we are not mutually fluent in its language, but are we beginning to collectively recognize it?

Spark posted a great summary of a book I think I'd like to read. It critiques the role/rule of experts, a phenomena which caught my attention when a history professor whose class I interpreted frequently mentioned the rise of experts with disdain.

I tried to post a comment but my Korean is insufficient for decoding the directions:

"Great summary! I'm intrigued, especially by the conditioning of excess, the separation between reality/representation effected by the new logic of economy, and its location/operation as a source of power."

Uttered in at least five languages (Arabic, Spanish, English, Japanese Sign Language, and Japanese), this film plays with the stereotype that different languages are a problem. As we follow the stories of four families, one realizes the source of confusion is not "in" the language; rather, it is the challenge of interpreting language in the context of a given person's life story.

The relationships and connections among members of these families range from the incidental to the intimate. "May I speak with you, sir?" inquires a police officer? "There's been an incident." "I have raised these children, fed them breakfast, lunch, and dinner their entire lives, can't you tell me if they are alright?" "That's none of your concern," replies the immigration officer.

There are two threads linking these families, two factors that bind them together tight: violence and the law. More specifically, a rifle and the institution of law enforcement, with the manipulations of politics hovering in the background. Acts of innocence and practicality unfold in scenarios of accident and opportunism. Babel exposes the vise of circumstance and consequence: in Morocco suspects are brutalized by military police, in Japan interviews are civil and police officers humane, in the US physical violence is replaced by emotional and psychic violence: " I guarantee that if you pursue legal action you will simply postpone the inevitable."

The systematic (peaceful?) order of Japan and the US masks the random unpredictability of sudden death; the apparent chaos and wildness of Mexico and Morocco highlights the human urge to seek experience in order to feel alive. Help appears as a rare offering in either place.

Language difference has nothing to do with these dynamics. Indeed, in Babel, the fact of linguistic diversity enables core commonalities of human suffering and ambition to be revealed.