Call this ACTION LEARNING!: June 2008 Archives

My dissertation committee is keen on the clarification of method. They want an articulation of what I will do as I conduct research into simultaneous interpretation at the European Parliament: particularly how I will decide what counts and doesn't count (what's "in" and what's "out") and - most significantly - what constitutes the boundary between inclusion and exclusion.

Triangulation is the key. I've had two distinct reference points all along - the spoken language interpreters and the people who use simultaneous interpretation. The third point has an amorphous existence, it's "there" and "not there," unfixable in a quantumly indeterminate way. Call it language, or meaning, or (my preference) meaningfulness; the relational axis shifts contingently, dependent on numerous variables any wild combination of which could be present and active in any given exchange. To wit: Is the dictionary definition most relevant or the slang usage? Is there an inside joke that relies upon a less common usage or is the popular sense the one intended? Does a particular political context - some story in the news, perhaps - shade a statement with a certain character, one that would otherwise convey either a less or more distinct point?

For instance, I am currently reading a book in the genre of fantasy. The title captured my attention because it invokes communication theory, the author is one I read voraciously in my youth and continue to revisit. If I had a chosen another book, I would be writing a different entry. But this book, read at this time, interacts with research planning. I embrace its temporal triangulation and claim its influence because it inspired me to craft an open invitation to join this research project. Put me (!) in the protagonist's position upon encountering one of the profound phenomena of the world she explores: ". . . she was dazzled . . . . she stood staring, blinking . . ." (p. 45).

Beautifully, what happens next is a stranger passing by offers an explanation - and then, most significantly (note: I've taken the liberty of replacing her object of study with mine):

"As she and the barrow man stood gazing, others stopped to help them gaze. That was the impression Sutty got. They all know what [simultaneous interpretation] looked like and therefore could help her see it" (p. 45-46).

I request your help (anyone interested in language, interpretation, meaning) to see fully, thoroughly, with incisive depth and relevant breadth, because only you (most precisely, Members of the European Parliament, - and simultaneous interpreters, and language scholars, and ...! ) know when and how you are trying to exercise leadership. This is how I would like to narrow that elusive third point of the research triangle - to the relationship between leadership and language choice. I am curious about correlations between best language use and leadership effectiveness, as well as correlations between leadership effectiveness (i.e., accomplishing what you want in terms of policy) and use of a lingua franca. Near the end of what will probably strike you as a rambling post (arcs of meaning), I wrote:

The interesting question then (to ask of your interpreter), is not "did you say what I meant" but "did you say what will accomplish for me the end I seek?"

As an interpreter myself (American Sign Language/American English), and based on interviews with European Parliament interpreters in 2005 (publication forthcoming), I have a decent sense of the typical ambition and outlook of simultaneous interpreters. What is missing is clarity concerning MEPs active, conscious, and deliberate use of simultaneous interpretation to accomplish your own independent and political goals.

Because this is research (not journalism), anonymity is assured. Comments (feedback, input, critique, etc.) here (in this public space, to me via email, and - ideally - through the official research series of brief conversations) are welcome from any and everyone. :-)

There was The Biggest Salad Ever and a Bison Burger. Margaritas and Honey Pilsner.
Laughter looping across periodic boundary conditions. My blushing. (!) A handshake for the chinese zodiac. (Do you know what they say about Virgos?)

The Italian mafia. A Columbian cartel. Romanian espionage and disruption services. A South African escapee. Bhutanese royalty. Some Americans and a Turk.

Seriously, one language or many? Interpreted (essential heterogeneity) or lingua franca (reduced homogeneity)? :-) Our debate draws forth a distinction: what do we value most and when - the depth and strength of relational connection or the collaborative effort to generate joint action toward a desired goal? I propose that

• we are always interpreting - the interactive presence of a simultaneous interpreter only makes the fact more evident, and


• more attention to this fact (of always and inevitable interpretation) could enable deepened collaborations to redress the critical needs of our time.

I am cautioned, again (and with great humor!), to be gentle with those who agree to talk with me: sensitivities about language skill can open vulnerabilities that could undermine the research endeavor. Refinements to the research problem have been percolating since the Committee exerted force on the prospectus. What matters - always - is the third, the locus of triangulation. There is the object of study - language use in an environment with an unprecedented range of language choice, and the emergent phenomena of an apparent preference for a (shared) lingua franca instead of a professionally-trained interpreter (to mediate linguistic difference). What, the committee asks, is the field of action within which language choice matters? What is the context that imbues significance to an individual's decision to use their best language instead of a weaker one? (I will also have to take into account that small percentage who are truly balanced bilinguals.)

The site of the study is political, institutional, and driven by economics. The crux of action could be defined as leadership - not in the strict sense of hierarchical role, but in the generic sense of providing a necessary function in the crucial moment that brings a desired goal closer to fruition.

For the record: Zeynep, my Temporary Quasi Date, Sangria Girl, STFU, Roommate, Henk, Don, and Anuj. Earlier, assorted town officials, a bonedigger and the FBI (now required for a visa).

A conspiracy between a bone-digger and an undertaker caused this rigorous sociological attempt at describing some general features of all human groups to materialize in order for me to abscond with it on my recent family vacation. Robert K. Merton concludes his introduction with

"this considered judgment: not since Simmel's pioneering analyses of almost half a century ago has any single work contributed so much to a sociological theory of the structure, processes, and functions of small groups as George Homans' The Human Group" (1950, p. xxiii).

Not a bad recommendation - and timely for my purposes, to come across now. I'd only time to glance at the potential relevance of this (old) theory to my upcoming research. One of the tensions I anticipate engaging over the next academic year is that between cognitivists (who root their science in the western psychological bias of individual and independent selves) and communication scholars (who recognize - to varying degrees - the inescapably interactive relationships that generate any and all kinds of meaning). The dual dichotomy may be overly simple but it is useful, at least to start: the often opposed frames of psychological and social, and the human products of selves and meanings.

My reading of Homans begins in earnest after reading a keynote address James suggested, Breaking Mindset, by Allan W. Snyder of the Centre for the Mind (Canberra, Australia). Snyder claims a fundamental question for cognitive science concerning originality: he wonders how do we get ideas in the first place? Snyder's "we" is of the royal sort - the presumption of common experience extended from a singularly authorized agent; it makes a sharp contrast with Homans deliberately collaborative we, in which "author and reader are learning together" (p. 2). This is one instance of the striking contrast between approaching social science by aggregating up (as it were) from isolated individual cognitions and extrapolating down from complex interactions.

Homans descriptive language is fully interactional. "No one," he writes, "just 'sees' human behavior. The eye is never quite innocent, but comes to its task sensitized. We see what our experience and ideas teach us to see - and this is never the whole story" (p. 13). Snyder provides a cognitive case to prove this point literally, referring to an instance (Hughes 1996) when a particular theory of optics prevented the direct observation of photoreceptors in the human eye. The problem with Snyder's example is that it does nothing more than provide an instance -the puzzle of attributing a particular meaningfulness remains. Homans continues: "The world and its meaning are always negotiating with one another, with experience as the go-between. Even common-sense language implies a theory of behavior and tells us, for instance, to look for actions and motives" (p. 13).

Homans' relational framing enables a mode of analysis not restricted by linear causality. Snyder's concern with the new, first, and original implies - and thus invokes - an ordinal logic. Only the so-called real numbers are made available within this cognitivist frame. As much as it names interaction, in cognitive science the brain is situated prior to thought, the mind before relationship. The metaphors made possible by mathematical breakthroughs of imaginary and complex numbers, which have led to deeper and more sophisticated understandings of the laws of physics and all of the natural world, are cut off by the limited horizon imposed by any individual mind. Homans' writing does not refer laterally to these breakthroughs occurring contemporaneously in the hard sciences, but he does highlight the work of Mary Parker Follett, quoting her at some length (interspersed with his own thought):

"In her study of administrative control, she argued, as others had done, that in studying any organized social activity we must study the 'total situation.' But we must not merely 'be sure to get all the factors into our problem.' We must examine 'not merely the totalness of the situation, but the nature of the totalness. . . . What you have to consider in a situation is not all the factors one by one, but also their relation to one another.' The relation is such that the parts make a whole, the elements make an organism. And Mary Follett affirmed 'that the whole determines the parts as well as that the parts determine the whole.' She recognized that the unity is not a static, finished thing, but an ongoing process: 'The same activity determines both parts and whole. . . . We are speaking of a unity which is not the result of an interweaving, but is the interweaving. Unity is always a process, not a product . . . . I have been saying that the whole is determined not only by its constituents, but by their relation to one another. I now say that the whole is determined also by the relation of whole and parts . . . . It is the same activity which is making the whole and parts simultaneously.' Finally, the activity, the process, she spoke of always leads to something new. Something emerges. She summarized her ideas as follows: 'my first point concerned the total situation; my second, the nature of the interacting which determines the total situation; my third, the evolving situation. we come to see that reciprocal adjustment is more than mere adjustment; that is where we get what the psychologist has called the "something new," "the critical moment in evolution."' (p. 8-9)

At lunch with Li (!), he spoke of "the tyranny of understanding, of agreement." The preminent challenge of our time is to alter the typical terms of reciprocal adjustment; to engage the dynamics of difference in ways that lead to new things: new structural institutions and social customs. This can only occur through the active practices of actual human groups. My individual challenge is articulated in one way by Bernard DeVoto (in the forward to Homans' book) as that between the pedestrian and the intuitive social scientist: "The 'pedestrian' does not get through from fact to adequate generalization; the 'intuitive' does not get through from generalization to adequate fact" (1950, p. 46).

I must build, carefully and painstakingly, from intuitive perceptions to convincing fact, such that I can achieve "success" according to the (rigid) logic of the academy. Simultaneously, that labor cannot be divorced from the everyday mingling with friends, acquaintances, and even strangers.