group dynamics: March 2006 Archives

Anuj parachuted in just in time to wave at Don before the movie began. (I received the clandestine codes: spongecell and backpack. shhh)

"There's something hidden in the long, static closing shot of Cache—a clue, an answer, a red herring, an epiphany. It's embedded deep, somewhere back in the shadows—or, perhaps, it's right up front, hiding in plain sight. It vastly alters everything that preceded it, demanding a total reevaluation of the film—or it just further complicates this already profoundly inscrutable mystery. It is a conclusion both languidly drawn out and violently abrupt, stunning in its simplicity, infuriating in its opacity."

It kept me tense, that's for sure. Was the entire movie made for one scene? And who made the videos? Why does it matter who made the videos? Majid is dead. Is he dead because of the videos or for another reason? Why now? Re-traumatization after he obviously had managed to make a life for himself? or is the point what hell wreaks itself upon a guilty conscience? Is it better to whet one's soul on the sharp edge of guilt or pass let it pass disinterested into the maw of forgotten memory?

What was hidden, besides a guilty conscience? A possibly illicit attraction? A nation's neglect of an immigrant population?

I wondered about the boy whose house Pierrot winds up at overnight, unannounced. I thought it was him (Francois?) engaged in animated conversation with Pierrot on the school steps in the final scene but apparently it was Majid's son: "The last shot in the film is of his son and the son of Moroccan man who once lived with the protagonist as a child." Did they plot together? A younger generation in cross-ethnic alliance against the deeply-buried sins of their parents?

To cap the undecidable weirdness of the evening, as we walked to the car afterwards, a young man with wild hair and clothing strikingly akin to Pierrot's strolled by in the cool spring-ish night air. We had just been talking about ghosts . . .

Here's another item I'm sure I've posted before but obviously didn't catalog or code correctly for later retrieval. At any rate, I saw this short video on the powers of ten when I interpreted a science class some years back for upper elementary school students (possibly fifth-graders). I find it a useful metaphor for this notion of social metonymy that I keep trying to articulate as a means of linking the microsocial with the macrosocial and vice-versa.

It's just a minor driving issue. Turning left from the right-hand lane. My current protege is quite casual about it. I'm calmer too, after surviving Korean driving lessons last year, the Romanian version seems like old hat.

We did pass through the infamous Hun Ju intersection. A full vehicle stop occurred in its proper place.

Ruth sends this:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow. - DOROTHY THOMPSON

Missing from among the other quotes on courage is this one from Amelia Earhart:

"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace."

As James and I have discussed and theorized the role of time in group interaction, I think a PM might come down to the incursion of a diachronic element into the synchronic. As long as the ritual elements of an essentially linear unfoldment of moment-after-moment occurs as expected (familiar) then synchronicity secures enough stability and predictability that one can exercise various forms of control (over self, over an interaction, over a process, perhaps even over an outcome). When the synchronic is disrupted by the diachronic, however, unpredictability and instability emerge, threatening the established order. [I'm not sure "order" here must necessarily invoke power; it could just be regularity, routine.]

Hmmmmm, it could be that diachronic emergences at the individual level are able to be subsumed into 'the routine' - even if they are disruptive to the group - and thus don't constitute a problematic moment at the level of the group's operational constitution. But if there is a synchronicity of diachrony among several members then it becomes a group-level event, which necessarily evokes the power structure and calls it into question?

There might be some equation between the scale of perceived threat and the intensity of backlash....

It's hard to imagine there's a person with any access to media who hasn't seen the original Star Wars movie, Episode IV, A New Hope, released (ohmygosh) in 1977 (six technical Oscars). I saw it in the theatre six times. The only other movie I've seen so many times is Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Its reviews are awful, but the album by The Beatles "is often cited as the most influential rock album of all time," according to Wikipedia.

List of things to work on:

1) Get new phone/ repair old phone...SOON
2) Do not read paper sent about a month ago
3) Request current version of paper
4) Plan trip to Columbus
5) Train cat
6) Stay well and happy
7) Learn to cook. Cook for friend
8) Continue being a pain in friend's butt
9) Call friend

Dan's on to me. "You don't come to bowl, you just come to collect stories for your blog!" Then he went on to set a personal best. He continued by speculating that blogs are the trainspotting of the decade, with someone checking in on how Anuj does every week. (He's been doing better and better! Not only at bowling: check out his latest minute of fame! He's way high on the cool factor too.) Turkish did not repeat her record performance from last week. Alas. LB couldn't hit a spare to save his life but did still win a game or two, much to the dismay of the brothers who felt the need to record one of his lowest scores ever.
Not that there's any rivalry beyond outright sabotage.

Will we have a repeat? Last week's record 153* (frantically tied by LB as he desperately sought to stave off this dark horse competitor) was roundly cheered by all. The regulars were all there (not the full extended crowd), mixing it up on Goth night - shifted from the dance club across the way because of a competing event. I truly thought I'd jumped dimensions when I walked in to the black lights, strobes, and fashion nightmares (and you think I dress poorly?!?): "It is still Tuesday, right?" I confirmed with the staff. A couple of times. :-)

"People can't distinguish, it seems, between describing dissent and being dissent." Celia Farber, journalist for Harper's, in an article about the link between HIV and AIDS, which she reports is questioned by some.

I've no clue about that debate, but I do know that publicly voicing concerns about possible disagreements is punishable. How to pursue a line of critique without succumbing to personally-directed aggression is the challenge. I've actually managed some humor this time around, trying to enact Burke's comic frame instead of the tragic one. We did it in Stephen's class some time back, when Shannon presented on defamiliarization. In particular I'll repeat the quote on perception; it uses vision as a metaphor:

"Humans, too, are victims of selective blindness. We often fail to see things around us because they are too familiar and seem to convey no new information, or because we are focusing our attention elsewhere. We don't know nearly enough about attention though it's a vital survival function. Visual attention seems to be a pair of processes. The first, the process of focusing on a stimulus or idea, has received a lot of research. The other equally important process involves concurrent decisions about which stimuli to ignore. Let me emphasize that. Visual attention is always partly, and often largely, selective blindness to other stimuli considered to be irrelevant at the moment" (from How a Poet Sees).

I mentioned reading Derrida (slowly); his subject is Nietzsche (slower still). "...do we hear, do we understand each other already with another ear?" (1985:35).

Derrida is discussing the inversion of Nietzsche into Naziism, in which "what passes elsewhere for the 'same' utterance says exactly the opposite and corresponds instead to the inverse, to the reactive inversion of the very thing it mimes" (30). He goes on to discuss how language is always "the double of the other", that "the one can always be the other" (32).

So, I wonder, with what "ear" have I been heard by colleagues in the CGSA? If it was the opposite, the double, the other of what I meant, then I'd have to flip the Bahktinian schematic around the other way. In other words, from my peers vantage point, *I* operate as "the centrifugal force" pushing us apart while they reflect back to me the centripetal forces they perceive pulling us together. This might be one reason why translation has been so arduous - coming from different 'centers', as it were?

Note to self: when most confident, be most wary of unrecognized assumptions.

I did think, going into the Communication Graduate Student Association meeting yesterday, that the handouts were practically self-explanatory. I had distributed the first handout the day before in order to jog people's memories of the brainstorming session in December. I covered it very fast (time limit) and moved into the second handout, which I also covered quickly.

I was then pulled under by the discursive currents with the very first comment. I do not remember who spoke, or what was said, except that I was instantly fighting for my life. I felt desperate and appeared as such, speaking with increased volume, intense diction, and sweeping generalizations. My attempt to pull (to bind centripetal forces in a formal procedure) and others' (centrifugal) countering pushes thickened the borderzone where “a group” is constituted. I was sucked deep into the maelstrom.

It took a while for me to re-establish the kind of balance necessary to float, to be relaxed enough to trust that my head was going to stay above water.

We celebrated a friend's new job last night. It will be very interesting to watch the future unfold!

We were again a more subdued group of rapscallions last night at La Guarida, taking in Johnny Cash and June Carter's story via the Oscar-nominated Walk the Line. Did we like it? I'd say the general mood was, 'it was ok', but perhaps that's just my take? Not being familiar with Cash's music, I was introduced to him and his music at the same time. Talk about moody! His affinity with the criminals in Folsom Prison was a bit disconcerting - not because of his recognition of their humanity, but because he seemed to enjoy a vicarious violence through association. Not that he came across as a particularly gentle guy...

La Guarida's head honcho took a significant risk leaving seven of us untended in his lair. No doubt he was relieved to find his easel still standing. Celebration was in the air as someone passed her comps!!!! I wouldn't say anyone was eager to leave afterwards, although when it became common knowledge that the witching hour had been passed there was a concerted effort at departure.

Next week...a comedy?

That was the birthday boy, trailing his balloon parrot down the bowling lane. It was an eventful night, with two personal all-time highs: Anuj, spinning 147, and Zeynep with a 122. Lava had a turkey and he and Luscious both had four baggers. Lava actually rolled five strikes in a row (there was a game break) and had an 8 frame streak with 7 strikes and 1 spare. (Ok. I admit it. I was impressed.)

Someone(s) contributed quite actively to this week's notes, editing, drawing, revising, and altering the codes to obscure their originally intended meaning. The uncertainty this inspired occurred simultaneously with the recounting of an earthquake dream resulting in sleepwalking. "We have earthquakes all the time in my country - 'Get out of the house!'" Don's need to publish a paper continues to trump blog-updating. They don't make cup sizes large enough for 9 pounders. (Welcome to my world.)

Bowling continued, per usual. "It's my hair," when things didn't go quite as one planned. "Be humble," when you get a strike (as if!) When trouble begins to loom (not that it would, not with us), "I don't speak the language." There were a few fingerpuppet associations. I was the monkey, in desperate need of advice from the parrot. The elephant whipped our butts in game one but moaned that I'd scored higher than him in later games (not new!) There was the frog that roared, the goose/swan that wanted to be a duck, the panda (or was it polar?) bear, gopher, and lion (chosen for being of the feline persuasion).

The lion was selected by the birthday boy, affectionately known as poonte, who may have been a tad bit overoiled for the evening's serious competition. I mean, come on! Luscious actually catapulted Lava right through the air onto his back! This was after Lava had tossed a 10-lb bowling ball at me and before he nearly knocked the b'day boy over and the two practically wound up in a wrestling match. [Note: bowling is a non-contact sport.]

Any gender confusion at the bowling alley was left there when we moved to the Iron Horse for salsa. I received a number of good lessons and a showing-up by the birthday boy himself in terms of knee-dexterity. I had a serious problem bowling straight tonight, but I was a good foil for dancing. I mean, how much trouble could a guy get into if he was dancing with me?