group dynamics: October 2006 Archives

"Commence the defense."

With these words, the game was on. Quite entertaining it was, too, as we munched on chips and witnessed the thrust and parry of analytical debate regarding the extent to which national/ethnic markers are essential (or not) to identity. There was the personal test (it matters to girlfriends) and the literature test (programmatic and ideologic). "You'll agree," our friend would say, catching his Chair chuckle out of the corner of his eye, "or maybe you won't," he continued, eliciting laughter in the face of adversity.

How communicational is this thesis? Do the frames drive the data or does the data drive the frames? What is the data? Are the frames internal or external? Is there a mind or a discourse at work within the frames? Is there a cat under the bed? How about some soup on the table? Why not more rhetorical criticism? Couldn't you have started with power? Descriptive or critical? Social science or humanities? Which came first, the "ism" or the "ness"? Tack back-and-forth, does it matter, what's the heuristic, no I mean the other one, there's an overlap no it's a tension, separate the wheel geez what a bum deal aren't you done yet what about resistance the counterpoint counterframe subversive deliberate debunk, we're talking slam dunk! You're excused from Bourdieu, hurry up "thank you", what about stereotypes why do we need them can't this be flattened "I quote not enough I know I quote" this is not specificity it's a discourse of specificity. Large arguments loom worried about someone's doom a metaphor no a metonymy what about methodology in the beginning was ideology. 200 pages "the longest confession" all to watch the paradox of a strong minor bridge use his smarts to wiggle out of anything orientalist although perhaps slightly balkanist western interlopers stymied by Mitica intercultural communication four years later what constitutes the elite?

Master Frodo. The limb hangs from a nation-like-a-family, under a father (damn good soup), identity as difference.

"It is done."

Adam and Eve "We're just an old couple" showed up with their son, Rastaman. They were late, however, beaten to the game by Boy Scout and Den Mother, who brought City Kitty and Rascal (no surprise the dawg won the donut-eating contest). A (recently married) couple of aging hippies appeared, tailed by a Counter-Terrorism Agent (who flashed a pizza cutter at my throat to extort two votes in the pumpkin contest). Spare Man arrived without Hot Stuff :-( - his teeth still glowed.

A slew of strangers arrived. Walter? Andrew? (Who snuck out before performing; a return is now required.) They swore they knew Dracula, who was apparently delayed by blood feasting. A Russian Vulcan who didn't know Spock clearly needed reconstructive surgery for those reverse ears, but the closest we had to a doctor in the house was a plant cell biologist. The Goddess-of-the-Empty-Cornucopia wielded no more magic than the Witch-of-the-House, whose Dark Ally mirrors reflected a lack of glue.

One of my students arrived (wtf?) as a member of Cleopatra's (underage) entourage. [FERPA censors - no illegal consumption of beverages was allowed.] Cleopatra, by the way, won the random door prize and the Dark Ally won best costume (suckin' up to the host, you gotta watch these people!) Boy Scout, a.k.a. Pyro, repeated his pumpkin-carving victory from two years ago. (Actually, Pyro took credit for a second victory but the record shows someone else actually won...???) ;-)

The Cheshire Cat approved the Woman-of-Flowers (especially after coaching on how to hack a pumpkin). All wine was drunk, most food eaten, nothing broke, and the mess will be cleaned up before the landlords return.

What a party!

"Laughter showed the world anew in its gayest and most sober aspects. Its external privileges are intimately linked with interior forces; they are a recognition of the rights of those forces. This is why laughter could never become an instrument to oppress and blind the people. It always remained a free weapon in their hands." - Mikhail Bakhtin (see Three Dialogues).

After detailing the grotesque body via the illustration of "the finger" as an erect penis, but before "c_cks, c_nts, sh_t, p_ss, c_m, s_liva et cetera in [Performance and Public Culture]", I commented, "I've been waiting to blog about this class." "You haven't done it yet?" a colleague teased. No. I hadn't. "I'm finally learning something!" said Spare Man amid the general clamor. I must have been waiting for the professor to perform Jung's breakthrough (see Footnote #1): balancing on her chair, posing as God on the toilet, dropping a huge turd on her ass-wiping mentee (the world). We laughed hard and often last night.

"I keep trying to figure out what my hesitation is with the blog," Spare Man confided during break. "It's not that I don't trust you to know what is ok to say or not....it's taking something live out of context and giving it back in alien form." [Quoted from memory.] We discussed again how whatever I write comes back to those I mention in mediated form - not only via the record of written text in public cyberspace, but also as skewed through my particular lens. I have extracted the live from its performance, selected elements of influence or desire, and packaged them from my peculiar point-of-view.

Here, playing the boundary between the embodied performance and the inscribed record, I laugh: at you, at me, at us. :-)

The carnivelesque was (circa the Middle Ages & Renaissance) a socially sanctioned and structured "safe" space in which humans could not only indulge the pleasures of the body but do so with full knowledge of being seen in so doing. The carnivalesque is public space for the performance of private self. You wanna find ways to transgress? You wanna make a difference? Then stretch the edges of institutionally-constructed roles, rules, procedures, forms, and etiquettes. Hot Stuff raised the question about whether there is any authority left that we respect enough (or revile enough, added another classmate) to want or need to mock so much as to upend social norms and create new paradigms. Those scenes which appear to approximate the carnivalesque (raves, for instance) are colonized by legal structures for the purposes of commodification and profit. (Illegal raves can't be carnivalesque because they are, by definition, already outside the accepted social structure.)

Part of what used to enable carnivalization to occur, I think, is that it was bounded. The annual season of carnival was preceded and followed by the rigid structures of everyday and official social practices. What carnival allowed was the expression of energy repressed throughout the other months of living within societies' constraints. It is this energy that, dialogically, opened the potential for new spaces and thus the capacity for lasting social changes. The openness of Bakhtin's dialogism is the fulcrum of change, not the atmosphere of the carnivalesque. The climate establishes certain necessary conditions (which are not usually available during the everyday - or so we tend to assume). It is the quality of intentionality to act-with-abandon that establishes the collective social relations of trust and respect which then generate momentum toward transformed practices and ways of being with and for each other because of our differences, not in spite of them. This is where a lever to the democratic can be forged.

This I believe: the only transgressive zone in our de-authorized world is personal risk.

In case you were wondering, communication technology and quantum physics beat out poetry.

Every time.

Just ask Nadia.

Watch Ari squirm.

(Maybe you had to be there?) :-)

OH HOW WE MISS YOU!

(Imagine sappy music in the background; the lyrics rhyme, keeping time with sniffles.)

There were tears and gnashing of teeth at Dr. Pu's farewell party this past Tuesday. People were shocked to find he was not yet gone. Alas, the celebration continued regardless. :-0 Puruman was mildly surprised. "Dada must be in the shower," he mused while unlocking the apartment door. "What's this?" he asked, noticing the spread of food on the table after turning on the lights. Then he noticed the shoes and began naming their respective owners. Eventually, giggling was heard from the bedroom. (No one knows what went on in there!)

Most people came for the meal.

Smita and Fugu prepared "fast food", Aloo Tikki with Chole (that's potato cakes with chickpea curry), accompanied by tamarind chutney and yogurt (see my third helping). Dada contributed bread (and random noises from his laptop). The meal was devoured. Apparently the biggest surprise of the evening was how eager Ambu was to get to the mall. Dr. Pu applied his legendary caution and painstaking criteria to the selection of a perfect pair of shoes for his father. There was much traffic in and out. No Satya, Puru is not going to buy you a pack of cigarettes: not now, not ever. That white shirt did look spiffy, though. "Puru is generous," Dada explained, "only when he's leaving." Sourya scored a kurta (he's still waiting for his second drink). Smita "got twenty bloody hangars." Hey, don't complain! The rest of us just got dessert.

The woman nicknamed for a poisonous delicacy assured Satya there were no eggs in the bananabread. Several folks still turned it down, even though "Smita made it from the ground up!" It was a nice combo, I thought, warmed and served with vanilla ice cream.

Rajesh spent time perusing The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, which this literate crowd mused was named as a play on The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Depayan won the "who has the worst TA" contest, but Ambarish was deemed the "Banana Bread Queen." A hard title to beat, though Satya flirted with being the Off-Color King. (He was also told, "Don't die in my car.) Shiva manned the camera. Krishna ate. So did Chris.

Talking to the hand" did not lead to any change in Dr. Pu's plans.

On Wednesday night, the final feast at Bueno y Sano was attended by some of the same crowd, Hema (who's down with "Dr. Pu"), Giri, Rmaya, Ravi, and Sarbjeet. All kinda folk been droppin' by the apartment too.

The good news is I finally got my laptop back from the IndiaBorg Collective.

Dr. Purushottam Kulkarni celebrated the successful defense of his dissertation in characteristic fashion: 12 ounces of hot sauce with a bit of Salvadoran burrito from Bueno y Sano, casual worship with friends at a Durga Puja, and a cup of calming tea from Rao's.

The fact of the full moon and the encouragement of dear friends was insufficient to entice him to take even the smallest sip of any new beverage.

"We'll pass Steph eventually," they joked about my comps defense, after grilling me for two hours and deciding I needed to clarify a few things. "I want to pound this point in," says one of my esteemed professors. "Not to pile things on," says another. Yeah, right! My chair tried to make me feel better: "People take comps at all levels in this department. The questions you've taken on are humongous." There was a sidebar at one point, about how I tend to experiment in real life...

I still make too many assumptions about shared understanding that makes the reader have to work too hard. This is part of what invites so much interrogation. The interrogation itself isn't bad, although it is hard! Being questioned so intensively feels hard but it is "the ideas that fight," as my favorite antagonist clarified when I said, "You know I like fighting with you." (This, after kicking me a few times.)

Some would argue that it is not politic to experiment with comps. The stakes are rather high, eh? Yet, while we were there, I was aware that I'll never have such an opportunity again: three brilliant minds focused exclusively on whether or not I know what the hell I'm talking about and guiding me through weaknesses, confusions, and potential pitfalls. They push hard because I reach far.