...the difference, according to Heidegger, is pain.
"Diviners," writes Dennis Tedlock, "Stay close to 'the rift of difference,' as Heidegger calls it, even a small difference. They leave us between two points, or at both of them, and sometimes three." (1983:254)
Today, my online life has taken me along this path:
1) Wanokip (facebook) posted a story on shopdropping, about which I blogged for future students (homework!): "even radical ideology gets commercialized"
2) after categorizing, I followed the tags to see what others' (strangers) have been up to and found this: “‘Definition of God’ - and it still leaves us with the job of living with each other through the unity of mystery”
3) which sent me back to facebook to comment to another friend who has listed his religion as "pseudopagain pantheist" - I've been trying to wrap my mind around the difference between panentheism and pantheism. According to wikipedia: "A panentheistic belief system is one which posits that the one God interpenetrates every part of nature, and timelessly extends beyond as well. Panentheism is distinguished from pantheism, which holds that God is synonymous with the material universe." Hmmm.
4) then, I returned to the "job of living together" post with all those cool quotes and read the comment after, which led me to: shoreless oceans of incorruptible wealth
5) which, I have to say, is overly religious for me yet still rich with the kind of sentiments I hold, to wit, the final line of a poem:
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
The primeval scene:
"The problem is not that light needs to be created, as in Genesis, but that it is hidden, enclosed in blue-green quetzal feathers (lv.26). In the Popol Vuh, the movement from hidden light to a false dawn to the rising of the morning star and of the sun itself is a lengthy allegorical counterpoint to the movement from incomplete or false approximations of human beings and their speech to a fully articulate and religious humankind. in Genesis, the story of light (first day) and of the heavenly bodies (fourth day) is all over before Adam is even created (sixth day), and the nearness of the divine is signaled not by light but by wind."
Scientific background: an astronomy of the seasons. "The dates of maximum tilt of the Earth's equator correspond to the summer solstice and winter solstice." Watch a quicktime movie of the earth's annual wobble. :-)
Tedlock continues (pp. 269-271):
"The first quoted dialogue in Genesis - and here we come to the bottom of the hole, the canyon that separates the Judeo-Christian and Toltec-Quichean cosmogonies - is the disastrous dialogue between Woman and Serpent, and in the second dialogue God vents his wrath upon Adam. In the Popol Vuh, dialogue is a positive force, necessary before the creation can even be conceived, and it is the first step beyond the meaningless murmurs and flickerings of the primeval scene. The Heart of Sky - or 'they' who are the Heart of Sky - come to the deities of the sea (lv.36-41):
'They spoke now, then they thought, then they wondered
they agreed with each other, they joined
their words, their thoughts:then it was clear, then they reached accord in the light,
and then humanity was clear. . . .'
"Here we have the description of a dialogue, and the first direct quotation in the Popol Vuh comes from the same dialogue. The first sentences of this first quotation are not commands but questions: 'How should the sowing and dawning be? Who will be the provider, nurturer?' (2r.6-8), and the discussion goes on from there. . . .
"In sum, the continuing growth of creation requires not a series of commands from a single source but an ever-widening discussion . . . in Quichean (and Mesoamerican) thought, dualites are complementary rather than oppositional, contemporaneous rather than sequential . . . the creation moves not according to the gusty wind of God's will and the clandestine questioning of a miserable serpent, but according to the increasing light of a widening dialogue."
I was challenged (by Robin), during my comps defense, concerning what I gain from distinguishing between dialogue and dialectic. Established philosophy considers the dialogic a subset of the dialectic. At the most abstract theoretical level, this is no doubt the case, but - as I tried to argue - the way academics use the term "dialectic" leads more to the re-creation of already-established hierarchies of relationships rather than to any kind of change in them. Constant labeling of "the dialectic" or application of "dialectical" to particular patterns reifies those patterns, re-constructs them in social reality.
The distinction between the dialogic and dialectic is apparent - and relevant - phenomenologically. Just as we discussed in class last night concerning categorical distinctions between "the everyday" and "the performative" - the crucial factors are agency and knowledge. In the everyday, we operate within the boundaries of accepted dialectics, take these as given and unremarkable (even if they suck). In the performative, the boundaries themselves are brought into view. No one knows what is going to happen as an effect or outcome of the performance. Will there be uptake? Fallout? Reification? Change?
The remarkable Xavante continually invent "new modes of interaction with dominant society." Anthropologist Laura Graham argues their creativity is a direct outcome of the Xavante's unique cultural form of performing dreams. These communal, marked performances reify the knowledge of Xavante empowerment and agency in the world. In effect, the Xavante confirm a dialectical structure that places themselves at the center of everything that happens - not as victims but as the cause of the circumstances. Their internal dialectic (of socially constructed, language-based, narrative performance) provides such a source of cultural (group) stability that the Xavante can engage in dialogue with a world of constant, unpredictable, and bizarre change. While we (outsiders to the culture) may perceive larger dialectical relationships that (in our version of reality) lend a dubious cast to the Xavante's perception of reality: the fact of the matter is that
The Xavante insist on dialogue with the rest of the world: keeping everybody guessing. :-)
The relational liminality is the relevant difference between dialectics and dialogue. As long as we operate in a dialectical frame, we have confidence in structure. The form of the relationships is more-or-less known - even when we are caught off guard the logic is accessible. Our identity remains intact, and we can go on according to established habits and rhythms. If we enter the dialogic, however, the phenomenology shifts dramatically. Now, the future is wide-open. Not limitless, but the limits are beyond familiarity, the awareness of risk exceeds perceptions of safety.
At this point, conclusions are unapprehendable.
Recently (December 12), I received a joke over email:
A driver is stuck in a traffic jam on the Tehran-Ghom Motorway.Nothing is moving.
Suddenly a man knocks on the window. The driver rolls down his window
and asks, "What's going on?"
"Terrorists down the road have kidnapped Ahmadi Nejad. They're asking
for 100 million tomman ransom.Otherwise they're going to douse him with gasoline and set him on fire.
We're going from car to car, taking up a collection."
The driver asks, "How much is everyone giving, on average?"
"Most people are giving about a liter."
I googled the unfamiliar name and came up with Iranian President Ahmadinejad! A few images came up as well, including an obviously irreverent one from May 3rd, 2007. The text accompanying the doctored image is challenging, too. People are paying a price for practicing freedom of expression: twenty students were arrested on December 7th.
My buddy Steve has sent two announcements the last few days concerning U.S. Representative Julia Carson (1938-2007).
Confronted with barely-veiled racial prejudice in the halls of Congress by a peer who did not recognize her, Carson queried, "What's your point?" Thus sums up the Indianapolis Star, in a special report called "A warrior for the city."
I paid no attention to state politics the years I lived in Indianapolis, being invested in the cultural and linguistic politics of the Deaf Community (which was a pioneer in the revolutionary bilingual-bicultural movement in Deaf Education), and working on issues of access and ableism in the lesbian community. Hence, I learn of "Julia" in retrospect, and am particularly drawn to the news story because of its invocation of "war" by labeling her a warrior.
"Her weapons of choice are blunt talk and a dollop of charm," the Congressional Quarterly's Politics in America once said of her.
Weapons. Words as weapons counterposed with "charm." I am not disputing these characterizations nor their utility as skills, what I am puzzling over is if/when we can learn (or teach ourselves) to speak of such determination and ferocity in a way that honors the power of negotiation, period. (Tary and I started a conversation about "centering" a few weeks ago.)
"A lot of people get elected to positions and forget that they serve all the people," said John M. Thomas, former president of Community Action of Greater Indianapolis. "She never forgot that."
Steadfast memory. Conviction. Blunt talk. These are the tools and skills of those who seek foundational peace, of those who intend with each word and every action to change the most basic operations of our institutions from subtle mechanisms of privilege/discrimination to equitable and just treatment of and for everyone.
I do wish I had known her. :-)
Dell Hymes writes (2003):
"It might be a fair summary to say that Dennis is concerned most of all with the moment of performance, and I am much concerned with the competence that informs it. Dennis trusts most of all the speaking voice, I evidence of recurrent pattern." p. 36
Hymes places the above discrete distinction in opposition with a polemical distortion:
"...the equation Tedlock : Hymes = pause : particle" (p. 37).
Is it too much to read this as a quintessential instance of the dilemma of quantum mechanics? Do these two erudite scholars represent the indeterminate two-sided-ness of language as energy ("moment", "pause") or language as matter ("competence", "particle")?
The other dynamic I'm observing in Hymes' wonderful chapter, "Use All There Is To Use," is a play between "dialectic" and "dialogue." I am not sure if his narration follows an alternation pattern - it may. :-)
This puts me in mind of a conversation a few weeks ago in class, about how graduate students can learn the academic system enough to succeed in it (as in finish with a degree) without being coopted by it (i.e., maintain resistance to certain forms of hegemony).
One cannot avoid co-optation. Whatever forms of resistance practiced are absorbed dialectically by the institution by a social version of Newton's Third Law: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." The discrepancy that often prevents recognition of the equality of opposing force, is that there are not equal and opposite effects. The harder we resist, the harder the institution pushes back. Since it is way bigger than us, we usually get squashed.
I say "usually", because there is an art (that can be learned) of switching from the particle-based dialectics of "reaction" to the time/energy-sensitive dialogics of "effect." Social change occurs when the reactions of equal and opposite forces are met with an alternative that breaks the dialectical pattern. Storytellers who adapt their narratives to fit the social circumstances operate in vertical, contiguous time; those who insist on the same narratives (or discourses, as the case may be) operate in metaphors, substituting one dialectic for the next (no dialogue).
Dialogues can become patterned too (just like story narratives), enacting representations of larger discourses, repeating the social dialectic just as effectively as the repetition of unchanged stories. When one recognizes this is happening, it's time to change up again. Institutions are not designed to adapt to such live fluctuations; hence the individuals who practice them are always and forever at risk.
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.
Ok - so "new research" is apparently untrue, although there is something to be said for "the role of letter order on reading." Matt Davis has compiled an impressive corpus of equivalents in at least thirty languages, along with references and commentary from original and follow-up research in this area of word-form research. The number of letters in the word has quite a lot to do with whether the mind can grasp it.
This is the challenge.
Non-violent resistance, as a synonym for peace activism, still centers "violence" as the standard. The force of much anti-war talk revolves around violence as the anchor, providing energy that feeds momentum. I have been puzzling over this discursive looping for a long time: all talk is subject to perpetuating something. That "something" is wildly out of our control - because "it" is always mediated by interpretation.
I have been guilty, way too often, of getting caught up in layers of interpretation ("processing") instead of maintaining discursive intentionality. In a dialogue, both/all parties recognize the inevitable looping, making conscious choices about a) when to discard the historical baggage and b) how to create the present interaction on preferred terms. Shared recognition is, I think, key to successful shifting. Recognition is not the same as acknowledgment: acknowledgment (disclosure) will be important on some matters to establish trust but is not always necessary. If depended upon overmuch, distrust will grow in response to apparent evidence that recognition can never be assumed.
