Language: January 2008 Archives

Not a surprise:

Dutch decline

English has overtaken Dutch as the city’s second language, according to a study published by the Free University of Brussels in January. Some 35% of city residents claimed to know English, but just 28% knew Dutch. When the survey was first conducted in 2000, Dutch had the edge. The number of Arabic-, Turkish- and German-speakers has also declined, whereas Italian- and Spanish-speakers have increased. The study's publication coincided with news that Zaventem, a Flemish suburb of Brussels, had introduced a law letting only Dutch speakers buy or sell property there. Officials claim the new rules will preserve the area's “Flemish character”.

Mike reached up and patted this sign to remind me to slow down. :-) I'd asked the class why I'd gone off on a particular tangent....it related, but I had to pause for a moment, back up, where did I begin? How did I arrive where I was? What was the point?!

I came across the sign near the hallway trashcans on my way to class and I thought it was too perfect to pass up: not for them, for me! I've a good feeling about this group, based on how assertive they were during the first and subsequent activities. We laughed a fair amount. And - they took the material seriously. Minds at work. I like.

At some point, they'll be designing some webpages. In the meantime, I'm using the space to post lesson plans and track our progress.

Any day now, students will start to post their first self-analyses of a decision-making process. They've been asked to make a real decision - to attend or not attend a protest in Boston against the FARC who occupy part of Colombia. (FARC is the organization responsible for the kidnapping of friends of a friend - close enough to touch me. I decided to be affected; I decided to care, to act, to do the little that I can do.)

I have two images in mind. :-(

One is a poster I came across in Palestine calling for a boycott of Israel. The image is a hand dropping a coin into a helmet that is already full of money.

The other one is a photo of a small boy urinating on the helmet of a soldier.

So, Hamas pissed on Fatah, and Israel pisses on Hamas. Meanwhile, the world watches.

Guilty as charged. :-/

A friend last night told me that that approximately 80% of what I write makes sense, but there's 20% when I lose her. That happened somewhere in the middle of reading yesterday's post. We hypothesized: boring? Lack of transition or context? Possibly, we mused, I wander too deep into my own mind, and simply do not make the links apparent - such writing is then "not a finished product," which can throw a reader off or away from the communication I attempt.

A few days earlier, another friend caught my systemic misspelling of Colombia and let me know (for which I am grateful, thanks). I was using the US version, Columbia, which refers to a different place and (obviously) invokes a much different context. Less obviously, but nonetheless apparent to a close reader, is what such a basic mistake reveals about me as an outsider. Just now, I'm up for a bit of self-chastising, as a pithy reviewer of television coverage of the US presidential campaign quotes Mark Twain:

...somewhere he said that “only presidents, editors and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’”

Dang. The thing is, I invoke "we" deliberately, as an act of membering, an attempt to constitute belonging. I started doing so, consciously and with intention, at last fall's second Dialogue under Occupation conference, which took place in Abu Dis, Palestine. I want to insist on a base level of togetherness among everyone who has participated in either of the first two conferences as a foundation for a community focused on tangible changes in entrenched institutional systems. There is no reason not to extend the boundary of "we" to include peace activists and change agents in Colombia and elsewhere in the world. The trick, as I was able to articulate a week or so after the conference, is to name violence without doing more.

Did you follow the link? I suspect this could be one place where I lose readers. Yesterday, for instance, I referenced a graduate level communication seminar on Language as Action and Performance. This link is not as straightforward as the one above concerning how we need to stop talking violence into inevitability. You have to notice, in today's instance, that the link feeds to a whole category of posts that I have related to each other through the label Language. Geez, even as I am explaining this (to myself as well, grin) I can see how much labor I hope you are willing to undertake. :-/ (Sorry!) The thing is, I am trying to work an epistemology, and I am still learning how to convert true beliefs into knowledge. (Another friend informs me that real philosophers limit the object/referent of "epistemology" to propositional knowledge, thereby excluding the how. My exposure to the term via pedagogy (education) and sociology will not allow a separation between the process and the outcome. Anthony Giddens' structuration theory describes this merger, and his distinction between practical consciousness and discursive consciousness explicates the interaction between "the how" of coming to know and "the what" of knowing.)

Giddens postulates a dynamic interplay between "practical consciousness" (tacit, take-for-granted knowledge) and "discursive consciousness" (knowledge/reasons that can be verbally articulated) as social agents reflexively monitor and rationalize their activities/practices. Practical consciousness is emphasized to a greater extent in this process, however, since it is linked directly with the casual mastery of routines....

In addition to the theoretical precepts which I am actively attempting to put into conscious and deliberate, "performative" action, there is the whole unique history of me as an embodied human being with particular experiences of social life and relationships. As much as I try to think "out from" myself as a person with agency to influence events and meanings, I also attend "inward" to the ways I react and then respond to events and the meanings I make of them. The conditioned dialectical interactions are what I want to shift from the dominant external power of established structure to an internal force of dialogical interaction that both recognizes my freedom to move variably within a range and concentrate my energies on a specific structural feature where I sense possibilities for a turn from one trajectory to another.

As I watched myself (over the past few days) feel and try to articulate some humanity for the other side, for the enemy, I realized that I always do this. I did this two years ago when Israel began bombing Lebanon and many of my friends burst into outrage. Yes yes yes, the bombing was wrong and unconscionable. The reasons for the attack are not justifiable under any ethical rubric. And - to use words that demonize all Israelis by casually conflating the policies of the government with the individual choices of citizens is a language trap. I think the same dynamic applies to Farc. As awful, horrific and devastating as their actions have been on the nearly one thousand individuals kidnapped, and miserable and agonizing as the pain ripples have been, we - not a royal imposition, but a self-selected cadre of compassionate people - have to manage not to throw our resulting pain back into the world, even onto those who elicit it.

I believe we must learn to manage our own pain, because I have been guilty of acting mine out on beloved others and observing the devastating effects. Sometimes, the guilt and depression are overwhelming. In fact, being able to throw myself into a support network on behalf of a friend was a means for surviving a severe bout that struck the same day as I learned of Ana and Alf's kidnapping. Would I have devoted so much energy if I was not so desperately trying, myself, to survive? I cannot say. What I can say, is that - having done so - my commitment is real.

I'm receiving quite an education about Farc while learning more about myself as a participant in discourses. Two of Alf and Ana's friends have commented on my susceptibility to rhetoric. I need to be firm in my response although I very much hope we can continue to dialogue, even if dialogue with Farc is an impossibility.

First, Juan and Javier, No! It is not that I believe in the words as a reflection of Farc's actual intentions. I do know better than that. My initial info came from the wikipedia links posted at Thorny Days, not from any of Farc's own self-representations (which is not to assume the wikipedia entry wasn't originally made by a Farc member, however I do choose to exercise some trust that some compilation of minds with different political perspectives have checked out and contributed to the wikipedia entry). My view is more complicated, and my words are carefully chosen. I knew some of my thoughts were risky, but this is just it, yes? We live in risky times; how will we confront our own fears? How can we possibly manage our own pain?

Yesterday I began to read a book for my own dissertation research proposal: Stories in the Time of Cholera. The professor in a course I took last fall on "Language as Action and Performance" mentioned this anthropologically-based discourse analysis as a powerful demonstration of the power of language to shape horrific realities. The authors trace the institutional use of cultural reasoning to create and justify medical profiling,

"document[ing] the mechanisms through which denigrating images are generated through specific institutional practices and in response to concrete organizational crises, presented for public consumption, used in creating widely shared perceptions of people and events, and made the center of public policy" (2003: xvi).

I had not realized, before beginning to read, that the cholera epidemic was in Venezuela, and not too long ago (early 1990s). I was struck immediately by the rhetoric blaming Colombia (which is weird, since the Orinoco Delta is on the opposite national border, near Guyana). The deft analysis of the authors in showing how everyone's talk about the Warao and other indígenas contributed to 500 deaths is absolutely compelling and scarily discouraging - how can such deliberately de-personalized forces ever be countered? Through the framework of medical profiling, the authors show how the words and stories of politicians, journalists, and even health care professionals create a racialized tiering of sanitary citizens and unsanitary subjects, thus pre-creating the rationale for the co-constructed inevitability of failure to prevent the cholera epidemic.
What we are part of, HereAndNow - me as an absolute newcomer, and "you" (specifically any who have suffered because of Farc, and particularly those who know Alf and Ana) - is "The Talk" that will determine the parameters of possibility for the future. Now, I needed to know the depth of the pain and passion of which Juan wrote. The words were effective: I had nightmares of rape last night. I am absolutely grateful for the education and the respectful tone, despite the obvious upset triggered by my words. We all need to be able to say "the hard words," we cannot afford to run what Briggs and Briggs-Mantini describe as "the risks of leaving hard words out of the story" (xviii). So I hope none of you will stop confronting me on my misconceptions, ignorances, and even sheer idiocies. I cannot meet my own ethical standards if you do not insist on trying to shape them. Please do not let me off the hook.

At the same time, I believe how we characterize the real human beings who do make up the membership of Farc matters. I do not on any level agree with or condone their actions. But, let me just jump off on one of the starker facts: the forced conscription of eleven-year-old boys. Horrific, inhumane, unjust, yes. We can apply every epithet to that behavior and be correct. But what about those eleven-year-old-boys who have now grown into the young men composing some percentage of Farc's "armed forces"? They had to survive, didn't they?

How long and how persistently will we insist on punishing them for the fate they have had to live? Understand me, I am not excusing their actions. And - I refuse to put myself on some higher moral plane simply because I've never had to face the choice of killing someone or dying myself. Perhaps as an adult, now, I might, maybe, be able to take the ultimate stand and risk surrendering my own life rather than take another's. As a child? Who among us can honestly make that claim? I am sure there are some, I do not intend to diminish anyone with that bedrock altruistic clarity. In reality, though, I think those individuals are truly rare.

No, I'm not suggesting any kind of blanket amnesty. I am saying that we must invent ways of talking that maintain some acknowledgment of humanity on the other side. Evil, as Hannah Arendt has tragically explained, is banal. And, perhaps we are not all susceptible, and/or can even break out of it despite socialization. If there is this chance, is it not the best and most effective way to insert an intervention that might actually cause the larger dynamics to shift? Meanwhile, we - injured and afraid - must not forget the common core of human instincts from which any abuse of power emanates. I do not say we excuse; I do not even say we go so far as to forgive. I do say we must understand, and from this understanding forge a better way.

Google debuts knowledge project: potentially a threat to Wikipedia (check out their Commons), and also to the Earth Edition (h2g2) of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dropping Knowledge. Who knows who else out there is giving knowledge compilation a go. There is a whole genre of knowledge ecology that is quite fascinating.

As I myself become more convinced in the construction of knowledge as the only way any kind of knowledge is achieved, the importance of staying on top of how these mega-projects unfold increases. The first two promote the kind of so-called "objectivism" that has driven western science while hiding the nature of social construction. The second two may not draw attention to the fact of social construction but simply move ahead on the premise that knowledge can be built with outcome in mind.

I am relieved that some of my students this past semester are able to articulate this fact. I hope most of them "got it" at some level, even if they lack (as of yet) the language to explain what they now intuit. Who knows, maybe they all did, and some are just more reluctant than others to give me a clue! :-o

I learned about oscillations the other day... they're a type of wave (e.g., a radio frequency or mathematical function) ... I started out by puzzling how to interpret the English word into ASL....a type of rhythm...but not necessarily synchronous, it could be asynchronous... my teacher (LOFTS) explained the important feature of an upper range and a lower range that these oscillations demonstrate in the natural world. We usually see these on a graph, a very common one is a sine wave.

Now, my own personal project everytime I'm learning about a hard science, is to imagine if - and if so, how - that model serves in any way to illuminate social behavior. The deal with the wave (and no, we're not waving hello or goodbye (yet!) we're moving across space and time like an ocean tide) is this bit about the ranges. Two of them. The upper and the lower. So, at the peak of a wave there is a typical range of values, and just about all the time the peak is going to land somewhere between those values: not always at the maximum, but not always at the minimum either. Somewhere in between the two outer edges (heights, if you will) that mark the average height area where the peak will stop and turn down again. A range - not a set number! Not "the same" place, but a similar place, over and over again. Same at the bottom. Almost always, the nadir of the valley will go past a certain point (we could say depth) but not beyond another point. Not always to the furthest in the average range, not always to the shallowest in the range, but somewhere in between.

Already I'm thinking, ok, so let's take moods, emotion. Mine, for instance. :-) When I'm feeling happy, there is, in fact, a range of "happiness." There's a minimum threshold I have to pass before what I'm feeling qualifies as "happy," and it can go on for awhile until maxing out at the peak of exuberance. I don't always get to feel the most ecstatic, and I don't always get to just barely arrive, but if I'm feeling happy I've hit the zone of variation that all qualifies as happy. Being sad works the same. I've got gradations of mopey to mournful to deep grieving.

Ok, so what. BIG DEAL. Nothing new here, nothing unique! But let's say you then add some kind of periodicity to the fluctation of "ups" and "downs". Am I playing with psychology here? No doubt. But I haven't read or heard it, so as far as I'm concerned (!) this is stuff I'm figuring out on my own. (Ha!) I'm betting - besides the obvious hormonal cycles - that each individual develops their own kind of "rhythm" of emotion based on events and incidents, repetitions and aberrations in the daily phenomenon of growing up. This gets remembered in the body and - what do you bet? - was then, and is now, reinforced by language. Certain words, particular phrases, a turn in the conversation that mirrors the play of previous conversations: whammo - the emotional rhythm gets kicked in. For 'good' or 'ill', I'd wager. Equal Opportunity Emotions.

I know this is a wild idea. (Or, I assume it is a wild idea, 'cause I thought of it and people so often react to me as if I'm just a bit further out there...!) But what if the language of persons - using languages in a Bakhtinian sense - is based on patterns or rhythms of linguistic memory?

What if the "wave pattern" of our own emotional oscillations has

a) particular ranges at the top and bottom, and
b) a ir/regular periodicity?

What if language (that we take in, as well as that we put out) is the means of identification? Then, we're predisposed (perhaps) at certain times (in the periodic cycle) to 'hear' (interpret) certain phrases in particular ways, and maybe also to say things because 'it's time.'

"If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious
process that may be because speaking to someone does not
seem mysterious enough."

I'm reading an exciting critique which includes an exposition of frame conflict, The Conduit Metaphor by Michael J. Reddy, who relies upon

Schön’s dictum that frame conflicts are “immune to resolution by appeal to facts.” As he [Schön] says, “New facts have a way of being either absorbed or disregarded by those who see problematic situations under conflicting frames.” (Reddy 1979:285)

Reddy provides radical subjectivity as one example of a “frame” (what Berger and Luckmann call a “paradigm”), in order to illustrate the problem of what Schön calls “frame conflict.” A frame conflict is an alternative way of describing the communication dynamics of mis/understanding that occur when people who think through (as in “from” or “on the basis of”) different paradigms attempt to find agreement on a matter of mutual concern.

"In the afternoon, everyone on the expedition was at the gully, sectioning off the site and preparing for careful collection which eventually took three weeks. That first evening they celebrated at the camp, staying up all night, and at some stage during the evening the fossil AL 288-1 was nicknamed Lucy, after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was being played loudly and repeatedly on a tape recorder in the camp.[8]"

"Lucy," as most of us know her, was named in two ways: a proper name - randomly assigned courtesy of The Beatles :-) - and a scientific name, situating her in relationship to other fossils in a theoretical structure. That theory has been created on the basis of a logic of relationships (time - by carbon-dating, and other paleoanthropological principles) which is largely deductive. Deduction moves "from general evidence to a particular truth or conclusion." In contrast, Mendeleev's theory of the Periodic Table of the Atomic Elements induced the presence of elements we didn't yet know existed, and even enabled the creation of man-made elements. This distinction between induction and deduction might be a way (?) of explaining the power of language as a force that creates and establishes meaning.

The title of Mendeleev's work states the relational quality of his theory up front and center: The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements.

"The strange new ordering of elements according to their properties and their atomic weight led to a series of conclusions. First, that certain properties occur periodically (hence the name), then that certain places in the table had to be left blank, for undiscovered elements."