phenomenology: July 2005 Archives

“People look around and wonder which backpack will change or end their life…” – Annmarie Sauer for the Chloride Epitaph

I haven’t felt suspicious, or under suspicion, too much, myself this summer. Yet the question of whether or not I ought to be is often there, just below the surface, straining for some subtle signal to spring it loose.

For all the differences that I can recognize, I don’t feel so far from my own cultural foundations. The pace is slower but the punctuation of events, the rhythm of daily life, seems about the same. I have not felt constrained in expressing myself, indeed perhaps I have been a bit more free to do so? Or is the sense of this the unconscious privilege of ‘americanness’ that keeps me unaware of people’s reactions, of their sense of being overwhelmed? At least I’ve been getting some coaching, lately. :-) One of these days I'll get to Claim [My] Treasure.

Discourse for 30/7/2005:
We live inside the act of discourse.
~ George Steiner, Language and Silence, 1967

This conference is coming up in about two weeks. I finally began work on the presentation I'd like to share....if it's not too late. I've had more logistical difficulties navigating my participation there...from postage to wire transfers to confirming with my long-suffering roommate-to-be...

Imagine a life where one's awareness of the world is measured by knowledge of "wind and swell". Is it only romantic to picture the waters of the world connected in one fluid system? To pursue a life on the basis of low-pressure systems?

I learned that until ten years ago the swell was very predictable. Surfers could predict, seasonally, where the largest waves would be, where the storm systems tend to develop, and when. Now, these rhythms are much less reliable. They were historically so consistent that ancient (?) Hawai'ians could navigate by feeling the swell and orienting to the stars, sun, and moon.

I devoured Absolution Gap on the flight back to Germany from San Antonio. Contemporary physics and intrapersonal recognition hooked me the most. It’s the last book (?) in an epic SF series by Alastair Reynolds; I read the others while in Europe last summer. The characters really grew on me, I have to say (I didn’t find them all that compelling at first, they weren’t very nice). I was a bit unsatisfied with the conclusion though, as it’s given as if the right choice simply takes care of the current (huge) threat. That’s why I wonder if another book might be in the making? For the conclusion to be sensible one had to recall the vast scale of interspecies interaction Reynolds invokes. If I put it in Goffman’s terms, the levels of lamination generated by transformations of the frame are as big as anyone I’ve ever read, including classics like The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov, and you were on your own to keep events in context. (My memory might be improving with age (?) because I was actually able to do so....!)

I’m more than halfway through Goffman’s Frame Analysis, subtitled “An Essay on the Organization of Experience” (described by Brian as “not an essay, that’s a f*cking tome!”). Robin’s recommendation was right on target. (As was the other text by Deborah Tannen, Framing in Discourse.)

Goffman uses the obvious changes in stage props over time as evidence to “alert us to the expectation that framing does not so much introduce restrictions on what can be meaningful as it … open[s] up variability” (emphasis added, 238). Here I am chafing against the limits when the natural capacity to adjust to all manner of framings and transformations indicates possibility! “Differently put, persons seem to have a very fundamental capacity to accept changes in organizational premises which, once made, render a whole strip of activity different from what it is modeled on and yet somehow meaningful . . .” (238). To wit, teaching “experientially” instead of traditionally, and the capacity of Jeff at UNH to apply communication theory in practice vs the inability of others to recognize the possibility of recasting teaching in an as yet meaningful way. Others (going unnamed to protect the innocent and the guilty) mistrust: “. . . that these systematic differences can be corrected for and kept from disorganizing perception, while at the same time involvement in the story line is maintained” (238). Right? Goffman is saying that the differences between the model and its reorganization are systematic and therefore sensible. “Correcting for” doesn’t indicate “fixing”, rather it indicates the ability to adjust to a different logic without losing one’s perceptive connectivity to the situation and persons in it.

I’m thinking of the degrees of realism and consistency imposed as standards for interpreting practice. In the enactment of interpreting, there seems to be a quite narrow range of acceptability (a tight frame?): EP interpreters and SL interpreters both talk about realism (as measured by the disappearance of the interpreter). To become visible, to appear as one’s own person (or even as the character of the interpreter?), is a violation of consistency, marked in SL interpreting by natural criticism of INTERRUPTING and TAKING OVER.

bicyclemark recommends radiohumper, and the first post I read makes it clear why. Gotta see this one!

He also recommends Ashbloem: