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.
phenomenology: March 2006 Archives
Did some research on honeybees this past week and found the Latin, Hymenoptera Apis mellifera.
I'm wondering about etymology of hymen, because Derrida plays with its inside/outside doubled nature. It appears to have only minimal crossover from referring to a thin skin or membrane to ... the wings of a genus of insects.
Honeybees have two kinds of dances to indicate the location of food: the round dance and the waggle dance. Waggling (!) involves fixing the coordinates of the sun with the hive and the pollen. Awesome.
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....
"Many physicists today say the waves that symbolize quantum possibilities are so fragile they collapse with the slightest encounter with their environment."
This is the central point of a fairly scathing critique of What the Bleep, Down the Rabbit Hole, the successor to the first badly made, overly proselytizing What the Bleep film about quantum physics and consciousness.
The point is that connections (a.k.a. dialectics?), as shown more in "I heart Huckabees" are the roots of structure, rather than any configuration of disparate elements. I would argue, though, that fragility in and of itself doesn't rule out the possibility of intentional change. It does rule out the possibility of controlled or directed change: outcomes might be probable but they are never, ever certain, most especially in human affairs.
Wouldn't you know that Wikipedia has a link on discourse? :-) I followed some of the debate on the Association of Internet Researchers Listserv (last fall). There was a strong bias to traditional sources. Not because they're traditional (which doesn't hurt) but because of the peer review process (which has plenty of its own problems, eh?). I came down on the side of allowing students to use online sources for data and as a beginning for research, but that "facts" should be verified through an academic library.
Then I read the Wired 14.03 ping by Joi Ito, who said:
"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).
Now, why does Nietzsche (or the translator?) need to use this word, acroamatic oral would suffice? Is it because he needs to emphasize both the speaking (oral) and hearing (auditory)? Or because it is confined only to the Aristotelian method? But what delineates this mode as necessarily esoteric?
Derrida clarifies (if it can be called that!): "Abstraction itself: the ear can close itself off and contact can be suspended because the omphalos of a disjointed body ties it to a dissociated segment of the father" (1985:36). Ok, the omphalos here is the scar where the umbilical cord used to be attached. Is he arguing (metaphorically) that the ability to 'turn off listening' is an act of death/dying comparable to cutting the umbilical cord to one's mother, a.k.a. "life"? And, therefore, that this ability (to not listen) is only possible through some "tie" to a similarly-scarred feature of male parentage/parenting?
(The whole mother-father dichotomy is so riddled with heterosexuality I find it somewhat awkward to wrap my head around.)
Derrida argues that Nietzsche borrowed his fame in advance (took on a debt) by extending credit to his name. He argues the unfixability of the date of the signing of this loan despite the fact that Nietzsche did date and sign "an outwork, an hors d'oeuvre,, an exergue or a flysheet whose topos, like (its) temporality, strangely dislocates the very thing that we, with our untroubled assurance, would like to think of as the time of life and the time of life's récit, of the writing of life by the living – in short, the time of autobiography” (11).
The whole passage puts in mind of that song about the Cherokee: Indian Reservation.
Second lesson today. Ten degree improvement in 20 minutes. Supposedly (!), this means my "psychological system is very elastic". With practice, I ought to be able to warm my hands at will, regardless of external (or internal) stressors: this is known as field independence. This paper by Musser places field independence/dependence firmly within cognitive studies and examines its affects on learning.
These definitions seem limited - bounded by the assumptions of cognitive science. They are useful, in context. My first association of the term, field independence, is with Gestalt theory and group relations, particularly the ability to self-authorize.
