phenomenology: October 2006 Archives

I see the Intuitive Acupuncturist this afternoon; I'm curious what she'll read in my body. Three weeks ago, I teased her about the pain - so not my thing. I don't recall the gist of the conversation, now, in terms of what was actually said about my psychospiritual being. (Note: "psychospiritual" is a term from the Alexander Technique. Kate would always ask, "How's your psychospiritual being today?" I don't know if the IA would use this concept herself.)

Actually, now that I pause (considering how to return from that digression, haven't seen Kate for a year or more), it might be this was the day the IA mentioned shame. It didn't resonate for me at the time and she said, "Sometimes I speak too soon." My puzzled question at the time was, "Is that for me or for me with others?" (I recall Spare Man telling me, "You make people feel bad." gulp)

That day (only three weeks ago!) the IA put needles only in my left side, ankle and wrist. The one in my ankle nearly sent me off the table, literally. Thank god the pang is brief. She left me "to cook" for however long, and what ensued was an intense awareness of "action" in my body. I explained it to her when she returned. "It felt as if the entire left side of my body filled with light. Not only was my entire internal space bright and clear, I was also light in mass." What was particularly striking was how transparent, clean, and open my left side was in contrast with my right. The right half of my bodily interior was dark, heavy, opaque. Nothing going on; no movement whatsoever. Still. When I became aware of the sharp bisection I started trying to draw light from the left side over to the right, to permeate the darkness.

"See, you're good at this shit," the IA teased back. I told her I still blog about her, and she said she thought it was an interesting bit of synchrony that her initials were IA, since her field of study is called Integrated Awareness. (Related (?) article on somat awareness.) I've been having more synchronic moments in the past month or so than ever in my life.

Pagan beliefs intrigue me. I'm struck by parallels between the 'white/european' celebration of Samhain and the Mexican tradition of The Day of the Dead.

Disability comes in all shapes, sizes, modes, and effects. There are legally-recognized versions and emotional varieties. These, or any number of indeterminate cognitive and psychiatric peculiarities, can interfere with intimate relationships and social interactions. For instance, people look at me and see a woman with a mullet who appears physically fit. What do they know? No, I don’t meet the federal criteria of “impairment of a major life function” (Americans with Disabilities Act 1990). I can breathe, walk, grasp, talk, feel, think, and otherwise function within the range of physicality deemed normal. Who decided to limit “normal” and impose such a measure for judging character or the potential worth of one’s contributions to society? Individuals will not claim responsibility, of course. Such boundaries and markers of difference are established ‘out there’ by impersonal forces of culture. The representations are propagated through the media, religion, and a disturbing range of incidental, informal taboos and negative sanctions. Questioning these norms is often considered problematic, disruptive, or unpleasant. When I do wonder about the so-called normal, people situate me clearly: I am deviant.

Fitting few standard stereotypes, I have learned to live through language. Sentiments not spoken affected me first. Often, the untold still wounds me. The silence of non-recognition echoes in words I hear and reverberates in perceptions left unsaid. The speech of my family was self-focused and therefore distancing, functional not relational, unaware and unreflective. My parents opposed each other on gender's fulcrum: mom never swore, dad often did. Anger was the palpable emotion of my formative years. I checked out, merely passing as present. When I woke up, twenty-seven years of my life were gone. How can one speak from pain without blame? I yearned for a language I did not know.

I needed words I could feel, a language that would bring me into my body. I sought belonging among lesbian communities and found that we were not much better at handling distinction than the dominant heterosexual society was at accepting us. Our bodies, full of longing, could not manage questions of dis/ability: our own aesthetics, potentials, possibilities. What is valuable if the body itself is constrained? I have never consistently been able. I fail much more frequently than I succeed. I celebrate small triumphs with all the gusto of athletic championships. Why not?! Yet I notice how the smallest movements can invoke urgency, feeding speed, haste, a rush to . . . where? Meaning constructed by assumption, cues missed, opportunities lost: wisdom becomes elusive. How much have I learned from friends' contemplating solitary visual horizons, or analyzing power’s most intimate nuances? Stillness inspires depth. I lament how long it has taken me to learn to enjoy listening for its own sake.

I cannot explain the random movement of the universe (or the privileges of being white and middle-class) that brought me into contact with Deaf people and American Sign Language. I spent years training to interpret others’ words, to translate their meanings into sensibility for those who could not see. Through signing, I discover my own emotions, investigating the boundaries of my expressive capacities. This practice, of sensing and conveying the intellectual and emotional meanings of others, prepared the ground for me to expand my range. Through this visual-gestural language I excavated buried wounds and static ambitions. The embodied kinesthetics of signing ASL allowed access to hidden and repressed parts of myself.

Through friendships, relationships, teaching and parenting I have observed the effect of words to inspire or deaden, enliven or thwart, create or sunder meaningful relationships. Uttered words (signed or spoken) leave their imprint yet vanish into insubstantial memory. Written down, words are a commitment. I mean this, right now. Writing was not, at first, something I felt called to do. It does not come easily, as signing usually does. The labor of compressing four-dimensional geometrical perception into one-dimensional linear text remains a challenge. I practice daily. When I write, I feel the energy of my being streaming out into the world. I am here. I matter. I want to make a difference. I care.

I sign to know myself. I write to live.

I wrote this piece, Language as Motion, as an example of the "Self-in-Contradiction" essay that is one of the options for the "personal/identity narrative" assigned to students in the introductory level writing course I'm currently teaching. There are a couple of friends who will recognize themselves in this piece (thank you), and I have to give some credit to Just-in-Time, who got us lost in traffic yesterday in Boston. While we were discussing writing as a craft, another part of my brain was mulling this attempt.

I am also conscious of the timing. Language set-in-motion through the last several semesters of blogging and constructing public writing environments for students is coming to some kind of turning point. The theory of language-as-action meets with (a) practical reality of language-in-use.

"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.

We were supposed to include Robin by videoconference but the universe has decreed speaker phone. How old-fashioned! :-(

Question 1 (on theory) related Poststructuralism, Language and Power: "How and to what extent are power and language related in poststructuralist thinking? How does the concept of 'dialectics' figure in this relation beween power and language? Feel free to address the questions from any angle you choose. Be specific and precise in your discussions."

I will (so I say!! Did I really do this?!!)draw from a select corpus of continental philosophy to respond to this question: Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Bakhtin’s Discourse and the Novel, Althusser’s essay, “Three Notes on Discourse,” and Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology.

Question 2 (on a speciality area) regards Critical Organization Communication: "While there is increasing emphasis among critical organizational communication scholars on intercultural communication in the workplace, there is little to no attention paid to the uses (or heteroglossic forces) of language in multilingual spaces. In this question I want you to: a) discuss the epistemological assumptions about language (its function, usage, etc.) in critical organizational communication scholarship; b) note the impact of these assumptions on our understanding of the dynamics of intercultural/multilingual workplaces, and c) explicate the possibilities for utilizing problematic moments as an alternative epistemological stance from which a theory and methodology of language use in multilingual organizational contexts might be derived."

I began, "Addressing the question of language use in multilingual work spaces remains a challenge."

Question 3 (on a research method) concerns Participatory Action Research: "For the following question you will assume that you are applying to a major foundation for a research grant. Although the foundation has previously funded proposals for qualitative research, the funded projects have been fairly conservative in their approach (i.e., providing hypotheses or research questions, criteria for validity and reliability, and a more deductive than inductive approach to the study). Your project centers around the use of participatory action research to study the interpreting process of the EU Parliament. In addition to clearly defining the participants and constituency for your research, (i.e., who is involved in the process and who will benefit from the research), you will need to present coherent specific arguments for the criteria mentioned above as well as specific need for the research and sustainability of the project."

What do I know? "Concerns with qualititative research have primarily to do with scientific rigour, particularly in the realms of reliability and validity."

Question 5 (a research tool) on applied interpretation theory: "Taking “Encounters with Reality” as illustrative of a variety of indigenous concerns related to the act of interpreting between hearing and non-hearing cultures. Recalling your responses to the questions about Critical Discourse Analysis, briefly describe what the status of such a book would have as data in your project. (specific scenarios inserted later)"

"This text is an example of what Ebru Diriker (2005) calls a de-contextualized meta-discourse."

Question 4 (my dissertation area) on Critical Discourse Analysis. "In the time allotted, please consider the relationship between Critical Discourse Analysis and what you imagine to be its utility as a tool for your project.

Part 1: Theory: What is it about discourse analysis that is particularly illuminating of the moment in which the EU finds itself? Using the discussion presented by your choice of two different theorists, address what critical discourse analysis offers to your project that a purely textual reading of what people say through translators does not (i.e., what does HOW people say things reveal that WHAT they say does not)? How do the former and the latter complement each other and what ontological status does each have as data?

Part 2: Application: Turning more specifically to your project, how do you seek to collect the two types of data and what do you think they will reveal about your concerns around power and democracy?"

Ha ha! I actually answered this! :-) "The two theorists I’ve selected for this response are Jan Blommaert and Mikhael Bakhtin."

Question 6 (a speciality area) on Democracy. "Ziarek notes that

“The ethos of becoming poses and redefines the question of agency and freedom of historically constituted subjects: no longer seen as an attribute or a possession of the subject, freedom is conceptualized as an engagement in praxis.”

Using this quote as a jumping off point, provide some reasoning first for the use of dissensus in radical democracy, potential critiques of this approach and an example, via the EU Parliament, of how agency and freedom might be enacted."

Uh oh. Longest run-on sentence in the world? "Dissensus, a term chosen by Ziarek (An Ethics of Dissensus) because of its “carnal implications” and implication of both “meaning and sensibility,” enables the inclusion of both primary forms of human living (being) in the political, decision-making realm: that of co-constructed social meanings (the relational) and that of intrasubjective phenomenology (the experiences and perceptions of/by “self” ~ however conceived). Her direct argument involves the necessity of embodiment and its valorization as a source of knowledge."