phenomenology: January 2007 Archives

Although January isn’t quite over, the winter break is. The spring semester of interpreting, teaching, and writing begins tomorrow. How have my bones handled the gift of reflection? Evil Kachina suggested the following theme:

I remember my story not as my own, but as a member of a family. Three families, actually, the biological one in which my brother and I basically raised ourselves, a chosen one which I lost, and the encompassing ‘family’ of humanity. The weaving of these three seemingly separate tales shifts from loose to tight, compacted to disbursed, distinct to conflated.

When I was working on my Master’s degree (Social Justice Education) in the mid-90s, a professor challenged me once about how far accessibility and inclusion could go. Would the scope of my own action be reduced each time I met someone with a kind of disability that I had not encountered before? I struggled with the vast expanse of non-disabled privileges that I took so much for granted: should I give them up in solidarity? Must I plan events with strict restrictions on the non-disabled, thus enabling conditions of welcome for people with disabilities?

Focusing on the physical is crucial (we are talking basic needs), but an exclusive focus on the material is limited. As siblings growing up in a ‘wannabe’ upper-middle class household, my brother and I were well tended; as consciously-living (thinking and feeling) beings we both needed more nurture than we received. That absence, those gaps, have re-appeared in strange forms over the four decades of our existence, manifesting most profoundly in our intimate relations and core sense of self. The contemporary philosophy of mutual constitution, of the pervasive and constant interplay of “self” and “environment” (relational and material), of the social/linguistic (see online) co-construction of reality, teaches that there is no linear cause-effect relationship between “who I am” and the context of what, where, when, with whom, under which conditions…there is no ‘story of me’ that makes any sense outside of the places and people populating the experience.

How does one become when the conditions for becoming are not ideal?

My current strategy, developed over years of trial-and-error (and some days it definitely feels like mostly error!), is to keep stretching my perception of the context. I think of it as a matter of adjusting the degree of focus – at what level of awareness, which range of conditions, can I find an environment that supports me being the kind of person I seek to be? Sometimes the lens must be narrow, small, even pinpoint: ”In this stressful moment, what can I say/not say that allows the conversation to continue?” Other times, the lens must be broad and encompassing: ”How much credibility do I allow mass media accounts of politics and everyday life in the Middle East before I travel there?”

The continuum of adjusting focus applies to family life, too. The immediate intimacy of present relationships (actual and felt) constitutes the closest focus: who can I be when interacting with lovers, ex-lovers, children, the extended members of their families and all of our closest friends? A few degrees removed, the biological family is that ‘container’ where I spent the early (some say formative) years of being human. When I can make connections between present behaviors/emotions/reactions/interpretations and patterns from my vaguely dim past, then I believe I gain more capacity to free myself from habits and instincts that no longer serve. I expand the range of choice concerning what it means to be a person, to be a self, to have ‘a story’ that is uniquely my own.

Extending the lens of my awareness to humanity, to the species of homo sapiens, the phrase that leaps to mind today, is 'the human race'. This label strikes me as more meaningful than 'the human species' because all of our large-scale social (corporate, political, educational, religious) institutions are premised upon notions of competition, scarcity, and hierarchy. We have inherited a social world built by our forebears as a race. The global system of interconnected technologies and money flows is running as fast as it can: we (as a species) are in such a hurry to get … somewhere. I recognize this as a social metonymy for my own life. My parents were moving up, seeking to advance their socioeconomic status. The effort and thrill of (apparent) success distracted them from some of the tasks of childrearing. I inherited the need to rush. “Here” was never sufficient; “there” was going to be better. My chosen family suffered my impatience.

It has taken years to interrupt the pell-mell, hellbent race to elsewhere and elsewhen, to find the people and places that call me to an other self, to build the structures, conditions, and skill at shifting focus to the most conducive level for becoming other than who I was originally constrained to be. Now, instead of telling the story of an existence, I can begin to tell a story of life.

"In his novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson uses the term [actually a name from mythology] Nam-shub to indicate a self-replicating meme." I am truly enjoying this novel. The plot involves a neurolinguistic virus - language that causes physical changes to brain cells: a radical version of the co-construction of meaning.

At the root of this tale's "philosophy of language" is binary code (computer programming is all done in 1's and 0's). Stephenson plays the mind-as-computer analogy to the extreme, suggesting that the insertion of a certain meme (Enki's nam-shub) into language altered cognitive functioning. In other words, that this "speech with magical force" (p. 211) introduced a disease into human thinking. Maximizing complexity, the argument Stephenson presents is that religious belief is the carrier of this disease.

So, what is a meme? The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene): "A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to MUTATION, CROSSOVER, and ADAPTATION" (Glossary based on Flake); a "viral encapsulated idea, with built-in feedback loop" (adapted from "a broad theoretical model of human communication, which [Weaver] defined as 'all of the ways by which one mind may affect another'; premised upon Shannon's foundation of "electronic signal transmission and the quantitative measurement of information flows"; and (originally) "a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); 'memes are the cultural counterpart of genes'" (Princeton WordNet).

Dawkins' original definition (focused at the level of the gene) has been expanded to apply to a wide range of cultural phenomena, including a particular use in blogging. I have to challenge the deliberateness of someone "post[ing] memes on a daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis" because it implies a guarantee that whatever is posted will be picked up. As I understand Dawkin's sense, what makes a meme a meme is precisely its operation at a level "below" or "pre" consciousness - at the genetic level. The question might be the extent to which such changes can be (if ever?) intentionally co-constructed through increasing attention to consciousness at the level of, say, the synaptic connections of the brain's neural net.

My aunt likes Byron Katie and a method of self-inquiry "based on four questions and a process called a "turnaround."

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it's true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?

The fifth step is not a question, but a kind of "trying on" by turning the statement/belief around into it's opposite and interrogating this version with the same four questions.

(I'm guessing she made her own wikipedia entry :-), as it still needs to be "wikified" - brought into alignment with standard formatting.) I'm intrigued by a juxtaposition of language (in the form of internal, conscious thinking) and an assumed external "reality" of other people's subjectivities (based on the examples given at the wikipedia site).

I can relate to what she says about her life before "The Work": "...instead of seeing what was happening, I was placing conditions on what was happening..." Yes, this is familiar. :-) But, I'm skeptical of the assurance with which she asserts that there is a "what is" when it comes to other people and their perceptions, emotions, and interpretations of "reality."

Katie's formula opens up possibilities, certainly. It provides a way of testing and demonstrating the power of language to invoke different realities, by which I mean, realities different than those we have previously enacted. More precisely, her method is a means for altering one's own identity through a process of investigating how one understands "reality" and learning to make choices for interacting with the terrain.

I've been thinking about assigning this zine to the students in Section 71, starting soon at a university near you.

Written by Christy C. Road, it is much more gritty than the selections in the Text-Wrestler.

One of the students in last fall's class loaned his copy to me. Thanks Dave.

Selected quotes:

"...we could talk about other things. We could talk about our formative heroes selling out, and about cast aside neighborhoods. We could talk about dismay and how its sometimes followed by deliverance" (Nine).

"Death was a difficult concept. I couldn't really talk about it, I could only think twice as hard.......I grew to see my friends and I as young and powerful, but not quite invincible. For once [when I found out Desiree had died], I didn't need invincibility. I realized that as real as our hurt is - fearlessness can be just as real. Invincibility was an attribute we entertained; as radicals, as manic-depressives, as optimists, as romantics, and as young people with whirlwind dispositions and fucked up experiences. But a boundary exists between what's true liveliness and what's unreal. What's tactical thrill and what's naive idealism. I never saw myself teasing or pressing a fingertip towards the edge of that boundary; not then, not ever. 'I'll be an idealist or a pessimist', I thought. Until one day, Desiree taught me about the difference between truly living and just staying alive. While you're truly living, you face danger's coils with spirit. You create emotional weapons and valiant tact. When you're just alive, you choose an unreal outlet to avoid distraction, whether the distraction is too positive or too negative. You wallow in mediocrity and evoke simplicity. Denial makes sense to you" (Fifteen).

Time (change) vs Information (fixed meaningfulness)

I have been witnessing a fascinating discussion in the course on Cultural Codes in Communication which is helping me identify tensions between the transmission and ritual views of communication in interpersonal, communicative action (an element of group dynamics). The events in this class unfolded with the routine assignment of a solid piece of ethnographic research demonstrating one particular way of “culture talking about itself” (Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact 1990 p. 1). (Find review via JSTOR.) The article is about the problem of recognition - how it is that persons are recognized as being of ‘this identity’ or belonging to ‘that group’ ("On Being a Recognizable Indian Among Indians"). Somehow, some students in the course understood that the authors were positioning themselves as authorities in determining, applying, and bestowing “recognition” of membership. If I had been teaching, I would have been tempted to return to a more careful reading of the text to show this is not the case, but to do so would have been to perpetuate a debate of “my” meaning versus “your” meaning (a style in the form of the transmission model) and done nothing to educate the class about the crucial differences between the transmission model and ritual model.

So, instead of returning to the article and finding the quotes that would counter accusations against the credibility of the authors, such as (I can’t resist!):

“Pratt, who collected most of the data, is an actively participating member of the Osage tribe. In becoming a participant observer of matters that he was already participating in, he did little to alter his usual activity, other than taking notes and becoming somewhat more focused in his attention…his questions were questions that he might well have asked as part of his ordinary pursuits” (47).

What are the matters that Pratt was already participating in? “On frequent occasions, the issues of recognition become a matter of discussion and ‘folk analysis.’ That is, Indians discuss the obvious Indianness, or lack of it, of a candidate Indian” (47).

The teacher, instead, invited a guest speaker to criticize the text and then facilitated a discussion among the students themselves, establishing the roles, identities, and practices necessary for an actual dialogue to take place in the classroom. Here, I’m talking about both the change-over-time occurring in any group as people become familiar with each other and the topic/task at hand, and also about the way the group learns to handle conflict and disagreement. Because difference was invited in, welcomed, and respected, a back-and-forth debate within narrow lines was avoided; instead, a broad-ranging investigation of the problem of recognition was actively engaged. [See here for a Hegelian lens, and here for a work by Paul Ricoeur.] The students are handling significant questions with depth and mutual regard.

I am gleaning some hints for my own research framing and problem-posing. I will gather as much “naturally-occurring speech” as I can, but most of my data will be interview-based. I need to learn to “hear” the transmission and ritual views in operation. I had the flash as I began to write this entry that there is a relationship (a metonymy?) between talk conducted within the epistemology of a transmission view of communication and dialectics, and talk conducted within the epistemology of a ritual view of communication and dialogics. It will take my lifetime to investigate potential ways that the transmission view shapes communication-in-the-present differently than the ritual view, and how tensions between these two views (when they are both present) play out in the process of negotiating meaning. They may contest or complement each other . . .

As I’m going about formulating a frame for my dissertation research, it becomes clearer that it matters where I draw the line between what will be “in” the project and what must remain “outside” of it. I always knew this, but the difference now, perhaps, is a better sense (?) of what is do-able, particularly in terms of promising an outcome. I don’t mean predicting a particular or specific result, because I do not know, now, the answers to my research problem. I do mean guaranteeing with some assurance that the problem is significant and the results of rigorous examination will be worthwhile and beneficial to the narrow field of language and interpretation studies as well as to (I hope) a broader social science. But I cannot say how the leap from the subfield of interpretation to larger fields will occur. Probably there are several possibilities. I don’t want to foreclose some by too close an interest in others. I cannot see any of them; I only intuit that the connections will become evident.

That penultimate goal must wait. I have been learning a different kind of trust the past few years and I must continue to exercise it. My mind is quick on a few things (sometimes too much so), medium with most, and just plain slow with others. Within my consciousness, a vague sense of understanding floats around definitive knowledge for a long time before it suddenly congeals into sharp coherency. Formulating the kernel of research into the institutionalization of interpretation and language processes has been like this: I've written nearly a dozen papers seeking clarity, all of them “promising” but insufficient. Then, last week, while taking notes of a lecture by my (!) cultural codes instructor, a foundational structure leapt into view. I apprehended what my intuition has been telling me lo-these-past three years.

My interest in epistemology (how we come to know what we know), cognition (more precisely, neuroscience), and perception (haphazardly categorized as “phenomenology”) suggests to me that understanding the productive effects of discourses might influence particular, relational communication choices. I’m going to have to wean myself away from the popular science literature elucidating what specializations have come to accept as knowledge. I resist, for just awhile longer. For now I relish the odd sensation of perceiving new synapses making new connections. There have been several specific time periods throughout doctoral coursework when I’ve experienced understanding snapping into view – ”Aha! – in a cascading sequence of minor revelations. ”No wonder,” I sometimes think, “some of my colleagues think I’m such a dweeb!” :-)

I wrote a while back about thin-slicing. I have nearly finished Gladwell’s book on rapid cognition. He spends a chapter discussing the face, linking the ability to discern emotional expression as akin to mind-reading: in his words, “the physiological basis of how we thin-slice other people” (213). Face recognition and object recognition are usually handled by two different parts of the brain, respectively the fusiform gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus (219), but more interesting to me are two things: the interplay between voluntary and involuntary facial muscle responses, and the evidence that simply making certain facial expressions generates corresponding physiological states.

All of us can control our expressions to varying degrees, but people exert this control only after our faces have involuntarily displayed our emotional reaction. He describes several examples, including a slow-motion microexpressions of Kato Kaelin looking like “a snarling dog” during the O.J. Simpson trial (211), the smirking double-agent, Harold “Kim” Philby (211-212), “I’m a bad guy” Bill Clinton (205-206), and a psychiatric patient, Mary (208-209), citing research from Paul Ekman, Silvan Tomkins, Wallace Friesen, and Robert Levenson (singly and in various combinations). “We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses. But, often, some little part of that suppressed emotion – such as the sense that I’m really unhappy even if I deny it – leaks out…Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. Bur our involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings” (210).

The above is based on a summary of research findings that there is a finite number of meaningful expressions and most, if not all, of these are intelligible – as in understood to express similar emotions – across cultures. These findings are gathered in a tool created by Ekman and Frisen called the Facial Action Coding System, now used by computer animators and applied in various kinds of psychological and social research (204-205).

The second point, more fascinating than the first (categorizing is cool, but inducing change is cooler), involves a claim by Ekman “that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind” (206, emphasis in original). They tested this claim rather ingeniously. Through some casual experimentation they discovered they could induce the physiological indicators of distress and anger: “As I do it [move specific facial muscles into particular facial expressions],” said Ekman, “I can’t disconnect from the [autonomic nervous] system. It’s very unpleasant, very unpleasant” (207). Two different teams of researchers documented that the pathway of internal emotion stimulus and facial emotional expression works both ways. “These findings may be hard to believe, because we take it as given that first we experience an emotion, and then we may – or may not – express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process” (208, emphasis in original).

Claims made by Gladwell are contested by Posner.

I'm observing a colleague teaching Cultural Codes of Communication. Homework for the first night included reading James Carey (foundational) and a series of questions, including what might be of interest for students to explore in this course. I've already snatched a quote from the Carey article for teaching this spring (!), and my brain is in high gear concerning my prospectus. Wow. Did I intuit that observing this class would provide some structure and motivation?! :-)

I've also got the blog on my mind. As a mechanism for transmission - it (I) seek to disseminate information, but not really. I've always hoped it would be more dialogic than monologic. It is true that through the blog, I organize certain symbols in a more-or-less personal attempt to impose order on my experiences. Blogging has become - for me - a ritual that positions me to/with the world in a certain way. I've noted several times over the past year or so that a function of writing publicly as I do is to write myself into being. By projecting a certain performance of self, of identity, into the public sphere (invoking accountability among other things), the effect doubles back, enabling me to better live up to the ideals I espouse.

It isn't as simple as that, though. The words I write, the symbols I use, become me - rather, I become the sign of the words (see p. 12, referencing Burke). Carey says, "We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced" (p. 16).

Finally, I better understand some of the unease about my blogging "real life" (as perceived, experienced, and interpreted by me), because my writing establishes a context which also positions those whom I mention in particular roles or even identities. It may be a matter of establishing a "history of order" on a minute, microsocial scale. For years, colleagues and I have debated the way my blogging "endow[s] significance, order, and meaning in the world by the agency of [my] own intellectual processes" (Carey, 13). We (or at least I) was confused with the positioning of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. into roles relative to "the blog": of being readers, nonreaders, commenters, noncommenters, advocates, and/or adversaries. That was a limited view.

I keep recalling a friend who said, "If I don't read it, it's not there."

I am thinking, at this moment, that much of this kind of framing is with the transmission model of communication uppermost in mind. Surely I am taken with the ability to transmit my words across spacetime. Maybe the tension could be better explained through an overlay of the ritual lens? The transmission model is premised upon control as the goal of communication: control over distance and control over people. I resist the accusation of power-mongering, but ritually....what sharedness is at risk?

I'm stealing Julia's wish for the New Year, reminding me of the sentiment:

2007, here we come!