phenomenology: January 2008 Archives

Friends of my friend were kidnapped in Colombia over the weekend.

Maria Claudia popped up in chat Monday, "Today is a weird day," she wrote.
"Why?"
"Two of my best friends were kidnapped last night."
"Oh my god."

It is real. Violence creeps closer, no matter how hard we try to keep it at bay, no matter how thickly we deny that it could happen to us or those we love.

They were on vacation at a calm, quiet community along the coast of Colombia - their homeland - and took a boat ride with other tourists (a total of six were taken). Maria Claudia sent me a photo of the young couple, they look So Happy Together!

I've been keeping their faces in mind, envisioning them safe, imagining processes that will lead to their release. A pastiche of memories and associations float in and out of consciousness. The young man in Qabatiya, Palestine, who argued there is no solution for the Palestinians except to increase the violence until the world forces Israel out; the apparently base "human" instinct of aggression and need for power/control - and how this is exacerbated by constant and unrelenting exposure to the prosperity of others, and how we, the others, persist with our pleasures: intent upon our own islands of happiness amidst great suffering.

FARC. Sure, I know the acronym. Well, I've read it. Heard it. The Spanish acronym translates to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The history of the group is complicated - associated with a communist movement and the illegal drug trade. FARC has been around since 1964; they are strong and organized enough to run an internal government (called a secretariat) with large-scale organizational strategy conferences, and have been involved in international peace processes. In other words, they are not just going to go away.

Their tactics are abominable, but their ideological goals are not - at least, if they intend to live what they say they seek, then they are in a weird bedfellow relationship with many contemporary peace activists and anti-neoliberal-capitalists. As I say, IF they are primarily motivated by "fighting against privatization of natural resources [and] multinational corporations," then these are aims shared widely. That they use paramilitary violence (while ostensibly arguing for its end), is qualitatively - but not necessarily substantively - different from the official uses of military (and other) violence sanctioned by democratic and communist governments worldwide. The "other violence" is less overtly horrific, but the violences done by policy are part of what FARC ostensibly says they are against. I'm hedging, here, for a couple of reasons.

1. I am just learning the blunt outline of the conflict, let alone any of its nuances.
2. If Ana and Alf are to be released, it will be because there are ways to talk with FARC, not only against them.
3. To talk with them means to allow them some benefit of doubt.
4. What kind of doubt? That there is a nobility buried somewhere underneath the deliberate and active use of physical, mental, and emotional terrorizing.
5. On the chance that those honorable intentions can be surfaced and given life in ways that alter the contours of the opposing sides,
6. with the hope that the conflict can actually shift, in order that
7. others may be saved through the prevention of future acts of violence and
8. the aspirations of the FARC community can be legitimately satisfied.

I cannot help but draw parallels to the situation in Palestine. Israel must withdraw. This is the physical and institutional fact. Israelis must move out of the only-always-temporary comfort of The Bubble, must surrender their attachment to the story/history of their own horrific victimization. We in the US must do the same regarding our intent to bolster our status regardless of the fate of others - especially those we know are different; those who think, feel, believe, and perceive the world on other terms than those with which we are most familiar.

We - humanity - must find a way for difference, plurality, and heterogeneity to coexist.

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

This was too.... what.... risky? an idea when I imagined it as a promo for a conference on communication hosted by my department - with the idea that the actual artifacts would be imagined and invented by my peers, cuz I wouldn't have the first idea about HOW to actually do it. :-)

I got the idea reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

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."