PM dynamics: July 2004 Archives

"[Informant] Thomas Speigal['s] warning about judging the past from the perspective of the present, about the simultaneous solidification of boundaries and blurring of distinctions between victims and perpetrators" (p. 217).

This quote continues her analysis of the commemoration parade, in a chapter she calls "Dis-membered Border". This seems (to me, smile) to parallel my relational struggle - we are contesting who was/is "victim" and who was/is "perpetrator." I see the ways in which both of us did both, AND my "20/20 hindsight" perceives the discursive evidence (what was said and what was not said) in much sharper relief than I heard at the time. I need to learn to hear/interpret differently (or at least with other possibilities in mind) and I think this is the crux of acting into a new discursive future when one recognizes a PM.

Berdahl's work doesn't ground the discursive "collision" in any specific microsocial instant of real interaction - she juxtaposes what people said in one context with what they say in another context. This is what I hope to do with the critical discourse analysis paper that I intend to write analysing the key new finding (a discovery!) from the workshop in Alaska. At any rate, I'm also wondering if there is something here that might lend itself to James' and my history paper. I've been struggling with the Churchill/Bush examples and need to work out more clearly why I don't think they will work....or at least, that they represent a very different strategy/approach than anything we've done previously.

This book by Berdahl is amazing. I think it has some gems that James and I could use for the history paper. And the parallelism with/for me and [the FP] is serendipitous, to say the least. Check this out:

"..memory is an interactive, malleable, and highly contested phenomenon...asymmetrical...and the interplay between local and extralocal processes of remembering" (p. 207). And this quote from an informant in the study: "The further we come away, the more we scrub ourselves clean" (p. 215).

Berdahl is exploring the change between the lived day-to-day experience of residents of this small town on the border between East and West Germany and their later commemoration of it after �the Wende� � reunification. Many things have occurred in the larger national discourse that allows these residents to discursively position themselves as victims (and accuse others of perpetration)�.the parallels I see are simply around how each person constructs memory and how the telling of events builds toward stories which can become reified. The deepest level of struggle now, for me, is to resist the momentum of my own discursive story and find a way to hear and take in another story without overlaying an habitualized interpretation upon it. Just to allow the possibility would be a significant change�

Been hearing about George Soros lately - his anti-Bush campaign. Came across this link regarding his views on reflexivity.

A quote to entice my SOM colleagues: "I am in fundamental disagreement with the prevailing wisdom. The generally accepted theory is that financial markets tend towards equilibrium, and on the whole, discount the future correctly. I operate using a different theory, according to which financial markets cannot possibly discount the future correctly because they do not merely discount the future; they help to shape it."

And one for Marta in particular: "Thinking participants cannot act on the basis of knowledge. Knowledge presupposes facts which occur independently of the statements which refer to them; but being a participant implies that oneís decisions influence the outcome."

I agree with him: "There is an active relationship between thinking and reality, as well as the passive one which is the only one recognized by natural science and, by way of a false analogy, also by economic theory. I call the passive relationship the ìcognitive functionî and the active relationship the ìparticipating function,î and the interaction between the two functions I call ìreflexivity.î Reflexivity is, in effect, a two-way feedback mechanism in which reality helps shape the participantsí thinking and the participantsí thinking helps shape reality in an unending process in which thinking and reality may come to approach each other but can never become identical."

He's applying this to financial markets, mostly; and I've applying it to human relationships, mostly.

He's been a hell of a lot more successful than me! %-)

Reading this amazing book, Where the World Ended: Re-unification and Identity in the German Borderland by Daphne Berdahl.

She quotes Gupta and Ferguson (1992:18): "we want to contend that the notion of borderlands is a more adequate conceptualization of the 'normal' locale of the postmodern subject" (p. 6). Berhdahl continues: "In this view, the borderland is as much a metaphor as a physical space, or what Roger Rouse has called 'an alternative cartography of social space' (1991:9).

"[The borderland] is a site of cultural confrontation, articulation, and, to a large extent, penetration, where struggles over the production of cultural meanings occur in the context of asymmetrical relations between East and West" (Berdahl, p. 9).

While Berdahl is studying a particular and specific geophysical location (the town of Kella), the concepts upon which she founds her analysis could apply to cyberspace and other locations as well.

James' idea for revising the history paper includes using two historical examples of PMs - one when Churchill finally sways the War Councel not to make any appeasement type approach to Hitler, and another one involving Bush and the whole terrorism/Iraq business. After watching F 9-11, I started wondering about the meeting with Richard Clarke on September 12. I'm prepping for the online class' session on democracy and the internet, but came across this article summarizing Clarke's interview with 60 Minutes.

The other day, the new professor, Emily West, was in town and Carolyn hosted her, Leda, and Erica for dinner. I hung out with them for a bit, through a bit of clothes shopping and lemoncello....Erica was teasing herself about something she'd said or done (which for the life of me I can't recall), and made a comment to the effect of how it could be taken out of context as part of a rumor mill. I said, "I could help with that! The benefits of living in Carolyn's house." A silence befell the group. The conversation struggled to get going again, and I soon excused myself.

Pure speculation, but whaddaya wanna bet my comment reminded them of my status as a graduate student, eliciting a collision between a faculty discourse of colleagial teasing and the threat (which I never intended to be taken as real) of a student discourse which could verge on the disparaging...? I meant to tease, and I was invoking my student status, but I didn't anticipate that it might strike a nerve of .... doubt? :-) (Raz "The Romanian Case" - near the end of these conference abstracts - would say something like, "Steph can find a PM anywhere!")

This book by John Lukacs has pointed James to a new focus for our PM paper for Rethinking History.

Some quotes: "...from macrocosmic to microcosmic history, of a sort" (p. xii).

"Tightly focused views are often useful, while there is a kind of broadmindedness that can be flat" (p. xiii).

The title of chapter one, "The Hinge of Fate" evokes a very PM-like imagery. :-)

"Any historian worth his salt knows how to eschew monocausal explanations of human events - that is, the attribution of a single motive to any given decision.* And there is another necessary distinction, the one between motives and purposes (the first a push of the past, the second the pull of the future), for rare are also those instances when the purposes of a decision are singular or exclusive" (p. 41-41).

*Footnote references Bond, Britain, France and Belgium.