PM dynamics: September 2004 Archives

I got some confirmation from one of Eileen's examples that time is perceived and experienced differently by the Deaf than the hearing. It actually came up a couple times, in a couple of different ways. Betty talked about it in terms of "silence" in an example she gave in the Discussion part of the workshop about what it means to be an ally. She said, "Hearing people hate silence!" I think the emphasis on silence might be ... not mistaken, but confused with the experience of time. When there IS a "silence," hearing people experience the passage of time. This is what makes them nuts, not the silence itself. (Which is not to say that Hearing people like or are comfortable with silence; most Americans are not.) Deaf people, however, are used to experiencing the passage of time during "visual silences" when they are waiting for eye contact to resume. This is what is happening when an audience member comes to stage to make a comment, and the presenter (and the rest of the audience) waits until that person returns to their seat before responding. It's a form of turn-taking. It shows respect. It is not experienced (I don't think) as "wasting time."

Confusion was the main emotion at most of the Allies conferences (spilling out sometimes as rage, sometimes as grief). I strongly believe that the Allies conferences were an important attempt to try and address some of the deep sociopolitical differences among and between Deaf folk and interpreters. I do believe that many individuals benefitted personally from the experience, but overall, the conferences did not move us toward any kind of collective understanding. Why they failed, given the good intentions and positive desires of the founders, participants, and later planners, has been a puzzle that I continue to think about.

First, let me record what happened today.

I played this game as an icebreaker with the 6th graders today - Day 1 of "media literacy" as part of the Health Curriculum. Each person has to give three statements about themself, two that are true and one that's a lie. The others have to guess which is a lie. For instance, I said:

I was born in Rhode Island.
Dogs are my favorite pets.
I go to school in Massachusetts.

Can you guess? :-) Anyway, the kids have fun with it and so did I. However, one "truth" threw me (and the teacher). He (the teacher) recovered and tried to save it but we'd already missed the moment and agreed we'll have to come back to it. One boy shared, "My sister died." When he said it, I had an odd reaction - like, that's not something someone would joke about it, and when one of the kids guessed that was the lie and he said, "No, it's true" there was a bit of a silence. Then a kid guessed one of the other statements correctly...we started to move on. A kid said, "Did your sister really die?" He said, "yeah"....bit of a silence, then the teacher shared his sister had died too but the next kid (at my request) was starting to share their three statements.

I was too caught off guard. We "should" have dealt with it as we had some of the other topics that came up, by asking who else had lost a sibling or member of their family, but somehow it was shocking in comparison with the other kinds of statements. Anyway, the teacher and I agreed that we'd come back to it at some point.

Well, I don't know, but I would guess that we ended up about where Lisa was hoping we'd end up in our discussion last night. :-) I was noticing how oriented I am to "structure of feeling", how Marxist-oriented (or at least well-grounded) many (most? all?) of the new cohort is, and now wondering about poststructuralist group dynamics. :-) Someone was telling me that the first round of this class was tough (in some respects) because the students had such different interests....I imagine we do too, but we pulled off quite a participatory discussion that (from my subjective space of point of view, smile) was a thinking-together which generated new knowledge (although to what degree and how much varied, I'm sure). Probably I'm in this mode because of an intellectual interaction between this class and Stephen's (where we're discussing inclusive democracy, how to make room for difference).

In this class, I'm still struggling with the notion of overdetermination, which is used by Althusser and Freud, among others. My penchant for group dynamics and forms of social metonymy (when the microsocial "stands in" for the macrosocial), has me thinking about the valences individuals bring to group membership & participation....which I'd just bet can easily be overdetermined in a parallel way as Gibson-Graham et al used it (building on Althusser).

Anyway, congrats to Erin for nailing the inverse equation of "suffering" being the possible overdeterminant instead of "class"!

Stephen made a typical grand entrance, kvetching about the campus cop who hassled him en route. :-) He's also pulled his usual stunt of mixing us up with an undergrad (welcome Jamie! I'm sure you'll fit right in) and given us an impressive lot of books to read and ideas to ponder.

Viveca (pushing her statute of limitations, as she says), Donna, and Brian drove most of the discussion last night; usefully for me, as I became aware of some huge gaps in my basic knowledge. Just when am I supposed to read Habermas (I missed the recommended title, but I gather its 1200 pages, and he authored many pieces) and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy?

Meanwhile, I enjoyed Wolin's piece in Benhabib on "Fugitive Democracy." (PDF available for download - just search.) The concept of fugitive democracy is in many of his works.

What struck me is its resemblance to the conceptualization James and I have of "problematic moments" in which contesting/contrasting discourses emerge simultaneously in talk and a group must choose between recognition or repression.

Overall, everyone's voice got in at some point (a feature of Stephen's classes which I value highly) and I'm psyched. (I did squelch a desire to just let out a holler on a few different occassions.) :-)

This is the 2nd time I've read about this in Zohar's Quantum Self. It's starting to sink in, although now I recognize it as only one of those nine currently existing ways of interpreting the connection between these states of quantum unity. "The crucial distinguishing feature of Bose-Einstein condensates is that the many parts that go to make up an ordered system not only behave as a whole, they become whole; their identities merge or overlap in such a way that they lose their individuality entirely" (p. 83, italics in original).

"A quantum physicist would say...