One of the New York Times lead stories, Shiite’s Tale: How Gulf With Sunnis Widened, opens with a microsocial version of the macrosocial dynamics which has overtaken Iraqi politics. The cycle is vicious...previous macrostructures inspire (infect?) microsocial interactions which, in their turn, lead to widespread social (cultural, political, religious) patterns. Effective interventions have to occur at both (all) levels - and be integrated with each other: those individuals who can do the emotional and intellectual labor of disengaging themselves from the dialectic-in-effect must also manage to maintain positions of political influence and become rhetorically effective at using language to exert voice.
research sources: August 2007 Archives
An email from a colleague came with this quotation by Frantz Fanon:
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
Weirdness.
I woke up this morning freaking out that I've shared my current work with someone who may actually "steal" my ideas. I've sent the paper I wrote for Critical Link 5 to four people (one academic, two interpreters from the European Parliament, and a fellow graduate student). It is the academic I'm worried about - only because weeks have passed, and a few emails from me, and no acknowledgement (yet).
My first wave of concern occurred within a few days of sending my article (per request of this academic) on July 25. I had just officially submitted it by the CL5 deadline of July 20, 2007.
Much has been happening in certain areas of my personal life that may incline me toward more suspiciousness than usual: I actually hope this is a case of paranoid transference! Then, this morning's headline story from The New York Times gave me more reason to consider external influences:
“Trust was shaken today,” said Thomas Mayer, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. “Credit depends on trust. If trust disappears, then credit disappears, and you have a systemic issue.”
I know it seems like quite a stretch, but I can imagine my whiff of fearfulness as an example of social metonymy. Here I am in my own private little bubble of "steph-ness", dealing with the current challenges and changes washing through my life, and sensing amorphous "things".... am I picking up on a general gestalt (such as the worldwide grief - that I was surprised to share so intensely - when Princess Di was killed) and importing it into the particular performance of my own being?
I witnessed a clear instance of social metonymy the other day, observing a group during a staff meeting. The newest member of the business happened to be the last person to have a turn during the warm-up/check-in activity. I was amazed at how leisurely the group was at filling each other in on their family lives, personal successes, and rewarding experiences from the office. No one seemed bored! There was a palpable sense of caring and acceptance, indicated mostly through humor and teasing, but also through thoughtful follow-up questions and visible signs of affirmation (the nonverbals of eye contact, body posture, and nodding). The last person spoke of the warm welcome and supportive environment, sharing their decision to use this workplace as a site where (my paraphrase) "I can be me." The accumulation of individual performances of "self" in this workgroup have created a collective culture that this newcomer was able not only to say (as in describe) but to actually embody, to enact with heartfelt sentiment. The clarity of integration between intention, action, and language about the intentions and actions shows how well this person will fit into the group (a confirmation of the interview/hiring process).
Dang neat stuff, if you ask me. :-)
"The giant brains who devised quantum mechanics, whatever that means" is the tagline for this book review in The Economist (14 July 2007.
Both Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, and Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science intrigue me.
An adaptation of the introduction to Faust in Copenhagen is provided by the author, Gino Segre, laying out his creative use of a play by the central physicists on Goethe's Faust as the organizational framework of the book. I'm definitely intrigued by the group dynamics - especially since the blogger linked to above agrees with another reviewer's diss of Bohr's actual contribution to the field. A New York Times review summarizes how the silly play upon "Faust, who in the legend sells his soul for universal knowledge... [became] in retrospect...profound." Another review in The Sunday Times blasts Segre's effort to link artistry and science with the lives of their progenitors is "where art and science differ. For understanding their work, Joyce’s and de Chirico’s lives matter. Pauli’s is irrelevant."
It seems I should read Faust first.
Regarding Uncertainty, The Economist review says the title is wrong because much more is covered than the Uncertainty Principle (a personal favorite). [Why? Because it articulates in the hard sciences what is known about language (see Burke, Billig, for starters): "the uncertainty principle posited that in many physical measurements, one can extract one bit of information only at the price of losing another."]
The Scientific American review (linked above) mentions something quite interesting: "Niels Bohr agreed with the basic premises of [Heisenberg's] startling insights but saw the need to 'make sense of the new quantum physics without throwing overboard the hard-won successes of the previous era.'" This is interesting in light of the debate about Bohr's contribution, as well as the critique of "logical inclusiveness" that Kuhn deconstructs as "closely associated with early logical positivism" (98): "[T]he view of science-as-cumulation is [closely] entangled with a dominant epistemology that takes knowledge to be a construction placed directly upon raw sense data by the mind" (96). Another reviewer explains that Uncertainty "illustrates the collaborative nature of science, especially of physics, and how major discoveries are usually the result of contributions over time by many individuals, with one or two leading figures providing the key insights that bring clarity to a particular issue." This is the same point emphasized by John Gribbin in The Scientists (see entry: The Middle is Always Light). This reviewer (Hugh Ruppersburg) continues, describing how author David Lindley places Einstein in the category designated by others to Bohr, as "the conservative elder doubter who believes that classical physics — its ability to predict with utter precision how the world must operate — must not be undermined by a theory holding that at a certain level there is no precision or certainty." From this angle, "it is Bohr who finally provides the vocabulary through which the world has come to understand the principle" - a direct counter to the critique that Bohr's contribution has no contemporary standing. At the same time, Ruppersburg seems to agree (in a parallel fashion, not directly) with the critic (cited above) of linking scientists' lives and work: "He [Lindley] also argues that the popularity of modern cultural, philosophical, and literary theories that depend on the notion of uncertainty, randomness, and unpredictability really have no real connection to Heisenberg’s principle, other than the fact that it helped popularize the notion of uncertainty in the 20th century. Heisenberg provided a metaphor for these theorists, nothing more." (I may beg to differ on this, but am not yet prepared to argue why.)
I am struck by the use of "soul" in the title of both works. Coincidentally (?), I was just contemplating the word in other writing this morning, suggesting it is too ambiguous because of its range of meanings (27 Google offerings). One of the articulations of soul that resonates with me is from the science fiction series, Alvin the Maker, which puts the forces of Making and Unmaking at the core of life. The physicists who worked on physics were aware of the double-edged sword of the knowledge they sought to uncover; it is interesting that the dialectical (?) tension between epistemology and ontology is invoked to characterize early physicists' search for knowledge.
[Two earlier blog references to Kuhn: Holding Form and Inside/Outside.]
More (selections from Reflexivity) on Burke: Definition of Human, Creation Myth, and On Hope and Despair.
Posted in my other blog - either my backup or an alternative? Perhaps I will begin to segregate certain categories . . . (maybe, maybe not, but it is an idea).
