teaching: October 2006 Archives

"Laughter showed the world anew in its gayest and most sober aspects. Its external privileges are intimately linked with interior forces; they are a recognition of the rights of those forces. This is why laughter could never become an instrument to oppress and blind the people. It always remained a free weapon in their hands." - Mikhail Bakhtin (see Three Dialogues).

After detailing the grotesque body via the illustration of "the finger" as an erect penis, but before "c_cks, c_nts, sh_t, p_ss, c_m, s_liva et cetera in [Performance and Public Culture]", I commented, "I've been waiting to blog about this class." "You haven't done it yet?" a colleague teased. No. I hadn't. "I'm finally learning something!" said Spare Man amid the general clamor. I must have been waiting for the professor to perform Jung's breakthrough (see Footnote #1): balancing on her chair, posing as God on the toilet, dropping a huge turd on her ass-wiping mentee (the world). We laughed hard and often last night.

"I keep trying to figure out what my hesitation is with the blog," Spare Man confided during break. "It's not that I don't trust you to know what is ok to say or not....it's taking something live out of context and giving it back in alien form." [Quoted from memory.] We discussed again how whatever I write comes back to those I mention in mediated form - not only via the record of written text in public cyberspace, but also as skewed through my particular lens. I have extracted the live from its performance, selected elements of influence or desire, and packaged them from my peculiar point-of-view.

Here, playing the boundary between the embodied performance and the inscribed record, I laugh: at you, at me, at us. :-)

The carnivelesque was (circa the Middle Ages & Renaissance) a socially sanctioned and structured "safe" space in which humans could not only indulge the pleasures of the body but do so with full knowledge of being seen in so doing. The carnivalesque is public space for the performance of private self. You wanna find ways to transgress? You wanna make a difference? Then stretch the edges of institutionally-constructed roles, rules, procedures, forms, and etiquettes. Hot Stuff raised the question about whether there is any authority left that we respect enough (or revile enough, added another classmate) to want or need to mock so much as to upend social norms and create new paradigms. Those scenes which appear to approximate the carnivalesque (raves, for instance) are colonized by legal structures for the purposes of commodification and profit. (Illegal raves can't be carnivalesque because they are, by definition, already outside the accepted social structure.)

Part of what used to enable carnivalization to occur, I think, is that it was bounded. The annual season of carnival was preceded and followed by the rigid structures of everyday and official social practices. What carnival allowed was the expression of energy repressed throughout the other months of living within societies' constraints. It is this energy that, dialogically, opened the potential for new spaces and thus the capacity for lasting social changes. The openness of Bakhtin's dialogism is the fulcrum of change, not the atmosphere of the carnivalesque. The climate establishes certain necessary conditions (which are not usually available during the everyday - or so we tend to assume). It is the quality of intentionality to act-with-abandon that establishes the collective social relations of trust and respect which then generate momentum toward transformed practices and ways of being with and for each other because of our differences, not in spite of them. This is where a lever to the democratic can be forged.

This I believe: the only transgressive zone in our de-authorized world is personal risk.

Disability comes in all shapes, sizes, modes, and effects. There are legally-recognized versions and emotional varieties. These, or any number of indeterminate cognitive and psychiatric peculiarities, can interfere with intimate relationships and social interactions. For instance, people look at me and see a woman with a mullet who appears physically fit. What do they know? No, I don’t meet the federal criteria of “impairment of a major life function” (Americans with Disabilities Act 1990). I can breathe, walk, grasp, talk, feel, think, and otherwise function within the range of physicality deemed normal. Who decided to limit “normal” and impose such a measure for judging character or the potential worth of one’s contributions to society? Individuals will not claim responsibility, of course. Such boundaries and markers of difference are established ‘out there’ by impersonal forces of culture. The representations are propagated through the media, religion, and a disturbing range of incidental, informal taboos and negative sanctions. Questioning these norms is often considered problematic, disruptive, or unpleasant. When I do wonder about the so-called normal, people situate me clearly: I am deviant.

Fitting few standard stereotypes, I have learned to live through language. Sentiments not spoken affected me first. Often, the untold still wounds me. The silence of non-recognition echoes in words I hear and reverberates in perceptions left unsaid. The speech of my family was self-focused and therefore distancing, functional not relational, unaware and unreflective. My parents opposed each other on gender's fulcrum: mom never swore, dad often did. Anger was the palpable emotion of my formative years. I checked out, merely passing as present. When I woke up, twenty-seven years of my life were gone. How can one speak from pain without blame? I yearned for a language I did not know.

I needed words I could feel, a language that would bring me into my body. I sought belonging among lesbian communities and found that we were not much better at handling distinction than the dominant heterosexual society was at accepting us. Our bodies, full of longing, could not manage questions of dis/ability: our own aesthetics, potentials, possibilities. What is valuable if the body itself is constrained? I have never consistently been able. I fail much more frequently than I succeed. I celebrate small triumphs with all the gusto of athletic championships. Why not?! Yet I notice how the smallest movements can invoke urgency, feeding speed, haste, a rush to . . . where? Meaning constructed by assumption, cues missed, opportunities lost: wisdom becomes elusive. How much have I learned from friends' contemplating solitary visual horizons, or analyzing power’s most intimate nuances? Stillness inspires depth. I lament how long it has taken me to learn to enjoy listening for its own sake.

I cannot explain the random movement of the universe (or the privileges of being white and middle-class) that brought me into contact with Deaf people and American Sign Language. I spent years training to interpret others’ words, to translate their meanings into sensibility for those who could not see. Through signing, I discover my own emotions, investigating the boundaries of my expressive capacities. This practice, of sensing and conveying the intellectual and emotional meanings of others, prepared the ground for me to expand my range. Through this visual-gestural language I excavated buried wounds and static ambitions. The embodied kinesthetics of signing ASL allowed access to hidden and repressed parts of myself.

Through friendships, relationships, teaching and parenting I have observed the effect of words to inspire or deaden, enliven or thwart, create or sunder meaningful relationships. Uttered words (signed or spoken) leave their imprint yet vanish into insubstantial memory. Written down, words are a commitment. I mean this, right now. Writing was not, at first, something I felt called to do. It does not come easily, as signing usually does. The labor of compressing four-dimensional geometrical perception into one-dimensional linear text remains a challenge. I practice daily. When I write, I feel the energy of my being streaming out into the world. I am here. I matter. I want to make a difference. I care.

I sign to know myself. I write to live.

Just read a piece, How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua, about Chicano identity and language.

"Los Chicanos, how patient we see, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian about us. we know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue we've kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the aeons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they've created, lie bleached. Humildes yet proud, quietos yet wild, nosotros los mexicanos-Chicanos will walk by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mesitizas and mestizos, will remain."

A link to an education course (Arnetha F. Ball, Stanford) premised upon Anzaldua's dialogic claims neglects the "at home" (meaning domestic US) language of American Deaf Culture. It is a common omission, glaring in the fact that even the prestigious (?) Associated Press fails to recognize the difference between "deaf" and "death".

Language as action. Vernon carried on in his inimitable way about Dewey and Wittgenstein during yesterday's New England gathering of scholars in Language and Social Action: Meaning in LSI Research. I missed the morning sessions :-( but attended the presentations of Bob Sanders and Anita Pomerantz. Vernon missed the mild fireworks among Bob, Donal (who organized the event) and another member of the audience whose name I didn't catch.

It was entertaining and instructive to witness the negotiation of meaning - particularly agreement and disagreement - among these heavyweights in the field. Bob came under fire for his interpretive lens on the elaborate ceromonial ritual of how nobility treats "a guest" of the Queen. I'm not sure if it was his own framing of insider/outsider that created the opening for this particular critique, but a critique was engaged as if there is no relation between the outsider perspective (on extreme excess) and the insider perspective (of representation and proper treatment).

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act deals with student records. I guess that all of the students whom I teach at the college level are 18 or older but it is possible a few 17-year olds sneak in once-in-awhile. The age distinction means the student gains the rights previously granted to their parents. These rights are described in the language of eligibility: seeing the records and requesting copies of the records. Schools are in general not allowed to share these records with others without consent, although there is quite a list of exceptions.

According to a September 25 memo from the UMass Registrar: “Students have the right to have some control over the disclosure of information from the records. Educational institutions have the responsibility to prevent improper disclosure of personally identifiable information from the records.”

I wrote this piece, Language as Motion, as an example of the "Self-in-Contradiction" essay that is one of the options for the "personal/identity narrative" assigned to students in the introductory level writing course I'm currently teaching. There are a couple of friends who will recognize themselves in this piece (thank you), and I have to give some credit to Just-in-Time, who got us lost in traffic yesterday in Boston. While we were discussing writing as a craft, another part of my brain was mulling this attempt.

I am also conscious of the timing. Language set-in-motion through the last several semesters of blogging and constructing public writing environments for students is coming to some kind of turning point. The theory of language-as-action meets with (a) practical reality of language-in-use.