media: November 2006 Archives

This email is going around, strategically targeting interpreters by their town of residence.

The first one I received (November 18) read "I am Ben Woods . I saw your contact on (www.rid.org) Anyway, I am an English speaking man from Madagascar ." A few days ago, I received another. Besides the first line, the rest of the text is the same. What's the scam, I wonder? (But not enough to respond.)

Hello,
I am Tobbie Smith . I saw your contact on (www.rid.org) Anyway, I am an English speaking man from Malta . I will be coming over to the USA(WDummerston) precisely, from 30th of Nov to 12th of Dec with my wife.

Susan my wife understands American sign language. She has never been to the USA before and so she will require the services of an Interpreter who can assist her in the course of our stay, for 10 days ( with the exception of weekends in between) and probably about 8 hours everyday because I will not always be with her on most occasions due to other functions which I must attend to.

I will want to know if you can offer your services at these dates if possible, then I will appreciate if I can get a price quotation As we want to make advance payments before our visit so she can be assured of an interpreter during her shopping and sightseeing because this is her first visit to the in USA. An early response will be appreciated.

I Hope to hear from you soon.
Mr Tobbie Smith

I haven't been to a musical in ages. On the way in to Springfield Symphony Hall last night, I noticed a banner for Jesus Christ Superstar, a childhood favorite along with Godspell. My brother and I used to listen to those soundtracks for hours.

Music enhanced the rousing performance, adding that 'larger than life' quality to the mundane and tragic. The balance of tragedy and comedy in Rent felt right, the laughs softening me up for Angel's death and Mimi's accusation that Roger didn't want to watch her die. I felt these scenes, deep - Uncle Sam and Alec were close - along with a melange of metaphoric associations: symbolic death, potential vision, psychic plays of presence and absence.

Not knowing more than that Rent was wildly popular on Broadway, I absorbed with pleasure the multigendered characters and multiethnic cast. A money/consumption-fame/happiness schizophrenia underlies the script, subtly rebuking the notion that acceptance of diversity is in-and-of-itself a solution to the challenges facing contemporary US society.

You're cooking Thanksgiving?!! Friends and family scoffed.

Yes.

Do they know what they're in for?

No.

How will you fool them?

They're foreigners.

Ah, they don't the difference!

And so it was. I was "the man", none of us were "unique snowflakes," gender ambiguity ruled (although someone did refuse to toast balls), food and drink were consumed in grand proportion. There was a syllable contest, eastern European rivalries were pursued with vigor (e.g., Romanian jazz vs Hungarian show tunes), assistance offered optionally and authoritarian directives disseminated. (I had nothing to do with the basking of the turkey.) Dysfunctional violence was kept to a minimum (mere verbal harassment, a few hurled pickled veggies) but enacted so as to capture the full flavor of typical US holiday dynamics.

It turned out well that we couldn't locate the football game. Instead, we watched Kontroll. It seems just as well that I have missed out on Budapest's subway system both times I've been there. This debut film by Nimrod Antal is dubbed "the most popular movie in Hungary" by one who should know. David periodically commented, "Jumping in front of the subway is a popular form of committing suicide," or "That happens everyday." The still unanswered question: why are there no turnstiles?

By the way, gravy fixes everything.

SS4 Shinobi (of DOA fame) waited in line for thirteen hours to purchase his very own wii. Not quite as hip as New York, we passed some time kicking around a soccer ball before abandoning the boys to their vigil.

Wanderer, from Hardcore Gamer, interviewed the kids (text copied and pasted below). We heard about the "rampant anti-PS3 humor" in response to the question, why the wii and not the ps3?

- "It doesn't cost $600."
- "The people at Sony suck."
- "I don't want to get shot."

These were just the answers Shinobi was inclined to tell us grown ups after the fact.

I'm not satisfied with the presentation; it was too shallow. The one question I received basically asked, What’s the point? Specifically (paraphrased), “what is the connection between the media artifacts analyzed by your multinational, multilingual team and the reflexive summary of group process?” I had thought (albeit vaguely) that I was enacting “polycentricity” by folding two presentations (two "centers") into one, tacking back and forth between both. The question confirmed my ‘read’ of the energy in the room. The 'depth' of meaningfulness I perceived while brainstorming with my colleagues and constructing the powerpoint slides was not translated into full potential by my delivery.

Dang.

This situation is an example of me doing my best to ‘fly by the seat of my pants’, with less than optimal results. However the experience itself is doublesided (at least). On the one hand, I’m embarrassed to have let down my colleagues by not appearing at my best on our behalf. :-( On the other hand, I’ve stretched myself into an extended zone of being, reaching for something I cannot quite yet grasp. In this act of seeking, I understood better what it was I attempted to do. I actively resisted the monocentric desire of theoretical academic discourse by refusing to provide only a definitive description of an abstract ‘external’ object (the interaction that we constructed among four accounts of the Israeli military’s forcible removal of settlers from Neve Dekalim, a town in the Gaza Strip surrendered in August 2005 to Palestine). To the extent that I did provide selected details of our media analysis, I enacted polycentricity by ‘bouncing’ among the layered and diverse “centers” evident in the intersection of
a) a sociopolitical event,
b) media texts (four) about this event,
c) subjectivities (four) engaging in mutual knowledge construction about the event and its associated media,
d) within a particular epistemology (critical discourse analysis),
e) comparing and contrasting written text in four languages,
f) combining online textual interaction (online versions of the four newspaper articles, a socialtext webspace, email, skype)
g) with face-to-face verbal interaction using a lingua franca (English).

In other words, (and this came clear to me while listening/watching Simon Faulkner present “Re-viewing Occupation: Art, Photojournalism and Israel”), I attempted to perform a work of discursive art within (under) the occupation of the form of academic discourse - “conference paper presentation” - whose “proper” focus is theory, not practice; abstract analysis not application.

Ironically, I had intuited the (potential) performance quality of this presentation last week. I had not, however, clarified its purpose. Or, even more precisely, even as I articulated certain purposes – negotiating parameters with my colleagues, confirming understandings, and coordinating intentions – I still did not comprehend the meaning of what we set out to do.

Taking the best possible interpretation of outcome, I wonder if a learning might be that the enactment of polycentricity is a state-of-being of just this kind of uncertainty? What I found myself doing throughout this presentation (and the entire process with my colleagues) is continually turning Bakhtin’s notions of centrifugality against centripetality and centripetality against centrifugality in counter-movements to those expected from sheer momentum (tradition, expectation, dialectics). If I can become more conscious and deliberate regarding when to flag this for audiences and interlocutors, and when to let such turnings be what they are, perhaps I can enhance the performance of this art in everyday dialogue. Ultimately (!), such practices may lead to more theoretical clarity, bringing “the point” of Decentering Conflictual Discourse into focus.

I was an "honorary Eastern European" only for the 1 hour and 24 minutes it took Borat to run. Then I resumed my accustomed role :-) as the earnest, pious, and self-righteous American who is mercilously mocked by Sacha Baron Cohen. This movie is funny, but only if you can step outside of the truly narrow frame in which most Americans live. Here we see ourselves - racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic (Jewish and Muslim) - in all our high-faluting hypocrisy. This Review covers many of the highlights.

The humor is overly-crass in a few places, and falls flat in others, but when Cohen's 'straight man' draws out the extent of white supremacist and classist hubris one cringes behind the laughter. Or ought to. The situation that personally disturbed me the most was with the three college students and their degradation of women. Yes, the desire for slavery was/is sick but in the scene it came across (to me) as a mechanism to operationalize pathological violence against women. I enjoy the young men I teach and can only hope they aren't living such double lives.

I saw the film with two Romanians and a Hungarian, seated in front of a Russian and an Australian. I know at least two Brazilians were in the soldout audience as well. How many of the rest of the crowd were internationals, celebrating the publicization of discriminations they might themselves often experience? I don't know. There were many young people there, and frequent, loud laughter.

One of the sweetest scenes occurs with a group of young African-American men, who are among the very few able to accept a foreigner with apparently weak English language skills as a fellow human being. Underneath and behind Cohen's humor are some sharp lessons about how we could all get along. (See how earnest I am?!!)

Proposal:

Utilizing critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the discourse of transaction in headline stories in four different languages – Finnish, Swedish, Persian (Iran) and US English – regarding the 2005 Israeli pullout from Neve Dekalim in which Jewish settlers resisted relocation. A textual analysis yields themes (indexes and icons) that are intertextual.

Intertextuality, as conceptualized by Fairclough and Foucault, refers to the way that statements always reactualize other statements. Each newspaper account generates its centering effect (Threadgold) in both horizontal and vertical ways (Bahktin) along the dimensions of time, space, place, and motion. For instance, aggression is attributed to different actors and along opposing trajectories in the Persian text than among the three western versions – which also have some significant distinctions from each other. The stories reported in these four online newspapers thus work interdiscursively to replicate and perpetuate a global, monocentric discourse of perpetual conflict. According to Irvine, interdiscursivity is “a specific semiotic effect [that] must be created in practice” (2005, p. 72). Most interesting, the examination of these media accounts reproduced similar interlinguistic dynamics among the four researchers, whose national identities align with the languages and newspapers chosen.

Such social metonymy highlights the challenge of decentering dominant discourses: the same referents can be treated differently in various national and/or media discourses yet still work to generate an overarching monocentric discourse. We argue that simultaneous attention to the workings of ideology at all levels - including our microsocial interactions with each other - enables the recognition of polycentricity and the interruption of interdiscursively monocentric repetitions. Such analyses and the linguistic options they support can contribute to the decentering of present discursive hegemonies of conflict and occupation.

I'll (attempt ! to) present on behalf of Ehya, Jussi, and Karin, of Dexus Nexus 3.0 (August 2005), on Wednesday Nov 8 at 3 pm in the "transaction" thread of Dialogue Under Occupation: The Discourse of Enactment, Transaction, Reaction, and Resolution, hosted by Northeastern Illinois University.