Reflexivity

Posts regarding the conference this past November (2006), in chronological order (most recent last). I still have some notes I’ve been planning to write up and add to the archive. (We’ll see if/when I get around to it…perhaps soonish?)
February 22: Dialogue under Occupation (DUO)
November 4: Decentering Conflictual Discourse (DUO)
November 9: Polycentricity (DUO)
November 9: Turning disagreement to dialogue (DUO)
November 10: Independent Nation of Hawai’i (DUO)
November 12: Thin-Slicing (DUO)
November 13: Language (DUO)
November 29: “Begin” (DUO)
December 15: “Shovrim Shtika” (DUO)

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“Unlike many other habitants of the earth
we chose not to be born, live and die in the same town
and hang out with the same people
from birth to death,
so sooner or later we will move on and
who knows where we will be next.
We will be spread around in several continents,
hanging out with totally new people.”
Dr. Zeynep Delen
“Fidelity is a notion, that at its most abstract level implies a truthful connection to a source. Its original meaning dealt with loyalty and attentiveness to one’s duty to a lord or a king, in a broader sense than the related concept of fealty.”
The movie, High Fidelity, details one man’s existential process of developing “the quality of being faithful” in his life and relationships, playing on the metaphor of musical “accuracy with which an electronic system reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.”
While the birthday boy of honor declaimed, “This movie is not autobiographical!”, there were occasional resonances felt by at least some of the invited guests. ahem The movie capped an elegant evening of surprise, spirits, fancy dress, festive chatter, and a live woodwind duet.
As proclaimed by the primary event organizer, Dr. Zeynep Delen:

Hopefully tonight,
and all other days and nights like these will
forever stay with us. This plan came to life as
Anuj’s birthday party but it could be
for any of us for any other occasion. I don’t know about you, but
I have been thrilled to be a part of this Amherst crowd.
I am simply amazed how anything is really possible.
(Hey, this is really America! ”

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This conference on pedagogy next April is definitely a place I wish I could be, but instead I’ll be in Australia at Critical Link 5: Quality in Interpreting: A Shared Responsibility. I suppose I should not complain? :-/ (But when they finally get transporter technology, Beam Me Over Scottie!)
I submitted two proposals, they accepted one called “Interpreters: Guardians of Social Justice?” Meanwhile, the selected papers from Critical Link IV (held in Stockholm, 2004) are actually being printed (finally!) I don’t know where my piece is placed in the dang thing, but it is my first attempt at the kind of combination of theory-generating research and practical intervention that I hope might become “my thing.”

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The dirt path beckons. I infer comrades in search and pursuit of the potentials of slippage.
Institutional wieldings of strategy threaten everyday tactics. “There’s no moral high ground” among those exercising tactics. “Who’s got the will?” to perform “on stage”?
I don’t want to compete against the tactics of my friends. As in all good fantasy, I throw myself into what it seems I am called to do, trusting others (who I may and may not know) are as fully engaged in their own diverse callings. I want to influence change in directions I cannot predict. I want to live in Phelan’s zone of doubt, where I know that my relationships with others matter &emdash; that I matter. Ouch. There’s the rub, eh? A psychological crux playing itself out in sociorelational terms: the embedded trajectory of what-has-been-inscribed dueling with the conscious striving-to-act-beyond the imposed boundaries of experience and discourse.

I want to live as spirit enfleshed.
(Maybe I really am psychotic.)

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Breaking the Silence: Fighters tell about Hebron” is an effort by former Israeli soldiers to describe the dehumanization they experienced through mandatory military service in Gaza, Hebron, Bethlehem and other places, where they manned checkpoints, participated in patrols, and otherwise took part in the war.
(Paraphrased from Yehuda Shaul and Dotan Greenvald in the conference program booklet, Dialogue Under Occupation: The Discourse of Enactment, Transaction, Reaction, and Resolution, 2006, p. 9)

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“ Some weird performance shit. Candles. Take a shot = solidarity for glass. Yes, a real worm. Symbolic. Monte Alban 100% Agave MexicanTequila. Honey-roasted peanuts. Two types of cheese (pepperjack, cheddar?) candy worms, cracker, lime, salt, apples.” (Class notes, “Derrida & Butler”, 7 December 2006).
We graduated from wine to tequila. Attempts to generate shame (who did the reading?) have risen to new lows. The double bite of ideology iterates us in the ass, interpellating proper academic subjectivities.
I perceive an intersection of horizontal timespace trajectories coalescing in repetitive (synchronic) vertical time. Early debate about electoral strategy is one discursive template: boundaries were drawn between those advocating the old form and those promoting a new one. Do ‘we’ promote and support a straight white man for the next president or do we risk the challenges of ’selling’ a new (different) body? Does the body matter so much more than the words? Are any/all words ineffective if uttered from an other? Since the midterm elections, silence. The urgency has passed. Advocates for the old form were wrong, the most narrowly conservative candidates did not win anywhere. Promoters of the new form have not pressed the advantage.
Then, a storm: do we understand power? Who has it; who doesn’t? Why? More significantly, how are our respective powers used, to what ends and effects? The old form reasserts itself. Now bodies do not matter, only words. Threats and intimations of accusation ricochet from mouths alternatively iterated by gender(ed) performances, an undercurrent of national cultures is left unspoken, the hierarchy of US-based race and ethnic dis/privilege invoked. But it is all (so we are told) a tangent: bodies do not matter this much, only our facility with rhetoric.
We revisit our norms. It seems we must choose: either we continue the debate or we return to the standard academic form. It seemed the old form won? Compelling personal testimony (via email, “Re: Start reading!” 19 November 2006, emphasis added) delineated the parameters:
”This idea of “the job market” makes me want to pee myself… thinking about how I wasted valuable time in this PPC class telling stories about myself–attempting to convince others I’m witty, or sensitive, or intelligent–not to mention trying to evade my advisor’s Flying Love Pumas and other unspeakable Bakhtinian acts of defilement, instead of directly engaging the readings. My feelings after class are too often akin to the end of “The Graduate”: that was vibrant and exciting, but now what do I do? Or more specifically, will this help me get through my comps? Will this help me publish a paper, or get a job?”
With fear so firmly established, what else could be done except “engage the readings directly?” No counteroffensive was raised, although the challenge of actually doing the reading was issued. It seems to me the issue at question is the amount and degree of participation we are each willing to commit. New forms confront us with unfamiliar, less and/or unpredictable outcomes; old forms maintain parameters within which we navigate in order to control the extent of personal engagement. The shift from professorial riff to peer-guided interaction was stark, evidenced by my impressions upon entering the room after break (quote at top of entry).
Was it my imagination, or was resistance to this new form less than before? Perhaps we are not mutually fluent in its language, but are we beginning to collectively recognize it?
“Stop talking Romanian.”
“We can’t speak Russian.”

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Spark posted a great summary of a book I think I’d like to read. It critiques the role/rule of experts, a phenomena which caught my attention when a history professor whose class I interpreted frequently mentioned the rise of experts with disdain.
I tried to post a comment but my Korean is insufficient for decoding the directions:
“Great summary! I’m intrigued, especially by the conditioning of excess, the separation between reality/representation effected by the new logic of economy, and its location/operation as a source of power.”

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Uttered in at least five languages (Arabic, Spanish, English, Japanese Sign Language, and Japanese), this film plays with the stereotype that different languages are a problem. As we follow the stories of four families, one realizes the source of confusion is not “in” the language; rather, it is the challenge of interpreting language in the context of a given person’s life story.
The relationships and connections among members of these families range from the incidental to the intimate. “May I speak with you, sir?” inquires a police officer? “There’s been an incident.” “I have raised these children, fed them breakfast, lunch, and dinner their entire lives, can’t you tell me if they are alright?” “That’s none of your concern,” replies the immigration officer.
There are two threads linking these families, two factors that bind them together tight: violence and the law. More specifically, a rifle and the institution of law enforcement, with the manipulations of politics hovering in the background. Acts of innocence and practicality unfold in scenarios of accident and opportunism. Babel exposes the vise of circumstance and consequence: in Morocco suspects are brutalized by military police, in Japan interviews are civil and police officers humane, in the US physical violence is replaced by emotional and psychic violence: ” I guarantee that if you pursue legal action you will simply postpone the inevitable.”
The systematic (peaceful?) order of Japan and the US masks the random unpredictability of sudden death; the apparent chaos and wildness of Mexico and Morocco highlights the human urge to seek experience in order to feel alive. Help appears as a rare offering in either place.
Language difference has nothing to do with these dynamics. Indeed, in Babel, the fact of linguistic diversity enables core commonalities of human suffering and ambition to be revealed.

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“How do you start a conversation?” Steve asked as we settled down to lunch in the Ugly Hookah Cafe. I had been torn over which group to join – the friends I’d met the night before (who I had just dubbed “peaceniks“) or these men who had clustered around the military officer who had just presented at the Dialogue under Occupation conference. “It’s always random, isn’t it?” I asked. “I like that, the theory of random,” said Kalawai’a. Steve continued, “one just needs a pretext.”
These graduate students in political science from the University of Hawai’i seduced me. I did not resist. They let me sit at the head of the table! Kuhio supplied notebook paper for me to take blog notes, declaiming, “If I’m going to be quoted, I want to be sure to speak sentences that don’t make sense.” The conversation included a preview of Keanu’s presentation about the Hawaiian Kingdom (there’s nothing like rubbing shoulders with a celebrity’s cousin), some discussion of the morning’s keynote by Tove as well as her question challenging the motivations of the military in taking on social agency roles that seek to mitigate some brutalities of occupation, and otherwise getting to know each other – primarily through humor.
While munching, scribbling, and laughing, I compared the vibe with that of my dinner companions the previous evening. I can hardly describe my excitement when it dawned upon me that Robert was the Phillipson whose work on language policy in Europe was part of my grant proposal for preliminary dissertation research on “Multilingual Democracy: Community Interpreting and Transnational Citizenship.” I could hardly contain my sense of good fortune when he expressed curiousity in my research and invited me to join the dinner party. I didn’t meant to embarass Tove with my comment about hanging out with famous people, “I’m no good with that talk,” she murmured, but come on! Her work has been embraced by linguistic rights activists within the Deaf community for years. Shelley whipped out the flyer for her new book, Dialogic approaches to TESOL: Where the Ginkgo Tree Grows, as I tried to place the familiarity of her name, then Ruth walked up to join us too. [Available for download, an article on "The European Union in Cyber-Space: Multilingual Democratic Participation in a virtual public sphere?"] I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Once Larry remembered where he’d parked the car (!) and after a tightly-packed (cozy) ride, we enjoyed an outstanding Mexican meal including my first glass of horchata. Conversation ranged from defending multilingualism, through international politics (pleasure at US election results and glee over Rumsfeld’s resignation, the end of Merkel’s honeymoon, Putin’s scariness, the recent murder of a journalist covering human rights violations), and some ins/outs of getting published. Shelley and Ruth shared notes about becoming radicalized via the student movements of the 60s, while Tove informed us that the food composing an average American dinner table has traveled 1500 miles. Laughter, comraderie, and passion characterized the conversation. (Where is that photo Robert described as “suitably compromising”?)
The last conference where I enjoyed myself this much was in Aalborg, Denmark over a year ago (August 2005): Discourse Nexus 3.0. It is not a surprise that critical discourse analysis is the common theme; those who practice it are undoubtedly ‘my kind of people.’
This morning I am feeling grateful for these folk and our shared experiences. You’ve taught me much and shown me hope: a happy combination.

“To The Kingdom!”
Background music: Ben Lee, “Begin“

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The One We’ve Got by His Balls accused us of a) not knowing what power is, b) not knowing that we don’t know, and c) certainly not being able to trace its definitions.
“Are you going to blog this class?” I said no. I lied. Sortof. I meant “no” at the time. Things change, although I am still not going to blog “the class.” I’m gonna blog me in the class. Hot damn it feels good to be able to measure my own progress in de-piousification! (Yeah yeah, it’s been a long time coming. FYI &emdash; it’s not about you!) I’m still as self-righteously intent on reproduction as I’ve ever been, however I am much clearer that I’m interested in the cultivation of skills rather than duplication of choices.
Durkheim on power: the result of multiple actors behaving consensually. Social justice language, which typically frames (all) interaction in the dichomotous terms of oppression based upon social identities, understands this power in terms of collusion. My own frame of group relations broadens the basis of collusion from stereotypes of identity to include the huge range of roles (socialized, resistive, psychological, interactional) that persons take up in groups. I’m in mind of those who argue that WAR (conflict) is the most sophisticated form of social cooperation.
The tricky art of critical discourse analysis offers a means by which to trace the patterns of cooperation/collusion in conflictual social interaction. Durkheim’s distinctions among force, authority, rule, and control add a framework for making sense of particular junctures in a group’s discourse when the moves of cooperation/collusion can be brought into view.
Force: going along with the general will rather than one’s personal/selfish will. “Durkheim, following distinctions made earlier by John Stuart Mill, used the idea of forced versus natural division of labour to illustrate an aspect of social power. The hierarchy of society is natural if individuals tend towards occupying the positions that they are best suited to. It is forced if there are barriers to people entering positions other than their abilities.” (Hierarchical power)
Authority: “the right to enforce obediance.” Authority is legitimized by law.
Rule: the functional harmonization of law and morality in society. Robert Merton says, “Functions are those observed consequences which make for the adaptation or adjustment of a given system, and dysfunctions, those observed consequences which lessen the adaptation or adjustment of the system. There is also the empirical possibility of nonfunctional consequences, which are simply irrelevant to the system under consideration.”
Control (gleaned from the wikipedia site on Durkheim): how social order is maintained (based upon Durkheim’s 1893 work The Division of Labor in Society). Control theory has grown from Durkheim’s study, Suicide, published in 1897. Control theory brings to mind Tuckman’s stages of group development.

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