Reflexivity

Walking the chilly streets of Antwerp this morning, I did not feel alone. Sure, my friends went bowling without me (such nerve!), but they teased me about it – which is almost as good as being there.

While some of those pals (you’ll have to guess which ones), may have still been roaring (like Fran, the Trader from Haven), “Who wants another drink? I mean, besides me?” I was waiting in line . . .

No, not for a rock concert, but to make an appointment (three weeks out!) to register my guest residency for the next nine months. The other day, Houda and Quetzal set me up for the Logic Test that would determine my placement for Dutch language lessons, with a delay of less than twenty-four hours! Quite efficient, those two.
I’m here during the elephant parade, which works for me (better than the cows that swept the artworld a few years back). I fancy myself a bit like Lathan Devers (who goes underground for The Foundation as a captive of The Empire), or Ambassador Spock, when he went underground to try and make peace with the Romulans. Although I do not mean to suggest that I am in enemy territory (the battlelines, as it were, are hardly so clear-cut), I would say that I am here in “the smallness . . . and the individuality; a relic of personal initiative in a Galaxy of mass life” (p. 107). Of course, in quoting Asimov I will also take issue with some of the claims infusing his representations. For instance, “relic” is not appropriate (at least not yet – don’t age me that quickly!). Asimov’s “psychohistory” is premised upon statistics as the base measure of truth and certainty. Without engaging the essential battle of qualitative vs quantitative research methodologies, let’s take his argument on its merit. Batya explains:

“The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more…” (p. 112)

Work backwards with me according to this logic – Asimov’s mythical future involves quadrillions of human beings (maybe more, me and numerous zeros have little basis of understanding). Our relatively puny sample (current population of Earth) must be in some multiple of decimal points of a mere one percent, yes? In short, hardly enough to extrapolate much further than a few decades ahead, if even that, and only in terms of hugely broad trends – such as economic spits and backfires and, probably, worsening evidence of climate change. (No wonder the immediate occupies most people’s attention.) Again, I hope some of you with a better sense of scale will correct me if I’m way off here, but doesn’t this put us (as a mass) somewhere near the level of a quantum particle? Remember I’m operating within Asimov’s conjecture of the human conglomerate.
Which implies that the universe of possible futures is actually pretty wide open, eh?
Asimov would discount the machinations of individual efforts as “this wild threshing up of tiny ripples” (p. 96), however such ripples writ large compose the limits of such mathematical equations as he proposes may someday be possible. Just because we lack, as yet, the tools to turn our perceptions of these ripples into certain prediction, this hardly proves that the ripples, as such, are devoid of meaning or doomed to ineffectuality.

Most of what I sense, leaving Asimov for the moment, I am unable to articulate. For instance, there is a quality of sound – or lack therof – about this city that I cannot place. It must be in reference to the background noise of Amherst but what it is that is “missing” I cannot say. The cafes buzz (even if the vast majority lack internet, sigh), and music plays in most shops. There is a hum of traffic, too, although perhaps it is less consistent (no constant thrum of a major interstate nearby). The air is still – windy, yes (its bite precedes itself: a warning of fall and winter to come). Perhaps I project my own psychic state onto the environment, but the atmosphere gives a sense of suspension . . . as if there is action brewing, momentum building, some sweep of happenings either suppressed or swelling which will soon burst upon the scene.
Hmmm. A Seldon crisis? Of course not, we’ve not reached the mass eligible for that kind of mapping. Perhaps, however, a problematic moment, or a confluence of them – crises on small enough scales to be permeable to group relations theory, predictable in terms of general knowledge concerning group dynamics, and thus indicative of “a new turning” (p. 112), as crisis directs us on.

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Phillipe, our tour guide, said “Belgium is surrealistic” in reference to the language alliance of the German-speaking population in the east with the French-speakers of the south. Belgium, he explained, is “a small country with complicated problems.” The majority language speakers of Dutch are the Flemish in the north. I will need to devote a single blog entry concerning what I have learned about these language dynamics to date – I think I have enough to sketch an outline of the main discourses. (We’ll see!)
Meanwhile, I put most of my energy towards my new colleagues. What a fascinating lot! You may guess I gravitated toward Colin (”metaheuristics”) and Jared (”neurogenesis”) immediately. Colin’s description of metaheuristics as a huge simplified abstraction of simple rules applied to a population which then generates complex interactions put me immediately in mind of Asimov’s “human conglomerate.” Jared’s work on bird brains led to a comment that there are now two known areas of the brain that produce new cells throughout life: the subverticular zone (responsible for smell) and a region above the hippocampus engaged with memory. What better start to this research project than optimization forces and new cells in the brain?
Bill, who is here to teach about the color line in American literature, said there is no other approach for addressing matters of race/ism than “to start with the present and proceed to the past.” (I want to take his class!) He really got me excited later, inquiring about this blog (!), when he described the inevitability of a diurnal narrative structure emerging with and without the writer’s conscious intentions. Yes! Indeed this is what I have grasped (over five long years and a lot of nudging from friends to present my thinking in a more organized fashion) and – hopefully – put into deliberate motion with the three new categories linkable from the cutesy flash animation (above). How much force/creation can be generated is a function of participation/response (so it seems to me). I am in agreement with Bill that one can only begin with the present. I am hopeful the past can help us learn how to make choices toward more preferred futures (presuming some agreement can be forged on a vision).
Vanja and I compared notes concerning our respective “Institutional Review Boards” processes in order to receive authorization for “human subjects research.” I received varying advice on approaching the Members of the European Parliament. One person is convinced response rates will be low. :-/ Jen suggested I follow ‘chains’ of connections by developing each contact slowly and deliberately. Meanwhile, I’m still hoping to find people to translate a few more of the initial invitations so that I can approach MEPs in their official national language. It’s just a hunch (as is most of this action research project), but I’m thinking I might up the percentage of interest just a nib by making this gesture. We’ll see!
Zac “The Architect”, Cathleen, and Kathy “The Medievalist” had an interesting conversation about the differences between studying the work of live persons (or those who lived recently enough that people who knew them in person are still alive) and studying those long dead. Is it really true that one can define clearer boundaries about a past subject than about a more current one? I’m not sure. I do know that I’m grappling with the liveliness of my own subject , its “superfluidity” to use Zac’s term, and have struggled to impose a boundary of location and membership (the European Parliament and its current Members), as well as to define the locus of study on MEPs discourses concerning the choices they make in terms of which language to speak, when and why, and how the attitudes revealed or exposed by these discourses establish a certain frame of reference in relation to interpretation. What is/are those frames, and how do they establish behavioral rituals that instruct (by example), thus limiting and enabling potentials of communication across cultural/linguistic differences?
Cathy’s artist of study, Marcel Broodthaers, kinda seems like a guy right up my alley (not necessarily an ally – so many people read my business card mistakenly! I guess ally is either not much in favor or largely unused.) He is famous among Belgians for his mussel pottery. Cathy described how some of his work “pretends to teach” and that he interspersed text in his work in an anti-modernist way . . . there was something she said about his use of space that I’d like to understand better. Later, on the tour, Phillipe explained that symmetry in buildings was a feature to emerge during the Renaissance in the 16th century. It had never occurred to me before that symmetry was not always a desirable geometry, or at least a frame of reference anchoring artistic deviations!
We’re all waiting to witness Alyssa in action, meanwhile I was reminded of the incredible cello performance I saw in Northampton some years ago – dang, can’t find a blogpost about it! – when they surrounded us with forty or more cellos and played deep and low like whale song. Still gives me shivers! Finally, Caitlin has also carved out a language-related project. I may even have a lead for her!
When I got home yesterday evening, my host and I had a long conversation about the day and all its learnings, ending with a bit of collaborative poetry:

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Robin, Tim, Rachel, and Hari were unaware that we were celebrating an exertion of The Force, accomplished earlier today with the incomparable technical help of Brion.
My first Flash animation was added to Reflexivity, partly building upon an idea implanted by The Lord of the Sky, that I really should try to make my blogwriting more comprehensible – even going so far as to feature a weekly theme or some such.
Since several friends (four, and one of them twice!) felt compelled (within the same week!) to give me feedback on my blogwriting, I thought to myself,

Meanwhile, intuitions, intimations, and other hints of possible futures suggested this idea of a blog category dedicated to the parts of the dissertation that will never find their way in to the official dissertation, because

a) I will never know enough, by myself, to actually make the case, and
b) my committee’s job is to keep this effort within some bounds of reason.

Nonetheless (because what else is life for?!), I echo Mma Ramotswe:

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