Reflexivity

Building on the potential for a paradigm shift is matter of recognition, marketing, and design. These processes can proactively influence each other, interacting and changing through the development of a project. All are contained within the conception and application of strategic planning.
Strategy has to involve conceptualizing the outcome in two different yet complementary ways. First, you must imagine what you want in terms of place. In the case of the next national conference of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID, US-based), the physical location will be some hotel in Atlanta, GA, but the more important issue is how the space of the place will be designed and implemented in order to generate the desired kinds of intercultural interaction. The second dimension that must be considered is time. By time, I do not mean the logistics of scheduling or considerations about the length of the event or even its parts. These are obviously important logistical factors that require detailed attention. However, the most important temporal factor to consider is how the conference contributes to long-term patterning of habits and attitudes for engaging in intercultural social interaction.

Not Even Related to a Deaf Adult: Buffered by Monolingualism
That would be me, and we NERDAs compose the largest percentage of the membership of RID. Most of us do not understand what it means to be Deaf. We want to understand, and we sure try hard, but our reality as native, hearing speakers of English in the United States is one of extreme linguistic privilege. No matter what other oppressions we may experience, we communicate with the same language as nearly everyone one else around us. NERDAs need to understand that we are affected by living in a society that has done more, historically, than any other country to enforce monolingualism. Unless you live or work in a dense urban city, it is quite possible that you never hear another language spoken in day-to-day living. Most Americans are protected from exposure to even tasting what it might be like to not know the language that would enable you to talk with your neighbor, your child’s teacher, shopkeepers and salespeople, peers in your classroom or a club, not to mention the doctor, police officer, realtor, banker, or the waitstaff at a restaurant where you must guarantee that there are no nuts or shellfish in the dish you want because you don’t want to risk anaphylactic shock.
NERDAs certainly cannot conceive of the intrapersonal, deliberate, conscious planning necessary to predict when and where and for how long we’ll need an interpreter, do not know the calculus of deciding why and for what reasons we’ll need an interpreter, and never have to weigh the costs – time, focused mental energy, unpredictable emotional surges – that come along with deciding, “Yes, in this situation I do need an interpreter,” or “No, in this situation I can manage without an interpreter.” Nor do we have to deal with the fallout from misjudging any of these factors: such as discovering an interpreter is necessary when it had not seemed so, or that the need is much longer/shorter than anticipated, or that the whole effort was a complete waste of time.

Atlanta 2011: Experimenting with New Norms
National conferences of professional associations occur for very specific reasons:

• to further the organization’s business and
• to provide members with professional development opportunities that are not available at home.

A critique offered by one of the other participants in the small group DEAF-FRIENDLY brainstorming sessions (described in the August 9 entry, “Embrace Change, Honor Tradition (RID 2009)” was that the conference focuses too much on training. In the immediate moment, I was most aware of the turn-taking dynamic – how her comment did not have any relation to mine – but I soon realized that her observation is significant. Why are we designing the national conference like an extension of an interpreter training program? Granted, many RID members are still in the early phases of their professional careers, but if we design the conference with students in mind, we generate a comfortable and familiar container for learning as usual.

No wonder, then, that many interpreters arrive and proceed to engage in comfortable, familiar, and usual ways! An alternative would be to take MJ Bienvenu’s deconstruction by reversal to the extreme. This would create a professional development experience that would use the capacities of our national organization to the fullest potential. We already have the technology:

• knowledge of Deaf culture
• linguistic fluency in ASL and English
• professionally trained ASL-English interpreters
• extensive experience with interpreter request systems and accommodation services…

What we need is the will to apply the tools in an altered configuration, and a rationale to convince people to come.

A one-time experiment of mutual discovery
Instead of following the dominant, inherently oppressive model (accessibility provided for the Deaf), we reverse it (accessibility provided for the Hearing). This would generate an experience like none other. In some respects it would resemble an ASL Immersion retreat, and in some respects it would resemble the environment at residential schools for the Deaf. What it would offer is the intellectual and empathy-building experience of being the one who has to ask.
There would not need to be any commitment or promise to continue: we can see what happens, evaluate it, and then decide. If the storming phase re-emerges – so be it, that will be an honest, deep indicator of the organization’s developmental status. If we do establish a foundation for new norms, well, that will be incredibly exciting and everyone who attends will have bragging rights for the rest of their life:

Popularity: 2% [?]

“It was not because of Ah Fatt’s fluency that Neel’s vision of Canton became so vivid as to make it real: in fact, the opposite was true, for the genius of Ah Fatt’s descriptions lay in their elisions, so that to listen to him was a venture of collaboration, in which the things spoken of came gradually to be transformed into artefacts of a shared imagining.”

Index: references to Ghosh in Reflexivity

• talking turkey, making tools (US Thanksgiving with Fulbrighters and other Americans in Brussels, 2008, includes a quote from an essay by Ghosh on the perils of comparing the November terrorist attack in Mumbai to 9/11 in the US)
• Comps (Question #4: “dissertation area”) (already two summers ago!)
• The Hungry Tide (a beautiful and inspiring novel)
• Ghosh on Interpreting (quotations from The Hungry Tide)
• What Saar would teach (a quote from Ghosh that illustrates, by metaphor, the kind of discourse diagnostics that motivates my being)

“I would produce my secret treasure, a present sent to me by a former student – a map of the sea-floor, made by geologists. In the reversed relief of this map [the students] would see with their own eyes that the Ganga does not come to an end after it flows into the Bay of Bengal. It joins with the Brahmaputra in scouring a long, clearly marked channel along the floor of the bay. The map would reveal to them what is otherwise hidden under water: and this is that the course of this underwater river exceeds by far the length of the river’s overland channel.
‘Look, comrades, look,’ I would say. ‘This map shows that in geology, as in myth, there is a visible Ganga and a hidden Ganga: one flows on land and one beneath the water. Put them together and you have what is by hard the greatest of the earth’s rivers’ (181).

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“Do you know where I live?”
I had remembered on the plane. When Koushik got his postdoc at the Max Planck Institute I was so proud to know him! Then he moved here – ok, I’m still delighted to rub shoulders with him (cool cosmologist and all-around great guy that he is!) but it turns out MPI bought a few of the apartments in the housing complex built for the 1972 Munich Olympics. I wondered if it would feel creepy to be on the site where several Israeli athletes were killed by commandos of a Palestinian terror organization, Black September.
All the apartments were sold after the games to private citizens or companies. The balconies are overflowing with plants, the complex seems abuzz with life. Dada and Jhunu’s apartment is cute and comfy. I think I’ve become a bit numb to the present-ness of the history of violence in Europe – having felt it intensely in many places over the past eight months.
What does strike me as one of those strange coincidences that populate my life is how immersed I am in co-writing a chapter for a book coming out of the Dialogue Under Occupation conferences that I’ve been attending since 2006. The chapter is an endeavor to act into Bakhtian dialogic space and turn discourse to dialogue. In some ways it is a response to the challenge of a Palestinian professor during the opening of the second DUO conference at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem: “Go ahead and see what you can do.”

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Language is a force.
Language names, and by naming, it calls into being. This is how social reality is constructed and maintained. I think it is an effect of quantum mechanics, but smarter minds than mine are needed to make the connections in a compelling scientific manner.
Last fall I wrote a post on some dynamics of dialogue and discourse, in which I engaged with ideas of a discursive psychologist, Michel Billig.

The core of the argument laid out by Michael Billig (in the articles from Discourse and Society 2008, Vol. 19, Issue 6) is that we who think in terms of critical discourse analysis (CDA) need to be acutely aware of our own uses of language, lest we repeat some of the very elements of language use that we critique in others. Billig’s concern is with social scientific language in general; he selects CDA for heuristic and practical purposes: “It should be a major issue for analysts who stress the pivotal role of language in the reproduction of ideology, inequality and power” (p. 784).

In particular, Billig goes after the academic/theoretical use of nominalization, which is a shorthand way of condensing a particular dynamical concept (something with a lot of parts) into a single term. Debate over costs and benefits of using nominalization seem to swing on the temporal grounding of interlocutors. I’m thinking at the mundane level as well as at level of ideological reproduction. For instance, does saying something about (i.e., naming) tensions in a friendship necessarily make them worse or can it provide a means to shift footings? At the precise moment of making the utterance, there may be a spike in bad feelings – all that tension concentrated and released in the acts of speaking and hearing. But I think that it is what comes next (at least, so I hope) that becomes determinative for the subsequent unfolding. When nominalization is at play, Billig argues there is a tendency to depersonalize behavior or action such that individual contributions to whatever unfolds are lost to perception. So the pattern of tensions enacted when one or another party to the tension actually says something directly about the presence or evidence of tension becomes bigger than the minute social interactions that compose it. The pattern itself becomes “the thing”, and individuals are simply swept up in it, all agency erased.
The question is, when things are not going the way one wishes, what next? I watched an interesting video on the synthesis of happiness this morning (20 minutes long) which argues that if we assume irretrievability, then we enhance our capacity to choose happiness. I’m wondering if this basic precept – that’s what done is done and can’t be changed – could guide many other choices, including the ways we respond when we find ourselves seemingly trapped in a discourse that we don’t necessarily want. I believe it is the element of acknowledgment that I am finding most attractive. Perhaps my general communicative strategy is to reduce uncertainty (see What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous) in order to make choices clear.
Perhaps.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Most of the Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace Festival is over, there were only two events that lingered past my arrival Sunday [15 March] – I chose to add them to my tourist itinerary as prep for the Dialogue Under Occupation conference that I dash to next.
I spent some time Monday afternoon [16 March] sitting under a wood-cut and linocut (2/8, 1996) by Angela Lemaire. No photographs were allowed, but the text underneath a citysprawl intercut by yellow triangles reads:

Triangles: LIGHT IN THE CITY. Triangles is a service activity for men and women who believe in the power of thought. Working in groups of three, they establish right human relationships by creating a world-wide network of light and goodwill.

Earlier, I gazed upon the castle and walked some of The Royal Mile . . .
The cabbie who brought me from the airport had suggested that I get where I can watch the light fade – he was right. I couldn’t absorb all of the running commentary so late last night when I arrived but he did a terrific job extolling the glories of the city; I wish I had more time!

Tuesday evening, I wanted to watch twilight fall on the water . . . anyplace high where I could get a beer with a view? The chap at the storyteller’s place whom I asked for a recommendation mused, “That’s the thing with Scotland, if you want comfort we go to ground.” His statement totally reframed my take on the basement room in the bed and breakfast where I was staying! I was given the lead to King’s Wark . . . it wasn’t as “on” the water as I had in mind, so I wandered around for awhile.
Leith
is homey in comparison to the glamour of the Royal Mile. After trying The Granery, and getting turned around looking for The Waterline on another recommendation, I wound up back at King’s Wark, where I had a cask-conditioned Caledonian 80 with clams & mussels for what might have been a third of the in-town price.
Most of my time revolved around preparing the talks. I nearly always operate in the last minute like this. The base idea circulates for a long time, but the final preparations are best kept as near as possible to the moment in real time. Perhaps this is why the gentleman I met at the Scottish Storyteller’s Centre suggested I stay in touch?
The best stories feel spontaneous – the labor of laying down the framework remains unseen.

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Ever wondered if abstract concepts can be discussed with signed languages?

Here’s proof.

Ever suspected Deaf people may not be very smart?

Find out just how wrong that view is!

The video is forty minutes long, so settle in and plan to give it your full attention. (Ryan suggests gourmet snacks to accompany viewing.)

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and how will we cope?

“Ideas about changing the organization of society in the long run are clearly needed, quite apart from strategies for dealing with an immediate crisis. I would separate out three questions from the many that can be raised. First, do we really need some kind of “new capitalism” rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically, and is based on social values that we can defend ethically? Should we search for a new capitalism or for a “new world”–to use the other term mentioned at the Paris meeting–that would take a different form?”

“The most immediate failure of the market mechanism lies in the things that the market leaves undone. Smith’s economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and in poverty relief (along with demanding greater freedom for the indigents who received support than the Poor Laws of his day provided), he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy.”

“Keynes can be our savior only to a very partial extent, and there is a need to look beyond him in understanding the present crisis. One economist whose current relevance has been far less recognized is Keynes’s rival Arthur Cecil Pigou, who, like Keynes, was also in Cambridge, indeed also in Kings College, in Keynes’s time.”

“Pigou not only wrote the classic study of welfare economics, but he also pioneered the measurement of economic inequality as a major indicator for economic assessment and policy.[7] Since the suffering of the most deprived people in each economy–and in the world–demands the most urgent attention, the role of supportive cooperation between business and government cannot stop only with mutually coordinated expansion of an economy. There is a critical need for paying special attention to the underdogs of society in planning a response to the current crisis, and in going beyond measures to produce general economic expansion.”

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Luiza could not believe her ears. “We’re on the grounds of Fontainebleau!”



“What now” is a question I borrow from curricular design, social justice style. First cover the what, then the so what, and finally now what. What is the subject matter? Why should we care about it? How are we going to use this knowledge?


I was ready for three days in France, away from the halls of the European Parliament and the concentration of stimulation. “Scientists,” Luiza quoted the director of her thesis, “throw away the most interesting stuff!” I needed the change in place for perspective, knowing that whatever I encounter has the potential to enhance or distract my focus from the essential elements and determinative dynamics of the system of simultaneous interpretation in such a concentrated center of global influence. “What do you think of France?” she asks me. I cannot give a discrete answer: I am treading water, immersed in a sea of history, currents of contemporary discourse, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. The evidence, I think, displays a need to worship and the desire for control.
This is not unique to France, of course – it is the story of Europe, perhaps of homo sapiens.

Upon return to Luiza’s mod flat, I retreated from the day-trip’s high-speed (time)travel to recharge my introvert self. I soaked up the smell of melting then baking chocolate, absorbed the sounds of Dvorak’s cello concerto and Yann Tiersen’s juxtaposition of strings and piano (Sur le fil), wondered at the juxtaposition of Flemish musical history with Romania’s inability to develop (so-called) high culture (”we were too busy being invaded”), and read:

‘Is it to be believed . . . that an island abundant in all things necessary has been leveled to this wasteland through the making of a Stone God and then by his destruction?’ (2007, p. 133)

Who builds in stone wants to be remembered; no other monument lasts so long or so well. Yet people (governments, organizations, groups of all kinds) also try to fix social reality – relationships, communication itself – as if hardening the rules will determine outcomes, enabling the assertion of final control by banishing all possible space for anarchy.
We hash over linguistics while we eat: attempting to digest the cognitivists, distributionalists, generativists, structuralists, psycholinguists, and sociolinguists all at one go. We sleep. (No one reports dreaming.)
The Islamic Arts Department of the Louvre is closed, so I opt for Near Eastern Antiquities. I learn about the land “between rivers” (Mesopotamia), known to us through the “archeological fortune” of remains from Girsu/Telloh and Mari and (particularly) the reign of Gudea, who poses in all statues with hands piously held across his heart. In one statue, Gudea holds a “gushing vase” from whence stream fish, invoking Geshtinanna, “the goddess of the reviving water.”


I note references to Ishtar and Inanna, figurines of women, and circles. I am fascinated by the “oscillation tendency” of the city of Susa to be both “the eastern extension of Mesopotamia” and “the western expression of Iranian mountain civilization.” I am as repulsed by the ancient rite of hierogamy as Luiza was by the relatively recent public birthing of royalty. The art of engraving stones, by the way, is called glyptic.


Then, we tiptoed through the Tuileries, sauntered the length of the Avenue de Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, past Place de la Concorde, La Madeleine, Napoleon’s burial site at the Dome des Invalides, and Grand Palais. We failed to find socks but did stop for sweets at Paul, before heading to The Lab.

The Lab is a treat. Jose dives into musical history, demonstrating how each of the old instruments work and explaining the way scores were written. We even get to see one of the earliest precursors of today’s synthesizer. Then we walk through a quiet residential area, hearing birdsong en route to the Eiffel Tower – another impressive artifact of manmade worship. From viewing angles underneath, it looks like a spaceship. How many wonders can a single day hold?


We passed the Pantheon (smart dead people buried here) on the way to dinner (which was absolutely scrumptious), and afterwards the fountain at Place Saint Michel and Notre Dame. Charlemagne looks like the WitchKing of Angmar; there were many times these past few days when I felt as if the statues atop eaves looked down on us mere mortals with bloody demand. How does it come to be that a quote by Napolean accompanies Barack Obama on the cover of Vanity Fair? Riding the Thalys back midday, I read:

“the regrettable acts of war . . . to the broken and the dead, the wounded and maimed, to the exploded and shrapnel-shattered, to minds gone dark, to eyes that have seen agony no tears can wash away, it hardly matters that the dead language of war repeats itself through time. The bodies that can say nothing have the last word” (p. 233-234).

I wondered where we were, as the train hurtled at top speed across a plain toward France’s border with Belgium. What “regrettable acts of war” had occurred here, and what can be done to ensure that such “regret” becomes a thing of the past rather than a recurring motif of human history? I know the notion is counterintuitive, but interpreters – professionally trained, ‘conference’ and ‘community,’ of any and every language combination – are poised at a liminal opening to societal self-organization that structures difference and equality within the most basic component structure: that of language-based interaction between human beings.

Continuing to gaze out the train window I see the first fresh hints of spring; the trees tinged bright green appear aglow. Earlier, Jose had noticed that the conductor addressed passengers in the language of their destination. The only way to avoid war will be to intertwine economies and social relations so densely that no class interest can benefit from disruption. To keep the system vibrant, differánce must be celebrated in core institutional processes.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Yep, it’s official.
I will co-present with two colleagues at Dialogue Under Occupation III in March.

In this presentation, we argue that the “discourse of resolution” offered by such a politically-charged conference as DUO should be conceived of as more than just the transmission of information from speakers to audiences. Indeed, as we turn our gaze inwards, we seek to analyze last year’s DUO II conference as not just an incredibly valuable “brainstorming session,” but also as a salient venue for the creation and management (through language use) of a structured, meaningful cultural and political world. To that end, we undertake a discourse analysis of a wealth of fascinating conversations emanating from DUO II, which we categorize as follows: 1) conference metadiscourse (i.e., talk about the language used in various DUO materials, released before, during, and after the conference), 2) purpose-related discourse (i.e., talk about the nature and feasibility of DUO’s goals), and 3) interpersonal discourse (i.e., communication between DUO II’s participants that continues to shape a highly heterogeneous “community”).

Speakers at previous DUO conferences have recognized that language is the premier system for expressing meaning in all human communities. This presentation takes that assertion one step further in arguing that language is also the premier locus of meaning-making. As such, “conferencing” is as much about the creation and management of “culture,” as it is about the transmission of concrete information. The conference-related communication, as well as the texts produced by the presenters themselves, are all instrumental to the acknowledgment, critique, and ideological prioritizing of personal and community-wide values, beliefs, norms, assumptions, and expectations. Believing with James Carey that “our attempts to construct, maintain, repair, and transform reality are publicly observable activities which occur in historical time,” we perform a qualitative discourse analysis of DUO II-related literature to assess the manner in which individuals associated with the conference make use (directly or indirectly) of this cultural function of communication. Finally, we suggest ways in which both past and present participants could take advantage of alternative models of communication.

Blogposts from DUO II at Al Quds University, East Jerusalem, West Bank, Palestine (November 2007)

Blogposts from DUO I at Northeastern Chicago University, Illinois, U.S. (November 2006)

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This post distills a series of thoughts from reading three different texts: The Heroic Model of Science (Chapter 1, Telling the Truth about History by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, 1991); The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen (2000), and an Interview with Ilan Stavans by Richard Birnbaum (@ 2003).
Three threads are primary: language, interaction, and science. “Language” is engaged theoretically and in practice, particularly the practices of interpretation. Although the references in the three selected texts refer mainly to written translations, I extrapolate ‘down’ to in-the-moment generation of understanding in everyday talking with each other, based on cooperation or agreement between people about meaning. I also extrapolate ‘up’ – or at least ‘over’ – to the interlinguistic skills that are most obviously evident in simultaneous interpretation. As to interaction, there are numerous levels from the microsocial to the macrosocial and the temporal to the ephemeral. The history of science is significant because of its influence on how people in western countries learn.
Why these three texts, beyond the coincidence of reading them more-or-less at the same time? Appleby, Hunt & Jacob (hereafter AH&J) investigate “what sorts of political circumstances foster critical inquiry” (p. 9). They write specifically in regard to the discipline of history by “examin[ing] critically the relevance of scientific models to the craft of history” (p. 9). I borrow their analysis as a way to explore the relevance of scientific models to other disciplines, particularly communication and the intersection of communication with political economy (especially governance), management (the organization of business), and culture (identity, ritual, and social relations).
AH&J challenge relativists and skeptics, sometimes lumping them together as postmodernists, arguing that in some ways they can “leav[e] the impression that the linguistic conventions of science have less to do with nature and more to do with the sociology of the scientists…in this way they have confused the social nature of all knowledge construction with the self-interest of the constructors, forgetting that all social beings participate in the search for knowledge and sometimes do so successfully” (emphasis added, p. 8-9). AH&J offer definitions for “skepticism” and “relativism,” showing how these attitudes form the substance of conflict with another historical attitude, that of religious absolutism. Tensions among these attitudes form the roots of the culture wars we see in the U.S. today.

“We view skepticism,” write AH&J, ” as an approach to learning as well as a philosophical stance…skepticism can encourage people to learn more and remain open to the possibility of their own errors” (p. 6-7).

Relativism, a modern corollary to skepticism, is the belief that truth is relative to the position of the person making the statement” (p. 7). There is an important nuance to this definition: truth is not directly relative to the person, rather, it is relative to “the position of the person.” (Note: “modern” means the idea of relativism wasn’t around when the initial fight took place between the skeptics and the religious. “Relativism” is an outgrowth of that fight.)

Religious absolutism is “the conviction that transcendent and absolute truth can be known” (p. 15).

All of these stances can be overdone, hence AH&J propose a standard for knowledge, i.e., for what we believe to be true:

The last phrase, it seems to me, is most crucial. If we are interested in democracy and social justice – meaning a fairness for groups of people of varying types – then we must find ways of producing and valuing broad social, political, and economic structures that are acceptable to everyone, even those whose self-interests differ from our own.
Jonathan Rosen, in a section about the ways Judaism and Christianity have borrowed from and influenced each other through the ages, writes about “open fearlessness, that willingness to assimilate outside cultures into your own without worrying that they will corrupt your beliefs” (p. 83-84). One of the anchors he poses for the Jewish religion is the collective realization, a very, very long time ago “that only words were durable” (p. 79). The Talmud, he argues, “is a sort of cathedral built across the ages and spanning all the earth – or perhaps I should say it’s a Temple, or at least a translation of one, built out of words and laws and stories” (p. 81).
I want to make three points simultaneously: language as a power with literal force; the “extraordinary religiosity” (according to AH&J, p. 50) of early (and at least some contemporary) scientists; and the inescapable fact that scientists today are the inheritors, intellectual descendants, and cultural products of the heroic science born of the Enlightenment. Certainly I am. I want to both rescue and continue the project of “truth with a purpose: the reform of existing institutions” (AH&J, p. 41), while seeking to escape or alter additional repeat performances of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century culture wars.
Power of Interpretation:
Language is key. Rosen’s parallel between the Internet and the Talmud speaks to a proliferation of heterogeneous meanings that suggests an antidote to “the nature of books never to be quite right and of words always to elude our grasp” (p. 54). The refusal of words to mean one thing only, and to mean only that one thing always and forever, is precisely the juncture where understandings are forged or splattered. Words are durable while truth about what the words mean remains elusive. Rosen’s desire “to embrace contradictory traditions” (p. i) seems similar to AH&J’s focus on “the interplay between certainty and doubt” (p. 10). This enables Rosen to keep faith with “the business of life [which] is to learn, not to know” (p. 33). For AH&J that interplay “keeps faith with the expansive quality of democracy” (p. 10). Learning, democracy, science, and faith are inextricably intertwined: language is their confluent expression.
This is why Ilan Stavans can assert with conviction: “I find translators, in many ways, to be the real protagonists of culture . . . Translators are the underpaid heroes of culture.” Translators – and interpreters – are always in between. Rosen explains how the Talmud “devised a culture intended to be a kind of middle term between extremes – between destruction and new creation, between the dead and the living, between God and man, between home and exile, between doubt and faith, between outward behavior and inner inclination” (p. 131).
Interpretation is a form of communication that has to work within and between “the chaotic contemporary forms of communication that,” Rosen explains, “are so often accused of diverting us from what is true. The chaos and the incongruities, it turns out, are part of the truth” (p. 119). On that basis he compares the “interrupting, jumbled culture of the Internet” (p. 10) with “a page of the Talmud” (p. 19): “all those texts tucked intimately and intrusively onto the same page, like immigrant children sharing a single bed” (p. 10). “Those portions and their accompanying readings,” he continues, “swim in a sea of commentary . . . so large that it seems at times to expand [like the Internet] to include everything” (p. 30).
Language in History:
Before elaborating on Stavan’s thesis, let me summarize the discussion of language and its role in history provided by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, because they present the discipline of linguistics in the creation of heroic science as an equal partner to the discipline of science. “The Enlightenment,” said to begin in 1690, “set the terms of the modern cultural project: the individual’s attempt to understand nature and humankind through scientific as well as linguistic means” (p. 39). Concurrent with the emergence of sciences and history as disciplines, “the European philosophes also developed new approaches toward old languages and texts. Reading old documents, indeed reading any document, is never as simple as it looks. Even picking up the local newspaper you ask, well, why did they run that story? Or, I wonder what party that journalist has joined?” (p. 37)
The discipline of linguistics began with criticism of written texts, called hermeneutics. It didn’t take long before “the language in a text, the words on the page, became too important to be left to clerical interpreters” (AB&J, p. 38). The Christian Bible was, at the time, the standard of absolute knowledge; it came under particular scrutiny. Ironically, clergy had originally invented hermeneutics, using the Bible as the reference point for all kinds of statements of absolute truth concerning the world and time. Now, AB&J continue, “The words had to be enlisted in the enterprise of creating wholly secular and scientific learning, but with consequences for … the present generation” (p. 38).
Stavans says, “Using language as a category is a way to say who we are in front of a mirror.” He goes on to illustrate how words change meanings over time, illustrating how the evolution of meaningfulness is what goes on socially, among and between people. When you, or I, use language – when we talk or write – we are “saying who we are” to ourselves.
When I wrote earlier that I am cut in the vein of heroic science, it is because I recognize how I think and talk in those terms. AH&J present a range of descriptions:

“Diderot described the follower of the Enlightenment as an eclectic, a skeptic and investigator who ‘trampling underfoot prejudice, tradition, venerability, universal assent, authority – in a word, everything that overawes the crowd – dares to think for himself, to ascend to the clearest general principles, to examine them, to discuss them, to admit nothing save on the testimony of his own reason and experience’” (citing Diderot’s article on eclecticsm in the Encyclopedie (1751), p. 39).

I am not an ideal type, but there is certainly a resemblance. How about this: “a new kind of person…hard to govern, suspicious of authority, more interested in personal authenticity and material progress than in the preservation of traditions, a reader of new literature, novels, newspapers, clandestine manuscripts, even pornography, all especially produced for an urban market” (p. 40). This description hardly marks me special, rather it describes today’s average western person. To wit, “a new cultural type who could be a pundit, prophet, fighter against tyranny and oppression, original thinker, elegant writer, sometimes pornographer, reader of science, host of salons, or occasional freemason” (p. 35).
The average western person today, as well as trained scientists and elites, however, is also subject to the culture wars that are the legacy of the original, historical figures of the Enlightenment who “battled with clergy and churches and at moments risked martyrdom” (p. 18). “In the culture wars of the present generation, language, with the many uses and abuses that can be attributed to it, has figured prominently in the arsenal of weapons” (p. 38). Today, continuing the trend of the Enlightenment when secular hermeneutics turned the scientific method on the Bible, all words are related to other words.

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