Reflexivity

I agree.

What's interesting about the story is that the women all expect their gifts to somehow protect them from ... something. Maybe it isn't that they're afraid, actually, but that the gift seems so sure and steady that they believe it will guide them into making all the right decisions. Which I guess are decisions without consequences? Hard to say. We don't have much motive from the author, only the characters' experiences.

This is the 'true to life' part, I think. What Annmarie recently described as "the universal value...the difference between a scream and giving form and rhythm to a scream so that your scream can become anybody else's scream..."

Each of the main characters has to make choices, in-the-moment, that have ramifications for the future whether or not they're aware of this temporal fact. Many of their choices, we infer, are predicated upon past experience - the link back. A lot of the choices seem, in retrospect, to not have been so well-considered? And yet, ultimately, these characters find that their impulse to love does lead them eventually to someone who can meet them where they are and participate in creating a mutual happiness.

Posted by Steph at 9:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 9, 2006

"presence" conference

I might have to check out the International Society for Presence Research. Conference in Ohio this fall. Online publication and print publications... focused more on what they describe as "(tele)presence, commonly referred to as a sense of 'being there' in a virtual environment and more broadly defined as an illusion of nonmediation in which users of any technology overlook or misconstrue the technology's role in their experience."

Posted to AoIR by Cheryl.

Posted by Steph at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 1, 2006

"Bravo!"

This is the most appropriate Romanian way to say "Good job!" (It is left to the imagination what a literal translation might mean...) It was some kind of bowling night. Anuj opened with a strike - although this might surprise you if you came in on the 8th frame of game two when he was crowing about his score: "22! Twenty-two!" Luscious Larry got another turkey and even rolled a strike with his left-hand! I think he does deserve honorifics for it, since he's a serious righty. Let me note, however, that I pulled off four (cont 'em, 1, 2, 3, 4!) left-handed strikes tonight. Unfortunately, they didn't help my overall scores too much: at one point I was told, "You're a disgrace to The Final Countdown." This was before LB managed NOT to beat me in the last frame of the last game, even though I'd told him it was his game to lose. We ended up tied, 109-109.

Zeynep started collecting high fives before her turn, leading to apparent improvement, Cesar and Cata played with characteristic understated style, and Claudia pulled off a couple of strikes in her very first games! Luscious Larry thinks, superstitiously, that he bowls best when there's a new woman joining us who has never bowled before. He also said, "Green is out; blue is in." This does not account for the pink ball he was using near the end of the evening.

Burcu also managed a very strong showing, considering she's still recovering from the sledding mishap that is apparently all Don's fault. Or the fault of Don's shoes. Or some other agentless whimsy of the universe.

Luckily Elena was there to make sure I knew when it was my turn. I'm not usually (?) so distractable. Or perhaps I am and last night it registered? :-) Somehow I found conversation more engaging than actually bowling...the topic? Organic chemistry.

Ok, maybe you're not so thrilled about it, but I was fascinated. Did you know they're working on making plastic magnets? Seriously! If they can just get enough molecules stripped down to one electron - a free radical - and get them all spinning in the same direction and somehow combined, these can produce enough force to function as a magnet, attracting substances with it's solo electron spinning in the opposite direction. Such would lead to innovations in all kinds of fields where iron is now used, because plastics are lighter and take up less volume than iron.

Now, you know me and my penchant for social metonymy. I was just imagining all of a person's free radicals spinning harmoniously in the same direction (the state of being at peace with oneself?) and attracting someone else who's free radicals are also spinning harmoniously in the opposite direction. At least more, rather then less, of time spent together. Wouldn't this provide a different basis of attraction than pheromones? (Some are used in pest control.) Perhaps there is a correlation between electron spin and the production of pheromones?

Now, who in their right mind would think a turn at bowling is more important than such romantic speculation?!!

Posted by Steph at 12:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 31, 2006

life following art?

I've been reading Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow. Imagine the jolt of recognition when I saw the story about his arrest and subsequent trial, reported in todays NYTimes, A Way Forward for Turkey. His novel grapples with the precise forces and laws that have now impinged - most forcefully - upon his life.

The editorial in the Times uses this freedom of speech case to leap to larger context, as a means of framing the politics regarding Turkey's ascension to the European Union. Interestingly, one of the issues regards Cyprus - I saw a presentation on this last December by one of this year's European Field Studies participants. She was focused specifically on the border between Greek and Turkish Cypriot and the interactions and flow of people back and forth across it. I'm sure there must be some analogies to be made between the on-the-ground realities there and the abstracted political maneuverings of various groups for national power.

Posted by Steph at 9:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2006

problems or puzzles? (the purview of philosophy)

I finally read Wittgenstein's Poker, a book that's been on my shelf for far too long. What I most liked about it is how readable it is: one does not need any background in philosophy to enjoy the story, which does a nice job detailing the battle of ideas at the introductory level.

The poker incident is presented as a symbolic enactment of the clash in philosophy between two schools of thought: Karl Popper's embrace of problem-solving rationalism in the form of a principle of falsification - "I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer the truth" (240) vs Ludwig Wittgenstein's linguistically-generated puzzles, "what many in the [Vienna] Circle misunderstood was that Wittgenstein did not believe that the unsayable could be condemned as nonsense. On the contrary, the things we could not talk about were those that really mattered" (158).

These philosophers followed (and to varying extents) diverged from the analytic philosophy of Bertrand Russell.

Posted by Steph at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 13, 2006

Magic

Or, the occult, meaning "hidden" or blocked from view. In terms of relationships, this is captured in the contemporary philosophical notion of intersubjectivity.

Mugwort (artemisia) can be used for strength, power, prophecy and healing (from The basis of magic in Harry Potter. Lest you distrust the source, Wikipedia agrees: "Mugwort was used from ancient times as a remedy against fatigue and to protect travellers against evil spirits and wild animals."

Mugwort is also known as common wormwood and has many wormwood relatives. Wormword has been used symbolically to denote bitter characters or realities, such as in The Light of Other Days, which I listened to on tape and continue to mull.

There is a physics discussion that is intended to lay the scientific foundation for the technology of the wormcam - a fictional device which allows remote viewing of any place, any time through miniature, stable wormholes. A wormhole "is essentially a 'shortcut' through space and time. A wormhole has at least two mouths which are connected to a single throat." Wormholes haven't yet been proven or disproven: they are hypothetical.

Curtilage, is a term used to describe the area encompassed by the limits of movement. The way I heard it was as the space of possibility within definite boundaries. A major challenge is pinpointing the parameters of the boundaries themselves.

Here's a legal use that's quite interesting because the case involves questions of privacy and surveillance:

"Respondent argues that because his yard was in the curtilage of his home, no governmental aerial observation is permissible under the Fourth Amendment without a warrant. 1 The history and genesis of the curtilage doctrine are instructive. "At common law, the curtilage is the area to which extends the intimate activity associated with the `sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life.'" Oliver, supra, at 180 (quoting Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630 (1886)). See 4 Blackstone, Commentaries *225. The [476 U.S. 207, 213] protection afforded the curtilage is essentially a protection of families and personal privacy in an area intimately linked to the home, both physically and psychologically, where privacy expectations are most heightened. The claimed area here was immediately adjacent to a suburban home, surrounded by high double fences. This close nexus to the home would appear to encompass this small area within the curtilage. Accepting, as the State does, that this yard and its crop fall within the curtilage, the question remains whether naked-eye observation of the curtilage by police from an aircraft lawfully operating at an altitude of 1,000 feet violates an expectation of privacy that is reasonable.

That the area is within the curtilage does not itself bar all police observation. The Fourth Amendment protection of the home has never been extended to require law enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home on public thoroughfares. Nor does the mere fact that an individual has taken measures to restrict some views of his activities preclude an officer's observations from a public vantage point where he has a right to be and which renders the activities clearly visible. E. g., United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 282 (1983). "What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection." Katz, supra, at 351."

Intersubjectivity remains.

Posted by Steph at 4:06 AM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2006

change the narrative

Bumped into a couple of colleagues yesterday and was telling them about the audiobook I just finished, "The Light of Other Days." However it happened, I mentioned the part about the past being immutable and one of them immediately shook her head in disagreement. "Just change the narrative," she said. Of course, I said, leave it to comm majors to disagree! There wasn't time then (we were going separate ways), but I want to pursue this a bit, because I don't think one person changing the narrative changes much of anything ...

We could get technical about what constitutes change, and then more picky about what it is that gets "changed" ... the book's premise is basically that everything can be watched as it unfolded in real time - this unfolding is what cannot be changed, what is immutable. Changing the narrative about what happened is certainly possible. These are interpretations of what happened, what it meant, what was intended, how it came about as the result of something prior, or how it seemed to causally lead to something later can certainly be changed, but these stories - however rational or descriptive or moralistic - don't change the unfoldment as it was. These stories can, however, change the future, and perhaps they can change the present but only if there is some cooperation between the teller(s) and listener(s).

There was a legal scene (one of the first court cases involving evidence gathered by the time-travelling surveillance device) that really caught my attention because of the fact that even though scenes from a person's life could be replayed exactly, the dialogue wasn't necessarily any more clear in retrospect than it was at the time - and possibly (?) even less so, as contextual layers fade from memory.

It's a domestic scene. The prosecution brings a certain conversation as evidence that the defendent deluded herself about the import of some crucial moments in a former relationship. There is dialogue between the woman (defendent) and the boyfriend. While the fact of the impending break-up is already known to these future viewers looking back on this conversation as an event in time, the meanings of the words spoken are largely ambiguous: they could be interpreted with a range of alternative meanings by different persons, depending upon which element is prioritized. Indeed, even the woman and her boyfriend might view it years later and understand what happened in different terms than what they thought it meant at the time.

For me, the question of change enters as a thought experiment. IF both parties were present "now" and viewing this scene from their past together, would they constitute its meaning in the same way that they did then? If so, there has been no change. If they constitute the meaning differently, then there's a chance - but no guarantee - of change. As they discuss the differences in meaning that they perceive "now" as opposed to "then", they might reenact the same dynamic, the same pattern = no change. It would only be under the circumstance of both parties understanding the difference in meaning and relating anew on the basis of this difference that a new story could be told, a new narrative constructed, that produces actual change.

An individual engaged with this process by themselves as a meditative or reflective practice can grow internally but for this to constitute change there must also be a behavioral element, something that affects sociality, which necessarily requires the participation of others. Perhaps "the change" is found by replacing persons with other persons but this is symbolic not structural. In other words, if all my lovers leave me, each lover leaving becomes symbolic of all the others leaving, each lover loses her individual personness and becomes a part of the structure of a system in which I always get left (this is a hypothetical example, btw!). The system is the structure that keeps me getting involved with women who won't stay ... change - to be changed, to be different in essence - means the structure has to change. Structures are always relational. My changed narrative means nothing as an agent of change unless and until it is 'picked up' - until others engage with the new/changed story - thus making it possible for the uncertain possibilities of the future to overrule the fixed patterns set by the structure of the past.

Posted by Steph at 1:38 AM | Comments (0)

January 7, 2006

parameter space

This notion comes up in Clarke and Baxter's book, The Light of Other Days, which expands upon a short story of the same title by Bob Shaw written in 1966.

Parameter space is a notion in statistics; Clarke & Baxter apply it to physics and space/time. This link provides a couple of examples.

It seems a Henon Map is how one gets a visual.

There are all kinds of other maps (scroll down Henon Map link above), but this one is more simple in comparison (at least, so it appears). One of the parameters it measures is "the rate of area contraction (dissipation), which must relate to "the connectedness locus" (in the visual link above). I may be grotesquely incorrect, but is this similar to when a quantum wave collapses?

Here's my thinking: An event-in-time unfolds through a series of oscillations between possibility and probability. "Reality" occurs at each instant the wave collapses from its dynamic energy/matter state into something fixed: phenomenologically known as arrival, or in Briankle's terms (?), a gift.

(In looking for an older blogpost on "arrival" - which doesn't exist, *sigh* - I came across this one regarding entelechy. It also has to do with the collapsing of a quantum wave. Yes?)

Here's a nice overview with a brief summary of phenomenology as a field of inquiry and useful explanations of phenomenological thinking.

I'm just thinking (as I get tired of blogging today), that parameter space is a notion that applies not only mathematically to the measurable objects of perception and experience but also, perhaps, to the intangible and ephemeral possibilities of human connecting.

Posted by Steph at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

January 5, 2006

The brain-gut connection

I revisited the article I found after Shemaya mentioned the enteric brain to me. It’s densely biomedical, and I wouldn’t pretend to understand the actual chemistry involved, except that motility (the digestive action of the stomach and intestines) is linked to serotonin in some way. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that has a lot to do with mood. Again, I don’t understand the actual reactions that stimulate sensation, but what I’ve been thinking about is the frequency with which – in my darker moments of the past couple of years – I’ve had the impulse to want to cut out my stomach. Rich said something similar the other night, about sometimes wanting to take a knife to his gut.

“Provided that the vagus nerve is intact, a steady stream of messages flows back and forth between the brain and the gut. We all experience situations in which our brains cause our bowels to go into overdrive. But in fact, messages departing the gut outnumber the opposing traffic on the order of about nine to one.”

In other words, just by quantity, the enteric system associated with the digestive tract produces many more messages than the brain. This leads me to think that the function of mind is to reconcile all of these messages. A task complicated by innumerable factors of genetics, socialization, exposure to various kinds of knowledge, and personal experiences.

The article is focused on physical phenomena, the material system that can be traced through careful scientific experimentation. I’m drawn to it because of the (oft repeated) phenomenological experience of emotional distress (grief, mostly) being accompanied by the urge to remove a part of my body. The article only mentions one example of an emotional-enteric connection:

“Correlation or Causation? Whatever the exact connection, the relationship between the cerebral and enteric brains is so close that it is easy to become confused about which is doing the talking. Until peptic ulcer was found to be an infectious disease, for example, physicians regarded anxiety as the chief cause. Now that we recognize Helicobacter pylori as the cause, it seems clear that the physical sensation of burning epigastric pain is generally responsible for the emotional symptoms, rather than the other way around. But because most ulcer patients, if questioned, will admit to feeling anxious, the misunderstanding persisted for decades.”

Posted by Steph at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

January 4, 2006

Ila's recent reading list

Kafka romanticized failure, and sadness,

so did Albert Camus: who "viewed a failure to act as a choice to surrender".

as well as Herman Hesse (actually a bit more positive about things; perhaps a good place to begin?), and Nietsczhe and Milan Kundera, one of whose novels was made into a movie: The Unbearable Lightness of Being....

Ila's Heartthrob On Romance: "The day the thought of me doesn't bring a smile to your face we'll split."

Ila On Blogging: "What are you doing?"

Ila In The Morning: "I can't believe you said, 'Rise and shine!'"

Ila on Classes: "What the heck! I won't go!"

Ila as Ila: "Tell them that I boss you around!"

Posted by Steph at 8:03 AM | Comments (10)

December 31, 2005

"Hope comes back"

The Korean acupuncturists wanted me to come back for a second treatment so I did. An indulgence. "Your chi is depleted," said Mrs. Kim, "Your spirit is wandering. We need to help it come back."

I received more moxa in the same places, needles in the same and several more new sites, and an extravagant, custom blend of medicinal tea. I asked for the names of the "more than twenty" goodies placed in neat piles on a tissue paper before being bundled up for brewing. Instead, Mrs. Kim told me what each one is for:

large intestine
woman
stomach - at least 3 different herbs in "combination - grow strong, help your stomach better"
blood clear, produce blood, strong blood
"memories coming back"
strong bone
"heart calm down"
your eye
lung
chi coming back, chi circulate
dragon eye - which she squeezed open with a load crack - "for your concentration better" (Longan?)
menstruation (2), liver, together and for kidney
"control your water"
circulate
"face shiny"
"decoration for your altar"

I received detailed instructions for brewing and consumption for a ten day treatment. I'll start when I arrive back east.

Posted by Steph at 2:18 PM | Comments (1)

December 30, 2005

Nephews

Both of them are a trip. Separately and together. Austin took us on the scenic route to Waid's for breakfast that just happened to take us by GameStop where the new release of DOA 4 awaited. :-) I really enjoyed watching him play last night, shifting between female and male characters and winning every single game. He explained a lot to me. Very interesting discourse involved with gaming. I asked Alec last night about whether he felt himself thinking in the ways of the games during his real life. "It doesn't make me violent, if that's what you mean." No, that wasn't where I was going. (Obviously he's aware of that interpretation.) He's articulate and concise: you don't solve problems in real-life like you do in the game. I know. What I meant was, there are parts of the games - especially the commercial elements - that are quite optimistic. They point toward possibilities. Austin acknowledged this: some things are just cool, but part of what makes them cool is that they demonstrate potential.

Alec was playing Conker's Bad Fur Day this morning. There are squirrels and teddies. "The teddies are evil but they're better." What does that mean? "The teddies don't take fall damage. Squirrels do. Squirrels can run fast but I don't care about that cuz I'm a good sniper."

I haven't learned much about Runescape yet. "It's a mythical game. You know what runes are? They're not just used in that game."

I'm having a great time. :-)

Posted by Steph at 2:17 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2005

Consent: A densely-textured life

Little Brother calls during bowling (affection flows back). Blood brother suffers. Parental pathology is passed on. I dream randomly.

SEMP subjected me to the most intensive grilling I’ve yet received over the Informed Consent form for Reflexivity. :-) The beginning point was this “favorite sentence”:

The guidelines used for selecting material have to do with intrasubjectively-perceived salience in the moment,…

The individual words make sense, but what do I mean by stringing them together in this way? Most simply, what I mean is, “I decide”. Yet the consent form puts limits on this power. The different choices people make concerning their own consent establish certain conditions that I commit to operate within – each individual’s decision contributes to a structure of accountability for me. Why do I need to be accountable to others in this way? Why not just rely on my own personal integrity? Because any kind of integrity requires a supporting structure and I’ve had no other. The academic language adds (hypothetically) a precision that seeks to specify the rationale justifying the choices I make.

I’m quizzed about “public” and “private”. “There’s no such thing as privacy,” says Jesus Evil Kachina. Intersubjectivity theorists (whoever these might be, smile) agree: we all mutually co-construct each other through acts of calling (instead of/in addition to "mission", also identity: interpellation). In commonsense terms, one could say we do this through culture (norms, values, etc).

“I don’t know if I want to be a blog! “ A log? A bog? “It sounds like a glob.!” A lob?

Why do I need a “weird computer” representation? Because I’m lonely and ambitious. Who does the representation invite? “Maybe the comments are just computer programs!” Understanding the blog as a representation means part of the selection criteria is the production of my own story – which moments lend themselves to the kind of person I want to be? Which anecdotes establish accountability? “The problem with writing stories is that the rough edges get rounded.” Maybe (just maybe), what I’m doing with this blog that is a wee bit different than other blogs is how hard I try not to round too much. I also deliberately intend to reflect the multiple aspects of my life experiences. I’m most invested in the long-term patterns – which I dearly hope (!) show development (growth, change). Ambition competes with pride. While the selfish ego wishes I could be (or appear) flawless; the trained social scientist grasps for objective description: how I understand life as I/we live it…

There was some tease about how communication majors communicate – or not (!) . . . something about thinking too much. Who? Me?! :-)

Posted by Steph at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)

Spiritual Guidance

You can pick your nose.

Put that in your blog and smoke it!

~ SEMP

Jesus Evil Kachina tested me. Do you want world peace? I do. Are you at peace with yourself? Getting there. The last eight days, yes. Thank you.

While driving, I talked with Shemaya about gut feelings and the trick of learning to distinguish between the “gut” that’s reactive defensiveness and the “gut” that’s intuitive guidance. She explained “the enteric brain” to me (note especially the section on The Third Neurotransmitter: serotonin), which I hadn’t heard about before. We agreed it’s probably connected (somehow) to the biochemical pathways in the mind that channel consciousness.

I actually arrived a bit earlier than announced yesterday evening, so drove past the road to S.E.’s and on toward Wellington. Turned around when I made eye contact with a young Great Horned Owl perched on a road sign. She made eye contact with me again when I returned and slowed down to pull onto the shoulder, then launched herself lazily in front of me, flapping ponderously over to a less exposed branch in a nearby tree. Her gaze pierced me as I continued to watch. After a bit, she moved another ten feet and decidedly looked the other way.

I was reminded of the older owl I watched in the Reserve in Montana the last time I was there . . . the consensus was that poor girl hadn’t caught anything for awhile otherwise why would she be out in the middle of the day? I sat by myself and watched her for a good half-hour that long and lovely midday hike.

Last night, the sighting was just at dusk after a rosy sunset.

Almost finished listening to Prodigal Summer. Deanna offers up this childhood prayer in a moment of astonished gratitude:

Thank you for this day
For all the birds safe in their nests
For whatever this is
For life.

Posted by Steph at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2005

Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail

This ethnography, subtitled Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool, is amazing. In addition to superb analysis that grounds complicated theory with real day-to-day living, there are bits that might relate to my study on interpreters in the European Parliament. An obvious connection is with RP, Received Pronounciation, also known as posh (p. 14).

The author, Jacqueline Nassy Brown (who will give a talk at UMass in Feb), is interviewed (briefly) on the BBC radio program Thinking Allowed (interview starts about 8 1/2 minutes in). In the book, she provides a two-page summary of phenomenology that's quite useful (p. 9-10). Interestingly, she distances herself from it as representative of her own epistemology, stating "my point is not to endorse ... but to lay the groundwork for one of the arguments that follows..." (p. 11).

Her argument is fascinating, involving the ways "people make sense of place-as-matter, a practice that includes reading landscapes and acting on the view that place acts, that it shapes human consciousness" (p. 11).

Broadly, Brown's argument is situated to engage the question of "how we might theorize the local in view of increased scholarly attention to transnational processes of racial formation" (p. 5).

Posted by Steph at 9:19 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

academics...

Cosette "just a finance person" mentioned this quote the other day and I couldn't quite recall it, but look! She posted it in her blog:

"I am "the overeducated in pursuit of the unknowable." - Solow (1997) paraphrasing Oscar Wilde. Why didn't they tell me that in the beginning?!"

Yet now we know, and we still don't stop!

Posted by Steph at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)

December 8, 2005

holiday spirit

politically incorrect glad tidings to all!

White Trash Xmas

The Fringe City promo after it is much better. Clever sequence. "...everything here is theoretical, every motive may be ulterior....this is the undefined medium between before and after, just as far from never as forever..."

shared via email from my favorite anonymous spiritual (!) guide. :-)

Posted by Steph at 8:06 PM | Comments (0)

December 4, 2005

Definition of Human

"Being bodies that learn language
thereby becoming wordlings
humans are
the symbol-making, symbol-using, symbol-misusing animal
inventor of the negative
separated from our natural condition
by instruments of our own making
goaded by the spirit of hierarchy
acquiring foreknowledge of death
and rotten with perfection"

Also by Kenneth Burke. Check out the cool plaques too.

Posted by Steph at 11:48 PM | Comments (0)

theory of the spectacle

This piece by Guy Debord (1967) is wicked dense stuff, but it lays out its logic regarding "Society of the Spectacle" in a compelling and articulate way.

I find Baudrillard depressing, but his thought is useful, nonetheless. Here's a peek, "Spectacle, Currency, Bits -- Baudrillard, Postmodernism, and Power.

Posted by Steph at 2:28 PM | Comments (0)

dealing with MS

A friend is adjusting to the news of a MS diagnosis. Life's randomness, in the face. :-/ Seems to me there's been a lot of that going around, or maybe I've just become more sensitized? Less in my own bubble? Here's a "hero", one of those incomparable persons who becomes extraordinary in the face of something that scares most people quite a bit: David Krolich.

Posted by Steph at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2005

spiritual justice

"I don't meet that many people who are awake enough to understand what I'm doing."

She said this to me after explaining a bit about the book she's writing, in which she details the last 16 years spent seeking justice for her murdered brother and other children who've been abused by a group associated with a very well-known political figure.

It was an intense and surprising encounter, to say the least. She must have overheard me talking with one of my students, because she opened the conversation asking what I teach. I was a bit taken aback - how did she know I was a teacher? But there wasn't much time to adapt as it only took a few pleasantries before she was deep in her story. Maggie said she's devoting her life to obtaining material justice but that she also works with juju (if I've spelled it correctly?) and is "spiritually marking" the men responsible for harming so many children: "I represent a quarter of a million children."

It reminded me of the woman I met in Brussels who I thought might be deaf because she was so articulate with gestures. Shirley was operating on a very different phenomenological plane - one that doesn't mesh too well with so-called 'normal' modes of behavior. I paid for her drink and I remember the waiter's eyes just about popping out of his skull he was so stunned I was being kind to her.

The woman I met today was not as disorganized as Shirley but she was operating on one of those different planes - and implied that I was, too. (I bet there are quite a few folk who might agree!) ;-)

It was an odd encounter: intriguing and a wee bit spooky, too.

Posted by Steph at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2005

sandpainting

Copied with gratitude from here. :-)

Posted by Steph at 12:02 AM | Comments (1)

November 22, 2005

"to be sure" (!)

we're having a good time in Briankle's class, discussing Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator and On Language As Such. Thinking together, as it were. :-)

To be sure, we're not the only ones. Others have been thinking too. I disagree with Sarah Dudek's assertion that "Benjamin’s thoughts cannot be understood without having a closer look at his concept of language". I thought we did a good job of imagining such a separation - or was that just me in my own head? I realize as I'm invoking the royal we (!) that of course you were thinking differently than me, but I'm using the "we" in the sense of the shared discourse - what was said out loud among us during class. :-)

The rest of Dudek's thought: " -'pure language' seems a rather vague term. [Benjamin's] whole project is so remarkable because it has an all-embracing notion of language as its basis: the world is made of language and the final aim is to understand this “textus” of the world, to achieve harmony between the inadequate human languages and the language of God."

David was right on top of the mysticism, eh? :-) Cabbala more precisely than Sufi, although there does seem to be a convergence of mystical spirituality from various religious traditions.

Dudek: "Benjamin posited a universal sphere of concepts, which he called the “intellectual part”, totally self-sufficient and distinguished from the “linguistic part”. The two components of the human being are connected to some extent, but the linguistic part never covers the whole conceptual sphere."

Looks like Cartesian dualism to me. Or traditional Freudian psychology. Neither of these conceived of the degree of "interplay" (Chang) between any so-called 'self' and the communication processes that constitute "it" (fancy term = subjectivity). Elinor Ochs argues that research on the practices of language socialization link "poststructural sociological paradigms that portray social structures as outcomes of social practices ... and to psychological paradigms that portray cognitive structures as outcomes of speaking ... and of social interaction" (p. 407, citations deleted).

Dudek's interpretation of Benjamin downplays this interactivity, describing the connection minimalistically, as only "to some extent".

We've also argued the following point sans theology: "Translation is the decisive means to reach the final end: it completes languages, puts together the disintegrated “modes of intention”—as Benjamin calls the sphere in semiotics termed “signifier”—and works towards the perfection of the original, which can be considered incomplete, requiring translation: “Thus translation, ironically, transplants the original into a more definitive linguistic realm”, Benjamin states."

We would argue (wouldn't we?!), that "transplantation" is too definite, merely transmissional. Instead, we'd emphasize the in-betweenness where understanding occurs as the translation substantiates or fixes meaning in the original. Dudek (it turns out) is anti-Benjamin, but this doesn't become clear until the end of the essay. She denies any practical value of his thinking because of it's messianic motivations, yet they seem - to me - to be not so difficult to strip away. In making her case, however, Dudek misrepresents (or misreads) Benjamin.

For instance, I think Dudek is way off, here: "Thus the extraordinary task the translator receives in Benjamin’s theory tends to reverse to an exceedingly binding restriction imposed on the translator lacking any granted creativity." Did anyone else get the feeling that Benjamin's endmodel was extraordinarily limiting? I guess we didn't talk too much about the boundaries of a text, but don't you think it's constituted in the same way the boundaries for deconstruction are? Just as deconstruction seeks to identify the ways a text betrays itself, doesn't an interpretation seek to identify the ways in which a text is true to itself?

None of us commented upon Benjamin's neglect of the reader, but Dudek is surprised by it: "Benjamin does not consider the reader." Here is a point of distinction, I think, between written translation and spoken/signed interpretation: a translator simply can't - realistically - "consider the reader," because the reader could be anyone and everyone. An interpreter, however, does consider the receiver, the audience, in addition to being concerned with authorship.

In practice, I bet interpreters are not uniform in the balancing of authorship and receivership ... hmmmm!

”The end of any consideration for the reader of a translation provides freedom to the translator. The transmission of content is superfluous: if there is not receiver there is no demand for information. It is possible to focus only on aesthetics—as incomprehensible as the result might prove to be." First, did anyone get the sense that the information didn't matter at all? I thought the point was that it's not really worth going to the effort of translation if there is nothing in addition to "information" - call it aesthetics, intention, desire, culture. Did I get this wrong?

Second, just because one doesn't consider the reader doesn't mean there isn't one.

Here's something we didn't discuss, I thought I recalled we'd had some discussion about the title last year. Again quoting Dudek: "the German title “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” could also be translated as “The Surrender of the Translator”."

Yes, this is the immersion in the text. The plunge, as it were, into the other language. To be sure, this is how one knows there are boundaries: one must submit.

Posted by Steph at 9:09 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2005

evolution of language

While it's never been extremely popular, as far as I know, among the Deaf to be enamoured of gorillas learning sign language, wouldn't it turn the tables a bit if it became widespread knowledge that all language evolved from gestures?

There certainly is a different kind of (intrasubjective) phenomenological experience when one signs instead of speaking, but according to The Salk Institute argue there isn't much difference: "The capacity of brain systems to subserve language, regardless of modality, is a striking example of neuronal plasticity."

Posted by Steph at 9:55 PM | Comments (0)

November 5, 2005

fiesta

One of my students asked on Friday if we could have a fiesta at the end of the year. Of course - complete with a pinata? This seemed to throw him - is it my stereotype or his monolingualism? He used a Spanish word to convey the idea of a party. Should that necessarily have conjured up an image in my mind of a pinata? I actually had a flash of memory in that moment. We had a pinata at one of the BM's early birthdays - I think it was when she turned 4, but maybe it was her 5th. ;-)

The kids were out of control, ohmygosh I had to go wading in there and holler like a drill sargeant to keep anyone from getting clocked! It was an awful lot of fun, but the moment it began it was clear there was potential for an accident. Whoa! So, this is flashing through my mind, as I'm also wondering, how does he not associate a Spanish word with its cultural event? Is this because English has colonized the term so completely it's original semiotic relation has been severed?

Posted by Steph at 3:38 PM | Comments (8)

"You're checking my stats?!"

Another work(ing) encounter...

I've been having more/continuing laptop stress: "there is not enough space on your startup disk to complete that operation."

I understand why folks can become convinced by the mind = computer model. Basic physics - if there is only so much room, only so much can fit. If the start-up disk is full to the limits of quantum mechanics, no room to jiggle things around and make space for that next priceless video clip. If my mind is full to the brim with whatever neurochemical reaction is playing out from memory, no room to incorporate an alternative interpretation.

thanks, Matt, for all the reassurance there's only a 1 % chance this Lacie hard drive will crash. I want at a ten-year guarantee!

Posted by Steph at 3:26 PM | Comments (0)

"say hi to your uncle for me"

"Do you know about me?!" I have a couple of "uncles". There's the fictional one, and then there's the non-biological but infinitely real one.

I met Leon Trainee at work today. He had to figure out how to answer my mundane and persistent questions: what time can I catch the bus? Will it really be there at 6:55 am? Do I choose time asleep or time with my friends?

It's all about timing. Well, and having something to say. ;-) How much of my life has been spent "out of time" with others? By far and away the bulk of it. Even many of those times when I *thought* I was "present" and "reasonable" turn out, in retrospect, to have been projections of emotional events past. Part of feeling "happy" might be the experience of moving into the temporal now with a minimal trace of the subjectively imprinted past. (Or maybe feeling happy is only possible in the "now" and in the "future" if there are glimpses of it in the "past"?)

Posted by Steph at 3:16 PM | Comments (0)

November 3, 2005

Global Fear

by Eduardo Galeano.

Those who work are afraid they'll lose their jobs.
Those who don't are afraid they'll never find one.
Whoever doesn't fear hunger is afraid of eating.
Drivers are afraid of walking and pedestrians are afraid of getting run over.
Democracy is afraid of remembering and language is afraid of speaking.
Civilians fear the military, the military fears a shortage of weapons, weapons fear a shortage of wars.
It is the time of fear.
Women's fear of violent men and men's fear of fearless women.
Fear of thieves, fear of the police.
Fear of doors without locks, of time without watches, of children without television; fear of night without sleeping pills and day without pills to wake up.
Fear of crowds, fear of solitude, fear of what was and what could be, fear of dying, fear of living.

The preceding is from upside down: a primer for the looking-glass world (p. 79). If you want more: "Fear of unemployment allows a mockery to be made of labor rights."

Posted by Steph at 7:05 PM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

"non-monologic unity"

This would be Mikhail Bakhtin, and somehow I'm going to make it clear that interpreters make this happen. Google could only find one reference to this idea, in a paper on the possibilities/problems of cybercommunity/ies, Digital Waco.

Here's what Morson & Emerson say in their intellectual biography, Creation of a Prosaics:

"Lives are not works of fiction. Meetings full of promise do not always ripen into friendships, and ideas rich in potential sometimes lead nowhere. Important people and concerns enter our lives and thought early and late, for various lengths of time, and then depart, never to return. Although in retrospect we may trace causal lines between events and see direct linkages between thoughts, in doing so, we may misrepresent the connections between them. The work we do to make events cohere in a sequence is easily underestimated. Overlooking the role of contingent factors that need not have happened, we imagine only the outcome realized to the exclusion of others equally possible. ideas that seem to anticipate others might in fact have led in another direction, and apparent resemblances across time may testify to little more than characteristic habits of thought. Memory and biographies tend to be obsessive in excluding accident and insisting on patterns, but lives and intellectual careers, as Bakhtin maintained, are not. Rather, they are wasteful, producing not only diverse achievements, but also unrealized or only partially realized potential" (p. 3).

Posted by Steph at 8:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2005

Phantoms in the Brain

(As if I have time for leisure reading, but when I do, Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind looks like a winner.

It's definitely timely, as I wax and wane between what can only be empirically described as fantasy yet feels, phenomenologically, like a vision of the future. I know it's only a potential future, but I cannot shake the conviction that if I find the proper alignments it could come to pass. Could be a text book case of what neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran explores regarding hallucination? There is external stimula, which I don't think I'm misreading (that would be an illusion according to the Wikipedia definition) - empirically observed behavior. "A hallucination is a sensory perception experienced in the absence of an external stimulus..." seems more on target because the moments of perception (possibly an example of insight?) occur in spatial and temporal distance from the stimulus.

Posted by Steph at 8:48 AM | Comments (0)

October 9, 2005

way of the warrior

"The human dilemma of communication is that we cannot communicate ordinarily without words and signs, but even ordinary experience tends to be falsfied by our habits of verbalization and rationalization." Thomas Merton, Zen and the birds of appetite

Preface
Way of the Warrior

Opens with a quote by Inazo Nitobe, author of Bushido: The warrior's code

In Zen in the Art of Rhetoric: An inquiry into coherence by Mark Lawrence McPhail.

"We tend to view the word warrior as peculiarly masculine and aggressive, but we might also think of it in terms of a transformative sensibility, one that can help us address the problems of fragmentation and negativity that confront us daily in our families, our classrooms, and our lives." 1996: vii

Posted by Steph at 9:27 PM | Comments (0)

The Collaboration Cafe

I read two different accounts of "Intersubjectivity in an organic pub", In Johnnie's (the first one), there was a link to the second one, David's, which led me to The Collaboratino Cafe.

Posted by Steph at 8:56 PM | Comments (0)

Intersubjectivity

Trying to guide students from the notion of subjectivity, through co-construction, to intersubjectivity. I've posed the question to a few of them to define "co-construction." I jumped ahead, to intersubjectivity. The stuff I'm coming across is pretty dense. :-(

Intersubjectivity in an organic pub

The (above) Blog for Collective Intelligence looks like a Tom Atlee site, except it's a bit more witty! (Tom writes more like me, or, I write more like him. Basically, not so funny. Don't tell me you guessed?!) Actually, I'm pretty sure I recognize George's name from among folk Tom has recommended in the past.

Intersubjectivity: Exploring Consciousness from the Second-Person Perspective

Identity, Intersubjectivity and Communicative Action

Posted by Steph at 8:42 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

knowledge mgmt and development

"This issue [of KM4D, on "Approaches to promote knowledge sharing in international development organizations" presents papers on experiences with knowledge sharing in international development organisations, highlighting strategies and approaches used to foster knowledge sharing in diverse settings and presenting their results."http://www.km4dev.org/journal/index.php/km4dj

Posted by Steph at 5:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 18, 2005

abduction (more on method)

Because part of my funding for the EuroParl interpreter research came from anthropology, there's been a big push to do ethnography. I've really only collected discourse at this stage, which I will look at through a critical discourse lens because I'm interested in language hierarchies and linguistic inequality. There is plenty of evidence of these things in EuroParl interpreters' talk about their work and working conditions. Rather than deduction (coming up with an hypothesis based on theory) or induction (making what I find fit some theory), abduction is about invention. It requires applying imagination to generate theory, to come up with categories based on the combination of characteristics discovered (the expected and the unexpected). My next task is to distinguish between what Agar calls rich points (the surprises) and those things that meshed with my expectations.

The piece on abduction linked above focuses on the element of surprise in epismetic production. Peirce formulated this into a logic equation:

The surprising fact, C, is observed.
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

The inventive, imaginative part of this formulation is coming up with A. What A could be possible that consistently explains C? This is the generation of hypotheses, which can be evaluated for their potential utility on the basis of being "explanatory, testable, and economic." As a (phenonmenological?) process, abduction occurs "as a flash" and has two elements: intuitive and rational (Anderson 1986; critiqued). It is apparently a big concept in artificial intelligence.

"In Peirce's epistemology, thought is a dynamic process, essentially an action between two states of mind: doubt and belief." In this view, "belief is a habit, doubt is its privation" and the term "knowledge" does not come into play. Atocha Aliseda, the author of all these quotes (unless otherwise credited), says Peirce argued that "genuine doubt is necessary to break up a habit" and doubt is generated by the experience of surprise. I'd say surprise doesn't always lead to doubt (which might be unfortunate), and I wonder what other triggers might instigate doubt? Surprise may be a blanket term for a continuum of bio-emotional responses...nausea, sweating, insecurity, puzzlement, etc. Aliseda discusses Peirce's two varieties of (what she calls) abductive triggers: novelty and anomaly.

Posted by Steph at 7:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2005

cognitivism

history of the term, originally referred to the "truth-evaluable" and was intended "to re-introduce belief and desire into psychology".

Posted by Steph at 9:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 14, 2005

developing collective wisdom (countering collective stupidity)

Here's a chart Tom Atlee has put together that "shows a big reason to prioritize developing our macro-scale (societal and global) collective intelligence and wisdom." This is necessary, he argues (and I agree), because our individual intelligences are insufficient to solve the problems our social structure instigates.

Posted by Steph at 5:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 5, 2005

Moved

Yep. Left Carolyn’s (with a pang, I confess) :-( and hustled all my stuff to Florence. This room is going to work out well, been getting it together this morning and I like how it feels. :-) Meanwhile, school officially begins for me tomorrow: “off to the races” as if I haven’t already been!

My overall orientation to time is different, though, as well as my awareness(es)…. it’s kinda cool to witness my own development leap. :-) Will it last? We shall see. I've been dreaming like crazy - all kinds of relationship stuff, theory, even about the convergence of themes in the blog (!) - looking for a link, I found this on babies' consciousness: it's pretty darn cool.

Posted by Steph at 11:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 28, 2005

Emmitt Till

The photographs of his mutilation by white racists helped to galvanize the civil rights movement in the US.

Now, a documentary: The Murder of Emmitt Till.

The violence done then ripples out in waves of emotional and psychic pain. And then we wonder why people are as warped as we often are. Trying to grow straight again Lillian Smith), impossible as its ultimate achievement be, must remain among our highest priorities.

Posted by Steph at 6:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 23, 2005

homecoming

Shemaya reminded me today of an incident from way back - a decade or more ago (probably more). It was a gathering at Mary Frances' place on the lake in Pelham. I was distressed about some situation or other. A woman who hadn't met me before observed my trying to deal with the emotions: "You look like Spock."

Upon relaying this story to Raz and another bud (who totally cracked up), Raz quipped that "ten years later you became Worf." From Vulcanism to Klingonism, now that's something! Raz has seen me rage a few times. His observation of me today was that I'm "quieter." Is this indicative of a real change or merely jetlag? We'll find out. Can anyone who's known me imagine me as "soft-spoken"? :-)

I kinda like the notion myself.

Posted by Steph at 7:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 1, 2005

Click Moments

Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15

If there’d only been one "click moment," I’d be set! I conceived of using a weblog as an attempt to produce an interface between face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. My experience teaching online had alerted me to the fact that the conditions of cyberspace enabled thoughtful, more evenly participatory group discourse about the topic at hand. I was enthusiastic – full of inspiration! – and unprepared for the contingencies of a (voluntary) public online space created for an already established (not anonymous) face-to-face group. I openly identified my desire to analyze our discourse in the blog as a means of tracking stages of group development. I was (narcissistically?) surprised, then, when others weren’t as enthusiastic as me (hello!); moreso when there were indications of resistance (especially after everyone had given consent). Funny how I knew, intellectually, that all kinds of things “go on” beneath the surface of what people say, but was (am still?) unable to apply it when my own ambition is at stake!

My professor was blase:

“The blog was not (intentionally) constructed by you—you are part of the surveillance as both subject and object. You have inserted yourself as a type of mediator/interpreter of the discourse.”

Yes, I had set myself up to be watched doing the work of watching (Andrejevic, M. (2002). The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure.) And others were not so happy about being watched! I persisted, made a presentation, wrote a paper, the course concluded. But I was hooked. Since, I’ve encountered a range of forms of social censure. I understand that when I continue to blog in the face of this, my choice can feel aggressive. Maybe it is? I am definitely resisting conformity to a widespread social code that seems (to me) to structure a kind of permission for ignoring/avoiding the implications of knowledge at the level of (our very human) social interaction.

Yet, I persist because it is my consciousness, my intrasubjective phenomenological development, that is most on display. I exploit myself. Others come and go, leaving a mark or not. I wish to preserve the marks that mattered to me when they occurred, for good or ill. I always hope to be joined by others similarly inclined. The first click moment, then, was my response after reeling from the real-life implications of doing public work (Sunday, October 27, 2002; the first parts of this blog have somehow been lost). Subsequent click moments occur when I face, for whatever imminent reasons, the fear of incurring social penalties for whatever I expose by writing here. The risk or threat of being accused of intentionally producing public data for the purposes of exploitation is always going to accompany this site. Should this prevent or inhibit my doing so?

Posted by Steph at 8:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 30, 2005

to be or not to be ... suspicious

“People look around and wonder which backpack will change or end their life…” – Annmarie Sauer for the Chloride Epitaph

I haven’t felt suspicious, or under suspicion, too much, myself this summer. Yet the question of whether or not I ought to be is often there, just below the surface, straining for some subtle signal to spring it loose.

For all the differences that I can recognize, I don’t feel so far from my own cultural foundations. The pace is slower but the punctuation of events, the rhythm of daily life, seems about the same. I have not felt constrained in expressing myself, indeed perhaps I have been a bit more free to do so? Or is the sense of this the unconscious privilege of ‘americanness’ that keeps me unaware of people’s reactions, of their sense of being overwhelmed? At least I’ve been getting some coaching, lately. :-) One of these days I'll get to Claim [My] Treasure.

Posted by Steph at 5:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dexus Nexus

Discourse for 30/7/2005:
We live inside the act of discourse.
~ George Steiner, Language and Silence, 1967

This conference is coming up in about two weeks. I finally began work on the presentation I'd like to share....if it's not too late. I've had more logistical difficulties navigating my participation there...from postage to wire transfers to confirming with my long-suffering roommate-to-be...

Posted by Steph at 4:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 26, 2005

The Swell

Imagine a life where one's awareness of the world is measured by knowledge of "wind and swell". Is it only romantic to picture the waters of the world connected in one fluid system? To pursue a life on the basis of low-pressure systems?

I learned that until ten years ago the swell was very predictable. Surfers could predict, seasonally, where the largest waves would be, where the storm systems tend to develop, and when. Now, these rhythms are much less reliable. They were historically so consistent that ancient (?) Hawai'ians could navigate by feeling the swell and orienting to the stars, sun, and moon.

Do the tides actually figure in? Yes: "the right tide can sometimes make or break an epic session". Spring, neap, and dodge tides each have their own character.

Although a biological unified theory (part of E.O. Wilson's proposed consilence) hasn't yet been adequately explained, one can certainly see how geology informs oceanography.

It appears there also may be a temperature component to the ocean's movement but I'm not sure if there is a direct application to surfing. It's appealing though, to think of the metaphoric possibilities of swell and communication.

Posted by Steph at 4:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 22, 2005

Alastair Reynolds

I devoured Absolution Gap on the flight back to Germany from San Antonio. Contemporary physics and intrapersonal recognition hooked me the most. It’s the last book (?) in an epic SF series by Alastair Reynolds; I read the others while in Europe last summer. The characters really grew on me, I have to say (I didn’t find them all that compelling at first, they weren’t very nice). I was a bit unsatisfied with the conclusion though, as it’s given as if the right choice simply takes care of the current (huge) threat. That’s why I wonder if another book might be in the making? For the conclusion to be sensible one had to recall the vast scale of interspecies interaction Reynolds invokes. If I put it in Goffman’s terms, the levels of lamination generated by transformations of the frame are as big as anyone I’ve ever read, including classics like The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov, and you were on your own to keep events in context. (My memory might be improving with age (?) because I was actually able to do so....!)

I did appreciate the three page summary of brane theory (333-335). Note this site which contrasts the two perfectly legible and completely contradictory theories of the universe. And I had that twinge of association with Rashmika when she acknowledges her affinity with Dan Sylveste, the archeologist who understood/predicted how much trouble a previous species, and hence humanity, were in but wasn’t believed (99). :-/ Same as the sense I had with Kassandra, the lead character in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Firebrand. Am I dramatic or What?! NO doubt someone will soon put me in my place -again! :-) Goffman (here summarized as a Durkheimian) might call it “the manufacture of negative experience”, but I haven’t read that chapter yet. :-)

Posted by Steph at 3:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 21, 2005

degrees of realism and consistency

I’m more than halfway through Goffman’s Frame Analysis, subtitled “An Essay on the Organization of Experience” (described by Brian as “not an essay, that’s a f*cking tome!”). Robin’s recommendation was right on target. (As was the other text by Deborah Tannen, Framing in Discourse.)

Goffman uses the obvious changes in stage props over time as evidence to “alert us to the expectation that framing does not so much introduce restrictions on what can be meaningful as it … open[s] up variability” (emphasis added, 238). Here I am chafing against the limits when the natural capacity to adjust to all manner of framings and transformations indicates possibility! “Differently put, persons seem to have a very fundamental capacity to accept changes in organizational premises which, once made, render a whole strip of activity different from what it is modeled on and yet somehow meaningful . . .” (238). To wit, teaching “experientially” instead of traditionally, and the capacity of Jeff at UNH to apply communication theory in practice vs the inability of others to recognize the possibility of recasting teaching in an as yet meaningful way. Others (going unnamed to protect the innocent and the guilty) mistrust: “. . . that these systematic differences can be corrected for and kept from disorganizing perception, while at the same time involvement in the story line is maintained” (238). Right? Goffman is saying that the differences between the model and its reorganization are systematic and therefore sensible. “Correcting for” doesn’t indicate “fixing”, rather it indicates the ability to adjust to a different logic without losing one’s perceptive connectivity to the situation and persons in it.

I’m thinking of the degrees of realism and consistency imposed as standards for interpreting practice. In the enactment of interpreting, there seems to be a quite narrow range of acceptability (a tight frame?): EP interpreters and SL interpreters both talk about realism (as measured by the disappearance of the interpreter). To become visible, to appear as one’s own person (or even as the character of the interpreter?), is a violation of consistency, marked in SL interpreting by natural criticism of INTERRUPTING and TAKING OVER.

Posted by Steph at 11:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 3, 2005

review: Batman Begins

bicyclemark recommends radiohumper, and the first post I read makes it clear why. Gotta see this one!

He also recommends Ashbloem:

again, such wit! The conversations I've been having with my mom lately have been retrospective, if not downright archeological. Not in the sense of historical (physical, material, environmental, officially documented) archeology but in terms of memories.

I may have to fiddle with Tulvings model distinguishing episodic and semantic memory..."The information in the semantic memory is very consistent as compared to the data in the episodic memory which is constantly changing. There is stable knowledge about the world, such as abstract knowledge, knowledge that is necessary for understanding and using language, knowledge of principles, laws and facts, and knowledge of strategies and heuristics (Lefrancois, 2000)." The premise of 'consistent' (stable? resistant to change?) semantic memory is of course intimately linked to language and discourse.

to read? An Archeology of Home. Mom spent some time growing up on a Kentucky farm - I wonder how many differences there are between the midwest and the south: both are in the bible belt, yes?

Randomly, here's info on the Nipmuc of Western Massachusetts.

Not to mention the fact that I may have a (brain) hemispheric advantage (!) because my dad and borther are both lefties!

Posted by Steph at 4:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 21, 2005

Warts, the Lonelies, and Others

"Witches didn't fear much, Miss Tick had said, but what the powerful ones were afraid of, even if they didn't talk about it, was what they called 'going to the bad'. It was too easy to slip into careless little cruelties because you had power and other people hadn't, too easy to think that other people didn't matter much, too easy to think that ideas like right and wrong didn't apply to you. At the end of that road was you dribbling and cackling to yourself all alone in a gingerbread house, growing warts on your nose" (19-20).

"It's always surprising to be reminded that while you're watching and thinking about people, all knowing and superior, they're watching and thinking about you, right back at you" (348-349).

A Hat Full of Sky, Terry Pratchett

Posted by Steph at 2:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 13, 2005

Ghosh: perception

“…she sensed that this project would consume all those years and more: it was the work of a lifetime. . . . here it was – and she stumbled on it by chance, exactly when things seemed to be going wrong. . . . at least she could see what it was about, how it happened that an idea floated unexpectedly into your mind and you knew in an instant that this was an errand that would detain you for the rest of your life. . . . it was true that whatever came of it would not revolutionize the sciences, or even a minor branch of them, but it was also true that if she were able to go through with it – even a part of it – it would be as fine a piece of descriptive science as any. It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth” (126-127).

“She imagined the [dolphins] circling drowsily, listening to echoes pinging through the water, painting pictures in three dimensions – images that only they could decode. The thought of experiencing your surroundings in that way never failed to fascinate her: the idea that to ‘see’ was also to ‘speak’ to others of your kind, where simply to exist was to communicate. . . .” (159).

”Every silence is preparation. . . . How better can we praise the world than by doing what the Poet would have us do: by speaking of potters and ropemakers, by telling of

‘some simple thing shaped for generation after generation
until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it’s ours’” (193).

“What could I write . . . what . . . would be the form of the lines? …would they flow, as the rivers did, or would they follow rhythms, as did the tides?” (216)

“…the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else? Flowing into one another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow. And so it dawned on me: the tide country’s faith is something like of its great mohonas, a meeting not just of many rivers, but a roundabout people can use to pass in many directions – from country to country and even between faiths and religions” (247).

“Words are just air…When the wind blows on the water, you see ripples and waves, but the real river lies beneath, unseen and unheard” (258).

“Words are like the winds that blow ripples on the water’s surface. The river itself flows beneath, unseen and unheard” (335).

The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh

Posted by Steph at 9:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Hobbit House

From the description, I thought I was on my way to The Shire yesterday: a house “totally covered in ivy and Virginia creeper” with “green round windows.” I had no idea the magic that was in store. I received so many gifts!

First, the show: a musically accompanied oral telling of Uit Spelevaren, from Camera Obscura by Hildebrand. Note: Hildebrand is the pseudonym for Nicolaas Beets, and there are few web pages in English! Most are in Dutch. ”Figuren uit de oude doos: afgestoft en in een proper en modieus kleedje gestoken. Wie kent ze niet? Hildebrand, de familier Stastok, Koosje van Naslaan, Dolf van Brammen en anderen. Pieter Stastok is waaratje verliefd. Hildebrand wil zijn neef een handje helpen. De bende gaat uit, niet met de trein, maar meet een schuitje …” I thought I did well to catch some of the names. :-) Amazingly, I didn’t feel any diminishment in pleasure for not knowing Flemish. No doubt it would have enhanced my appreciation, but this way I concentrated on the sounds – they were marvelous!

My only point of reference is Peter and the Wolf, and I did have a brief stretch close to the beginning when I thought this was the story. However it didn’t take too long to realize the rhythms and moods weren’t right. The character of the girl didn’t come across as a sleazy old wolf. :-) (And I was wondering how Annaleen was going to pull off all the different instruments!) It was later explained to me that a piece of 19th century petit bourgeois literature was chosen especially because it was written at the time of the bass clarinet’s entry into the orchestra – allowing Anneleen to compose and show off her talents (bass clarinet, clarinet, foot pedals and laptop mixer). She will perform this for her Master’s defense this upcoming Friday; Raf will expand his oral art to shadow play (the makeshift facilities didn’t allow for the curtain and light effects that will emulate the technique of camera obscura).

I have no doubt it will be spectacular. Note this article on the phenomenology of vision applied to film: Cinema and Embodied Affect.

And this, my friends, was only the beginning of the day!

The artists and I spoke afterwards about the difficulty of earning a living with art, be it music, oral expression, or some other form of transient experience instead of a material consumer product. Raf also said something about on-going education as “a confrontation with yourself.” I relate (!), considering my own education a process of continual learning via encounters with my own shortcomings and limitations. Then - talk about random! – Bert the lorry driver/translator told me about the text he is currently translating from English to Dutch: John Holloway’s “How to Change the World without Taking Power.” Now does this sound like a book I need to read or what?!!? “He’s not a Marxist,” says Bert, “He’s a Marxian.” I’m intrigued. A summary and critique down on john:
Change the world - without taking power?.

It only gets better! Tony Mafia’s paintings cover the walls of this dwelling. They are simply phenomenal. Several took my breath away, and I was treated to a tour and narrative of their origins. If I ever do publish a book on interpreting, I now know what I’d like to have on the cover! :-) Stunningly beautiful and evocative. Some of the works are haunting, many speak of a love so deep I can hardly imagine. A few of the paintings foretold Tony’s death. In one, a pale white horse enters boldly and threatens to dominate the entire scene. My host, Tony’s “Loved,” explained with her voice trailing off: “Art does what it can in the face of . . .”

There was The Sentinel, looking over the Mojave Desert, interrogating (?) those who would pass through. Not to mention the one I gazed upon for the hours of our afternoon conversation in the living room, which we spent talking about books, beliefs, life, living, and learning. You wouldn’t believe it, but my lap was occupied by first one, then two, Brussel’s Griffons!

It was indeed a day of “constant astonishment.”

Posted by Steph at 6:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 9, 2005

coincidence?!!!

OHMYGOSH Jan Blommaert is only a short train ride away at Ghent University!

Posted by Steph at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 4, 2005

“How do you move your thinking?”

I told my host family last night that I’d been able to move my thinking forward in terms of the kinds of questions to ask interpreters going into the week in Strasbourg. Helena asked how. It’s actually still a bit vague in my own mind, so perhaps I can write out loud and gain clarity. I’ll use Van Manen as my reference point, because the notion of phenomenology - interpreter’s consciousness and their awareness of self/other consciousness - is a move that the discourse enables. (This reflective writing doubles as a note-taking exercise clarifying my phenomenological research methodology.)

Van Manen’s object is pedagogy – teaching and parenting; so whenever I quote or paraphrase one of his ideas, I’m either substituting interpreting for pedagogy or generalizing. In pursuing knowledge, he says we should always refer questions back to the lifeworld “where knowledge speaks through our lived experiences” (46). One way I’m moving my thinking then, is being responsive to the knowledge(s) evident in the experiences interpreters tell – which (type of?) stories, what (kind of?) examples, which adjectives, as well as how they seem to relate to the experience of talking with me and responding to my questions. Van Manen talks about the iconicity of questions – such that the question itself serves as an example of it seeks to clarify (46). My questions are not yet this honed. I am struggling with the asking, but what is exciting is the sense of my interlocutors struggling with me – there are many close-to-the-surface responses, but as the conversation goes on it often deepens and some interpreters begin to articulate less formed, more-or-less “new” thoughts, generating their own questions. The extent to which I can facilitate this kind of reflection will enrich the whole process – at the immediate level of the face-to-face conversation, the discourse’s trajectory, and any results or findings that come out of it.

Of course, this shows how deeply involved I am with the entire process, which many might criticize as “un-scientific” on the basis of “not being objective.” But this is the essence of phenomenological inquiry. I have not posed a static question to carry forth and ask in the same way of every interlocutor in order to demonstrate some kind of proof. I’ve posed, instead, a living question which interlocutors and I experience together. The methodological challenge, then, is not “how consistently I hold to the original formulation of the question.” Rather, it is, “how attentive and responsive can I be to the nuances and shades of relevance in the things interpreters actually say?” This is an issue of my flexibility and skill at allowing myself to be subjected to the discourse, instead of seeking to guide or direct it, while not losing focus on the core question: what do interpreters know about the world and the place of language in it?

Van Manen refers to Gadamer (1975:266) who said the essence of the question is the opening of possibilities – opening them up and keeping them open. “To truly question something is to interrogate something from the heart of our existence, from the center of our being…. research [is] going back again and again to the things themselves until that which is put to question begins to reveal something of its essential nature” (43). As I continue to return, I live the questioning and it lives in and through me. To discover what it’s “really like” to be an interpreter, I must stay attuned to what it’s “really like” for me to investigate interpreting (40).
In this regard, there is “a distinction between appearance and essence, between the things of our experience and that which grounds the things of our experience…phenomenological research consists of reflectively bringing into nearness that which tends to be obscure, that which tends to evade the intelligibility of our natural attitude of everyday life” (32). Movement in thinking, therefore, is the effect of reflection. Such movement responds to the dialectic between appearance (particular words, phrases, descriptions) and essence (the feelings accompanying such).

Perceiving this dialectic is, I think, a function of esoteric epistemology. In contrast with poetry and literature, which leaves its wisdom implicit and particular, Van Manen argues that “phenomenology aims at making explicit and seeking universal meaning” albeit in still evocative and animating ways (italics in original, 19). A qualification on universality is necessary: “The object of a phenomenological interest is [according to Merleau-Ponty, 1964a] “neither eternal and without roots in the present nor a mere event destined to be replaced by another event tomorrow, and consequently deprived of any intrinsic value (p. 92)…phenomenology [continues Van Manen] consists in mediating in a personal way the antinomy of particularity (being interested in concreteness, difference, and what is unique) and universality (being interested in the essential, in difference that makes a difference)” (emphasis mine, 23).

[Note: return to the phenomenology/hermeneutic debate on p. 25-26.]

Posted by Steph at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 3, 2005

David Chalmers

Has (re)organized an online list of papers on consciousness and related topics.

Posted by Steph at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 31, 2005

More on methodology and theory

I´m quite enamored of Blommaert; I hope I can locate him and make direct contact. The notes on "Text and Context" I´ve generated include ruminations on tentative "findings" of the conference interpreter discourse to date and more sharply defined research questions. Also, Van Manen is being extremely useful and timely with his explanation of a phenomenological approach to research - NOT the usual social scientific mode (and who would I be if I did anything in the "usual" way?!!

Posted by Steph at 12:35 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

May 30, 2005

“A language that sings the world”

I was asked by one interpreter if there was a difference between what I’m trying to do with my research and what journalists do when they research and publish stories. Many of the points I considered possible distinctions were persuasively argued as not that different, but the one point which seemed most different is the notion of participation in the writing/publication process.

I started reading this book Leda loaned me, Researching Lived Experience by Max Van Manen, which describes the phenomenological angle in terms that reflect my ontology. Van Manen says, “phenomenology attempts to explicate the meanings as we live them in our everyday existence, our lifeworld” (11).

Phenomenology is a focus on consciousness, broadly conceived: “anything that presents itself to consciousness…whether…real or imagined, empirically measured or subjectively felt. Consciousness is the only access human beings have to the world” (9). Necessarily, then, it is through consciousness that we are related to the world; hence a phenomenological approach is always concerned with the dialectic between consciousness and things of the world. Van Manen adds the term hermeneutics to capture the continuous, cyclical nature of phenomenological experience: “We might say that hermeneutic phenomenology is a philosophy of the personal, the individual, which we pursue against the background of an understanding of the evasive character of the logos of other, the whole, the communal, or the social (italics in original, 7).

One key distinction, I believe, between a phenomenological approach and a journalistic approach is that phenomenology is not concerned solely with the so-called rational. “Knowing is not a purely cognitive act” (6). Because phenomenology is inherently dialogical, “to do research is always to question the way we experience the world, to want to know the world in which we live as human beings. And since to know the world is profoundly to be in the world in a certain way, the act of researching – questioning – theorizing is the intentional act of attaching ourselves to the world, to become more fully part of it, or better, to become the world” (italics in original, 5).

Van Manen continues: “Hermeneutic phenomenological research reintegrates part and whole, the contingent and the essential, value and desire. It encourages a certain attentive awareness to the details and seemingly trivial dimensions of our everyday…lives. It makes us thoughtfully aware of the consequential in the inconsequential, the significant in the taken-for-granted” (8). As a science, phenomenology “attempts to articulate, through the content and form of text, the structures of meaning embedded in lived experience (rather than leaving the meaning implicit as for example in poetry or literary texts)…it is self-critical in the sense that it continually examines its own goals and methods in an attempt to come to terms with the strengths and shortcomings of its approach and achievements. It is intersubjective in that the human science researcher needs the other (for example, the reader) in order to develop a dialogic relation with the phenomenon, and thus validate the phenomenon as described” (italics in original, 11).
Consciousness can only be studied in retrospection: “Reflection on lived experience is always recollective; it is reflection on experience that is already passed or lived through” (10) and as such (here’s the unnerving part!), “does not offer us the possibility of effective theory with which we can now explain and/or control the world, but rather it offers us the possibility of plausible insights that bring us in more direct contact with the world” (9). In this regard, phenomenology views “the experiential situation as the topos of real pedagogic acting” (7), and the “textual reflection on the lived experiences and practical actions of everyday life with the intent to increase one’s thoughtfulness and practical resourcefulness or tact” (4). Van Manen refers back to the trickster Diogenes, who believed “a human being is not just something you automatically are, it is also something you must try to be” (italics in original, 5).

In sum, “phenomenological research has, as its ultimate aim, the fulfillment of our human nature: to become more fully who we are” (12). “Phenomenology…is a poetizing project; it tries an incantative, evocative speaking, a primal telling, wherein we aim to involve the voice in an original singing of the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1973). But poetizing is not ‘merely’ a type of poetry, a making of verses. Poetizing is thinking on original experience and is thus speaking in a more primal sense. Language that authentically speaks the world rather than abstractly speaking of it is a language reverberates the world, as Merleau-Ponty says, a language that sings the world” (italics in original, 13).

Posted by Steph at 6:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 29, 2005

sgraffiti (more on art nouveau)

Dramed of stained glass last night. :-) And sgraffit, or modern petroglyphs. Saw a frieze I really wanted to take a picture of but hadn´t bought a camera yet: it was in the gymnasium of an Ecole Primaire that was on the art nouveau tour. It said, "Refuge."

"Instead of copying the classical forms of the past, designers turned to nature for inspiration, using the shapes of flowers, plants and insects." This summarizes the architectural movement, which specialized in combining wood, stone, metal and glass.

In addition to the school, the other three stops included: the Comic Strip Library, the Hannon House (also saw the facade of Saint Cyr House), and a restaurant, De Ultieme Hallucinatie.

Here´s an article on the phenomenality of architecture.

Posted by Steph at 3:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 28, 2005

late to art; later to architecture

I just began being interested in art the past few years. Never knew enough about it to understand what could be so compelling to folk. Am definitely into symbolic uses - particularly of the ancient kind such as Dan Brown details in The Da Vinci Code (yes, it nurtured my soul) - and also of the protest kind, such as Néstor García Canclini describes with academic and theoretical zeal.

Today, art nuoveau.

We went into four buildings, but what got me hooked was the contrast between art nouveau and art deco in the very first building we saw. Seeing the two styles juxtaposed on the same facade, and hearing them described as pre- and post-WWI did it. My imagination leaped to the level of subjectivity and a totally different consciousness before and after "the war to end all war."

This isn´t exactly the case, as L´Arau guide explained: there are two peroids in art nouveau, an early and later period, each roughly a decade apiece (the movement spanned 1890-1910 here in Bruxxelles). The later period anticipated the straightening of lines and rejection of fluid flourishes that is the most prominent characteristic of art nouveau.

In addition to the splendid buildings and styles, this particular tour provider, L´Arau brings a deliberately political bent. I learned an incredible amount of political history and current political structure of the city and country. It´s strongly Catholic in heritage (although few go to church these days), the liberales are the right wing political party (think free market neo-liberalism), and the socialists are the left (Christian/Catholics in the middle, more-or-less). These three politicql "families" each have two groups, a Flemish (Dutch-speaking) group, and a French-speaking group. The Greens are a recent - and important - addition to local politics.

Our guide explained that the city was quite poorly managed after WWII, and pointed out evidence of same, including the location of the European Institutions where much downtown, residential demolition has had to occur with the ongoing EU expansions. Things are looking up these days, at least partly due to the efforts of this and other activist groups interested in preservation, heritage, and sensible urban planning.

Posted by Steph at 9:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 25, 2005

I´m in - again!!

I am feeling blessed. Got my badge to the European Parliament here in Brussels; already had one interview today and have another one lined up for tomorrow. And there is an AIIC meeting tomorrow evening where I will meet a bunch of interpreters and hopefully arrange more interviews. Phase two is off to a great start. :-)

I´m still toasted, though, from the past weeks´ marathon of travel, plunge into "the field", paper-writing and all. Mentally and emotionally I am feeling IT. Lucky I have Dan Brown and The DaVinci Code to grant some respite. Here is a tidbit on The Rose Line, which is "believed to emanate a certain spiritual frequency - one that sustains feminine energies and the search for unbiased truth."

Posted by Steph at 3:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 19, 2005

Do not disturb

“Artists who inscribe in the work itself the questioning about what the work should be … exclude the spectator who is not disposed to make of his or her participation … an equally innovative experience” (27).

:-(

“Should we admit – along with disenchanted artists and theorists – that autonomous experimentation and democratizing insertion in the social fabric are irreconcilable tasks” (27)?

Néstor García Canclini

Posted by Steph at 9:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 4, 2005

holding form

Last week, Briankle gave us a karate lesson, emphasizing over and over again that it is the form that matters.

"The perfection of the form of a thing is its entelechy in virtue of which it attains its fullest realization of function (De anima, ii. 2)."

Entelechy "denotes realization as opposed to potentiality."

What I'm thinking is that entelechy is the achievement of a form's skopos. In order not to lose form - in other words, in order to realize something, to bring it into being - one must train diligently, vigorously. Training is the practice of moving into position, of choosing the form that best responds to contingency, of enacting the form spontaneously, at the level of instinct because it is so deeply ingrained.

Karate is an analogy for life. For communication. For theorizing about communication and life? To theorize is to believe especially on uncertain or tentative grounds. From theoria, a latin term meaning "to see, to stage, theatre, scene, spectacle" (class notes, 4/27/05).

Here's an explanation: "Theoria, in contrast [to phronesis], defines a very different rational capacity, traditionally translated as "contemplation," and by Irwin as "study," particularly theoretical study. Theoria is the activity which expresses nous, "understanding." One understands origins‹origins are not demonstrable, one cannot prove them syllogistically‹however, everything has an origin, and it is through theoria that we know these. It does not lead to "an answer" to a problem. Aristotle does not see theoria as necessarily equivalent to philosophy, then‹I can think philosophically about a number of things, however, rarely do I do theoria. I might, instead, wonder about various applications of ethics to problems in the real world, or about theoretical issues of translation, or what it means to have knowledge‹but this is not theoria. From what Aristotle seems to be saying here, theoria would be strictly reflecting on the knowledge of origins‹almost like meditating on the idea of a god." (from EUDAIMONIA AND THE ACTIVITY(IES)OF THE SOUL IN ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS.

This article, The Place of Phronesis in Postmodern Hermeneutics, discusses Lyotard's suggestion, based on Kuhn, "that scientific knowledge involves a search for instabilities rather than consensus." This reminds me of Immanual Velikovsky. Enoch tried to show us this movie about him yesterday. (Note: he is still being critiqued, but at a level that is incomprehensible to me.)

Juan noted that Velikovsky's theory sounds like Eldredge and Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium. The difference, I think, is that punctuated equilibrium refers specifically to evolution, whereas Velikovsky's theory has more to do with geology and astronomy.

What intrigued me about Velikovsky is the notion that there may be forces larger than the institutionalized, macrosocial social, economic, and political processes that cultural studies and political economy takes for granted as the biggest patterns that matter. It reminds me of that basic science movie, the power of ten. Here's an interactive web site that does essentially the same thing. Take, for instance, 10 to the +12 as a Velikovskiian "level", compared with 10 to the +7, which shows continental geography (roughly the level of political economy?) Both macrosocial and microsocial perspectives originate from the position of our own perspective.

Our own perspective is grounded in our body and the social mileau we operate within. The flower bed which composes the example could analogically be my immediate peers, colleagues, friends, professors, etc. Microsocially, the first increment "down" distinguishes individuals, 10 to the -1. The next level isolates features and characteristics of an individual. At 10 to the -3, we're dealing with perception, and next at the perceptual apparatus, then to the unique characteristics of each biological element of functional perception.

At 10 to the -8, we arrive at the level of DNA and the capacity for reproduction. At 10 to the -10, we encounter electromagnetism. Arguably, somewhere at this level are the operational structures of consciousness.

This is (if my analogy holds) the level where knowledge is constructed, where language occurs.

Posted by Steph at 4:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 2, 2005

out of phase . . . ?

I'm catching a lot of heat for being on a different page than a vocal segment of my colleagues working on a joint project...it's a little stressful. :-/

I've been toying with the notion of bi-temporality. I came up with the term a few days ago to describe/explain why I'm not expressing as coherent and clear an argument as my peers would like. It was an individual discovery, but of course I didn't invent the term or the concept.

I would like to see Bitemporal Vision: The Sea.

This essay on time lays out some of the complications. A possibly worthwhile resource: Temporal Patterns. Here are a quantum physics angle and something on the gravitomagnetic field.

The math equations are beyond me, although an explanation helps (a little): The work will proceed as follows...

I downloaded a pdf from bladerunner, and there are two Chinese sites that came up on Google. One article, time variation and patterns includes this quote: "A pattern is an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others."

Posted by Steph at 8:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

backward chaining

I'm not sure if this is what I'm doing, but it's possible:

"Backward Chaining" Learning Methodology.

"So, what does one do in backward-chaining learning? It is really very simple: we start by finding something about life, or about the world, or about culture, that we are fascinated with. We disregard everything we think we know about learning, and find a question that really fascinates us, a subject we would really love to understand, or a form of creative expression we would really love to master. We don't worry about having the necessary "background" or "prerequisites" to understand this question or topic. We begin to hunt down everything we can find out about it.

Soon enough, we will find ourselves in the position of being unable to progress any further, because we lack the necessary understanding of some conventionally antecedent subject: e.g., my attempts to understand how the brain works run ashore due to my limited understanding of physiology.

What happens now? I take up the study, not of general biology, or even general physiology, but of neurophysiology. I cannot help but be aware of why I want to study this, and how each piece of knowledge I gain about it serves my overall purpose of understanding the brain. At some point in my study of neurophysiology, I run aground again, this time because I do not understand organic chemistry. I begin to study organic chemistry and find myself chaining backwards into general chemistry. Then, perhaps, I unwind the path I have taken, finish learning what I need to know about organic chemistry, finish learning what I couldn't learn about neurophysiology because I didn't know organic chemistry, and arrive back at the brain again."

Posted by Steph at 8:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 24, 2005

dreaming

"I take gods and spirits to be existentially coeval with the human, and think from the assumption that the question of being human involves the question of being with gods and spirits" (Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000:16).

I would call this an example of esoteric knowledge, to be contrasted with the exoteric kind.

Yes, I know I sound/look/appear as a lunatic. But I'm not the only one.

Posted by Steph at 11:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

incipient

Just read this word in the introduction to Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe. In the particular context it reads negatively, as though "necessary" and "incipient" are inherently contradictory (p. 15).

I'm thinking, though, that an aesthetic life lives on the edge of incipience. It anticipates what will appear, what could appear, if contingency allows. It arrives simultaneously with an appearing. This is how intersubjectivity operates - myself and an other(s) meet in temporality, in a particular place, producing a certain space of action.

"But I might die tonight."

Posted by Steph at 11:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 23, 2005

beginning . . .

Thoughtful questioning is more important than construction of systems (Moran summarizing Heidegger 246)… can thoughtful questioning itself be structuring in a systemic way? Seeds are sown – production, address, negation, accessibility – a trajectory will unfold, its velocity overdetermined by dissent, assertion, resistance, negotiation. A group forms within the limits of language, guided by what ideology/ies? A Marxist view juxtaposes persons with historical movement; Marcuse claims Heidegger accounts for the bourgeois deconstruction of social life from within (Moran, 245). Are we transcendentally homeless?

“We are caught up in a structure of care…it is not a matter of indifference to us” (Moran, 241).

Heidegger’s project is not problem-solving, but descriptive of “falling” in (to?) the world. When, where, how can we catch our thrownness? At what moments does it matter, and when is the flow of existing trajectories generative in their own right?

Dasein, existentially, is care, and “names human being in so far as it is individualized as myself or someone else and in so far as questioning is its essential mode of relating to Being” (emphasis added, Moran 238, ref Being & Time, § 41).

Not only do the questions we ask cast certain patterns and presuppose certain boundaries on the discoverable, these questions will be shaped to some extent by our mood when inquiring, and are imbricated with the performative. We will co-enact and co-construct a kind of knowing; could it be a knowing-together?

“Heidegger,” according to Moran,and me, according to me (!), “is coming to see that the essential disclosure of things takes place through Dasein’s concernful dealing with things in the environment, that it takes place essentially in expression. Relating to things, disclosing them, always relates to our concerns in advance, our relation is primarily interpretative, or hermeneutical” (emphasis removed, 234).

Posted by Steph at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 15, 2005

it will NOT be boring!

Oy. I just bailed on the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference. None of the presenters were bad, it's just that they conform to the structure of making academic presentations ABOUT the object of study, rather than doing/being the subjects of study. Highlight? Meeting VJ. :-)

I'll go to the liminal lecture by Carlos Tanner tonight - hopefully it will be better.

I went to the plenary at the World Systems Conference this morning, and it was dynamic as all get out! Saskia Sassen turned me on. :-) Immanual Wallerstein set an important tone for the conference with his keynote last night, but he's not the most dynamic speaker. He might be in Spanish, but his pacing in English was a bit tough.

Of course, I'm envisioning the COM dept's proposed/potential conference for next year...

Posted by Steph at 2:14 PM | Comments (2)

April 13, 2005

solipsism and stochasticism

Is solipsism an attempt at control - to order the universe, refute or seek to deny the effects of stochasticism?

For instance, I know someone who occasionally describes themself as "insular", which may be true. It's one thing, though, to hold one's own counsel, and another to create a worldview and interpretation of events and others that excludes other viewpoints. I think this is what solipsism really means? This piece, Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds. I have to grapple with how this relates to and interacts with intersubjectivity. Or plural singularity, as we discussed in Briankle's class last night based on Jean-Luc Nancy's piece, "Banks, Edges, Limits (of singularity)".

I can't find any reference to this online, it comes from Angelaki, hournal of the theoretical humanities, vol 9, no 2 August 2004.

Note: do a web search on "singularity."

As for stochasticism....

For consideration:

ILovePhilosophy.com

New Religions, Science, and Secularization looks like it dabbles with esoteric knowledge?

Life After Newton: An Ecological Metaphysics

any relation to sacred geometry?

Far afield yet informative:

Running Regressions: Some Psychological Constraints

Posted by Steph at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 8, 2005

David Chalmers

This is the analytic philosopher Bern was talking about who argues against materialism.

He even has his own weblog - lots of stuff relating to perception. Hunju!

Posted by Steph at 4:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

cipher of genesis

I've been trying to track info on Carlo Suares, but can't find any details about his background, training, etc. I am finding other interesting things!

Some physics from way beyond.

Info on Sufism.

The International Conference on Science and Consciousness

Worth investigating more, Esha. I like the sound of this name!

Hmmm...another thing I've been curious about is the source of Enoch's info on Pythagoras. I, being schooled in the traditional U.S. public way, never imagined any other source of education for him than his own society.

This site, The Hermetic Garden needs more time. I'm intrigued that it has French and Portuguese versions. :-)

Posted by Steph at 4:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 5, 2005

how we got capitalism

It's all because of western science. Really! "Mathematics, vision, philosophy. And the next thing you know we have capitalism!"

Maybe you had to be there, but it was the heartiest laugh in Enoch's class tonight, that and going down the Juan path.

We did the Hebrew letter-numbers, the archetypes of 1-9.

These sites all interested mein one way or another; all I can do at the moment is list them.

http://www.psyche.com/psyche/autiot/hyper_autiot.html

http://www.geocities.com/lucifer_gnosis/book_reviews/aleph-cipher.html

http://www.psyche.com/psyche/autiot/bayt.html

http://www.psyche.com/psyche/autiot/ghimel.html

http://www.soul-guidance.com/houseofthesun/treeoflifeletters.htm

http://murraycreek.net/labyrinth/labyfour.htm

http://www.soulinvitation.com/heartseminar/

Posted by Steph at 9:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 30, 2005

parsing

I've heard this term, and maybe used it once or twice. Hoping I had it "right". :-) did you know there are many different techniques? After reading this explanation, I'm not sure I've used it correctly OR understood it right. Alas!

I think I had it sortof backwards - more of a "putting together" rather than a "taking apart." Might these be two sides of the same spinning coin?

Posted by Steph at 11:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 29, 2005

1 + 1 = 3

Exoteric - Esoteric. Are these in opposition or in conjunction? This is one theme in Enoch's class on consciousness.

Another is number. I can only find definitions on the www that privilege its material, conventional construction. From this view, 1+1 can only equal 2. Another view, that of sacred geometry, poses a different answer.

A geometrician takes us through the vesica piscis, which is where the equation 1+1=3 originates.

After 3 comes 4, the square.

The Egyptians were the first to figure this out, but you have to do a bit of intellectual sifting to give them due credit, as Pythagoras is most often associated with it (the Greeks claim many "origins" which were borrowed or learned from other cultures - this is Enoch's claim, and it seems sensible to me, although I haven't done my own research to verify such and un-do my own socialization into historical origins of knowledge). The vesica piscis has been adapted to various symbolic meanings.

What really got me jazzed up was the discussion of there being a whole (1), which becomes divided (where else would another number come from?), and this division occurs because of desire: the desire to know oneself. Division casts a gaze upon itself, becoming two. Subject becomes subject AND object, and the result (function) of two-ness is the generation of knowledge - creation (and now we have 3).

Multiply this a bunch of times and we have the interlocking, co-creative play of desires withing the whole producing the flower of life (scroll down to the end). Looks an awful lot to me like intersubjectivity. :-)

The whole was conceptualized way way back in the original Hebrew as the ayn soph. Here's one explanation that comes close to what Enoch provided: "Emptiness, Ayn Soph, God. Use "God the Father" (better: substitute the unspeakable name YHWH) as placeholder for the ineffable emptiness that transcends subject/object dualities; for Nirvana, for the Real. This is expressed in Kabbalistic jargon as the notion of God ayn soph. The consequence of this is an ultimate principle that cannot be grasped, comprehended, or communicated except through meditative kenosis, the miracle of its direct self-disclosure to an enraptured spiritual being, or the apprehension of apophatic riddle in a moment of spontaneous insight. In any event, that which is "revealed" is not a datum, but the meaning event itself; that enlightenment in which one perceives the non-duality of phenomena, their emptiness, the absence of subject/object distinction." from Meta-Mythological Template.

I'm having trouble locating the original ying-yang-yuan symbol with the red dot. Found one that sort of hints at it - using a red star. There's a bunch of pages in Chinese...might have to pester a friend to help with this. :-)

Posted by Steph at 11:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 24, 2005

tell me I'm not a phenomenologist!

Briankle was in a rare mood last night - he inquired about my oh-so-close-to-psychological thoughts. Well, he asked me to "say something" at a moment when I was thinking about my own theoretical problem - of trying to enact a consciousness premised upon an epistemology that accepts the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics. (btw - I'm not very good at it.)

I think the psychological is a contamination of my language that contradicts my intellectual bent. It's gotten me into trouble numerous times, however, and I've simply got to get more clear. I think timing has been unfortunately anti-synergistic (if such is possible?) because my general depression (yeah, its still here, as if you couldn't tell, sigh) comes through more "loudly", I think, than whatever I say. At least this has been operational, recently, more often than not. I have had glimpses and moments of life beyond the pale ... is that too extreme a metaphor to use? It has truly and totally sucked, that's for dang sure. :-(

At any rate, reading about Husserl's Logical Investigations in Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology, Moran quotes Husserl:

Phenomenological study is "...a turning of intuition back towards the logical lived experiences which take place in us whenever we think but which we do not see just then, which we do not have in our noticing view whenever we carry out thought activity in a naturally original manner (p. 93)."

Now, here's where intersubjectivity enters. My hesitation when Briankle asked me if it wasn't too simplistic to say that I was just interested in empathy, in understanding the other, was because it is only a third, or maybe even a quarter of the "object" I wish to examine. Yes, my desire to know another, to put myself in their shoes and perceive through their worldview can be extrapolated as a strand out of a rope of intention which equally and simultaneously must include their desire to know me, my shoes, my perception/worldview. Before I complete the equation, let's ponder: am I prescriptive or descriptive here?

Perhaps prescriptive, since my desire to be known belongs to me as much as my desire to know others, and others may not wish to know me at all, or not at this level. (Would we call this intimate? Private? Public? (overlap with another debate.)

Yet, there is a reflection in the absence or rejection of desire just as much as in the presence of desire. And here is where I see description as the actual aim because it encompasses all forms and - I need to make the case - can do so without disrespect. Again, it seems I'm not too skilled at this yet (shall we hope there is hope for improvement, smile), and I might need help with the double negative. I often think of "honoring" as the act of recognition that perceives the other as "other" and just leaves be, but it seems too culturally-laden to serve as a theoretical term.

In other words, a choice not to engage me (I'm being particular for immediate social and interpersonal reasons as well as theoretical reasons) carries no intrinsic value. Because I've communicated my desire - Briankle's basic conception of communication, as I understood it from his explanation tonight, being that what is communicated most effectively in each and every act of communication is the wish to communicate; and the subsequent "demand" this puts on "the receiver" (to put it in linear giver-receiver terms) - does not mean there is a moral obligation on anyone to respond.

If I/we respond psychologically, I'd suggest that this is the combined result of our interaction and, as such, is "the effect" of the communicative interaction (no one will dispute that silence is also communication). The challenge, in my mind, is to continue to work (via experimentation, I'm afraid) to reduce the psychological so that we can get at the phenomenological. Uh oh, does this bring me back 'round to prescription? You see how much trouble I'm in . . . . !

Back to the equation. If my "acts of meaning-intention:your acts of meaning-confirmation" are a third or quarter of the equation, and your "acts of meaning-intention:my acts of meaning:confirmation" are the constitutive parts of a whole, then the "sum" or "product" or "effect" (obviously no clarity here, yet, or even a pretense at one!) is "the answer" - yet these three "things" are braided together in such a way that one cannot appear without the other.

Any reduction then will be one-sided unless and until subjectivities mutually engage the act(s) of reduction together. I suppose my desire for this experience provokes prescription...I am not clear if this can be avoided! Or, at least, not within the limits of my present vocabulary.

Posted by Steph at 3:35 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 23, 2005

the dissident now

Radhika asks if one can be liminal, really, ever - "in any context."

If time is, then existence is pertually liminal, always becoming, what Enoch called "the dissident now."

Now is described as "dissident" to emphasis the notion of existence continually coming into being (in a quantum mode, and/or in keeping with ancient mystical epistemologies) against popular "commonsense" linear conceptions of temporality.

The problematic, then, may not be where/when, but rather how. (Ah, cyberdiva is ahead of me on this, too!) :-) "...wondering how "how" figures into all this..."

"How" is the relation to context...

If now is always becoming then context does not preexist. No determinism whatsoever. Context is itself a relation, is (co?)constructed by the relation rather than providing limits of contingency for a relation.

If it ain't discourse, it's dialectic (follow up on this link)! Hmm, note the archaic definition of discourse: The process or power of reasoning. Here's another definition arguing that use of the term, "discourse", presumes an intellectual component is involved in the interaction.

Too many tangents! I wanted to note the different applications (epistemologies?) of the term, relation:
logical,
equivalence,
binary. I can't even do this now (!), but here's more on binary relations which might hint at the difference between "number" (ref. Pythagoras) and "mathematics" that Enoch mentioned....(maybe).

This online poetry journal, Voice in the Wilderness: art and the shame of being human, looks hot.

Posted by Steph at 4:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

on desire

Enoch challenged us to problematize desire. Is it possible that desire itself is an evolutionary cause? Did fish grow legs over millenia because of desire to leave the water? Or small mammals wings from desire to fly? Or humans consciousness out of desire to understand?

Here are some quick results of a google search:

Painless Civilization
: A Philosophical Critique of Desire (2003) by Masahiro Morioka . The full text is still in translation, but the opening reads: "I would like to deliver this book to those who are in the midst of anxiety covered over with pleasure, in the midst of repetition without any joy, and in the midst of an endless labyrinth without exit, but are nevertheless willing to live their lives without regret in a corner of their minds."

We were discussing repetition in class tonight in reference to Vasistha's Yoga and life in general.

This book,
Philosophy of Desire in the Buddhist Pali Canon is described as "addressing the idea of a paradox of desire, whereby we must desire to end desire, the varieties of desire that are articulated in the Pali texts are examined."

This essay argues that desire has taken two predominant forms in the West: sex and power.

This looks interesting, someone's compilation of musings on philosophy and desire, including a section on unconscious desires. If I'm not mistaken, he makes a similar argument to that which Enoch made: ' It seems, then, that even when we intensely desire things, the desires themselves are not making up consciousness. Instead, the desires cause other things � feelings of knots in stomachs, feelings of pounding hearts, mental imagery � and these other things are what actually make up consciousness. They tell us that we have a desire, and they even help us know what the desire is, but they are not the desire itself. The desire itself remains outside of consciousness."

Posted by Steph at 11:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 21, 2005

Althusser v habermas?

We (thankfully) postponed Habermas for a week, and I'm trying to prep for Mass Comm this afternoon - have finished Gramsci and now onto Althusser, which I did read before (last year, Li gave it to me thinking it might relate to the mentoring project, hmmmm. :-)

There's a section here that has me thinking back on the private-public debate between me and Stephen (last entry February 21).

Althusser writes: "The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its 'authority'" (1971, 137).

Continuing, Althusser explains how there can be no "public" or "private" without the existence of "the State, which is the State of the ruling class" because the State is "the precondition for any distinction between public and private" (emphasis mine, 137-138).

I will definitely be thinking about this as I read for next week. In particular, the function of education as an ISA (applied to us, smile), and the way it "function[s] massively and predominately by ideology, [and] secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic" (italics in original, 138).

Althusser's claim reverberates for me: "the Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle" (italics in original, 140).

Note to self: Be sure to follow up on this link to A Critique:
Competing Interpellations and the Third Text.

Posted by Steph at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

re-invention

Liminality. Who will I be? Who do I want to be?

In LinguaMoo I want to be rewind. (I wanted to be endless reflexivity but it wouldn't accept that - I think I needed an underscore. Oh well. rewind is better.)

In pmc2 - a different space. How do these relate to each other? LinguaMoo is e-theory...experimentation and application of/with theory (or so I gather...)

pmc2 is ... for play? Or, perhaps, for plurking? (although I wager such is welcome in LinguaMoo, too).

Posted by Steph at 10:15 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 20, 2005

Berkelian philosophy

Matter does not exist, according to George Berkeley, "one of the three most famous eighteenth century British Empiricists" (along with Locke and Hume), who utilized "strictly empiricist principles in defence of the view that only minds or spirits exist."

Motto: esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived.

Did I ever read Sophie's World? The story is familiar, I guess what's more to the point, is did I learn anything from it? Can't say as I recall a single durn thing. Either it was prior to me actually arriving - phenomenologically - in my own body (after an early disassociation that exceeds memory) or those long-term memory banks never did their thing.

This entry extends the sa-cyborgs google group discussion and marks my virgin entry into pmc2. Some nice ballet dancers held my hands and didn't let me fall. :-)

Posted by Steph at 8:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sa-cyborgs

Careen says:

"You're not outside what you want to be inside of."

I'm holding this despite all evidence to the contrary! ;-)

Posted by Steph at 7:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

metonymy

Dang. Have I had metonymy all wrong? Hall describes is a linguistic term in which a part is substituted for the whole inadequately because, as a one-sided or single moment it can never provide or capture a process (or object or event or . . . ) holistically, in all its dimensions, moments, and aspects.

I've been considering it alternatively as a representation or symbol in which the whole enacts itself within the part.

". . . it is not attempting to classify something by placing it as a species within a genus.

Worth a serious follow-up while I'm there this summer: The Metaphor and Metonymy Group.

Wikipedia has multiple links and at least part of explanation that seems more in keeping with where my head's been: "... is the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity." And there's this, which is contexted as a rhetorical use: "Metonymy works by contiguity rather than similarity. Typically, when someone uses metonymy, they don't wish to transfer qualities (as you do with metaphor); rather they transfer associations which may not be integral to the meaning." I have to think on this more, because I like the continguity but need to be clear on the difference between "associations" and "qualities." And how associations might not be "integral to meaning."

Ah - this looks even closer: "In cognitive linguistics, metonymy is one of the basic characteristics of cognition. It is extremely common for people to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of something and use that aspect to stand either for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect or part of it." The Wiki site (link above) includes links to cognitive linguistics and cognition. Do follow up! (There are several more leads there - gesture, sign language, perhaps links to consciousness...)

ps. Don't forget Hall's contrast of metonymy with fetishism (37). First time THAT's made sense (too?)! ;-) "

Posted by Steph at 4:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

identity politics

Interesting NCA paper, on Reading Identity Politics through Marx.

Critique of Althusser and also of Foucault: A Lover's Discourse: Using French Social Thought for Media Criticism.

Posted by Steph at 12:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 19, 2005

ideology

According to Raymond Williams.

I'm trying to find the full text of a quote excerpted and ellipsed by Stuart Hall (1986). The closest I've found is:

"...apparently more neutral sense of ideology in some parts of Marx�s writing, notable in the well-known passage in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Philosophy (1859):

"The distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production�and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic � in short, ideological � forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out."

Hall (a busy man) starts with "ideological" and deletes the hyphen right after it - which makes the rest of the sentence seem much more definitive. Also, he has deleted "this", which refers the entire point back to the transformation of production and its conflict (his word!) with the institutions (and their institutionalized discourses?) listed above. Except there is another ellipses preceding the list of so-called "ideological forms" which is why I'd like to see the whole dang thing!

Mick Underwood's awesome summary of uses and definitions for "code".

Includes a much needed definition for discourse!

Posted by Steph at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 18, 2005

the lifeworld

Working with James (we are going to get this piece published!) -

"According to Husserl, intersubjective experience plays a fundamental role in our constitution of both ourselves as objectively existing subjects, other experiencing subjects, and the objective spatio-temporal world. Transcendental phenomenology attempts to reconstruct the rational structures underlying - and making possible - these constitutive achievements."

and

"Husserl's notion of lifeworld is a difficult (and at the same time important) one. It can roughly be thought of in two different (but arguably compatible) ways: (1) in terms of belief and (2) in terms of something like socially, culturally or evolutionarily established (but nevertheless abstract) sense or meaning.

(1) If we restrict ourselves to a single subject of experience, the lifeworld can be looked upon as the rational structure underlying his (or her) "natural attitude". That is to say: a given subject's lifeworld consists of the beliefs against which his everyday attitude towards himself, the objective world and others receive their ultimate justification. (However, in principle not even beliefs forming part of a subject's lifeworld are immune to revision. Hence, Husserl must not be regarded as an epistemological foundationalist; see F�llesdal 1988.)

(2a) If we consider a single community of subjects, their common lifeworld, or "homeworld", can be looked upon, by first approximation, as the system of senses or meanings constituting their common language, or "form of life" (Wittgenstein), given that they conceive of the world and themselves in the categories provided by this language.

(2b) If we consider subjects belonging to different communities, we can look upon their common lifeworld as the general framework of senses or meanings that allows for the mutual translation of their respective languages (with their different associated "homeworlds") into one another."

Excerpts from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/.

Posted by Steph at 8:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 9, 2005

tangent

Here is an excellent primer on Foucault.

The author, John Haber, poses Foucault vs Sartre: "For Sartre, a self-assured fighter who violently distrusted revolutionaries, alienation is normal. For Foucault�a homosexual who died of AIDS in the midst of composing an ambitious, unfinished History of Sexuality�accepting normalcy as others define it is out of the question."

"In Discipline and Punish, he finds the discovery of individuals to parallel the development of some areas not of increased freedom, but of increased authority�prisons and scientific analysis of behavior.....see[ing] deep connections between the parallel trends that he identifies: individualism and central authority ... argu[ing] that individualism has a lot to do with the individual point of view, and I take the word "view" literally indeed."

Posted by Steph at 1:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

art as a screen

This "light, little book" that Briankle assigned us for pleasure and a change of pace is striking me heavy. It's fascinating, and fun, as some of my colleagues have said. And... its full of resonance for me - so many overlaps with my last relationship and the extended circle of "friends."

Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing, by Darian Leader, has taught me more about art (to which I've "come late", as I once said to the FP, not all that long ago) than anything else I've ever read or heard or discussed.

It's the density of the relationship between psychoanalysis and art that is weighing on me. I've not read Lacan, but as used by Leader in this book I'm intrigued.

Posted by Steph at 1:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 8, 2005

"some freaky shit"

One of my classmates said this today, describing an experience she had during meditation ("sitting") when she felt the two lobes of her brain widely separated by "the void" of the universe. Of course it sounds like a drug trip, illustrating the subsequent conversation we had about the academically-sanctioned search for causality - as if a knowledge of material causality is the only worthwhile epistemology.

Materialism rules. This seems to be true in much of the curriculum within the Communication department. Political economy, quantitative analysis, media effects...all are concerned with what can be empirically demonstrated. I haven't delved into cultural studies yet (soon!), but what little exposure I've had leads me to it also leverages materialism in its arguments. I'm compelled by materialist arguments, however I'm not convinced of their exclusive claim to the constitution of knowledge.

Enoch mentioned four theories of causality which we'll discuss in next week's class, noting that only physical causality is widely accepted within anthropology. I came across this piece on cultural materialism, whose "theoretical principles" seem quite in line with traditional Marxist thinking (as if I know so much about that!), asserting: "there is a universal pattern of sociocultural systems which consists of three components: infrastructure, structure, and superstructure." The author, James Lett, quotes Tim O'Meara's critique of cultural materialism's inability to " explain people�s behavior in current circumstances or predict them in novel circumstances."

This Wikipedia article on causalityprovides a great overview. I think I'm going to have to follow up more on David Hume (who came up in Briankle's class last week), who "could see no more reason for hypothesizing a substantial soul or mind than for accepting a substantial material world."

An alternative to the dominant paradigm of physical causality is that of replicate causality, posed by Gregory Bateson. This article, GREGORY BATESON, CYBERNETICS,
AND THE SOCIAL/BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, "delineates the fundamental principles underlying the cybernetic paradigm as it was employed by Bateson." I'll have to come back to reading it later.

Then there is the Copenhagen School of quantum mechanics, which accepted the uncertainty principle as a complete theory limiting the range of deterministic knowledge. "They made no distinction between reality and our knowledge of reality." Much more here to read later, too. :-)

Finally, the fourth version of causality theory is formative causality, proposed by Rupert Sheldrake (interview describing morphic resonance!). His notion is distinguished from Aristotle's emphasis on essential form which doesn't consider the universe as dynamic and evolving. As summarized in the preceding link by James Arraj (note: this review of one of his books mentions critiques and cautions about meditation): "the forms of things would no longer be determined by eternal archetypes or universal laws, but by the actual form of previous similar organisms which effect the present forms by morphic resonance, which is a "non-energetic transfer of information."

Fun blog entry on morphic resonance.

Perception and judgement of physical causality involve different brain structures "provides evidence for brain regions involved in a conscious level of inference about the presence of causality."

Physical causality and brain theories dismisses quantum mechanics as a source for theorizing about the brain.

Posted by Steph at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 3, 2005

can i get a witness?

I'm just wondering. Are Koreans always late or is it just HUNJU?!!!! I can handle it though, because I am getting The Best tutoring on philosophy a person could possibly wish. :-) We had an awesome talk about the first two chapters in Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology. It's pretty complicated stuff, but fascinating. Sheer downright absa-tooting-lutely fascinating. Folks are welcome to join us, if you want, we're reading fairly big chunks every two weeks then meeting to hash out understanding. Today we went over the Intro and the chapter on Brentano. It's wild to imagine being back in the day just figuring these things out, like how to separate and/or integrate and/or comprehend the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. "Objectivity-for-subjectivity" is the formulation that stuck in my mind... meaning (if I can wrap my head around this one more time)....whatever we experience or perceive as objective is always already conditioned by subjectivity...the question is "how the world comes to appearance in and through humans," or, as Husserl put it: "how does objectivity get constituted in and for consciousness?"

Posted by Steph at 10:51 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 2, 2005

sound in the forest...

Oh dear. I am going to worry this one for awhile. Why is it staying on my mind? (Attachment?) :-)

I�m talking about the damn tree. It�s still falling. Making noise. I�m reading about Franz Brentano, who invented descriptive psychology and inspired all kinds of folk, including Edmund Husserl. The book is Introduction to Phenomenology. The discussion I�m just now reading is about intentionality.

The author of this book, McDermot Moran, states: �Intentionality is the doctrine that every mental act is related to some object� (47). The relational element is what just jumped me, and this example quoted from Brentano: �There is no hearing unless something is heard, no believing unless something is believed; there is no hoping unless something is hoped for . . . and so on, for all the other psychological phenomena� (48). (I keep coming around to what Enoch said, that the sound, if we can't hear it, doesn't exist for us, but I can�t seem to rest there, so let me pound on this a bit longer.) I think what I�m resisting is the human-centricity of this construction, which poses �objects� and �existence� as only that which is perceptible to human consciousness. I think there are things out there! Outside of my limited awareness, beyond my perception, exceeding what I can comprehend. Now, in terms of consciousness, there is an object of my intention. It is unnameable, unperceived, unknown, but I believe in it. Does it matter, then, if I can�t hear it?

Posted by Steph at 12:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 1, 2005

What's a chiasm?

Merleau-Ponty uses this term to describe the inevitable and inextricable intertwining of consciousness with being. The phenomenological challenge he undertakes is to describe this mutual imbrication of selves and the world.

There is a medical reference, the optic chiasm, and a literary reference. Most simply, it means "an intersection or crossing of two tracts in the form of the letter X", and is reference to form.

Posted by Steph at 12:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 26, 2005

mobile personality

I'm kinda liking this Lerner dude's take on the evolution of subjectivity through modernization. Seems to me like a way of describing factors that go into the construction of a post-structural self - one that is adaptable to both deep structure (say, culture) and structure more palpable to perception (such as microsocial interaction).

Daniel Lerner (1958): The passing of traditional society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: MacMillan: 43-75. Contextualized here.

What does Lerner mean by �empathy� and mobility?

Empathy is a psychoanalytic term referring to two processes by which an individual identifies with or �incorporates� others: projection and introjection. Projection perceives self in other and introjection imagines other in self. Lerner suggests these processes are the operational mechanisms by which individuals adapt themselves to the demands of a changing environment. The more efficiently (and selectively?) a person utilizes these processes the more mobile is their subjectivity (49). Mobility is the internalized (socialized) comfort with the experience of and adaptability to change as the �normal� way to be (48). This �high capacity for rearranging the self-system on short notice� based on the ability to see oneself in another�s situation, to see oneself as the other (or an other), is a style cultivated by modern society and complemented by emphases on notions of participation - taking up new roles, and having opinions -identifying personal values with the public sphere (50-51).

What role does the media play in Lerner�s formula for modernization?

Mass media are the �great teachers of interior manipulation� because of their multiplying presentations of a simplified and organized perception of life in another land, sans the complicated overload of sensory stimuli one has to manage by actually being there (54). This has had the effect of increasing non-traveling people�s imagination about other places through exposure to an �infinite vicarious universe� (53). The packaging of the mass media conveys a mediated sense of other places, the are �composed and orchestrated version[s]� of life outside one�s familiar milieu (53).

I was tickled to read the comment about people in the early days of the movies trying to intervene in them, as Hannah did that once, quite dramatically, when she was about six. She had not been exposed to much prior to that time (videos of the Teletubbies, Sesame Street, Arthur). I don't remember what we were watching, but there was a scene, well into it, when the protagonist was in danger but didn't yet know it, and Hannah started yelling at her to pay attention! It was amusing, on the one hand, but also a bit freaky to see how deeply she was engaged with the story.

Posted by Steph at 7:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

seeing and looking

Briankle assigned us a terrific book: Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing, by Darian Leader. (Another pro and a con critique are posted here, scroll down.)

I'm interested in the way Leader describes the difference between looking and seeing. One may look and not see. Simply, this is perceptually similar to hearing but not listening, however Leader is really dealing with consciousness and what it means to know that one is being looked at without ever knowing for sure what (who?) is being seen.

And what if seeing is the primary receptive sense? Of course I'm thinking about the Deaf, and of my involvement with ASL. Of knowing that one is being watched. I wonder if one of the factors in the differential success of varying ASL students has to do with the willingness to be seen? Because one certainly is! I recall many instances of horror when I was in my beginning and intermediate ASL courses. The self-consciousness of attempting production, the discomfort of generating inadequate performances. And the pleasure of adequacy. :-)

As I think about it, there was (is!) satisfaction on two levels: the achievement of linguistic meaningfulness and of relational acceptance. If I can be looked at when operating at what often feels like my most vulnerable (as in, most exposed) mode, and accepted as a person doing a good job at her profession, that carries a lot of validation. Note: I'm not talking about the adulation that is sometimes expressed by people who do not know the language (which I consider generally superficial), but with Deaf persons and colleages.

Posted by Steph at 4:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 25, 2005

a practice of public reasoning

"I was really impressed with your latest blog posting. Lots of self
discovery going on there."

"How do admissions of psychological/emotional vulnerability contribute to getting people to move to action? It's very easy for people to say, "Ah ha! I knew it wasn't about the department; she's having personal problems and using the department as a scapegoat."

Probably this is what Stephen's been on my case about - does acknowledging the personal (what he has been defining as "private" and labeling "psychological") move people to action? ? Perhaps not, but maybe it depends on what kind of �action� is desired�

We recently clarified a conflation in the discussion we've been having (in the DRP category for the past couple of months). Stephen had not remembered a classical distinction between the "private" and the "intimate." My mulling of this since our talk about Habermas Monday evening has been complemented by some reading material on "Functional Roles of Group Members" in the small group communication course. First, I've been pushing for acknowledgement that whatever one person considers "private" or "intimate" is a social construction. We can approach the construction from perceptual, sociological, ideological, rhetorical, or epistemological lenses, each of which brings different elements into view, but we have to admit at base that each of these frameworks presuppose no "real" (objective, positivist, materialist) existence of a concept of privacy or intimacy outside of human imagination.

If we accept this premise, then it becomes clearer (to me at least!) that what I've been arguing against is Stephen's insistence on selecting out only those elements of my arguments which "fit" his stereotype (?) (!) of where the boundary between the public and private "ought" to be drawn. This is where I have suggested that our debate has the quality of a power struggle: between the imposition of his (historically based) model of categorization, and my attempts to bring a critique of this model's contemporary applicability into focus. The model influencing my analysis today has to do with a heuristic division of roles in a group (which is equally rooted in white male rationalist epistemology).

Where I agree with Stephen about the need to delineate a boundary regarding what is appropriate or not in the practice of public reason (especially with the intention of generating a public sphere) is whether an individual's contribution leans most heavily toward self-serving (individual) goals or whether an individual's contribution leans more in the direction of accomplishing the group's stated task and/or maintaining the communicative and relational practices necessary to hold a group together through difficult stages or periods of time.

From this angle, I would suggest that if there is suspicion about a self-serving motivation for any particular action (which could, for instance, be manifested through criticism of that action) then the "issue" is already public, it has simply not been acknowledged as such. My argument is that only via self-disclosure of so-called "personal, private, or (possibly even) intimate" details, can such suspicion be confirmed or denied. Further, I argue that such disclosure is a necessary precondition for any kind of intellectual separation of personal (as in selfish) motivation from potential value to the (public) collective effort.

In other words, public reasoning needs to be flexible enough to include elements of human be-ing that have hitherto been proscribed.

Posted by Steph at 9:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 24, 2005

"we are still monkeys"

I am so jealous of anyone who's already done with Paula's paper! And, I'm kinda....having fun (!) re-reading Mumford (1963) after Chris made more of it legible to me with his presentation yesterday. :-)

I'm just over half done with the paper. I'm enjoying what I now see as a merger in Mumford of the material and the ideological, to wit:

"...instantaneous personal communication over long distances...is the mechanical symbol of those world-wide cooperations of thought and feeling which must emerge, finally, if our whole civilization is not to sink into ruin" (241).

The recordability of such instantaneous personal communication is one example of "the new permanent record" which "suggest[s] a new relationship between deed and record, between the movement of life and its collective enregistration: above all, they demand a nicer sensitiveness and a higher intelligence. If these inventions have so far made monkeys of us, it is because we are still monkeys" (245).

;-) Gimme a banana!

Posted by Steph at 11:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 22, 2005

voidness

I looked up some of the things Enoch either shared info from and/or suggested we read:

The Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio seems like an intriguing read. The author, Antonio Damasio, has been interviewed by The Harvard Brain and for some publicity from his publisher.

According to Damasio, Descartes' mistake was to separate the brain from the body. Damasio proposes the somatic marker hypothesis to explain a connection he believes exists between emotion and the exercise of reason.

An opposing view. This looks similar to the stuff I did for Nelson's class oh way way back....on pre-conscious perception. The intent of the study I read was to debunk Freud (fine with me) but it was intriguing because of how I thought it fit in with Billig's notion of dialogic repression. (Have to check up on it again to be sure.)

We had some discussion about whether the notion of a self is an internally generated phenomena or an interactively-generated one. While there seemed to be some agreement on the interaction part, it also seems problems of "what a self is" are no more easily solved in anthropology than they are in communication. :-)

Geosophy was a new term for me. It reminded me of Ley Lines and Chaco Canyon.

Then there was a hint about the body recently being "discovered as an electromagnetic device". And some interesting parallels: that the earth and the human body are composed of the same percentage of water (70%), and also have the same base resonate frequency (7.8) - and rumors are this may be shifting up. There's two types of stuff on the 'Net: astrobiology, psychic sites, etc., and electronics, but I couldn't find a basic definition. (I can deduce it but always like to verify my deductions.)

What intrigued me most about class tonight, though, was our group dynamic. There was no way I was gonna leave Juan hanging out there all by himself!

Posted by Steph at 11:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 19, 2005

antiphysis to pseudophysis

Roland Barthes may be beyond me, but his critique of myth is fascinating.

Physis "was the Greek word for the material cosmos we sense and measure and attempt to predict."

Here's the quote in question: "[I]n the contemporary bourgeois society, the passage from the real to the ideological is defined as that from an anti-physis to a pseudo-physis." From The Bourgeoisie As A Joint-Stock Company. "Antiphysis" is linked to "the real"; and pseudophysis is linked to "ideology." I get the latter, but not the former. :-(

Posted by Steph at 5:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"asset?"

My buddy Carole is a gem. This afternoon she told me she'd never met anyone like me and wonders how my life will turn out. So do I! We were talking about the things I do. I keep trying to figure out what it is, actually, that I "do." :-) And why! Since what I do often results in distress (for me and for others, to varying degrees and intensities, situationally). Is there something I bring that is actually an "asset", and if so, what is it? Am I misusing or misapplying it? Are there other ways to "use" it than the ways I currently know?

Maybe I'm trying "to do" what Arturo Uslar Pietri prohesied during the height of technological determinism, believing communication would solve all the major world problems: participation "in everything that happens [to which] we will react accordingly, outside the bounds of ideology, models, and commands" (in Mattelart, 127).

Briankle was talking about "the double play of ideology" in class the other night. How the real bite of ideology, where it does its work, is upon those who profess to "see" the system, or have the privilege or subjective means to withdraw from it temporarily (for instance, via meditation), and yet continue to participate in it. I do not at all believe that I'm operating outside of ideology, but I do wonder if part of what I do by living in a kind of "resistance" (I use the word guardedly, for lack of an alternative) is to somehow identify the work of ideology in us? Oy I am going to get in so much trouble for this!

On Democracy Now this evening, Amy Goodman interviewed Ward Churchill about his description of WTC technocrats as "little Eichmanns". I didn't hear the whole interview, but I did hear the part about Arendt's experience of going to see Eichmann, whom she had imagined as evil personified, and discovering what a typically ordinary person he really was - loved by his children, active in his community, doing what he was told as a function of his bureaucratic job with a sense of detachment from the actual outcomes of his labor.

This essay, Eichmann, the Banality of Evil, and Thinking in Arendt's Thought applies Arendt's argument about the banality of evil, and includes a discussion of the difference between the commonplace and the banal. Maybe that's where I need practice? In distinguishing between these two? Or maybe this is something that can't be known (recognized?) until called into question?

Posted by Steph at 1:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

shamanism

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I've actually had a few wild perceptions of being potentially able to alter reality - especially time - (and no, I wasn't under any influence), but they always seem ... out of ken. Not real. But here I am reading Mattelart for Paula's class, and he quotes McLuhan...

Participants and actors �seek to program events rather than to watch them�these �effects� appear before their �causes.� At instant speeds the cause and effect are at least simultaneous�.this dimension� naturally suggests � the need to anticipate events hopefully rather than to participate in them fatalistically� (1974, in Mattelart p. 125-126).

Now, McLuhan was referring to the perceived (at that time) power of media to spread a message and instigate deep social change (especially outside of North America). It's a deterministic view in which technology is perceived as neutral and the message would automatically produce the intended or desired effect.

What catches my attention about this is the temporal element - that effects and causes are "simultaneous". Which means neither one comes "first" or "next" but they co-occur. I think this is what happens in group communication too. For instance (beating a dead horse?), complaining could lead linearly to a protest but the moment of "protest" is both cause/effect - not just in the linear sense of what came before and what comes after, but in the meaning made in the moment of production/reception. I can reflect back on everything I "brought" to my actions and intentions in the moment, but inevitably that reflection is only upon a part of the whole that generated the event itself as "an event."

Posted by Steph at 12:32 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

February 11, 2005

understanding...

"Until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts." Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 13.

I recognize Lippmann's context is mass media, but the example he provides is what I would characterize as group dynamics/group relations: a 1919 argument in the U.S Senate in which partisan Republicans and Democrats engage in a discourse that develops from the recognition of a rumor to an assumption of truth. Lippmann argues this incident "reveals how difficult it is...to suspend response until the returns are in. The response is instantaneous. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed" (emphasis added, 19).

The intriguing question (to my mind) then becomes, what motivates the need? Lippmann goes elsewhere - although it may be a step on the way to mine :-) - saying we can't generalize "about comparative behavior until there is a measurable similarity between the environments to which behavior is a response" (25). Does Lippmann refer here to a synchrony of pseudo-environments (mediated) or to some external, objectified "real" environment? And how does one assess such?

Posted by Steph at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2005

the Quarrel

between the Ancients and the Moderns is described by Joseph M. Levine as, "how far to imitate the classics and how far to risk the freedom to innovate."

However, another view, by Rosen, argues that "the quarrel that is significant is not between ancients and moderns but between philosophy and sophistry, for the continuous attempt of Western civilization to prevent playfulness from degenerating into frivolity constitutes the unity of historical experience."

Here are some additional links to authors with an online paragraph or so of commentary on the Quarrel, including Schiller: "Antique poetry now is equated with the naive mode of perception (naive Empfindungsweise). Naive poets live in inner harmony and unity with nature, and their works of art are produced spontaneously and in the absence of poetic self-consciousness. The poetry of modernity, on the other hand, is sentimental in outlook (Schiller's German term is sentimentalisch rather than sentimental). Sentimental poets are self-reflective and skeptical of inspiration, they are apprehensive of the psychological abyss that dissociates their own age from antiquity, and they feel their cultural and moral self cut off from the harmony of senses and from the union with nature that they ascribe to the writers of antiquity."

Terms I'm still struggling with:

synchrony, as in "an idealization of synchronic modes of understanding" (3). Locke is described by Labio as "almost exclusively synchronic" (10), which must mean that "knowing" and/or consciousness itself is taken to be a simultaneous event?
Later, "Descartes's narratives also have a definite static, or synchronic, as well as visual quality" (31).

This is opposed to diachronic views.

I think this is a different argument than the "absolute/transcendent" vs "contingent" truth argument, right?

asymptotic, as in "humanity, which has given birth to itself by severing itself from its aboriginal nature through that first flash of consciousness that marks it as secondary and asymptotic" (62). This is in reference to the first naming of thunder (what Enoch might call a "decree"?) which separated the human from the un or a-human who preceded us evolutionarily. I think what asymptotic means is that the approach can never be consummated - perhaps an example of what Briankle might call a promise? One can get closer and closer and yet never actually touch (arrive at) the desired object.

Posted by Steph at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 9, 2005

human choice

Vico defines philology as "the doctrine of all the institutions that depend on human choice; for example, all histories of the languages, customs, and deeds of peoples in war and peace" (in Labio, p. 47).

The academy is an institution; rhetorical discourse is an institution. War is an institution. Peace is not. How does one exercise choice that invokes an institutionalizing of peace without negating half the human experience (aggression, desire, passion....in short, sensation itself)?

What does an "immanent metaphysics" entail? Labio affirms meditation as a narration of an ideal that one makes for oneself (48). Unless I'm reading her wrong and I pray someone will correct - or at least argue! - with me if I am.)

I'm straddling what Strawson (1979, 9) describes as descriptive and radical metaphysics (as paraphrased by sofiatopia in the link above on "immanent metaphysics). Descriptive metaphysics "is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world." Radical metaphysics "is concerned to produce a better structure."

Posted by Steph at 12:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 6, 2005

Gabriel Tarde

This may be one of my new guys. The blogpost cited before (The Pinocchio Theory is a great summary of Tarde that winds up exactly where I've been trying to be, believe it or not! (I loved Ripley's as a kid.)

This article by Bruno Latour about Tarde is about interrupting repetitions - think problematic moments! (and Latour looks interesting in his own right: Making Things Public).

Wikipedia shows his work turned to unsavory purposes (Le Bon) but also taken up by others who may be less scary....I'm not sure yet, because Mattelart lumps him in with the psychopathologists and (despite dysfunctionality) I really don't think humanity is hopelessly pathological, but more investigation is on the horizon. I wonder if I can get the Encyclopedia Brittanica article on him from school?

Posted by Steph at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

emergence of technical networks

I'm thinking, only on p. 30, that it makes sense to me why so many intellectuals commit suicide. The quote by historian Douglass McKie suggests a hands-off policy from government toward business until business goes bad, when a moral discourse is invoked. The blatancy of fear-based policy decisions in the relations between nations is no less today than it was then.

I'm puzzled by this though: "The tension between the logics of negotiation and those of security/insecurity was too tangible to render credible the first efforts to construct a system for regulating international relations" (30). Meaning it was so real that it couldn't be faced? Or accepted as requiring significant, deliberate, and direct mediation? I'm not disputing Mattelart's judgment, but wondering about the intensity of denial, and how that still plays out in so many ways and places.

There is an intellectual imperative to hold both the "bad" and the "good" in some kind of phenomenological tension in order to stay sane. For instance, the fact of so many agreements which do curb "the impulse to war" (27) countering the ways in which war is still an acceptable option for conflict resolution. But the depth of governmentalist hegemony is distressing. My naivete is shocking. What a sucker I've been for the discourses of western civilization and democracy ~ even as I constantly increase my knowledge of their duplicity I do still believe in human evolution as (at least potentially) ascendant...maybe that's a different discourse altogether? I may have to learn better how to separate them, without going overboard into new ageism (which is equally susceptible to cooptation and misuse).

It looks like here's a clip of Mattelart speaking at a conference; I can't view it from my dial-up...

Posted by Steph at 1:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 2, 2005

revising...independent study

Hunju prefers Merleau-Ponty and that would be nicely synergistic for me, since my first encounter with phenomenology was through a popular rendition based largely upon M-P's work.

Also, it's Max Scheler (not Schuyler), and this looks interesting: On Feeling, Knowing, Valuing.

Posted by Steph at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

independent study

Here's my thinking (finally) for the critical phenomenology with Briankle:

Problem 1: what's the difference between epistemology (ways of knowing) and phenomenology (consciousness)?

Problem 2: the role of perception. How is perception articulated/understood within these two fields?

I like Labio's book on aesthetic epistemology (he's assigned to for COM660).

"Phenomenology." Translated by C. V. Salmon. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. vol. 17 (1929), 699-702. is recommended as "one of the best of Husserl's short works."

Then, perhaps the Logical Investigations? Probably the longer version?

The two texts for Anthropology of Consciousness might fit in, somehow: Why God Won't Go Away and (less sure of this one) Vasistha's Yoga, but only because it seems more methodological - a "how to" rather than a "why". We'll see. :-)

From Husserl to....Heidegger? I have reservations about him. I know his thinking is important. And, I'm not sure I want to promote the thinking (however insightful) of someone who was an active Nazi.

Briankle mentioned Schuyler but I can't pinpoint any works - need more directioin to check him out.

What about Hegel? Not critical? (Briankle didn't mention him.) Phenomenology of Mind. He also wrote <a href="http://hegel.net/en/eb1911.htm"Phenomenology of Spirit which might compliment Enoch's insistence on spirituality as the foundation of knowledge.

Finally (as if this isn't plenty!) - Merleau-Ponty? For instance, Phenomenology of Perception.

This reference page on Husserl is awesome, btw! And this one on Hegel.

Posted by Steph at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"a forbidden conversation"

This is how Enoch Page framed the course, Anthropology of Consciousness. His critique of academia is based upon a combination of personal experience and a theorizing informed by Gregory Bateson. I haven't read any Bateson, but his name has been mentioned occasionally in COM, and now I know I need to read him.

The quotes here are from "notes" that Enoch has written and read to us. Some of them are Bateson's own words (I think) and other's are either Enoch's paraphrasing or his own contributions. The gist of the argument vs conventional academia (which I believe characterizes most of the approach in our COM dept) is an overemphasis on "purposive conscious activity." As I understood it, its the reduction of knowledge to only what we consciously intend and conceptualize; leaving out anything unintended or otherwise out of consciousness. Taking only the overtly conscious into account "lacks systemic wisdom" and means that whatever action taken on solely "purposively conscious" bases will "always require a remedy." In other words, the results of action that doesn't acknowledge or take into account the presence/infuence of non-rational, non-purposive, non-conscious factors will always be flawed.

The problem is "what would entail a rigorous study of unconsciousness without psychologizing it?" Page argues we need to study the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, not just assume we've somehow transcended Cartesian dualism (which he asserts is the foundation of societal pathology in the U.S.). He wasn't familiar with Michael Billig, who I think does provide a way to study unconsciousness through the mechanism of dialogic repression.

What's forbidden about this conversation? I'm not sure exactly which aspect(s) Page would privilege, but I'd wager two specifics: "the unconscious" as a topic of intellectual inquiry, and notions of collectivity applied to the unconscious. Page mentions Jung's theorizing about a collective unconsciousness (which he has some problems with) and also discourse among people who meditate about a collective consciousness. Page refers back to Durkheim's neglected work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (original translation 1912) and a notion of "collective representation." This was the first step (so says Page) toward getting the first glimpse into master narratives, such as "sacred national fictions" (Robert Bella).

What's distinctive about the collective representation of Durkheim is that it goes beyond ideology (exemplified by Althusser) and incorporates perceptual patterning. Perhaps the "ideal type" (I'm reaching) is "collective effervescence." Page says Durkheim meant something more than the "communitas" of Victor Turner, because he thinks Durkheim was referring to a "level of emotional intensity and shared intensity" that exceeds the "I know everybody" of community. Eduardo offered "levitas" as an opposition. :-)

Anyway a search for collective effervescence leads to some interesting pdf's, and this book review. The summary of the first chapter of Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the College of Sociology captures the points of main interest to me.

Posted by Steph at 3:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 28, 2005

discourses in tension?

I had a great day working today. My teammate was (is!) awesome. :-) We had the best conversation at lunch, about her workshop on discretion (which gets as much of a plug as I can give it), and a quasi-update on where I am with the research on role.

Our conversation was fascinating because it was going along just fine, full of investigatory questions and comments, and then it got tense! Why? It was right before we had to get back to work.....and then didn't come up again....but was really on my mind. Why? Was I presenting my hypotheses and tentative findings in an ethnocentric or oppressive way? It worked out that we walked to our cars together, and the moment arose for me to ask if she'd felt the conversation get tense. (Maybe it was just me?) Yes, she had noticed! And she thought it was about something she was doing! Being too questioning or too .... something (I can't recall her word - persistent, maybe).

Fascinating! We both sensed the tension, and both of us thought we were the cause of it! I thought I must be doing something "wrong," and she thought she must have been doing something "wrong"!

Hmmm. That really got me thinking. I have a partial/quasi/VERY tentative hypothesis - that it wasn't about "us" as individual persons at all (although we don't know each other well even though we've known OF each other ever since I moved to VT....twelve years ago) - but rather, about the discourses each of us was invoking/enacting. Really, I am just plumb guessing, but as we "de-briefed" the tension, what seemed to be the point of most affect was (what I can only describe as) a "contest" between the current/contemporary most "fashionable" discourse about the interpreter's "role(s)" (term used advisedly) and responsibilities, and a .... oy, how to characterize this ....

A "new" discourse that seeks to question some of the hitherto unquestioned assumptions about the interpreter's role. Such as whether or not the reproduction of a "monocultural" environment for Deaf interlocutors is really "the best" or most ideal Vision for what we ought to produce.

AND - this is the key (I think!), it didn't seem to be the whole discourse or even the specific question itself (might a bicultural model of/for interpreting be a more appropriate and/or effective model than the monocultural one?) but the fact that there's no answer for what this "alternative" might look and feel like!

I think what this means (based on my huge sample of one, grin) is that it is the unknown itself that is scary (and not the notion that maybe the current "ally/cultural mediator" model isn't the full or ultimate answer).

Gosh. I'd LOVE it if my team would like to respond (!) and of course if anyone else wants to chime in.....

Posted by Steph at 9:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 17, 2005

why blog?

Todd sent me these (among other) questions awhile ago. I think the timing is good to answer them now because I basically threw down the gauntlet to my blogmates from DRP.

1. Do you remember the first time you thought, "hey I want to create a blog!" That is my "!" You might not have had a "!" when you thought of it.

When I learned about blogs, my "!" was the ability to combine two things: group dynamics (including discourse) and publicity (like Peter Wiggins of Ender's Game). Not that I identify with him in terms of personality or scale of ambition!

3. Do you think your "voice" or "identity" as changed since you started your blog?

My "voice", perhaps, but not my "identity." I think of voice more like representation, and I've tried to spice things up a bit. Early reviews found my writing dry, dull, and deadly. :-) I always wonder if people experience my writing as pedantic. (Do you?) As for my identity - in terms of my presentation or performance of self, I think I'm pretty consistent, but again, I don't know if others agree...?

1. (extended answer) The moment of "!" was in Leda's Information and Technology class. I was getting ready to drop. Couldn't find anything that turned me on enough to write about for a paper. We read about blogs and I immediately started one for the class. It received sporadic attention from my peers (mostly cohortmates) but generated enough "data" (!) that my attention was hooked.

2. How long have you been blogging? Two full years! I used to miss days pretty often in the beginning, now hardly ever.

3. (extended answer) I think teaching online before I started to blog helped me develop my online style. I do envision a "group audience". Depending upon what I'm blogging, the group-in-my-imagination is composed of various individuals. Some categories in my blog are specific to particular groups, so I write to that configuration. I am usually cognizant that others' might also read - but I don't write to them; I try to add enough information so there's a chance what I'm writing is clear to those not immediately involved or addressed (so that it - hopefully! - makes some sense if they do choose to read it).

With some posts my orientation to audience is very general - vaguely including some specific individuals up to and including non-specific or anonymous persons. All the posts I've amde in the "Oh, just me" category for the last several months are from "duty" or a sense of "mission" to keeping the intellectual commitment to see how the blog functions as a means of recording subjectivity and subjective development over time. I don't think subjectivity can be compartmentalized by cordoning off the "private" and "public", or picking and choosing which parts of my life count for the record and which don't. I certainly don't "tell all", but the integrity of the task requires me to tell something when I'm aware that its relevant.

Posted by Steph at 1:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 3, 2005

postmodernism

"incredulity toward metanarratives" ? - Jean-Francois Lyotard This essay says NOT.

or

the "age of indeterminacy" ? - Ihab Hassan It's not so keen on this either...SOME things are random, but maybe not as many as we think.

characterized by "indisciplinarity, working outside of the parameters of one's own body or field of knowledge" ? - Charles Jencks

"Wittgenstein, a modern precursor to many postmodern philosophers, is creating a space for incredulity, not of Napoleon, but of the very existence of the earth. In mathematical terms (set theory), Wittgenstein in suggesting that in order to call into question one member of a set (Napoleon), one must question the entire set (the earth itself or history). According to this, for Lyotard to maintain his incredulity of science, he would have to be incredulous, not just of such notions as Grand Unifying Theories, but also of such basics as Isaac Newton's Law of Gravity and Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution. So, either Lyotard's postmodern exists as incredulous of all science, or it posits science above the level of master narrative, as a kind of ueber-narrative, towards which one does not have to maintain the same kind of incredulity."

"this overriding of our first impulses -- the visual, in Plato's example -- that is necessary for science to maintain some degree of objectivity. "

"language/theory precedes "reality" (discovery)....having the theory precede the discovery is not truly postmodern, considering that Neptune was first "discovered" mathematically in 1845"

"It appears that the "belief" in quantum mechanics requires the suspension of "common sense." We postmodernists are placed in a paradoxical position over this; in order to validate Feynman's postulation, we must acknowledge that it represents the absurd over common sense in order to maintain the integrity of the master narrative -- quantum theory. To paraphrase: incredulity of the narrative (observations of light) is required to maintain the credulity of the metanarrative (quantum mechanics). "

"if we are to insist on locating incredulity, it would not be at the metanarrative level, but would have to be at the narrative level. Incompleteness is an important idea in postmodern thought because it suggests a lack of totality, but G�del's theory is more concerned with reflexivity, and thus its importance is in the need for meta-languages. "

"In order to understand the underlying differences between the humanities and the sciences, we must again investigate the differences in meaning in another key term: theory. In the humanities, one uses the term "theory" to designate any idea that circulates, regardless whether it has been subject to systematic experimentation. In the sciences, there is a hierarchy of hypothesis (idea), theory (hypothesis that has been supported repeatedly but not disproved), and law (a theory that has undergone extensive testing and has been shown accurate every time)."

"Physics equations replace god in the sciences, while in the humanities, god is replaced by humans: it seems quite clear why one group insists on the rejection of master narratives while the other assumes they underlie our universe's evolution."

" One of the leading chaos theorists, John L. Casti, explains chaos in his book, Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprises: "Basically, a chaotic system generates behavior giving the appearance of complete randomness by means of a purely deterministic rule. . . . Scientifically speaking, chaos is only the appearance of randomness, not the real thing" [32]. This understanding of "chaos" is integral to Sokal and Bricmont's definition of postmodern science as well: "One characteristic of postmodern science is the stress on nonlinearity and discontinuity" and "the new sciences stress the dynamic web of relationships between the whole and the part" [33]. "Chaos" is not disorder, but is not linear either; similarly, complexity focuses on the relationships between parts and the whole in a manner far more involved that simple cause and effect."

"Shortly into Gut Symmetries, Winterson explains the difference between contemporary science and the humanities: "As a scientist I try to work towards certainties. As a human being I seem to be moving away from them" [48]. This is the crux of the postmodern problem: how does one reconcile one approach that is incredulous of all masternarratives with another that assumes a universal coherence?"

"As humans, other humans surround us: the variables in any interpersonal equation are profound, so that we cannot be certain about much. However, our universe has evolved as it has and continues to function as it does precisely because there are certain laws govern it. We live our lives as we do because we do believe that the earth will keep spinning around the sun. Contemporary science and the humanities have different subjects, and thus we should not assume that theories in one field will automatically translate into another. It seems more prudent to examine the uses of scientific theory by contemporary writers than trying to contort scientific theories to explain contemporary texts. A novel is not a photon."

Posted by Steph at 12:10 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 2, 2005

Sreela's comment

Sreela posted this but the comment function is screwed up. :-( She wrote:

I am thinking of the relationship between micro and macro seen through the metaphor of the body politic. The phrase "the king is dead, long live the king" suggests that a larger organic whole (monarchy)goes on despite the the component(king)missing/dead. Yet the king/micro is what the macro (kingdom) derives its value from. I am not sure that made sense! But microcosms have always been celebrated, I guess, like the Romantic poets who visualized a unity in the micro scenery representing the universe.

I like the idea of postmodernism as a "preoccupation." Interesting choice of words, implying a tendency toward obsession?

I respond:

I took "preoccupation" to be a state of attention or focus. I looked it up to see if it's semantically related to "obsession." Which does use "preoccupation" in its definition! (Of course, the preoccupation definition uses preoccupied, which goes against all sense and convention!)

What draws my attention (!) in your example is the notion of value. Because what makes the king valuable to the notion of monarchy is the ATTENTION the king gets, which is an ongoing interpellative interaction between the (now already established) notion of monarchy and the body of the person bethroned. "Originally" (Briankle might take issue with this concept, smile), a person became king because of both the attention demanded and the attention given.

If such is true, then the current scientific preoccupation with postmodernism is likely (?) possibly (?) co-generating a world in which postmodernism gets institutionalized in a similar fashion as monarchy.

(And I realize that you may have just been teasing me about being obsessed. Grin.)

Posted by Steph at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

postmodernism

" What we call "postmodernism," whether we refer to the sciences or the humanities, is a certain preoccupation with the role of the human observer in the composition and perception -- perhaps even construction -- of reality."

~ To See More Clearly and Broadly: Science and the Postmodern Sentiment

This is the best, most concise explanation I've come across to explain postmodernism (I'll have to read more of this online journal, Reconstruction to see if/how they distinguish this from poststructuralism).

The Body Observer Model sums up the "the terms of our collective postmodern endeavor. The only appreciable difference is on what scale the observer interacts; even then, as we can see in the following, the farther one moves up or down the scale of observation the closer one moves to the opposite scale in time. Thus, the observers of the smallest (quanta) and largest (Universe) are dealing with material originating in the Big Bang."

What's cool about this model, is how it illustrates the zone I'm trying to work - close in time, body, and observation: body natural - system is the microsocial interaction of a small group; body social - organ is the immediate social and historical context; body politic - tissue is the institutionalized macrosocial system and its ideologies. In fact, this is a summary of the layers/levels worked in group relations theory.

One component of group relations theory is object relations, which is in many ways too deterministic for me, and no doubt overpsychologized.

Posted by Steph at 6:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 31, 2004

relativity

Charles Taylor 1991, via Gerard Hauser 1999:

"The metaphor of moving together through conversational space can be sustained only if that space accommodates the appearance of the individual's I as a source of contribution. The presence of the I, however, invites us to understand the space and the we it contains from our own stance. The conversational partners qua individuals, or relata, must not be subsumed by the relationship or the relationship itself is lost. Their separateness is mutually necessary for differentiation. The relata and relationship, the separate I's and the we, are mutually constitutive of each other's identity within the space they create through conversation. But the I must continually grasp the intersubjective meaning that is always and exclusively a part of the we. Although personal and intersubjective meanings are always matters of perspective, mutual understanding requires that these independent points of view be linked. The we perspective is jeopardized when discourse partners jointly cease to grasp their common space of norms."

Posted by Steph at 11:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 26, 2004

phenomenology of deafness

"It was a mistake to assume that my cousin's universe was a tenuous universe of silence or emptiness. In fact it was a fluid universe of movement, affinity, alliances, sublime extravagances, evanescent pleasures, rendezvous with first-blush auroras, mornings, voyages, mercurial vagrancies, and a momentum forged in rampant elevation, up, up, standing on my shoulders in the water, vaulting circumfusion bubbled forth, embodied in a gulp of waves. His feet slipping from my shoulders and we both fell. It was a mistake to assume his silence was a heaviness, when in fact his silence was a gravity balanced light against the ballast of the world."

Nasdijj, the blood runs like rivers through my dreams, p.170

Posted by Steph at 1:52 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 1, 2004

ethnomethodology

A site

http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/sociosite/topics/theory.html#ETHNOMETH

Posted by Steph at 12:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 21, 2004

continuing to procrastinate...

I was looking for another link to What the Bleep and I found a link to a review board that looks pretty interesting: OFFOFFOFFfilm. We'll see if they vet my comment through or not. :-)

Thanks for the neurolinguistic programming part, Brad. John - you seem to be on your own in here! I think the claim that internal changes affect the outside world is exaggerated, but as a first step of getting people to even consider this kind of thinking the movie does some good.

diggindeeper - I appreciate you putting all the background info here too. I'd heard that there was an unnamed organizational affiliation and it's good to have that cleared up. Too many things are promoted without any kind of clarity about who's behind it, to what ends.

I agree the movie made me extremely uncomfortable with its evangelistic tone. But its "honest", I think in its argument. It marshalls facts in a way that is designed to persuade. Its clumsy, yes. But a waste of time? That seems extreme to me.

I think about the concept of interpellation that althusser came up with to describe how institutions condition us...how we come to "recognize" a "calling" into "roles" and certain "ways of living". I think this happens between individuals too - and that's where this movie could have gone (I wish) a lot further. But maybe we lack the language or experience or perceptual abilities to lay this part out yet. But, if I'm being conscious of what I put out as an "invitation" to others, how I "hail" them, AND they are mutually engaged in a similar endeavor, that's when I think the leap from quantum physics to social realities can come into view.

At least, that's what I'm hoping! :-)

Posted by Steph at 3:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

connected & separate knowing

I was thinking about the two movies, Huckabee's and Bleep, and what it is that makes people react so differently to them. Perhaps, its in the way they "structure" the message? Because I did read essentially the same message in both but they are packaged quite differently.

Huckabee's presents a mainly connected knowing view of the world, and Bleep is almost totally separate knowing.

In Huckabee's, the "message" of the movie is discernable only by making "connections" among the variety of disparate, random, meaningless and meaningful incidents occuring in several people's intertwined lives. While the film is framed as a "battle" between two philosophical views - nihilism and infinite interconnection - the way that nihilism and meaningless is portrayed through gaps, breaks, and disjunctures, ultimately serves the purpose of illustrating connection.

In Bleep, the "message" is presented in separate, fully-developed and well-supported "chunks" of "factual information."

And both movies make the point that where you direct your focus matters. If you focus on the gaps - trouble! If you focus on the connections - drama! Actually, connectivity seems to come out with a slightly more positive slant than nihilism (perhaps this is inevitable). It's the interplay between the two that compose life as we know it. Pain comes (from my current stance as a phenomenological expert) from a failure to resolve or productively work with different stances of each party to the encounter. In other words, the stances can be different, but if these differences are unable to be addressed...

poof

Posted by Steph at 2:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 20, 2004

dangers of a post-structural self

(Switching back and forth between Balibar and mullets has complicated my intellectual experience this afternoon.)

Labeled one of the "extremes," Balibar marks the boundaries of possible identity- construction:

"...we find infinite multiplicity, the continual passage from one identity to another, which has become an ideal for a certain postmodern ideology of liberation from authoritarian figures of the construction of personality, at the risk of lending itself to another form of subjection: that imposed by the model of t he universality of 'exchanges,' that is, the market and its own 'libidinal flows'" (2004:27).

The footnote (242) is dense as hell, but looks like stuff I might want to follow up on someday:

"It is important here not to conflate all discourses abusively. In particular, it would be appropriate to devote detailed readings to the analyses of 'becoming a minority' in Deleuze 9see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], pp. 291-93 or of the 'performative subversion of sexual roles' in Judith butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), w hich constitute esthetic-philosophical inversions of this tendency. The problematization of these questions is also at the center of the important work of Zygmunt Bauman, which is just beginning to be known in France."

Posted by Steph at 4:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 15, 2004

maybe I'll submit

an updated version to the First International Conference on Qualitative Research. Jung Yup shared the call, and I notice the first theme is autoethnography and performance. It occurs to me that this weblog in toto is a form of autoethnography....not to mention some of the specific categories and uses to which I've put it, most specifically with my interpersonal comm classes...

Other themes are relevant to me as well: critical ethnography as performance, critical pedagogy, democratic methodologies, discourse analysis, decolonizing the academy (!)...indeed, this is just a sample!

Posted by Steph at 8:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 14, 2004

How Far will it go?

One person (thanks Nadine!) approached me after the panel on Saturday saying she'd like to know how things turn out. I don't know, yet, but I'm mapping a possible path....

The overall audience response was ... remarkable, now that I stop to think about it.

There were definitely some contemplative (?) moments, but we spent most of the time laughing. At what?

I know that I presented the information in a humorous way, and even as humor. "This is the funniest part but we can't spend too much time on it..." or something to that effect. Tina emphasized the risktaking - of all of us - repeatedly in her response....Bonnie was the only panelist I really spoke with....Katie and I smiled at each other before we started and when the panel ended we were off on our separate orbits. Leda was probably off to her third appearance of the day...Tina did come over to suggest that I consider the angle of power in the study. Yep, I've been noting some of these junctures (like this one!) all along.

Coming back to the laughter, I'd already told some individuals about some of the things my students had said. About me being capable of podiatry, but not brain surgery or law. About the visceral impact of the haircut. I've consistently presented this as humor, being amused and pleased that the students/co-researchers felt comfortable to tease me so much. I also want to honor and recognize their honesty and willingness to make themselves vulnerable to me and each other.

It probably doesn't matter, except for vanity's sake, that I never knew about mullets until 3-4 years ago, when my FP talked about her students' reactions. Some teenybopper mag she gets had a spread on them. I thought I'd come up with it practically on my own! I saw a woman with a somewhat similar haircut at a women's music festival (down south, years ago, near Atlanta?), and then there was the impetus of the mohawk at the '96 Olympics...anyway, my pop cultural knowledge is widely known to be practically non-existent.

If the sharing of strongly negative feelings is framed and embraced as humor - what does that laughter point toward? Vernon is right, I think, when he says not enough emphasis is placed on the forward-in-time aspects of communication. Am I inviting you to laugh at me, or at some widely shared recognition of...something, or at.....what?

Sharing the limelight (!) was interesting. Most of the comments were directed toward Bonnie, if my memory serves. Pregnancy anecdotes, suggestions for further research....just discussing pregnancy in a group of (by visibility, anyway) non-pregnant women (24) and four men (and one person whose gender was indeterminate to me) over a period of 12 minutes as part of a larger conversation seemed to invite some of the same kinds of messages as those Bonnie was reporting from her semester-long classes.

I hope Leda actually felt teased (as she should have!) by my comment about her acting on an intuition about my horizon and inviting me to do this panel probably before I would have sought out such an opportunity on my own. While my "experiment in progress" currently runs on unarticulated theory, after listening to her talk about her paper I wanted to just say, 'ditto on that'. :-)

Posted by Steph at 2:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 31, 2004

self-interpellation?

I dunno. I'm just wondering. Can one "hail" oneself? Can I call forth the valences in "me" that I choose, rather than those that are called forth from others? Of course, I'm pondering the whole parent- and partnerhood thang. The more distance I have (and I don't think I'm talking about the aesthetic kind!), the more able I become to disengage from the less appealing valences and personalized history that has fed them and perceive "where things went wrong" and hypothesize about why/how. And....this makes me a bit more capable of recognizing when those same valences are being triggered (silence just flips me out; it can be so aggressive and diminishing) and - while being pulled into "old" (repetitive, familiar) emotional patterns - I can imagine that maybe this silence isn't a disciplinary silence (one designed to let me know that I have transgressed some communicative/relational code) but a "silence" of another kind, for instance, of gathering one's own resources, of "dealing", of coming to terms with one's own subjective tendencies and "choices". Then again (see here comes the drift!), maybe it's just an opportunity to solidify the suppression of any residue of affection...no no no, here is the moment....I call to the better parts of my own nature and banish suspicion.

Posted by Steph at 10:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 30, 2004

intellectualizing "the gaze"

I've been getting clearer about some of the academic impulses (indoctrination?) that I've been resisting. This, from Paul Claudel on Bourdieu's principle of aesthetic distance, sums it up:

"This typically intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly contradicts the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate definition; acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition. The 'eye' is a product of history reproduced by education."

While I understand the need for some distance, for some supposed "rationality" (As Chakrabartty argued is necessary in history), I am not willing to let go of the embodied sensibilities, and the phenomenal experiences and implications of the topics we choose to study and the methods we choose to go about such study. I think the way that I'm usually seeing (reading about) ethnography's use in mass media studies, political economy, and cultural studies, is as evidence to support assertions of institution's influence upon individuals, as if the institutions and their policies and practices exist a priori, within their own boundaries and autonomously of any human agency. My desire is to step back another step in the ongoing cycle of cultural reproduction, to the choices of decision-makers in these institutions which shape their impact upon the world.

So, I'm critiquing (I guess!), intellectual tendencies to study those whom we have easiest access to - general "publics" (in Habermasian or other terms), instead of the elites. Gaining access is of course the issue. I need to find people who are even trying.

Posted by Steph at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 25, 2004

SUCKER!

Benjamin sucked me right into that trick question at his presentation today! Of course I assumed that if he was showing us a certain example it had to mean something. :-)

A couple of the new cohorters got right in there - but what was up with all y'all marching in late and disrupting the whole show, eh?! And did anyone besides me notice the faculty member dozing off and on throughout?

Overall, though, it was cool. I like having monolingual thinking pointed out to me - that we have these base assumptions that people "ought" to speak "one" language and not codeswitch. That its often the observer who "makes" meaning out of it when bilinguals are just using a tool at their disposal to do the same kinds of things monolinguals do with the tools at their disposal. Nifty!

That bit about identities being "dimensions of ongoing processes of differentiation" really caught my attention. Sounds like interpellation to me! And I didn't quite catch the whole statement, but Benjamin also said something about the meaning of language use (such as codeswitching) between individuals being "a phenomenological question that is ideologically mediated." While "meanings are tethered to structures", histories, specific social scenes and situations....the person who says something (the author) may arguable be the author of the text but quite possibly - and most likely! - not the author of the meaning. Benjamin shared that last idea with us from an obituary for Derrida.

Posted by Steph at 9:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 24, 2004

What the &^^&%$$##?

This was a bad movie about really fascinating stuff! Too evangelistic for my taste, but a useful compendium of cutting edge theory in quantum mechanics, human biology and chemistry, and consciousness studies. I was fascinated by the whole neural net/nerve connection scenario in the brain - where repeated emotional experiences sortof install routine pathways that lead to a kind of "addiction" in which experiences that will stimulate those same pathways are sought....over time the biochemical pathways for other emotional experiences are impaired and eventually cut off. Its reparable - one can shift one's neural nets - but requires concentration, deliberation, time, and repetition.

I had a couple of revelations while watching this movie - particularly around the notion of possibilities and that focusing the gaze "collapses the wave". There is a scene in the movie when the protagonist (Marlee Matlin, not at her best) looks "away" while a bunch of basketballs and the wise kid (Rudy?) pepper and bounce about in numerous "places" - existing in all these spaces simultaneously. It's the "wave" part of quantum mechanics - the energy of possibility. When she turns around - "looks" or focuses her gaze - the wave collapses into one "possibility".

The ephiphany for me was that in this group dynamic that I sortof unleashed (dunno how else to describe it briefly), I "collapsed the wave" on a "possibility" that was an overlay of previous experience (the "past") on this experience (the "present"). Here's how I think it worked:

I sense the energy of the quantum wave. This "energy" is meaningful to me, potent, and "calls" me to engage with it. (There's a tangent here about concentration of wave energy - the interactive part - that I think intensifies at given moments in a group: it was this intensification in particular that I sensed.) The energy is amorphous at this point - rife and ripe with possibilities. What does it mean? Where could it go? Anywhere! Literally - the possibilities are (were, sigh) infinite.

I respond to the call. I engage with the energy of the wave. I focus my gaze. And goddamn it but I "focus" based on previous experience and essentially "import" an interpretation into the group that has nothing to do with this particular, uniquely-configured, historically-situated and socially-specific group! The wave collapses. Possibilities vanish, evaporate. A chain of events is set in motion stemming from the things that my importation "calls" to in others. Who respond as they are "called".

One keen observer who has pushed me hard on this noted that they found a problem with a "certain displacement in the lineage of your argument for change that appears problematic." That "displacement" is, I think, exactly this "importation" or "overlay" of my neural net on the wave - which I can see all too clearly (now, painfully, in hindsight), and absolutely was damaging and hurtful to many, if not most of the members in the group.

It gets worse. Because I have now invoked a certain frame (race) it invites, more accurately "hails" others to interpellate me through the lens of race. And then, forthwith, all my entitlement and privilege as a white person becomes the most visible "cause" of "the problem." Which leaves me, perhaps others, with little room to maneuver "out" of enacting an awful and painful pattern.

And - more humble pie - perhaps my entitlement and privilege as a white person IS embedded deeply in this scene because I felt "able" to bring my concerns to the group; I felt it was "allowable" to advocate for certain things that would benefit me and (I thought) others; and I felt it was somehow "ok" to do this generally, publicly, instead of privately.

I am working hard to reconfigure my neural net into an acceptance/belief in the possibility of a different ("new") outcome (than me being "killed as the messenger" - which is the - my - historic pattern). [I do want the current race-based "hailing" to stop - to be "killed"; but I'm referring to the original "message" which was, most basically, about the presence of a concentration of energy...and THAT is another revelation!] The thing about the wave (the energy) is that it is fresh, new, untainted in each moment: it could be "collapsed" in a different direction at any point in time, however, this can only be co-produced through the interaction process itself, and if the train's got enough momentum, it's pretty dang tough to stop it in its tracks.

Posted by Steph at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 15, 2004

sound vs vision

Heard a story on NPR's All Things Considered two days ago about the speed of sound and the speed of light, which concludes that the human brain processes sound a teensy tiny bit quicker than it processes vision. I think this is evidence in support of my recent "revelation" :-) that Deaf people experience the passage of time differently than non-deaf people.

Extended coverage on Protein Key to Human Hearing. I might have to get the transcript.

Posted by Steph at 9:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack