SITUATED

Telling Stories: Building bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society and Culture.

Narratives have been studied in many different disciplines: linguistics, literary theory, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, folklore, anthropology, sociology and history.

The primary focus of GURT 2008 is the linguistic study of narrative, especially as it has developed within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

As our theme suggests, however, studying the language of narrative can take us far afield to other concerns: the construction of self and identity; the differences among spoken, written and computer-mediated discourse; the role that small and big (e.g. life) stories play in everyday social interactions; the contribution of narrative to social status, roles and meanings within institutional settings as varied as therapeutic and medical encounters, education, politics, media, marketing and public relations.

Thus GURT 2008 will be a forum for building interconnections among language, narrative and social life.

Filosoof Richard Rorty overleden

De Standaard:

De Amerikaanse filosoof en cultuurwetenschapper Richard Rorty is vrijdag in Palo Alto (Californië) op 75-jarige leeftijd na een slepende ziekte overleden. Dit heeft de Universiteit van Stanford maandag op haar internetsite gemeld.
Rorty gold als een van de meest invloedrijke hedendaagse denkers. Tot de belangrijkste werken van de postmoderne taalfilosoof worden “Philosophy and the mirror of nature” (1979) en “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity” (1992) gerekend.

De op 4 oktober 1931 in New York geboren Rorty wuerd met name bekend als vertegenwoordiger van het nieuwe Amerikaanse pragmatisme. Rorty, die zich eerder postnietzscheaans dan postmodern noemde, zag filosofie als taalspel temidden andere taalspelen als religie, wetenschap, kunst en politiek. Rorty keerde zich tegen de aanspraak van de traditionele filosofie op (de) “waarheid”, en zorgde met literair hoogstaande provocerende en zelfironische teksten voor discussie.

Hij veroordeelde de Amerikaanse invasie van Irak en riep Europa op, de rol van “globale politieman” over te nemen.

http://www.standaard.be/Artikel/Detail.aspx?artikelId=DMF11062007_060

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On this blog I already mentioned Ian Hackings groundbreaking work “The Social Construction of What?”

His central argument is that much of the work that has been done to ‘unmask’ certain phenomena as constructions often starts from the idea that these constructions are ‘false’ or in any case a ‘bad thing’ and according to Hacking this does not need to be so:

“Social constructionists about X tend to hold that:

A thesis of type (1) is the starting point: the existence or character of X is not determined by the nature of things. X is not inevitable. X was brought into existence or shaped by social events, forces history, all of which could well have been different. Many social construction theses at once advance to (2) and (3), but they need not do so. One may realize that something, which seems inevitable in the present state of things was not inevitable, and yet is nor thereby a bad thing. But most people who use the social construction idea enthusiastically want to criticize, change or destroy some X that they dislike in the established order of things”. (p. 6-7)

He goes even further by stating that the denial of the truth value of these constructions is in fact the incentive for talking about is as a construction:

“Notice how thesis (1) – X need not have existed – sets the stage for social construction talk about X. If everybody knows that X is the contingent upshot of social arrangements, there is no point in saying that it is socially constructed.
People begin to argue that X is socially constructed precisely when they find that:

Statement (0) is not an assumption or presupposition about X. It states a precondition for a social constructionist thesis about X. Without (0) there is no inclination to talk about the social construction of X.”

(p.12)

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The last edition of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival was organised around the theme of interactivity. Interact or Die! focused on interactivity in general (“Interaction not as a deformation of existing forms, but rather an addition of information, an informing, a formation of forms”) and the notion of interactivity in art in particular (“Interactive art is an open kind of art, one that permits multiple perceptions, though not every perception”).

The symposium that took place during the festival brought several speakers from diverse backgrounds together around this notion of interactivity. (a.o Detlef Mertins, Lars Spuybroek and Howard Caygill).

Noortje Marres presented a paper around the question whether there is “drama in social networks”. She problematized the fact that “in some respects, the organizational form of networks (…) make them ill-suited for the staging of political drama”. Especially interesting was that she referred to the “performative turn” described by Edmund Burke and the American sociologist Erving Goffman who “described everyday life as a set of dramatic performances (and came to the conclusion that) all social interaction can be characterized in terms of people putting on shows for others”.

For the complete development of her argument I refer to her chapter in the symposium book, but she concluded by stating that the possibility of drama in (political) networks “depends on the type of networks we choose to focus on and our idea as to what the drama of politics consists of”.

“The 16th -century humanists were the founders of the modern Humanities just as surely as the 17th -century natural philosophers were founders of modern Science and Philosophy: for instance, the ways of describing human cultures implicit in Book VI of Aristotle’s Ethics, and reintroduced in our day by Clifford Geertz as “thick description”, were already put to use in Montaigne’s omnivorous ethnography. Indeed, the contrast between humanism and rationalism – between the accumulation of concrete details of practical experience, and the analysis of an abstract core of theoretical concepts – is a ringing pre-echo of the debate on the Two Cultures provoked by CP Snow (…)” (Toulmin, Kosmopolis, p.43)

In his phd thesis (Intertextual turns in curriculum inquiry: fictions, diffractions and deconstructions) Patrick Gough explores a “methodology for curriculum inquiry” focussing on the “generativity of fiction in reading, writing and representing curriculum problems and issues”. In his introductory chapter he explains how he used the original version versus the director’s cut of the SF-film Blade Runner in his teaching as a means to give a meta-perspective on “our day to day comedies”:

“These differences between the two video versions of Blade Runner prompted me to think about how we ‘frame’ the other actors in the day-to-day comedies, dramas and soap operas in which we participate in schools and universities. What sense of ‘real’ life would we get if we ‘re-edited’ our perceptions of our students and peers and their interactions with one another and with their settings? What difference would it make to place some of the peripheral actors in our everyday lives at ‘centre screen’ (and vice versa)? More importantly, perhaps, how do the frames we put around actors get there? What cultural mechanisms are the equivalents of ‘pan and scan’ editing? How many of the people with whom we interact (students, colleagues, etc.) are surrounded by ‘dead space’ that we do not see. How can we put the material conditions of those who are marginalised and alienated by our perceptual editing processes onto the ‘screens’ of our visual imaginations?

Sharing these questions with students drew their attention to the significance of Le Guin’s (1989b) thoughts on narrative, as quoted in the opening of this chapter. By imagining ways in which they might ‘recut’ their autobiographical accounts, they recognised their stories as ‘active encounter[s] with the environment’, as fictions that do not ‘reflect… without distortion’ but instead offer ‘options and alternatives’ for enlarging (and perhaps improving upon) present realities. Such experiences reinforce my preference for focussing my (and my students’) intellectual efforts on taking responsibility for the fictions we choose to privilege rather than being diverted by unproductive struggles to distinguish between stories of the imagination and of ‘reality’.”

(Gough 2003: 55)

“We are animals ‘suspended in the webs of significance’ we ourselves have spun. Culture is that web. So: the analysis of it is therefore to be not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning”

(Clifford Geertz 1973: 5).

According to the psychologist Jerome Bruner, there are two ways of looking at the world: logico-scientific on the one hand and narrarive on the other hand. These two modes of thought provide “distincitve ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality”. In Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986) he explains how this idea is strongly linked to a personal crisis he experienced during the years he was a student of psychology:

“Twenty-odd years ago, engaged in the research on the psychological nature and development of thought, I had one of those mild crises so endemic for students of mind. The Apollonian and the Dionysian, the logical and the intuitive, were at war. Gustave Theodor Fechner, the founder of modern experimental psychology, had called them the Tagesansicht and Nachtansicht. My own research had taken me more and more deeply into the study of logical inference, the strategies by which ordinary people penetrate to the logical structure of the regularities they encounter in a world that they create through the very exercise of mind that they use for exploring it.
I also read novels, went to films, let myself fall under the spell of Camus, Conrad, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Burgess, Bergman, Joyce, Antonioni. From time to time, almost as if to keep some balance between night and day, I wrote essays about Freud, the modern novel, metaphor, mythology, painting. They were informal and “literary” rather than “systematic” in form, however psychologically motivated they may have been.
Eventually, I published these “fugitive” essay as a book: “On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand”. It was a relief to get the book out, though I do not think its publication changed my way of working much. By day, the Tagesansicht prevailed: my psychological research continued. At night there were novels and poems and plays. The crisis had passed.” (Bruner 1986:8)

Thanks to the Cultural Studies mailing list (CultStud-l), I found this televised debate between Foucault and Chomsky on the relation between justice and power, on the “situatedness” of human nature.

Justice Vs. Power - Chomsky Vs. Foucault, Part 1

Justice Vs. Power - Chomsky Vs. Foucault, Part 2

Interesting quote by Edwards coming from his Rhetoric and Educational Discourse, he starts by quoting Derrida:

A Standard act depends as much upon the possibility of being repeated, and thus potentially of being mimed, cited, played, simulated, or in general ‘parasited’, since all these possibilities depend upon the possibility said to be opposed to it.
(Derrida 1988: 91-2)

“This implies that there is no substantial difference between, for example, promising on stage and promising in ‘real life’. Both are performances that the speaker/actor has witnessed and internalized as the ways other speakers/actors have of saying/doing a thing (promising), but which are realized as acts only in the performing or iterating of them. To put this simply, we are always acting, in both senses of the word, regardless of whether we have memorized our lines from a specific script for a specific play or, more generally, from ‘life’, from previous speech encounters. Our acting always relies on that script, the iterable or ‘always already’, a socially regulated pattern for our behaviour that is nonetheless located in situated and dynamically contingent contexts. Furthermore, speech acts embodied in figurative or metaphorical language are just as much speech acts with performative force as are those embodied in ’serious’ or non-figurative language, even if they make work in different ways for different purposes and audiences.”