change happens, but how? david meyerson

I'm preoccupied with change in this world.  Change in the past.  Change in the present.  Changing the future.  If we get beyond the basic academic fight for the "best" definition, I think it's a semantic battle over how to characterize change.  People are afraid of change and academics try to capitalize in order to make important points that will gain notoriety.  This does not mean the definitions should be ignored.  They are quite useful if they are given a context.  I don't pretend to know all the contextual information about Pierre Bourdieu (thanks for including the Swartz article- another professor and I agreed that Pierre is almost unreadable!). However, Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, two giants in the philosophy/cultural theory game, seem to be a bit trapped by their own definitions.  (Maybe they are only trapped if I try to fit them into my own particular context.)  The study of power by Foucault at first reads quite cynical.  I think he's brilliant (in fact, I have a small Foucault hand puppet on my fridge at home) but he posits such a dark existence and agency seems nowhere to be found.  To understand and speak truth to power is invaluable, especially in today's "post-racial" society. (I quote the word with sarcasm in my fingers). Large institutions have kidnapped the discourse of what help is to a society.  We have banks that are too big to fail despite being the perpetrators. We have media conglomerates that give us a multitude of choices.  Their choices.  Who gets left out of this equation? When the large institutions reach out across many class boundaries, the marginalized are so hidden as to be non-existent. Okay. So, we know bigger isn't always better and we have to tease out the complexities or we are entirely too controlled.  Big Brother meets the entertainment industry, if you will.  But, that doesn't mean we don't fight.  That doesn't mean that we can't choose our own interpretations. Is the goal for every person to be wealthy, monetarily or otherwise.  We tend to forget that wealth as a concept can mean many different things to different people.  I'm going to contradict myself here by saying that it is entirely useful to recognize polarizing arguments.  Just find a place for them in the general conversation as means to illuminating where the compromises can take place.  Although I am very opposed to them politically, there is merit to the Tea Party in my mind.  Without them, fat cats wouldn't necessarily challenge any assumptions.  The power wielded in Washington suffers from extreme confirmation bias.  Not just political ideologues, but those who believe in the sanctity of the system.  I am comfortable with the idea of the Arab Spring not only because I believe the citizens of these countries should have a say in how they're governed, but also because they illuminate the building process and the choices that can be made.  Burkitt speaks of spaces that can transform.  Now, he talks more about the role of "play" in spaces.  I think that there is "space" for "change".  Symbols are needed to highlight how change is taking place.  That square in Cairo is a symbolic space for change.  We see the flip-side with the Syrian government destroying whole towns because they act as symbolic spaces of resistance.  Without spaces such as these, the dichotomies that inevitably appear cannot be interpreted by the second wave of revolutionaries- ones that will build institutions based on the information they glean.  The square in Cairo (forgive me for not looking up the name) revealed a people deeply convicted that they had been paternalized to death by President Mubarak.  It also revealed a society divided in its quest for future, divided in how it treats its women, divided in how it views the "West".  I believe the goal in response to Bourdieu is to realize that habitusii (?) exist, but are not immovable.  Change happens.  Good, lasting change happens when we have the information we need and we embrace reflexivity.  In an instant, everything can change, but it's easy to revert to form.  Look at the Egyptian street where the military is trying to strong-arm citizens.  Look at Wall Street, which hasn't learned a damn thing, although that was never their intention.  Change does happen if we're prepared for it.

I am very excited about our readings this week, particularly Elaine Lawless’ “I was afraid someone like you . . . an outsider . . . would misunderstand.”  Questions of academics’ subject positions, lack of acknowledgement of background, and/or possible and sometimes blatant bias have been my academic obsession this semester.  I was impressed with Lawless’ willingness to actually “put her money where her mouth is” and take her work to her subjects for discussion.  That is my fear for my own work, that I will come to an understanding of the inherent and multiple shades of the power position of the academic (namely, myself), but will be unable to follow through.  That following through would involve the rigorous self-interrogation of my work and my own subject position as well as the offering up of that work to the scrutiny of my “subjects.”  

Having grown up in a conservative, rural, Pentecostal town in Oklahoma, I agreed with Lawless’ interpretations of the female pastors.  I was not surprised at all at Sister Anna’s concerns over Lawless’ analysis.  Her concerns are not based solely in religion, but also in the general social attitude toward women that can come out in rural/small town areas.  Schools and communities may pay lip service to equality for women, but the general “feeling,” attitude, perhaps habitus, is that you (as a woman) find a man and marry after high school.  Your individuality terminates there.  I saw classmates go through this feeling that to want more was to ask too much, to be too prideful.  Yes, it has roots in religion, but it is not all religious in how it bears out in people’s lives and psyches.  This is the only little issue that I had with Lawless, that she forgot that she was a feminist scholar, influenced by other such scholars.  She even notes that she LEARNED to take pride in herself as an individual and in her work as a scholar.  When it is the habitus (I hope I am using that word correctly) to value the lives and needs of men over those of women, you learn it because you live it.  It was not surprising to me that Sister Anna, despite her position as a pastor, would feel part of this atmosphere and be bound by its restricts without ever seeing them as restrictions, but as the way things are.  

Specifically on the issue of reflexivity that Barbara Babcock was discussing, a song kept playing through my head:  “White and Nerdy” by Weird Al Yankovick!  In this song, the character of Weird Al describes with extreme self-awareness, and NO unhappiness whatsoever, why the gangsters won’t “roll” with him.  The character (which is the singer’s persona in songs and on-stage) says I know how the gangsters perceive me and I OWN it.  I am sure pocket protectors, Star Trek, and rolls of bubble wrap were not what St. Augustine had on his mind.  But, Weird Al perceives the perceptions of himself and also shows how he perceives the gangsters’ perceptions of him.  Here is the link to the video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw.   This video features Donny Osmond in his own self-reflexive moment, dancing in the background.  At least this is how I perceive Osmond’s appearance.  

Plus, we could always talk about how the entertainment industry LOVES when older male stars “humorously” reflect on their own roles later in their careers.  William Shatner, anyone?  Ha, ha, ha.  I made it back to Star Trek.  Sorry, Kirk, I really do prefer Picard.  Make it so (by pressing the publish post button). :)

Reflexicity: Adrian Mendoza

       The concept of reflexivity was a bit unclear even though I reread parts of Barbara A. Babcock's article "Reflexivity: Definitions and Discriminations". She defined it as, "the individual is able to understand and adjust to the social processes, to modify his future behavior, and to modify the social processes itself" (pg. 2). In order to achieve reflexivity, one first as to be involved with a community or person outside of their social comfort zone. Or is it possible to acquire reflexivity within one's own social processes. Needless to say Elaine J. Lawless' article "I was Afraid Someone like You...an Outsider...Would Misunderstand: Negotiating Interpretive Differences Between Ethnographers and Subjects"clarified the concept of reflexivity.  Her work was based on pastor women preaching in Missouri, most importantly she gave a  close analysis of the role they played in their community. Lawless admits that she left her work undone after she received several letters from Anna (308-311), pertaining to her interpretation of her life.

Personally, if there is to much personal interaction between the subject and researcher, the end product could be compromised. However, after reading the letters between Lawless and Anna I have come to understand that there is a human aspect to research. Lawless failed to allow her subjects to give feedback on her interpretations and methodology. By doing so another dialogue is included in her work in which two different scopes and interpretations of social behavior met. In the end, the concept of reflexivity is tempting me to question my own methodology and interpretations of documents. 

Reflexivity and the Picture of Dorian Gray, Stephen Pallas

     Much of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray focuses around the dichotomy of physical appearance and the soul, through the use of deformation and as represented by the titular portrait.  Painter Basil Hallward expresses the nature of deformation insisting of public scandals that they “must interest you, Dorian.  Every gentleman is interested in his good name.  You don’t want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded…Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face.  It cannot be concealed” (126).  Wilde chooses the word degraded at several significant moments throughout the novel, consistently drawing a parallel by which the committing of sin and physical appearances deform congruently, if not causally.  Dorian the man is based on Ovid's Echo and Narcissus and the deformation and degradation of his portrait represent in the novel Dorian Gray's reflexivity.  This is where Dorian differs from Narcissus, for as the latter "is reflective...he is not reflexive that is, he is conscious of himself as an other, but he is not conscious of being self-conscious of himself as an other, and hence not able to detach himself from, understand, survive, or even laugh at this initial experience of alienation," Dorian is forced constantly to confront his otherness, his alienation, and his detachment--and yet Dorian still fails to survive (Babcock 2).

Earlier in the narrative—as the reader enters Lord Henry Wotton’s consciousness—the man of pleasure meditates upon his work of art in Dorian the man, drawing an analogy between his and proper art insofar as “now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, Life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or paintings” (Wilde 52).  Lord Henry continues to expand upon an understanding of the life-art correspondence in terms of the existence of “animalism in the soul, and the body [having] its moments of spirituality.  The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade…Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin?  Or was the body really in the soul” (53).  The conflation of body and the soul, however, becomes a complicated reality as each character maintains a high degree of difficulty determining if the body primarily affects the soul or if the opposite is true.  As Dorian himself contemplates the relationship and the nature of deformation in the aftermath of his ill treatment toward Sybil: 

He shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in sickened horror…There were opiates for remorse, drugs that could dull the moral sense to sleep.  But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin.  Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls. (81)

It becomes, here, by no means clear whether sinful action causes the degradation of appearance, but that certainly seems to be the order of events.  This scene represents the fruition of Basil’s intimation to Lord Henry Wotton, “I hope the girl is good, Harry.  I don’t want to see Dorian tied to some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his intellect” (63).  But rather than Sybil’s appearance and nature deforming Dorian’s soul, it is Dorian influencing his own demise.  The portrait’s grotesquification allowed for Dorian to lament his sinful behavior but also to experience an invisibility of his own physical deformation. 

By this invisibility, this ability to forego responsibility, Dorian’s soul slipped even further into evil.  Dorian does attempts to reason his deformation to a “natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves” (108).  He notices how “the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic” (108).  Then of his own deforming situation, he comes to a expressing a declaration:

There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field of his companions. (108)

Wilde’s project attempts to create of his society a new and unique theory of degradation, wherein fearful selfishness causes both physical and spiritual degradation that needs to be on display for society in order to control its monstrosity.  Or, in Basil’s words to Lord Henry and Dorian prior to Sybil’s stunted theatrical performance as Juliet, “’One has to pay [for selfishness] in other ways but money…Oh!  I should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in…well, in the consciousness of degradation’” (67).  The idea of consciousness as a mode through which degradation appears denies the prevailing sociological mindset, which insists that Dorian’s beauty represents his good nature.  And although Dorian’s degradation lived invisibly behind his beautiful physical features, “upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain” (117).

            In similar ways as the novel debates the body-soul dichotomy, so too does the story discuss science and magic as a lens through which to study human nature.  After the first notice of the portrait’s distortion, Dorian “remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest” (80).  Then later in the chapter, Dorian believes “there would be a real pleasure in watching it.  He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places.  This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors.  As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul” (89).  The narrative broadens its utility of the language of science with distance to the action and dialogue within the story. Wilde’s narrator invokes the scientific community, relating the “moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses” (158).  As he corresponds the effects of fear on the degradation of body and soul, he also proposes—through Lord Henry—that “Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain.  There are only two ways by which man can reach it.  One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.  Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate” (173).  The function of Dorian Gray’s scientific language, the emphasis on the city setting, and the model of social evolution, predicts tropes and themes that will become more dominant in the Modernist and Naturalist fiction of the twentieth-century.