Hermeneutic Heretic

Several years before his death, the famous Estonian semiotician Yuriy Lotman came to Prague and the thing that I still remember from his talk is an admonition that boundaries are the places to study because that’s the most interesting phenomena happen (or come to the surface) at the border between two stereotypes (my words not his).

One such boundary is high quality (not necessarily high-brow) narratives and low quality narratives. Leave the whole conundrum about the subjective and relative nature of any such value judgments. Let’s (for the time being) accept that rottentomatoes.com, criticslist.com or imdb.com ratings are accurate reflection of some intrinsic quality of a piece of art (in this case a film).

I was watching a film called Uptown Girls which is a true ‘boundary’ piece of art. Like many Steven Segal films (and so much else) it displays its building blocks and framework for all to see. But it is not just the building blocks that are in plain view - the projected meaning is also plainly displayed for all to see. This earned it an IMDB rating of 5.5 and a RottenTomatoes rating of 14%.

Here are two statements about it from Rotten Tomatoes:

“Yakin and the great cinematographer Michael Ballhaus give the afternoon such a primal, heartbreaking sadness that you feel like you’re watching Lillian Gish in a D.W. Griffith melodrama.”
– Jeffrey M. Anderson, SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

“It’s excruciating, a film of forced humor and fake, grating sentimentality, featuring two lead performances that elicit neither affection nor empathy.”
– Joe Baltake, SACRAMENTO BEE

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the full text of the first review any more so I’m not sure about the context of this accolade but it seems that the film had the same effect on both reviewers, but both integrated it differently. One of them describes them as ‘heartbreaking’ and the other as ‘excruciating’. Some more ‘objective’ descriptions that seem to describe the same kind of feeling.

“You can snicker and enjoy all at once.”
– Jack Zink, SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

“Entirely unoriginal and unbelievably predictable, but director Boaz Yakin knows how to create Kodak moments for the crowd that desires such fare.” – John Venable, SUPERCALA.COM

I was only half-watching this film while working on my website’s design and it was obvious to me (how I don’t know) that it wouldn’t be very good. So I was all the more surprised to find myself having an emotional approach to the final moments of the film - where the words that have been said before are said again to show the character’s growth and also the resolution of the plot twist. Now, this is a purely introspective observation but I think the analogy might have some meat in it. The feeling had a certain inevitability about it reminiscent about reactions to certain kinds of music. For example, the minor chord (or scale) is typically expected to evoke a maudlin feeling - at least in the Western musical sense. It is almost as if listeners have no control over their reaction - even though they may actually dislike the music. Somebody pointed out that many of Sting’s tunes sound like love songs but when one listens in they are about saving the rainforest or something of collective worth. In the same sense, a particular narrative device may have that effect on its recipients (at least those acculturated to it) without giving them much control over the physical aspect of the reaction. Whether these feelings are interpreted positively (the interpretor integrates them into something relevant to their lives) or negative (the interpretor sees them as deceptive) will depend on a lot of factors that would be interesting to investigate more deeply. Some of them may be the momentary mood or life context (I wish I could find this quote from this completely non-memorable thriller I read years ago but basically it said - ‘when you’re in love, the words of a silly pop-tune will start having deep meaning for you’), it could also depends on whether having a particular emotional response to a piece of narrative is sanctioned by the community - which in this case is the critical community. Drawing conclusions about life based on Shakespeare is valid doing the same with Buffy is not (I consider both to be of equal narrative and literary worth).

The problem with this analogy (at least on the surface), is the same problem that faces structuralism. Namely, where is the meaning. We’ve reduced the narrative to some sort of functional structure without any individual meaning. But I think the meaning is one of the layers that is a part of the structure. One cannot exist without the other but in this analogy, I’m focusing (for the sake of abstration) on the structure. But it does bear keeping in mind.

I was just listening to the UK Prime Minister’s Question Time. I don’t do it very often, because the questions and answers are predictable in content and not particularly informative, but maybe I should tune in more often to get a sense of the tone of the exchange.

As I was listening, I was struck by the tone social conservatism, law and order and peaceful environment for the law abiding citizens. It felt to me like a representation of a yearning for return to the 1950s (or rather our rosy image of the 50s).

This is probably more prevalent in the discourse because the traditional home of radical politics, the Labour Party, is in power and has to observe certain discursive practices.

One hypothesis that seems to offer itself (and others have put it forward, I’m sure) is the idea that there are periodic returns to social conservatism in any society (or a group with in-group/out-group dynamics). However, this would need to be tested. I suspect, that if we examined a corpus of public debates from  any period, we would find similar tone. This would be an interesting challenge: what would be the composition and sampling of such a corpus? What would be our measure of its representativeness?

And most importantly, what in the corpus would we accept as evidence for  a definition of certain conceptual environment of a given period. And we’d also have to relate such results to those from other scholars who have done similar research based on historical and/or literary critical methods.

No matter what such an investigation would bring up we would still be left with the question of how do we account for personal description of change in public discourse?
Somebody please start a study to confirm or disconfirm my suspicions!  I can’t take this any more!

AfterEllen.com - The L Word’s Vanishing Bisexual
The L Word’s representation of bisexuality reflects popular and sometimes opposing ideas about bisexuality. One belief–represented best on the series by Jenny–is that those who identify as bisexual are merely experimenting with their sexuality before they choose to identify as strictly heterosexual or homosexual, thus suggesting that a “bisexualâ€? identity is at best a transitional identity, and at worst a false one.

The second is the belief that everyone has the potential to be attracted to people of either sex; in other words, everyone is at some level bisexual. This has been most clearly expressed by the character of Shane (Katherine Moennig), who stated in the second episode, “Sexuality is fluid, whether you’re gay or you’re straight or you’re bisexual, you just go with the flow.�

Third is the stereotype that bisexuals are sexually promiscuous or indecisive, with the added threat that a bisexual woman could, at any moment, leave her female lover for a man. While Alice is not promiscuous, she is framed by the other characters–particularly friend-turned-lover Dana (Erin Daniels)–as indecisive. In the pilot episode, Dana demands, “When are you gonna make up your mind between dick and pussy?â€? Alice responds, “Well, for your information, Dana, I am looking for the same qualities in a man as I am in a woman.â€?

This  is an interesting analysis of how the TV show the L-Word portrays bi-sexuality. Two things stand out to me about it. First, and largely incoseuential, I’m struck by how common this type of analysis seems to be in the homosexual discourse. My other favorite place for literary analysis online, the Kittenboard (on the lesbian characters from Buffy) is certainly, if not full then, not alien to this kind of approach to narratives. Similar perspectives can be found in discussions of Xena/Gabrielle. This begs the speculation whether this is a function of the type of perspective a certain social footing gives you or just the fact that some very smart and incisive people happen to be writing in these contexts, and I happened to come across them. I suspect a combination of both (but I hate third ways so I’ll come down on the second).

What is more interesting is the identification of competing frames/models/stories/implicit theories of how bi-sexuality is represented. This may seem obvious in the case of sexuality but these procedures of conceptualization and conceptual integration are probably central to most of our cognition (and probably also quite a bit of ‘affection’). Here’s another example I wrote earlier for my thesis (this is a reference to cookery shows, btw):

Another important aspect of models is their partiality and availability to switching. There are a number of models relevant to education that are currently often applied in education debates. Let us take an example from discussions of the responsibilities of decision making and planning (where the two opposing poles are central vs. local planning decision making). This is a complex conceptual area impossible to describe in detail but there are several salient features that will exemplify the need for the concept of a cognitive (or in general a mental model). There are essentially two models of decision-making topology available to discourse participants. These are then blended in online conceptualization. Let us first examine them from the locus of decentralized control. On the one hand, there is the “local expertise” model. It is built around a schematic scenario of neighborhood residents having specific local knowledge acquired through long experience and carry on conversations about issues. This conversation is further facilitated by their personal acquaintance which breaks down communication barriers. These people know what their needs are and can agree on the best way of meeting them. They may have to face interference from disinterested, overly confident and ill-informed “experts” from a center of power, who seek to impose possibly well-meant but ultimately self-defeating solutions on problems that may not even be real. This model is popular in development studies, where much money has been spent on educating local communities in how to conduct their localized decision-making. There, the centralized power is the donor of large sums of money to the government (e.g. the World Bank or USAID). But this model is also used in the context of reform within organizations and very frequently in debates on educational reform. For instance, Michael Howard’s insitence of tackling discipline problems through giving power to head teachers over that of expulsion tribunals. However, this model has a counterpart which in the British context may best be called the “post-code lottery” model. This model is centered around a scenario in which local decisions are taken against the grain of accepted universal standards and quite possibly because of ill-informed local decision makers who do not have access to examples of best practice and recent “scientific” knowledge about a specific problems. The two areas in which this models (in this particular guise) is most often invoked is health-care and very prominently education. A recent example of the blending of these two models, is the idea of “superheads”, successful headmasters brought in to fix local schools.

What I’d like to investigate more, is why these models usually come in pairs. I’m worried that it may be just me polarizing the issues or making things easier for myself. That’s why I was interested to find another author look at a subject and find three models (although, it seems to me the third one is subsumed in the first). But maybe this is not a bad thing as long as it is seen for what it is. George Lakoff in Moral Politics also identified two overarching metaphorical models - strict father and nurturing parent - but the details of his analysis were much more reflective of the multiple layers in the discourse than many reviewers gave him credit for. Deborah Tannen, speaking about frames (another word for models) as expectations spoke about the multiple levels in the context of Goffman’s concept ‘footing’. But she was talking about this with reference to the structure of the conversation. These models, in a way, add yet another layer. For instance, in writing about this I’m reflecting the expectations of the genre, the format, the intended audience, etc. as well expectations about the content. All of that is happening at the same time. But if I only look at the conceptual background I often see only two competing models (with increadibly rich  internal structure and fuzzy boundaries, of course). But in fact, at any given time a multiple models are applied at a different level of magnification (when I use the word level, I usually mean this).

Now, there’s a third question here, as well. And it is how do we know that these models are actually at play and what cognitive (conscious) status do they have? Tannen suggested some types of acceptable evidence for conversation (such as re-statements) but we will probably always remain dependent on one exegetic approach or another. The one employed by the author of my quote is probably just as good as any other. But it will bear further investigation.

Technology News: E-Commerce: Study: Poor Web Design Alienates Customers
One twentieth of a second. That’s about how long it takes for a Web site Get Linux or Windows Managed Hosting Services with Industry Leading Fanatical Support. to make a first impression on an Internet user, according to researchers at a Canadian university, whose findings could have competitive impacts for businesses on the Web.
…
What’s more, the researchers reckon the study results produce a halo effect: the first impression creates an initial bias that drives long-term opinions.

If the user thinks the Web site looks good, the impression translates to other areas of the site, like its content. Since people like to be right, Lindgaard reasoned, they will continue to use a Web site that made a good first impression.

None of this is at all surprising. It is similar to the concept of semantic prosody but the same effect can be observed in a variety of contexts (e.g. gender or racial expectations). In a way, it could be described as forming pre-judice on the fly.

CNN.com - Quotes from the Golden Globes - Jan 16, 2006
“As I was coming in, I felt a little tug at my skirt. And I looked, and there was a little girl maybe 8 or 10 in her first party dress, and she said, ‘Because of you I want to be president someday.’ And I just — well, that didn’t actually happen. Awwww, but it could have.” Geena Davis, best actress in a TV drama for “Commander in Chief.”

This snipet from Ms Davis’ acceptance speech stands out (or at least stood out to me) as interesting and funny for two cognitive/feminist/narrative reasons. First, is related to the expectations placed on gender roles. Actresses are expected to give acceptance speeches that are emotional and teary-eyed and male actors are supposed to be stoic and wryly humourous (unless they otherwise fulfill expectations for acceptable public emotions - for instance by having a particular history of public behavior or belonging to a group that has different expectations placed on it - for instance, black or gay). That is not to say that many women awardees have not made funny and ’stoic’ acceptance speeches, but the (implicit) expectation is still there. So Geena Davis’ starting out her speech in conformity with her role and breaking that role could cause cognitive dissonance which can cause either discomfort or a humorous reaction.

But Davis, was also (maybe consciously, maybe not) reflecting on the importance of role-model narratives in our culture (by our I mean broadly Western, US-influenced). When she says ‘it didn’t happen, but it could have’, she is making a statement about the importance of her role as an actor depicting a female US president in a mythopoeic narrative. There is an expectation that this portrayal will inspire your girls and women to aspire to political office. How successful it can actually be without concomitant changes in other parts of the symbolic system is an open question (two decades of integration narratives - 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon - have done little to contribute to actual inegration). ^[1] But telling the stories of empowerment through role-models is essential to our understanding of this rather nebulous macro-process. We’re assuming a particular social mechanism to be in place operating on the society as a whole but to understand it we need to tell stories of individuals exemplifying this trend. This relies on the folk theory (which is also an, often implicit, academic theory) that changes in groups occur cumulatively. But the key challenge to social sciences (and in fact to natural science as well) is to come up with a cognitively and narratively realistic (meaning, such that we can cognize and talk about) way to describe phenomena at the level of groups (or dynamic systems, in the verbiage of complexity or chaos theory).

The Prejudice Map The Prejudice Map According to Google, people in the world are known for…

Here’s an interesting ‘mash up’ of Google’s API that supposedly answers the question above. It uses a very simple Google query as in http://www.google.com/search?q=”germans+are+known+for+*” to create a graphical overview of the different ‘prejudices’ about various cultures in the world. It brings up several interesting questions. Let’s deal with the boring ones first.

We can talk about the nature of prejudice and ask ourselves which of these statements constitute prejudice and how do we determine their veracity or even appropriateness. In fact, the only thing the map outlines is how various people online have completed (without prompting) sentences like ‘Germans are known for’. This can certainly be revealing but it is nothing more than that.

This leads us to the question of shared meaning or perhaps a conceptual code (in the sense of ‘code switching’ rather than cryptography). Here we have a large collection of texts that can (when queried appropriately) reveal something about some greater shared meaning of the community. But then we know something about the nature of the community in question, namely that it isn’t really the kind of community that can engage in the processes of codification (at least on some level). So we’re back to the same problem we had with ‘argh’ and the ‘islands of probability’. This in some way challenges our concept of shared meaning and shared code (or rather some of the assumed mechanics thereof). However, for the purposes of interpretation of this map it is probably a non-sensical question. Each statement comes from an individual who in some (as yet undefined) way represents the views (or ways of talking) of his or her community. How often do you need to hear X are brave to be able to say ‘X are known for being brave’ is an open question (I’d say often once is sufficient). No real puzzle there.

Now for the really interesting question which has to do with linguistics. The software as it is only works for nations with large enough mentions. The query as it is nets 18,700 results for Germans 97 for Czechs and 17 for Albanians. This is partly because it needs to be very simple and asks the engine to select one word (or so) of the subsequent text. As such the results (when collected automatically) are not very good. This shows the limits of ‘dumb’ text retrieval algorithms. What would the results be if we used something akin to Sinclair et al.’s idea of local grammar which already is very good at locating definitions (I suspect that’s what Google use in their search engine define: function) or evaluation. And then we could ask the seemingly interesting question: Is there such a thing as a grammar of prejudice? To which the answer is again no but there is probably something like a grammar of talking about nations. Such grammar would probably be a very useful thing to have along with other local grammars because it would make data mining much easier. However, it depends on some way of tagging the corpus for parts of speech or other elements - either during compilation or on the fly.

Interesting. I started with rather lofty questions, dismissed them as misleading and woolly-headed (even though they were mine) and ended up with a view on data-mining. That’s how philosophy should be done!

January 13, 2006, Science Friday = Franklin at 300

Franklin as inventor, socialite and statesman, and take a look at the Tercentenary Exhibition in his honor, now open in Philadelphia.

America is often said to be an experiment in new national identity (or something along those lines). However, any closer examination of American national identity reveals more similarities with the traditional nations (and it bears remembering that those are really only several centuries old at most) and other in-group types of identity. This program discussing Franklin’s legacy to America is an interesting illustration of that. (More in the book by one of the discussants on Franklin - on Amazon and searchable.)

Franklin is described as the First American in two revealing ways. First, he is the first American in the sense that he was the first to adopt an identity as an American as opposed to an Englisman living in the Americas. This was (reportedly) in reaction to the negative reception he received before the English parliament. Where he realized (and I’m quoting loosely from the program) that Americans were never going to be accepted as full Britons and might as well revel accept this label but make it into something positive. This is certainly a very common way for group identities to develop (be it for minorities or oppressed groups - islamist extremism has also been described in those terms).

However, the participants in this program also describe him as the first American in the sense that he was the first to personify the values or traits with which Americans have since been associated. (Or have ascribed them to themselves). One that struck me as particularly interesting was that in the context of Franklin’s ingenuity, Americans were described as a nation of ‘tinkerers’ and one of the contributors claimed that that was how they are known around the world. This is interesting both in that it is wrong and why it is wrong. First, Americans are not generally known as a nation of tinkerers in the sense that Franklin was a tinkerer. The ‘can do’ attitude is different because it describes a belief that anything can be done and not the ability to do it in a particular way. But, more importantly, they even cannot be known for that, because pretty much every nation I know of thinks of itself as tinkerers and usually rates that as pretty high in its list of characteristics. The Czechs most certainly do, the English, the Albanians, less so the Russians but they do too. Therefore they are unlikely to ascribe that valuable characteristic to somebody else. In fact, I’m not aware (although there’s bound to be some) of any situations where one group would think of another as tinkerers as opposed to itself.

Of course, identities are complex things and these examples deal with mere fractions of these complex webs of relationships. The ‘melting pot’/'new nation’ idea is certainly a part of that identity and not a small part, at that. But the real question is, does that overcome the sociocognitive properties that structure (I’m using this term loosely, as always) what we call ‘national identity’. And my hunch is that the answer is no. In order for any grouping to work as a recognizable group, certain things have to be present and group identity (with all its exceptions and fuzziness) is one of them. And one representation of this identity is so called ‘nationalism’ which America is often said not to have. This example (and countless others which I’m hoping to collect here) show that this is wrong (although these types of statements are also a part of a nation’s identity).

Right or wrong it probably makes no difference outside the academia although it would be nice if it would.

Wired News: Military Women Can Hack It
Female soldiers have long fought off perceptions that their bodies just aren’t equipped to handle the rigors of training and warfare. But a decade’s worth of research suggests that women are hardly as fragile as critics once thought.

A new study by military researchers found that many assumptions about female bodies are “astoundingly wrong.” Women are just as good as men — in some cases, perhaps even better — at handling intense exercise and decompression sickness.

The findings, reported in the Journal of Women’s Health, don’t change the fact that women — on the whole — are smaller and less powerful than men. Still, they suggest “that human physiology is more consistent than would be suggested by the social embellishments and exaggerations” that come about when there isn’t any actual research, said Col. Karl Friedl, commander of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine and co-author of the report (.pdf).

Is anybody really surprised any more? Yet another myth about gender differences is put to bed. That is not to deny some basic physiological differences between the sexes (just as the report does not do) but the problem is that to determine what these are we need to be extremely careful about drawing extended and fixed policy conclusions on them because what was considered a ‘basic difference’ yesterday may be a debunked myth tomorrow. Also, we need to be aware (as I keep banging on) about confusing statements about ‘women as a whole’ and statements applying to any particular woman. Given the unreliability of ‘established truths’, each woman should be treated as an individual person rather than as an instance of a category woman. This is well known but hard to achieve cognitively.

The Aargh Page
# Not surpisingly, “argh” is much more frequent than any of the alternatives, and the items with fewer ‘a’s or ‘r’s are more frequent than their longer neighbors.
# However, there are high-frequency islands, even way out in the long-word planes. For example, “a17r23gh” (17,23) occurs in 171 pages, even though if you change the number of ‘a’s or ‘r’s by one, it drops at least 20-fold. “A15r5gh” is almost 100 times more frequent than its neighbors.

Tracking the distribution of different spellings of ‘aargh‘ on the web may seem like a completely pointless exercise (although a great proof of concept). The same could be said about the companion page regarding ‘hmm‘.

However, there could be an interesting lesson to be learned here. Particularly interesting is the concept of high-frequency islands (my emphasis). The spelling of both ‘aargh’ and ‘hm’ exhibits iconicity in two ways. First, it is onomatopoeic in the sense that it tries to capture the sounds made in puzzlement and exasperation (these sounds are conventionalized, i.e. vary by language, and the need for special spelling is dictated by English orthography). However, iconicity can be also employed to indicate the strength of emotion (this mirrors but does not replicate what happens in spoken English). Given all this, we can predict that the more emphasis the author wishes to employ, the longer the string. The number of ‘a’s or ‘r’s could either be governed by rules or be random. Of course, we know no such rules exist so the next prediction is random distribution. And that, by and large, is borne out but then there are those pesky frequency islands.

Why are those there and what role do they play. We could think of them as kind of spandrels, i.e. there for purely structural reasons, such as certain combinations being more likely given keyboard design or the human hand-to-eye coordination, etc. But given the nature of the islands that seems unlikely.

A better way of looking at them (although lacking the beauty of causal explanations) would be to treat the islands as properties of the stochastic system that is the typing in of ‘argh’ by users of the internet. This is deeply unsatisfactory to our usual way of looking at explanations but may be the only honest way of looking at it.

Analogy:  Now, this can serve as an analogy for language as a whole. What if much of what we have been so far capturing throught the medium of the ‘grammatical rule’ is a combination of rules, spandrels and properties of language as a stochastic system? Our system of rules has mushroomed (Plato only had about two - hyperbolically reminiscent of Chomsky’s minimalism) and many of them are there simply to plug holes created by the postulation of some previous rule. Formal linguistics (both in its generative and non-generative guises) is particularly susceptible to this. Most of the rules in generative grammar are describing an independent system only partially isomorphic with natural language. However, there has never been a viable alternative. It may (and really just may) lie in this direction (some key ideas related to this are: neural theory of language, neural nets, bootstrapping, construction grammars, local grammars - how exactly it all falls together nobody knows but a picture seems as if it is about to emerge).

ABC News: Sharon Reportedly Moves One of His Hands

One headline, two blog posts. What value! There seems to be a fine line between what is in the public interest and what the public is interested in. Personally, I find every mention of the story compelling but its information content is of no consequence to me. Instead I’m asking myself the question: is it in my interest to be informed of every single detail of Sharon’s health at the very moment it occurs? Probably not. However, this is probably price we have to pay for there not being somebody to decide what is in my interest to know. Instead, I have to go by what other people are interested in (the elusive ‘public’). It is an interesting form of market-based collective sensorship. Of course, we can debate the scale - such as letting much of the news business be aggregated in two few hands in which case we need to mix in the element of economies of scale, as well.