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I too enjoyed our first large-group conversation last week, and look forward to those we are planning for the future. Most intriguing to me--and perhaps a concrete demonstration of the useful distinction we developed between "provisional" and "directed/deliberative" ways of being--was our strong resistance to a group narrative: we were insisting thereby that we are now acting provisionally, without a common story to guide us. Although we seem to have come together because all of us (but Hank?) were friends of Paul, we insistently refused him the role of group storyteller, and very quickly began to stand aside from his narrative of our sharing a "dissatisfaction with academic discourse."

I was interested also in our debate about whether "opposition is GOOD," or whether change might be motivated instead by curiosity or imagination (in either case, there is a gap between what is and what might be...and it is in that direction that we move). I went for clarification (where else might one go? how do the rest of you resolve confusions?) to the Oxford English Dictionary, where I found that the whole notion of opposition is a construction, an opposition which etymologically we can recuperate. I found (for starters) that the Latin prefix "dis-" came from the Greek word meaning "twice"; its the primary meaning was "two-ways, in twain." I found that the etymological element "dis" implies "different directions, apart, abroad, away"; think "discern" and "discuss," as well as "dismiss, disrupt, dissent." Think (as you think about our writing on Serendip) of "distribution" and "distributed systems." The privitive senses of removal, aversion, negation, reversal all came later.

Our other keyword (the one we didn't get to!) was "against," the shared title of our three essays, and (as Hank notes) a commonly odd word in academic titles. Turns out that "against" was formed by adding the genitive ending "es" to "again," and its original meaning was positional: directly opposite, but also "facing, in front of, in full view of"; it indicated a motion TOWARDS. So? etymologically? towards and against were the same motion, and to "dis" something might mean simply to see it twice ("deliberatively"). The action of the carrot and the stick, in other words, is the same action. 

All this connects nicely with my (now concluded; whew!) reading of William James. James often cites--and praises--Walt Whitman, as an example of an optimistic, "once-born" personality, able to see only the good in the universe. He then describes the "twice-born," those who get depressed, see life's darkness...before eventually finding their way out of it to a place of happiness. The latter view, James argues, is a more "realistic" reaction to life-as-it-is, which always and inevitably disappoints. This notion of being "twice-born" probably relates to (and explains, in part?) the origins of pragmatism, to the practice of simply "trying things out" to see how well they work and calling them "true" if they do. So, I see-and-say that to "dis" is to be twice-born, to see things two-ways, to see "beyond."

I wonder if that's a common story?

Not that I'm searching for one. I am certainly "twice-born," having been through several deaths (of others close to me) and depressions (of my own) and come out on the other side. I would also call myself oppositional--not necessarily because of all those losses, but I think just temperamentally. Inevitably, hearing any story, I begin to think of alternatives: other ways of saying it, other dimensions missing. The point of telling stories, for me (and for a course I frequently co-taught) is not to revel in the old, but to generate new ones.

One of the new stories I'd like us to be generating (or that I'd like to generate myself through my work w/ this group) is that of telling academic stories in different forms: on the web and with images. I'd like to write less declaratively, more evocatively. Essays that are, in Alice's terms, not arguments but gifts, to circulate freely.