Voices Of Others Research Articles

A second-order cybernetics of otherness

In the spirit of second-order cybernetics, human communication is reconceptualized by including in the process not only its theorists but also their observed Others without whom social reality is inconceivable. This essay examines several versions of otherness, how the voices of Others survive social scientific inquiries, the dialogical spaces made available for people to build their home, and the kinds of citizenship encouraged. The essay draws attention to the epistemological limits of different inquiring practices and seeks to expand the range of possibilities for humans to see each Other.

Moral Paralysis and the Ethnocentric Fallacy

Abstract One of the greatest achievements ensuing from contemporary commitments to multiculturalism has been a greater awareness of the indignity of ethnocentrism. However, an inadequate understanding of how to avoid ethnocentrism may lead to moral paralysis. In this paper, it is argued that extolling the voices of others does not necessarily imply denigrating our own and that respecting diversity is the only genuine antidote for ethnocentrism.

An Interview with Elizabeth Alexander

An Interview with Elizabeth Alexander Christine Phillip (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Elizabeth Alexander photo by Barbara Kigosi. This interview was conducted via telephone on Thursday, February 22, 1996. CHRISTINE PHILLIP: You have added a new dimension to your writing. Already established as a poet and essayist, you have now ventured into drama. Your first play, Diva Studies, was staged by the Yale Drama School in May 1996. Does the theater offer new avenues for creation and expression not available in other genres? ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: It absolutely does. First of all, in my poetry, I am always borrowing what I think of as poetic vernacular language. I am fascinated by the distinctly wonderful ways that people talk, particularly the ways that black people can talk. So what seems exciting about working in the theater is that borrowed language is put back into live bodies when actors embody the language. The issue of audience is also important. Those who love poetry are true devotees. A poetry reading audience is rarely as large as most theater audiences. When a book of poems is published, probably a thousand copies are printed, even if the book’s hand to hand life is greater than that. But hundreds of people see a play on a single night. Of course, what is completely different about working in the theater is that it is collaborative. Even though I have found that to be difficult, as I am used to working in solitude, it’s wonderful to receive other peoples’ expertise to help realize your work. There is something very moving to me about other people devoting their skills to making my words live. I am actively learning about that difficult, exciting new dimension of writing. PHILLIP: As a poet and essayist, you have a great deal of control over your work. Do you have that same kind of control as a playwright? What is it like to see your work manifested through the eyes and voices of others? ALEXANDER: When I got to see, for the first time, the beautiful costume drawings and model sets the designers had made, it was completely thrilling. As a poet, I don’t talk about my work very much at all. In fact, I think that when you talk about poetry before you’ve written it, it kills it. Talk is only a substitute for writing, and the only thing you are supposed to be doing is writing. The part that is perhaps the hardest is that I’ve had to get used to talking about my work before it’s finished, showing my work to people, to the director, Leah Gardiner, and the dramaturge, Elizabeth Ackerman, before it is finished. Aside from simply getting over the ego part—I don’t [End Page 493] like to let my work go until it’s polished—it’s unsettling. I’m really, really used to pouring all my energy into making the work so that it can speak for itself. What you get back from collaboration is that the dramaturge and director have come to know my characters, they’ve helped me see who those characters are through their eyes. Also, what I have found is that going from the very small scale, miniaturist, meticulous world of poetry, it’s hard for me this first go ‘round to hold on to the architecture of an entire full-length play. So my collaborators have helped me understand the overall structure and the overall curvature of what it is I’m trying to make, and then make explicit threads that tie it all together. That training is a different kind of mind training than mine, which is more language-based and image-generated. And, of course, there’s nothing like watching wonderful actors bring your words to life. PHILLIP: What sparked your interest in the theater, and what is your association with the Yale School of Drama? ALEXANDER: Those two answers are related. My interest in theater has been lifelong because I grew up dancing ballet and then modern dance quite seriously through my teenage years. Then when I was in college, I did some choreography and a little bit of...

Seventeen Ideograms and the Search for the Wandering Word

In NTQ 30 (1992) Dorothy Knowles provided a description and explication of the recent work of the visionary French director Armand Gatti. For what he calls his ‘plural writing’ projects, Gatti has increasingly come to recruit not actors but ‘actors’: those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them – together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether developing a performance within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre are entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. Here, he speaks for himself, describing both the inspiration and the evolution of his work in a style which characteristically combines pragmatism with lyricism. The article derives from a series of interviews conducted in 1991 by Hélène Châtelain – an actress who has worked with Gatti since 1966 – and first published in Le Monde Diplomatique for February 1992. The translator for NTQ, Wesley Hutchinson, wrote his doctoral thesis on Gatti at Trinity College, Dublin, and now lectures in the English Department of the University of Paris, Nanterre.

Armand Gatti's Theatre of Social Experiment, 1989–1991

In TQ31 (1978), Christophe Campos described an earlier experiment in social theatre by the French playwright-director Armand Gatti – an attempt to politicize through theatre the depressed yet conservative town of Saint-Nazaire. Since that time, Gatti has continued to battle against (and when necessary within) ‘the system’ for his own, unorthodox kinds of theatrical endeavours. His work until the late ‘eighties formed the subject of Dorothy Knowles's pioneering full-length study, Armand Gatti in the Theatre: Wild Duck against the Wind (Athlone Press, 1988), and in the following article she supplements this book with a description and explication of Gatti's latest work, in which he has involved not actors, but ‘actors’ – those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them, together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether working within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre is entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. In a long career which has embraced both practical and academic theatre, Dr. Knowles is perhaps best known for her directing and writing in the field of French theatre, and is also the author of French Drama of the Inter-War Years (Harrap, 1967).

Gender and Modes of Collaboration in a Chemical Engineering Design Course

Modes of collaboration are gendered in the sense that they define power relationships among members of a group. In this study, the authors define three collaborative modes: dialogic, asymmetrical, and hierarchical. Dialogic and asymmetrical modes are emancipating and characterized by flexibility, open-ended inquiry, and concern for the growth and development of the individuals involved. Hierarchical modes are oppressive and are characterized by rigidity and suppression of the voices of others in the group. Two collaborative writing groups in a chemical engineering design course exemplify these modes. The first, composed of two women and two men, was primarily dialogic, and the second, composed of two women and three men, exhibited characteristics of all three modes.

Narrative Structure and Fictional Mediation

Insofar as fictionality characterizes the discourse as well as the world of literature, literary communication is always mediated. Between the two extra-fictional parties to the communication act the implied author and the reader there stands at least one fictional subject (a speaker, narrator, reflector, channel of information) and often more than one. By whatever name it is called, such mediacy of transmission necessarily attaches not to discourse in general or even to narrative, as most theorists appear to believe, but to fabricated discourse and narrative (Sternberg 1983:176 ff., see also 1982:passim). Everyone can speak in his own voice, without citing, invoking, or hiding behind anyone else; only the maker of fictions must in principle speak through the voices of others, and these voices all of his own making, from the primary speaker or narrator down. Like the characters, whose monologues and dialogues he in turn introduces, this official speaker must therefore be seen as a mediator relaying the implicit message (world, theme, effect) from its authorial point of transmission or origination to its point of reception and decoding by the reader. To be interposed in this way also means to be quoted, to have one's discourse inset within a surrounding frame of discourse, to speak or think in the service of others who keep silent across the distance (gap) of quotation. Hence the fictional mediator's paradoxical position. On the one hand, he serves as an indispensable bridge between two participants who cannot otherwise meet and communicate. On the other hand, he is a wedge driven between them that prevents their direct rapport a barrier of discourse that is parallel and added to the barrier of existence that divides the fictional world from the real. From either standpoint, however, every literary text presents afresh to the reader the interpretive challenge and dilemma of the mediationgap. Is the mediator reliable? In what manner and degree? Does he

On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in Narrating Nationalism and Ethnicity

Recent proposals for 'dialogic' narrative ask anthropologists not merely to include the voices of others in their ethnographic narratives, but explicitly to share 'ethnographic authority' with them. Yet such a strategy may not be well suited for narrations about realities one wants to explore critically. For example, the analysis of nationalist politics reveals a set of basic presuppositions about the nature of culture that most anthropologists share with nationalist ideologues. In this case to share narrative authority simply traps ethnographic writers in a discourse from which they might need to distance themselves.

Defeated Sexuality in the Plays and Novels of Samuel Beckett

Defeated Sexuality in the Plays and Novels of Samuel Beckett Kristin Morrison “I summoned up my remaining strength and said, Abort, abort. . . .”1 This cry of the reluctant father in the short novel First Love suggests an element which is prevalent throughout Samuel Beckett’s work: concern with the physical details of reproduction, its success or lack of success, and specifically the impotence, sterility, and decay of the sexual organs, repulsive copulation and the destruction of progeny. The earlier novels abound with scenes of grotesque and defeated sexual activity (e.g., Watt’s laborious and futile fondling of Mrs. Gorman2) but in the plays such lengthy scenes are usually replaced by a single word, phrase, or allusion, often oblique and obscure but as important in its context as are the more elaborate fictional passages in theirs. It is these varied and elusive sexual references in the plays which I will discuss, showing them to be not random and incidental details, but rather, as in the fiction, significant metaphors for the misery of human life itself. Throughout Beckett’s career, the fiction with its greater explicitness has provided an important context for words and phrases which appear in the plays. In the increasing condensa­ tion which has marked his later work, there is no diminution of sexual references, but their meaning is not always immediately apparent. It is thus very helpful to keep the earlier novels in mind while looking at the later plays. The Unnamable (1949) provides a representative and particularly repulsive reference to copulation: “the two cunts . . . the one for ever accursed that ejected me into this world and the other, infundibuliform, in which, pumping my likes, I tried to take my revenge.”3 This passage provides the most explicit statement of motive for the hatred which permeates the story of “Mahood’s” return home, 18 Kristin Morrison 19 where he stamps “underfoot the unrecognizable remains of [his] family, here a face, there a stomach. . . Birth—and the sexuality that leads to it—is the great enemy. The only triumph over this enemy is death, a death which precedes birth, an annihilation which precedes existence, as the narrator makes clear later in this novel when he states, “I’m looking for my mother to kill her, I should have thought of that a bit earlier, before being bom” (p. 391). Copious references of this kind in the fiction alert the reader to the importance of similar, but quite elliptical, references in the plays: that very important “panhysterectomy” in Embers, Minnie’s menopause in All That Fall, the negligent fathers in Endgame, Winnie’s sexless non-existent legs and breasts in Happy Days. These references present a striking coherence from novel to novel, from play to play: over and over again abortion or some kind of sterilization is presented as the term of human existence.4 The radio drama Embers (1959) provides a useful place to begin this discussion of defeated sexuality because as an early play it is relatively detailed and explicit, and the sexual refer­ ences (though brief and for the most part unobtrusive) fit together quite neatly. Because the play is directed entirely to the ear and not to the eye, words and their interrelationships have even more importance than they do in a stage play where gestures affect meaning: when Holloway states, “I have a pan­ hysterectomy at nine,”5 his listeners cannot miss the word and find themselves wondering what a panhysterectomy has to do with the action, the meaning of this play. The answer is, everything. The main voice in Embers is that of Henry, a lonely, tormented man who speaks to himself and conjures up the voices of others in order to cover the sound of the sea, which he constantly hears and hates. The dramatic situation is thus a kind of monologue; and although there is another voice heard at length, that of Anna, his wife, it is clear her voice exists “in” his mind; she is not physically present there on the beach with him (stage directions indicate his movements make noise on the shingles, hers do not). These imaginary conversations include his father (who now will not answer him, will...