Website of Valerie Wilkinson

You can see photographs of the most recent party at: http://tanabataparty.com/gallery.php

[1] A feature of The Party is that it offers potential for disaster. For some reason, it is difficult to sell students on the value of a semi-controlled disaster experience, though it is worth rubies.

[2] For the sake of this essay, The Party takes a position at the center, as an example. ¡¡A play, a film production, or some kind of simulation game could have the same inner completeness and effect on a community over time.

[3]Definition of the parameters of The Party process structure is necessarily arbitrary.

[4] Because parties are familiar. Is a party still a party if we defamiliarize it?

[5] Perhaps the students do not (yet) recognize The Party as a context for learning.

[6] Much of what I have to say is in footnotes and parenthetical comments, because "the point of it" is elusive and wriggles away from words, being rather an effect of the process and a suggestion about desirable attitudes toward perception, than a fixed realization.

[7] "Prometheus" signifies the vision of The Party (and the eagle feasting on his gizzard is reminiscent of the feeling of waking on the day of The Party, having bitten off more than one can chew. This is the first shot at metaphor as sensemaking tool in the interpretation of a real life "strip" (ala Goffman) of experience.)

[8] Thought becomes Procrustean when some thought system becomes more important than the field that we are attempting usefully and accurately to describe. At a certain point, an overwhelming desire may arise to make a good descriptive system work in a particular case, which leads to massaging the information to fit.

[9] This thought belongs originally to Heraclitus, though my friend Lenny profitably applied it to a really good bar in Honolulu, among other nefarious abductions.

[10] The unasked Grail question in the legend of the Fisher King is the very question motivating this entire inquiry. It isn’t just "why bother" (Bate 7), though invoking Bate at this moment is a marker of the relevance of The Party to cultural change in student community, for enhancement of self-perception in a Japanese academic situation. Circumstances wrest the motive, and to give utterance to it in an inhospitable (dare I say the element of shared belief is required?) context either makes it seem culpably naïve or impossibly abstract.

[11] Cf. "raids on the inarticulate" in Eliot’s "East Coker", V (Four Quartets).

[12] The choice of the word "cultivate", to describe this applied research with the informal cultural infrastructure in developing the concept of The Party, comes after discarding "create", because something is there already in the culture, in ancient patterns, in nature, if you will. The Party has some apriori form. Yet I also discarded the word "discover" since something is emerging (co-evolving) that both resonates with established ground, yet is nonetheless novel.

[13] I was prepared for Bateson by important academic experiences in The Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, Botany, and Literary Criticism.

[14] "Failure" in this inquiry does not concern the normal miscalculations and contingencies that provide positive learning experiences, but rather radical institutional reframing that requires a total re-visioning of purpose, development, and source of staff for The Party. The result is a store of information that disappears, because there is no similar context to apply it to, nor any surviving coherent group to use it.

[15] From admitting that a fiasco is occurring to deploying whatever means to minimize the damage requires decisive thought/act. The power to "turn it around" to success takes something more. I’ll call it belief or shared vision or even good-will, a spiritual capability of a whole system to sustain uncertainty and move toward a harmonious resolution beyond success or failure. Learning with personal and team integrity in a complex system can be a powerful experience.

[16] Other productive dialectics include: theoretical/applied, rigor/imagination, prescription/description, essential/contingent, and so on.

[17] Note I am slipping in the primary defining term "culture" as academic sleight of hand.

[18] Hinting at levels (possibly hierarchical) while claiming to be starting from the drawing of a line is an old trick. Think of a classic wheeze, like "there are two kinds of people".

[19] Consider the new connectivity possible with the ubiquitous cell phone.

 

[20]  Other options for a process which probes paradigm rigidity: "Theory of Constraints" (Goldratt) "Six Hat Thinking" (De Bono).

[21] This is a miserable oversimplification of Chris’s processes.  Or maybe it makes double-loop learning sound too complex!  The point is, "to question the setting", to probe the context, to attempt to see other perspectives, multiple-versions — and so to melt fixity into possibility.

[22] Apathetic students.

[23] See Goffman’s Frame Analysis.

[24] "Choice" may not be voluntary. Contextual cues and the nature of the interlocutor or audience might enforce a particular framing.

[25] Language or "discourse" is a primary means of ordering and describing experience. The use of language can either open or deny access, as coded discourse aims to exclude all but the few who know. Any of the five academic framings I choose here have a world of literature, defined specialties, and presently situated degree holders, which makes it extremely risky for the generalist to do anything more than constellate a few concepts and then move on.

[26] I insist on the "general" because the principle of abduction assures that any "strip" (Goffman) of experience contains "transforms" of abstract information (Bateson) for "sensemaking" (Weick) of any other "strip" of experience. No example too trivial; no context too far-fetched. But once observation becomes situated in a specific context, it becomes highly specialized (idiosyncratic) and complex at once. The term "general" is the latchkey of the escape hatch to the "double loop".

[27] Mapping is description of process and its dialectic partner is control (what we used to call "cybernetics" in the metaphoric, not mechanical, sense of the word.)

[28] In the process of The Party I observe system archetypes, applications of Theory of Constraints (Goldratt), a kind of dynamic "energy" as a system effect. I have urgent questions about the impact of implanting something like The Party on the culture of the Faculty and the effect of new entities vying for social/cognitive spaces. I have no "colleagues" to share it with, though there are potentials.

[29] Ah! Principles and applications! This is the stuff I want to talk about! Sharing The Party generates shared experience so we can get to the point where we can talk.

[30] Whatever we happen to be reading becomes the critical commentary of what we are living/perceiving; concurrently our reading is implicated in motive and form of what we perceive/actualize in our situated world.

[31] For the anatomy of havoc wrought by the naively good-intentioned, see Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) or John Master’s Coromandel (1955). For a pure disaster facilitated by a naive, see Le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama (1997).

[32] I am white, privileged, sheltered, comparatively rich. Managing my own myopia is part of the job.

[33] Billy Budd’s (Melville) narrator begged him to interpret his world.

[34] Cf. Robert Scholes’ 1985 taxonomy of textual strategies: reading: text within text, interpreting: text upon text, criticism: text against text (New Haven: Yale UP). I reduce that to: text/world A and text/world B are articulated by agent wielding metaphor.

[35] As a third technique, along with induction and deduction. (Developed by C. S. Peirce.)

[36] None of my primary framings include business! How does one create a lot of real, differentiated jobs? Besides, we have a very large staff. The Party is labor intensive. I do it this way to multiply the actively engaged teams. If there were lots of teams and no guests, it would be all right with me. Except we need the guests to believe in the tickets and posters and high quality food.