Discovering One's Own Alterity

2009-04-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

When I traced and retrieved my master thesis past, dived into Derrida, Levinas, diaspora & displacement, psychological & psychoanalytical, obsessed in testimony and how people getting out of the darkness; I suddenly realized, comparing to my current sociological training and identity moulding, basically I am a "culture study" person, the Other.

Updates in 2007

2007-11-19T10:43:00.000-08:00

Now I am with new identity as sociological PhD student in NTHU, Taiwan's Sociology Department. NTHU Sociology is renown for its critical participation tradition in Taiwanese society. Right now I am in the 9th week, the middle of the semester, of 3 courses: Classic Works of Social Analytics: Institution, The History of Taiwanese Social Development: Postwar Taiwanese Politics and Economy, and Fieldwork Theory and Practice 1.

And the past involvement in the National Digital Archives Program, Taiwan (now merged with the National e-Learning Program) continues. Right now I am editing and re-submitting an international collaboration proposal on regional center connecting culture portals world wide. It is also the result of past series of participation of international activities, for example, APAN e-Culture Working Group Meetings / Workshops.

A kind of integration for my trajectories in the past decade is now underway. We'll see...

from 1998 till now, the poetry still continues

2006-07-12T01:30:00.000-07:00

Running into my ancient article Nocturnal Wanderers... on nettime-l, and I found Books in Review: A monthly column on books by Emory authors by Matt Montgomery talking about Angelika Bammer's edited book, "Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question". It dealt with the cultural identity issue. And I think, that's where my poetry toward the borgian world came from. The lost moments, identity crisis, search for language to express oneself and survive the communication are the poetic dimension for me in the world we are today.

In such a wild crazy primitive world, we developed means to communicate. But there are always forces, violence, domination and succumb in the discourse interwinding. One good friend Kerim had generated an important argument: Can The Subaltern Google? I do think there are certain primordial situation in the learning and using new languages. Gadgets, servicies, protocols, softwares and data. In the interstices, there are stories.

That's the embarking point for me to think about open source. People do learn to share and collaborate, instead of competing one another. As open hospital, open data, open science could be analogically applied using the successful experiences / hypes and legends in open source, I would like to dig back into the primitive moments for people to communicate.

Bammer, associate professor of German studies with a joint appointment in Women's Studies, outlines the organization of the book in her introductory essay, in which she cites the separation of people from their native culture or displacement as one of the most formative experiences of our century.

The translator of the cryptic article Dog Words from Abdelfattah Kilito that stimulate my writing is Prof. Ziad Elmarsafy.

Elmarsafy writes, At issue in Les mots canins are language and identity, how one creates the other, and how the act of speaking a different language threatens to strip the speaker of his or her self.

Another article in Displacements, Marianne Hirsch's Pictures of a Displaced Girlhood, is about a girls childhood in new USA, the reviewer mentioned about Lost in Translation: A Life in A New Language by Eva Hoffman. It reminds me of the -40 project by Canadian artist remixing the 1940 propaganda film: Children From Overseas (by DJ Dopey).

In Bammer's essay, Mother Tongues and Other Strangers, she uses animated movies, comic strips and Freud to create a context for her discussion of home, family and community. The organization of this essay mirrors the larger organization of the book--posing the various conflicts and then offering options for resolution.

I think I had followed Bammer's argument: among all these conflicts, they sharpen and crystalized the central issue, language, or how people connect to the world.

One of the issues around which debate, hopes and hostilities often crystallize is language.

My last rant on research proposal is rooted here.

BTW, Dr. Bammer's description is quite touching my own thoughts toward the humanities research.

Her work began with an interest in the utopian possibilities of the not-yet (the non-place), then moved to a study of the reality of displacement in the contemporary world, and is currently focused on the shifting meaning of place in our understanding of selves-in-communities.

dogwords

Discovering One's Own Alterity

Updates in 2007

from 1998 till now, the poetry still continues