Search Results for: non-verbal

Late draft for an article published in the Yale Divinity School alumni/ae magazine Reflections, Spring 2008, pages 53-57. I reckon this draft differs from the final copy in some respects, but the differences should be slight.
 
 
I came to Yale as a refugee from the early days of the computer graphics industry. Business had been good, and would eventually get much better, but as soon as I set foot on campus and heard the clatter of late-summer typewriters settling the academic debts of spring semester, Yale drew me into the musty delights of the Higher Criticism, three different library classification systems, and Coffee Hour.
 
   Once I settled into my seminary studies, however, I discovered that my fascination with biblical studies engendered a baffling problem: the more I learned in my biblical courses, the less my studies seemed to enhance my ministry and preaching. Like any good academic apprentice, I tried at first to redouble my efforts. That only aggravated the problem; I knew more and more, but the technical apparatus of my learning always seemed to stand between me and the fluent, compelling, preach-able biblical theology for which I thirsted. My increasing technical expertise did not help me inhabit and proclaim the traditions I was studying.
 
   My teachers at Yale Divinity encouraged me to keep chipping away at this complex of problems: in biblical theology with Brevard Childs, literary theory with Richard Hays, postmodernism with Cornel West, among others. Gradually, the puzzle pieces came together. Their inspiration and instruction helped me articulate a way of understanding interpretation that produced theologically rich readings of scripture, but also allowed for a nuanced, historical-critical approach to the Bible.
 
   My way forward involved learning to explore the Bible and Christian tradition without participating in the ceaseless power struggle over whose interpretation is authoritatively right and whose is wrong. This means sidestepping — recuperating from — a fixation on the illusory authority of claiming the “correct” interpretation. I offer instead a way of thinking about interpretation that still involves deliberation about better and sounder interpretations, but without pretensions to decisive interpretive authority. This proposal is unlikely to assuage our fiery passion to claim privileged possession of biblical correctness. But it may afford the incalculable advantage of clarifying the bases of our interpretations, and the bases of the relation of our interpretations to our dogmatic conclusions, our ecclesiology and our ethics.
Continue reading “Interpreting the Bible in a Sea of Signs”

The other day, David quoted a passage from Herbert H. Clark’s Using Language that supports David’s position that information theory has seeped over into — and distorted — the discourses on interpretation (he alludes to this in his Ars Electronica presentation). But it also supports my claims about the semiotics of verbal and non-verbal communication.

I gave the presentation on Magritte and Krazy Kat at the Society of Anglican and Lutheran Theologians meeting yesterday, and it was a shade of a letdown; the group was attentive and very responsive to the presentation itself, but the preponderance of those who spoke up were pretty firmly committed to the hermeneutical status quo — especially after my presentation, when a panel discussed Lutheran approaches to the use of Scripture in discussions concerning sexuality. Though I didn’t by any means expect that everyone would fall all over themselves to accommodate my points in the talk, many of the pivotal issues in the panelists’ talks fell squarely into the area that I had just devoted ninety minutes to calling into question. Anyway, I’ll post the gist of the lecture in the extended version of this post — in case you’re interested. Continue reading “SALT and Savour”

When I met Jill O’Neill yesterday, her first question was, “How is the dog?” I ought therefore to assure readers that Beatrice came through her toxic dose of chocolate as sweet and dumb as ever.

All the travel yesterday went as well as could be asked, if it be granted that it involved waking up at 3:45 in the morning. No traffic, no cancellations, no delays, and no one even squeezing into the seat next to me on either flight (though on the return flight I was seated behind a knee-masher; he reclined till the crossbar of the tray table crushed my patella, then — as I tried to maintain some degree of leg space — bounced his seat back to make sure that he gained every millimeter of reclining space possible, which was important because he was in the exit row seat without a seat in front of him). I got home early, to Pippa’s surprise. She had a great time with Beth, and came home cheery and agreeable.

What I said at the SSP-TMR turned out to depart more or less significantly from what I expected. Jill had been in touch with me several times, which was very helpful, but arriving on the scene and sizing up the people there, and hearing the kinds of thing they came to Philadelphia to talk about, I realized that I had not arrived at as focused a sense of the occasion as would be most productive. I scribbled through the morning session, excused myself early from lunch, and came up with a different set of points.

What I wanted to propose — whether it came through or not, I suspect I could have made my points more clearly — was the relatively bleak situation for discovery tools in the humanities, compared to the snazzy, elegant tools in the scientific, technical, medical sector. Once I caught on to the difference, it made sense; STM searching involves data sets that lend themselves to orderly definitions and manipulation, and there’s a lot more commercial-industrial value in the databases in STM fields. So as I say, it makes sense that discovery tools have a big head start on tools in the humanities. At the same time, “scholarly publishing” does indeed include the humanities, and there’s a sense in which the digital transition in the humanities poses a more pointed challenge to the inherited models and assumptions about scholarly publishing. With that in view, I described a series of desiderata. For the vast audience of non-expert users, search tools need to be much more intuitive and effective; the user community with which I’m most familiar engages two discovery methods, a bibliographic interface that baffles even committed researchers (I won’t name proprietary names), and Google. Each of these, for different reasons, returns less-than-satisfactory results. The humanities in general, and the theological academy in particular, stand very far behind STM sector for the useability of discovery tools.

(It occurs to me that another piece of this puzzle may involve the various levels of users, and their capacity to interact productively with databases. Even a lower-level inquirer into STM research quite probably brings more rich acquaintance with structured inquiry than many advanced scholars in the humanities. This may engender a cycle of success-and-improvement that leaves humanities search lagging.)

So, useability constitutes a goal for non-expert users, but for more adept users “useability” (in a different sense) would be great, too — but the advanced useability, involving full, standards-compliant mark-up, rich metadata, and so on.

On behalf of all humanities users, though, I urged the SSP to look forward to a digital-media future, rather than backward, toward a book-and-card-catalog past. Open access (made possible via online distribution, made practicable by the capacity for unlimited exact copies), non-verbal media (increasing amounts of scholarly communications will involve audio files and images, not solely alphanumeric information), and developing business models that support these endeavors with a basis that doesn’t rely on restriction and control (the ol’ copyright model).

I’ll try to add more reflections on the earlier sessions, but I have an all-day faculty meeting today. . . .

It’s been a long, busy week. I finally finished up my Winslow Lecture, and delivered it to a very full house on Thursday. It went well — a number of people gave very kind feedback about it — and I’ll post a summary in the “Extended” window below (it’s probably too long to post the whole thing, but I’ve uploaded a pdf of the complete text of my lecture, with notes).

Trevor came out from Ohio to stay with us during the series, which was terrific; we don’t get to see enough of him, now that he’s far away. We got to see a little of Steve, less than we’d have liked, but it was complicated since Francis and Kevin were here on equal standing as lecturers, though not such long-term friends. It was excellent getting to talk at greater length with Kevin and Francis, and at lunch yesterday Kevin allowed that my more loosely-joined hermeneutics (more loose than his) make more sense to him when he sees the shape of community life here.

At dinner Thursday night, at Koi in Evanston (home of the “Mongolian Plates,” which the menu describes: “The major staple of this dish is its wok-seared characteristic”), we learned that not only did Francis not know about blogging and tofu, but he didn’t know what a dumpster was, either. Steve helpfully equated “dumpster” with a British “skip,” so that was easily solved. “And another thing word I didn’t recognize,” Francis added, “was — ‘mojo’?” That was a little harder for us to explain, especially with a degree of circumspection concomitant with Francis’s dignity and decorum. I suggested that he might have heard of Muddy Waters, and he, at the other end of the table, said, “Oh, it means ‘to muddy the waters’?” At that point, we were nearly helpless at the incongruity of the situation.

I’m very relieved to have finished this up, and a little embarrassed at how much less-well-developed my thoughts were in South Bend last week, compared to the way I ordered them in my formal lecture this week.
Continue reading “Catching Up”

This morning, I realized one aspect of Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action that really bothers me. Habermas suggests that the tacit “intent to communicate” that every communicative action implies, obliges us to interpret those communications in concord with the latent intent. As I was doing my sit-ups this morning (sit-ups coming back easier than stationary-biking, my mind was clearer), I tried to connect Habermas to the general points I’ve tried to make about signifying practices in general; Habermasian arguments tend to play well among biblical scholars, so I’d do well to have a riposte in view.

What dawned on me is that Habermas tends to define signifying in terms of speaking/writing — to define all signifying in terms of verbal communication. Now, he doesn’t exclude non-verbal communication, but the thrust of his argument treats non-verbal communication as though it were a less-precise version of verbal communication, or a failed (or flawed) attempt at verbal communication. This tendency has bothered me from the time that I began to observe ways that ASL required that I think about hermeneutics in very different ways; this morning, it occurred to me that when a Habermasian approach treats the case of verbal communication as normative, it bootlegs in a variety of suppositions about interpretation that don’t necessarily apply to non-verbal communication. If I’m right in supposing that all we do signifies, and that we can’t control signification, then one can’t simply hold up verbal communication as paradigmatic. . . .too sleepy to finish. . . .