Field notes

In some way, this blog is becoming more like field notes than anything else. There's something about the potentially public nature of it that pushes me to be a bit more articulate (maybe?) than the scrawl of notes that I make on post-its and in my word file called "field notes" that's a highly inconsistent set of observations.

One thing that's really circling for me -- I was thinking about linda's work, and how infused it is with her deep relationship with linguistics -- how comfortable she is with the architectonics of the analysis, how focused she is on wanting to be precise with her terminology. And *my* analysis, otoh, is much more rooted in my early training in literary analysis -- I analyse the stories and how they're put together, and I'm a lot more imprecise with terms, and have to keep going back to my little lists of practices that I've made over time to know how to name what's happening. I get a little thrill when I recall a term like "constrastive sets" and know that it's the right term, but I'm not nearly as much at ease with the perspicacious distinctions between terms as she is -- and, I really get into the narrative aspects of what I'm analysing. Literary texts and conversations between couples become exactly the same thing for me. I think my early steeping in the kind of new school criticism that whacked the idea of "intentional fallacy" into my head set me up to really *get* the social constructionist psychological position -- what the author MEANT is irrelevant; what HAPPENS is what counts. Same thing in our social interaction.

The other thing I was thinking about is how when I wrote my two proposals, somehow I made the assumption that CMM (Barnett's theory/approach) was more of an afterthought -- I think somehow I thought, yeah, yeah, it's part of it, but not the core. And I realize, in doing this, I don't really know any other way of doing this analysis other than CMM -- apparently, unbeknownst to me, it snuck into my framing in such a way that it IS the way I view communication. The entire analysis of my work rests on being able to map stories of relationship and self-concept through CMM heuristics, and to trace what happens in conversation through CMMish contextual hierarchies and forces. Funny how it entered my veins when I wasn't paying attention and I could no more do this work now without that frame than I could do it without using English.