INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICOLOGY INSTITUTE Communicology Summer Symposium 2002 Program & Highlights

Brock University: St. Catharines, Ontario
Thistle 258 & 259

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WEEK 1: July 8-12
Monday, July 8
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon - A Visual Adventure Opening Session Representations of Sexuality and Disability in Opera "The Platonic model of correlation of the beautiful and the good is not extended to disease and disability." "'Eros is in the word.' But words fail when confronted with the reality of the erotic body." ["Diseases and those who suffer from them have always taken on meanings well beyond their medical significance. Part of the reason is the force of certain representations that are repeated so often that they eventually create their own social reality" (from "Melodies and Maladies: An Introduction," in Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. See also, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Hutcheon.html)].
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Isaac Catt Roundtable Discussion on Current Research in Communicology Update and planning for the completion of the "Strangers" book project
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Lunch
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	Stu Rothstein (with Maureen Connolly) -- Back Survival for the Business Traveller: A Curious Phenomenology of Everyday Life Workshop Session for Book Project I'm a business traveler and have a bad back. . . . This project is designed to provide the business traveler in basic back survival techniques. We provide here a practical phenomenology of business travel: planning the trip, booking the right hotels, renting the right car, and simple exercises to do along the way and upon arrival at your destination. The net effect, we hope, is to bring the bodily experience of travel to a greater level of awareness so that you both can protect your back from the stresses of travel and train yourself to be a more intelligent and demanding consumer in the travel industry.
Tuesday, July 9
9:00 –10:30 a.m.	Richard Lanigan – Communicology, Past, Present, and Future "Science begins solving problems by getting rid of linguistic descriptions." [However] "Codes intervene with our perceptual process and we're not even aware of it." "Embodiment [is] the index to the code." Ladouceur: "Do you have any [biological] evidence of how these codes are coded?" Lanigan: "You're asking a classical question . . . Biology provides some very useful information, but it doesn't give the dynamics of the code."
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Pia Kontos Roundtable discussion on Agency and Alzheimer’s Disease "Implicit in the prevailing paradigm of Alzheimer's Disease is the assumption that memory impairment caused by cognitive deficiencies leads to a steady loss of the self. Underpinning this assumption is the Western representation of personhood that emphasizes cognitive orientation such that a sense of self-worth is achieved through the display and nurturance of cognitive or intellectual abilities. . . . Underlying this understanding is the belief that the body is fundamentally passive, rendering the lived materiality of the body silent and inconsequential." [However, as argued in Merleau-Ponty's radical reconceptualization of perception and Pierre Bourdieu's sociological exploration of the logic of practice, demonstrated in the paintings of Abstract Impressionist, Willem DeKooning, and verifiable in participant observation / case studies with persons with Alzheimer's Disease:] "The pre-reflective, moving body is itself intentional." "Agency actually resides in the body." Pia is the recipient of a 2002-2003 Social & Psychological Doctoral Award from the Alzheimer Society Research Program for her work on "Exploring the embodied experience of Alzheimer Disease."
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Lunch
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	Tom Craig and Maureen Connolly King Solomon and the Unbearable Rightness of Being: Communicology and the Embodied Politics of Biblical Interpretation [Hebrew Bible: 2 Samuel 7, 1 Kings 1-2] Experiential Workshop in Semiotic Choreology "Texts in general, and sacred texts especially, tend to go unquestioned as sources of truth and accuracy -- indeed, even students who profess agnostic inclinations are disinclined to take up a serious examination of sacred text and are even more resistant to non-traditional (read "bodily-based") encounters with these texts. Texts are privileged in academic contexts, both as content and modality, and moving to a sensibility of interrogating texts, and engaging holistically (i.e., politically, cognitively, affectively and phsycially) in their interpretation is challenging."
Wednesday, July 10
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Sleep in!
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break – Begin the day with a healthy snack!
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Eric Peterson – A Performance of One Sort or Another: Story Telling in Web logs
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Lunch
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	Isaac Catt and Deborah Eicher-Catt (Workshop) Isaac's Report on the Course, "Introduction to Communicology" "Communication is a problem. It is not just any problem but is, perhaps, the most important problem in human affairs. . . . The course is divided into four units: Unit #1: The Rhetorical Perspective focuses on communication as a process of influence, as persuasion, as oratory, as propaganda . . . This perspective is focused on verbal and nonverbal information exchange. Unit #2: The Social Science of Communication describes communication as a behavioral science, primarily emphasizing messages and information and how they are processed, at all levels of communication. This perspective is focused on verbal and nonverbal information exchange. Unit #3: The Human Science of Communication introduces dialogic and hermeneutic approaches to communication and contrasts communication theory with information theory, upon which social science is based. This perspective is focused on human perception as the source of meaning for all messages. Unit #4: Emergent Paradigms in Communication cannot be collapsed into a single perspective, though there are common elements emerging as we look at the future of communicology and, particularly, at the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity. . . . The focus of these [newer philosophical] perspectives is on a critique of power and knowledge as undemocratic influences on our communication."
Thursday, July 11
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Marilyn Evans – The Pregnant Body and Modern Technology "Motherhood is an experience of the body and of mind: women come to feel in touch with their bodies, maybe for the first time since chidhood in pregnancy" (Barbara Rothman. Revisiting Motherhood).
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 – 12:15 p.m.	Dianne Bergsma – Experiential Learning in Women’s Studies – A Reflection on Content and Process "Education without action is futile. Action without education is fatal." [The Federalist Papers]
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Lunch Buffet in Alumni Lounge
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	OFF!!
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.	Participant Observation of Guest Lecture on Natural Body Building and Fitness Contests – Thistle 246 [Note: Guest Lecture cancelled due to death in the family]
8:30 – 9:30 p.m.	Reception – Thistle Corridor
Friday, July 12
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Frank Macke – Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Communicology "Whither Psychoanalysis?" "We create our family relationships in every relationship we embody." "Children are going to grow up at the parents' level of differentiation." "The capacity to learn the language of the other is the ground of reason." "Basic differention refers to core internalized development of the individual--which can be maintained independent of shifting circumstances in the relationship." "Functional differentiation is highly dependent on the current status of the relationship" (David Schnarch on Bowen and Kerr's, "Range of Differentiation").
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Maureen Connolly and Tom Craig – King Solomon and the Unbearable Rightness of Being: Communicology and the Embodied Politics of Biblical Interpretation (Roundtable discussion) Movement Education Concepts: Body (basic body function, body parts, weightbearing, body actions, body shapes, spatial mass, symmetrical and asymmetrical use of the body, motion and stillness, flight, manipulative and nonmanipulative).) Space (personal space, general space, space words, using space, spatial mass) Effort Qualities (weight, time, space, flow; emphasize one element, emphasize two elements, basic effort actions -- thrust, slash, flick, dab, press, wring, float, glide) Relationships (with objects, with people) Semiotic Choreology "This choreological process is based in the crossroads of subject matter and the lived bodies / actual bodies of teachers and students, making it progressive and political (in the Freirian sense), offering a mirror on the insidiously normative familiarity of dualist and productivist codes of bodily inscription, and placing the body at the heart of an 'experience in practice' (Kristeva) that calls for the rupture of our certainties and the possibility of transformation."
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Lunch
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	Fiona McMurran – Privates on Parade: Phallic Interpretations in Ancient Athens [with slides of the processional phallus in the secret rite in the worship of Dionysus] Philology/Phallology the verb, aideomai = "to be ashamed" (to do something), or "to feel regard" (for someone); with an accusative, it can mean "to stand in awe of, fear" the noun aidos (long "o") (f.) means "a sense of shame, modesty, self-respect" the adjective aidoios, a, ov can mean "deserving of reverence, venerable, or shamefaced" the Greek word for genitals: aidoiov, to (n.) usually in plural: aidoia, ta And, speaking of modesty: in Liddell and Scott's Greek lexicon -- peos, to (n) = membrum virile ("penis" to the immodest) also, phallos (m) = membrum virile, phallus, or a figure thereof, borne in procession in the cult of Dionysus as an emblem of the generative power in nature
WEEK 2: July 15-19
Monday, July 15
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Richard Lanigan – Reflections on Communicology Opening Session Problematic: "Culture provides you with ready-made choices. The problem is, that's what science is based on." Definitions: Math Logic: closed choice procedures Bracketing: disengaging the automatic rules that . . . [are] instantly taken into the system Creativity: ability to make unlimited choices Handouts & Charts: "The Postmodern Ground of Communicology" (article) "Lanigan's Semiotic Phenomenology Model of Communicology as a Human Science" (chart from Lanigan 1988) Pierce on Qualitative Logics -- deduction, induction, abduction (a posteriori), adduction (a priori) [on blackboard] Thematic (Creativity): {Both (Both/And) And (Either/Or}
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Marion Zelinsky – Roundtable discussion on Painting and Merleau-Ponty "Thoughts Toward a Phenomenological Semiotics of Art and Visual Perception" [with experiential--"Draw your home"--work in pastels] "The artist's eye dives into thick, isolated pools of pigment circling the palette, immersing his or her whole being and its world into the primordial, transcendent belly of the subconscious mind. Here, the body swims in the currents of colors swept by the gesture of a brush into coarse streams -- each in itself, a rich microcosm of new lived experience. Every blank white canvas invites and intimidates, excites and overwhelms the painter, who, regardless of how many times she faces this void, must do so alone, and with all of her bodily experience of being in the world, must paint again for the first time. The body and mind must discover a new synchronicity of gesture and vision, dance and music, which are the very core of the act of painting."
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Lunch
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	Experiential Session – Embodied analysis of static-dynamic tensions in training / conditioning contexts [Experiential Workshop in Brock University's training facility, "The Zone," and Stability Ball session in the Dance Studio]
Tuesday, July 16
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Jackie Martinez – Rhetoric, Semiotics, and Racist Exclusions: A Phenomenology of Transforming Racisms "Rhetoric places the act of speaking at the juncture of personal expression and social perception or, equally, social expression and personal perception." "What are the rhetorical processes through which racism and racist expression sustain themselves? How is it that racism and racist expressions continue to circulate and stand ready as rhetorical mechanisms within a culture? How can we account for the rhetorical availability of racism and racist expressions and the communicative contexts in which such expressions are taken up? How might we counteract the ready availability of racism and racist expressions as cultural and historical fact?" Developing anti-racist rhetorical practice: "Interrogate the interpretant." "Historize time and place, self and other." "Favor the particular over the universal." "Situate racial categories." "Favor rhetorical ethics over ethical rhetoric."
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Maureen Connolly – Bikini Bytes: A Communicology of Front Stage and Back Stage Performances at Competitive Bodybuilding Events [with video of Maureen's Can/Am Natural Bodybuilding Competition routines from 2001 & 2002] [In this project:] I employ Richard Lanigan's (1988, 1992, etc.) methodological framework (semiotic phenomenology), Susan Wendell's (1996) notion of the "paradigm citizen," and Linda Bain's (1991) tripartite hidden curriculum to disclose and examine surveillance, and regulatory practices in training and conditioning in general, and competititve body building in particular." [On technocentric ideology and the ideal woman bodybuilder's body:] "The body tends to become a commodity to be exchanged for admiration, security, or economic gain. . . . Think of Barbie, with a six-pack!" ". . . I have trained and dieted my way down to 114 pounds and have spent enough time in the sauna to sweat out what little water remains in my muscles. I am now ready to spend the day competing in a natural, drug-tested body building competition. By the end of this day, I hope to have earned my pro card." "I must always ask myself, 'in favor of whom and of what do I employ my technical competence?'" "Body building and body culture have been investigated and interrogated by sport sociologists, feminist theorists, and in the recent semiotic phenomenological work of Jackie Martinez. Very few of these scholars -- with the exception of Martinez -- actually are involved in strength and conditioning programs or environments. Physical education and kinesiology scholars have long conducted research on training, training methods, and outcomes, training spaces, human systemic adaptations to training, however, while many of these scholars are actively involved in some kind of physcial activity program, their work is characteristic of much bioscience research and does not take up the lived body, cultural or political contexts, or their own disciplinary assumptions.
12:15 – 1:30	Lunch
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	Lisa Anderson - Experiential Workshop [on Gender and Performance] [with video presentation of "Dream Girls" and oral performance of student Monologues]
Wednesday, July 17
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Open Papers / Presentations Stuart Davidson on Gait and Obstacles Aaron Marquis on the Physiology of Pain (Student Researchers with Brock University Assistant Professor of Physical Education, Michel Ladouceur)
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Open Roundtable Session
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Lunch
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	Social Dance Taught/Learned Through Lived Body Theorizing (Experiential Workshop in the Dance Studio)
Thursday, July 18
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Frank Macke - Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Communicology (Revisited) "The Mystery of Magritte's Le viol: Surrealist Transgression and Postmodern Investigation" (a 1989 SIUC essay assignment revisited) "René Magritte, through the course of his work as a painter, claimed to have grasped 'the ascendancy of poetry over painting,'1 a discovery that, according to Suzi Gablik, in fact moved him to tears.2 With respect to his own strategy with words (such that there may have been) he once wrote: I think the best title for a painting is a poetic title. . . . a title compatible with more or less lively emotions such as we feel when looking at a picture. . . . The poetic title needn't tell us anything, but should surprise and delight us. A poetic title is not a sort of indication which tells one, for instance, the name of a town whose panorama the painting represents or the symbolic role attributed to a painted figure.3 As such, it is neither realistic nor in any way intellectually meaningful to attempt a codification scheme for the explication of words employed in the titles of his paintings and the content of that which is pictured in the paintings themselves--to the point, I would argue, that Magritte's conception of painting resists the general academic projects of structuralism, hermeneutics, and semiotics. As the venerated art critic and historian David Sylvester comments: 'His images are to be looked at, not looked into.'"4 1 See James Harkness, "Translator's Introduction," in Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, ed. and trans. J. Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 2 Suzi Gablik, Magritte (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1970). 3 René Magritte, unpublished manuscript, cited in A. M. Hammacher, Magritte, trans. James Brockway (New York: Abrams, 1985), p. 27. 4David Sylvester. About Modern Art (New York, Henry Holt, 1996), p. 207.
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Keith Johnston - Roundtable discussion on Disability Studies and Hidden Curriculum Discussion of the Brock University Physical Education Course, PHED 2P92: Adapted Physical Education for Persons with Disabilities and Chronic Conditions Course Description: "This course focuses on the life-conditions and needs of individuals with disabilities who require special physical education or adapted physical activities within their regular program. Emphasis is placed on developing a deeper understanding of the life-world of people living with disabilities in order to further your comprehension of the implications this may have towards programming."
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Lunch
1:45 – 3:30 p.m.	Glenys McQueen-Fuentes – Movement in Teaching and Learning: Freeing up our first language (Experiential Session)
Friday, July 19
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Tom Craig and Maureen Connolly – Ritual process and Social Drama in the Bible and the University: The Trial of the Unfaithful Member "This project emerges from a recent independent reading course we directed in Women's Studies which had as its premise the intersection of contemporary feminist theories and biblical studies scholarship on selected texts from the Hebrew Bible. The specific text in focus for this particular presentation is the ritual description of the Sotah (the prescribed "ordeal" of the sexually suspect wife accused by a jealous husband) presented in Numbers 5:11-31 and discussed in recent analyses by biblical scholars who attempt to utilize a more feminist-oriented interpretation within the structures and strictures of the critical biblical studies field. As both insiders and outsiders of the academic guild, we began to wonder, are there similar "cultural performances" (Turner 1981, 1990) that effectively constrain and control the acceptable boundaries of legitimate participation in university culture? What are contemporary students and scholars expected to swallow (i.e., what "ordeal" must they endure), for example, in order to compete successfully within the highly competitive, productivist codes of academia? What are the consequences for straying from the expected path, or even for being suspected of doing so? . . . In sum, we ask, is there an analogy to the ritual Sotah in contemporary university culture and, if so, how does it function to control the disciplinary boundaries of un/acceptable behavior?"
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.	Nutrition Break
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.	Richard Lanigan – Roundtable discussion to conclude 2002 Symposium Discussion of the article, "The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science" (Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus. In Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, eds., Perspectives on Embodiment, 1999, 103-120) Either / Or Logic of Differentiation / "Oppositions" Both /And Logic of "Appositions" "The {Both (Both/And) And (Either/Or} rule in plain English: 'But everything is similar to everything else and different from everything else in an independently large number of ways. We just do not notice it'" (ibid., 117a). Merleau-Ponty's point: "There is no such thing as apposition without an embodied starting place." For more on Communicology and the writings of Richard Lanigan, see amazon.com's "Public Reviews". For a more complete list of Lanigan's writings, see his Publications on the SIUC university site.
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.	Catered Lunch in Cafeteria

Communicology, an emergent field in human science research, is a critical study of the expressive body as mediated by cultural signs and codes. The expressive body discloses cultural codes; cultural codes shape the expressive body - an ongoing, dialectical, complex helix of relations, twists and turns. Because of the breadth and depth of inquiry made possible by a critical examination of the signs and codes of culture(s), Communicology is one of the few scholarly disciplines which not only encourages, but also theoretically (and practically) engages in trans-disciplinary understanding of cultural phenomena such that humanities, social sciences, sciences, education, and medical/institutional themes and methodologies are often blended, or seen as complementary or dialectical rather than oppositional. The scholarly - and political - power of such collaborations is certainly evident in contemporary grant and funding models and initiatives.

The scope of Communicology includes - but is not limited to - communication, popular culture, advertising, discourse analysis, economic analysis, institutional analysis, organization of urban and rural spaces, ergonomics, body culture, clinical practice, health care, constructions of disease, health, and rehabilitation ... and so forth. Whenever and wherever the signs and codes of culture impact on bodily expressive modes, we have a communicological phenomenon to be investigated, described, interpreted, and deconstructed.

This symposium will offer a thematic focus on cultural constructions of technological and human relations, healthy and unhealthy, strange and familiar bodies. This focus will allow participants to explore complementary, contested, and ambiguous relations between technology and bodies as lived. This focus is especially relevant in light of current events which necessitate heightened security and medical screening, more precise understandings of bodily presentations and processes (eg., gait, neurological and metabolic processes, disease states), more complex analyses of belief systems, cultural norms, conflict and consequences. The more we know about the body, the more mysterious it becomes, blurring the borders between familiar and strange, law and transgression, self and other.

For more information on Communicology and the International Communicology Institute, contact:

In the USA	In CANADA
Richard L. Lanigan, PhD	Tom Craig, PhD
Professor and Outstanding Scholar	E-mail: tom.craig@communicology.org
Dept. of Speech Communication (MC 6605)
Southern Illinois University	Maureen Connolly, PhD
Carbondale, IL. 62901-6605 -- USA	Professor and Distinguished Teacher
Phone: (618) 453-1894	Faculty of Applied Health Sciences
E-mail: rlanigan@siu.edu	Brock University
	St. Catharines, ON. L2S3A1 -- CANADA
	Phone: 905-688-5550 (ext. 3381) E-mail: mconnoll@arnie.pec.brocku.ca

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