More Thesis - Community, Meaning, and Geography

In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy describes how human communities, communities of knowing (abstract, practical, social, cultural, and so on) are where meaning exists. Meaning is not separate from human forms, rather human forms and meaning are the same thing (at least under certain circumstances) such that if we do not exist in human communities, we exist without meaning. (Also see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.) Steiner Kvale describes qualitative research interviews as a an "inter view," a sort of Gestalt image of two faces staring into one another that is also--though oddly not perceived simultaneously--a vase or candle stick. As we explore the territory of another's storied (his/herstory) experience, we undergo a flip of our own perception into the perception of another's. We cross between my view and your view of the world into an inter-view, where we have the potential to see, if briefly and fleetingly, the world as it manifests for another. What I am interested in doing with my thesis is exploring these perceptions of the world, concerning Flagstaff's current situation and future potential, its hindrances and opportunities, in order to lay out a sort of geography (I think of Borges's map in "On Exactitude in Science") of meaning in Flagstaff around staying and shelter. Ultimately, by acting as a traveler through this geography (both Kvale's and Borges's imagery) I can gather enough meaning from the different places to stitch together in exciting, novel, and structurally supportive new ways. Harry Boyte explains the IAF's relational meeting strategy and organizing imagery as a sort of "multiverse" of different world views. Though the multiverse notion has some advantages--the world IS perceived in radically different, even contradictory ways by different people--I find it deeply unsettling. If the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker (to return somewhat to the Gestalt image) all dwell in different universes perceptually--not to mention the mayor, governor, constable, farmer, miner, and so on--then how can we expect them to build a relationship? Their meaningfulness--the ways they constitute a community of meaning a la Nancy--is undermined by the radical separation of the multiverse. What Nancy suggests, then, is that regardless of the framing of pluralism (which is the goal of IAF's multiverse), the ability to corporate, to literally grow the body of meaning that a community requires to exist coherently, we have to stitch and suture and mend the broken fleshy pieces of ourselves to one another. MacIntyre begins After Virtue with a story of the loss of a meaningful method of science, of a dystopia where only pieces of scientific knowledge from various eras remain, but how they are meaningful--that is, the cultures and communities that produced them--has been lost. He argues that we reconstitute a society, culture, and tradition of philosophy--especially ethics--that will allow for a re-signification (the infusion of meaning) of ethics. I believe this is also Nancy's goal, and mine. We have remnants, pieces of a culture that don't meaningfully come together. There is a radical way in which any future culture that is coherent will be coherent in a cyborgian (Donna Haraway) or Frankensteinian way: It will be a deeply hybridized pluralistic meaning because we have been so deeply wounded and mended and reconstituted by the divorce we have experienced from the land, our families, our histories, our communities, and ourselves. That said, what I hope to uncover is some of the basic expectations, desire, and roles that will being the healing of ourselves to ourselves; that is, the reconstitution of meaning in an epistemologically, culturally, and environmentally ravaged world.