October 2, 2015 - 16:31
New Reflection
Five weeks have passed. As weeks passed by, my perspective toward even the trivial circumstances that I had easily ignored has been gradually transmuted as I encountered new vocabularies or phrases that entail striking concepts that I had never gotten a chance to muse over: contact zone, dynamics of power, slippage, metacommunication, material-semiotic field and many more. On the second week, after reading Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”, I was amazed to perceive how the conflict that I had with my roommate in high school could be interpreted as the dynamics of a contact zone. But after reading “Ravens at Play” by Deborah, Stuart and Thom, I realized the absence of trust in the relationship hindered us from going into deeper relations –or from “playing” –and was able to see the origin of the conflict with different perspective.
When Deborah and Stuart encountered coyotes and ravens respectively, each of them were willing to connect and involve in “play” with the animals, both widely known as tricksters. Thom, however, refutes their claims that their play could not have happened at the first place since they did not build a mutual trust and bond to one another beforehand. He also states play is crucial when it comes to forming a “useful relationship”. According to Haraway, she believes that for ‘groups’ of two to meet and communicate successfully, trust has to exist between (Deborah et al. 10). Reflecting on what Thom and Haraway stated, I now could see how our relationship had to go awry at the end since we did not have trust on one another at the first place. Three weeks ago, I wrote down how I was overwhelmed with excitement and anticipation to meet a roommate, who I would get to share a room for the first time in my life other than my family (Haabibi 1). But like the encounter between Deborah and the coyote, and Thom and the ravens, I might have been just too excited to encounter a “roommate” –my very first roommate ever in my life whose mere existence gave me goose bumps since I had never encountered a roommate face-to-face before then. Deborah had an overwhelming urge to feed the coyote and Thom approached the ravens thinking they could share the joke together. I expected a couple mechanical pencils that I prepared for her could build a foothold for us to have a great relationship. But the conflict that I had with her and the reading tell me how the relationship formula for my roommate and me cannot be defined as “play” with mutual respect and trust. There was not enough time for both of us to build trust and bond before we came to the school. We did not know anything about each other except for the fact that we would share a room together for a semester. Time was too limited for us to see if we were a perfect fit to build deeper relationship. People who I now call “my best friends” are the ones that I had met during my sophomore and junior years at high school. Because my best friends and I had enough time to get to know each other, we were able to build deep mutual trust and bond between us and also had enough time to play to form “useful relationships” like how Thom had mentioned.
The perspective of how I see the origins of the conflict that I had with my roommate has also been challenged after reading “Ravens at Play.” The authors in “Ravens at Play” talk about how we are living in a material-semiotic field, in which there are full of signals but lack of words. Especially Thom thinks metacommunication, which “has the potential to produce playful interactions”, occurs when ‘this is play’ suddenly changes into the question form of ‘is this play?’ (Deborah et al. 10) Before reading, I thought that even my roommate and I had spent so much time together at the beginning of the school, the conflict that I had with her was mostly due to our greed over the power to dominate each other after finding mutual weaknesses. But it was not the greed that started and ignited the conflict. It was miscommunication and the absence of metacommunication. I now think over and reinterpret those times, and then I realize how we seemed like we were playing, but were not playing directly “with” each other. Before we could ask ourselves the question –is this play- we were ignoring each other’s performances and would rather get affronted by them. For example, my roommate’s asking me to eat meals together might be her own way of showing intimacy, but to me I felt like she was intruding the limit of boundary of my privacy and time. I thought I was showing intimacy to her by telling other people proudly that we hear weird and exotic music that she likes in the morning together; however, she might have wanted to hinder her taste to other people but only wanted to share with me. The concept of metacommunication sounded very abstract at the first place, but after contemplating the close relationship that I have with my best friends right now, I realized we were actually metacommunicating to one another, understanding each other’s truth without any spoken words. Thom further stated, to play actively, people should have “attentiveness to and knowledge of others” (Deborah et al. 11). Because words do not exist within metacommunication, I learned that I should actively pay attention to what others are performing and try to question if it is play.
For past few weeks, I had an opportunity to read various articles and essays about contact zone and a relationship that comes from it –whether could it be defined as play or as a conflict. And it is needless to say how much my perspective has changed a lot by comparing and merging the ideas that I had before and after. The conflict that I had with my roommate could be seen as a belligerent war, each of us trying to dominate another through penetrating weaknesses. However, it could also be viewed as the preliminary stage before starting the real relationship, in which both were not yet ready to play together. And even if we did build a truthful mutual bond, it would be metacommunication that would make the relationship deeper and useful.
Works Consulted
Haabiee. “Virtue of Heterogeneity and Dynamic.” September 11, 2015 (15:36p.m) /oneworld/changing-our-story-2015/virtue-heterogeneity-and-dynamic
Tim Edensor, Bethan Evans, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington and Jon Binnie. Playing in Industrial Ruins: Interrogating Teleological Understandings of Play in Spaces of Material Alterity and Low Surveillance. Urban Wildscapes. Ed. Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan. New York: Routledge, 2011. 65-79.