MEETING NOTES Followup, September 19, 2001: Jerry's Email
Some reflections on today’s Ivanhoe meeting:
While I think it would be wise (=pragmatic) at this point to stay with the sequential move model of the game, I also think jeff’s model SHOULD BE PURSUED. Not least because, for me, it implicitly calls into play/calls to attention aspects of interpretational method that are almost never theorized. We of course (now) are very aware of the social character of interpretation, but that socio-historical idea is never (to my knowledge) instantiated, theoretically, in the present which is what a "diplomatic" procedure involves. (So we want to say: everything needs to be theorized in historical terms, including the immediate scene of interpretive activities.) One may observe many aspects of "diplomacy" in the day to day institutional operations of any disciplinary field, which means that "interpretation" (the "field" we’re making a model for) is shot through with logics of diplomacy (the "old boy network", eg, involves complex logics of diplomacy we have not begun to theorize).
BUT: how one codes those logics even in elementary ways is not a trivial problem. Which is why nathan’s and andrea’s comments seem(ed) to me so telling. We must, I believe, aim to locate as much of the game play as possible within the "game space" (which does not include, so far as I understand the matter, the café).
And then there is the problem too, as I said just before I left, of the need to build a working model in THIS ACADEMIC YEAR.
Selah.
jerry