Dialectic of social-individual

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Mon, 06 Nov 95 00:26:55 EST

A final point on the recent individual/social discussion. It
didn't seem to me that Stanton Wortham meant us to dismiss the
dialectical approach to using these two terms so easily. In a
dialectical relation, which seems to me in many ways the best one
in this case:

1) each term presupposes the other -- certainly the case here as
I've argued in a prior posting today, or see Ch5 of _Textual
Politics_, and not in a reductionist sense. (Social systems are
not made of individuals, but of processes in which individuals
participate. Those individuals are themselves the products of
these processes.)

2) the terms function in an oppositional contrast such that they
cannot be reduced to one another -- also the case here, and this
is the great weakness of the reductionist view of society as
reducible to the behavior of individuals, and equally of a naive
social determinism which reduces the behavior of individuals to
its social functions; both lose the productive complementarity.
(Individual behavior is always more than what is socially
functional, but is still the product of having lived in a social
system, participated in its processes.)

3) each term alters the meaning and/or functioning of the other,
producing, where the terms are on the same level of analysis,
change in the dynamics of the system containing both of them, or,
where the relationship is abstract or hierarchical rather than
interactional (these are actually two kinds of dialectic, which
Hegel either confuses or subtly fuses, depending on your taste in
such matters), a perpetual instability, and the possibility of
reconciliation through the emergence of a still higher level
system (true in both sorts of dialectic). For our case, this is
the critical issue. Individuals are not the same sort of
individual when they are the product of social, and especially
ecosocial-with-semiotics systems, nor are social systems the same
when the kinds of individuals who participate in their processes
are more specified, more individuated, than is strictly necessary
for the operation of those processs (this is what leads to social
change). So there can be no stable individuals in social
interaction-activity, and no stable social systems which contain
maximally individuated individuals. Both at the type level, and
at the token-interaction level, the dialectic leads to change (of
type of individual and society, and of particular individuals and
societies).

As to what is emergent in these dynamics, it can only be a
different _kind of_ larger ecosocial system (larger than
individual societies or communities with their interacting
environments), since the higher organizational levels have
generally already been around. Perhaps new intermediate levels,
though just what these might be ... who knows? Maybe we should be
posing not the question of 'individual-level activity' but
'ecosocial-level activity': what systems larger than human
cultures and communities entrain our activities as units of their
own? what are their 'goals'? Can we know? JAY.

-----------------

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU