In that view, the social system, whether as culture or ecology,
as social milieu/environment is dumbed-down to the level of the
'natural' environment, so that the tool, the tree, and such
things as texts, social norms, folktales, beliefs, and values,
all alike are simply 'objects' confronted by Subjects (us, one at
a time). Only the Person as Subject in this view is endowed with
intelligence, soul, agency, knowledge, etc. The result is the
well-known contradiction concerning other Subjects: do we relate
to them as objects in our environment, or somehow 'put ourselves
in their shoes' to enable us to relate to them as co-Subjects,
who feel and know and act (not just behave) as we think we do?
In a new possible view we are challenged to conceptualize our
relation to the social system (for me more generally the
ecosocial system, since the same rock is a tool in another
activity) from the best models we have of our 'interpenetration',
our 'intimacy', our co-subjecthood with other persons. To
reconstrue the I-it as I-thou, not just for the privileged (and
in the old model oddly exceptional) category of Persons, but for
everything that the old model tended to object-ify.
This certainly would put a different spin on the question of how
knowledge is distributed. Do we doubt that many kinds of
knowledge (e.g. the knowledge of how to send people to the moon)
is distributed among Persons? Or (Luhmann has a book on love)
that the knowledge of how to maximize intimacy, sexual pleasure,
or trust between two particular people is distributed between
those people as it is acquired? that it is an emergent property
of the dyad, uniquely embodied in it, not analyzable into
separately held knowledges in the separate Persons, and not
transferable in general to other partners?
This view does provide an important corrective to the 'networks
of social practices' model that is still quite useful for many
purposes, for it balances 'practices' as socio-typical and so
independent of particular individual practitioners with a sense
of the individuality of systems or networks of practices-with-
these-practitioners. Dyads, groups, communities (along with the
non-human participants that are integrated into the practices
that constitute these units of analysis) are always, like
Persons, also individuals, and one cannot construct individuals
from units like practices which are 'typicals'. So one needs a
sense in which practices-by-Persons or practices-in-dyads, etc.
become individualized instances of typicals (and potentially new
or divergent future typicals, necessary for a dynamic model).
The practices model, or an equivalent actant-network model, does
then make sense of how something more than a single other Person
can be person-ified (the reverse of the Cartesian object-
ification). For if that other Person, in relation to us, is
constituted (at least in part) from the co-practices and joint
activities in which we both participate, and if His/Her
Personhood (consciousness, agency, feelings, etc.) is so
constituted, then so may be the Personhood of any unit of
analysis in which Person-constituting practices play a central
role (i.e. practices which can only be done with Persons as
actants or participants).
Minus this rationalizing bridge, this strategy has in fact been
applied, going intuitively from I-thou models to
reconceptualizations of Person-environment relations, by the so-
called Deep Ecology movements, which claim (either on moral
grounds or epistemological ones) that landscapes and ecosystems
do/ought to have the status of Persons in terms of how Human-
Persons interact with/in them. Many cultures treat ecosystems and
non-human integral components of ecosystems as Persons, and it is
arrogant to imagine that this is simply a 'mistake'. It is a very
effective and widespread cultural practice, and many people in
our own culture/s have proposed that unless we can revive it in
some form, we may well prove not to have been a long-term viable
culture.
Our recent discussions have tended to objectify knowledge itself
into a know-how embodied in persons-and-things-in-activities, but
if we instead more radically Subject-ify knowledge, then the
question arises whether _consciousness_ is an essential aspect of
know-how. This leads to a number of difficult further problems,
of course, but the ultimate one I have in mind in light of the
Subject-ification of eco/social systems, is this: should we be
able to define, for every level of organization at least as
complex as a living human organism, an appropriate analogue of
(form of) consciousness? (and unconsciousness, of course). If we
are to relate to larger-scale human-and-more systems as co-
Subjects, will we not need a sense of their consciousness? and
some 'empathic' practices for 'sympathizing' with them, i.e. for
putting ourselves in their 'shoes', for some sort of asymmetric
reciprocity of feeling? Do we have any available cultural models
for this? JAY.
-----------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU