Jay suggests that notions of justice may be so specific to different
levels of analysis that "linkages between them are mostly illusory" :
Our sense of being fair to an
>individual requires that we think in terms of all the meanings
>that individual has for us, that we think of the individual as a
>complex intersection of social positionings, trajectories,
>histories. This is how we do tend to treat people once we get to
>know them, even in a good job interview process. At this level of
>analysis no macrosocial category has any utility (as
>ethnomethodology has long maintained, precisely because it does
>analyze at the level of the 'whole interaction' if you like, as
>phenomenology recommends).
In contrast, "culturally salient discriminands" are better viewed
in terms of:
>a 'social space' whose dimensions of relevant difference are
>something like social categories (but they can't really be
>categories, they need a more topological basis), and certainly
>aren't meant to be sets consisting of individuals.
The complexity of these
>systems is such that one needs multiple, incommensurable
>discourses (and analytical practices generally) corresponding to
>really distinct 'levels' of organization in ecosocial systems
"Incommensurable" is the critical term. The conclusion is that,
despite the use we have made of "intermediate levels" like
individuals-in-activity to see the overlap between micro & macro
levels of analysis, there is "an irreducible, unbridgeable divide"
between them.
And that may be.
On the other hand, it doesn't help us much with our close attention
to ourselves and positioning in a social order, which writes itself
on interpersonal relations. As Jay said, social class categories are
irrelevant to interpersonal relating _once we get to know another
person_. We learn rather quickly to disattend to signals
of gross social categories and to attend more capaciously to signals of
locatedness in multiple and often ill-defined social spaces, and even
to lose that perspective as we focus on the minute particulars of
the "whole" person; but until we engage the other person, we can't do that.
And we still have choices to make in our day to day lives about whom we
engage, the activities we choose to take up, we still have some choice
about how to position ourselves in the institutional practices that
engage us. If social facts have a material reality that derives from
>their cultural salience and the material actions
>taken by people in accordance with these culturally salient
>meanings and differences_,
then social actors can at least indirectly influence the material
effects of those facts. The space we have to negotiate in may only be
at that "intermediate level" but that is where our actions count FIRST.
Jay raises the question, what does it mean "at the social level"
to be fair to members of social groups other than those we
recognize as ours:
>we don't have very good discourses about fairness,
>justice, equity, and so on at the social level (any level beyond
>the individual). What does it mean to be 'fair' to 'women'?
>'African-Americans'? or for that matter to 'rainforests' or 'the
>cities' or a landscape? Any attempt to define and reduce such
>notions (which are I think essential to the long-term viability
>of cultures, maybe of the species) to corresponding notions
>framed at the level of the individual will fail, just as misuse
>of social categories does when applied to individuals.
....
the statistical change does
>not take place 'because' of how any individuals were treated, as
>individuals.
Mmaybe not "because of" in a linear sense, but I would
have thought from some of Jay's previous xmca messages & other
texts that ways of treating individuals on a case by case basis
might shift probabilities.... Maybe "changing individual people's
attitudes and beliefs is not enough," but if more individuals
in institutional settings make choices that favor the inclusion of
those more typically excluded, if more employers choose to hire a
woman over an equally qualified man, then the job in question is
less categorizable as gender-specific; it becomes more of a space where
categorial relations can dissolve into multiple combinatorial
possibilities, to paraphrase Jay from somewhere else.
Jay writes:
'Social
>policy' is supposed to be something like ethical reasoning at the
>social level, but no one really quite knows how to do that.
But do you mean to suggest, conversely, that social space topologies have
no relevance to ethical reasoning at the individual level, to what we
do or choose to do? -- why bother?
He writes:
I would even go so far as to
>say that it is _not_ the actions of individuals alone which leads
>to phenomena of social-category differences (e.g. that the
>economic level of African-Americans vs. European-Americans cannot
>in principle be traced to the sum of all the actions of
>individual people, tolerant or prejudiced, industrious or lazy,
>inclined to capitalist labor or alienated from it); there are
>_system_ level effects ('interactions' 'synergies') at work which
>all the conscious good-will and individual-level fairness in the
>world would modify but not supersede.
So what's wrong with modification, if that's the degree of difference
that individual action makes possible?
>So AA has been a noble experiment in setting social policy in
>terms of social categories. And we didn't have a clue what we
>were doing. We knew there were statistical effects in terms of
>these categories, but not how they were produced, and so we don't
>really have any chance of changing them. If some do change, it's
>not because of AA in and of itself.
No not AA in and of itself. But it is one inroad. One tiny inroad. And
if many travel that road, it becomes a branching artery of tiny
inroads, and gradually the re-composition of social space has its own
effects, which we can't yet calculate, but which we may want to believe
will contribute to changing micro-macro relations.
I wonder if dialectical faith might have relevance to how we relate and
think about our relatedness to the "larger social unit"...
In conversation with Therese, Jay wrote:
"Skepticism says that we should not have any faith....
Our view of dynamics may be that hypotheses once established as
reasonably likely can only come historically to be seen as less
warrantable, or to beome irrelevant to new concerns or new conditions.
But we do still go on, most of us. We do still take the risk of
wasting our lives in a vain project of passing on useful ideas and
information to others and to an uncertain future. Every day we commit
to this agenda... so we must indeed have some sort of dynamic fairth,
a faith that is contingent, but also renewable... act to act,
commitment to commitment
A dialectical _praxis_, then, is not at all one that is assured of
making a better world tomorrow, but only of aiming to do so today.
We cannot, I believe, know the consequences of our interventions,
whether for good or ill in the longer term. Buyt we can try today to do
something that seems good now, and one of those things, for me, is to
find ways to intervene more succcessfully. I suppose that is hybris, and
rationally it is really folly.... but still there is a contingent faith
that if these things are not done others will do more ill....
Hmmmm.....
He also wrote there that "feminist discourse is positional and valuable
for that reason" but constructed from a position he can't occupy -- if
that's the case, if feminism were presupposed by some project you were
hired to do, Jay, and a feminist were in competition with you....
I hope you get a chance to post the "maybe more positive"
different tack on AA....
I really do value the systems-level analysis, though it is not
enough for me as a view on Affirmative Action, or for writing the
ethic of my daily life.
- Judy
....................
Judy Diamondstone diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Graduate School of Education Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place New Brunswick, NJ 08903