I have not read Peter Hoeg's story, but the themes seem familiar
enough ones in our modern culture: school disicipline and
rebellion, the tyranny of regimentation by the clock, outcasts
united against the system. I have known some people who led lives
very much like those of the protagonists.
I want to comment on Yrjo's challenges, and add some further
footnotes to the story he uses to ground them.
The ending of the story, at least as we have it here, stuck me as
strangely reconstitutive of dominant cultural biases: August, who
rebels violently (the working-class and underclass way), turns
his violence against himself, and the Director gets away. Peter,
who rebels in a more middle-class way, by clever text-mediated
extortion, wins advantage (and the Director goes unscathed?). And
Katarina, the female, fades away with no dramatic role to play in
the denouement?
Development and Rejection
I don't think it is anything too new to theories of adolescent
development (as formulated by adults, who as a caste oppress
adolescents at least economically and politically, and often
physically as well) that rebellion is to be seen as a normal part
of development. The question, at least since the 1960s, has been:
with what consequences? eventually reintegrating into a basically
unchanged social order, or ramifying into a variety of life-long
struggles to subvert aspects of that order?
If we take a more social and collective view of 'development',
that individuals and face-to-face groups develop within a
changing ecosocial system, with changes at different levels and
scales affecting one another, then we need to understand more
clearly when, and how, if at all, local rebellions can have
system-wide effects (the reverse we know only too well).
It's interesting to look at the origins of the 'development'
metaphor for socialization (and that is mostly what social and
cognitive development is after the first year or so of life out
of the womb). 'Development' is a biological metaphor, grafted
onto, as Yrjo notes, a cultural notion of 'progress'. But it is
not altogether clear even biologically that development
represents improving adaptation to the environment (forget about
'mastery'!). Developmental stages in ontogeny represent the
evolutionary stepping stones by which we happen to have evolved
into what we are at birth; each of these stages was quite well
adapted to its own environment in the past. If evolution does not
represent 'progress' (not a tenable view anymore), then
development doesn't either. It simply represents a
recapitulative, cumulative sequence that gets us from single-
celled organisms to a particular primate variant.
We can take this notion further and question whether
socialization (i.e. enculturation, behavioral 'development')
should not be seen similarly as a relatively accidental sequence
by which it is possible to get children to behave like
contemporary adults, more or less. And as a sequence in which
younger humans are at every stage equally well adapted to their
environments (which obviously include caregivers as part of their
ecosocial environment). Now if you believe that history
represents 'progress' (and only towards Us, not towards every
human group existing in 1996), you might consider that
socialization-development is a historically recapitulative
improvement. But I don't think that is tenable either. We are
simply forced to adapt to different niches in the ecosocial
system, adult-niches rather than child-niches. Adults are not
better adapted to their niches than children are; if anything
less so.
'Development' is a convenient metaphor for socialization
ideologically. It tends both to naturalize the particular course
of development in our society (inevitable, so don't critique it)
and valorize it (it's good, it's leading to better things, so
don't knock it). It also allows all divergence to be labeled
deviance, and treated as sickness, quasi-biological abnormality,
to be 'cured' (as in Hoeg's story). It creates a false
identification between necessary conditions for ontogenetic
development (otherwise the foetus aborts, or dies soon after
birth) and contingent conditions ('their plan') in socialization
(otherwise you get a different society, not _no_ society).
Finally, in biological development there is, as Yrjo proposes for
socialization-development, a rejection and destruction of older
forms as new ones appear. Those gills on the foetus -- what
happens to them? At least they are superseded, but are they
transformed or actually destroyed? what happens to these cell-
lines? I don't know, and I hope someone else does.
In the late stages of ontogeny there is more tolerance for
alternative pathways, for viable mutations (in the early stages
most deviation is fatal), for now we are almost what our
ancestors became by evolution (recall that what evolves are
developmental trajectories, not species as such) and there are
undoubtedly some alternative forms built on the same foundations,
some might-be's that could occur rather than the did-be's being
recapitulated. Post-natal development likewise, insofar as it is,
slightly, a continuation of ontogeny, allows greatest lability
for change. And in socialization, we might imagine, later
socialization allows the most scope for behavioral alternatives
as well.
Hoeg's story of 'glass tunnels' regimented by time strikes home
here: where are our 'laboratories' where we can 'have peace'
'gather our thoughts' to 'carry out experiments'? Possible
alternative lines of late-socialization-development are perhaps
preempted (especially among those of us with the material and
mediational resources to critique the status quo and plan and
carry out experiments) by never having enough 'leisure time' to
do so. Even us academics. Leisure may be a luxury for the
individual, but it is a necessity for the longterm survivability
of an ecosocial system (see below).
Collective Development
If we see 'development' as socialization, then it is quite clear
that it must happen through social interaction. But Yrjo's point
in his paper goes further: an exclusive focus on individual
development defines the wrong, or at least an inadequate _unit of
analysis_ for these processes. No one s-develops (i.e.
socialization-development) alone, but more than this, how we
develop is a function of intimate interdependencies among the
developmental events in others' lives; we participate in others'
s-development; we s-develop each other. Not just adults and
children, but peer-to-peer, and older-with-younger; and this is
true _reciprocally_ (you can bet that new parents s-development
is shaped strongly -- and most often conservatively -- by
participation in their children's s-development!).
In the 1970s Klaus Riegel proposed the writing of 'collective
biographies' to study mutual-development in close-knit groups.
Literary and artistic criticism have occasionally done this for
groups of adults who influenced one another's literary and
artistic development. This seems long overdue as a project for
social-developmental research.
Tall Towers vs. Broad Foundations
Perhaps the most interesting of Yrjo's challenges, for me, is to
break away from the linear, vertical metaphor of developmental
'progress' as increasing adaptedness to a single social niche
(i.e. becoming an ideal adult of a certain subculture by
socialization wholly within that subculture) to consider the
importance of socialization as adaptedness for the future of an
ecosocial system which is composed of many social worlds, many
communities and subcultures.
If we all stay within the glass tunnels offered by our own group,
socialized perfectly to function within it, but undeveloped in
relation to the larger ecosocial system of which our group is
always only one small part, then the system as a whole becomes
fragile. The long-term survivability of an ecosocial system
depends on its plasticity, its continuing adaptiveness (not its
current adaptedness) to inevitable changes in the conditions of
its survival. It cannot afford over-specialization of its
constituents. It needs a balance between specialized development
and a more robust retention of plasticity. Not only must there be
interaction between different 'patches' of the system, but, in a
true ecosocial system, where meaning matters as much as material
exchanges, there must be a certain degree of 'understanding'
between patches/subcultures. Some members of each subcommunity
must have a broader socialization than their own group can give,
must be socialized across the borders of different social worlds.
[The principles of ecosocial systems theory, and some of the
terms I'm using, are discussed in my _Textual Politics_, esp.
chapter 6.]
Shifting architectural metaphors, our society can build tall
towers of vertical s-development (efficient socialization into
specialized niches) only on the broad foundations of horizontal
development (cross-community hybrid socialization). Since this is
true in ecosocial systems on many scales (the fractal mosaic
model), even the most vertically specialized individuals require
some breadth, while all communities require some members who are
also at home in other communities. From the individual viewpoint
as well, or from that of the small face-to-face group, horizontal
breadth enhances vertical development by providing 'perspective'
(i.e. alternative views) on, for example, new concepts to be
learned. But more importantly, it allows the individual, and
moreso the group collectively, to critique and innovate more
effectively. Horizontal components in development act to prevent
stasis, which is deadly to any living system; vertical components
tend toward recapitulative perfection, too-narrow specialization
which is always only a change-in-the-wind away from uselessness
for survival.
In theorizing collective development which hybridizes social
worlds, such notions as 'third space' referred to by Yrjo owe a
debt to postmodern cultural theories (e.g. Homi Bhabha's) of
postcolonial literature, in which the 'third space' represents
neither recapitulation of the styles and values of the colonial
culture, nor an effort to return to pure indigenous forms, but a
space created by a new generation which has grown up partly in
both traditions and which refuses to be bullied into allegiance
to either, but sees in its own experience the sources of a third
culture of equal legitimacy, to be expressed by and in new forms
fashioned from the (now) raw material of the established
traditions.
I will be very interested to hear other people's responses to
Yrjo's challenges. xmca is surely an example of collective
development for many of us! JAY.
-----------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU