Perhaps we should recognize that there can in principle be a continuum of
possible scales of analysis, and of action, from the most local event to
the longest chain of connections made among events, and the largest scale
of networks of such connections. But in this continuum we typically find
that there are certain scales, or perhaps simply certain networks of
connections (made materially by the circulation of actants, as well as
semiotically by the naming and analysis of scale-specific phenomena of
circulation), that stand out to participants and to observers (sometimes
differently in the two cases). These are the 'emergent' levels of
phenomena, still contingent on their construction 'from below', but with
meanings and implications that cannot be reduced to or predicted from
events below. Why do we continue so often to circulate in the same paths?
to re-enact larger-scale patterns? How is it that I can write, contingently
at each moment of word-selection, and yet wind up writing well-known genres
and registers, and very typically for my historical period and social
background? The answer in part is that in each event I am participating in
more than one context, more than one chain of events on a larger scale. I
am in circulation along many paths, and so are the other actants with which
I interact in each micro-event. So that we are mutually constraining in
ways that have only some possible self-consistent and repeatable patterns
... other choices lead to dead ends, to contradictions, meaninglessness,
points from which there are no possible sequents ... though occasionally
they also blaze new trails, discover and create new possibilities in the
larger system.
The meso and the macro are the typical. They are also the mutually enabling
and mutually reinforcing and constraining intersections of multiple
typicalities, of a _complex_ system.
I think it is very important to see, as Naoki points out, that if we ever
hope to connect our understandings formulated in the languages appropriate
to these different possible scales, that we must see how they all arise
from a common matrix of events that are never isolated instances, but
always a kind of event not usual in our modern eurocultural metaphysics:
events that always mirror other events, events that are always implied by
and implicate other events. (Some have returned to Leibniz to speak of this.)
Just one consequence of this is that we need to regard communities, just as
semiotically we regard categories, _dialectically_, both in the sense that
they must be mutually defining and implicating as Naoki points out, and in
the sense that from this same origin, they must also be dynamically
contingent, self-organizing-in-context, and so always in the process of
change ... on many scales.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
---------------------------