Every once in a while (how often, Eva?) we get back to critique of our own
social-cultural-class-gender-age-etc. positions as academics,
intellectuals, writers, theorists, racists, capitalists, millennarians,
christians, jews, Americans, non-Europeans, bisexuals, old farts, etc.
Maybe not surprising Diane's expression of feeling acutely the absence of
focus on gender (i.e. the unremarked universalization of a perspective that
could not be, or was not, multi-gendered -- a guy's, some guys' ) came in
the flow of discussion about the supposedly historical differences between
American and Russian neo-Vygotskyans (that turned out to be about cultural
and linguistic differences; what ever happened to History?), i.e. about the
role of difference. Big difference to so rarely get mentioned.
I am now reading, in rare spare moments, Donna Haraway's wonderful new book
_Modest Witness who-is-at Second Millennium ...._ (the title is long and amusing,
repunctuating the usual title-subtitle genre like an internet mailto URL).
The first couple chapters have a lot to say about the absence of gender
concerns in science studies, and I assume I've not read the last on this
core theme of the book.
Maybe after some time goes by, people might like to discuss a bit Haraway's
narratives about these issues.
Meanwhile, I have lately been having a periodic personal crisis of the "is
all this getting anywhere?" variety. One sidetrack has been taking
seriously Ken Gergen's arguments that a key thing about discourses (i.e.
discourse formations, Gee's Discourses) is what they imply about how people
live in communities where those discourses are prominent/dominant. 'Live'
here in the sense of the quality of our lives, our sense of bodily
satisfaction with what we do every day, with how we feel about the people
we live with/around. Communities in the sense of communities of practice
that are also communities of proximity and daily doings. Gergen foregrounds
interpersonal relationality, and here uses it as a barometer of quality of
life. He sees it as largely construed through discursive practices (not
just talk, but meaningful inter-action), and do looks to the talk as a
window on the quality of life in a community of people who talk this way.
My musings have led me in the direction, reflected in another posting to
the list (twisted internalization) of a 'reverse engineering' strategy.
I.e. the rather bizarre notion that we should spend more time trying to
make and live in satisfying human communities and then see what kinds of
discourses (including theoretical discourses) make sense in, are compatible
with the best of, such communities. Of course there is a chicken vs. egg
paradox here, you can't imagine and build better communities without some
discourses; but I get the feeling I have spent far too much of my life
trying to get the discourse first, and ignored the need to also re-frame my
life-in-community. Life in community has a lot to do with who we are and
what we are disposed to speak. I am beginning to find serious limits on
what I feel like speaking that seem to arise from the dysfunctions of my
local, lived communities.
One can not only catch or miss trains, one can also build them, but our
capacity and desire to do so develops or doesn't out of the synchronies and
dyssynchronies of what happens daily in our lives. There are possible
trains that could be built if we worked to modify the dyssynchronies that
keep us from being able to do so, which means changing the material
circumstances of our lives and our bodily and emotional relations to
others. The Hippie experiment seemed to partly follow this radical path,
but the mantra of 'Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out' began with the primacy of
inner experience (correct as to the importance of feeling, but not in
privileging interiority); in fact it was probably far more the 'dropping
out', i.e. changing participation from one kind of community to a very
different (and in that case mostly nonsustainable) kind, that spawned a lot
of both the emotional satisfaction and the intellectual-artistic production
of those communities. They were not based on LSD hallucinations, but on
alternative models of human relationships more faithful to (mostly
traditional) values than were/are the (also unsustainable, but
longer-lasting) communities they rejected.
This view is also causing me to reduce my enthusiasm for new
info-communication technologies. They are more likely to make things worse
if they are developed without the infrastructure of more humane communities.
It's seemingly a long way back to Diane's issues (shorter if I'd taken the
Haraway train), but evaluating what we omit in our discourses as a function
of the norms for relating to Other sorts of people in our most immediate
communities and daily lives, may prove more useful than reaching for more
distant, abstract and macro-social excuses.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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