Some clarifications.
I was not arguing against dialectical materialism, only for its
compatibility with social-semiotic-ecological perspectives. I was also
trying to do so from a sense of how the term 'Materialism" was being used
in earlier posts, trying to steer a middle course between what I take to be
the most common uses of dialectical-historical materialist ideas in the
subjects under discussion (and which may not agree with either a close
reading of Hegel or anyone's interpretation of Marx) and my own broadest
interpretation of the relevant theoretical implications of these ideas
(broad because I was seeking to find possibilities of integration).
My point about commensurability and the historical succession of dominant
ideas was an argument against modernist views of Progress, that later ideas
should replace earlier ones, whereas I was arguing they should only be
added to them, in a cumulative rather than a Progress-ive replacement
model. It would make sense, I was trying to say, to have later ideas
supersede earlier ones if they really were 'commensurable', by which I mean
culturally commensurable, talking about the same matters within systems of
terms of reference and assumptions that can be put more or less in
one-to-one correspondence. That certainly does happen within the same
cultural tradition over relatively short timescales; a community may simply
decide that the scientific explanations of a decade or two ago were wrong
or inadequate and better ones now exist. I don't think it happens on
timescales where there has been a 'paradigm shift' in the very way in which
the issues are defined, or on scales of cultural change where the rest of
the system of terms of reference and assumptions are very different. My
argument was really just an application to history of the usual argument we
make about the value of cross-cultural diversity in any one historical
epoch. It's better to have many truths, from somewhat incommensurable
viewpoints, than just one. "Progress" and ethnocentrism seem to me very
much cut from the same cloth. (It should also be clear that I was not using
in/commensurable in their simplest meanings of having common units of
quantitative measure, but in the extended meaning of having a common
qualitative basis for comparison.)
I'm not quite clear what the question about developmental levels refers to,
especially in regard to the history of ideas. Development is a process in
which system organization gains in complexity in part through the emergence
of more levels of organization, usually in a nested hierarchy in which
lower level units get organized into new intermediate-level patterns so as
to function in some way at a still higher contextual level. It does not
proceed in a simple fashion of piling higher levels on top. What actually
happens is pretty complicated, and interesting. I do not however believe
that the concepts of development, or levels, as I use and understand them,
apply to ideas, theories, philosophies, or to intellectual or social
history directly. They might apply, in a subtle and indirect way, to
something like the ways in which 'texts' mediate social organization and
social control, and to something like the historical development of more
complex societies (really ecosocial systems). This is an extremely
difficult issue. Useful notions of development usually depend on
recapitulation, on a system developing in a way that is 'true to type'.
Such systems also individuate, or develop in unique ways, within roughly
the envelope of the type (but also sometimes outside it, extending it).
Types of such systems evolve, which is a different process than
development. Emergence in development is not ordinarily an initial or
originary emergence, but a recapitulation of a sequence of emergences that
have evolved to define the type.
Something like a city might well have a type-specific developmental
trajectory. New types of cities might evolve in part through the emergence
in some first city (or several meeting the right conditions) of a new level
of material-social-cultural organization. The new cities would not be at a
"higher developmental level"; they would just have _more levels_ when fully
developed. If the conditions needed for the emergence persist (perhaps in
part through the effects of the first new cities' existence), then other
such cities might also come to exist, and might well up to a point
recapitulate the development of the original more complex cities. In these
new cities, I think, one would expect to find new ways in which 'texts'
(semiotic products) both as artifacts and through their meaning-content
contributed to the functioning of the city. In this indirect way, there
might be some connection between typical contents or genres of texts and
the cross-level dynamics of cities that were of the same type. None of this
however would lead to a model of cultural ideas 'developing' or there being
developmental levels of cultural ideas. Emergence does not refer to ideas
as such, and is not akin to Aufhebung as a relation among ideas. It refers
to material systems whose internal dynamics may be mediated by semiotic
artifacts and their meaning content.
From a semiotic point of view, it is perfectly reasonable to say that when
new ideas come along and the whole structure of ideas about some theme
changes, that older ideas may become incorporated within an expanded
system, and in the process they are likely to change their meanings and be
reinterpreted. Perhaps for the generation for whom both the old and the new
systems have existed in different periods of their lives, the dialectical
tensions and the sense of Aufhebung remains; but in time I think we lose
our sense of the relations among ideas historically because we have never
experienced the intellectual world of the old system or the meanings of
ideas within that system. I suppose I am saying that I do not believe at
all in the possibility of intellectual history, if it claims to know what
ideas meant in earlier historical epochs. Like Foucault, I regard all such
history as conducted within our own intellectual frames of reference for
our own purposes, an archeology in which the semiotic artifacts of the past
exist now as elements of the present and have their meanings in the
semiotic terms of reference of the present. Older discourses do exert a
certain 'tug' on our frame of reference; in trying to make sense of them we
frequently have to enlarge our own terms. But we only make newer present
systems, we never recapture the meanings of the past. This does not mean
that I do not believe that present ideas arose in part from social-material
interactions in the past and mediated by whatever those past meanings were.
I also believe that a 'historical' method is extremely useful for expanding
present meaning systems. I just don't believe its usefulness arises from
actual regeneration of past meanings. (The case for meanings seem very
clear to me; the case for the possibility of knowledge of past events is
less clear, and has to be defined relative to what knowledge we imagine we
have of present events in which we are not participants.)
All this, pretty much, is about history in relation to the development of
ecosocial systems. Part of that development, on a much shorter timescale,
is the development of individual human organisms (and lots of other
subsystems). I am quite sure that there is true neurological development,
say, including recapitulation of emergence of new levels of neurological
organization. I am not so sure that there is 'cognitive development',
depending on what we mean by that. If it only means that the ways in which
we interact with the environment grow more complex in part because they are
mediated by neurological developments, and in part because they are
mediated by semiotic participation that couples us progressively into more
levels of social organization in more complex ways, then, as an
epiphenomenon, yes. If we mean, however, as Piaget proposed, that either
ideas or schemas for semiotic production follow their own logic of
development to greater complexity, then I would say, mostly no. Piaget of
course was looking to find something like the Kantian a priori in early
development; or else he imagined that one could reconstruct humankind's
progress from elementary to more advanced scientific concepts. Neither
project to me is feasible. What Piaget observed seems to me to be mainly a
socially induced pseudo-development, again an epiphenomenon, which to some
degree in its earliest stages may also depend on the readiness of the
organism's primary development to respond to socially organized input.
Perhaps some of the very most basic invariants have a long evolutionary
history in perceptual-motor functioning, but as we get to complex symbolic
mediation, and so to anything like what I would want to call 'ideas', we
are no longer dealing with a developmental process in the sense I'm using
the term. (For language, some of syntax may follow brain development --
itself dependent on social language use to advance -- but semantics, whose
role starts quite early even in the elaboration of syntax, depends on
social semiotic input.)
Obviously if we change our definition of the 'system' in any of these
cases, we get a slightly different story, and this can be very confusing, I
realize. Is the developing system the organism? or is it the organism plus
its immediate social and material environment? Are we talking about the
development vs. the history of a society, a culture, a city, homo sapiens,
the whole planet? What's necessary to sort these matters out, I believe, is
to look at what processes take place on which timescales, what material
systems underlie these processes, what semiotic artifacts/productions
connect processes on the same and especially across different scales to
each other, and how the semiotic content of these artifacts changes the
dynamics of the couplings among the processes. Doing this systematically,
or case by case, tends to make rather a hash of much of our usual
terminology (history, development, evolution, person, cognition, culture,
society, environment, etc.). I apologize if I have added to the confusion
by trying to write across different discourses, some of which may be
incommensurable, and others of which may be in the process of being superseded.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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