Jay, you say:
"Modernist institutions belong to the Machine Age; they live through
a cybernetic technology of predictability and control, internally as
also in their requirements for controlled and predictable
environments."
The problem, surely, is that they can't have either condition.
Institutions composed of human habit and patterned practice cannot
internally regular enough to fulfill the requirements of a cybernetic
model. Nor can "the world" be made so regular. Whatever the world may
be like behind our representations of it, the consequences of our
actions leads to the conclusion that it resists interpretation as a
cybernetic/clockwork model.
What sorts of happily functioning institutions are there that would
help us resist this interpretation? The term "institution" has widely
gotten to be synonymous with bureaucracy but in the pragmatic
tradition of sociology this wasn't so. Might families be examples of
institutions that work more "ecologically" (for want of a better
term)? Are there larger institutions that work better? --I wonder
because given our (I think mistaken) basic cultural presumptions
that the world is governed by rigid rules and that human thought
itself is best explained on a similar basis it is hard to think
around the idea that rationalist institutions are necessary if
regrettable.
I'd like to see a real-world, different model for at least
medium-sized coordination of people as a basis for discussion.
Any ideas?
(Was there a time when colleges were collegial and could be seen as
such an example? Or am I dreaming?)
John
>This message is partly a test to see if I am indeed re-subscribed
>and gremlin free (I got my self-description message back in
>duplicate from the listserver, so who knows?) ...
>
>... and partly to say hello again to many friends, who are probably
>on vacation and suffering email and xmca -withdrawal symptoms in a
>ritual act of e-cleansing ... certainly a form of summer rehab in
>our line of work.
>
>In my case it was surely a mistake to come back to the office ... to
>find our website mutilated by our locally inept computing services
>people, their "solution" locking me out of fixing it ... no check in
>the mail for funding our upcoming conference ... and numerous
>administrative frustrations not worth thinking about much less
>mentioning in public.
>
>If anyone actually knows firsthand of a university, or any
>institution to which one could belong without too much pain in the
>conscience, where there is good management and functioning
>infrastructure ... I'd be interested to hear about it.
>
>My experience with the increasing dyfunctionality of modernist
>institutions, from cities to air traffic control to universities, is
>leading me more and more to try to understand a new kind of internal
>contradiction in modernist society ... not so much economic per se,
>as socio-technological ... in which the modernist impulse to solve
>problems by adding new regulations and controls runs head on into
>the tendency of complex eco-social systems to "lock-up" (yes, just
>like your computer) when subject to too many constraints and to
>operate efficiently only when there is a great deal of "slack"
>available to allow them to improvise around the always emerging new
>structurations that arise from the unpredictable interaction of too
>many semi-autonomous elements (yes, us, but also most everything
>else, too).
>
>Globalization, however much a misnomer (it's really a thin network
>on a global scale, hardly the whole world in any sense), is pushing
>institutions to try the modernist solution at unprecedented scales,
>not just of space and time, or of matter, energy, information, and
>artificial value (i.e money-like flows), but of complexity.
>Modernist institutions belong to the Machine Age; they live through
>a cybernetic technology of predictability and control, internally as
>also in their requirements for controlled and predictable
>environments. I don't know how close we are to hyper-regulating
>ourselves right out of existence, but the nonlinearities of the
>system would suggest that that horizon (yes, also known as a
>catastrophe) is closer than it appears to our linear-trained
>intuitions. More and more institutions, at all their scales of
>operation, are more and more desperately trying to regulate their
>environments ... which consist more and more exclusively of other
>institutions (and the "natural" environment), also engaged in the
>same effort .... with the set of self-consistent solutions (either
>win-win, or even win-lose) shrinking exponentially ... toward the
>point where there are no solutions (lose-lose) and the conditions of
>sustainability of the whole and its dependent parts can no longer be
>met. It can happen a lot faster than you think.
>
>I painted a somewhat more optimistic version of this picture in a
>plenary address in Canada last week, but since returning to the US,
>and my own institutional reality, my palette seems to be growing
>darker again. There are a lot of people thinking about social
>justice within the modernist institutional framework, a lot thinking
>about looming ecological catastrophes, and a lot looking for the
>silver-lining in the global information thunderhead, but not many I
>fear thinking intensively about this other internal contradiction
>within modernism (yes, including capitalism of course) ... and about
>what happens if it arrives first.
>
>Enjoy your vacations!
>
>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>
>---------------------------
----------------
"To every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and
wrong." Walter Lippmann
John St. Julien (stjulien@udel.edu)
School of Education
University of Delaware
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 01 2001 - 01:01:23 PDT