Alfred is a treasure. Even moreso when I think again of absent friends from
earlier iterations of this discussion ...
I hear a good deal of phenomenological sensibility in Alfred's discontent
with the divorce of abstract categories and concrete experience. I resonate
also with his focus on the evolutive nature of
experience-in/through-systems, which I call the dynamical, though of course
for complex systems (we agree entirely about why they differ in this from
electrons and atoms) the dynamical is what I always seek a word like
"evolutive" for ... though I usually settle for something like
"developmental" ... systems that can't know where they can go until they've
got there, systems that surprise us, and themselves ... the generators of
diversity (g.o.d., a poor pun from immunology), the making new.
Alfred and I, and I think many of us, share a desire to codeploy the
semiotic and the phenomenological, the dynamic and the systemic. My latest
fascination is with the re-integration of affect into meaning-making
systems, recognizing that the only way we know systems is by being part of
them, and this is also the only way we can know ourselves. Feeling is an
important quality of our experience of dynamic inter-activity in-systems
(or in-networks), it can be a guide to insight, and it is also a cultural
touchstone -- like the other dichotomous concept-pairs Alfred mentions --
of how far we have to go to re-imagine our basic view of science.
What stood out for me in Alfred's most recent message was the judgment that:
"What's crucial ... for us, is what a structure we
can discern can do in connection with other structures."
Again we have to take this dynamically, evolutively, in the context of his
previous point:
"the basic question we have to find
answers to is how do the structures we can discern or infer come about."
Becoming. Connecting. Seen and felt from the inside.
I like "discerned" as a word for seen-meaningfully. Halliday likes
"construed", for much the same usage. DIscerned adds the sense of judgment,
and that is a quality too much hidden away in the ideology of science.
Science, like everything, is grounded in good judgment. Discerning is also
a kind of judgment; discernment.
I wonder, Alfred, as you write more about evolutive systems in our semiotic
ecology, if you have any advice about how to talk more usefully about
affect, feeling, and judgment?
Admiringly, JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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