intermediation

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Fri, 09 Feb 96 00:10:17 EST

Many thanks to Phil Agre for the fascinating story of his affair
with intermediation and the noticing of analogies.

I certainly recognized the phenomena he was describing since I
have for most of my life found myself doing much the same sort of
thing. I did not write the examples down (usually, unless they
concerned my current work or theoretical interests), and so may
not have pushed the habit to quite the level of mania it seems to
have eventually reached for Phil. I suppose I have always been in
the habit of constructing hierarchies of less to more abstract
categories for the phenomena of everyday life, and once such
categories suggest themselves (and they are of course limitless,
with the probability of notice a function of cultural
predispositions and then of individual recursion), they form a
temporary perceptual filter (or selective amplifier): we project
them wherever we can. I suppose that in a way this is as close as
I've ever come to one of the principles of ethnomethodology (as I
understand it): that reflexive consideration of everyday practice
foregrounds our construction of reality (aka our accomplishment
of socially meaningful activities).

What particularly struck me, though, was Phil's suggestion of the
inculcation of this habit as a useful element in educating
ourselves or others for the kinds of thinking that are valued in
some places in our society (like universities with intellectual
pretensions), and which I certainly believe are useful tools for
some purposes (whether others value them _per se_, or only the
results we obtain with them). I have no real recollection of
where I acquired these habits, though I certainly had them
already by the 10th grade. I exercised them quite a bit at the
University of Chicago, not so much in classes as in the informal
culture of divergently-chaining bull-sessions. I don't think I
acquired the habits at home, or in school, though perhaps in
loosely structured, and not-too-seriously-taken adolescent
conversation with my 'bright' friends. I have noticed that most
of the people I consider to be smart in the same way I am have
this habit, one way or another. (They also tend to think about
any given issue from several different viewpoints and play these
off against one another; and to generate a sort of dialectic that
moves across cases and levels of abstraction to produce novelty
from incommensurability -- much harder to describe than to do.)

I wonder if we can indeed get very far by deliberately teaching
people such gymnastic strategies? I suppose it has been tried,
and sometimes works. But, as with many such issues, I keep coming
back to the question of why some people enjoy these games and
take to them, while others find them pointless or in conflict
with their identities, with the kind of 'who' they are. I believe
that it is only if we understand how basic dispositions towards
these meta-discursive strategies come to be formed, or re-formed,
that valuable articulations of the strategies themselves, such as
Phil has provided, can play a useful practical role in education.
JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU