So, in addition to the original thesis of a play meta-relation,
and a resistance/piety one, we can add a possible 'heyoka
balancing' stance (see below), and a 'critical-reflexive self-
awareness' stance. All of these add to our freedom-in-action by
allowing a break to made within the flow of activity, through
recursion, as well as through 'contradiction'. In little Arne's
bottle-feeding episode, my guess was that a material
contradiction (toy-bottle doesn't do as real-bottle does) set off
or enabled the semogenesis, but that the play-stance also played
a role in allowing a space of alternatives to be 'lived'. In the
other cases as well there is always, I think, both some
ecological leverage point (crazy behavior, often physical or
materially highlighted) and some recursivity (we act on our own
way-of-acting) involved when a stance-to-activity is created,
maintained, or changed.
Coyote wisdom or medicine seems to belong with the play-stance,
as a creation of contradictions material and/or discursive,
probably on more than one level of logical-typing simultaneously
(the liberatory inverse of Bateson's double-binding). Heyoka
balancing or interpreting the heyoka spirit seems to have
somewhat the same effect, but in a more serious mood, perhaps the
'pious' analogue to coyote playfulness. 'Pious' in Bill's
original sense of striving, or not-striving, to maintain a heyoka
way of doing (doing 'backwards'?) that is in tension with the
'normal' way of doing and -- and this is the key point, I think
-- _not_ thereby simply offering an alternative (Hey, be heyoka
backwards like me!), but enabling us to see the unmarked, normal
stance _as a stance_, and so levering us up towards meta-
consciousness (Aufhebung?).
The 'balancing' then could be viewed as like my notion of moving-
in-and-out of play, as Rolfe says, at the community level -- to
have heyoka and non-heyoka lifeways lived out, and so everyone's
being socially enmeshed in them; all are participants in a
collective being-heyoka/not-heyoka, and so being able to achieve
a point of balance between the two which is neither, but meta to
both. I think that truly Being-Heyoka is maintaining oneself in
this state of balancing (a dynamic, not static balance, the
moving-between), and not simply acting-heyoka on this or that
occasion. Obviously there is a dialectic here. The acting-heyoka
makes the Being-Heyoka possible for the interpreter and
ultimately for the community; the Being-Heyoka of the interpreter
enables him (her?) to act-heyoka on this or that occasion.
How about Trungpa-Buddha? a stance toward activity that has a
'light touch' also seems to me to be one that is from some sort
of dynamic balance that enables us to participate passionately,
but at the same time never to be entrapped totally into the flow
of activity. Such a view would not be unlike our own classic
notion of how humans differ from animals (who are supposed to be
thus trapped, stimulus-bound, etc. whether they are or not), but
it would be at a higher meta-level, for one would then not even
be locked within semiosis itself, even meaning-commitments and
reality-convictions could never 'harden' but would always be kept
dynamically 'off-balance' (which _is_ dynamic balance), enacted
'with a light touch'. In this cultural tradition, of course, one
can go back to the stance-toward-action of the Hindu _Gita_
texts, often translated as 'non-attachment to action'. This does
not, I think, correspond to our Western notions of objective
distancing or socially superior disinterest in the mundane
(though it can degenerate into this in India as elsewhere), but
exactly to this same 'light touch' or 'dynamic off-balance'
stance to activity.
It is interesting that our European tradition seems to give us a
choice of either piety-authenticity-sincerity or critical-
reflexivity (faith vs rational skepticism, alas!) as marked
stances toward activity, but has not developed or valorized play-
stance, light-touch, backwards/forwards-balancing, or some of
these other possible meta-stances toward activity. Our cultural
disposition to conflictual oppositions (either/or) rather than
dynamic complementarities (both/and) does not really seem to
offer a road to meta-consciousness-in-activity in the way these
other cultures do. What do we get out of trying to balance piety-
authenticity-faith with its unmarked alternative stance/s (ie.
stances of opportunistic flexibility? habituation?) -- not much
enlightenment. Or from the same exercise for critical-reflexivity
vs. 'ordinary doing'. The two marked stances, when played off
against each other, have probably produced the intellectual
highpoints of European modernism, but certainly not much in the
way of a meta-consciousness that could be envied.
Not sure how to wrap this one up! still a lot of thinking to do
... Perhaps, at the least, one can see here that it may be
impossible to construct a satisfying conceptualization of human
activity, including its important capacity for meta-relational
activity stances, without looking beyond the European cultural
tradition for our data and models. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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