Re: appropriation.trans

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Fri, 12 Apr 96 23:34:09 EDT

While I'm sure that Paul Prior's concerns about the shorthand
of 'transformative appropriation' for the kind of learning I like
to see could lead to interesting discussions of the underlying
metaphors and their limitations (e.g. ownership models of
appropriation), on the core issue of enculturation, I do want
to acknowledge that I believe that all learning must be, to some
very large degree an 'attunement' (not a bad metaphor, but with
its own problems, e.g. the presumption of 'harmony') with an
existing community in which a historical tradition is 'sedimented'.
Nearly all our learning is learning in and about our communities.
They had all this stuff before we did. There isn't much we know
that came from anywhere else. But (a) we can't truly replicate
other's ways of knowing (only rough equivalents), and (b) we can
recontextualize and revalorize, make the others' Words our own
(ownership, appropriation), by changing them (and so also
our Selves) in our use of them (transformation).

I would be the first one to deconstruct the notion of the
individual as an ultimate unit of analysis, but then there would
be no viable notion of 'learning' left as most people understand
it. Learning for me can only be a process of coming into a
particular sort of relation with a community (i.e. as an individual
who participates in a commmunity). If we shift focus to the
community, or the ecosocial system, level, then the processes we
formerly called learning become part of the dynamics of the
community, the ways in which its parts interact so as to continue
its existence as a system. But at this level we have very little
or no developed language in which to formulate what we desire or
want such processes to be like. Phenomenologically, we experience
communities from the perspective of individuals who are parts of
such communities, and not from the perspective of the community
itself. Accordingly our moral, political, ethical, and value
discourses only frame an answer to what is 'good' or desirable
learning in these terms (i.e. presuming a notion of individual).

It might be a very exciting exercise to try to reimagine these
issues from the community-level perspective. We do have some
discourses about what makes a 'good ecosystem' and certainly
ones about what makes a 'good society'. Frankly, however, I know
no convincing or persuasive discourses that bridge between these
desires and those for learning at the individual level. (I know
our literature is full of them, I just read them as earnest
efforts but not successful ones).

I am not sure that (a) any model we have about the good society
which is framed above the level of the individual is itself
cogent, (b) that it is possible to link discourses across these
levels, or (c) that as participants in a system it is possible
for us to view the system from its own level, or even to imagine
such a view, at least in what we regard as our normal states of
'consciousness'(i.e. by what we consider sanely self-aware ways
of being-with-the-world, modes of interactivity for which discursive
meaning is useable).

JAY.

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