We are born into already on-going communities and cultures, and
our resources for meaning (as opposed to just what we use them to
mean) come _mainly_ from these traditions. So does a lot of what
we do with them, and the dispositions to do some things rather
than others. To the extent that we are 'typical' of any of the
many types of behavior in our communities, or even fall within
the wide normal range of variation in such behavior, some sort of
cultural determinism is a good guide.
But cultures and communities change. The types change, the norms
change, the variances change. How? only through the interactions
of elements (whether practices, individuals, networks, or
whatever units) already largely conditioned by pre-existing
cultural patterns. So there must be something possible and even
inevitable (in aggregate) about these actions/interactions that
tends toward cultural change. What? uniquenesses (individualities
in the not-necessarily-human sense) of intersections,
trajectories, that are also critically located in relation to
larger levels of emerging self-organization. In what sense? in
the sense that _some_ unique events, idiosyncrasies, highly
atypical behaviors, networks, etc. can play a role in the
evolution and change of types. They can recur. They can attract
recurrences (positive feedback). They can mediate existing
practices in ways that stably change them. They can meet a need
in the system that it may not have possible to characterize until
they came along to fill it. They are 'taken up' by higher levels
of organization and integration, where many other unique
occurences are not and die out or have no lasting effect.
This is not a causal model. Unique events do not change history
as causes, but they can be of such a sort that the system
'welcomes' them, that they are 'pre-adapted' by chance or some
unperceived linkage, to fitting into the emerging dynamics of the
system, its self-generated change processes. Of course the system
may welcome them by resisting them at some level, but fail
because at some higher level of organization there is a
relatively stable configuration possible in which new typicals
arise along this possible history (where these novelties fit in).
Systems have a way of giving rise to events that force them to
change. This is dynamics, or dialectics of history. It is perhaps
not quite so simple as just 'contradictions', though perhaps that
is a general name for this category of events, or more likely it
is a first-guess model of the kinds of conditions in a system at
some higher level of organization (A vs. B) that prepare the way
for events that can change the system. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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