CP 9 and + critical theory
Douglas Williams (dwilliam who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Thu, 24 Jul 1997 23:11:38 -0700 (PDT)
I was not going to post this, but--I got talked into it. Hope this
counts as positive rather than negative egocentric monologue!
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I am finally commenting on *Cultural Psychology*, which I hadn't
bought. Leafing through someone else's review copy last December, however,
Chapter 9 immediately struck me as critical to what I was doing, and I
photocopied it to look at later. All this talk about it in relation to a
positive critical theory finally reminded me to go read it. (!!) Adorno's
methodology of negative dialectics argues that the only way to critique a
"constellation" (as he called it) of social practices was to confront the
object or system being criticized witht he contradictions between what it
claims about itself and its actual existence. Mike's critique of the
"artificial intelligence" project of cog science does just that: Computers
are modeled on humans, but disembodied humans; all that is left is the
brain-as-machine--and even that lobotomized of everything but the neocortex:
Humans as information processors who construct rational systems of symbolic
representations. (Computers implicitly are also defined by the traditional
belief in mind-body duality, secularized; computers are *perfect* humans,
pure abstract processors). Mike points out, with Searle's Chinese room
analogy, that Turing's model of computation only contains a model of a
static sociocultural system of problem-solving, rather than a human being.
No computer would ever dream of a snake with a tail in its mouth and realize
that it was the structure of benzine, because computers don't have
pseudoconcepts, or think in complexes, or constantly operate in environments
that force seemingly irrelevant patterns and experiences together in time to
create montages. Thought is not processing, but a complex adaptive system
of culture interacting with the environment, mediated through individual
agents, much of whose creative activity is done unconsciously or
hypnogogically. More or less right?
What I'd like to know in relation to this is where the rulebook runs into
ideas coming from left field, as in the benzine example I cited. Thinking
in complexes (vygotsky) or metaphors (cognitive linguistics) seems to be
critical in the construction of any novel rules during the process of
activity--or, in other words, thinking through displacement or condensation,
through unconscious pattern association, which is required to turn snakes
into abstract representations of chemicals. The operative system on the
individual level seems to be the hippocampus, and the mechanism of memory
formation--which I won't get into here. Are there cultural systems through
which nonarbitrary, collective innovative thought is facilitated? Popular
art (drawing from Dewey and Bruner) is one of these systems, I argued in my
dissertation, in that it recombined implicit associations into concrete
forms and made them available for conscious analysis and
abstraction--although preconscious agenda-setting is more common. Critical
theory seems to be directed toward analyzing the contradictions between the
complexes that direct activity (like thought is mechanical activity; thought
is a series of steps on the stairway, on which one ascends from the problem
floor to the solution floor), the intended goal (make a tool in the image of
a human), and the reality (people are not pure directed thought, outside of
culture).
Wouldn't a positive form of critical theory be one in which one analyzed the
complexes that direct activity as one of the rules carried out in the
activity itself--a constantly introspective process that would modify the
activity in progress by noticing any contradictions in intentions and means?
The big problem in abstract instrumental reasoning is the lack of feedback,
isn't it, of the sort that we would receive automatically if we didn't place
our foot properly while walking, for example? If people's goals, like
"freedom" or "education," which are fine ideals, are not being met by their
practical expressions, an introspective process that would bring out that we
were staggering rather than walking, or walking sideways rather than forward
(obvously, I'm being very metaphorical here), that was critical/corrective,
as opposed to critical/condemnatory could correct it. But that would
require that the introspective process be carried out by people both within
the system, and thus able to change it, yet people who would be
dispassionate enough to act in order to achieve the collective goal, rather
than personal agendas.
Which would seem to bring us back to Lippmann's idea of top experts who
mediate between the world outside and people's faulty images of it--the sort
of experts against whom critical theory was devised to begin with.