November identities

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Sat, 06 Nov 1999 18:25:50 -0500

Among the specific issues posed in the paper, and raised again by Stanton,
are the sense in which 'learning' and 'identity' can be defined as process
or phenomenon on a single vs. on multiple timescales.

As I described for the notional case of 'thought' in another posting, it
would be hard to confine 'learning' to a single timescale no matter how we
defined it. The many things that go on when we learn go on across a wide
range of different timescales. There is moreover the polysemy of the term
'learning': there is the learning of a moment, the 'aha' when we see for
the first time how to do something, or what some sign means to others;
there is the learning of a long effort to master a practice over hours,
days, and months; there is the learning of a lifetime as we come to know
things about ourselves and our communities that cannot imaginably be
learned except by passing through the 'ages of man' . These, and no doubt
many intermediate scale cases, cannot possibly be instances of the same
process. Cannot possibly be constituted out of the same relations among
actions and experiences. Every generalized 'process of learning' must be
defined in relation to some specific range of timescales, as emergent from
processes on much shorter timescales and constrained by those at much
longer ones.

It is not so much a matter of defining each type of learning as occuring AT
a specific timescale, as it is of discerning the specific logic of
relations across timescales that constitutes that mode of learning. Perhaps
we shall eventually dispense with ancestral folk-categories like 'learning'
(or 'thought') altogether. They are heuristic, they lead us to pose
questions, but they are not necessarily useful parts of our answers.

It is also worth noting that this view of phenomena as specific to
particular cross-timescale logics is very general. In discussion in a
complexity and information listgroup (OCA), it has come to seem natural
that the notion of 'information' must also be defined relative to specific
cross-timescale logics; and even 'entropy' may require such a more careful
formulation in cases of complex systems with multiple levels of dynamical
organization.

What about 'identity'? In the paper I offer this as a notion to focus our
attention on longer timescales of learning that go well beyond that of
particular social interaction events or short-term experiences. What I am
really talking about is the process of 'identity development' and I assume
a view of identities as multiplex, metastable, dispositional, situationally
adaptable, etc. The link to learning comes from such work as that of Jean
Lave or Valerie Walkerdine, who emphasize that what, how, from whom, how
enthusiastically, and with what longer-term effects we learn depends a
great deal on how the activity in which we learn also functions as an
activity in which we can perform various aspects of our identities
(masculine or feminine, artist or scientist, conservative or radical,
Chicano or Swede, Gen-X or WW2 vet, fundamentalist or atheist, bit of both,
something in between, Other, etc.).

Both moments and durations contribute to identity development. Not just
single experiences cumulated, but invariant and perhaps taken-for-granted
features of our lives that continue over long timescales.

The principle of heterochrony is illustrated by the role of the human body
as a material participant in longterm identity development processes, but
which is also a material participant in short-term actions and
interactions. The material dynamics of the body in some situated activity
is described by its dispositions-for-action in that situation and activity
(cf. Bourdieu's _habitus_). Those dispositions are the product of, and
participate in, rather long timescale processes (cf. the 'durations' above)
and mediate the interaction between those processes-of-a-lifetime and the
present processes-of-a-moment. In this function the body is not unlike a
book, a material 'text', made and circulated in longterm processes, but
capable also of functioning in short-term processes-now in such a way that
embodied features of longterm processes 'make a difference' in what happens
in the short term.

Instead of reifying a notion like 'identity' and treating it as some
'thing' or inherent quality of a thing, this way of talking restores our
sense of the material dynamics that underlie the phenomena it names: the
activities in which dispositions are shaped, and the activities that are
shaped by dispositions; the timescales on which these processes take place
and the logic of their relations to one another. The semantics of our
language leads us to make nouns out of the more verb-like processes
involved, and then we have to remind ourselves by speaking of, say,
'performing our identities'. The language of process naturally draws our
attention to dynamics and timescales; we only need to remind ourselves to
pay attention also to the constitutive faster processes and the
constraining slower processes as well as the focal process, and then to the
logics and media of heterochrony. The language of objects should complement
that of processes (by naming the artifacts, bodies, etc. that mediate
heterochrony) rather than replace it. We must learn to think even of
objects as only the more persistent effects of some dynamical synchronies
among processs, as inherently metastable, as having a characteristic
lifetime on some timescale. "Panta rhei; ouden de menei" -- Herakleitos.

JAY.

PS. All things flow/change; nothing just persists.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------