Re: Lang embodied? dialectics and ecologies

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 12 2000 - 14:47:35 PDT


I don't think we need to worry too much that dialectics and
social-semiotic-ecologies are contradictory or incompatible.

Dialectics, after all, is an approach to the dynamics of change, as well as
a philosophical rejection of a worldview of eternal truths; it is about
process.

Social semiotic ecologies, in various forms, are about interrelationships
in a material world of processes, and between meanings and their material
production and effects.

Perhaps they seem to diverge if we interpret dialectics (correctly in my
view) as predicated on the dynamic potential inherent in conflict or
contradiction and any kind of 'ecological' model as idealizing (incorrectly
in my view) harmony, balance, and integration.

My deepest understanding of dialectics is that it embodies the insight that
heterogeneity combined with interaction leads to change. In dynamic system
terms, rather than as a purely philosophical argument, the issue here is
about what happens when differences collide -- not trivial differences of
variation on a theme, but profound differences of a kind we have never
really been able to characterize (contradiction is certainly not the right
condition, incommensurability may be too strong a condition). How does a
whole hold together when it contains incompatible or antagonistic elements,
and especially when those elements need each other, or imply each other?
when the whole cannot resolve the conflict, but in fact arises itself out
of this conflict? theories of emergence of higher levels of organization,
now a cornerstone of ecological models, are direct descendants of
philosophical dialectics (albeit by a different path than, say, historical
materialism's).

Logic takes a static, neo-Platonic view of propositions and relations.
Dialectics began as an effort to extend logic to a dynamic view, in which
from a Now there can come a New, as opposed to classical logic for which
there is only an Always. In making dialectics also material and
social-historical, it comes to be a theory of the dynamics of social
systems. And that is also just what ecosocial dynamics aims to be. Both
recognize the role of meaning, or ideological formations, or the Ideal,
provided these are always also given a material basis. Both recognize that
social systems are not just systems of people, but also of the material
infrastructure of society, from tools and machines to texts and other
inscriptions, from bacteria and chickens to sunlight and streams.

Dialectical social theory adds several key theses: that conflict in some
sense underlies change, that new forms of social organization emerge
historically, that there is no endpoint to history. These have come to be
incorporated in systems dynamics. (It would be interesting to trace the
history of the latter to see where it may have made contact with explicitly
dialectical theories.)
System dynamic models hold that open dynamical systems, like flames, cells,
organisms, and ecosystems, survive only by interactions with their
environments, which change the very conditions to which they were already
adapted, forcing them to change and re-adapt. They also hold that all
complex systems generate emergent new levels of organization from
interactions among their parts. They give a picture of ongoing development
or evolution (progressional but not 'progressive', getting more complex and
complicated but not necessarily better) that cannot halt. To halt is to
die. To live is to create conditions which force us to change.

The dialectical and system dynamical pictures are not exactly the same. But
they are very similar, and certainly compatible. The most unique feature
from dialectics is the emphasis on conflict, contradiction, the generative
character of a unity of opposites. We certainly see this in human history,
and we see it in real ecosystems as well. We do not yet understand well
enough how to analyze the timescales on which opposition and change,
conflict and emergence manifest themselves. We do not understand well
enough the relationships between spontaneous internal reorganizations,
externally forced re-organizations, and the ways in which each of these can
provoke the other.

Social semiotics and ecosystem theory also have things to add to historical
materialist dialectics as a theory of social change. They help to clarify
and specify the role of the ideal and its manifestations in texts,
discourses, and activities/practices (social semiotics), and they help to
more carefully articulate the interdependencies among activities and
institutions, tools, artifacts, persons, biota, and all the rest (ecosystem
dynamics). They build the conceptual bridges across scales of organization,
from the evolutionary and historical, to the macrostructural, to the
developmental, to the micro-interactional. Not all flavors of semiotics are
equally useful; some are very static-structuralist, some are very
abstract-formalist. Social semiotics aims to be not just social, but also
dynamical and particularist, to go as far towards the phenomenological as
semiotics can get. Likewise there are ecosystem theories emphasize
static-balance (not much in favor today in biology), but better also ones
that look at instability and change across multiple scales in space in time.

There may be some divergence in goals among the various flavors of both
dialectics and 'ecologics'. Human social values, which have evolved through
many long ages of humanly painful conflict and violence, long for peace,
for an end to conflict, for a final resolution of tensions. There is a
strong 'romantic' strain of this kind in many ecologically-based movements.
It is hard to deny its appeal, or the real necessity of minimizing social
violence and violence against the nonhuman part of the ecosystem. But I
think that both dialectics and system dynamics imply that conflict will
always be with us, that radical and unpredictable change will always come
again, that there will never be a final resolution of tensions, only new
forms of conflict. I think it is fair to say that there are utopian strains
of historical materialist dialectics that also imagine a final resolution
of tensions, however much they are aware of the need to go through the fire
to get to any really new social order. No one wants to fight forever.

Dialectics, I think, has also developed a masculinist bias. Traditional
male identities relish the risks of conflict and speak more confidently
about violence and upheavals. Ecology, while still historically a mostly
male intellectual and institutional formation, seems by degrees more
comfortable for more traditional feminine identities, and in modern times
has shifted a bit from an emphasis on competitive struggle red in tooth,
claw, and nail, to a picture of mutually supportive and sustaining
relationships among species, ecosystems in balance and harmony. To
emphasize conflict and violence without also giving its due to harmony and
nurturance, to honor upheavals and not also stability, is both
undialectical, and, historically, gender biased.

I still think that change is unending, that upheavals will happen, and that
there will be no final resolution of ecosocial tensions. But I also believe
that ecosocial systems have and need long periods of relative stability and
slow and gradual change. I am willing to hope that we can evolve towards
ecosocial orders which minimize inflicted pain and violence on humans and
nonhumans, but I don't believe that the theoretical minimum is zero. I
believe that notions of balance and harmony for real ecosystems are
exaggerated, but not illusory. I don't believe you can make an omelette
without breaking eggs, but I do believe the main motivation for making the
omelette in the first place is to better feed a large family.

JAY.

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