From a social perspective, what interests me is our ability to avoid
noticing conflicts or contradictions between our own beliefs in different
domains, and between our own schemas and others schemas for "the same
thing" (which begs the question and is why realism/anti-realism matters).
I think that what Yrjo's practice in institutions proposes is to create
activity structures in which people are more likely to have to confront
rather than avoid discoordinations among their (intra- and inter-
individual) schemas. Of course for me a schema in this sense is always more
than something "mental" ... it's some hybrid of ways of talking, ways of
doing, etc. This leads to new kinds of dialogue, new in contents and often
also new in terms of who is actually talking seriously to whom about what.
New couplings in the system matrix. And that's a good recipe for social
change and even for the production of new ideas. SO LONG AS the higher
scale institutional framework keeps people trying to re-achieve social
"equilbrium", i.e. to find a way to manage their differences and keep the
institution going. It can also be a recipe for destructive social conflict
if people's value commitments force them, and their other institutional
niches permit them, to put maintenance of their own internal equilibrium
above maintenance of the functioning of the group/institution.
Expansion is one outcome. Explosion is another. Social change can be
dialectical, but it can also be bloody. You can wind up with a new emergent
attractor of the same system/ institution, or you can cross a threshhold
for "schizmogenesis" (Bateson) and get fission, or disintegration.
Disaffiliation. Polarization. Fanaticism. Civil war.
Perhaps some larger-scale level of ecosocial organization "learns" from
this, becomes better adapted. Or maybe noise just wins out over order at
some scale and for some period (Serres).
Our contemporary turn towards the global scale is also a turn, by some,
toward the eradication of trans-institutional values ... and identities so
strongly committed to such values that people would risk or accept social
chaos, institutional disintegration, to maintain them. This strategy does
not have a very high probability of success.
While we are especially aware these days of religiously-based conflicts,
where for long periods people managed to ignore their basic differences,
but then something happened (or was done) to force them to confront them
and find them irresolvable, one can also imagine other sorts of political
conflicts .... What happens in a school if you get students from oppressed
groups really talking with their teachers about what each thinks of the
other and the social groups/interests/cultures they represent? Learning, or
institutional disintegration? What happens in a community if you force
people to take sides over a polarizing issue like gay rights, abortion,
etc.? [or whatever are the hidden spoilers in your community]
Functional coordination of schemas is often an effect of disjunction, of
NOT comparing, confronting; of compartmentalizing and insulating, so the
incommensurables never have to be seen at the same time, the
irreconcilables live in "peaceful coexistence" without being forced into a
hot war ..... such stasis does not promote learning, but it may promote
survival. Disrupting it can be a very reckless move, unless you have a
better understanding of the conditions of in/stability of the larger social
formations within which these conflicts are contained than I usually do.
JAY.
PS. I think psychoanalysis probably makes a similar argument regarding
unresolved conflicts.
---------------------------
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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