Kevin's reminder of the beauty in many other cultures' different
orientations _in_ (rather than, as in the modern West, _to_) Nature, raises
many of the same issues Alfred does about the prison of our scientific
traditions.
Yes, we turn our experience in the natural world (of which the social world
is one part) into objects, objectifying and alienating at the same time ...
and we lose something. We pay a price. Dis-enchantment. Many of us long for
the re-enchantment, not just of Nature, which is already objectified and
dichotomized in being separated from Culture or Society, in being named at
all, reified as some Thing, which can be spoken of, but of what we
experience and share with others as part of the larger world.
We can re-conceptualize, within the arc of possible languages of science,
as I try to do, as Alfred tries to do, and many of us. But I think we also
recognize that we need the participation of other languages, such as the
language of poetry, to fully imagine what we seek. I have done a little
study of poetic language from time to time, of its affordances for meaning,
or for "activity" in the sense of our active feeling-participation in it,
how it connects to where we go with it, not just in imagination but
potentially (and too rarely) in action. (I did a rather infamous talk once
at the Applied Linguistics meetings in which I dissected the political
effects of keeping scientific, poetic, spiritual, and hortatory discourses
apart.)
Other cultures, where the scientific-technical worldview (aka economic
instrumental-rationality, evolved out of large-scale capitalism in large
part) is not so dominant, remind us that worldviews _we_ would call poetic
or spiritual, but which for them are usually eminently _practical_ can also
serve to guide human life and conduct and make for fully-felt, meaningful
lives and constructive collective activity. They are also "sciences" in a
functional sense, they do for others what science does for us. (In this way
of speaking, global capitalism itself is as much a part of "science" as
physics or economics; and vice versa.)
The point of Latour's _We Have Never Been Modern_ is similarly to say that
our science (and the modern "compact" that articulates it with modern
religion, politics, art, etc.) is not so different from what smaller-scale
cultures have long been doing; we just scale it all up in a way that allows
us to enlarge the networks, capture more in our nets. But the nets are
thin, they also miss quite a lot. And what they miss, we find ourselves
_missing_ ... wishing we had not lost.
Not to be too logocentric into the bargain, there are other arts than
poetry, other material practices that do not find it necessary to narrow
the range of feeling (to dispassionate calmness, or the pretence thereto)
in order to move us to insight, or to useful knowledge. Western art,
especially in the Long Modern era (i.e. post-medieval), has accepted its
smaller place, as decoration, esthetic evocation, or the expression of pure
feeling. And we forget that elsewhere and otherwhen it was also practical
and scientific in its functions, not differentiating those functions as we
are taught to do. Perhaps our new era of multimedia is an opportunity to
re-integrate the esthetic-expressive and the practical-scientific-economic.
Our cultural momentum is not favorable for this, but perhaps our longings are.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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