One is whether our theories may be bad for us if we take them too
seriously. Maybe I haven't read widely enough in the work of the
'strong programme' in social studies of science, or among
'Latourians' (which in Chuck's view I hope doesn't include BL
himself), but I have not noticed what I have read (a dozen or so
authors) to be particularly more ruthless in the academic agon,
or more cynical -- though perhaps one needs to follow these
networks behind the scenes for such insights. Most of them seem
pretty tame to me compared with say the MIT linguistics crowd
when trying to control the relative value of discourses in the
linguistic field of academic production (actually they're pretty
notoriously bullying in their rhetoric).
But the general question is an important one I think in the
social and human sciences (or more general ones like my ecosocial
or Latour's network models aspire to be). How seriously should we
take our own or others' theories about power, the social order,
learning and development, technology and environment, politics
and ethics? In my opinion, not very.
I don't know whether it seems more foolish or more arrogant to
imagine that any such theory ought really to dictate our own
personal lives and projects. Foolish not to be aware of the
deficiencies of particular theories and of the _impossibility_ of
creating consistent, reliable, and anywhere near complete models
of systems larger than ourselves to which we belong. Arrogant to
believe that one's _own_ theories can be more than a single
reflective stance on processes which can never in principle be
comprehended within any single discursive formation. I have
mainly pity for anyone who tries to live, or do research, or gain
power, or teach according to the tenets of _a_ theory.
Unfortunately, I believe that there are many people who do try
this, and fortunately none who succeed, though many may not
realize the impossibility of their course.
If theories are tools (at best), and not images of What-Is, then
we need many of them, indeed as many as possible, provided each
is useful sometimes and they are collectively diverse -- which
means _incompatible_ (if not incommensurable) and
_contradictory_. Perhaps one of the most useful of postmodernist
insights is that 'master narratives', grand integrated theories,
are symptoms of the will to power (or the fear of pain) and not
sane goals for thoughtful people. We _must_ be bricoleurs, and we
need to find ways to be happy living by inconsistent and
contradictory theories and principles.
...
My second response is to Chuck's very interesting, if brief,
account of his struggle (as we all must do) to turn the teaching
role and the classroom situation from one of dominating
(volens,nolens) into one of helping. I hear in his account of
encounters with differently positioned students with different
projects of their own the same kind of relationship I have always
found with my 'data': new kinds of texts like new kinds of
students require new kinds of theories. Every new kind of
discourse I analyse adds to my theoretical toolkit tools that are
especially useful for it, and may be interestingly (or
perversely) applicable to other text types as well. I suppose one
could say that every text does this, that every student we teach
_as an individual_ teaches us something about how people learn,
about what kinds of relationships between teachers and students
are fruitful, etc. Encounters with large numbers of consistently
distinctive kinds of students brings such a lesson home even if
were not looking for it at that level of generalization.
I think that in relation to teaching and students, as in relation
to our analyses of texts or activities, we still labor too much
under the delusion of modernist universalizing meta-theory. We
spend too much time looking for tools and methods and ways of
interacting that apply to _all_ and not enough attending to what
is special and unique about each. There is a 'science' of the
particular and the individual. It arises by successive
specification from more general classes about which we can say
_something_, but always _less_ than we can usefully learn to say
about narrower sub-classes or, finally, instances and
individuals. It is _not_ the most universal models of the most
general classes which are the highest goal of the human and
social, or ecosocial, sciences. It is the most useful and most
specific things we can say about instances. We define our objects
of interest differently from those of the natural sciences. For
their objects it is far more true (and in some extreme cases in
physics it seems to be entirely true) that individuality does not
matter, that individuals are more completely described by what is
typical of the general classes to which they belong. We know now
that this is not true for ours, and the project of our sciences
must be correspondingly different in a way that opens up more
room for contradictions.
Enough said, I think. This perspective is developed further in
some parts of _Textual Politics_ (esp. chap 6 and the Postscript)
and more in "Matter and Meaning", a recent paper for the Odense
semiotics conference (available by email on request). JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU