Perspectivalism, yes, but with the unfortunately logically and
practically necessary (for me) addition that P-ism is itself a
socially and historically, i.e. culturally and subculturally,
specific attitude, which is subversive of everything it is joined
with (including itself), and which no doubt also fits better with
some of the interests of people so socially positioned as to be
drawn to it (like me).
Constraints. Not the right metaphor, and this is an objection
that goes also to some arguments here lately that have taken
'constraint' as the irreducible minimum of coercion. Neither
biology nor culture constrain. In fact they do just the reverse:
they are the resources, the foundations, the ground that lets us
walk. They appear as constraints only if (1) we separate them
from 'us', and (2) we construct desires and believe they thwart
these. (1) makes (2) possible. My view of true constraints is
that they are either negative (lack of resource) or positive, and
if so, social-oppositional (people who are trying to stop us by
force). In a self-organizing system view, 'constraints' in the
Bruner sense are features of the system itself which contribute
to its dynamical possibilities. There is a long and in-need-of-
analysis cultural history of the Barriers to Desire mythology,
which get displaced into such an enormous range of discourses.
Constructivism. But without the constructor as otherwise isolated
agent; meaning-realities get constructed in ecosocial systems,
but not as purely personal efforts/products (not even for
'psychotics' I think).
Interaction. Interaction is fundamental, but not if restricted to
person-person interaction, for that leaves out too much else that
is necessary to what goes on. Likewise if intersubjectivity (in
Paul's or Bruner's gloss) is seen either as a product of priorly
separable subjects (not so in late Bruner, I think), or as the
product solely of subject-subject processes. Certainly
fundamental to development, indeed constitutive of and
practically definitional for development, but again the
development of a system of many levels, with various notions of
individual organism or person/subject only a partial view of one
of these, and even then usually incomplete as a unit of analysis.
Fundamental to 'learning': the latter is a notion even more tied
down to isolable subjects.
Externalization. Sounds a bit backwards to me, if what is meant
is that symbolic realities are the meaning-dimension of material
processes, artifacts, institutions, etc. Why not just the
materiality of meaning processes? But perhaps what is meant is
rather educational processes and institutions as materializing
discursive practices from other domains?
Instrumentalism. Education is pervasively political, that's for
sure! but I would not like to isolate education or even its
institutions as a cause that has consequences 'elsewhere' (in
lives, in history), when we want to dissolve 'education' into
practices that both constitute it and get constituted by/through
its bringing together of other practices. A logic of chop the
system up and construe causal relations among the parts does not
work well for complex systems like organisms, communities,
ecosystems, etc.
Institutionalism. This seems to be an argument for 'emergent'
properties of educational institutions themselves, which I would
accept, provided we don't draw too strict a boundary around what
is education (or even what is schooling). The material
intersections in real schools, etc. should be a key site for
seeing how practices are brought into linkage that lead to the
emergent properties (for example the physical conditions of
schools, teaching practices, budgets).
Identity-formation. This version is very Bourdieu. I think it may
be a bit exaggerated, in that I doubt that very many people form
much lasting identity in relation to school-based practices. It
is right on, however, in seeing that schools and teachers do try
to clone like identities in students, but in competition with
other institutional networks of practices that are much better at
this (and last longer into people's lives; schooling ends).
Narrative. Well Bruner has learned a lot by delineating the role
of narrative in social interaction and identity-formation, but
narrative is not a privileged mode of discourse in my view, and
the exaggerations about how it is the key to everything social,
even personal identity, should be brought up short before a good
idea gets out of hand. Bakhtin provides a better-rounded view of
the relations of discourse and identity, even though he is mainly
operating in a literary framework where narrativity dominates.
There are non-narrative conversational discursive identities, and
non-narrative rhetorical (e.g. persuasive, expository,
analytical) identities made in just the same way as narrative
ones, and the conversational ones are probably more important
than the narrative ones for most people. Foucault describes (in
Archeology of Knowledge) how discursive formations always have
associated roles, for the modes of discourse characteristic of
all kinds of human activities. Narrative gets privileged I think
for two reasons: it dominates in _retrospective_ accounts of
identity, and our current notions of what identity is too often
derive from folk-theory accounts grounded in the use and analysis
of narratives (i.e. identity as a Character vs. identity as a
more generalized consistency of participatory role).
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
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