A bit strange in a way how linking humans to nonhumans, and
defining the resulting composite heterogeneous system as more
fundamental than the humans (or the nonhumans as isolated
entifieds) seems to get interpreted as collapsing the
distinctions between humans and nonhumans. Is it so threatening?
maybe the threat is where it really _is_: a threat to agency as
resident within the organism. That goes, just as all local
causality goes in any complex dynamic system model. Internal
agency is just a localized causality, after all, and that is just
what a lot of us are eager to get rid of in all sorts of other
aspects of our theories. Except when it hits us in the moral-
political ideology? yes, adopting such views would probably mean
major changes in our views about moral responsibility, identity,
political responsibility and efficacy, etc. Hopefull towards more
usefully realistic notions, or what's the point? And yes, there
is a lot of social danger in such changes. But the memes are
loose, some sort of radical changes are coming, the danger is no
longer avoidable in any case.
Francoise also asks about mind vs mind differences, i.e.
individuality. This is another very complex question. I started
to thrash around with it in chapter 5 of _Textual Politics_. But
for one simple point, the difference between how I behave in an
interaction and how Francoise might behave, say interacting with
me and others face-to-face in a situation, with artifacts, etc.,
is not simply a function of her organism vs. mine, but of our
interactions in the system, and not simply of a history of her or
me, but of what is carried forward into the now-interaction of
past-interactions, and so of past larger systems than us-as-
organisms, or at least of on-going processes on scales longer
than what is encompassed in the now. "My" biography is hardly
just about me. On what scale in time and social networks do mind
processes operate? surely not just the here and now, surely not
solely internal to each organism? over what size nets and what
time scales beyond the here and now are behaviors in the here and
now also participating? There are differences encountering one
another when Francoise and I and others get together (which I
hope we will other than virtually!), but they are not, I think,
best talked of as those of a definite her-mind and my-mind, but
of much more than is usually meant by such terms.
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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