So I really do agree with Latour that it is materiality that
grounds the mutual involvement of human and nonhuman actants, but
what gives that involvement its significance is its role in
semiotic, i.e. meaning-making and meaning-dependent processes.
It's obviously not easy to say such things succinctly (brevity
depends on familiarity of ideas), which is why, I guess, I've had
to refer a couple times already to my recent book-length attempt
to deal with some of them in a preliminary way.
If I have seemed to begin from 'mind', it was only because that
is where the discussion here was starting from; I'd certainly
have been happy to start with bodies, but the real point, as I
think Chuck is trying to say is _not_ to divide these but to
emphasize their unity on two counts: both 'minds' and 'bodies'
are constituted in and through and are, materially, nothing but
physically occuring processes, and both 'bodies' and 'minds' are
ways of talking about what is meaningful to us in the symbolic
systems of our cultures. Both are material, both are semiotic.
And both arise only within much larger systems.
On the more interesting substantive argument Chuck is advancing,
which I assume is his take on the problem of intrinsic vs.
relational properties of 'reality', I think I was trying to get
at much the same thing in writing before about 'invariants'
(analogous to his reconstitutability and reliableness). Now since
my examples were from elementary dynamical systems, I was putting
things in the extreme form: total invariance of properties across
interactions and observers. That's most because elementary
dynamical systems are defined by having very few properties, and
there is no real way to define 'degrees of robustness' in such
cases. If we do what I suggested in my discussion of Mike's issue
of naturalism vs. contrivance, and extend the definition of the
phenomena, say electons, to the whole social-material system of
practices/activities in which phenomena interpretable in terms
of, say, quantum states of electrons occur -- ie. the scientific
institutions, laboratories, technologies, people, and their
doings -- and embed 'electrons' in all that ... then of course we
can certainly apply the degrees of robustness notion, or ala
Garfinkel see if we can reliably find an address and whether
anyone's usually at home there, and if so, whether they seem
regularly locatable there, and look and act more or less the same
from visit to visit, etc.
That _is_ for me the pragmatic view. Chuck seems to give a very
nice version of it, one of which Peirce would probably have been
quite proud, and one which brings -- in my view necessarily --
the social-institutional embeddedness of 'phenomena' (quotes
because they are not just the way things appear, but what we make
ourselves see by our active seeing, i.e. our doing, as part of
larger material-semiotic systems) into play more than Peirce
himself seems to have done (though I think sociology lurks on the
threshhold, but Peirce prefers to build up from the elementary to
the complex, rather than foregrounding that the complex is always
already there from the outset, at least for us humans). I do not
think, however, that I want to follow where Chuck's argument
seems to become 'much more than pragmatic', IF it means that
reconstitutability is taken as warrant for inferences about
things' 'BEING'. What Chuck says is appropriately careful here:
"treat things as being". For me the big issue is not really
whether 'things' have an objective nature, intrinsic properties,
or reliably reconstitutable roles in activities (obviously I like
the last version best, too). It is what we may lose sight of too
easily if we allow 'things' to include electrons or individual
humans: to believe that their reliably reconstitutable roles
arise from properties they have intrinsically and could be
imagined to have in isolation, or even (what is to me, though not
to all philosophers, the same thing): that they have a reality of
their own -- as opposed to seeing them as ONLY real or meaningful
insofar as they are reconstitutable by the total system needed to
reconstitute the relevant processes.
The practical drift of these issues bears, as Mike so often
reminds us, most crucially on our choices of units of analysis,
and even more on our notions of what sorts of 'contexts' are or
are not relevant to a unit on any scale. In these matters, I
don't think Chuck's practices and mine differ very much; in fact
he may often do a better job of showing how text-making practices
are situated in larger social-institutional processes than I do.
But since we both study, among other things, the cultural
institutions of natural science, we seem inevitably to get drawn
into these epistemological debates. They do bear, of course, on
how science practitioners orient to their own practices, but for
me the epistemology wars are more to be regarded as data than as
critical issues for my own practice. Since I take them less
seriously, I can perhaps be satisfied with perspectives that may
not fully satisfy others. JAY.
---------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU