Re: RRP

Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Tue, 22 Jul 1997 09:25:41 -0700 (PDT)

Mike,
I am not quite sure exactly how you might see positive critical
theory, but I would hope that all the concepts I work with are guided by a
spirit of critical, reflexive, informed participation--that is knowing
what you are doing with others, making decisions about what is worth
doing, and trying to figure out how to do it better. Critical theory as it
has largely emerged has helped people identify those participations that
don't wish to engage in and has given them some means to identify details
of disengagement. That's good, people should get out of bad deals and
should try to keep bad deals from being foisted upon them. On the other
hand, we also need to figure out what the good deals are and how to pull
them off successfully. Critical theory (as part of what has been called
a culture of suspicion) has given us little guidance on this participatory
end. Generally we have more than enough reasons to suspect each other and
to be cautious in our interactions, and few enough positive experiences of
complex satisfying interactions to maintain the sociality whioch is our
medium of existence, so that people regularly resort to less than
satisfying interpersonal strategies to meet their needs, which only
undermine our sociality further. What we need more of are ways to
positively identify what we need and agree to do and the means of
accomplishing them.

With respect to "reliably reconstitutable phenomena," I suppose
one could say that was a critical way of identifying what some scientific
practices do or make, as opposed to critically pointing out all the things
they don't do, that some people have claimed they do.
Your investigations of active cognition in situ and projects of
growing activity in vitro as ways of extending cognition I see as moved by
similar impulses of understanding that
people are always trying to do things by their own best lights, no matter
how things may look from various distanced perspectives--and that one can
usually be of most help and support by working with and providing tools
for people's current projects (unless they are clearly destructive) and
the best way to draw people in new or more ambitious directions is to
provide conditions, opportunities, tools, and guidance that attract them
into new areas of activity and participation.

On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Mike Cole wrote:

>
> Chuck-- I like your idea of Reliably Reconstitutable Phenomena. I think
> it fits somehow with the notion of a "positive critical theory" that
> I have been playing with. Might they be thought of as coordinated
> sets of lenses?
>
> I also think this is related to the strategy I developed in
> the work described in Cultural Psychology. (On that topic, chapters 8-9
> seem either to have confused people or they are on vacation, or....
> Myself, I got a fine week away from work and near some beautiful
> mountains and lakes and trout.
> mike
>
>