I was certainly too elliptical in the sentence John quotes about "tacit
effectual action". I did not mean to overlook the familiar cases like
Heidegger's hammer and Bateson's cane/axe. I was trying to find a way to
re-label the category usually called 'intentional action'. Those of us who
prefer to avoid presuppositions about intentionality (I've stated my
objections here many time in the past) usually speak instead of 'mediated
action', but specifically meaning sign-system (and usually language-)
mediated. But that is just what 'tacit' is denying in this case. It takes
us back again to the issue of whether and how tool-mediation is distinct
from sign-mediation. I tend to view signs as a special case of tools, so
really the issue here is about non-sign tool-mediation ... but frankly, I
think our whole theoretical discourse apparatus is pushed past its present
limits at this point.
Stanton offers a more realistic, if less ambitious, approach: even tacit
perception and action is still language, or more generally
semiotic-resource-system mediated. There is always tacit sign-mediation, or
as I like to say, once you have caught the language disease, there is no
cure (e.g. perception of pictures is always at least partially tacitly
language-mediated). Stanton is quite right that this is a very important,
and tractable, domain for research. We can and should learn a lot more
about tacit sign-mediation in relation to overt or explicit sign-mediated
behavior, especially in the cases of metalanguage, ideology, dispositional
activity, etc. I was trying to formulate a more extreme, and perhaps
unrealistic case, just to push the limits of connectionist metaphor.
Perhaps the realistic case will better lead us to useful views of these
limits.
John, and others, also point to the possibility of critical resistance
arising from tacit habitus in a system of 'heteropraxia, arising in
historical traditions. This is certainly so, and I think I did mention a
case like this in my posting ... but it is not automatic resistance, but
resistance that generates alternatives, or tacit response-in-activity that
can do what we do when we explicitly critique, and self-critique. Perhaps
Stanton's point may be applied here too: if we ask from whence come
'correct ideas' (with a nod to Mao) in the sense of articulate critique, do
they not originally come from tacit discomforts with dominant practices,
discomforts born of Other ways of experiencing, through the tacit and
inevitable links of activity and sign-mediation? Do we not feel the wrong
before we can say what it is? and does not our later articulation arise our
of unarticulated sense that is still itself never fully outside the meaning
realm which sign-systems afford? This is no mere accidental source of
viewpoint (discourse, language) change, but a systematic source, arising
from our tacit-but-mediated participation quite literally in larger scale
ecosocial systems and in their internally conflicted histories.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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