To churn the waters a little more, let me add a notion that I've been
playing with more and more lately, that we, too, are artifacts, tools, and
signs. In the simplest sense, the human body, my body, our bodies, are
artifacts that mediate activity for our selves (whatever that now means)
and for others. Our bodies are media on which histories of events are
written, in memory and scars and wrinkles and hexis and habitus, and read,
by us and others, as signs of time past, linking now-scales of time and
space and event with longer term and larger-scale processes, just as do
texts and other artifacts as mediators. So also are our bodies tools for
ourselves and for others, to carry forward activities, and to transform
them in keeping with our bodily affordances. And surely we are also
artifacts of the technologies of our time and culture, made and shaped by
discourses, by tools we use, by technical practices from child-rearing to
clock-watching to lens-wearing ... that change every "us" we might care to
define.
There is a weak taboo against this viewpoint in mainstream academic
culture, mainly I think because one of the simplistic but popular
explanations for evil and exploitation in our century has been that it
arises when we allow ourselves to treat people as objects. I understand the
well-intentioned politics of this taboo, but I scarcely find its
assumptions credible. It's a dodge, an effort to avoid more painful inquiry
into the more substantial reasons for cruelty and evil. It's also
intellectually rather twisted, or at least arbitrarily convoluted.
Ontogenetically, if not in our local logic, "objects" are a sub-class of
"people"; people is the first and fundamental category, or at least that
category passes on critical properties to our adult notion of person or
agent, and "objects" form one of the subtractive classes that LACKS some of
these properties (in a subtractive hierarchy that concedes full agency only
to our dominant caste, and takes away progressively more bits from women,
children and old people, the lower classes, animals, machines, plants,
dynamic matter, malleable matter, ... down to the most inertly imagined
rock). So objects are actually a rather revealing sub-species of people,
and we could if we wanted to, more specifically identify just what kinds of
agency, etc. are denied to each exploited category, without the simplistic
and backwards assumption that every property of an object is one that must
be denied to persons to keep them from being exploitable. It is the
differential assignment of these properties that creates the hierarchy, not
the properties themselves.
So back on the maintrack of these musings, just as we need to learn how to
see objects as a species of people, and perhaps one with more sorts of
agency than we usually credit them with, we can also profit from seeing
people as filling many roles usually assigned only to objects: as textual
media, as artifacts, as tools, as raw material, etc. We may object morally
to some "uses" of people, but we should not refuse to see the fact that
people have use-roles that are in many cases the same as those of various
other sorts of objects.
Complementing the bond of possession is the bondage of possessiveness, and
with it, of being possessed by our possessions (or more precisely by the
activity formations in which our posessions participate, dragging us along
with them) -- as saliently in the case of money. The old theory of
commodification, which carries with it only the negative connotation of
circulating and trading in people as we do in gold or wheat or coin, may
not recognize the potentially positive side: that possessiveness is an
index of appropriation and a means whereby we make ourselves (and get made)
through the mediation of posessing our possessions.
Of course this happens rather specifically with different sorts of
posessions. To posess the object of our affections makes us in many ways
(cf. the meaning of "my love" "my lover" "my child" etc.), but differently
from the possession of (appropriation of) a text, an idea, a discourse, and
differently again from possession of a favorite pet, a favorite painting,
our home, ... and perhaps down through some cline and/or subtractive
hierarchy to possession of a deed, a banknote, a credit card, some coins ...
Differently for possessing the currency in hand vs. the knowledge of a
balance with the bank ...
And, yes, Diane, always both present and future -oriented, not only in the
case of money, but perhaps in all matters of possession ... there is a
trajectory: a history of ourselves in relationship to this possession;and a
present, being the possessor; and many possible and implied futures, from
those we fear to those we hope for. Yes, money is a bit special, as it is
a bit more of a sign, or a bit less of a tool, not I think in the sense of
inner- vs. outer- directed, for it works as much as a sign for others as as
a tool for our self-construction ... but rather the material affordances of
the object agree less with its uses than we expect of most tools, and the
efficacy of its usefulness in activity depends more on its sign properties.
I think we might fairly say, with Peirce, that what money buys is as much
its interpretant as what, as money, it means to us in having it.
And people, both bodies and social personae conflated in one, can also
function in exactly the same manner as any other form of money, as
exchangeable and tradeable units of value. Nor does it require capitalist
commodification to accomplish this feat; from traditional to capitalist
slavery, only the commensurability of units was added semiotically.
Levi-Strauss of course gives us a very nice analysis of kinship rules as
governing traditional trade in females; contemporary wife-swapping could
probably be subjected to an interesting model of non-commodified exchange
analysis; and a little thought will probably produce a host of practices in
which people are in effect traded and exchanged more as signs, in terms of
their meaning and value for some one or some community, and less as tools,
in terms of their actual affordances (what they can do) for activities.
We may recoil from viewing people as objects to be exchanged, as "meat"
(low in the subtractive hierarchy), find it a bit distasteful to commodify
one another as tools (valued for what we can do), but nearly the whole of
our emotional economy, and much of our self-construction, would seem to
depend on viewing people as signs (ala Peirce always: sign-of-x-FOR-z).
The appropriation of other people, and even of aspects of our self/body, as
signs, would seem to be at least as important to the constitution of
identity, as the appropriation of other sorts of objects, practices, or
discourses. Is there a clue here to the role of affective bonds in
scaffolded learning?
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------