"Dialectic" is, uncharitably for today, the attempt to make the impasse of
meta-closure itself the basis for an escape from that closure. At least
this may be said of Hegelian dialectic, and there is a lot of that still in
all other dialectics. The dialectic argument says, in effect, system change
really happens, and all we can see (through the grid of our reproductionist
discourse) is established thesis and resistive antithesis, so it must be
somehow that from this contradiction comes the source of true change ...
but dialectic does not really convincingly say HOW. We believe it because
both its premises and its conclusions seem inarguably correct, and we
actually enjoy the idea that there is a "jump" outside ordinary logic in
order to connect them. But dialectic as a technology is not notoriously
successful; it is nearly impossible to teach people how to think
dialectically, it is pretty well impossible (except by luck) to demonstrate
dialectical thinking on demand, even if you know you can "do" it sometimes;
and the successful examples of dialectic in practice (and there are many)
are all post-hoc -- you can't set up the conditions for dialectical change
and know when it is going to actually happen and when it isn't (we just
ignore the cases where nothing happens). Some of this is a problem of
ignoring timescales in theorizing dialectic, but that is not, I believe,
the basic problem.
The basic problem is that reproductionist theories are inseparable from
categorial modes of reasoning; both are fundamentally politically
conservative, both arise from the same historical conditions of modernism.
(Obviously reproductionist theory is a less general feature of modernism
than categorial reasoning, and both also occur, with perhaps different
cultural functions, in other historical eras as well.) Resistance is
conceptualized in terms of counter-categories; it is this categorization of
actions that defines whether some act is resistive or not. All resistance
is in effect modeled on reaction. Reproductionist theories need categorial
analysis because it is only at the level of abstract categories that there
_is_ social and cultural continuity. Or one should rather say, that one can
retroactively construct the illusion of such continuity. These illusions
are quite fundamental to all sociopolitical orders, to legitimation, to
control, to the grounds of coercive action, etc.
Many theorists of the last half-century have tried to rehabilitate the
notion of resistance, and the most successful of these, I believe, have
taken a more phenomenological path (see previous posting). They have come
close to saying that what makes an action resistive, or change-furthering,
is not simply that it is categorially opposed to the established practice,
but that it somehow belongs to an autonomous system of practices that has
no direct, or has only an incomplete and partial counter-categorial
(reactionary) relationship to the established practice. It may begin as
reaction, but it aims for ... well, not precisely revolution ... but at
least autonomy or disengagement; it is more oblique to established practice
than antithetical; it has its own logic and its own functions quite apart
from oppositional effects; it 'appropriates' the space of normal practice
for some purpose unrelated to the functional system that the normal
practice belongs to. That is, to use unfashionable language, it is really
_creative_ rather than resistive. Rather than saying "I will not play your
game" or "I will stop people from playing your game", it says "We have made
a new game." The new game may compete for resources (time, interest,
materials, energy, etc.) with the established one, and there may be
conflict ... indeed it may ultimately be only the conflict that
re-establishes a direct relationship between the News and the Olds.
But none of this still really tells us how the cycles of reproduction were
escaped. That requires the full step to the phenomenological (100%
phenomenology is impossible in language, but let's not worry about that for
now) ... it requires us to accept the argument of my last posting and to
see that the categorial, in terms of which continuity is constructed, is
almost everywhere absent in concrete being/doing-with-the-world ... and
that the "escape" from reproduction/resistance is to move _outside_ the
category system, passing "under" its grid into the realm of the concrete.
Marxist thought here converges with phenomenology through materialism. The
material is everywhere concrete, especially if its paradigm is not the
object but the subject, not the lump of inert matter but the materiality of
action-as-unique-historical-event. Feminist and Queer thought converges
through the focus on the body, or really the body-doing, the pre-categorial
body (which really means the body-doing as primary phenomenological reality
outside of the thin grid of categorizations of it). None of these
perspectives however, I think, has really been willing to accept the
terrifying unstructuredness of phenomenal reality. Its unchartability. The
utter powerlessness of categorial reason outside/underneath the grid. For
those of us mainly dependent on categorial reasoning for our judgments
(it's never that bad, of course), it is like exploring blind through an
environment full of complexity and richness of form, none of which has a
meaning already attached to it.
But such is the space of radical creativity, which most of us have
experienced, but which is often as painful as it is exhilarating. It is, in
the cliche terms of modernism, the borderland between great art and
profound madness. It is the 'underground' , the Outside. All fundamental
change passes through this filled space, not through the empty space of the
categorial grid which is projected over it. The painful scraping of your
knuckles bloody against the cave wall ... not the comfortable couch-potato
viewing of the shadows cast upon it. (Pardon my purpled prose!)
To go beyond resistance, I believe, we must go outside the grid, or perhaps
"inside" it is better said. Like the artist, or the lovers, or the artisan,
we need a translinguistic (not non-linguistic, though Eastern cultures
offer this alternative) medium (MORE than categorial): the clay, the body,
action-as-materiality not as categoriality. I don't think we need to leave
categoriality altogether behind, we just need to put it in its proper
perspective (as quite minor, rather than as nearly all that matters). Zen
and many yoga disciplines try to teach the lesson that the categorial is
illusory, that true reality lies outside/beneath/inside these, and often
the method is to try to drop categoriality altogether, even briefly. It
works, but there is not always much of a follow-up -- what comes next,
after satori? What matters I think is the new integration, in which the
categorial gets demoted into its proper, minor place. When the Hindu
classic, the Gita, speaks of a special kind of action, an action-yoga, it
says the enlightened person acts 'without attachment to the fruits of
action'. Perhaps all this means is a 'pure action' in-the-Now, rather than
one muddled by thoughts of consequences (quite alien to Western bourgeois
notions of moral responsibility). But I think that in the context of the
whole work it means something more fundamental: action which is not
performed within the grid of categorial reason/meaning, whether present- or
future- oriented. Action which is 'felt' rather than 'meant', action which
operates as purely phenomenological, and which passes through, or is
constituted in that 'full space' beneath the grid ... and which therefore
almost inevitably brings us into something new, something which, if the
grid is extended to encompass it, forces the grid itself to change rather
profoundly.
This making-new of the world is going on all the time. The real dynamics of
the world is happening beneath the grid. Our bodies are participating in it
constantly. But we do not learn to _act_ in that realm; we learn to act as
if the grid were the reality, and so we are safely condemned to resistance
and reproduction, two faces of the same folly.
Is it so hard to learn to see the grid from the underside? or is it just
too frightening ... JAY.
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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>
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