At 01:43 31-03-99 -0500, Jay wrote:
>The concept of "resistance" belongs to the discourse of reproductionist
>theories of social systems, i.e. those for whom the basic phenomenon to be
>explained is social and cultural continuity.=20
Resistance as a concept and resistance as action are not the same "things".
Resistance as a concept, which is different again from the concept of
resistance, belongs to no discourse in particular. Neither does resistance
in action. In action, to resist is to reject; but to to reject is not
necessarily to ignore. But I take Jay to mean "resistance" as "resistive
engagement", for want of a better term, and therefore my own understanding
is that he is speaking of a certain sort of resistance: i.e. resistance by
engagement, theoretical or otherwise.=20
If it's true that resistance belongs to a reproductionist view of social
systems, which are necessarily reproductive unless one takes a synchronic
perspective on the categories (participants, processes, and structures)
that constitute the resources for a given social system (dynamic and
concrete; conceptual or physico-chemical), then any dynamic social
perspective contains its own resistive element.
One can look at the social reproduction of certain aspects within a social
system, rather than their reproduction as a whole (categorial or
otherwise). My own interest lies in how value systems are reproduced within
social systems. The categories that fall into (and out of) this aspect of
social meaning making are as dynamic as the systems from which they emerge.=
=20
Naturally, I think, then, that understanding is as much resistance as
rejection is, and that a social reproductionist perspective is useful for
identifying how the grid's surface tensions are formed, and how they also
prevent facile attempts to see its underside (no, I'm not suggesting that
any attempt at seeing the underside is facile). In othere words, only after
much engagement can the surface tension be penetrated. Much like card
tricks: once you know how they work, they no longer mystify.=20
>When such theories, and I
>believe that most of us are pretty steeped in the deep assumptions of such
>thinking, for it is very characteristic of modernism (for specific
>historical reasons), try to account for change, they really only account
>for lapses or miscarriages in reproduction.=20
Or systemic evolution or adaptation. One must look backwards for an
historical perspective, seeing in each instance the histories that permeate
each change and each intertextually defined utterance that is part of the
grid's manifest surface tension. What really becomes clear here is that the
radicalist/functionalist dialectic is artificially circumscribed; just
another illusory division which is quite probably obfuscatory and (I find)
unhelpful.=20
>They are trapped into defining
>change as resistance, or into making resistance the ground of possibility
>of change. And resistance is always resistance to established practice,
>always therefore defining itself, and even the space of alternatives it
>opens, within the same larger systems of differences that defined the
>established practices in the first place. Such a model has meta-closure; no
>systemic and foundational change is possible in its terms.
Change is only always resistance if it is considered as a function of
"choosing to resist". I don't see why choosing to understand systemic
behaviour necessarily negates the possibility for change or resistance. In
fact, I would say that choosing to understand means, to some extent,
choosing to step outside the categories that form the surface tension of
the system. These are the categorisations that stand in opposition to one
another and that create the tension which appears to be what we are looking
at. If we are to understand and describe these, we need a new lexicon=
anyway.
>"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.=20
Indeed. But formalism in any case is unhelpful because it contains its own
answers in the questions it asks and therefore can never _create_ anything
new.
>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 ...
This is not entirely my own understanding. I would say, rather, that
everything exists in the tension created by extremes and that these
interact dynamically through (for the moment) "spaces and times" to create
their own illusions as they interact. Any historically specific description
cannot be described without drawing on a history of interactions. Which is
why=20
> dialectic does not really convincingly say HOW.=20
It can't say by itself how. It can merely has its own conceptual (and
therefore epistemological!!) ontology (I'm not collapsing the two). Any
categories must be (artifically?) inserted into the historically specific
case being discussed to say how, when, where, who, what ... but not why.
That is why "Why?" is the big assumption that dialectics makes.=20
>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.=20
I do not believe they are inarguably correct. I believe they are, formally
speaking, inarguable, precisely because for the reasons Jay outlines above.
It's analagous to defining what is living and what is not. It demands a
certain kind of two-sided, mutually dependent theoretical bigotry: in
short, a set of basic assumptions. Any idea that dialectal thinking is a
jump outside "ordinary" logic is a kind of self-delusion on the part of
idealistic (ontological not teleological) belief in the concept's
independent existence. I try to avoid such delusions.
---snip--
>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.
But non-categorial modes of reasoning are incommunicable precisely because:=
=20
a) They are not reasonable; they are ontologically unique moments and
therefore defy categorisation.=20
b) Any communication is, however modally or historically pastiche, a
mixture of categorical modes which are interwoven to produce a "new"
mixture of categories, the meanings and values of which must refer back to
categories that have a social history and which are socially negotiated. =20
This is our noumenous world, the world of language in which every saying is
a category, whether a Thing, a Process, or a Structure (which is merely the
illusion of things interacting throughout conjoint histories).
Here, unfortunately, is our bind in stepping outside categories:=20
Society =3D a dynamically interaction set of things, processes, and
structures (certain organisations of things and processes)
Language =3D a dynamic interaction set of things, processes, and structures
(certain organisations of ideas and sayings about things and processes)
How to get outside that which faciltitates our very understanding of that
in which we live???
I confess, I have no idea.
>(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.)=20
The noumenous exchange society has, as its means of understanding,
categories: names. This is the same for Plato as for Phil, I believe. Just
like money, the exchange of which is the _process_ that passes as a
substitutes for _things_ and which creates certain, though not immutable,
_structures_, the nomenclature of things, processes, and structures is the
system that substitutes for the things themsleves. Sometimes we give these
things their own ontology as if they were apart from our saying them.
Of course, this is all misleading, because the money and the names (which,
from a certain perspective, are things themselves) obscure the things and
the structures which are created in their exchange. They become real as if
they existed independently of our doing them.=20
>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.
Sure thing. But any analysis is either category-based or incoherent, no?
Continuities are an illusion, but necessarily so for a very real reason: we
couldn't survive without them. At least it seems so to me.=20
>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).=20
Phenomenology has many different aspects, as you know. My own tastes run to
Merleau-Ponty rather than, say, Heidegger. Heidegger's one sided "Dasein"
cannot exist in a social reality, but it can certainly form the "rational"
basis for one, as we have seen. I think we need to be careful and realise
that the academic field is symmetrical about the field of power. It _is_
part of the field of power, whether in resistance (in my terms,
understanding/explaining) or reinforcement (regurgitation). Its categories
are dominant categories.
---snip ---=20
>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.
Jay is describing the inversion to which I was alluding when I said that
dialectics has its own meta-dialectic. Yes. I agree entirely. The
categories should be sought in the concrete, sophisticated definitions of
this abstract category notwithstanding: =20
"The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first
directly interwoven with the material activity and the material
intercourses of men [sic], the language of real life =85 The same applies to
mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality,
religion, metaphysics etc. of a people. Men [sic] are the producers of
their conceptions, ideas, etc. =85 Consciousness can never be anything else
than conscious existence, and the existence of men [sic] is their actual
life-process." (German Ideology).
As Bourdieu points out so beautifully in "the field of cultural
production", the explanantion (and therefore the analysis) for anything
lies outside its own phenomenological manifestation. Marx, for instance,
was writing the above at a time when the concepts and categories of
Hegelian dialectics and neo-classic economics held sway in most
rationalisations about the way society operated: they had been given their
own life and separate ontology (as today, we see phases like "Theory
suggests", or "Research shows"... and other such authoritative
pronouncements). That is to say, the abstract concept was considered to be
the generative principle for the concrete social realities that surrounded
him.=20
As observers, we are at the centre of our universe whether we like it or=
not.
>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.=20
Processes, not things? A groundshift in perception? A shift from the naming
of things to the process of naming? A shift from an analysis of ideas to an
analysis of real life? If that is what you mean, I agree.
>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.
Meaning is made in interaction between bodies and things and other bodies
and other things. Meaning isn't "out there". Nor is it "in here". It is in
between and is the unique interactions that arise from the tension of
difference (and differentiation or "distinction" - another two-sided coin).
How we define these differences, who has the right to define and name them,
how they are endowed with social significance (value) and dominance (power)
- these are the "things" that interest me.
--- snip --
The Zen school of thought, the Gitas, and the Sufis, they are dialectical
and paradoxical in communicating their thought. Their most profound
meanings are made beyond the playful dialectics they construct in aphorisms
or parables. As for the creative moment, I can remember certain
transcendant moments while playing music or doing other stuff that seemed
beautiful to me at the time, and I remember these moments, each one unique.
But I can't tell you about them in any meaningful sense. They are mine
alone. There are no words for them.
Beyond resistance, I think, is understanding
"I know your game now".=20
Then, perhaps, we can make a choice as to how/whether/what to play.
Because, in the end, if we understand, we must choose. If we don't
understand we have no choice at all.
Phil
Phil Graham
p.graham who-is-at qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html
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"Another damned fat book, eh, Mr Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh,
Mr Gibbon?" - The Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication
of "Decline and Fall".=20
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