Most of it understand me well enough and there don't seem, to me at least,
to be significant disagreements, but there are some places where the
response doesn't quite meet head-on what I was trying to mean.
What I meant by 'resistance' was in fact not acts that resist, but the
concept of 'resistance' as a notion in neo-Marxist inspired discourses of
the last few decades (Althusser, de Certeau, et al.), especially as they
have come to be taken for granted notions of a sort of common
left-intellectual way of talking about education, mass media, etc. That's
what I situated within a broader reproductionist storyline.
Phil mentions one point I didn't: that any ecosocial system contains its
own inherent 'resistive' elements. This is a sort of move, which I also
make, beyond _logical_ dialectic, to a genuinely
material-physical-biological dialectic, and is really a first step outside
the reproductionist view. It notes that complex evolved systems maintain a
degree of reserve plasticity, they don't become totally ritualized, or
totally reproductive; they need to be able to respond to changing
environments on various timescales. One way they do this is by
incorporating forces that resist their tendency to closure or
ultrastability. But here we are only on the borderline between a
reproductionist and a dynamicist view: inherent resistance, or what I have
called 'counterfunctional subsystems' still function at some larger scale
to maintain or reproduce the same sort of system. But this is still an
important point, and a kind of progress beyond, say, Parsonian functionalism.
I am not entirely clear what Phil means when he wants to count
understanding (presumably critical-analytical, ideological-effect-exposing
understanding) as a mode of resistance. I am rather ambivalent about this.
I used to agree. Now I tend to see more and more of this kind of
understanding as within the grid and ultimately grid-reinforcing. Perhaps
once again it is a matter of scale. Such understanding can subvert shorter
term mystifications and lead to effective change-strategies, for personal
situations, even for political organizations ... but not, I think, for
systems on the timescale on which the very terms and conceptual
distinctions used in the analysis come to be and persist as part of some
longer-term cultural 'moment' (really epoch). My point here, I suppose, is
that subversions of short timescale systems do not necessarily add up to
subversions of longer timescale ones; and indeed may actually reinforce these.
But the main point where we seem to be missing is:
"But non-categorial modes of reasoning are incommunicable precisely because:
a) They are not reasonable; they are ontologically unique moments and
therefore defy categorisation.
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. "
-- Phil G.
Re (a) -- there are a number of alternatives to categorial reasoning, and
some of them are not in the least incommunicable; they may be to a large
extent _verbally_ incommunicable, but they can be communicated _visually_
and _acoustically_ and in some strange ways, mathematically ... but what I
really have in mind here is not a pure escape from the categorial ... that
is not generally necessary, that is it is not necessary to escape from ALL
categories all at once. It is only necessary to defeat the categorial
imperative, the Either/Or, the dichotomy (and the systems of many related
dichotomies) where it is most relevant in some particular situation or
analysis. While it may be true that in any well-developed culture all
categories somehow imply all other categories, there are relative distances
and relavancies. It is rather difficult to sketch this alternative briefly,
but some of my work on both 'topological meaning' and 'multidimensional
caste' is on my website and suggests the direction ... the basic idea here
is simply that one can replace a system of dichotmous categories with a
large multidimensional space of continuous variation, so that the
categories are then seen to be reductions of dimensionality, in effect
oversimplifications of material variability.
Re (b) -- I mostly agree with this, but want to add that in the mix there
are often, perhaps always, non-categorial meaning modalities and forms
(esp. visual-spatial-kinesthetic) ... this is one of the profound
implications of a material theory of meaning-making ... that there is
meaning-by-degree that is made by the material dynamics of bodies (of all
sorts), and that this is essential to an understanding of how categorial
meaning (meaning by kind) changes across scales of time ...
What Phil goes on to argue about the noumenal world is more or less what I
was borrowing from the classical arguments of the phenomenologists.
But again, at the point where he seems to find it impossible to see how to
get beyond the categories of social structure and language, what is missing
is the other half (maybe more than half) of our meaning making ... the
topological, quantitative variation,
meaning-by-degree-in-body/ecology-dynamics ... and its total
interpenetration of the usual sort of categorial meaning-making, when
analysed as action in a material system.
Non-categorial, meaning-by-degree is not entirely outside culture either
... much of it is well organized and ritualized in local and historically
specific ways ... but not nearly all of it. Here is one of the escape
hatches through the grid.
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>
---------------------------