Actually I have another paper, for Gordon Wells' CHAT and Education volume,
that takes up the village theme in a second sense: that we ourselves must
each become a village to live successfully in the village. This brings back
issues of multiplex identity and the most basic functions of collaborative
activity and sociality itself in human life. There are obvious implications
for education, and indeed the editors have just asked me in the revised
draft to spell these out even more. (Wish me luck!)
I also in another post today raised the deeper, but related, methodological
issue of the limitations inherent in our notions that only discursive
knowledge about social systems counts, and the sundering of the discursive
from the bodily and affective in our scientific traditions.
Are there fundamental limits to what an individual can know and learn about
an ecosocial system? you bet! not the least being how an individual is
situated within the system ... but this is not as narrowly restrictive as
might seem in first reaction against the fallacy of the God's eye view,
because we are ourselves 'villages' and we do not see the system SOLELY
from one viewpoint within it, and to varying degrees we know something
about how our viewpoints differ from various other ones. Still, we cannot
comprise necessary genuinely different viewpoints, me-as-a-village cannot
comprise us-as-the-village. Then there are the practical limits: how much
data is needed? how can it be reviewed, much less analyzed? how much
'reduction' do we typically do to our data, not because what we exclude is
known to be of limited relevance to our question, but simply to make the
analysis manageable? or less obviously, to make the kind of answer we come
up with _comprehensible_ by another limited individual?
Even before issues of data reduction, or data collection, is that of the
kinds of questions we pose. Bill asks what sorts of questions can we
usefully pose? presumably accepting our limitations. But I don't think we
should accept these limitations. Between the augmentation of what
individuals can do with information technology appliances (think cyborg)
and more significantly what collaborations of diverse individuals can do in
(dense, fast, rich) communication and information networks, and what
on-going collaborative projects that have timescales from lifetimes to
multiple-lifetimes, a lot more can be done than has ever been done before.
Perhaps we should be asking what kinds of questions does it become newly
possible to pose and answer under these emergent conditions? perhaps even
more radically we should try imagining, collectively, what kinds of answers
it would become newly possible to comprehend, or better, to USE, as
networks that could not be grasped or used by an individual?
We could even ask what kinds of knowledge do organizations have that no
individual within them has? knowledge that is put to use by the
organization as a whole, but not by any individual? how do organizations
'pose' and 'learn' answers to their 'questions'? Do organizations in some
sense produce 'models' of the systems they are part of which are not
'models' that can be grasped or articulated by anyone in the organization,
but are distributed over many people (and artifacts and logics of practices
and interrelations)? And what about ecosystems? economies? If we give up
the traditional ideas about mind and consciousness that restricted these
notions by definition to humans-as-isolated-individuals, then our
reformulated notions of distributed/situated multi-scale meaning-making
systems can apply as well to higher-scale units of organization. We
traditionally have rejected notions 'group mind' or 'organization
consciousness' or 'ecosystem consciousness' because we had a notion of
'mind' for which these extensions appeared no more than empty romantic
fantasies. But this is not true of the successor notions we are posing in
place of the older views of mind. Indeed the qualitative distinctions among
levels are replaced by a logic of inter-level relations, so that my
meaning-making can simultaneously also be a part of the meaning-making of
an organization or an ecosocial system at higher scale.
In the older romantic parlance one could ask how we can listen to find the
questions that our communities and ecosystems need answered, instead of
just posing the questions of relevance on our own scale (cf. deep ecology,
eco-ethics) ... perhaps we can now struggle toward the corresponding issue
in this new view, maybe something like fostering the emergence of
collective learning enterprises which make sense for the whole, on a scale
we individually cannot quite grasp?
One clue. That bodily-material connectivity in the larger scale system,
those affective-felt-bodily dimensions of curiosity, interest,
desire-to-know ... those roots in ourselves of why we feel drawn to the
research we do, not in some trivialized pop psychology of childhood
influences, but in a mature awareness of our participation in something
larger than ourselves which is also agentive, also a meaning-maker, also
struggling ...... What role then in our methodologies for intuition,
feeling, and desires we cannot quite explain?
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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