One of the areas of convergence between dynamical systems theory and
(broadly marxist) historical materialism is the emphasis on historical
contingency. Unfortunately, without a theory of relevant timescales,
historicity in explanatory discourse can get embarassing.
For one thing, you are obliged by reflexivity to account for the specific
historical origins of your own discourse, and at least a guess at its
historically specific limitations. For another, your theory has to have a
fairly finite time horizon; you can't theorize about matters that don't yet
exist, just as you can't theorize about matters that may exist but are not
yet culturally visible.
These issues are more tractable if you can define the timescales on which
various sorts of changes in social practices and discourses, including your
own, are taking place, and how they are linked to one another.
Historicity, even in the present, involves quite a bit -- way too much in
fact. The present historical circumstances include EVERYTHING that is going
on in the world. If you accept the many-to-one view of how discourses, or
representations, match up to material processes, then YOU can't know or
perceive a lot of what is going on, because you're only equipped with some
discourses. If you are really wise (which most of us are not) you will go
out and try to get hold of incommensurable discourses from people who are
as differently socially positioned from yourself as possible. Then you may,
to the extent you can understand these discourses, be able to see more of
present circumstances. But who should you talk to? their social distance
from you is defined by the parameters of your own discourse/theory. If it's
a class-centered theory, you go talk to the workers. It may not occur to
you to talk to your wife, or your ten-year old child, or a villager in India.
It was very insightful of Marx and Engels to connect legal equality (and
workplace equality, and home equality, and financial equality, and
generally power equality) to the possibility of (ie. the changed historical
conditions necessary for) gaining better understanding of gender relations.
But all they could do, in their own historical circumstances, was to see
gender relations as an example of the same sort of relations they were
theorizing for class. A sort of prototype of class relations. What they
could see about gender relations in their capitalist society was how gender
relations in the nuclear family were useful to (used by) capitalism.
None of that, of course, is at all like what gender theorists have to say
about gender today. The ways in which gender relations are appropriated to
the economic-productive order is taken to be secondary to bodily and felt
experiencing of sexualities and human relationships; to the responses of
gendered subjects to dominant discourses and practices, and especially to
dominant attitudes and values; to the unique products, in the form of lives
lived, feelings felt, connections made, of gendered lives other than those
stereotypically sanctioned by masculine norms and values.
What happens to the objective category of social class when we begin to
realize that gender is experienced differently across classes, and across
age-groups and cultures? when we realize that there are not several systems
of social relations here, but ONE, with multiple, interacting dimensions?
How do we have to reconceptualize social class to marry it to gender
theory; to make both (and other elements) parts of a more powerful
analysis? At the very least, for example, we have to wonder how social
class is experienced differently with differences in gender and sexuality,
and how it feels to be economically oppressed and oppressed by virtue of
gender or 'race', indeed just how much it matters to the definition of
social class how you _experience_ the 'objective' conditions of your
economic relations (how you feel them as well as how you talk about them).
Contemporary gender theory is on the forefront of theorizing without
factorizing. Class theory has a lot to learn from it.
But these new discourses and analytical perspectives are themselves the
product of changed times, in part of exactly the differences in power
relationships from a century or more ago needed to allow SOME contribution
from publicly silenced subjects to be heard. Once it's heard, all sorts of
new possibilities open up for hybridizing it (a sort of useful halfway
house between replacement and incommensurability isolationism) with views
inherited from earlier historical epochs. A lot depends on the relative
timescales of social change (in women's power) and theory change (when
class theorists decide to stop trying to assimilate the new paradigms to
the old ones and try doing the reverse, or something still more thoughtful).
The timescale of global technological change has lately proved shorter than
that for global cultural change, at least insofar as the dominant old
euro-patriarchal culture succeeded in its greed in getting its economically
productive and global-scale communications technologies distributed around
the world before it succeeded in homogenizing the world's cultures in its
image. That means that their relative power is increasing rapidly and our
coupling to their cultures is also, so that various sorts of
'post-colonial' discourses are now producing and will continue to produce
radically new social analyses.
I'd be willing to bet on two more rapidly rising sources: transformations
of gender theory coming from newly empowered voices of formerly taboo
sexualities (from gay and lesbian, to TV/TG, to intersexual, to S&M, to
everything in all combinations and mixed together in the lives of many of
the same people), and totally new perspectives coming from younger age
cohorts (at least the 13-20s and the 6-13s, maybe younger still on a longer
time horizon) and perhaps older age groups as well ... as these two
increase in relative power and challenge the privilege sustaining myths of
vanilla sexuality and 'adult' superiority.
So it is not a good time for any long-established theory about social
systems, or any current theory for that matter, to expect to be more than
one precursor to the radically transformed theories of later in this
century. It is however a very good time to be saying new things, remaking
old concepts, and generally riding the rapids.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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