This message is partly a test to see if I am indeed re-subscribed and
gremlin free (I got my self-description message back in duplicate from the
listserver, so who knows?) ...
... and partly to say hello again to many friends, who are probably on
vacation and suffering email and xmca -withdrawal symptoms in a ritual act
of e-cleansing ... certainly a form of summer rehab in our line of work.
In my case it was surely a mistake to come back to the office ... to find
our website mutilated by our locally inept computing services people, their
"solution" locking me out of fixing it ... no check in the mail for funding
our upcoming conference ... and numerous administrative frustrations not
worth thinking about much less mentioning in public.
If anyone actually knows firsthand of a university, or any institution to
which one could belong without too much pain in the conscience, where there
is good management and functioning infrastructure ... I'd be interested to
hear about it.
My experience with the increasing dyfunctionality of modernist
institutions, from cities to air traffic control to universities, is
leading me more and more to try to understand a new kind of internal
contradiction in modernist society ... not so much economic per se, as
socio-technological ... in which the modernist impulse to solve problems by
adding new regulations and controls runs head on into the tendency of
complex eco-social systems to "lock-up" (yes, just like your computer) when
subject to too many constraints and to operate efficiently only when there
is a great deal of "slack" available to allow them to improvise around the
always emerging new structurations that arise from the unpredictable
interaction of too many semi-autonomous elements (yes, us, but also most
everything else, too).
Globalization, however much a misnomer (it's really a thin network on a
global scale, hardly the whole world in any sense), is pushing institutions
to try the modernist solution at unprecedented scales, not just of space
and time, or of matter, energy, information, and artificial value (i.e
money-like flows), but of complexity. Modernist institutions belong to the
Machine Age; they live through a cybernetic technology of predictability
and control, internally as also in their requirements for controlled and
predictable environments. I don't know how close we are to hyper-regulating
ourselves right out of existence, but the nonlinearities of the system
would suggest that that horizon (yes, also known as a catastrophe) is
closer than it appears to our linear-trained intuitions. More and more
institutions, at all their scales of operation, are more and more
desperately trying to regulate their environments ... which consist more
and more exclusively of other institutions (and the "natural" environment),
also engaged in the same effort .... with the set of self-consistent
solutions (either win-win, or even win-lose) shrinking exponentially ...
toward the point where there are no solutions (lose-lose) and the
conditions of sustainability of the whole and its dependent parts can no
longer be met. It can happen a lot faster than you think.
I painted a somewhat more optimistic version of this picture in a plenary
address in Canada last week, but since returning to the US, and my own
institutional reality, my palette seems to be growing darker again. There
are a lot of people thinking about social justice within the modernist
institutional framework, a lot thinking about looming ecological
catastrophes, and a lot looking for the silver-lining in the global
information thunderhead, but not many I fear thinking intensively about
this other internal contradiction within modernism (yes, including
capitalism of course) ... and about what happens if it arrives first.
Enjoy your vacations!
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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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 01 2001 - 01:01:22 PDT