Just an observation, though I can imagine Mike hoping this thread
disappears before it gets disruptively hot (listgroups tend to be tinder
boxes because we lack some of the binding interdependencies of material
communities, without a certain threshhold of inhibition, or self-restraint,
things can and do get out of hand .... past experience on xmca has burned
enough of us to keep our cool, at least among the suvivors).
One of the professional CoP's in which I used to be a more central member,
but am now more peripheral and almost outside, is physics. One of the ways
I've noticed that members validate/ratify/signal one another's membership
is by telling jokes that use language, concepts, and often puns or figures
of speech, that are intelligible only to other physicists. I find I can use
this to regain entry and acceptance, even though I no longer meet most of
the other qualifications. It's a sort of subtler form of 'name-dropping', a
use of cultural capital functionally as if it were social capital. In fact
it is a regular means within the community to transform cultural capital
into social capital.
I offer this an another example of how humor functions
inclusively/exclusively in CoPs. Scientists more generally will do this
sort of language-play in mixed company, occasionally to express solidarity
and separate the sheep from the goats, though it seems done more often in
all-scientist groups, and especially with newcomers. It is not I think used
in a blatantly exclusive way, but its inclusionary functions do work
exclusively as well. If someone comes into such a group as a peripheral
participant, s/he quickly feels not-a-full-member, because they do not get
the jokes the others do. At the group level (not the individual level of
intentional behavior), the effect is exclusionary. But those who are
engaging in the practice see it as totally innocent in this respect; they
are aware only of other functions. They tell these jokes for reasons, and
they are not exclusionary reasons. It is only with a high degree of
reflection and analysis, and a sociological perspective (not common in
informal groups of physicists, or most people!), that the covert functions
of normal CoP practices become visible. It also requires a longer timescale
than that of the event itself, and perhaps some 'intertextuality', by way
of comparison with visits to other groups where you yourself have felt an
outsider.
I never cease to wonder at cross-level confusions over the difference
between what some action means for the person who does it and what the
larger-scale functions of the activity or practice of doing things of that
sort means for a community and for its relations to other communities. An
act can be innocent while the practice enacted is not. Culture is a box we
are not meant to get out of. But with a little help from our friends, we
sometimes can ... and we shouldn't expect it to feel good.
All communities not only marginalize some individuals, they breed
malcontents, loners, and small stigmatized, excluded castes. Why? Not just
to concentrate resources in fewer hands, but because deviants embody the
reserve plasticity of the community to respond to radical, unpredictable
challenges, and perhaps also because they continuously "queer" the
comfortable homeostasis of a community --- a tendency that is itself both
necessary to sustainability of the community and dangerous for its
longer-term evolutionary potential. We need to keep upsetting each other,
just enough. A LOT of what central members do upsets people who are defined
by it as deviant or not-centralizable. The LITTLE that the subaltern
reflect back to central members ought to upset them. One works with the
power gradient, one works against that gradient.
A central fact of all complex social-semiotic systems is that there are
conflicts of interest between levels of organization (the new immunology,
for example, is built on this idea). I personally often enjoy politically
incorrect humor. I don't tell jokes about the minority groups I can claim
membership in, even though I have some moral right to do so. I prefer to
tell jokes about dominant groups. I do sometimes laugh at other's jokes
about subaltern groups, but not if I know a member of such a group is
around. I recognize that most group joke-telling is about identity
performance and in-group solidarity; we tell jokes about groups of equal or
lesser status, who are potential rivals, as a way of affirming our loyalty
to our own group's interests. We tell jokes about superior status groups to
assuage our jealousy and ease our fellows' contentment with our lot in the
order of things, or to counter hegemonic images of the "natural"
superiority of currently dominant groups. We also tell jokes to have a good
laugh, and we often need a good laugh. We are a lot more aware of this last
function, on our own normal scale of observation and participation, than we
are of all the other functions at higher scales.
I'm not going to stop laughing at jokes that are funny, regardless of their
social functions on any scale. I'm a person, not a sociological force. But
the more I know about the social-scale functions of such joking around, the
more conflicted I am about playing my part in my CoP's. I am cautious about
when and where and with whom I do humor. You can't be perfectly just in an
unjust world. You can't even come close. You can seek to know what this
means in painfully personal terms. What you do next, however, is not at all
obvious.
JAY.
---------------------------
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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