It took me a moment to realize that "defend" was meant as shield, rather
than in the Cyrano De Bergerac sense. Dolphins dueling with
sponges--clearly a sign of superior intelligence! As I have fenced, on
occasion, that is part of my conceptual capital. Which underscores Jay's point:
>We have been taught that we can take a gun anywhere in the world and
>shoot someone, or take our math skills anywhere in the world and
>succeed in problem-solving -- but can we really? are there not
>many hidden presuppositions about constancy of context (the reach
>of the network that grounds these practices for us) that we tend
>not to take into account? Do we not need to account, as Latour
>reminds us, for the successful traveling of practices in the same
>terms as we account for their failure to travel successfully?
>Perhaps what we should be teaching people is not just 'higher-
>level' skills, but how to extend the scaffolding that keeps those
>skills so high up there ... or, more subversively, how to
>dismantle or modify such support structures, if that is possible
>by individual or collective action.
Clearly, fencing is an instance of a poorly travelling practice. But is all
cultural capital so arbitrary? The absract purpose of *all* culture, as I
understand Wartofsky's definition of meme, is to further articulate behavior
which adapts any species more successfully to its environment. To the
extent that the culturally encoded semiotic representations of the world
that we all have are more or less accurate and predictive of our activities
in and understandings of the world (which I accept we cannot know truly),
don't they have a certain validity that goes beyond simply transforming
infants into proper members of "our club"? Cultural practices to persist
must have a heuristic utility. Even dangerous cultural practices, like
nationalism, are mediums through which activity is coordinated, and complex
systems of interaction enabled. And although Latour tends to emphasize the
arbitrariness of the success or failure of his warring Leviathans, isn't the
motivation for joining (in L's case study) the Renault or EDF Leviathans
based as much on the heuristic utility of the various smaller Leviathans
that join together into the larger Renault and EDF Leviathan systems? To my
mind, culture must function through what Vygotsky calls "complex" conceptual
thinking--and thus does not seem on the surface rational--but there *must*
be an emergent schema of the world that arbitrary cultural practices enable,
that *must* be substantially "true" in accordance to its answering the
problems a given society has had in the past, even though they are not
really "Truth." The problem arises with all of the non-functional, and even
deadly, detrius that accompanies successful cultural practices, particularly
in response to new probems arising from successful practices in the past.
That's where the evils of nationalism emerge. That's where evolutionary
theory becomes social darwinism (newly popular these days), or national
socialism, or all the other charming brutalities leviathan systems create.
Doug