Our usual view, and the one that undergirds reductionism (but certainly
does not require it), is that the relationship between more macro-scale and
more micro-scale units of analysis and phenomena is one of constituency:
the smaller faster goings-on are somehow parts of the larger slower ones.
This fits with our tendency to find spatial relationship metaphors more
intuitive than other kinds (perhaps part of our phylogenetic heritage,
perhaps just a historically specific cultural bias). The image is Russian
dolls, the little ones inside the bigger ones, except that we usually
imagine, as with cellular to organismic organizational hierarchy in
anatomy, that there are a lot of smaller ones making up each bigger one.
But there is another semantic relationship possible here that we also
believe in but which gets lost in the spatialized view, and this is
represented by Vygotsky's suggestion that social psychology and indeed
sociology can begin from the individual, because the individual is a
microcosm of society. We find this notion also in Bakhtin, that individuals
articulate and ventriloquate many social voices that ideally represent
social viewpoints and positions in which they may or may not participate:
the whole social heteroglossia is implicit in the dialogicity of the
utterance. The Dostoyevskyan novel is an orchestration, and so also an
artistic microcosm, of the society in which and of which D. writes.
Note that in this interpretation, the individual is a microcosm of the
society most fundamentally NOT in being a map or representation of it, but
in being an instance and a product of it. This semantics of instantiation,
or of the indexical sign relation, gives quite a different view of the
relation of the individual and the social. Not least, the individual, or
the event, or the text, as an instance of a larger social system and social
meaning system, inherits properties from that larger system.
The system now is in some sense a generalization over its instances (rather
than a composition from its parts), and instances do not have to seem as
limited as they do in the whole-part way of talking. Our usual view of a
part is that it cannot share many characteristics with the whole; so we
imagine that the whole is either aggregated from diverse parts
(reductionism) or that it is entirely and uniquely emergent with its own
properties that cannot exist in the parts (extreme emergentism, perhaps
Durkheim's view in the heat of rhetoric).
But the whole-part view is only part of the story; we also need the
system-instance view. Each person, event, text is an instance of a social
order, a culture, a language. We bear the traces of our times, our places,
our relationships on many scales. We are examples and products of the
larger scale systems as well as parts of them, and as such we embody (our
ways of participating in and making activities _instance_) not just ONE
PART of the larger system, but many typical phenomena that are inherently
relational in character and so index OTHER parts of the larger system.
Like Leibniz' monads, we are not isolated atoms, but we reflect one
another: my gender makes no sense apart from a system of genders, my social
class habitus implies other class habitus, my utterance implies an
addressee, my rhetoric implies others' viewpoints, etc. Like the hologram
metaphor for brain function (Pribram), each element, by deriving its nature
from its connections to other elements, speaks (if less distinctly) of the
whole. In Latour's actant-network epistemology, each actant is only defined
through its network of relations, and not ever prior to or outside all
networks; and so to know an actant (an individual, a text, an event) is to
know it in-the-whole (on some scale, perhaps to some degree on every scale
of whole) and from-the-whole, and so as monad or microcosm. This view also
implies, of course, in complementary fashion that we cannot know the
individual if we do not understand the society ... much as Jerry Bruner
concludes that you can't say you know the individual as an individual
unless you know him/her both as instance of a culture, an epoch, a place, a
family, and, perhaps only finally, as unique. JAY.
---------------------------
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>
---------------------------