Peter
At 10:46 PM 9/17/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Bruce Robinson raises a very interesting aspect of Vygotsky's views that
>seems to me relevant to a deeper consideration of issues of units of
>analysis and scales of organization and phenomena.
>
>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>
>---------------------------
>
>