Some of the comments about language and the use of terms like 'minority' or
'dominant culture' have turned my attention toward one specific issue: the
historical specificity of our current discourses about 'minorities' and
'diversity' ... we talk a LOT about these matters; certainly this has not
always been the case, and the ways we talk about them today have perhaps
not been around all that long. When did they arise? why? what are their
present variants and functions? how can their would-be successors
successfully contest them?
Whatever Locke meant by diversity, it's not what we mean in urban schools
today. Perhaps he meant that urbanization produced the high culture of his
day, or that the rise in international communication and the multiplication
of international intellectual and political movements (apart from those
grounded in religion) was producing an essential ferment that turned the
national renaissances of the 16-17th centuries into what we today call the
Enlightenment. Perhaps as the scale and volume of communication among
different viewpoints increased in his day, civility and urbanity emerged in
a new form. But so did civil wars and bitter feuds, among states, religious
viewpoints, political adherencies, scientific schools, etc. Our 'culture
wars' are mild and breezy by comparison. People suffered from the conflicts
that arose in the climate of that diversity, and movements toward tolerance
were one idealized solution, though probably not the most popular. In the
18th and 19th centuries a hegemonic solution arose, a great commonality of
culture and values created by the newly dominant international bourgeoisie.
A new solution emerged: not tolerance, but conformity; not the celebration
of diversity, but the celebration of 'universals', later sedimented as
taken for granted values.
That hegemony more or less held into our century, weakening with each of
the world wars, and finally beginning its collapse with the end of
colonialism, with the shift of power back toward non-european peoples,
first in their homelands, and then in their diasporas. Suddenly there was a
serious challenge to the dominance of european culture, or at least of the
right of europeans (wherever they resided) to dictate the future of that
culture and its variants around the world. More or less simultaneously,
working class disdain for bourgeois arrogance gained a certain intellectual
respectability it had never had before. Not too much later, feminisms and
gay movements added more dimensions to the critique. The 'differently
abled' rebelled as well, even the emotionally divergent ... all symptoms of
the collapse of a true hegemony (which rests on taken-for-granted-ness, and
has little need to defend or justify itself) into mere dominance. And this
is also the time of the new discourses of diversity and minorities and Others.
Conservatives in most eurocultural societies are frightened that what they
take to be the basis of social solidarity is being destroyed by the
demotion of the common high culture to just one self-interested and storied
viewpoint ... that Others are pointing out that They are just another
minority. Conservatives believe that the basis of social solidarity is
cultural homogeneity, the solution of the 18th/19th centuries in Europe.
(Note of course that it was only the elites who shared in this uniformity,
but they were the only ones who mattered, and they had NOT agreed before,
with disastrous results.) For us, the basis of social solidarity is mutual
interdependency in interaction, which more or less guarantees not
homogeneity but diversity, if only in divisions of labor and their
consequences for habitus. But this modern (postmodern?) alternative view
does not provide an ecosocial niche for a hegemonic elite, for the
exemplars and arbiters of a common high culture.
So we have found ourselves immersed in discourses of difference and
diversity. Rebel discourses that create political solidarity among diverse
oppressed people in the name of some categorial, totemic, and sometimes
real (i.e. interactional) Name: the "we" of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians,
Women, Gays, Workers, the Disabled, etc. Who may have much less in common
as individuals than the Name suggests, but who have considerable political
interest in mobilizing large numbers under their Name. And also
establishment discourses, the inheritors of the 'racist' (classist,
patriarchal, ...) discourses of the hegemonic era of consensus, seeking to
remit the stigma, but maintain the Category as a natural reality,
regardless of whether it is for the sake of promoting civil rights or for
the sake of subtly re-awakening the old racist, etc. fears of the
divide-and-conquer hegemony.
Neither discourses nor other sorts of institutions have priority in the
analysis of social change; the discourses that arose in the conditions of
the changes I sketched (among others) now function to co-determine (as one
factor among others) future changes in other social institutions. And it is
not language as such that falsifies, but our use of its resources. Names
and Categories, in the sense of abstract collective nouns, defined by
discourses that foreground a few human traits as salient and then accrete
to category stereotypes numerous other traits that are made to seem
'naturally' associated with them, clearly create a false and dangerous
model of diversity: a low-dimensional reduction of a high-dimensional human
space, with plenty of opportunity in the reduction for re-grounding the
inscription of dominance, even of hegemony. On the other hand, rebel
discourses can either adopt these ideological categories and try to use
them to political advantage, or they can temporarily reject Names and
Categories in favor of specificity, making every noun require local
definition as part of a Clause and a Text that tells us just who we are
really talking about now and what they are specifically like in this
particular instance. (Cf. ethnographic vs. categorial-quantitative research
discourses).
Nouns, standing alone, invite oversimplification; that is part of their
abstractive function (shared with all single words in isolation). Language
is not built up out of words; words are not basic units of meaning in
language, and for good reason. The minimal unit of meaning in language is
the clause (I skip some technicalities here): it is the representation of a
complete Process or Relation, including its participants (obligatory) and
circumstances (optional), that makes sense. Anything less makes sense only
because we are silently filling in the rest of some possible clause. And
even the clause makes a particular sense mainly in some textual and
situational and intertextual context. But the semantic taxonomies of nouns
(or most lexical items) are low dimensional, very low as the nouns become
more abstract or general. We restore the high-dimensionality of real-world
meanings by adding qualifiers and classifiers to nouns (these being
compressions of possible clauses specifying the meaning of the nouns), and
then by looking to full clauses in which these noun-phrases take on
semantic roles in Relations and Processes relative to other specified
nouns. This is a very brief account of what linguistic theory has to say
about 'rising to the concrete'.
Discourses, in the sense of discourse formations, recognized and repeated
constellations of clauses-in-texts making typical sorts of cultural
meanings about topics, tend over time to become condensed into single nouns
and phrases, shorthand to be interpreted by intertextual reference to the
full clauses and typical textual contexts of the discourse formation. This
is the sign of their cultural sedimentation, their coming to be taken for
granted as simply making sense, while we go on to use them to talk about
something more. They constitute the regime of 'normal science' (ala Kuhn),
while in the interregna of rapid cultural change, we get instead much more
explicit and specific discourses that periphrastically avoid the rejected
assumptions built into the old familiar category nouns and their syntactic
partners.
Awkward sounding discourses. Not easily summarized. Not self-evidently
convincing. Lengthy. Unfamiliar. Deconstructive of the familiar. Not the
discourses of political rhetoric. Possible ways forward. These are the sort
of alternative discourses we need to create. Creating them is, in the
longer view of history, perhaps the only uniquely useful function of
intellectuals. JAY.
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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>
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