"Under what conditions do we defer to categorial
stereotypical characterizations of people, events, situations, and
is there anything we can do to interrupt our disposition?
"... under what conditions are we likely to complexify
social reality and what can we do to create those conditions
under social pressure to do otherwise?"
apropos of my critique of the uses and abuses of over-simplifying abstract
categories, esp. those about persons (e.g. "minorities" "Gays"
"African-Americans" "feminists" "men" "academics" "the mentally ill"
"children" etc.) ... and perhaps particularly about their uses in either
folk-theory or social pseudo?-scientific generalizations ...
When do we feel most inclined to just use the categorial terms in
naturalized ways?
when we are trying to be brief ... what are the implications of our norms
of brevity? of the false and real notions of scarcity of time? the origins
of the scarcity of time? the ideology of the virtue of brevity?
when we assume our audience is already critical of the assumptions lying
behind the terms ... but we are usually wrong in the instance because we
are read as using them uncritically, or we trigger uncritical readings, or
some of the audience is not as critical as we are or critical in the same ways
when we are speaking to people whom we fear would not understand or be
patient with more periphrastic locutions ... the naive, the politically
obtuse, those who do not share the experiential basis of our critical
stance toward the categories ... that is in a stance of intellectual and
perhaps moral superiority
when we are trying to be rhetorically effective ... that is when we are
trying to manufacture assent, to assert power, to use the master's tools
against the masters, or the masters' dupes
when we are addressing people in power, whose interests dispose them to
naturalize these categories and dismiss those who do not agree
when we are trying to sound scientific and abstract, to win a point with
the power of generalization about matters about which evidently
generalization is not a reasonable way to speak ... that is again when we
are trying to operate the machinery of power available in common
discourses, when we try to ride the coattails of pseudo-scientific
expertise, when we are in fact a bit naive about the limits of scientific
modes of discourse (they apply only to matters whose similarities are more
relevant than their differences, or perhaps only to matters where there are
no differences from instance to instance), or naive about the norms of
rationality in our own cultural-historical tradition (that they function in
part to reinforce social-structural inequities) ...
And under what conditions do we find ourselves most likely to resist overly
simplistic categorization?
When we are speaking to someone who would belong to the category, esp. if
it is not a maximally valued category ... because they have both the
interest and the evidence to contradict us
When we are embarked on a practical project whose successful outcome
depends on more accurate characterization and whose failure would do us
serious injury ...
When our own interests, perhaps as members of a negatively valued category,
are served by deconstructing it so as to reduce others' potential power
over us
When our interest is not in a truth but in a person, as when we are in love
... or less intensely, when our interest in is a project, an event, a
history, a community _as an individual_ in the generalized sense of a
particular, rather than in discourses and representations about that
individual, or about classes of such individuals
In short ... when we care, when we fear ...
... other suggestions?? 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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