Epigenesis is a nice term from developmental biology, reminding us that
developmental trajectories for organisms are always functions of the
environmental interactions through which type-specific potential works
itself out as token-specific uniqueness.
Ecogenesis as a term might remind us that what's involved in organism
development is not just other humans, but all the rest of our ecosystem
communities, including other species, artifacts, landscapes, air and rock
and water ... and that, dually, the dynamical phenomena in eco-communities
are always multi-scale: development is happening for units at every scale
of organization in the system, interdependently. What is of interest is how
processes at each level, on each timescale, constitute, influence, and
constrain one another.
In this view, it is rather simplistic to identify just two levels: the
individual and the social. Almost everything relevant to the questions we
want to answer is already eliminated. A system with more than a dozen
relevant levels of organization is treated as if it had only two -- and
neither of those two is well-defined. All the levels 'below' the organism
are lumped with it as part of the individual, and all the levels 'above'
the organism are indiscriminately contrasted with the individual as 'the
social'. Worse, the notion of 'individual' is taken to mean the social
individual, the persona (meaning-making agent, subject), which cannot be
defined except in relation to levels of organization larger than the
organism, but the 'reality' of the individual is established by reference
only to the material level of organization of an organism. Conflating the
social person and the biological organism already defeats serious
theoretical analysis and elides careful critique of how each of them are
actually constructed as realities (e.g. their continuity in time is defined
quite differently in each case).
Most of us know a fair bit about the history of these ideas, and we know
that the individual vs. social split has primarily political functions,
rather than theoretical or scientific ones. In very crass terms, the
bourgeoisie championed the view of the primacy of the individual in order
to free their property from community control, and their opponents argue
for the primacy of the social to justify that control. In our
sociopolitical order, this is a systemic contradiction; in other times and
places it has not been such a major issue. The political struggle
continues, but I'd rather not allow it to limit our theoretical options.
One does, however, have to recognize that many people have strong identity
commitments to views that emphasize certain shibboleths of the competing
discourses. At best, these views do insure critique of any theory that
veers too close to the other pole. We should be trying to get as far from
both these political fantasies as we can.
There is no such thing as 'the human individual' -- the concept is an
incoherent mishmash.
There is no such thing as 'society' or 'the social' -- the concept is an
incoherent mishmash.
Gordon says that 'internalization' can be easily misread as justifying
transmission because it seems to imply that information passes directly
from 'the social' to 'the individual'. It should be obvious that
information CANNOT pass directly from the social to the individual, because
they are at different scales of organization, with processes on radically
different characteristic time scales, and they CANNOT exchange information.
Only two units on the same scale can interact directly or exchange
information directly. A person cannot interact with a 'family' or 'a
community' or 'a university', except metaphorically. Only with another
person, or with a rock or a dog. Hence transmission.
You can't unravel the confusions here without a critique of the notions of
individual and social, and without some theory of the dynamics of
multi-scale systems (and one that includes the role of meaning, or
'culture'). Gordon says, briefly, that practices do not get transmitted
from A to B, but rather there is an A-B interaction in which conditions are
created such that B learns to act sort of like A does.
In more detail, of course, the pattern of the A-B interaction involves all
sorts of other higher level constraints (the nature of the language they
speak, the discourses in use, the meanings of gestures, the typical role
relationships assumed and enacted -- matters of 'culture' though that too
is obviously much too simplistic a notion to pin a lot on), and also many
lower level constitutive conditions (sensorimotor habits and capabilities,
neurological plasticity and dynamic memory, adequate concentrations of
neurotransmitters and hormones, ATP synthesis, ...). The A-B dyad is
embedded in many higher levels of organization and meaning (family
structure or classroom routines, group belief systems or local curricula,
dialect patterns and facial-postural cue systems, economic relations, urban
services, etc., etc.).
Materially, only same-scale entities interact, and only adjacent scale
levels directly afford or constrain (buffering and filtering variation from
still higher and lower levels). But semiotically, via bodies and artifacts
(at least), processes on very different timescales (mainly for humans the
longer ones) can mediatedly intervene in human scale processes (e.g. a
book). In the multi-scale dynamics of this very complex system, there is
'self-organization' or 'emergent' patterning on every scale, and one tiny
bit of that on one particular scale (actually across a few scales in this
case) is the 'learning' by B. (Obviously there is no such thing as
'learning' or 'teaching' either as they are usually understood. As we all
know, the relationship between what the teacher teaches and what the
student learns is extremely indirect and contingent on happenings in much
larger systems over much longer periods of time. And 'learning' cannot be
understood as a here-and-now activity.)
The particular complication in this case comes from the fact that B is not
simply the B-organism in the A-B dyad, and it is not simply their material
interaction that is relevant to the emergent behavior in A-B. B is the
B-persona, or better still the B-persona-trajectory, itself with multiple
timescales (me of the minute, me of the year, me of my life so far), which
can only be defined in a much larger system than the here-and-now A-B dyad.
Of course this is true for B, too, and for the book, and the chairs, and
the room. As Klaus Riegel once said to me, 'society and history are present
in the dialogue'. Dialogues, and learning, and development of identity
cannot be defined except in a system/network far larger in space and time
than the here-and-now. Neither can the social persona be defined on a
system limited by the scale of the biological organism. Which is why the
notion of an 'individual' that is defined in some of its properties by the
organism and in others by the social person is incoherent. It is also why
'mind' cannot be mapped onto 'brain' nor meaningful processes of reasoning
or even memory identitfied solely with neurological processes.
All meanings get made in systems larger than the single biological organism.
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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