I think that the performance perspective is a very important one that has
not been well developed in social theory, much less in philosophy (where I
don't much care).
Bourdieu, in the original arguments that led later to his Logic of
Practice, had the stunning insight that meaning-in-the-moment and
meaning-after-the-fact, or more prosaically actions and accounts of
actions, were not intrinsically connected, and that we needed a separate
general theory or logic of action/performance/practice, not as they are
represented statically or synoptically (standing outside of time, or after
the fact), but as they are happening, on-the-fly, in the midst of
always-still-contingent action and happening, where we don't know whether
some later stage of the action may make us retroactively reinterpret the
meaning up-to-now. I was drawn by this to Bourdieu's work initially because
I had made, in a much narrower context, the same distinction (between
dynamic meaning in on-going discourse and synoptic meaning in the analysis
of the completed episode). Unfortunately B. never really followed through
on this. His paradigm example was sports, how the athlete responds with the
intelligence of the trained and experienced body faster than he could
possibly think through what to do. This led to the notion of habitus, but
habitus was then interpreted mainly in macrosocial terms -- on the time
scale of socialization into a class-specific habitus, gender-specific
habitus, etc. The dynamic or performative issue was left behind.
Judy suggests that truth is in the moment of happening, of action, of
performance, of event. There is a certain very basic sense to this; it
would be my own version of the notion that truth as a notion applies most
directly to sense-data and the rest in inference and generalization, or of
Descartes' famous _cogito_ (the first and truest fact we have is that we
are here-now-conscious). My version would be that our surest fact is our
direct experiential participation in the now-event, our inter-activity. The
rest is categorization, measure, inference, abduction ....
But how long does the moment of action last? is truth just in the briefest
division of our action, the threshold between operations and action in
Leontiev's sense, the timescale of tenths to single seconds? isn't it also
in our sense of duration over longer timescales? not in our semiotic
construction of sequences (whether clocktime or just retrospective accounts
of performed or observed activities) of events, but in our phenomenological
sense of durative 'time' (really durative inter-activity; longer, slower,
more drawn-out doing or experiencing)?
And how far does this go? it gets murky because beyond a fairly short
duration (except perhaps in some sorts of well-trained meditation), the
longer timescale 'duratives' get overlaid by semiotic descriptions,
recounts, and all the self-talk and imagery, the blather of the language
disease, etc., in which our experience of talking, etc. has a more
fragmented time (nothing is easier than segmenting the speech stream in one
way or another into fairly small units) ... but these overlays do not have
to _interrupt_ the timeflow of longer durational doings/feelings, and those
can continue 'underneath' and also ground a sense of primary truth or
factuality of the 'long now'.
We can also imagine, going beyond the limitations of segmental and
categorial semiotics, that much of our experiencing is 'modulational', and
so even though we may be aware (must be aware) of variation in
feeling/doing, it need not be totally segmented, such that all continuity
is merely conventional retrospective construction, but can have a 'long
now' of its own, across its modulations, uninterrupted. We perhaps need to
learn to listen for these longer nows.
So performance and action can have truth, at least in the sense of durative
conscious immediacy, across timescales ... though I admit it is pretty
difficult to maintain focus and 'hear' these longer nows beyond even a
minute. But I think that some part of us, an unconscious part of us, does,
and that in some ways this grounds our sense of the continuity of perceived
reality, even though different neurons are firing every few milliseconds.
There are a lot of physiological processes in activity that have longer
cogent moments.
Are the truths of different timescales, the shorter and longer durative
'nows', commensurable? probably not, but they do seem to be integrable,
reinforcing one another.
Judy seems to be proposing that we ground the meaning of texts, which as
artifacts are very much constructions in semiotic bits and pieces, in the
experiential response to the text. I think this is a good foundational
point. But then we have to figure out what's going on on the many longer
timescales ... not just extended durative responses to the text, but
returns to the texts, ever new responses to it, where those responses lead
us, including to different places, from which we can have still newer
responses to the text.
And here, potentially, we get the linkage to the larger social world and to
historical change, because it is not just the text as an artifact that
circulates in the wider world and through history, it is also us. Our ever
newer responses to the text depend on our interactions with more than just
the text, with other people, other texts, landscapes, interior feelings,
etc. making us capable of returning to the text again and again, letting it
mirror to us more and more of the world we have brought with us to it. And
we can overlay these in time as well, letting a text mediate our relations
of the moment to one another, and vice versa. (I think of love letters as
an intense example.)
Does this get us to a political response to globalization? It might if we
could 'hear' the very long nows on the timescales of global processes. More
feasibly, its logic might suggest that we ask just what makes us so sure
that there are global-scale social-institutional processes? This whole
discourse is one of those occasional attempts to marry phenomenology and
semiotics, and phenomenologists, esp. of the ethnomethodology school, and
even of the hybrid Latourian school (more an alliance perhaps in Latour's
case personally, but a hybrid for others in ANT), are really quite
skeptical of macrostructures. I don't agree, but I admit that pure faith
and intellectual tradition is not a very good basis for claiming that
globalization is not just a descriptive practice with no phenomenological,
or any other kind, of reality. It's a text that we can't actually perform.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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