Nate,
you think about that basic question of how (a) the traditional
"subject-object"-opposition could or should be replaced. Two
alternatives: (b) mediation between the two and (c) repudiation that
there is separation in the first place. The latter, if feasible,
would render mediation dispensable on this level. You don't say
explicitly what you adopt but go quicker onwards than I expected to.
I come back to this.
I shall sketch here now the overall picture with the "subject-object"
problem as I see it and try to comment a bit on some of the options.
This also allows me at the same time to advance to the next step: to
introduce here a provisional picture of the function circle.
Perhaps a bit of personal history is again useful. An important
starting point has long ago been the question of where the individual
or the person, to speak of humans in particular, ends and where the
environment begins or vice versa. No reasonable and satisfying (to
me) answer could be given. The boundary between organism and
surrounds is certainly not a reasonable separation line. Living
beings suffer and die when isolated from their environment, whether
in terms of energy, stuff or "innovation" ("news" if you want) i.e.
coordinated reorganization of internal and external structures. Also
losing some body parts does not necessarily make a difference for the
person, except of course for the handicap and its sequels. But take
away anybody's clothes and he may become another person in some
respect, same with uniforms, dwellings, so-called possessions, even
land for some people etc. Two or more persons working jointly and
complementarily to attain an objective where each one mutually
depends on the other's competencies, knowledge, sensibility, care,
hands and tools in a constantly changing constellation demonstrate
another facet of this unit-positing business being questionable. As
Peirce, the formidable psychologist (!), wrote in 1893 in a
manuscript (Robin 403) entitled "Grand Logic", $17:
"[...] personality, on both sides, that of the unification of all of
a body's experiences, and that of the isolation of different persons,
is much exaggerated in our natural ways of thinking, - ways that tend
to puff up the person, and make him think himself far more real than
he veritably is. A person is, in truth, like a cluster of stars,
which appears to be one star when viewed with the naked eye, but
which scanned with the telescope of scientific psychology is found on
the one hand, to be multiple within itself, and on the other hand to
have no absolute demarcation from a neighhoring condensation."
Obviously the figure-ground organization of perception and the
ensuing cognitive constancy and fixation tendencies over time is
playing games with the observer, both when looking at persons and at
"objects" of the environment. It is well known that also the ground
may be essential for the ensuing receptive and actional process. "The
function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous
impressions to unity." (Peirce, loc.cit., §16). I suspect that this
feature of our psychological organization is at the root of the
notion introduced by the Greek philosophers of "substantia" as a
carrier of "accidentes" which is at the base of the possibility of
class concepts, as ravaging as practical. (I judge the
figure-ground-principle to be one of several great and missed chances
of the psychologists to bring their empirically based knowledge to
bear widely in philosophy and the sciences including psychology
itself. Psychology is so often a "science" that follows, confirms and
elaborates preconceptions and so fixing beliefs rather than
dissecting and extending our understanding.)
This fixating inclination may also have lead to the notions of object
and subject and the strange reversal of meaning of the latter in the
history of ideas from the subjected to the subjecting. As a
consequence in the Western world -- and well made powerful in its
basic language features, not so in all languages of the world --
substances have gained primacy over relations and thus the static
dominates the dynamic. Parmenides and Platon have superseded, also
suppressed Heraclites, so to say. And thus the ideal of the eternal
existence has produced the objective of catching all conceivable
processes in terms of law or function in the hope of predicting
things forever: sort of staticization of the dynamic. Systematically,
being has been given precedence over becoming. Of course, there is no
good justification for that. Most scientists, though researching
processes, are only happy when they succeed to freeze events and
activities in a formula. In our conceiving it, ours is still, in
spite of so much knowledge about the evolutive nature of the cosmos,
of our planet, of life, of individuals and of culture, essentially a
static world view. I think the subject-object opposition is one of
the most powerful manifestation of this. Much activity in the field
is an attempt to reintroduce process and so amend the fixating power
the the concepts. Unfortunately, it is not of "concrete things" and
their dynamics. It is of abstracted notions neglecting the
connectedness and dynamics of the real systems in question. (Cf. my
other message to come soon on the concrete and abstraction.)
Of course, in some way, both a static how-things-are and a dynamic
how-things-come-about view are correct. The problem is with primacy.
You cannot extend a static understanding to become a dynamic one. Yet
the static can be a phase of dynamics in the real world. Evolution is
as much stabilized as it is innovative. Innovation alone would
explode things, overstabilization will paralyse and make further
evolution impossible. I cannot understand the widespread desire to
fix things; it breaks life. Twice in evolution a fixation strategy
has gained a major hold: instinct in bioevolution and science in
cultural evolution. Both function on the premise that the world will
behave as it has before. Of course both are very elegant strategies
-- as long as the world stays the same. As soon as things change it
is a deadly strategy; witness the animal phylae extinct. Science is
allright in dealing with atoms and the like; applying the same
principle to life, persons, and cultures is deadly because it fails
the real. Our children shall have to suffer the experience. To create
a static concept of the object and the subject is forgetting about
the real thing. It is hopeless to think you can do it provisionally
and then introduce dynamics as an amendment. (You may think, even if
you agree in principle, I am overstating my case? Perhaps. But don't
forget that there is a long history of people claiming that same case
almost in vain and most have been actively suppressed: from
Heraclites to Herder, from Bruno to Bergson, from Peirce to Dewey,
from Nietzsche to "you-name-your-favorite" etc.)
The consequence for me was to look at the field in terms of evolutive
ecosystems as process and becoming entities (Gebilde im Werden) and
in addition to dynamically follow their changes over time finding out
about the conditions of their change and their stabilization. Any
moment in the existence of an ecosystem would then appear as a step
in a genetic series. And -- a crucial step to clear things -- in
distinction from Kurt Lewin's conception of the life space embracing
the psychological person and the psychological environment and
developing as a whole in a (linear or) serial chain of states, the
genetic series of my ecosystem should be conceived as running in a
circling or spiraling way endlessly through the living organisms and
its environment. This would bind, indeed, constitute what the
observer can discern as an organism or a person or a group and plenty
of things and events and constellations in the environment. The
spiraling thread would be a structure building, modifying, demising
process leaving traces here within and there around the concrete
individual focussed. Conceiving these structures as sets of meaning
for each other and introducing a generative semiotic would complete
the picture. I follow this later.
This basic understanding of ecosystems (to call them evolutive is
tautological, but sometimes recommendable) as process in the function
circle is not to say that for observational purposes it can and
should not be looked at the usual entities, the organisms and the
surrounds' parts, but both should be conceived as parts of one system
not as a secondary composition done by the observer and at his like.
It must be the ongoing process in its own diverging an converging
sequences rather than the observer or researcher that decides about
what entities from the environment or the organism belong into a
complete picture. To choose and decide upon units of analysis in
advance and definitely will again fail the concrete thing and replace
it by some preconception. Following the process as tightly as
possible will do that job, in principle at least. So definitions of
subject matter must always be provisional, in working definitions,
and ready to be revised by whatever the processes of transacting
brings into the scene.
There are great advantages with the semiotic ecosystem conception, I
believe. I mention here only the immeasurable gain of being able to
describe perception, action, psychic processes proper and changes of
the cultural objects all in one and the same terms and within one
coherent conception. These things that look so different on the
phenomenal level and in consequence have found entirely different
conceptions in spite of the fact that they are so intimately
connected and follow each other and base on each other's attainments.
The gain in coherence of understanding and in economy of explanation
is immense. The function circle combines these four phases of
any(living)thing maintaining itself in the world. It is run through
repeatedly in spirals, from conception to death of any individual,
generating itself its own systematic change and inducing change in
its neighbors and more. In view of the inner and and outer subsystem
of the organism and its environment I call the ingoing, and outgoing
processes IntrO- and ExtrO, the processes within the inner and the
circumferent subsystems IntrA- and ExtrA- processes or -semioses
respectively. (Mentioned here just to get you used to some neologism
to be explained later). Imagine the spiral running through ExtrO,
ExtrA, IntrO, IntrA and again going into ExtrO, ExtrA, etc. of
myriads of ecosystem with distinct organism and partially shared
surrounds of which the environment of each ecosystem is drawn. So the
spirals intertwine forever, some finding an end and others arising.
That's my image of this world.
Let me now comment upon Nate's options and thoughts.
I think you are basically right that my non-separation of subject and
object or positively stated the idea of such entities to become
ongoing results of that spiraling process within each ecosystem makes
mediation non-requisite on this level. The notions in question are in
need of revision to become genuine empirical concepts rather than
being the postulates to be interpreted almost ad libitum they are
now. What is not separated need not be brought together. It is
particularly important the these two concepts are not defined in
opposition to each other, one's understanding dependent on the
other's, but each in its own right within one conception of their
conditions which assures their relatedness in fact.
I therefor seriously doubt that dialectics will help. Dialectics is,
in my understanding, of abstractions, not of real concretes. One
abstraction may still be related to what it is abstracted from; but
it's anti-abstraction is enclosed into the abstract domain. And the
same ensues for the so-called synthesis. It is similar to the logic
of negation which can only make sense of symbols, not of reals. And
when you do negate in symbols you should be very careful indeed in
proceeding with the result of the operation. Does a concept such as
<everything in the universe except Alfred L.> as the negation of
<Alfred L.> make any useful sense? You may well use it for the names
(any name other than Alfred), but not for the referents of the names.
I for one strongly recommend dialogics instead of dialectics. But
that's again a topic for later dialogue.
You hint at ideas of "self-regulation" and similar topics. Closed
systems are dead entities, in fact more than dead, because even
so-called dead or passive matter such as stones or everyday things
have "hooks" to related to other things in ecosystems. A notion like
"self"-regulation is therefor in severe hardship to define "self" or
the range of regulation within. As a concsequence, all that
(new)speak of the isolated individual separated from its object of
knowledge and having to make his own constructions, I think, is
utterly unrealistic. I mean it's pure nonsense. All living beings
from plants to primates are very well integrated into their
environment. Better or less so when the environment changes. They'd
die if they were not. Why should this be different for humans? I mean
in fact rather than in idea. Indeed, that's the present human
condition: they change their environment so thoroughly and quickly
that more than many cannot follow. Who could dig the gap if not
humans themselves in their fiction? And some appear to have done it
and to spread the word. Why promote or take fiction for real? I can
see only one explanation for this view: the gap is a construction
itself and calls for a second construction to bridge it. (Greetings
here from Kant and Herder!) It's also like the kernel of Christian
theology: in order to get a chance to be salvaged you have first to
have fallen. What a crazy detour? Are there motives the motive to dig
that gap?
Your way of comparing notions rises in me the interesting question of
whether the idea of mediation would not be wide enough to cover the
processes in the function circle, or, seen from the other side,
whether the notion of generative semiosis could not give the notion
of mediation a concrete meaning. I am still a bit open to checking
how and what kind of a mediation concept could be compatible and how
it fits with semiosis in the function circle; maybe triadic
generative semiosis is a relative of some aspects of a differentiated
mediation concept. But my tendency is rather to renounce any such
special construct on this level once the person and the cultural
setting are understood as process and structures continually going on
rather than as given. I am not yet fully clear about this, but
propose to also defer that discussion. What I see clear already,
however, is this: There is a role for "mediation" on a higher level:
communication attaining its effects. Here "mediation" as a term would
be used nearer to its standard general language meaning, e.g. as used
in diplomcy etc. But this topic has also to wait until I can treat of
communication in semeco terms.
But I can well understand that the superficial similarity with direct
perception can mislead; I'd rather describe it as a kind of "direct"
yet multi-step connection within the ecosystem, imposing also its
own nature and creating qualities, while retaining important
characters, and two-ways in every respect (rather than pickup direct
perception); your reading of the papers seems essentially correct. I
find particularly doubtful the idea of "picking up information". Who
is to pick up and what is picked up? Poultry do it with grains. Do
modern humans it with bits and bytes? With media bits?
But the relation between individuals and their environment is
probably better described by notions like these: an ongoing process
of maintenance of the existing structures within the organism is
modulated by what has effects upon the sense. Such effects on the
immediately are a part of the ongoing regulative processes; the
present states influence the behavior and functioning of the senses,
dealing with their incoming flux selectively which, overworked,
becomes part of the ongoing flux and will eventually influence an
outgoing flux that governs the behavior and achievements of executive
subsystems such as muscles, glands, speech, walking, griping, action
etc.
And when I sketch this, focusing on the individual, it is obvious
that focusing on some environmental structure can result in a very
similar picture. Imagine for instance a garden hosting and guiding a
gardener in her activities depending on the present state of the
ensemble of the plants and animals and, of course, under joint
influence of some internal structures in the gardener we may
summarize in terms of knowledge, desires, ideals, disturbances. It is
evident that no sensible actor will treat with entities of his
environment without considering and bringing to work his knowledge,
desires, guesses and so on about the nature and regular behavior of
the things in question.
>Maybe rather than S----O (direct perception) or S><O (mediation),
>argueing for a S/O in which a seperation is not called for. No
>inside or outside or maybe giving up the project of "thing in
>itself".
Yes, Nate, you probably give the essential summary here. This is
indeed what I attempt: outside and inside being relative, and
certainly no "thing-in-itself" anywhere around nor nowhere. What
could that be in an evolutive world, where everything what occurs is
a function of the interactions of the structures already present?
> Maybe wrongly, reading your work reminded me a little b of the
>arguments of Goodwin et al in MCA 7.1&2 that pointed toward, at
>least for me, how individual/ activity, subject/object,
>perception/classification are constitutive - (their non-seperation).
I received my copy of MCA today, so I have yet to read. Color ecology
is, besides the dwelling process and music, one of my favorite
examples for demonstrating how semiotic ecology works.
Best, Alfred
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch Website: http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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