Thank you Andy, Eugene, Jay... Virtually :) all of what you say makes sense
to me, especially Eugene's "functional relational" definition of Everything.
As I was reading through this thread, whatever I wanted to say kept
changing, & this is my unraveling of my reading, post hoc:
Jay posits 3 media of our knowing (should we call these macro-media?)
(1) personal experience, (2) historically-specific folk theories in the
culture, and (3) technical theories based on networks of information that go
beyond personal experience
Eugene questions the implicit grading of these media. However, his
perspective on the AmWay scheme, which was based in part on 3, did not lead
to a view of an other's "false consciousness" (but rather, a view of the
other's view....) Eugene, can you please comment on this, and on how you see
in particular the relationship between (2) and (3)? I see all 3 media as
useful dialectically, as producing tensions that can lead to more inclusive,
complex, indeterminate subjectivities/ views of the world, and thus fewer
observations of "false consciousness" [?]--but then, variability in personal
experience & access to multiple (2)s could do the same. Would this be your
critique of over-valuing (3)? What do you think, Jay?
Jay notes that,
"most people do not have access to (3) at all, or only as mediated
by the more slowly changing (2), which itself has all sorts of other
functions (which we often call ideological in the large scale, but which
also need to be recognized as face-saving, or hope-generating, etc. on the
personal scale)"
As I understand (2) (i.e., folk theories), they do their ideological work
because they are more inclusive of (1) (i.e., the subject's experiential
"take" on 'common sense') and thus can serve "true consciousness" (as
defined by Jay and Eugene) in ways that (3) cannot. What do you think?
-- as Andy says:
"it is very much the day-to-day person-to-person experiences in a society
which are the basis of people's "theories of society"...the issue is to fill
out these abstractions from personal experience.
However, even the less accessible social scientific theories in the academy
are mediated by personal experience (i.e., even those who have access to
these theories orient to them -- select the ones that matter; use them -- in
ways informed by personal experience & social positioning). So (1) mediates
both (2) and (3) but in different ways.
[If we call (1) (2) and (3) "macro media," should we call their
intersections "meta media"?]
Which brings me to the point I started out with (in my reading, not in this
message), which was that, to answer Jay's (rhetorical?) question, "How come
our view of the world is not able to meet people's experienced needs very
well?" we need sociocultural theories of identity, because the answer lies
in processes of identification. The individual is a signficant constituent
of the everyday, where we want our "neo-folk" alternatives to the [** jargon
caution **] hegemony of the military-industrial complex to matter. So in
this sense, I respectfully questiuon Andy's bit of qualification to his
appreciation of Gee's discussion of the 3 identities at stake in playing
simulation games (including The Games we all play in our professional &
everyday lives) as a bit "too inividualistic."
I look forward to challenges to, comments on, emendations of my claims
even as I hope to disappear into lurker status again, since I do not think
in real-time, which is the time of much xmca exchange.
Judy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 01 2004 - 01:00:10 PST