The kinds of codings, griddings, and positionings with which cultural theory has been preoccupied are no exception to the dynamic unity of feedback and forward, or double becoming. Gender, race, orientation, are what Ian Hacking calls “interactive kinds”: logicalcategories that feed back into and transform the reality they describe (and are themselves modified by it in return).ix Ideas about “cultural” or “social construction” have dead-ended because they have insisted on bracketing the nature of the process.x If you elide nature, you miss the becoming of culture, its emergence (not to mention the history of matter). You miss the continuum of interlinkage, feedforward and feedback, by which movements capture and convert each other to many ends, old, new, and innumerable. The world is in a condition of constant qualitative growth. Some kind of constructivism is required to account for the processual continuity across categorical divides, and for the reality of that qualitative growth, or ontogenesis: the fact that with every move, with every change, there is something new to the world, an added reality. The world is self-augmenting. Reality “snowballs,” as William James was fond of saying. Perhaps “productivism” would be better than constructivism because it connotes emergence. “Inventionism” wouldn’t be going too far, for even if you take nature in the narrowest sense, it has to be admitted that it is inventive in its own right. There is a word for that: evolution. There is no reason not to use the same word for the prolongation of “natural” processes of change in the emergent domain of “culture.”. Is a constructivist evolutionism conceivable? An evolutionary constructivism (chapters 4, 9)?
No comments:
Post a Comment