ALL RED FEATHER MATERIALS ARE ALWAYS FREE TO STUDENTS AND TO THOSE WHO TEACH THEM....T R Young

AFFIRMATIVE POSTMODERN SOCIO-LINGUISTICS

SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES

by

T. R. Young
The Red Feather Institute

Note: This mini-lecture is out of order...although it has
number, 017, it was posted long after others in series on
postmodern knowledge processes.  For some reason,
the original No. 17 is absent from my files or perhaps renumbered.
At any rate, this is part of the series.

							TR

I have been following the exchange on the concept of
the 'white male' and 'maleness' on the socgrad network
for some time; there are, I think, several ways to 
resolve the linguistic dilemmas posed by such human
constructs...the one upon which I would focus attention
is one which does not have wide currency in sociology.

Socio-Linguistics has a long and rich history from Whorf's
work to that of such progressive scholars as Chomsky and
RD Smith.  And I have a few pieces on the nature of
symbolic interaction in mass societies listed below.

Now to the point at hand: Postmodern understandings of 
						White maleness

A.  The Human genome is incredibly complex;  the base pairs
in it have enough pattern and enough variety to support efforts 
to construct an rich variety of 'races,' 'genders,' 'species'
and any other socio-linguistic construct purporting to have
a biological basis.

It is very important to note that the geometry of sets of
genes in any complex genome is fractal...and that the fractal
geometry of that set varies with time, place and purpose.

B. There are some 300,000 words in the English Language; all
of them are cultural configurations...of those which have
a physical base, still the 'reality' out there is so complex
that CHOICE of just which aspects of 'reality out there' to
select and to use are intimately connected to power, privilege
and other human purpose...this is true of such putatively 
neutral categories as 'time,' 'space,' weight,' 'volume'
'pressure' and 'mass.' Even though such concepts lend themselves
to precise quantification, still closely related constructs 
could have been used with equal intellectual efficacy.  The
concepts of 'wave' and 'particle' are case in point; they 
appear to our eye and brain to be different but from the point
of view of fractal geometry, they merge in the concept of the
soliton.

C. Of the words used to refer to social categories: race, class,
gender, age, wealth, money, male, white, black, American, Catholic,
Republican, god or Pittsburgh, human purpose and human power
creates still more grounds for argument about the intellectual
validity of such constructs.  

All socio-linguistic categories have both poetics and politics.

D.  The concept of 'White' is particularly poetic.  Neither the
wave spectrum of light nor the human genome supports the concept.
It takes a powerful imagination to collapse the infinite variety
and mixtures of colors on the human skin to 'call' someone white.
...or black or brown or yellow or red.  These are poetic devices
not ontological categories which exist in and of themselves apart
from human imagination and human desire.

E.  The concept of 'male' is, genetically, a poetic device, of the
3x10k base pairs in the human genome [Singer and Berg: p875] males
and females share almost all of them...of those which unravel to
produce secondary sexual characteristics, the pattern in any given
individual varies from any other given individual...so the truth
value of a binary category such as male/female is, a political 
construct.

Of all men and women alive at any given point in time, there are
no hard and fast boundaries, based upon the expression of genetic
information, which justify absolutistic categorization.

F. Reification is an essential human process; without it, neither
society nor culture is possible.  Those in symbolic interactional
theory know reification better as the self'fulfilling prophecy; things
defined as real become real in the consequence.  Those in marxist
theory will appreciate the great harm that some forms of reification
does to the human project, to social justice and to human potential
of those categorized as 'Black,' 'female,' 'foreigner,' 'owner,' 
'king,' 'pope,' and 'prisoner.'

G.  Trust, belief and faith are essential social psychological 
capacities evolved over the long history of human culture; they arose
in pre-modern knowledge processes and were given social and moral
power by religious teachings...everyone, in this sense, must be
religious else society won't happen.

H. Sometimes, out of faith and trust in authority, people come to
believe and to act upon the more harmful reifications of their 'religion.'
'white maleness' is such a case.  Those who believe, innocently, that
there are such things, god-given things as 'whites' and 'males' reproduce
alienating social structures...

AFFIRMATIVE POSTMODERN SOCIO-LINGUISTICS.  Much of what we've seen on
the socgrad network is, I believe, part of an effort to work out an
affirmative postmodern socio-linguistics.  

Tom Brown was working at a postmodern linguistics when he wrote:

> 2) Conceptions of masculinity are so variable across cultures that
> they alone are not sufficient to explain the common tendency for males 
> to dominate.

Andy Austin was working on an affirmative postmodern socio-linguistics
when he wrote:

They are not *that* variable. In general, men dominate women, and what
constitutes masculinity cross-culturally shares more similarities than
differences. The patriarchy is practically universal. (Cultural relativism
is a scientistic sublimation of the political-ideology of liberal-
pluralism.) As a point of clarification, nobody said that conceptions of
masculinity are sufficient to explain the common tendency of males to
dominate (nice to see you concede that point, thereby agreeing that
patriarchy is real and meaningful). In fact, I was arguing that
conceptions of masculinity were a cultural-ideological overlay to deeper
material relations that constitute the patriarchal structure. Christian
Harlow, in clarifying her argument, has made a similar point. Despite
cultural variation, the deep social and material relations that constitute
social formations are common throughout the world. The patriarchy is one
of these deep social and material relations.

Together Tom, Andy, and those of us interested in a better social
psychology than we inherited from prior generations of theorists can
work together to do better than any one of us alone.

												TR

Some things to read:
 

In your library:

Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Singer and Berg, Genes and Genomes

Briggs and Peat: Turbulent Mirror...a fine and fun
	Intro to chaos theory.

On the Red Feather Chaos Home Page:

	double click on:

	CHAOS THEORY: EXPLICATIONS and APPLICATIONS

Chaos Theory and Postmodern Philosophy of Science 

Symbolic Interactional Theory and Nonlinear Dynamics 

Chaos Theory and the Knowledge Process 

CHAOS, RACE, CLASS, GENDER and ETHNICITY
An Article by RD Smith.  One would do well to start with this
	fine piece by Smith.

Class Structure and Non-Linear Social Dynamics
Bifurcations in Social Class