Costelloe-KuehnMemo25

Memo25: Shifts in Sign Systems
For this memo, write a few hundred words describing a critical discursive shift that you think is going on in or around your object of concern. A shift in sign systems is a shift in what is common sensical. Examples are in the reading section: Daniel Botkin and I. Scoones(in separate pieces) describe shifts in conceputalizations of nature; Steven Lansing's essays asks what it would look like for social scientists to shift to thinking in terms of complex adaptive systems. Gayatri Spivak's essay reads the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective as charting shifts in sign systems.

"...one can always come up with binary oppositions... and bi-univocal relations... but that's stupid as long as one doesn't see where the system is coming from and going to, how it becomes, and what element is going to play the role of heterogeneity, a saturating body that makes the whole assembly flow away and that breaks the symbolic structure..." (D&G, kafka, 7).

is kuhn's paradigm shift a good model for these kinds of shifts in sign systems? pickering's mangle better? lakatos's core and periphery? are different models needed for shifts in "ontology" vs. "epistemology?"

re: the concept of "revolution" "Applied to anything other than scientific revolutions, [Kuhn's paradigm shift] implies that the world really was equivalent to our knowledge of it, and the moment we change the principles on which our knowledge is based, reality changes too... insofar as 'reality' refers to anything, it refers to precisely that which can never be entirely encompassed by our imaginative constructions. Totalities, in particular, are always creatures of the imagination" (Graeber, fragments, 43).

"Karl Popper argued that this shift form an atomistic and mechanistic ontology to one based on probabilities was among the most significant intellectual pirouettes in the history of science... 'the world... can now be seen as a world of propensities, as an unfolding process of realizing possibilities and of unfolding new possibilities'" (Lansing, 185 / Popper 1990, 19).

"a functional change in a sign system is a violent event... yet, if the space for a change (necessarily also an addition) had not been there in the prior function of the sign-system, the crisis could not have made the change happen" (Spivak, introduction to subaltern studies, 4).

the idea of a "shift" (in social systems and sign systems) itself may be shifting. possible shifts in sign systems:
 * 1) totalities (as real) --> totalities (as tools for thought)
 * 2) totalities --> affinities
 * 3) global --> local? glocal?
 * 4) revolution (as power takeover, all at once) --> revolution (as gradual experimentation and building new institutions 'in the shell of the old')
 * 5) revolution (noun. event. thing.) --> revolution (verb. process. experiment.)

In "Gramsci is Dead," Anarchist Trends in the Newest Social Movements, RF Day whites about how the "hegemony of hegemony" is being displaced by struggles against capitalism, for environmental justice, etc. He argues that a politics of "affinity" is becoming more common and that outdated notions about broad "revolutionary" social change (involving the struggle for hegemony, "all at once," etc.) may still hinder progressive projects. Similarly, anarchist anthropologist David Graeber writes about how "after the revolution" can be useful as a tool for thinking and imagining, but only if we recognize that revolutionary change is (already) happening in the "shell of the old" world.

I am interested in environmental media organizations partly because I think they are a good site for looking at how affirmative experimentations in developing alternatives that can run parallel to dominant organizations and practices might "succeed" and how they can "fail" as well.