The notion of lifescape is important in order to simply acknowledge
the existence of the vast, idiosyncratic and always intrusive nexus of
relationships that living creatures, especially humans, have woven into
the world. Before rushing off to debate any specific issues it is
better to just behold the enormity of the subtle connections, the
unconscious connections, the dependencies, the biases, the myriad wishes,
cultural predilections, unlikely associations, strange viewpoints that
actually exist. This initial assessment makes sense of meaning and
knowledge as natural aspects of the environment. Relationships
exist; we make them; all creatures make them; they have effects
irregardless of any questions of legitimacy or accuracy; there are more of
them than we will ever be able to manage even for ourselves. Looking
at the dense web of meaning, the lifescape, is an acceptance of our
enormous creativity and ignorance at the same time. We cannot help
making meaning; our meaning will hopelessly far from any normative,
central rightness. The lifescape shows that meaning shares
the conditions of our physical thermodynamic drift to entropy and our
physical-logical conditions of uncertainty. By being able to refer
to this large reservoir of actual and overflowing meaning relationships,
we will gain a sane reservoir where we can leave our disputes of truth to
gain a fallow fields enrichment of what actually matters to us.
The notion of conceptscape is
intended to form a background ecology to culture and shared meanings.
Each friendship, each group, each culture and each disciplinary field can
be seen as their own societies or even from the viewpoint of systems
theory as systems within the lifescape. Each of our subsocieties
feeds off meaning to build and maintain itself. The conceptscape is
the shared meaning ecology where groups process meaning in particular ways
and with particular characteristics similar to how biological species
process energy and matter in unique ways. In contrast to an
impossibly large actual lifescape the conceptscape points to the many
collectivities, particularly human groups, which have assembled
self-supporting concepts, relationships and practices. Concepts too
are embodied, but in groups rather than in individuals. These
concepts are interdependent with the group's needs, dependencies,
assumptions, history and so forth. But the point is not to say that
any group's concepts are undone by their social class, by their cultural
biases or by some such but to simply acknowledge that shared meaning is,
as for personal knowledge, to some inextricable degree intertwined with
the group's identity and conditions of existence. This shifts the
social debates of today to: how are a group's beliefs tied to other
aspects of its meaning and existence, how healthy is any given group and
how can we get along that group. All these questions are first or
second person points of view rather than third person points of view that
attack groups from afar or that undermine groups from the presumption of
special places of judgment.
Quotes
“Neither totalizing structures that repress differences or oppositional
differences that exclude commonality are adequate in the plurality of
worlds that constitute the postmodern condition. To think what
post-structuralism leaves unthought is to think a nontotalizing structure
that nonetheless acts as a whole. Such a structure would be neither a
universal grid organizing opposites nor a dialectical system synthesizing
opposites but a seamy web in which what comes together is held apart and
what is held apart comes together. This web is neither subjective nor
objective and yet is the matrix in which all subjects and objects are
formed, deformed, and reformed. In the postmodern culture of simulacra, we
are gradually coming to realize that complex communication webs and
information networks, which function holistically but not totalistically,
are the milieu in which everything arises and passes away.” Taylor, Mark
C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. University of
Chicago. 2001. p. 11.
“Different theorists tend to
approach society from one perspective or the other. Someone like John
Rawls would, implicitly at least, consider society from a lifeworld
prespective, looking for the overlapping consensus that participants in a
political community might share and communicatively reproduce. Conversely,
theorists such as Emile Durkheim and Niklas Luhmann adopt, indeed develop,
the systems-theoretic approach, ‘realistically’ looking at the constraints
and imperatives that various subsystems impose upon social actors....
“Yet even as he integrates both the lifeworld and the system perspective
into his analysis, Habermas notices that there has been an increasing
differentiation or decoupling between the system and life-world aspects of
society.” McAfee, Noelle. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship. Cornell U.
Press. 2000. p. 86-7.
"Almost invisibly to consciousness, conceptual blending choreographs vast
networks of conceptual meaning, yielding cognitive products that, at the
conscious level, appear simple. The way we think is not the way we think
we think. Everyday thought seems straightforward, but even our
simplest thinking is astonishingly complex." Facuconnier, Gilles and
Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the
Mind's Hidden Complexities. Basic Books. 2002. p. v.
“Rather than representations being the primary locus of understanding,
they are similarly islands in the sea of our unformulated practical grasp
on the world.”
“Seeing that our understanding resides first of all in our practices
involves attributing an inescapable role to the background. The connection
figures, in different ways, in virtually all the philosophies of the
contemporary counter-current to epistemology, and famously, for example,
in Heidegger and Wittgenstein.” Taylor, Charles. “To Follow a Rule...”
Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. University of Chicago Press. 1993. p. 50.
"That is to say, every social
contact is understood as a system, up to and including society as the
inclusion of all possible contacts." Luhmann, Niklas. Social
Systems. Stanford University Press. 1995. p. 15.
“It [communication by linguistic
reference only] is theoretically inadequate, as demonstrated by the
philosophers Wittgenstein and Quine, and it is empirically inadequate in
many ways, perhaps especially its inability to account for the acquisition
and use of linguistic symbols whose connections to the perceptual world
are tenuous at best, that is to say, most linguistic symbols that are not
proper names or basic level nouns (e.g. verbs, prepositions, articles,
conjunctions). We must therefore explicitly acknowledge the theoretical
point that linguistic reference is a social act in which one person
attempts to get another person to focus her attention on something in the
world. And we must also acknowledge the empirical fact that linguistic
reference can only be understood within the context of certain kinds of
social interactions that I will call joint attentional scenes.
“Joint attentional scenes are social interactions in which the child and
the adult are jointly attending to some third thing, and to one another’s
attention to that third thing, for some reasonably extended length of
time....
“The first essential feature concerns what is included in joint
attentional scenes. On the one hand, joint attentional scenes are not
perceptual events; they include only a subset of things in the child’s
perceptual world. On the other hand, joint attentional scenes are also not
linguistic events; they contain more things than those explicitly
indicated in any set of linguistic symbols. Joint attentional scenes thus
occupy a kind of middle ground–an essential middle ground of socially
shared reality–between the larger perceptual world and smaller linguistic
world. The second essential feature needing emphasis is the fact that the
child’s understanding of a joint attentional scene includes as an integral
element the child herself and her own role in the interaction
conceptualized from the same ‘outside’ perspective as the other person and
the object so that they are all in a common representational format–which
turns out to be of crucial importance for the process of acquiring a
linguistic symbol.” Tomasello, Michael. The Cultural Origins of Human
Cognition. Harvard University Press. 1999. p. 97-8.
“The point is not that language
creates ex nihilo the ability to categorize, to perspectivize, or to make
analogies or metaphors. That is impossible because language depends on
these skills, and they may be present in basic form in either nonhuman
primates or prelinguistic infants. But what has happened is that in
collaboration over historical time human beings have created an incredible
array of categorical perspectives and construals on all kinds of objects,
events, and relations, and then they have embodied them in their systems
of symbolic communication called natural languages. As children develop
ontogenetically, they use their basic skills of categorization,
perspective-taking, and relational thinking–in concert with their ability
to comprehend the adult’s communicative intentions–to learn the use of the
relevant symbolic forms. This enables them to take advantage of a vast
number of categories and analogies that other members of their culture
have seen fit to create and symbolize, and that they very likely would
never have thought to create on their own.” Tomasello, Michael. The
Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press. 1999. p.
170.
“There is agreement within the
discipline [of sociology] today that the point of departure for all
systems-theoretical analysis must be the difference between system and
environment. Systems are oriented by their environment not just
occasionally and adaptively, but structurally, and they cannot exist
without an environment. They constitute and maintain themselves by
creating and maintaining a difference from their environment, and they use
their boundaries to regulate this difference. Without difference from an
environment, there would not even be self-reference, because difference is
the functional premise of self-referential operations. In this sense,
boundary maintenance is system maintenance.” Luhmann, Niklas. “The
Autopoiesis of Social Systems” in Essays on Self-Reference. Columbia
University Press. 1990. Quoted in: Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of
Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. University of Chicago. 2001. p. 91.
"To begin with, we could say that reality is that which is immediate. Yet
this immediacy itself refers to two different realities: the one temporal,
the other factual.
“The first has to do with the reality of the present. This reality is
quite strong and has abolished a part of yesterday’s reality, but it is
also very weak, as it will itself be partially abolished by the reality of
tomorrow.”
“...The factual meaning of the term reality refers to situations, facts,
and events that are visible in the present. Yet perceptible facts and
events often hide facts or events that go unperceived and can even hide a
still invisible reality.” Morin, Edgar. Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a
New Millennium. 1999. Hampton Press. p. 99-100.
Examples
Statement of Point
The public space of our
traditional social life should be separated like meaning and knowledge
into the radical sum of all actual meaning in the environment and into the
aware space discovered and usable in public interaction. The names coined
for these are the lifescape and the conceptscape. The conceptscape
corresponds closely to culture with the only difference being that the
conceptscape is much more inclusive and includes not only small
subcultures but also even the “cultures” of individuals. The lifescape,
the web of all meaning of all creatures stands between the aware sphere of
the conceptscape and the sum of all possibilities, the physical space. We
can never leave the conceptscape but the lifescape can grow into physical
space and the conceptscape can grow into both.
Bibliography
Adbusters Magazine, any issue
Further
Considerations