Kim+Fortun+Field+Journal

January 28, 2014 Talking to Karin over the weekend (about language games in the law, and in the Myriad case in particular), I began thinking about Evelyn Keller’s work on the discourse of gene action – emphasizing how fixation on the gene made everything else fall away, out of view. This may be another instance of what I’ve thought of as the essentialist language ideology of industrial order – fixation on objects without their context. The gene without embryology is then akin to the industrial product without its environmental interactions. As with the fixation on the gene, the fixation on tumors in toxicology has made it difficult to see many other things – non-cancer end points, for example. Can I see how this kind of language ideology is reproduced in our k-12 schools?

From a somewhat different angle, I wonder if its worth looking at Foley’s //Learning Capitalist Culture// (discussed in the Collins essay) because of his argument that capitalist culture is upheld and reproduced through an instrumental, Habermasian theory of language as “communicative action,” set against a class culture enacted through “situated speech performance.” Without reading more, I can’t really understand the argument, but the connection Foley makes (ethnographically) between capitalism and a particular use/theory of language may be good for me to think with – both about the language ideology of late industrialism, AND about how/why all the work on “capitalism” somehow misses critical aspects of late industrialism.

January 27, 2014 In my effort to characterize the historical period that I term “late industrialism,” a key concern is with the way industrial order not only produces toxic chemicals but also a discursive regime in which it is impossible to make sense of the possible harm caused by toxic chemicals. Industrial order has a signature language ideology, regulating what counts as meaningful; the non-linear, distributed effects of toxics can’t register. I could elaborate but here want to consider how the literature on schools and social reproduction might suggest a way to think about how industrial language ideology has been (and continues to be) re-produced. The emphasis in this literature is on the reproduction of class; could we not also see the reproduction of particular modes of sense making -- that actually undercut students’ ability to understand some things. The way “science” is taught – in isolation from other subjects, often without any framing that gives it relevance – certainly doesn’t help. The sheer lack of content about “the environment” doesn’t help either. But I what I really want to see is more subtle – how cultivated habits of mind exclude some kinds of meaning. I expect that there is “evidence” in the how “the scientific method” is taught. But maybe also in the way “systems” are conventionally taught – with little attention to what destabilizes systems and even less attention to harms produced by a system (or a system’s failure). The teaching material for kids on rainforests (which does address both the ecosystem value produced by rain forests, and threats to them) is a counter example – but perhaps also suggests how environmental content in itself tends to produce a different (non-industrial) kind of analysis