"agents acting in time, amid histories we did not create but which we must take up, using rules and norms that we did not originate but which we must decide upon . . . both inheritance and creativity . . . "

This sounds nice as a description of being modern, but how get from that description to the assertion that the process through which categories and grammars come to be is also the happening of self-aware active selves and societies?

Where is the argument* that self or subjectivity is constituted within the process of inhabitation rather than just a product of that process?

Why not say that our selves and subjectivities are products that may then be able to react on the process of their own production? This would be something like a pulsating rather than a continuous creation.

That idea would imply an inertial stage followed by a new ignition, which would make for an unrealistic randomness in moving from the passive to the active stage; it is better to think in terms of continual activity that is also receptive. But that's the difficult idea to get our minds around.

Repetition, rather than creation. Repetition, not pure establishment. Events in the plural.

Index
Gateway

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001