Top 15 Jay Lemke Quotes

A discourse, a way of speaking, is considered less scientific, or even rendered ‘unscientific’ exactly to the extent that it includes elements either of the language of feeling or of the language of action and values.

Human communities are ecosystems. Ecosystems are biological, chemical and physical systems. The physics, chemistry and biology of complex self-organizing systems can tell us much that is useful about human communities: about the conditions necessary for the existence of human communities, about the properties human communities 'inherit' because they are special cases of more general kinds of systems, particularly ecosystems.

Meaning is a much more fundamental notion than truth, indeed more fundamental even than the notion of "reality" itself. The basic argument [of the essay] was that claims about truth or reality are meanings made by people according to patterns that they have learned, and that trying to understand how and why people make the meanings they do is more useful than fighting over the truth of their claims.

Our visual discrimination is far better than our linguistic system at dealing with complex ratios and continuous variations in space, line, shape, and color.

The biological organism and the social persona are profoundly different social constructions. The different systems of social practices, including discourse practices, through which these two notions are constituted, have their meanings, and are made use of, are radically incommensurable. The biological notion of a human organism as an identifiable individual unit of analysis depends on the specific scientific practices we use to construct the identity, the boundedness, the integrity, and the continuity across interactions of this unit. The criteria we use to do so: DNA signatures, neural micro-anatomy, organism-environment boundaries, internal physiological interdependence of subsystems, external physical probes of identification at distinct moments of physical time -- all depend on social practices and discourses profoundly different from those in terms of which we define the social person.

We will document a single instance of a widespread and increasingly dominant political strategy in modern society: the transformation of discourses of expert knowledge into discourses of social policy.

Each community, each discourse tradition, has its own canons of intertextuality, its own principles and customs regarding which texts are most relevant to the interpretation of any one text

All meaning is intertextual. No text is complete or autonomous in itself; it needs to be read, and it is read, in relation to other texts.

Minds are formed by our social interactions in a community and a culture.

We need a social theory that sees all social phenomena, including itself, as being partly the product of how people in a community deploy semiotic resources: how we mean, and what we mean, by every meaningful act.

We are constantly reading and listening to, writing and speaking, this text in the context of and against the background of other texts and other discourses.

Many people have been taught a social habit, a discourse, for speaking about meaning, which considers only the role of the individual organism, or the individual mind, in the process of making meanings... Mentalistic discourses, by creating a separate realm and locating meanings there, are not useful for understanding the material and social aspects of meaning-making. Mentalistic discourses depend on a common sense view of the separation of mind from body, and individual from society, which has ideological functions in our society. Particular aspects of these discourses deflect attention away from the social, cultural, historical and political dimensions of the meanings we make.

Instead of talking about meaning making as something that is done by minds, I prefer to talk about it as a social practice in a community. It is a kind of doing that is done in ways that are characteristic of a community, and its occurrence is part of what binds the community together and helps to constitute it as a community.

When I speak about discourse in general, I will usually mean the social activity of making meanings with language and other symbolic systems in some particular kind of situation or setting.

The role of discourse in society is active; it not only re-confirms and re-enacts existing social relationships and patterns of behavior, it also renegotiates social relationships and introduces new meanings and new behaviors.