[Xmca-l] Re: The Stuff of Words

[Andy Blunden]

Personally, I think the first and most persistently 
important thing is to see how much alike are tables and words.

But ... Vygotsky was very insistent on the distinction 
because he was fighting a battle against the idea that 
speech ought to be subsumed under the larger category of 
labour. He had to fight for semiotics against a vulgar kind 
of orthodox Marxism. But we here in 2017 are living in 
different times, where we have Discourse Theory and 
Linguistics while Marxism is widely regarded as antique. As 
Marx said "Just as philosophers have given thought an 
independent existence, so they were bound to make language 
into an independent realm." and we live well and truly in 
the times when labour is subsumed under language, and not 
the other way around.

Everyone knows that a table is unlike a word. The point it 
to understand how tables are signs and word are material 
objects.

Andy

(BTW David, back in 1986 I walked in an offshoot of the 
bionic ear project. The ear has a little keyboard that works 
like a piano keyboard in reverse, making a real time Fourier 
transform of that air pressure wave and coding the harmonics 
it in nerve impulse. The brain never hears that pressure 
signal.)

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://home.mira.net/~andy
http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making 

On 3/05/2017 7:06 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
> David (and or Mike, Andy, anyone else), could you give a bit more on that distinction between words and tables?
>
> And could you say how (and whether) (human, hand) nails are different from tables; and then how nails are different from words?
>
> Alfredo
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> Sent: 01 May 2017 08:43
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l]  The Stuff of Words
>
> Gordon Wells quotes this from an article Mike wrote in a Festschrift for
> George Miller. Mike is talking about artefacts:
>
> "They are ideal in that they contain in coded form the interactions of
> which they
> were previously a part and which they mediate in the present (e.g., the
> structure of
> a pencil carries within it the history of certain forms of writing). They
> are material
> in that they are embodied in material artifacts. This principle applies
> with equal
> force whether one is considering language/speech or the more usually noted
> forms
> of artifacts such as tables and knives which constitute material culture.
> What
> differentiates a word, such as “language” from, say, a table. is the
> relative prominence
> of their material and ideal aspects. No word exists apart from its material
> instantiation (as a configuration of sound waves, or hand movements, or as
> writing,
> or as neuronal activity), whereas every table embodies an order imposed by
> thinking
> human beings."
>
> This is the kind of thing that regularly gets me thrown out of journals by
> the ear. Mike says that the difference between a word and a table is the
> relative salience of the ideal and the material. Sure--words are full of
> the ideal, and tables are full of material. Right?
>
> Nope. Mike says it's the other way around. Why? Well, because a word
> without some word-stuff (sound or graphite) just isn't a word. In a
> word, meaning is solidary with material sounding: change one, and you
> change the other. But with a table, what you start with is the idea of the
> table; as soon as you've got that idea, you've got a table. You could
> change the material to anything and you'd still have a table.
>
> Wells doesn't throw Mike out by the ear. But he does ignore the delightful
> perversity in what Mike is saying, and what he gets out of the quote is
> just that words are really just like tools. When in fact Mike is saying
> just the opposite.
>
> (The part I don't get is Mike's notion that the structure of a pencil
> carries within it the history of certain forms of writing. Does he mean
> that the length of the pencil reflects how often it's been used? Or is he
> making a more archaeological point about graphite, wood, rubber and their
> relationship to a certain point in the history of writing and erasing?
> Actually, pencils are more like tables than like words--the idea has to
> come first.)
>
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
>
>