[Xmca-l] Re: "Context" or Object of activity

[David Kellogg]

Andy--

I agree that what you are describing with the example of studying why
Latino children in LA have trouble learning to read is better understood as
a social problem in search of a project than as a context. What I am
arguing for is a linguist's, and not a psychologist's, definition of
context: one that assumes that the key relationship is not between an
individual and a social circumstance but rather between a text and the
ensemble of social relations (and other relations, e.g. perceptual ones)
which might be realized by that text. No context without text, just as
there is no culture without living, breathing, meaning-making culturers and
enculturees.

There are two places where this relationship might appear a psychological
one. The first is that reailzation takes place through the selection of
certain alternatives, certain choices. In adults (but not in small
children) this is typically done by selection from a "system" provided by
the language, which can be described as a system of systems (a menu of
menus, such as polarity, tense, transitivity, mood, and so on). The
selector is, obviously, an individual, even if the system is a great social
project which has been going on for centuries and involving thousands and
even millions of speakers.

The second place where this relationship might appear a psychological one
is that we can think of the individual mind itself as having the structure
of potential text. Instead of thinking of minds as ghostly homunculi made
of spirit instead of flesh and blood, we can think of it more as a voice in
search of a text. I don't really believe very much in periodizing Vygotsky:
I think that the key to the earlier Vygotskyan work (e.g. Roth's note that
in a very early paper Vygotsky describes consciousness as the perezhivanie
of perezhivanie) is in the anatomy of the later Vygotsky (e.g. the
pedology). But I do recognize, as Bathurst does, that at a certain point
Vygotsky does make a decisive turn in favor of Voloshinov's view of
consciousness as having a semantic structure, and that turn has created a
split in our movement which persists to this day, a split between those of
us who emphasize AT and those who prefer to stress CH. I'm with the
latter.

David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 6:37 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I lost interest in this discussion about "context" and went
> back to writing up the chapter of my current book project of
> "formations of consciousness." And then I think I realised
> why I was just not getting what people were talking about
> with "context" and why my ideas (apart from their remoteness
> to the interpretation of writers like Bronfenbrenner) found
> so little resonance with others on this list.
>
> Then I realised, if you are a psychologist then your
> interest is in understanding the actions of a given
> individual, i.e., that individual is the subject matter.
> Being cultural psychologists and not rat-racers, it is
> blindingly obvious that the context of the individual's
> action is part of the subject matter being researched. My
> efforts at criticising the concept of "context" were
> therefore futile.
>
> I am not a psychologist (and if I am, I am a very poor
> one!). My starting point, my subject matter is social change
> and my unit of analysis is "projects" or "social formations"
> or "activities" or whatever (according to the precise
> theoretical frame).  I approach the understanding of the
> actions of individuals in terms of the individual being the
> immediate being of a number of formations of which they are
> a part.
>
> So if the question is why is this Latino boy in San Diego
> having trouble learning to read, Of Course, you need to know
> the context, both immediate - the American Anglophone
> education system for example, and the important distal
> context of the boy upbringing a Latino community. But his
> experiences are in the main just like those of thousands of
> others like himself, in which these two projects interact in
> a similar way - a process which can only be studied through
> the actions of the various individuals instantiating this
> interaction. That's not what I call "context" though. It is
> the subject matter itself.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 3/02/2018 9:01 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> > Rod:
> >
> > Yes, that's the issue I was raising. What KIND of context--a context of
> > situation, in which exophora, visiographic representation, and sense can
> > predominate? Or a context of culture, in which endophora, concepts, and
> > signification rule? But of course in between them there is a continuum,
> not
> > a vaccuum. And in between segments of the continuum, there are gaps and
> > crises to be navigated by the developing child. (One of these, the moment
> > when a child realizes that a question has to be answered rather than
> > repeated, is discussed in my forthcoming article in your journal, but
> there
> > is another even more interesting one I am writing about--the moment when
> a
> > child realizes that you can switch names with your little sister, and
> even
> > call you mother "Daddy"!)
> >
> > It seems to me that this issue is clearly linked to the issues that Mike
> > was raising.
> >
> > a) Mike says that there must be some relationship between context (of
> > situation, of situation-type, of culture) and social situation of
> > development. I think that a social situation of development is an age
> > specific situation-type: that is, it is the ensemble of social relations
> > between the child and the environment that are specific to a given
> > developmental age. I don't think these are simply terminological
> variants,
> > because--first of all--the SSD is part of Vygotsky's pedological
> > periodization scheme, and therefore age specific, and--secondly--the SSD
> is
> > not a specific situation or a culture (that is, the ensemble of all
> > possible situations for a particular speech community) but something in
> > between (though obviously the SSD of a child in early years is closer to
> > the context-of-situation pole and the SSD of the adolescent is closer to
> > the context-of-culture pole).
> >
> > b) Mike says that Vygotsky can be read as a contextualist (and not a
> > mechanist or even an organicist). I think he can, but not if we consider
> > context as an undifferentiated category, which is what Andy is doing when
> > he claims that context is always unbounded. On the contrary--it's much
> more
> > useful to think of context as always bounded, but whose boundaries go
> from
> > all of the actual, sensuous boundaries of the material-situational
> setting
> > (which is the case for a child before he or she learns to speak) to the
> > highly abstract boundaries we see when we consider a context of culture
> as
> > all of the things which may be potentially chosen as meaningful (as I
> said,
> > there are real boundaries here too--e.g. the category of a Proper Verb
> > corresponding to proper nouns, which isn't meaningful in our culture,
> > although it could be. But the boundaries are constantly changing because
> > our ability to mean is constantly expanding (and by the way the fact that
> > our ability to mean is constantly expanding makes no sense unless you
> > accept that our ability to mean does have boundaries).
> >
> > c) Mike says that context includes elements of phylogenesis alongside
> > sociogenesis and of course "microgenesis" (I confess that I don't like
> the
> > term microgenesis, because I think it confuses what the Gestaltists
> called
> > Aktuelgenese with what Halliday calls "logogenesis",w hich is the
> expansion
> > of meaning in real time. To return to the point you are making about the
> > richness of the tapestry of context that a French speaker has when she or
> > he has grown up near the Musee de Cluny (the unicorns!) or the Bayeux
> > tapestry (but I hear this is going to tour England now). A good tapestry
> > has at least two different kinds of threads (the old ones actually used
> > many layers, like a palimpsest, and some layers were designed for
> > washability while others were for strength). Unlike me, Vygotsky DOES
> use a
> > lot of etymology in his discussion of how children develop new forms of
> > meaning (e.g. his discussion of Mondegreens in Chapter 6 of HDHMF).
> >
> > Ruqaiya Hasan doesn't praise Vygotsky not for the usual thing that people
> > see in him--a firm grasp of the obvious, and even tautological, facts of
> > the sociogenesis of mind. Instead she appreciates what she calls
> (somewhat
> > unfortunately) his "biogenetic" approach: his ability to see development
> > from the phylogenetic, sociogenetic, and logogenetic angle all at the
> same
> > time, without ever forgetting that although they are all one and the same
> > thing--just different forms of change over time--they can still look
> > very very very different and consequently mean very different things to
> the
> > child and to the ensemble of social relations in which the chld is
> > enmeshed. I think Hasan appreciated that this was not only Marxism but
> > genius Marxism. One of the things I really didn't agree with her on was
> > Salman Rushdie, an author I still love and that she had a strong dislike
> > for. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie talks about the magicians in the
> > market of Mumbai (who I can still remember from when I was a little child
> > in what was called Bombay). The magicians are all members of the Indian
> > Communist Party, so they have this uncanny, but self-critical, ability to
> > magically bend reality to their will without ever forgetting that magic
> > doesn't really exist.
> >
> > But you said that already, didn't you?
> >
> > dk
> >
> >
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> > Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> > Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> > Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
> >
> > Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
> >
> > http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
> >
> >
> >
>
>