[Xmca-l] Re: Saussure vs Peirce

[David Kellogg]

Well, Bakhtin is full of precisely the kind of sloppiness that Andy is
deploring, Helena. So for example Bakhtin says that a whole novel can be
considered as an utterance. You take down the book and open it. The
novelist has something to say to you. He says it. And then you close the
book and you put it back on the shelf.

That's all very well, and it's very useful as a way of showing that
literature is not some "state within a state": it is also made of language
stuff, by people who have a historical existence and not just an afterlife.
But it doesn't help Andy (or me, or my wife who studies these things full
time) distinguish sub-units within the novel which will help us understand
how novels are structured, how this structure has changed with their
function, and how the very functions have changed as literature has
evolved. And these WERE the problems which Bakhtin set himself (e.g. in
"Novel and Epic" and elsewhere).

We see the same problem from the other end (micro-rather than macroscopic)
with the minimal pair (originally, in the work of Sacks, "adjacency pair").
It's all very well and it's very useful as a way of understanding how
conversations get structured as they go along, how people know when its
their turn to talk and how they know when the rules have been broken. But
it doesn't help us to understand, for example, why we all feel that when
you say "How are you?" and somebody says "Fine, thanks, and you?" there
seem to be three utterances in the second pair part, and the exchange as a
whole doesn't seem finished, even though if we are using turns as the
element (pair part) of the minimal pair, it really should be.

Craig Brandist remarks that Bakhtin uses the term "dialogue" in so many
different ways that he has rendered it meaningless. I think the same thing
is true of the way he uses "utterance".

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article;

 David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE: VYGOTSKY’S ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’,
THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT AND ‘INGROWING’ IN THE WEEKEND STORIES OF
KOREAN CHILDREN, British Journal of Educational Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
<https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>


Some e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200




On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 1:47 AM Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I find it useful to think of an utterance as bounded on two ends: on one,
> by the utterance to which it responds, on the other, by the utterance that
> responds to it. Thus you can discern utterances within utterances.
> Minimally, a two -part exchange, as Martin says; maximally, a whole stream
> of briefer utterances bounded by their prompt and response.
>
> Helena Worthen
> helenaworthen@gmail.com
>
>
>
> On Mar 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>
> According to conversation analysts, the minimal unit in conversation is
> the adjacency pair: a two-part exchange in which the second utterance is
> functionally dependent on the first.  Question-answer; greeting-greeting;
> request-reply, and so on. An utterance, then, is both a turn and a move
> within a conversation.  An utterance is *not* “complete in itself” - it is
> a component in a larger organization: at least a pair, and usually a much
> longer sequence.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 16, 2019, at 3:11 AM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>
> I would  have appreciated a definition of some kind of what the writer
> actually means by "utterance." In absence of that "the word, as a
> compressed version of the utterance" is nonsense, or at least a step
> backwards because it obliterates a concept. Otherwise, I wouldn't mind
> saying that the two are together the micro- and macro-units of dialogue (or
> something having that meaning). The same as Leontyev has two units of
> activity: action and activity, and Marx has two units of political economy:
> commodity and capital. To theorise a complex process you always need two
> units.
>
> The rest of what you have cited reminds me of what Constantin
> Stanislavskii said about the units of an actor's performance:
>
> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/stanislavskii.pdf
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 16/03/2019 5:42 pm, Arturo Escandon wrote:
>
> Thanks for that conceptual jewel, mate.
>
> Let me bring here Akhutina to further show their complementariness:
>
> The minimal holistic unit of conversation is the utterance. An utterance,
> unlike a sentence, is complete in itself. The utterance always carries
> within it the marks and features of who is speaking to whom, for what
> reason and in what situation; it is polyphonic. An utterance develops from
> a motivation, “a volitional objective” and progresses through inner speech
> to external speech. The prime mover of the semantic progression (from the
> inner word that is comprehensible to me alone to the external speech that
> he, the listener, will understand) is the comparison of my subjective,
> evanescent sense, which I attribute to the given word, and its objective
> (constant for both me and my listener) meaning.Thus, the major building
> material for speech production is the living two-voice word. But polyphony
> is a feature of the utterance as expressed in the word; the word carrying
> personal sense is an abbreviation of the utterance. Thus, the utterance and
> the word, as a compressed version of the utterance, are the units of speech
> acts, communication, and consciousness.
>
> Best
>
> Arturo
>
>
> --
> Sent from Gmail Mobile
>
>
>
>
> Martin
>
> *"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr. Lowie or discuss
> matters with Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my
> partner does not understand anything in the matter, and I end usually with
> the feeling that this also applies to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)*
>
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20190318/7ce40457/attachment.html