Chuck Bazerman offers some stimulating perspectives both in his
forwarded queries to the Bourdieuans about habitus and his
comments on Bakhtin's view of our reading-world.
I've perhaps said enough around here already on the first topic,
though I'd be interested to hear from Mike what potential _he_
may see in using 'habitus' to think about classroom culture/
cultures.
On the other matter, though, it seems important to me to second
Chuck's reminder that Bakhtin was very concerned in his work on
the dialogism of reading and speaking to balance to dominant
'centripetalism' of his day (which was in the service of Russian
and pan-Slav nationalisms, emphasizing the unifying force of
national languages, ethnic cultures) with a corrective
recognition of the social 'centrifugalism' of heteroglossia.
However we may seek to unite dialect communities into a national
language- (and culture-) state, we must still recognize that
_within_ any national language there will still be many distinct
'registers' and 'genres', which differ not only in form, but in
social positioning, institutional context, and value-attitudes.
This internal diversity of a community, created by the very
division of labor which also defines it as a united whole,
produces different social and institutional languages, the
divergent social voices of heteroglossia.
Thus the reading-world, or the novelist's written-world,
especially among us moderns, is not just about co-operative
activity which brings reader and writer (or writer-construct)
into harmony and understanding. It is also about the diversity
and conflict of voices, about their interactions, or lack of
interactions, with one another. There are many texts we do not
read co-operatively (e.g. propaganda texts that we resist), or
that we (mis-) appropriate by a transformation of voice (and so
of activity context), or whose activity-frame we simply cannot
join in (alien texts, genres, registers; e.g. technical ones).
In my own work I follow this view of Bakhtin's in all aspects of
activity, thinking of the 'heteropraxia' of communities in all
kinds of practices, not just language-using ones. This is one
reason I am not so easily persuaded that we do in fact join in
'the same' social activity in interaction, or at least that we
always also find ourselves trying to integrate what are really
different (yes, individual, but also social-category-bound)
activity patterns. Just as I do not believe that we use words
with the 'same' meanings, or construct in dialogue meanings that
match (A of B's utterances, B of A's), I cannot quite believe
that we co-operate in social activity so seamlessly, or that the
notion of activities does not need the corrective of an analysis
of the degree to which their seeming effectiveness is itself a
construction, partly an illusion which downplays the mismatches
and incommensurabilities.
Is heterosexual intercourse 'the same activity' for the man and
the woman? a labor negotiation 'the same' for union and
management? A 'Dear John' letter the same genre for writer and
reader? A 'spanking' the same activity for child and parent? A
lesson, for teacher and students? _This lesson_ 'the same' for
students from dominant and oppressed cultures sitting side by
side? For any two students?
Communication across difference is never seamless, is always
partly an illusion. And there _is_ always difference, difference
that matters in just these ways (and especially difference in
power, resources, respect). So also with co-operation of any
sort. I think Bakhtin offers here an important corrective to the
centripetalisms of modernist theories with their dreams of unity,
coherence, and universality (dreams born of the not always so
nice projects of modernist nation-states). If the corrective
applies to the projects of linguistics (uniform idealized
'languages') and anthropology (uniform idealized 'cultures'), I
think it ought to apply to those of cultural psychology and
activity theory as well. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU