Maybe what is lurking behind this issue is a question of how to think about
what kinds of things get developed/produced in activity. History is
transforming and sedimenting structures in various media: material
artifacts (texts, objects, machines, built environments), persons (with
practices both internalized and interactively emergent), semiotic artifacts
(languages, specialized discourses, speech genres), societies (institutions
and communities), and even, over long stretches of time, in species
themselves. These are not trivial differences. A "word" on a piece of
paper seems different from a "word" in an individual memory and from a
"word" temporally and spatially dispersed in the various media of an
institution and related communities.
Part of the problem I see is that a sociohistoric perspective asks us to
see functional systems that conflict with our folk (and usually
disciplinary) categorizations (the point of Bateson's
blind-man-with-a-stick-in-a-city). Language isn't really just a semiotic
artifact. Not is a text just a material artifact. Nor is a person just a
person (an isolated, autonomous organism). Activity involves functional
systems that are located in dynamic, interpenetrated interactions of, say,
a text with particular persons who have sociohistorically internalized
semiotic resources/practices and who are jointly engaged in activity that
has emergent properties and that also implicates social and material
worlds. Hutchins' analysis of how navigational bearings on naval ships are
socially mediated and distributed (and ecologically afforded by the world a
la Gibson) provides a well-developed example.
This interpenetration of artifacts, persons, practices, communities, and
the world in activity--Wertsch's notions of mediated action and
agency--challenges the ways we conventionally represent people, things, and
events in narratives. To go back to the materiality question, I don't
think it is the acoustic energy of talk (or the reflective play of light
energy in gestures) that gives these signs an "artifactual" status; it's
the trajectories of these signs in and between persons, both in the
immediate moment and historically (where they came from in past thought,
communication, and action and where they are going in future thought,
communication, and action).
Paul Prior
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois 61801
Tel: 217-333-3024