"I think that Jay, Keith, and Bill agree that an explanation of what is going
on at any moment cannot be given (except in special cases) in terms of
context-independent rules. So we have a theoretical problem of how to
account for the fact that participants generally act as if they know what's
going on, even though we cannot account for this in terms of general rules."
>From the standpoint of sign-mediated action, where utterances taken in
context are used as units of analysis, I think Bakhtin's concept of
addressivity is particularly useful to answering this problem. Each
utterance in this sense, not just a sequence of turns in activity, is
_dialogical_ in that it responds to previous utterances and anticipates the
voices of others.
The anticipatory dimension of addressivity is one (and there are probably
many others) way that rules "get into" activity. People articulate their
assumptions about what others anticipate themselves (e.g. "Now this won't
result in a waste of taxpayer dollars") or about what they might value (e.g.
"This is no 'pork' program you're funding here") in local activity settings
into utterances.
Both local activity setting rules generated and larger cultural voices can
get incorporated into utterances here, which makes the operation of the power
or influence of rules very local in one sense (in that they can be observed
and constructed in concrete utterances) and cultural in another (in that they
respond to voices that might be attributed to larger social practices).
So from the standpoint of the utterance, I might argue that the way _rules_
are referenced in action is closely allied with what is _anticipated_ and
_addressed_ by speakers implicitly or explicitly as
governing/constraining/empowering interaction. The problem for the analyst
becomes, "how can I identify the voices being addressed?" Naming these is
itself a tricky interpretive act, but there is probably no way out of that
reflexivity....
Bill Penuel
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PreventionInventions
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