I'm very
>interested in understanding how we can talk about beliefs as shared
>(and there must be some shared component--interactions are like
>dances, and if there's no shared understanding of what the dance is
>and what the appropriate steps are, then we only step on each other's
>toes; admittedly this happens at times, but things go smoothly often
>enough to suggest some real "sharedness"...)--and yet we are each
>uniquely different.
Have you read Eugene Matsusov's article in the last MCA, discussed
recently on XMCA, in which he conceptualizes intersubjectivity as
something other than "overlap of understanding"-? (The article
suggests we think instead of "coordination of participants'
contributions to joint activity.") What do you think?
I find it helpful to avoid talking about sharing with respect
to meaning-making, even among members of the same discourse
community - as if the experiencing of two people were the
same, as if relations between sign/referent were the same across
persons, or across members of the "same" discourse community.
I don't think we can count on it being so.
In an AERA roundtable given by Chichako Tomako on students'
interactions over text, I objected to the term "intersubjectivity"
to account for students' making use of one another's talk.
It seems to me that subjectivity is resistant to semiosis, and
the term "sharing" invokes (at least for me) both subjective
experience and similarity of experience. Given the specificity
of an individual's historical trajectory, it seems
reductive of ourselves as potential meaning-makers
to insist on what we share with respect to sign-sense relations.
I suggested at the roundtable that intersubjectivity must necessarily
involve pleasure. Where more than one person experiences pleasure with
respect to a particular event, we can claim some intersubjectivity
around that event. Later, Eugene appropriated this notion in his
theorizing of intersubjectivity as "involvement" -- Involvement
presupposes pleasure. Eugene points out the pleasure of any kind of
engagement, even an antagonism. Where there's involvement, there's
pleasure; there's commitment; attachment. Where there is no pleasure
in an individual's mode of participating, there is no involvement.
But now we have analogous terms: "pleasure" and "involvement"
and no better way to guage whether students are engaged than by our
usually reliable intuitions.
-- Judy
I've been conceptualizing it as a continuum of
>shared discourse representing different levels of commonality. At
>one extremely broad level we are all human beings, and so there is
>the potential for understanding one another at that level. At other
>levels, I'm a psychologist, and a northeasterner, and a liberal, and
>a catlover, and a Yalie, and so on--and I can share certain types
>of discourse with others who fit into these categories that I can't
>with those who don't. I'm also middle-class, white, and American,
>and these also shape the sorts of discourses that I share. But I also
>don't think of these different discourses as a randomly scattered,
>heterogeneous collection of possibilities within myself; instead,
>they seem hierarchically ordered--some seem more salient and more broadly
>defining than others. I think probably being white, middle-class, and
>American are the most broadly defining for me. Well, just some
>half-baked thoughts...
>
> Robin
>
>
>
Judy Diamondstone
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
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