RE: Burke's Parlor and other modes of entry

Gordon Wells (gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca)
Thu, 27 Jun 1996 10:11:32 -0400 (EDT)

Thank you, Mary, for injecting a dose of "reality" to point out how
idealized - and biased - my version of what I now know to be Burke's
parlor was.

Contrasting your particularized personal account with my version of a
generalized and invented account of joining a CofP makes me realize how
often our attempts at theoretical explanation of learning and
development result in bland idealizations that are seriously at odds
with the particular cases that they are intended to subsume/explain.

This seems to me to be related to the issue of "synopticization", as it
relates to the study of human activity, that has recently been discussed on
this list. I can't speak for Burke, but my intention in re-presenting
the parlor vignette was to try to capture in a relatively condensed image
a general principle that is much more synoptically captured in the
expression "legitimate peripheral participation". What Eugene's and
Mary's responses make clear is that real-life experiences of LPP are
much more varied - and fraught - than the synoptic generalization might
suggest. The same is true, I believe, of all synoptic generalizations
about learning, development, transformation, etc.

This also connects, for me (in my own trajectory of sense-making) with
Ilyenkov's concept of the "ideal" (which I have been reading as a result
of another recent thread on xmca). He writes:
'"Ideality" constantly escapes, slips away from the metaphysically
single-valued theoretical fixation. As soon as it is fixed in the "form
of the thing" it begins to tease the theoretician with its
"immateriality", its "functional" character and appears only as a form of
"pure activity". On the other hand, as soon as one attempts to fix it "as
such", as purified of all the traces of palpable corporeality, it turns
out that this attempt is fundamentally doomed to failure, that after such
a purification there will be nothing but phantasmal emptiness, an
indefinable vacuum.' (p.87)

If I have understood the implications of this passage correctly, we have
no choice - if we genuinely want to understand - but to live the tension
between the synoptic representations that we create and the particular
and diverse (even conflicting) embodied activities and interactions from
which they are derived and against which they must be tested. Because of
the limitations on length that are imposed (by self or others) on
writing, we tend to choose the former when communicating in print and can
easily lose touch with the particular instances, which take so much
longer to convey. So thank you, Mary, for taking the time and space to
tell your particular experience.

As so often, I hesitate to send this message, as I am aware that it
betrays my ignorance and the half-baked state of my own understanding.
But I know that I am not alone in feeling less than competent, so I will
hit the send key and trust in the collaborative spirit in which I have
come to believe it will be received.

Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca
OISE/University of Toronto.