Here lies one of my concerns about some versions of Activity Theory: that
the notion of goal, or object of activity, while very useful as a way of
constructing a unity for the actions that comprise an activity, does so
from a psychological viewpoint that, while significantly post-Cartesian,
still privileges the viewpoint of the human-actor scale. We may tell
ourselves that we do things for some particular reasons, but our actions
are always constitutive of social and material processes on _many_ scales,
while our theories, folk and scientific-psychological, focus only on one
scale. AT is a wonderfully social theory at the level of interpersonal
interaction, from its Vygotskyan roots, and its later developments have
improved the cultural and historical sensitivities of the original, as well
as the semiotic-artifactual model of mediation, but I am not sure that the
theory enables us to see every action, indeed every operation, as
participating simultaneously in multiple activities and ecosocial processes
on multiple scales. Even if we accept the ethnomethodological view in which
scale differences are merely extensional in a single universe of events
(rather than consequences of an emergent hierarchy of qualitatively
different domains), too much of what we do matters in ways that have
nothing to do with objects, goals, or intentions. The political, ethical,
and educational analysis of practices must also be able to evaluate them
across multiple scales.
So, yes, the curriculum's large-scale social agendas (i.e. the interests it
represents, and the consequences it has for class relations, gender
relations, etc.) are often NOT visible to actors who see only their local
and immediate rationales for activity. BUT these same actors can also talk
about the larger scale, do also very often see what the curriculum as a
whole leads to -- just not their own role in these results, which are
blamed always on other factors, including imaginary social forces of the
kind ethnomethodology warns us are pure fictions. Ethnometh is right to
this extent: that all that exists are actions and events and networks of
interrelated actions and events -- but what we do not see is that each
action we take counts not once, but many times, depending on the
extensional or emergent scale at which we view and aggregate the results.
What is hidden, I think, is not the large-scale outcomes of the curriculum
and its/our practices, but the CONNECTION between our practices and these
outcomes. It is not a simple causal connection. It cannot be reasoned about
within any discourse that confines itself to a single scale, or any
discourse that does not show how different extensional-scale processes (or
contingent-but-habitual dependencies of events) lead to emergently new and
unpredictable phenomena. (It's the 'habitual' or 'typical' part that arises
emergently in the self-organization of networks of interdependent practices.)
In Eugene's wonderful and terrifying example of the "learning-disabled"
child who invents an alternative arithmetic-cum-numeral-system, which can't
get noticed or recognized in the normal world of his teacher's
well-intentioned and rationalized practices, or in all the "gate-keeping"
research, or so many of Bahruth's examples or the debates in my own
university about "remediation" and "standards", the bad consequences are
truly _unforseeable_ emergents. Pick a scale, define a bounded set of
practices, make sense of them with a discourse on that scale, choose goals
at that scale, enact activities toward those goals ... you can never know
if the results on some larger scale, or intersecting some differently
bounded set of practices, will contravene other cherished goals and values
you might espouse if you had started your discussion there.
The world is so full of people who do and advocate actions that have
terrible consequences, especially large-scale ones, but which seem to them
to be reasonable and necessary on the scales on which they consider them.
Many of these people do NOT reason in terms of self-interest, and if their
class or gender or cultural interest is served, they are often quite
unaware of this. Most viewpoints we disagree with have powerful internal
logics, and too many of us are dismissive of them. (Recall my inquiry here
a while back into the logics of conservatives, fundamentalists, etc.) Our
own viewpoints have no claim to superiority if they cannot truly encompass
these others. The adversarial mode resists the hybridity while alone can
allow a common moral stance. You cannot blame people for the unforseeable
consequences of actions and policies, and you cannot know that your own
will not turn up just as misfortunate for reasons 'beyond our control'.
When our plans go awry, we blame others, when we should blame the logic
that thought it could tie them to results. Our mistake will turn out having
been to set our policies up against those of these others, rather than to
only make policy with them.
Just as Eugene shows us that the teacher should have been open to learn
with and from that student, rather than set her own correctness and
diagnosis up against his interpretation of his practice, so we all perhaps
need to sit down and hear out those we regard as "learning disabled" -- as
fanatics, as enemies, as arch-conservatives, as fascists, ... to see why we
cannot make good policy just out of our own viewpoints if we do not also
understand (not explain away or dismiss) theirs. This is not a "liberal"
viewpoint. I am not advocating understanding our enemies because it's a
nice thing to do, or because I hope to change their viewpoints to agree
with mine. It is also not a Macchiavellian proposal, I do not seek to
understand my enemy in order to defeat her (note the effect of
foregrounding gender here). It is a postmodern, or at least anti-modernist,
perspective: differences and conflicts are not there to be resolved or won,
but to be juggled, and the juggler must handle all the balls that are in
the air -- and not as the sole master of them, for they are also being
juggled by many others with different patterns in mind.
What needs to happen in that classroom? the mediator who saw the student's
viewpoint in its own terms needs also to see the teacher's viewpoint in her
own terms ... and from there could begin quite an odyssey across relevant
scales, perhaps forcing them to create discourses that could articulate
across these scales ...
For this is the last step, still missing for me ... how to imagine a praxis
across scales that does not aim to be a definitive master-view of a system,
but takes the participant-logic route rather than the observer-logic route.
This is where theory ends, and something more wonderful could begin. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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