You keep refocusing the joint attention of the xmca community -- this
distributed collective -- on the object.
So here we have an emergent activity system with "the object" as its object.=
=2E.
The motive would be something like developing the shared understanding of
the AT unit of analysis -- which is in the Engestromian version the whole
interdependent, relationally defined activity system. In this practice of
conceptual development one might argue that we are also helping the concept
of "the object" to evolve. (I hope that side remark is not too confusing).
Anyway, when writing this tracing of the AT(zero) to AT(N) evolution of
"the object" you, Bill, participate in the subject position of the model:
engaging with the object, in the context of the xmca community, its
open-ended rules for multiloguing, its reader-writer division of labour and
the available mediating artifacts -- which in this case includes your
networked computer, the literature that mediates your grappling with the
object AND the language resources that enable you to do so.
So the deduction that OBJECTS and ARTIFACTS are not opposing categories you
make when you arrive at the Engestrom model fits with my reading.
But I find it a little confusing when you describe the primitive entities
of AT(N-x) as SUBJECT, OBJECT, and ARTIFACT. I think it is very important
to keep in the discourse there that the "top" component of the triadic unit
of analysis is MEDIATING artifact. If there's a one-word rule to the game I
think it would be less confusing to use SUBJECT, OBJECT, and MEDIATOR. (If
Mike happens to do something else somewhere in Cultural Psychology I'm sure
he does so having grounded the concepts elsewhere in the text -- I don't
have the book right here).
ARTIFACT comes into the context as an "integrator" of the two triads used
by Vygotsky: SUBJECT-TOOL-OBJECT and SUBJECT-SIGN-SUBJECT. So ARTIFACT
stands for all cultural products, and when they are in use -- in mediated
action -- they serve as MEDIATING ARTIFACTS between the SUBJECT and the
OBJECT.
In all these versions the subject and the object are defined through some
"oppositional" relation between them. How this relation has been defined
has presumably changed over the evolution of the conceptual system of AT,
and how the relation is defined in AT is what tells AT apart from other
approaches.
Keyword: mediated
Eva