levels of context

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Thu, 02 Sep 1999 14:55:58 -0400

These issues of contexts and action-with-tools raise a number of questions
I am currently thinking about.

I certainly agree with Luiz that we need a dynamical view in order to
overcome the static, spatial metaphors of separation between production and
use or immediate-local and more "distant" contexts. I think this is also
Genevieve's point in emphasizing "continuity" of historical process, though
in mentioning only the constraining or enabling effects of tools created
prior to an action that uses them, she may have pulled the pendulum to one
side, potentiating the swing to Luiz' concern about struggles against
historical continuity.

Mike balances the spatial metaphor of concentric circles of context with
its "co-weaving" etymological sense, and the latter fits nicely with my
current thinking about the role of tools and other semiotic artifacts in
enabling coherent social organization across timescales of activity.

In my current view of some of these matters, I find it useful to think of
three levels of activity on shorter, focal, and longer timescales, and with
these often (but not always, so you have to be careful) associated shorter,
focal, and larger scales of spatial extension, matter, energy, etc. The
lower level units are reorganized as a result of their interactions into
emergent organization at the focal scale (think characteristic times for
processes at that scale as well as spatial extension), subject to the
larger-scale, slower-changing constraints from the higher scale. Below the
triple of levels, and above, there are usually more organizational levels,
but emergent intermediate organization filters or bufferss their normal
influences on one another, EXCEPT in the critical case (heterochrony,
heterarchy) where material artifacts (but also bodies, natural features of
the environment) interact via their cultural meanings (semiosis) as well as
their material properties in the narrow sense. A tool is such an artifact:
it links the long timescale processes of production and distribution to the
short timescale activities of its use. In this it is not at all unlike a
book, but perhaps simpler to analyze!

What enables focal scale activity in this view is the immediate material
affordances of the tool. WHICH of all the possible uses of the tool happen,
depends further on the semiotic interpretation of the tool (what it's good
for, how to use it), and these are part of larger-scale cultural
formations, with their longer histories. Of course focal level activity, as
a specific trajectory (what happens THIS time) depends also on the
'accidents' of the situation: the histories (and so the habitus, both
unique and generic) of actors (and individual tools), and those 'actors'
include (ala Latour) other nonhuman, and inanimate 'actants' (even the wall
and floor, the wiring infrastructure) and their configurations (cables that
cross just here, or are too short to be connected over there, etc.).

Dynamically, those parameters of the situation that take a long time to
change function as "constraints" (not in the sense of only preventing
activity, they also enable, but in the broader sense that they limit the
possibilities of what happens on shorter timescales); those that can change
or be changed very rapidly provide the "resources" (again both enabling and
preventing) which can be juggled on the focal timescale (i.e. shaped over
times longer than their time-of-malleability, but much shorter than the
times needed to alter the 'constraint' features). You can't reprogram an
operating system while calculating a spreadsheet, but you can change
formulas in spreadsheet cells fast enough to make that activity a resource
within the larger activity of trying to calculate a total cost or other
problem-solving goal in which the spreadsheet calculation becomes a part.
Likewise you don't re-cable the workstation or the network as you use the
web, but you might change default colors (quickly) for better viewing of a
webpage (more slowly).

With this sort of view, then, you retain the notion of a hierarchy of
contexts, and even in general of their potential relevance to one another,
but as a temporal and dynamical notion, not just a spatial metaphor.

You can also then sort out questions of whether a constraint or affordance
is "first" in the tool. There are the properties of the tool relative to
the activities of design and production (large scale, long times), but
these are only "constraints" (in my technical sense as above, i.e.
dynamical boundary conditions) at the different timescale of the tool-use
activity when we add in the semiotic dimension (how we 'read' the tool;
what typical cultural activities there are for using it, etc.). And the
effects of these constraints/affordances at the focal scale of activity
will always also depend on emergent actions at that scale (e.g.
innovations, improvisations), which in turn depend on the interaction
(juggling, cf. bricolage) among elements at the faster timescales (quickly
changeable) and those elements' less malleable (and often historically
unique) features.

I have written a paper that expands on these ideas, and we may get a chance
to discuss it here on the list at some point in the next month or two when
I will have time to participate regularly. I have also developed these
ideas for biological systems down to much smaller scales (molecules), where
relationships among levels and timescales are a bit less complicated (less
heterarchy), in search of the origins of bio-semiosis (i.e. information
transformation across scales involving 'interpretation' and thus
context-dependence).

But rather than getting to more of that now, it might be useful to bring in
some discussion of the paper in the latest issue of MCA by Keller & Keller
on tools, materials, imagery, and speech in artist-blacksmithing. I will
offer a few comments on this interesting paper in a separate message.

JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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