November notions

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Sat, 06 Nov 1999 17:30:42 -0500

Thanks to Stanton, Judy, and Paul for starting discussion on my Timescales
paper. I hope others will join in as you find time to distribute some
cognition into the medium/artifact/tool of your choice for accessing the
text of the paper!

Stanton specifically asked how a multiple timescales approach to
meaning-making might fit with a situated or distributed view of cognition ...

Clearly there is a sense in which as the material substrates of our
meaning-making involve neurons, brains, eyeballs, hands, computers, paper,
other people, furniture, rooms, electricity, etc. it is always distributed
both in space and on multiple timescales of material processes and cultural
practices.

Why do we find material artifacts that embody meanings for us so useful? if
we include the body itself as one such, so necessary?

One version of this question leads to a shift in perspective, which many of
us have already made, from seeing tools and signs as adjuncts to an
essentially interior mental process of cognition, to seeing cognition as
the semiotic dimension of human material activity in the world -- with all
the matter with which we interact, and for which we construe meaning, as
equally participants in this more widely distributed process.

But where then do we draw the boundary? how extensive is the total material
system in which meaning-making activities take place? if it's not just the
brain, but the whole body; not just the bare body, but the clothed and
tool-equipped body; not just the outfitted body, but also the affordances
of the setting and its constituents; not just the monologic speaker, but
the dyad and the multiloguing group and their outfitted bodies; not just
what we are currently touching, but also what we see and hear at a
distance; not just the computer screen but the distant electric generators
that keep it lit; not just physically co-present interlocutors but
virtually present partners on the phone or the web -- and their outfitted
bodies, and settings, and the infrastructure that keeps us in communication
(wires, routers, splitters, chips) ... then where does it stop?

Our activity is activity in, and constitutive of, a social-semiotic
ecosystem: a specialized, late-emerging kind of ecosystem in which
artifacts, meaning-values, meaning-construing material practices add
additional dense webs of economic and informational feedback that are
essential to understanding the flows of matter and energy in this kind of
ecosocial system.

In this view there are no boundaries. There are kinds and degrees of
connectivity, interdependency, and coupling. There are levels of
organization on different scales, each with emergent irreducible processes,
phenomena, meanings. It is not true that only spatially nearby agents
participate in one another's meaning-making or matter-moving processes.

So a different principle of sorting out what interacts more and less, and
why, is needed. Another kind of map on which to plot what 'distribution'
means, what gets included, how and why. I am proposing two principles for
this: a default principle of adiabatic separation of processes that occur
on radically different timescales (say, two orders of magnitude different,
one a hundred time faster/slower than another), and a principle of
heterochrony to account for the ways in which processes on very different
timescales nonetheless get integrated with one another even though they
cannot efficiently exchange energy or information directly.

Even the most classical neurological model of cognition distributes it
across timescales: neurons fire, but it's not thought unless there are
(slower) coherent synchronies across neuronal clusters, and what 'firing'
means can only be defined in terms of faster processes of membrane
depolarization and still faster processes of neurotransmitter synthesis and
degradation. Thought does not occur when one molecule binds a ligand, nor
when one neuron membrane depolarizes, nor probably even when a whole
synaptic chain cascades. Cognition in this narrowest sense is already
distributed over many levels of biological organization, and across many
timescales. Culturally meaningful thought probably requires an outward
extension beyond the brain into the neurohumoral system, the perceptual
organs and/or muscular feedback centers that close the efferent/afferent
loops by which brains are part of living, doing bodies. What is the
shortest timescale of a meaning-creating act? what is the smallest material
system involved in the human performance of such an act?

But this is just where the fun begins! many, perhaps all, human acts are
not just part of momentary interactions, but also part of longer timescales
dramas, genres, agendas, projects, institutional processes, historical
processes, etc. What an act means, how it is performed, and why and when,
depend not just on its smaller-scale constituent operations (as in
Leontiev's terminology) but on its place in MANY larger-scale (in
extensions of social-material networks, and in timescale) levels of
ecosocial organization and their dynamics. Between the act and history
there is not just one logic of Activity, but multiple timescales of
social-material processes, each with its own logic of emergence.

Let me respond to the issues of 'learning' and 'identity', and research
methodology in separate notes. JAY.

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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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