mike,
your christmas eve outpouring picked up many threads where i have
contributed my two pesos and also directed many questions my way out of
those different threads. here i will try to weave some responses to those
questions into a single fabric--this post--by looking at them in relation to
their immediate relevance for practice.
1. The social context of the emergence of LSV's key concepts (i.e.,
mediation, internalization, the inter-subjective=>intra-subjective) and also
reinterpretation of Leslie White's ideas on the basis of activity theory.
Intellectually these are very interesting issue and would be of long
term relevance. Both are clearly scholarly work--historical and
theoretical, library research and suture-opening inspiration driven. On the
horizon of the practice since there is no immediate way I can see (given
resources and the political-economic conjuncture) to recreate the conditions
in Russia 1920-1930. I don't think we can dismiss the communality of the
living situation as simply "several families sharing an apartment." That's
certainly one way of looking at it but given the entire conjuncture (the
totality of relations) with the overwhelming emphasis on "creating the
communist society" in every area of activity and especially the intellectual
pursuits, that "apartment sharing" shouldn't be conceived from our point of
view in which middle-class privacy is a goal to be aimed at. A possible
test case might be to look at any of the approaches to psychology that
emerged out of the kibbutz movement or other modern communalistic
experiments, if there were any. As I say this is at the most extreme
horizon of relevance to immediate practice.
2. Bergson and the phenomenological approaches to time.
You asked several questions here. I haven't read Creative Evolution but
have read Time and Free Will and found that book very relevant, in
particular the sections "The Free Act" and "Real Duration and Contingency".
(a) You ask about the precedence of one over the other. It's not so
much an issue of the precedence of duration over Aristotelian (or any other
measured time) as of completeness of our account of time, failing to give
consideration to the primordial time leads us to attribute false objectivity
to the measured/spatial time of everyday life. Bergson clearly says the
time of causality (measured time) is derivative but where you ask if it is
"reducible" I think the problem is rather how the measured time is
constructed out of primordial time. That is where first Husserl and later
Heidegger come in. One of the four characteristics of primordial time that
Heidegger described was "publicness". He wrote, "To understand the
expressed now as a now we do not at all have to agree in our dating of it.
Although each one of us utters his own now, it is nevertheless the now for
everyone. The accessibility of the now for everyone, without prejudice to
the diverse datings, characterizes time as public. The now is accessible to
everyone but thus belongs to no one. On account of this character of time a
peculiar objectivity is assigned to it . . . it is somehow there".
Datability, another of the four characteristics, is basically what Jay
described in his paper--everything happens during the time that something
else happens. Measured time is constructed through coordinating the of the
individual experiences of the now. As a consequence the objectivity that
comes from the now's publicness is conferred on one another form of
datability. But these forms of datability are relatively arbitrary, we
could say culturally variable (culture with a small "c"). Here we arrive at
such immediately given experiences of intersubjective coordination of
datability as rhythm or appropriate times as in the notion of "ill-timed" or
"the right time". .
(b) For Bergson the recognition of duration is the basis of freedom but
free acts are the exception not the rule. everyday time is the time of
routine. I can't find the exact passage in "Time and Free Will" but a
commentator write: "Deliberating about a choice is not like being at a point
on a line and oscillating in space between various courses confronting us."
Freedom of action occurs in those moments when, so to speak, "the clock
stops". Such moments as liminal or those described in Engestrom's
discussion of choice/development from the '96 paper about development as
breaking away. There's a lot of threads that need tighter weaving here--in
particular connecting the free act of the total individual to the process of
developing intersubjectively shared objectivities but this is still far
from immediate practice.
3. Eclecticism.
Yikes! I can see how Smirnov might have reacted. Eclectic, as I
understand it, was almost the equivalent of dilletante, a bourgeois luxury
of drawing room intellectuals as seen from the iron gaze of Vladimir
Illyich. Not just insulted, the poor guy might have been seriously scared
of possible negative consequences.
In this context you raise Bakhtin. I also have great admiration for
Bakhtin. His ideas about genre and utterance inform the way I think about
what happens in education. But I seriously question whether he
ventriloquated a meta-theory through Volosinov. There is an interesting
multi-colored strand here. In "Rabelais and His World" Bakhtin lays out a
"history of laughter" in which the corporeality of the body is progressively
subordinated that has a very similar time line to the progression of
epistemes Foucault describes in "The Order of Things." It might even seem
that in this sense Bakhtin, like Foucault, subordinates all practice to
discourse. I think nothing could be farther from the truth. There are two
points I want to make in this context:
(a) Bakhtin/Volosinov clearly grounds genre in extra-verbal activity.
"This is the order that the actual generative process of language follows:
social intercourse is generated (stemming from the basis); in it verbal
communication and interaction are generated; and, in the latter, forms of
speech performances are generatedl finally, this generative process is
reflected in the change of language forms . . . The full fledged question,
exclamation, command, request--these are the most typical forms of whoses in
behavioral utterances. All of them (especially the command and request)
require an extraverbal complement, and, indeed an extraverbal commencement.
The very type of structure these little behavioral genres will achieve is
determined by the effect, upon a word, of its coming up against the
extraverbal milieu and against another word (i.e., the words of other
people." (M&PL:96)
I find it hard to see these passages of forms of ventriloquism--it rather
seems to me that Bakhtin/Volosinov was demonstrating the complementarity of
his theory of genres and utterances with the premises of dialectical
materialism. Providing in fact the framework for a social semiotics that
could answer the issues Arne Raithel raised in the message that Eva provided
you upon request (I stand corrected). Bakhtin did not do sociological
linguistics in the sense that he articulated the genres to specific activity
systems -- rather he seems to have provided a reinterpretation of the nature
of the utterance and syntax that would allow such work to go forward.
(b) A second direction in which Bakhtin was complementary with dialectical
materialism (which he might or might not have embraced) is demonstrated in
his discussion of the <<archaic>> found in "Problems of Dostoevsky's
Poetics". There he writes, "A literary genre, by its very nature, reflects
the most stable, "eternal tendencies in literature's development. Always
prserved in a genre are undying elements of the <<archaic>>. True, these
archaic elements are preserved in it only thanks to their constant renewal,
which is to say, their contemporization. A generre is always the same yet
not the same, always old and new simultaneously. Genre is rebor and renewed
at every new stage in the development of literature and in every individual
work of a given genre" (106).
Two issues are of note in this passage. First is the incompatibility of
Bakhtin's conceptions with Foucault's "ruptures" in which there is no
continuity. Second, is the parallel to the basic dialectical principle of
the past being carried forward in every moment, an example of which is
Vygotsky's point about a child's external speech being carried forward in
internal speech.
I'm aware that Bakhtin repudiated the dialectic and contrasted it to the
dialogic but I can't help but believe that his repudiation must be seen in
terms of the Stalinist interpretation of language as part of the
infrastructure.
4. Work with community colleges.
Here we arrive at practice. How do all of the preceding feed into that
work? That is in process. I can only provide indications at present.
a) Durations: our concept of "student pathway" involves looking at how
individual students integrate their course-taking patterns into the time
progressions that the institutions (community colleges) lay down as standard
or normal or whatever, the list of courses suggested or required for
successive semesters, the sequence of pre-requisites. When we find "gateway
courses" we need to question the relative primacy of their temporal
organization--to what does it refer, to which temporality, that of the
student or that of the administrator.
b) Analysis of intra-institutional and inter-institutional activity
systems.
We have begun to develop an activity theoretic model of the transfer
function of community colleges (very very incipient). Like Eva's discussion
of mailing lists and Mittienen's study of cellulose it concerns embedded
systems. As stated in other posts, our focus is on remedial english and
math since these are the courses that serve as gateways into
An axiom of dialects states that contradiction (not identity) provides
the key to the phenomena. You point to such a contradiction in your
comments on the bureacratic interfaces
You made some interesting comments, in particular "At the same time, they
make the way CC's play out the class division of access to resources
incredibly clear for analysis . . . if you can stand watching the triage."
I'm wondering if you could expand on this statement.
Well, I started this message hoping to finish before hitting the road but
it looks like I've run out of time. I will continue the CC issue later.
Paul H. Dillon
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