Some initial notes on this dialogue, more to come, I hope.
Dialogue _is_ a genre of activity; it is first and foremost a DOING. The
dichotomy in some branches of western culture between talk and action is a
pernicious one. Talk accomplishes a lot. It does social work, negotiating
power and personal relationships. It does intellectual work, articulating
meanings for our lives and mediating our more complex processes of
problem-posing, problem-solving, artistic creation, etc. It is even tiring
.. far more tiring than the simple expenditure of calories would suggest.
Why is talk, especially dialogue, an effort? certainly in part because it
does work, and work is always done against some inertia or resistance. All
talk changes us and changes the world, in some way and on some timescale.
Dialogue is a material process, not just a formal exchange of signs. You
can't have a dialogue that is not materially embodied and mediated, and
therefore you also cannot have a dialogue that is purely linguistic. The
materiality of the signs (signifiers) insures that there are always
trans-linguistic meanings that can be made, always material tokens and
actions at stake that have more than just their linguistic meanings. To
talk you must do more than just talk. What you say is never just words, it
is always also an index of who you are, how you feel, etc.
You also must do more than just produce signs -- of any number of semiotic
systems, even beyond language. You must produce _effects_. Both Peirce and
Austin emphasized that semiotic processes like dialogue have meaning for us
not just in terms of the value of the signs in themselves, or in their
systemic relations to other signs, but also in terms of their
'perlocutionary effects', their beyond-speech effects on the world, on
ourselves, on the state of the social system. Talk moves the world as much
as any other form of work. It can indeed move it more than any other form
of work because we have organized our social ecology in such a way that the
world-effects of talk (or of sign production in general) are amplified
across space- and time-scales far beyond what most material actions can
span. A lot more can be said about how this happens, but I'll leave that
for some other time ...
Dialogue is not interwoven (in the sense of alternating in time) with other
forms of action. Phenomenologically, there is a single continuous process
of action. We can analyze that process into various aspects and moments,
but there is an important sense in which what we say always also grows out
of the rest of what we are doing, and all else that we do as we talk
somehow takes shape in relation to the talking. A dynamic, material model
of discourse-as-action, discourse-in-action should help us understand the
unitary flow of doing ...
Is dialogue an activity in the AT sense? It certainly has all the cultural
characteristics in relation to a community that we associate with AT
analyses of activity, and it also can be described in terms of a
psychological model ala Leontiev (though I don't quite agree with some
interpretations of the notion of object-orientation as applied to discourse
and activity, at least not unless the object-ive remains dynamic and
constituted in activity, not governing it from above).
We can play a bit across the terms of AT and semiotic discourse theory
here. "Object" in AT is usefully ambiguous between material artifact and
motive-objective; it is a sort of "final cause" that can also be embodied
in a material thing, or at least in a material situation that gives
functional affordances to the thing. Semiotic objects in discourse theory,
however, are first material artifacts (or natural things, including our
bodies), and then also "readable" objects which are assigned meanings in a
community and context that are not the inevitable consequence of our
interacting with them materially (i.e. which transcend their material
"properties"). Tools and signs are closer kin in semiotic theory than in
AT. The semiotic view is closer to the notion of Ideality in some related
Marxist theory ... that material things also have social meaning in
relation to their social uses or functions, and that there is a dynamic
dialectic between the Ideal (or social-semiotic) and the Material in this
sense. So a tool is a material sign of its own affordances, and a sign is
always also constructed through some system of material relations that
gives it its affordances or use-meanings. At least this is so in an
anti-idealist (anti-Platonist) view of semiotics. Signs are not purely
abstract formal tokens in some Platonic heaven of pure mathematics
(including mathematical signs!), they are ways-of-functioning of material
things in a community of interpretation.
We can also imagine that Activity in the full AT sense is meant to be
conceptualized on a longer timescale than the actions of a single episode
of dialogue or dialogic-action. This does not mean that dialogues are
embedded in activities like chocolate chips are embedded in cookies. (It's
late, I'm getting hungry ... :) ... it's more as if in the course of
unfolding, an activity at some times involves speaking, and at other times
not .... but the activity is still unfolding on all these shorter
timescales, and whatever happens before and after the speaking is
continuous with it in many material-bodily and social-semiotic ways ... we
continue to "speak" by other means all through the activity (i.e. to
produce cohesive signs that may or may not be linguistic).
Phenomenologically, it is also true in a certain sense that we never stop
talking (except maybe in well-practiced meditation exercises or moments of
sheer panic ....): there is silent dialogue on-going throughout our
participation in activity, though there may be intermittency on very short
timescales, especially when other forms of meaningful activity are fully
occupying our attention and carrying-forward in their own actional modality
(e.g. being deeply involved in the playing of a musical composition, lost
in the music; being deeply involved in playing some sport, or doing
intimacies .....). But for the most part language and inner speech
accompany all other forms of action in an activity. Many of the
peculiarities which LSV noted for inner speech are typical of
action-involved uses of language, as they are also of maximally implicit
talk-to-oneself language. Some of these forms, which appear early in the
developmental sequence, such as holophrases and single-word namings and
commands, remain in the repertory of inner speech as part of self-monitored
activity throughout life.
But is it dialogue? Bakhtin helps us understand that all language use is
dialogic in several respects, and I think it's safe to say that whenever an
unfolding speaking or textproduction, even without an explicit speaking
partner or interlocutor, evolves along an unpredictable logogenetic
trajectory, with emergent meanings being made (and actions being done),
that there is the essence of dialogue. We can interact with our own
language/action of a moment before as if it were the language/action of
another ... and so also with the response of the world as we do the work of
producing world-effects, as if that were the language of another. We are
always in dialogue with ourselves, with our imagined addressees, with
intertexts heard in other times and places, with the state of the world in
which we are doing speech (whether it seems to change or not; often its
not-changing is taken as its response).
Of course we are often well supplied with face-to-face interlocutors, or
potential interlocutors (which is just as bad!), or on different
timescales, with dialogue partners online or in the community of writers.
But whether they are salient for us across some time of
doing/talking/inner-speaking or not, it is dialogicality itself that is
important as an aspect of activity that is not limited to language use ...
and not linguistic dialogue as such. No one doubts the importance of
discourse, but we need to understand its unity and continuity with the
ongoing flow of activity, rather than to segregate it and privilege it, or
to mythologize its uniqueness. Being inseparable, it cannot be unique.
Phenomenology does not permit logocentrism, which is one of many reasons to
hold it up as the perfect counterbalance to semiotic analysis.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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