I wrote my long note about the phenomenological continuity of dialogue and
activity before reading Steve Gabosch's posting which makes some similar
points, responding to Gordon's arguments, which also share this basic
orientation.
Steve notes:
My thinking sees both an abstract and a concrete aspect to all the key
entities in human activity - the object being acted on, the tools, the
artifacts, the words spoken or written, etc. Just as material objects can
be considered concrete and semiotic objects can be considered abstract, I
would argue that there is an abstract aspect to any material object (its
meaning) and a concrete aspect to any expressed semiotic object (the
utterance, sign on a page, etc.). This means that all material objects
have a semiotic aspect and all semiotic objects have a material aspect.
The one exception to this rule might be pure thinking, where a person is
keeping their thoughts to themselves and not expressing them externally.
This could be considered a special case of discourse, where inner speech,
invisible to others, replaces external dialogue, and abstract objects are
only processed in the mind of the thinker. To my knowledge, this way of
thinking is classic Vygotskyism, and is basic to Activity Theory."
I have highlighted the reference to "pure thinking" because I think Steve's
point is the best argument argument mentalism in the neo-Cartesian sense
... there cannot be immaterial thought insofar as thought is semiotic and
signs are always materially embodied. (Feelings can be infrasemiotic,
though they are not usually so for us, but they too are always very
obviously materially embodied.)
Steve on Gordon:
This approach seems to confuse the relationship of subject and object, sign
and tool, etc., in human activity. "
I think that the ambiguity in the use of "object" in AT and other theories
is the source of the confusion here, and it may be Steve's trying to read
Gordon without benefit of the multiple meanings of "object" rather than
Gordon's confusion that is the problem here.
I follow Steve's general argument that we ought to have a model in which
explicit dialogue and sawing wood have symmetrical accounts in terms of the
unity of the semiotic and material aspects ....
but when he gets to:
Intuitively, I would rough out six steps altogether: ..."
I'm afraid that I hear in the articulation of distinct steps a
folk-segmentation of a much more complex and variable process, a much more
continuous process that defies any such segmentation. We are taught to
follow such steps as part of our rationalizing analytical culture, but they
are very artificial and quite contrary to the processes by which we
actually come up with anything new and useful. We easily come to feel that
we are following such steps, but only as an artifact of our having learned
how to fit the steps like a grid over the more protean flow of
doing/meaning. Even worse, the planning-doing model is an aspect of the
instrumentalism of our culture, part of its alienation, part of the logic
of capitalist production (investment), part of its repertory of social
control ... we live in a sociopolitical order than ahhors spontaneity,
unpredictability, and even non-commodifiable art. Is it the planned or the
unplanned life that is not worth living?
I do agree with Arne's point, later cited by Steve, that the phenomenon of
closure is an important aspect of activity. This is probably the one
element that does allow us to see activity as segmentable ... activities,
as distinct units of some larger living, are completable in principle. I
have often given this myself as a defining feature in relation to genres
and activity types. And closure does tend to be inseparable analytically
from cyclicity, and thereby may hang some rather basic insight about how
humans act, though I won't try to work it out here. But this refers to
activity-as-a-whole, it is what allows us to distinguish activities from
activity, to define a unit of analysis, as in AT. But the segmentation
within an activity is genre-specific and part of its meaning; it is not
universal across all activities.
Steve:
Of course, these simplified schemes are infrequently close to what human
activities often actually look like ..."
Not because we mix up the neat prescriptive order of our culture (though we
also do that), but because goals do not just precede action, they as often
arise from action, and we frequently act without definite goals, only
assigning them retrospectively if at all. What shapes the trajectory of
action is not anything that precedes the action as a whole, but what
accompanies and gets entrained into the action, and how each next action
newly reinterprets and carries forward the actions-till-now ... resulting
in considerable (and delightful, and adaptive, unpredictability).
Steve's notion of deliverables is somewhat like my emphasis on
perlocutionary or world-effects ... but again, what those may be imagined
to be at one time (if imagined at all) and what they turn out to be down
the road, are often quite different, and more different the longer the
road. There are, rather, I would say, saliences in the world-effects of
each moment, or on each meaningful timescale of action-in-activity. These
saliences, highly variable with actor, history, situation, activity, etc.
feedback into the flow of action, in a sort of dialogue with the
consequences of our own doing that leads us where we could not have
imagined, much less planned, to go.
Steve concludes by showing how to fit his grid over Gordon's data, which is
a lot easier to do than what Gordon is trying to do. What is at stake in
Gordon's analysis is not the segmentation of the activity, but the ways in
which the semiotic and material aspects of the activity, the solo and
collaborative aspects, the linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects, work
together to evolve some flow of action that seemed to be making sense to
the participants as they did it, and retrospectively, and perhaps therefore
a bit more artificially neatly, can be made sense of by us. It is not what
happened that is interesting here, but how it happened. Once an activity or
an action sequence seems to have reached closure, that very closure and the
retrospective stance it affords, makes it relatively easy to say "what
happened". While we are in the midst of on-going, contingent dynamic
activity, it is not nearly so easy to say what _is_ happening, and indeed
there often is (not yet) any definite thing happening.
This is a profound lesson of discourse analysis: that synoptic meaning and
dynamic meaning are very different. What something means, what is happening
in the moment, on the shorter timescales, is far less definite than what
something turns out to have meant, retrospectively, at the end of a clause,
activity, episode, lesson, or lifetime. Retrospectively, from some time
later, from some point of closure, or evaluated over some longer timescale
interval, in some larger context, meanings become definite. But in the
moment, when we have only prior context and not yet subsequent context,
when units are incomplete and can still be completed in different ways,
then meaning is fuzzier, less definite, more "vague" in the Peircean sense
... and in this sense logogenesis is a very exact analogue of ontogenesis
-- development leads to progressive differentiation and organization, the
pluripotent cells are not yet typable ...
Time is the enemy of taxonomy. Dynamic development that leads to change,
innovation, surprise, progressive specification is not describable in terms
of the fixed classifications of types that may be useful if we look only at
end-states. The synoptic view shows us definite types, boundaries,
functions. In the dynamical, ongoing, real-time view ... the view in which
reality is created ... nothing is quite so neat or simple. The synoptic
view works from the records, the traces, of dynamic process. It can't
explain what made it, because too much about the how is lost. The
scientific logic of reconstruction from traces only works to the extent
that dynamic processes unfold in the same way each time, or to the extent
that the traces are made on timescales short compared to the timescale of
unfolding of the dynamical process -- and to the extent that we have a
dynamical model that enables us to move from the micro to the macro.
This god-trick may work for some simple regular phenomena in our universe,
but not for the elusive contingency of human activity. That's why we need
to look more deeply into the _how_ of meaning making and activity as
process, including as bodily process ... including how we _feel_ as we act
... something clearly important to how the trajectory of action develops,
but curiously absent from most would-be explanatory accounts ....
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 01:00:07 PST