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Re: [xmca] A Good Class or a Good Show? CHAT and timescales



Jay, in addition to appreciating the **descriptive** potency of viewing reality (complex dynamical systems, etc.) in terms of the co- existence of timescale levels - as so nicely and accessibly described and explained in your writings - I am also interested in its **explanatory** potentials.

In particular, I find myself thinking about how different timescale levels of reality **transform** one another, as systems change over time. Ultimately, levels of human social reality, for example, that operate in fractions of a second, transform levels of social reality that operate at the level of decades and centuries - and vice versa. In other words, cumulative human actions transform social systems, and social systems transform human activity. My take is that viewing how different timescales **transform** one another - how timescale levels are metamorphosed, revolutionized, negated, reborn, etc. - could, might, would be the basis of harnessing the **explanatory** powers of the highly dialectical insights into nature and society that timescale theory offers. It has the potential for giving us insights into how and why reality in general and social reality in particular change the way they do.

Linking timescale theory to Hegel, Marx, Engels, Vygotsky and others who have focused dialectical theorizing on questions of how systems transform could be a very interesting study. Perhaps you have done some work in this direction, Jay?

And how interesting that you worked with Stan Salthe, a key architect of hierarchy theory. What is the "3-level model"?

Speaking of hierarchy theory - and switching to a secondary question that is related to timescale theory - that secondary question being, is timescale theory a theory of nature itself, or just human observation? - I read the book _Hierarchy Theory_ (1996) by Valerie Ahl and T.F.H. Allen a couple years ago. This book has many rich and easy to understand examples of complex hierarchical structures in nature and society which make the book quite thought-provoking and stimulating. And it has lots of great pictures! Its worth a peek if you see it at a bookstore or library.

I was struck by what seemed like a very Kantian approach by the authors to the question of the object of science. Is science about nature, society, etc. - or just how we observe them? The authors seem to claim that reality itself cannot really be known. The authors define their approach by explaining "Hierarchy theory is a theory of the observer's role in any formal study of complex systems." Ultimately, their approach seems to be a theory about consciousness, not the complexity of nature. "Complexity does not exist independently of an observer's questions. Instead, complexity is the product of asking questions in a certain way."

On one hand, they make some very good criticisms of reductionism, linear thinking, the illusion of "pure objectivity," and other common errors of objectivist-oriented and mechanical-minded approaches to science. On the other hand, in contrast with the Marxian materialist tradition, which advocates that science should seek understanding how nature and society **work** - to seek what Vygotsky called causal- explanation - Ahl and Allen seem to prefer to restrict the power of scientific research to understanding how humans **observe**.

My take is that hierarchy theory, timescale theory etc. can do more than just be brilliant insights into how people can observe things like timescales, complexity, etc. I take timescale theory, hierarchy theory, dynamical systems theory, dialectical materialism, etc. as attempts to describe not just the laws of **human observation**, but the laws of **reality itself**. Hence, I look to timescale theory and dialectical scientific concepts in general to do more than describe, but also explain. And even more - to help find ways to create real change.

At the same time, it needs to be emphasized, any explanations of reality, no matter how sophisticated they seem at the time, become increasingly inadequate as new modes of production evolve and new ways of understanding reality that are more appropriate to new social systems are discovered and developed. Science never sits still.

But - and this is my take - this should not discourage us from getting as close as we can to understanding reality - and - viewing reality as something that **can** be understood. I happen to think timescale theory can help us do just that.

Thoughts?

- Steve



On Dec 21, 2009, at 2:27 PM, Jay Lemke wrote:


Thanks for the sincere interest in timescale theory, David! :-)

My ideas about timescales actually grew out of analyzing TEXT. It was just that gap between the time-, text-, and meaning-scale of sentences vs. chapters vs. whole books ... and then sequels and series of books and tv episodes, etc. that suggested to me both the importance of scales and the idea that there were really a LOT of them: many intermediate scales.

I asked questions like: what kinds of meaning can be made in extended texts that cannot be made in a single sentence? And this was the basis of the theme in my 2000 timescales article in MCA: how do moments add up to lives?

I only found the convergence of the developmental issue and the textual analysis issue through a serious consideration of the role of time, based on another area of my interest: complex dynamical systems. Such systems tend to have a multiple-levels type of organization, and while we usually think of those levels in terms of scales of size (e.g. cells in tissues in organs in bodies), complex systems dynamics sees the organization as arising out of processes at different timescales that give rise to different structures at different space scales. I collaborated with a theoretical biologist (Stan Salthe) to develop a model of how the different processes at different timescales integrated with or coordinated with one another (the 3-level model), and everything else more or less then fell into place.

Most people think it's best in research to keep the number of distinct timescales to a minimum, like the 4 of microgenesis (event/ activity scale), ontogenesis (developmental/biographical), historical (centuries/millennia), and phylogenetic-evolutionary (100,000 to 100,000,000 years). And at least this plan reminds us not to leave out anything across such a large range, and it also parcels things out among our traditional disciplines of inquiry based on kinds of data, processes, and reasoning. Way better than a naive and impossible division into micro vs macro. But for the same reasons that the micro/macro divide is unbridgeable, so for the most part are the gaps between each pair among these 4. To bridge you need common terms, or at least a cross-scale scheme of some sort, and for that you really need to fill in the gaps with the relevant intermediate timescales and their processes, even if the result is more complicated and less neat intellectually.

From a strict physics point of view (or complex systems dynamics, which transcends physics as such) every two to three orders of magnitude in time (ie. timescales that are 100 to 1000 times longer) you need another intermediate scale. Sometimes ever smaller intervals are needed, but rarely less than 30-50 times the last scale. This neat principle (which derives from the Adiabatic Principle in physics), however, gets a bit messed up by human semiotics and the role of semiotic artifacts, which leads to the "heterochrony" discussion in my work. Some of this was also independently theorized by Michel Serres, the mentor of Bruno Latour. In practice, the 3-level model serves as a good guide to figuring out how many timescales you need in any given case.

Of course identifying the relevant scales, and the phenomena and processes at those scales, does not guarantee that you will be able to find the data or have the methods to work across those scales and work out just how they do relate to one another. But that's what makes research fun!

JAY.



Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 21, 2009, at 1:29 AM, David Kellogg wrote:

Yuan:

Thanks for a very rich and thought-provoking note. I too am Chinese, by marriage and by choice (in the same way that Obama chose to be black), and so I know all about dressing one's kids warmly and cooking well instead of offering cheap talk (whether praise or criticism). In fact, a lot of the criticism I get from my wife is along those lines: her most common criticisms about my hygiene are veiled concerns about my getting sick and her usual way of finding out if I am uncomfortable is to say "A dead pig doesn't know how hot the water is").

I have found that Chinese people and especially Koreans praise their PROFESSORS far more fulsomely than Westerners tend to, and at first, as a professor, I found this rather embarrassing. Thinking about it, I decided that the key factor underlying all of these differences is a much higher preference for sincerity. The problem is that when Western parents indulge in fulsome praise of a child, the child cannot help but suspect that the praise is INSINCERE, because they are often being praised for things that adults really do much better.

My wife tells a very bitter story about how when she was growing up one of her mother's co-workers praised her for her knitting and asked her how to do it, so she proudly showed her how. She was then completely disgusted to find an almost fully knitted sweater on the woman's bunk in the workers' dormintory (it wa the early seventies and workers tended to live together), so she knew that the woman already knew how to knit and resolved never to trust praise from grown-ups again.

When my students send me presents and embarrassingly fulsome notes of praise, they are often genuinely referring to skills which I have and they do not have yet, and so I never ever feel that there is any insincerity in them. On the other hand, I just came back from the USA and was really struck by how little of the praise I heard for my wife's thesis work contained any genuine desire to acquire knowledge or the methodology contained therein and how hard it was to tell it from the pro forma sort as a result. My wife was actually much more attentive to the criticism; it seemed more concrete, more detailed, and either as cause or as result struck her as a lot more sincere.

One piece of knowledge and methodology that I genunely lack and genuinely would like to acquire is Jay's work on timescales; but I found it rather difficult to map them onto the four time scales of phylo-onto-microgenesis that sociocultural theory usually uses. On the other hand, I find the leap from onto- to micro- too large; I suspect that there is an intermediary timescale somewhere (and I KNOW there is one in text, we cannot simply treat a book and a sentence as the same level of organization). Sometimes I even wonder if THIS is the source of the problem we often have actually describing and operationalizing the link between learning and development. (This is elswhere referred to on this list as the zoped problem).

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Sun, 12/20/09, yuan lai <laiyuantaiwan@gmail.com> wrote:


From: yuan lai <laiyuantaiwan@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] A Good Class or a Good Show?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, December 20, 2009, 6:27 PM


David, I think it's not so much the merits or demerits of an article as the monthly discussion paper's role at xmca. I think of the discussion paper as
a piece to hold our shared attention, accessible to all and for all
interested to comment on, not about what could have been, as it, like all research work, has its constraints, but, like a museum display, to make visible our own different takes, yet another way to share (“I didn’t know you also…”), to reaffirm, to envision “what could be”, etc. But how one feels about something does matter (neutral feelings usually means less speaking and acting), especially when there are other means to be members of a community. On the other hand, the sponataneous tends to be irregular, although not a problem at xmca. (I seem to be switching positions back and
forth)

I have been thinking how less praise is linked to collectivistic cultures. I
speak from personal experiences. I’m a Chinese and Chinese culture is
characterized as collectivistic. When I first came over to North America, as an adult, I was struck by the amount of praise parents and teachers lavish on children, as well as how much parents and adults talk to babies and toddlers, among other things. Gradually, the unfamiliar becomes familiar. My own experience of growing up at home, back in Taiwan, is that my parents did not hug me and my siblings much at all (all my aunts and uncles did the same, but my grandfather always hugged and kissed his grandchildren; I still recall complaining to him about his beard). But children growing up in such homes know that their parents love them because there are many ways to show love. My mom loves me every time when she cooks the food I like; my dad shows his love for me when he asks me to dress warmly. Chinese may get or give less praise, but we know it IS praise when parents do not say anything upon reading a report card of straight A’s. That’s a high school student put it to me; she knew her parents were pleased. Good grades are expected and both children and parents know. Overt praise among Chinese people, based on my personal experience and immigrants in Canada that I have experienced at that time, is not necessary because of shared expectations. I guess it would be the same with behavior. Someone I know told a story, which happened many years ago when she first arrived in New York from China. The host family picked her up at the airport in the evening and asked her if she would like something to eat before going to bed. She thanked her host and declined. She was expecting a second offer and ready to accept that. But the second offer never was made. Of course, the host family did not know the Chinese code for being a host. That was some years ago when I talked to some other immigrant Chinese about parental expectations. I don’t know the newer generation and how much parenting practices has changed or not. I can’t judge fairly my own
parenting practices.

In the example of expectations understood between and among parties, I think it is not so much “less praise” as to how praise is expressed, via body language or because there is less perceived need (due to shared, tacit understanding). But I’m not sure if “less praise” means “more criticism”, which Gratier et al. seem to place on the same plane. Looking at personal experiences on the speculated mechanism of “less praise”, I would think that, if a parent frowns while reading a report card, it is an expression of criticism and there shouldn’t be different patterns of occurrences. But then
again we are human and we probably let out our anger when shared
expectations aren’t met than to withhold praise, at least openly, when good results come in. It appears that Gratier et al. refer to a different way of
conceptualizing praise and criticism. They write, “one element in the
‘collectivistic’ worldview is a dispreference for praise, which makes one child stand out” (p. 297). This implies that praise or criticism is given in public or at least there is an audience or potential audience. There is a saying, a nail that sticks out gets pushed down (as opposed to “a squeaky wheel gets oiled”). I can’t sort out what this means to me at the moment. But my question is that, if praise makes one child stand out, wouldn’t
criticism also do? If so, we should expect to see less criticism in
collectivistic culture, but the authors expected it in the opposite
direction. I’m thinking why people in collectivistic societies might be fearless of making their young stand out with criticism. The only thing I could think of now is a Chinese tradition to name one’s children humbly so as not to invoke anger from gods or something. But I think it is more a tradition of the past and applies to private names family members used for
their youngsters. Most Chinese names I know are grand sounding! Like
“Beautiful flowers” or “Righteous Way.” There are some exceptions; One neighbor of mine formally named her daughter “Dian Dian”, which means Dot
Dot. But that may suggest more fondness than fear of standing out.

For me, Jay's article, Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts, Activities, and Meanings in Ecosocial Systems, inspires “what could be”. The parts of the article on the adabatic and heterochrony principles are a bit difficult for me (at first at least), but the rest is a treat! I was thinking of how it would apply to young immigrant children in Gratier et al. and methodological considerations as I read it. I like very much Jay’s view on page 288: “we
still tend to define our objects of study in such a way that a single
researcher could in principle come to understand them. This appears to be a
contradiction in the case of ecosocial systems. The longest timescale
processes that characterize such systems are almost certainly longer than a human lifetime. We cannot study such a system from more than a few of the many viewpoints within it, and we honestly do not expect all these views to fit consistently together. We need at least a team to conduct such a study, one as diverse or nearly so as the system under study, and along the same dimensions of difference. And we need a self-sustaining institution that will last long enough to observe major historical change in the system. ‘It
takes a village’ to study a village.”

(correction of phrases, errors, and misinterpretation is welcome) How to study longer-term processes and patterns (longer than one lifetime) in
shorter-term processes? The individualism-collectivism is a framework
Gratier et al. use; topdown frameworks (perhaps having been developed from bottom up) can be useful but, as lived through individuals with different variations, they are evolving, albeit probably at snail pace in a vast land.. Jay's envisioning of a self-sustaining institution, perhaps global in nature (a future plan for LCHC perhaps?), would help track longer- or shorter-term
processes across different timescales. As carriers of longer-term
processess, how would the Latino children in Gratier et al. interpret the teacher’s, say, verbal or nonverbal signs of praise and criticism, intended by the teacher or not? How would this interpretation relate to their own perceptions and practices around their parents’ praise or criticism? How do researchers invite children to reflect on what they have just experienced? What emergent processes and patterns in the classrooms where different worlds come into contact? As I think about these, I see that researchers in the future would write with less finality of their interpretation (even when interpretations of participants are incorporated) if they intend their work to continue living, so to speak. Perhaps let the data speak for themselves more. Perhaps more built-in design to allow the data to be compared with research of similar nature in databanks for future researchers to mine the
data.

Yuan

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 10:25 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com >wrote:

Mike, I think that the answer (to the temporary lull in the discussion of the Gratier et al article) is of course all of the below: final exams, end of quarter, and a certain amount of delicacy over an article that at least some of us see as deeply problematic (see Jay's comments, especially).

I often think it's more useful to bring whatever discussion we are
currently having (e.g. bodies and artifacts, emotion and cognition) around
to the article at hand rather than vice versa.

Some of our most successful and fruitful discussions have (alas for me!)
also been some of our most general.

This is partly thanks to the very articulate and ardent philosophers on the list, but it's also because general means inclusive, transdisciplinary, a
party to which every party's invited except the bouncer.

Now it seems to me that the Gratier et al. article really does have a bearing on both the "bodies and artefacts" thread and the "emotion and cognition" one. As I already said, I think the "bodies and artefacts" connection is INTONATION and STRESS: this is the way that gesture really "goes underground" in language, and so I think that Gratier et al (and also Wolff-Michael Roth) are right to look at it in all its spectrographic
splendor. But the level of detail we get that way has to somehow be
harnessed to a more macrogenetic perspective to do much good.

This time I have a comment on the "emotion and cognition" thread. In
Chapter Two of Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky spends a LOT of time quoting Bleuler. I've just been reading Bleuler's book on autism in the library. Vygotsky likes him because of his rejection of the over-extended content of
the autistic function (actually, as we shall see, an over-extended
conception of the reality function)..

We can see, even if Bleuler cannot, the beginnings of Hegelian triad
describing the emergence of higher EMOTIONAL functions. The first,
relatively unmediated response, to reality is an instance of the reality function, but it is based on perception and sensation. Here the James-Lange formula that we feel sad because we perceive ourselves crying or we feel frightened because we feel the sensations of our body running away from a bear may be a useful metaphor (except for the obvious homunculus problem it raises), or at least a catchy inversion of the individual subjectivist view
of the genesis of affect.

From this primal, biological response a second, more fully psychological
response is born. As Bleuler points out, it requires a relatively complex response, because it involves the recollection of sensation, and even turning away from the immediate sources of sensation. This is the autistic function proper, and it is not genetically primary. When this response
becomes linked to itself, rather than to objective events, we get
“irrealist” logic, the pleasure principle, the associative links of dreams
which Vygotsky refuses to call “symbolic”.

Finally, there is a third response, which is “realistic” in the sense that it is oriented towards an objective state of affairs existing between people rather than within them. Yet it is mediated, by recollection and reflection, and above all by language. Here is where we must look for higher affective functions, culturally mediated emotions, and conceptually based aesthetics.

This third response is also where we need to look to find the basis of a Spinozan—a socialist—ethics; like the second response, it considers human pleasure and the satisfaction of desire to be a positive good. But like the first response, it is objective, in the sense that it is not individualistic but socially shared through and through. Bleuler, a biologically oriented
psychologist, cannot get us this far. But Vygotsky can!

When I read Gratier et al. I am impressed by how many of the descriptions of the Bridging Cultures Classroom contain descriptions of positive affect, and how many of the non-Bridging Cultures Classroom are rather negative.

But of course a good class cannot simply be a chain of what Wolff- Michael calls emotionally positive valences; some such chains are going to be at the lowest level of physical response (e.g. the satisfaction of desire, such as when kids get treats in class) and a good many more are going to be at the level Bleuler is calling autistic; the chain of "one positive valence after another" that we often see as a substitute for plot in children's literature
and a substitute for a script in kids' movies.

So we need more than glowing descriptions in order to see what experienced teachers see at a glance: the difference between a good show and a good class! One of my grads is working on this right now; the idea is to test the positive valence of particular topics in a conversation by counting the number of times they get brought up voluntarily by one child and continued
by others.

We initially thought we would use this technique just to find out who the kids wanted to talk about: did they want to talk about the characters in the textbook, or about their teacher an their classmates? Surprisingly, they often chose the textbook characters, and they were particularly interested in...the TEACHER character. In their chat about real people, they also prefer the teacher as a topic. Perhaps this is part of OUR culture, though!

While writing this, though, a problem occurred to me. The topics that get the most "hits" and which run the longest in classroom conversations really
represent two rather contradictory things: the ability to stimulate
interventions from the most voluble participants, and the ability to
generalize to the interests of the greatest possible number. On xmca, of course, that means topics of a certain generality and abstractness. In our
classroom data, though, that tends to mean the teacher.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education


--- On Sun, 12/13/09, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, December 13, 2009, 8:38 AM


My apologies for posting the les treilles paper twice. it did not show on
my
screen. As "recompense" here is a review of a book that
promotes the idea of "bio-cultural co-constructivism" without mention of Vygotsky anywhere. Perhaps, as a result, it leads some of its adherents
into
some (in my opinion) inappropriate reduction of culture to "the
environment," thereby opening up a very old, very stinky, can of worms.

Question: Many people on XMCA voted to discuss the
"Tacit Communicative Style and Cultural Attunement in Classroom
Interaction"<
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Edb=all%7Econtent=a915635308
article,
but very few have followed David's lead in discussing it directly.
Is it because of final exam time on both a quarter and semester system in the US? Or voting as a prelude to spectatorship? Where are those voters?

mike

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 7:20 AM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

The book description came through, Larry. Attached is the most recent Fonagy article i could find that appeared general. His work looks very interesting, thanks. I have not read it yet, but that fact that Gergeley
is
a co-author indicates that issues of intentionality are involved and I am very curious to see if the effects you talk about are connected with
changes
at 9months. First guess, it would fit with Tomasello and Vygotsky, but if
it
fits with Trevarthan and primary intersubjectivity it will be a suprise..
We'll see.

A brief paper on this topic I wrote for an audience for whom the idea
that
culture mediates human activity was a novelty, and that there is a two
way
relation between "natural" and "cultural" is also attached.

thanks a lot for the pointer.
mike


On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca> wrote:

Vera
I sent an attachment through CHAT but I don't think it went through.
Fonagy and three other authors wrote the book "Affect regulation,
Mentalization, and the Development of the Self.
It is an extension of Bowlby's and Winnicott's approach (He works at the
same Tavistock institute in London) and its interweaving with his
understanding of Hegel and intersubjectivity theory.
The summary of infant studies from a relational framework is excellent.. Some of the "clinical" approaches in the second half of the book may be
critqued.
Also I wonder how feminist scholars may critique the focus on "mothers"?

However the detail (though sometimes overwhelming) is systematically
presented and builds a coherent perspective on the centrality of
relational
processes to the development of subjectivity.
Larry


----- Original Message -----
From: Vera Steiner <vygotsky@unm.edu>
Date: Saturday, December 12, 2009 8:04 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

Hi Larry,
I would be interested in a link to Fonagy's recent publications.
I am
related to him and am doubly curious about his work.
Thanks, Vera
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry Purss" <lpurss@shaw.ca>
To: <ablunden@mira.net>; "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2009 8:51 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts


Andy

I believe the reason we are cautious about brain research is it
usually
implies "biology" as foundational to being human.  The
reason I mention
Fonagy and others exploring the foundational premises of infant
development
is they are starting from intersubjectivity as prior to
subjectivity and it
is only within relational contexts that a sense of subjectivity
arises or
emerges. They are using brain research to support this
relational paradigm.
Larry

----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Date: Saturday, December 12, 2009 7:28 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

Larry,

In my first forrays into this discussion on emotion, I found
myself introducing talk of physiological observations in a
way I would never have thought of doing in relation to
cognition. After reading about the 300 years of reflections
on the physiology of emotion in Vygotsky's article, I was
left asking myself: why? Why do I think it is important to
investigate the physiology of emotion, while I hold such a
low opinion of the place of physiological investigations in
understanding the normal process of cognition.

Consciousness is the outcome of the intersection of two
objective processes: human physiology and human behaviour.
This is equally true of both emotion and cognition.

While the marketing, military and medial industries are
spending billions of dollars on neurological investigations,
I would think that CHAT people would be interested in
questions like the role of emotion in learning, behaviour,
addicition, the formation of social bonds, and so on,
investigating such questions with dual stimulation type
experiments, with artifacts that are more or less affect-laden.

Andy

Larry Purss wrote:
Mike
Your comment that this leaves us only at the starting gate of
understanding how bodies can be "written on"  points to the
research and reflection on the relation of changes in the brain
mediated by culture.
One area of research that is exploring how the brain is
changed via mediation is intersubjective infant developmental
studies that are mapping physiological changes in one person's
brain that "mirrors" similar  physiological brain
changes  being generated during the activity of the
other  person.  Fonagy is doing research in this area
and has written a detailed summary of the research in this area.
His term for this intersubjective process is "mentalization".

Larry

----- Original Message -----
From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, December 12, 2009 12:19 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

I do not have all this sorted out by a long shot, but my own
way
of thinking
about the issue is that humans are hybrids, really complex
one's. Their
brains have LITERALLY been shaped by prior genrations of
mediation of
activity through material artifacts, their brains (and often
other parts of
the bodies) cannot operate normally without inclusion of
artifacts, they can
be "written on" as jay points out.

The problem is that this leaves us only at the starting gate
for
furtherdevelopment of this point of view. I found that
experimental study I sent
around sort of interest in this regard, even though it
provides
such sketchy
detail and assumes so much about its cultural content and
organization. The
developmental implications, which in our current discussion
would mean, the
organization of hybridity during ontogeny, which in turn has
implicationsfor the cognition/emotion
discussion.
mike

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Jay Lemke
<jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:

One of the ways I have found useful to think about the body
in
relation to
semiotic mediation is to see the body as, among other
things,
a semiotic
artifact.

What I mean by semiotic artifact is a material object or
substrate that can
be written on and read from, much like a printed page or an
architectural> drawing. Written on, in the general semiotic
sense, not necessarily in
words, but in signs of some kind: meaningful features that
can
be "read" or
made sense of by people (or nonhumans, but that's another
story) in that our
meaning-mediated world, and our actions that respond to
that world
(including by trying to change or re-create it or just
imagine
it in some
new way), are affected by our encounter with the features of
the semiotic
object, according to some community interpretive practices,
with our own
individual variations on them.

At a very obvious level, bodies can be dressed up in signs:
hair styles,
tans, cosmetics. And this can be taken to a more
"artifactual"
form with
dress, or a more physiological form with, say, body-
building.
From tattoos
to ripped abs is a small shift when we are thinking about
the
body as a
writable/readable object. If we want to get still more
physiological, and
think not only about reading other people's bodies, but
reading our own,
then the proprioceptive feelings we sense within out bodies
can be
considered signs as well, whether exhilaration or nausea,
strength or
weakness, etc. The meaning of these feelings is certainly
culturally>>> mediated. They are physiological phenomena, but
they are also
meaningful> cultural phenomena, with value judgements
attached,
with intertexts in
literature, etc.

And we can deliberately write to our most physiological
states, e.g. with
drugs, to produce feelings that have cultural meanings and
values for us,
whether of calm or elation, energy or hallucination. And to
a
considerable> extent, our modifications of our body
physiology
can be "read" by others,
just as can our made physiques, tattoos, or hair styles.

So I would say that the body mediates our sense of the world
and ourselves
and other people in at least two ways: directly through
physiology, as with
hormonal responses, sensory modalities of perception, bodily
affordances and
dis-affordances ("handicaps" for example), etc. AND also in
these other,
clearly semiotic and cultural ways, as a semiotic artifact,
as
well as with
the cultural overlays of meaning that lie over and color the
meanings and
responses to all the direct physiological mediations.

I do not, however, know what being wooden on a rainy day
feels
like to a
chair.


JAY.


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke> <
http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke> <
http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 7, 2009, at 4:14 AM, Mabel Encinas wrote:


Ok. You have a point. Then, lets start thinking from an
embodied approach
:)

Let's accept that the body is an artifact. What is then the
difference>> between a chair and the body. Both are yes,
"products of human art", as you
express it. However, only in the process (practice) there
seem to be a
difference. Both are material and ideal (the body is not
separated from the
mind; the chair, this one here that I feel is made of cloth
and a cushioned
material, plastic, metal, and involves the ideal that a
designer and workers
in a factory transformed so people could seat on). What is
the difference?
Mabel











 Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 22:53:40 +1100
From: ablunden@mira.net
To: liliamabel@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts

Well, the body is the body is the body. The reason the
question arises for me is when we make generalisations in
which things like person, artefact, consciousness, concept,
action, and so on, figure, where does the body fit in? My
response was that even though it is obviously unique in many
ways, it falls into the same category as artefacts.

My questions to you are: what harm is done? why is anything
ignored? And, what is the body if it is not a material
product of human art, used by human beings?

Andy

Mabel Encinas wrote:

Is this way being fruitful? That is why I do not like to
consider the
body as an artifact. Did not cognitive pscyhology do
that?
(Bruner, Acts
of Meaning). Then intentions and all the teleological
aspects are so
much ignored...



Mabel









 Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 20:21:09 +1100
From: ablunden@mira.net
To: liliamabel@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts

Sure. But the body has been constructed like a living
machine - the various artefacts that you use
(especially but
not only language and images) are "internalized" in some
way. So one (external) artefact is replaced by another
(internal) artefact. Yes?

Andy

Mabel Encinas wrote:

However, sometimes practices do not involve other artefact
than the body (some practices are directed to the
body),
and that was
why I was talking about the limit of thinking about the
body as
artefact... is that a limit? That is why I mentioned
the
body as "the
raw material". I was thinking for example practices
linked to
meditation
and the like, for example, among many others.
Mabel


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