While Vera John-Steiner's talk set me thinking a bit feverishly
(see Part I), I recognized many long-standing concerns in the
other talks, from the sociology of classroom discourse (Duran,
Green and the Santa Barbara group), to the relations of discourse
and activity (Gordon Wells) and the cultural and ideological
dilemmas of ambivalently Cartesian modernism (Jim Wertsch). (I'm
strictly an amateur in matters of emergent literacy, though I
cite Anne Haas Dyson often in connection with the unity of
mediational means in social development.)
I'd be interested to hear a bit more on Wertsch's thesis,
especially how Lockean and Rousseauiste traditions might have
been mediated for LSV by the Germans through whom (I assume,
perhaps wrongly) he inherited them. My memories of Germanic
philosophical representationalism and romanticism in the 19th c.
are far too hazy (I read Fichte and Schlegel in my teens) for me
to reconstruct the shifts, but some bodily sense seems to tell me
they would have been important, that by LSV's time these
positions had been transformed a fair bit from their 17th and
18th century origins, and in different directions from what
happened in England and France. Who, for example, were the
philosophical muses of W.Koehler?
Gordon Wells of course dips into texts and issues he and I share
an appreciation of thanks to the work of Michael Halliday. Not
only the co-evolution of scientific discourse genres and broader
scientific practices (and either their influence on the rest of
the dominant culture, or their scapegoating for trends with other
motors), but also the curious fiction of Goldings' _The
Inheritors_, where Halliday had analyzed differences in
transitivity of clauses (representing the semantics of agency)
correlated with the viewpoints of the two tribes. Gordon notices
that one can take this also as a case of two linguistic (and so
largely implicit and unconscious) models of activity available in
our language (and at least most Indo-European languages). Whether
Golding has the pre-history right or not we can't know, but even
in fiction we can ask about the relations of linguistic mediation
of action and our model of agentivity in action. Golding may or
may not have foregrounded an earlier stratum of human meaning
styles fossilized in our grammar, but at least he shows us that
more than one such way of meaning is possible to us.
Gordon, in Peter's account anyway, seems mainly interested in
this as a way into questions of the relation of linguistic and
cultural change. I believe Halliday sees it mainly as evidence
for the deeply ambivalent (and so doubly resourceful) potential
of the language's semantic system: neither totally 'causal'
(someone did it) not totally 'eventuative' (it just happened).
For me the salience Gordon highlights is the role of linguistic
mediation in the cultural construction not just of agentivity and
our models of action, but more broadly of subjectivity, not only
reflexively (which we now accept, e.g. that our identities are
made through our narratives, etc.) but even 'actionally' (i.e.
our Self as efficacious Doer, maker of hammers and histories). If
we are ready to question the Cartesian _mens_ in its separate
reality (i.e. consciousness as a purely mental phenomenon), are
we also ready to question individual human agency as a matter of
causal fact? If our reflexive consciousness is always the product
of joint, social, situated, ecological interactivity, shall we
say the same about our cherished belief that we are the authors
of our actions and their consequences? that we cannot do
anything, cause anything, except as an integral part of systems
larger than ourselves? and that it is only our culturally
habituated ways of speaking about our role in action that makes
it seem so?
And then what becomes of the individualist grounds of our ethics
and our principles of legal responsibility?
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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