Re: Individuals in joint activity

pprior who-is-at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Thu, 4 Apr 1996 11:09:37 -0600

Gordon wrote in part:

> But at the same time, I would want to add, individual
>contributions also issue from the individual's position with respect to
>the joint activity, and do not make sense without taking into
>consideration the individual's unique life trajectory, including his or
>her previous participation in related activities, both similar and different.

I agree. I find Bakhtin useful here in his insistence that utterance and
speech genre (as concrete situated, specific interactions) are the
fundamental source of "language" and, as I read it, culture. He emphasizes
the particular influences of *a* family history, of an occupation, of the
historical moment, of particular persons. Also, useful is his notion that
the person is responsive, is selectively appropriating (as
authoritative-internally peruasive discourses) and responding to such
particularities.

If the character of joint activity or a functional system is shaped by
technologies, like whether I am writing with a pencil and sending a letter
or with a computer and posting an email message, then it is also shaped by
who is involved in the joint activity/fucntional system and what practices
and orientations they have come to embody through their life trajectories.

In this sense then, I also agree with Gordon's point below. Forms of
participation in communities of practice (to use Lave & Wenger's terms) are
certainly interactive and social-political issues, but they also have to do
with learning--the historical production of particular persons.

>...it still seems to me to be the case
>that, in any particular activity setting, different individuals differ in
>their potential for participation as a result of their previous experience.
>So, even if we refuse to call this potential "competence", it needs some
>other form of characterization. It is the attempt to provide this
>characterization that seems to me to be missing from the discussion so far.

This is also a place where I see externalization as important. If an
interpsychological perspective means that the isolated atomistic individual
is not tenable, that the person, even alone on top of a mountain with no
cultural artifacts in sight, is socialized, then it also means that an
abstract, disembodied social is not tenable, that the social, both in terms
of on-going activity and in terms of sociohistoric artifacts/practices, is
personalized.

________________
Paul Prior
U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu