Latour offers a trenchant re-voicing of what Hutchins, and many
of us, have been working towards: a notion of internalization of
the social as a continuation within the organism of the semiotic-
material practices that begin beyond our particular organism, but
that we enter into interactively, and which therefore cross, and
blur, any possible borders between the me and the larger units in
which me's are constituted.
What is striking in the particular version Latour offers from his
reading of Hutchins is the notion of 'continuation' (my word), of
transforming practices (successive transforms of a practice as we
enact it with different tools, media; Hutchins' 'propagation of
representations'), past the imaginary boundary of the individual,
and so on into the internal organismic resources (habitus,
embodied memory/habits-of-doing, etc.) as just more tools, more
media for the enactment in yet further ways of the chains of
practices that constitute participation in a social-cultural
activity.
Perhaps the term 'continuation' has special resonance for me it
may not have for others because of its use in mathematics and
physics to mean the way in which we extend a functional
relationship past the boundary of the domains on which it is
initially defined, by seeking to preserve some critical
properties (cf. analytic continuation, for any cognoscenti).
On the practical side, as in individualization of instruction or
learning, this continuum of interior and exterior media of
practice means that no two individuals, in no two settings, will
enact a practice identically, or in ways for which the individual
differences do not matter in some important ways. Edelman told us
this at the interior neurological level, but it is true at every
level of tool-use or mediated-practice in the interior-exterior
continuum. Still, this is not to say that we cannot construct
useful similarities across individual organisms, situations,
groups, events. These are the social structural, cultural, local-
formation views. In the AT sense, the activity as a social-
cultural formation provides us with the unity across instances;
and as we proceed to action, we find unities dependent on shared
tools and routines, but now enacted differently for each case;
and finally at the many levels of operations, the most uniqueness
(often infrasemiotic, sometimes semiotically ignorable), with
unities now at the organismic-biological levels.
Unfortunately, I do not think it is possible to draw normative
implications from this view. It will not tell us how people ought
to learn or how we ought to teach. It will explain usefully how
people do learn under all possible social arrangements.
How people do learn will, of course, matter to what kind of a
society we have. But in this view, I believe, the choice of how
people shall learn or how we shall teach is entirely a political
one. The _Is_ of science is again silent on the _Ought_ of
action. Perhaps that is a good thing. We can stop trying to pass
the moral and political buck to an (impossible) objective
science, and start to reframe educational issues again in terms
of arguments about values. JAY.
PS. Yes, there could be a role for science in these debates
again, _if_ you believe science can predict, or even trace post
hoc, causal connections between methods of learning/teaching and
larger social phenomena to which political values apply. I no
longer believe this is possible, though fictions along these
lines can be useful parts of a critical praxis. What we need are
more local, moral values at each scale of ecosocial
interactivity. Let us do what is good here and now in this
situation, and make reasonable projections into and from the
networks of directly related practices at immediately neighboring
scales, but not try to be guided by speculations about larger
social-political ramifications, saving those for judgments about
activities on those scales.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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