Re: more on genres (CHAT and SFL)

David Russell (drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu)
Thu, 15 Aug 1996 14:46:35 -0500 (CDT)

Jim, Gordon, Judy, and y'all,

My take on activity theory (deriving from my reading of Engestrom's use of
Leont'ev with healthy doses of Latour and a thread Anglo-American
philosophy of language best exemplified by Donald Davidson) does indeed
subsume language in activity. Any material object (including tongue-sounds
and marks on sufaces) can be used by people as a tool to make meaning. In
the moment-by-moment the playing out of human actions-with-tools (as well
as in the [always temporarily] stabilized routines of those
actions-with-tools) speaking and writing come into use with other shared
tools.

This is a very broad semiotic, but one that may be necessary for the kinds
of analysis people are trying to do with it, where tools of all kinds come
into complex interactions. Instead of asking what is semiosis (or a tool),
one might ask under what conditions a material object or behavior ISN'T
semiotic (or a sign).

There are of course many specific material objects and human behaviors that
people are not making meaning with at any given moment--one's heart beat,
most of the time, for example. But all of them can be "semiotic", signs, if
need arises (not because it is part of a system). Once that material object
and that action are brought into some joint activity (love-making, or
diagnosing a heart ailment, for example) that "biological" or "natual"
object and behavior becomes part of the cultural (semiotic) activity, in
conjunction with other material objects, sometimes writing and speaking.

In this account, semiotic systems derive from texts (as material objects),
and not the other way around. Linguists, choreographers, music theorists,
and so on, may bracket off, for the purpose of analysis one kind of
tool-in-use, leave others to worry about the other kinds (and the
boundaries with the others--as with pictographic traditions writing,
oscilliscopic representatios of sound that my wife uses every day as a
radio journalist editing digital tape, words incorporated into
archetectural structures and onto clothing . . .). The question is, for the
analyist, I suppose, what is gained and what is lost by the bracketing?

Gordon's reading of Leont'ev,for example, separates certain "semiotic"
behaviors and material objects from others and and sees the semiotic as
playing not a dominant role, now a supporting one. This is rather more
cartesian than my reading of Leont'ev, who as I read him takes great pains
to overcome analytical separations between, words and deeds. What is the
advantage to you, Gordon, as an analyst of learning and teaching in
schools, in making this distinction? What, Jim, is the goal for the analyst
of finding a theoretical way of making linguistics subsume activity?

David R. Russell
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
USA (515) 294-4724,fax 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu