Hi Judy, you wrote (in part)
>On the other hand, I am vague about Paul P's "Activity 1" -- Paul, would
>you say that Jim Gee's "big 'D' Discourse" corresponds to Activity 2? &
>if so, what would be the discursive entity corresponding to Activity 1?
>Or am I barking up a catless tree?
I see Gee's Discourse as not precisely related to activity theory. His
accounts of Discourse have been expansive in the sense of ways of acting,
doing, saying, feeling, dresssing, etc. However, I still sense the role of
speech/discourse community theory, the tendency to see big D as like a
language but multisemiotic and much smaller. I'm still recalling his
discussions of biker bar discourse.
Activity 2 (collective, motivated) involves some durable human life
project, like getting food, establishing shelter, creating social relations
and institutions, providing for security, reproduction (literal and
social), play--immensely transformed and complicated by the development of
sociohistoric practices. I think Tulviste was right in suggesting recently
that we need a classification system that would point us toward the key
families of activity and some of its specific sociocultural species.
By Activity 1, I mean the total, the whole, the union and disunion of all
the things going on, which means in practice that multiple Activity 2's are
co-present (so always multiple collective motives are co-present), multiple
actions centered in individual persons (and this resonating with activity
2's), and artifactual/operational things happening (and these sedimented
with collective and individual practices and perspectives in the form of
affordances). So yes, labor has to be a site where much more is always
happening than say making shoes; it is always also going to be about
(re)making persons, practices, institutions, society--and each of those
multiple.
If you think about Goodwin and Duranti's account of context(s) as
laminated, multiparty, contextualization phenomena and then make the shift
from context to activity, that's more what I'm thinking.
>
>I'm also wondering, Paul P., in your description of Activity 2, how you
>understand the relation between multiple motives and "social relations"
>-- I assume you are saying that motives are (also) embedded in social
>relations; can labor also be, in your understanding, a site of multiple
>motives, as Helena proposed?
>
>
>And when you say that learning happens in Activity 1, do you mean that
>what we think of as learning at lower levels doesn't count unless some
>change happens in Activity 1?
I meant that development (of artifacts, practices, institutions) as well as
people happen in the profound heterogeneity of Activity 1, which has, I
think, important implications for how we understand the character of
development.
We have to take into account that the historical development of activity
2's, individuals with their goals, and the artifacts/tools of operations
are all co-genetic, always developing in association with other activity
2's etc. The historical development of, say, labor relations or of
schooling is not insulated from the historical development of race and
gender relations, for example. They are co-developing (and here, of
course, development doesn't necessarily mean improvement).
Another example, I'm thinking of Pickering's discussion of how starting in
WWII the military enfolded physics, altering both profoundly.
Does this clarify my ealier points?
Paul Prior
Associate Professor (English)
Associate Director, Center for Writing Studies
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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