I hope this is a useful dialogue, in parallel with the issues Gordon raises
in his paper.
The different zooms, perspectives, aspects, or "moments" (a fashionable
term now) do lend different weight and salience to the material and
semiotic aspects of mediation.
Some questions raised for me by Ana's discussion:
If we can't have a chat with a chair, and can with a friend, then the
deeper issue is -- What is the system in which dialogic meanings are made?
Can there be such a system which consists only of persons? Can we imagine
two persons outside the larger network which makes their meaningful
chatting possible? probably not ... so should we zoom in so far that all we
see are the two persons? again probably not .... and I don't think Ana
would disagree ... but her notion of mediation at this level seems to be
that the mediating object may be what we are talking ABOUT ... which might
be irrealis or virtual in a material system sense (or far away in time or
in space), whereas mine and Latour's view is that the mediating artifact
must be material (as well as semiotic) and must have some direct and
immediate material role and presence ... this does get interestingly
complicated when we bring in heterochrony or extended networks, for then
the chains of translation may get very long and the mediating object might
be again far away in time and space ... but there must still be some chain
of translations (which consist of material-and-semiotic operations or
processes in the network) linking these points -- and this must be more
than just the MENTION of the remote item in our talk.
This is probably also compatible with AT insofar as an object mediates
subject-subject interaction, or subjects in inter-activity, to the extent
that it participates in the activity, even as a goal, i.e. even as an
endpoint of some chain of translations that will eventually link us to it.
This is a sort of proleptic view of a network .... Latour so far as I know
is rather vague about the extension of networks in time, but I don't see
why he wouldn't welcome a symmetrizing there, too. This is perhaps where
Latour's theory is not as dynamical as what I would like to see. We don't
get much sense of the implied futures of a network ... the alliance he has
made with ethnomethodology tends to emphasize the complete contingency of
futures, we make them as we go along, and can make them differently .....
but I still tend to think that we are at the same time entrained in
already existing longer-timescale processes that make some futures a lot
more likely than others, at least near-term.
I think Ana may also have over-stated, at least for me, the role of
material causal effects in making new states of the network. Yes, they are
necessary (though I still have trouble with "causal", since you can't
assign local causes within such networks, nonetheless there is some sort of
material efficacy, material physical interaction at work), but they are
never all that is necessary.
The main point however is about symmetry ... what kinds of dialogue can I
have with nonhumans that go beyond the simple
material-interactional-physical affordances of our bodies? At one extreme
of course we have semi-intelligent interactive computer programs and robots
with whom I can have very chat-like interactions that do not seem to me to
be usefully reducible to saying I am really chatting through them with
their programmers. Can I chat with a chair? Can I commune with a landscape?
Is this just poetry and metaphor?
There are important semiotic and affective aspects to my interaction with
all material objects, in-the-network. I would not say that I alone as an
organism system isolated from the network make the meanings. Neither would
I say that the chair does. The role of the chair may be rather small in the
network in which the meanings are made, which is always bigger than me. (I
long ago invented the term trans-individual cognition and several people
thought it was a crazy idea; we now call it distributed cognition.) I
suppose that the key elements that Ana supposes the chair does not
contribute in this process are meaning-making and agency. But again, for
both of these, I don't believe that I contribute them either. I do not have
either semiotic capacity or agency outside the network. There is no
unmediated meaning making and no undistributed agency (related to the issue
of local causality above). In the symmetrizing, I do lose something
relative to the traditional modernist ontology. Agency and meaning-making
are no longer endogenetic (an awkward term but better here than
"autonomous"). They are no longer properties or capabilities of humans in
isolation (a questionable unit of analysis even physically). They arise in
networks, not in people, nor in chairs.
In some other work I've done in the last few years I have asked what is the
simplest material system in which semiosis can arise. Of course it depends
on your minimal criteria for semiosis ... this is a view that zooms in in
something like the fashion that Ana wants to have. But Latour would remind
me that the criteria are part of the chain of translations, and that
whatever the simple biological or computer systems are doing, it's only
semiosis to the extent that the network translates some observations about
them into the realm where people like me are defining semiosis. He's saying
you can't zoom in without also zooming out.
This is in part why many conservative philosophers of science, and some
scientists who have never read most of his or other people's arguments
about these matters, get very testy about his rejection of modernism. The
status of truth claims about the nonhuman world is more or less symmetrized
with that of claims about the social world. The natural sciences are not
allowed to escape from the messiness of culture. But at the same time,
something they don't as often notice, our claims about culture (e.g.
meaning and dialogue and activity) have to be anchored in material nature.
For many of us, this means that if we want to be genuinely post-Cartesian
and reject idealism and non-materialist views of cognition or social
dynamics (Hegel is hardly a spent force in historical explanation of
cultural change ...), then the ontological price of making the
social-semiotic a part of the material is that the material can no longer
be foundational for the social. The social and cultural are not built on
top of an autonomous biological-physical foundation; both are built
together, or not at all. And this mixing of the natural and the cultural,
at the level of the human individual, requires some changes in our
humanistic outlook. Some decentering.
If all this seems too radical, and too much a peculiarity of Latour,
compare Foucault on a very similar issue:
"A change in the order of discourse does not presuppose 'new ideas', a
little invention and creativity, a new mentality, but transformations in a
social practice, perhaps also in neighboring practices, and their mutual
articulation. I have not denied the possibility of changing discourses: I
have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and
instantaneous right to it." (Archeology of Knowledge 1969: 209).
Maybe the key words here are "exclusive" and "instantaneous" as much as
"sovereign".
JAY.
At 12:51 AM 11/2/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi Jay,
>
>You make excellent points. I must agree with everything you said - but I
>think that we have a different "zoom". I am only slightly familiar with
>Latour's work, but from what I understand, and from a lot of your writings I
>can see that the his main goal is as you say:
>
>"He is trying to get social analysts to look beyond persons as the focus and
>only meaningful or primary units, to get them to see that who we are and how
>we act depends as much on the artifacts around us as on the people around us
>or on anything internalized within us."
>
>The difference of Latour's "zoom" and the one I see in CHAT (but that is my
>focus personally) is not in this overall goal but how to arrive there. It is
>true that you can describe social processes as networks in which material
>artifacts play roles that are as important as the roles of humans. I have no
>problem with that at all. You also say that mediation is pervasive in ANT.
>But I see a big difference in the notion of mediation in ANT and in CHAT.
>The recognition that everything can be a mediator between any two other
>actants, is only the beginning of the argument. When I say, "zoom" I mean
>that I was looking in the very nature of the functional unit of a
>"network"/activity/dialogue - and there I see asymmetrical relationships.
>But I don't mean an asymmetry between people and material object or an
>asymmetry in the sense "that only humans matter and everything else is just
>an instrument for our purposes". I mean an asymmetry in the very process of
>making meaning, an asymmetry between the momentary functional elements.
>Let's say I am looking at a small "move" in a dialogue, which lasts a
>fragment of a second - like a slice that is cut thin in order to be put
>under a microscope. In the next moment (slice/frame) everything will be
>changed: the relationships and the roles and the nature of the "elements".
>In that particular moment - there is a fundamental functional asymmetry.
>When taken all together, in is entirety; these "slices" make a dynamic
>movement that becomes a part of an evolving network. We all know that. OK. I
>always see us all as trying to zoom in and to zoom out, constantly changing
>levels of analysis. And it is hard to bring arguments from one level of
>analysis to another.
>So for instance you say:
>
>"The argument about person-person being different from person-thing harks
>back for me to Martin Buber and the I-thou, I-it distinction. Buber was
>talking about dehumanization, about treating people like we treat things."
>
>Taken like that - yes. But, on another level of analysis (of mediation), I
>distinguish between I-thou and I-it relations not to say that they differ in
>value, but to say that they play different functions in the process of
>making meaning in which I-thou is mediated by I-it. And I-it is mediated by
>I-thou. But those are two different functions - one a relation to be
>mediated and a mediator. And these functions can be taken by each particular
>relational pair, leaving the other relational pair the other function. And
>yet in the same instant of time there is another "slice" of the process in
>which the functions are reversed. Maybe, instead of "slices" I should call
>it perspectives, but the mere fact that there are perspectives in which each
>relational pair gets to play the same role, does not make those perspectives
>"symmetrical". Not in this "zoom".
>
>And therefore when you continue with:
>"Latour is headed toward saying that we ought to treat things like we wish
>we treated people ... he is trying to take the best of both paradigms, the
>humanization of mediated social relations (as emphasized say in Deborah
>Hicks' recent readings of Bakhtin) -- extended to the realm of the
>nonhuman, and the recognition in AT and situated cognition models that
>people are also shaped by our encounters with things."
>
>I also do not argue against that, and yet - it also misses the point I am
>making. I would say, but, of course - people are shaped by our encounter
>with things, and I would add that we are capable of shaping things. I would
>also add that we ARE things too (material, I mean). But I still cannot have
>a conversation and a nice chat with the desk and the chair here, nor even
>with the computer I am using, but I can have this conversation with you.
>More importantly, I can have a conversation with you ABOUT the desk and the
>chair and about pure ideas and anything else. And the fact that you and I
>can relate to each other ABOUT something else - is to me mediation. At the
>same time - the thing we can have a conversation about functions as a
>mediator of our relationship, yet it can itself be a living being, even one
>of us: but as long as it FUNCTIONS in our conversation it is a
>mediator-thing in that little slice of the process.
>That's all I meant. A very close up "zoomed-in" perspective.
>
>You also say further that:
>"He (Latour) would not agree that for nonhumans the networks are
>deterministic and
>causal ... they can't be, for many reasons. For one, meaning effects
>intervene all along the network of connections."
>
>I can also agree with that. Because in a sense, we don't know really who or
>what else is capable of making meanings. As soon as they are - there is no
>more simple determinism. Be it humans or non-humans. But for those parts of
>our universe which cannot make meanings, things that can change them are
>either deterministic or they are of no consequence. You can use a lot of
>making meaning to build a house out of stone. But using only meaning making
>to transform the stone into a building will not change anything. For the
>pile of stone to be changed the only thing that matters are causal
>deterministic processes by which the matter can be transformed. The stone
>(as a subject of this process) is oblivious of all the meaning that went
>into the final deterministic process. But of course - the meaning is a part
>of this process for those that can make meaning. I understand the
>connectedness of the material - ideal processes, and yet, when I search for
>the dynamics of the very process of making meaning I need to look at the
>each possible perspective. And it is because I give the same IMPORTANCE to
>looking at the perspective of a stone as I give to looking at the
>perspective of a meaning making individual, I see the difference. - Not the
>difference in value, or importance, but the difference in the scope that
>each of these participants in our mutual world can have about the world. In
>fact, maybe even what we call "stone" can make meaning, it is just that at
>this moment of history, we are not aware of this ability in the "stone" or
>we cannot recognize another way to make meaning that is not "human".
>
>Sorry for this long digression. What I really wanted to do tonight is to do
>some more analyzing of Gordon's paper, because there are fascinating and
>very important issues that he brings about. I am thinking of the question in
>his title "the role of dialogue in the activity (theory)." But I will leave
>this for tomorrow.
>
>Ana
>
>
>
>
>----------------------------------------
>Ana Marjanovic-Shane
>home: 1-215 - 843 - 2909
>mobile:+267 -334-2905
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu]
>Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 10:43 PM
>To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>Subject: mediation, symmetry, and ANT
>
>
>Ana makes a number of good points, but I think that Latour has found ways
>to finesse them. He is rather strategic in his use of the "symmetry"
>principle, which is in some ways more of a rhetorical ploy than a master
>theory. He is trying to get social analysts to look beyond persons as the
>focus and only meaningful or primary units, to get them to see that who we
>are and how we act depends as much on the artifacts around us as on the
>people around us or on anything internalized within us.
>
>Networks are not causal, though they are material ... although I would say
>that for Latour the distinction between material and semiotic is also
>"symmetrized". This is a different ONTOLOGY, not just a different
>epistemology. Networks are made up not just of material connections, but of
>practices of "translation" that link elements by way of meanings. More
>exactly, there are processes that take place, involving the actions of
>humans and nonhumans together, which transform relations and inscriptions
>(or meaningful traces) so that they can be embedded in further links and
>connections. Networks are made, they are dynamic. They do not persist on
>their own, independently of human agency (and nonhuman agency).
>
>So "mediation" is pervasive in ANT. But it's not just that artifacts (or
>"natural" elements, also symmetrized: natural-social nonhumans) mediate
>between humans, but humans also mediate between artifacts. A person or a
>human community is part of the way one tool or sign gets another one made
>... to paraphrase the infamous dictum about genes. WE are also mediational
>means in the network ... and why not?
>
>Latour is radically anti-Faustian ... and in his later work consequently
>very "environmentalist" ... the world is not a place where humans are all
>that matters and everything else is just an instrument for our purposes. We
>are also among nature's "tools", and we also function as "signs", as
>carriers of meaning (in our bodies and in our actions, including discourse).
>
>The argument about person-person being different from person-thing harks
>back for me to Martin Buber and the I-thou, I-it distinction. Buber was
>talking about dehumanization, about treating people like we treat things.
>Latour is headed toward saying that we ought to treat things like we wish
>we treated people ... he is trying to take the best of both paradigms, the
>humanization of mediated social relations (as emphasized say in Deborah
>Hicks' recent readings of Bakhtin) -- extended to the realm of the
>nonhuman, and the recognition in AT and situated cognition models that
>people are also shaped by our encounters with things.
>
>He would not agree that for nonhumans the networks are deterministic and
>causal ... they can't be, for many reasons. For one, meaning effects
>intervene all along the network of connections. For another, the networks
>consist of loops, and causality become distributed, or in effect becomes no
>longer deterministic, when it turns back on itself along multiple pathways.
>Latour is also not thinking of these networks as consisting of causal
>material interactions as such, but as made up of functional transformative
>actions or practices (or processes ..... he does not use these terms
>because some imply the agency of humans and other imply the agency of
>nonhumans and he wants to speak equally of both).
>
>I think that to really sort this out any further we would have to take a
>specific example and consider how ANT might deal with the effects of
>mediation and agency. ANT is a really strange worldview, but a very
>productive one that avoids a lot of the dichotomies that have hampered
>western thinking for a long time. It is a truly post-Cartesian worldview,
>and very much misunderstood -- and also very difficult to explain!
>
>I recommend Latour's books in English: _We Have Never Been Modern_ and
>_Pandora's Hope_. You can also find a lot of his work on the website that
>is maintained for him at:
>http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour
>
>JAY.
>
>
>At 01:38 AM 10/31/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >Jay,
> >
> >I think that "ANT, actant-network theory" looses the notion of "mediation"
> >which is central in CHAT. The actants cannot be symmetrical ( Latour makes
> >of this a "symmetry" between persons-as-actors and things-as-actors,
>calling
> >both actants-in-networks). A person-as-actant relates to a thing-as-actant
> >in a very different way than the "thing-as-actant" relates back to the
> >"person-as-actant". There is a shift in the "domain" or "level". And the
> >mutual relationship is mediated by, let's call it, a "mediator-as-actant".
>I
> >think that the accent on "symmetry in action" in ANT destroys both the
> >asymmetry and the mediational quality of the relationship between an actant
> >and an "actee". It is true that all is connected and that what an
> >individual-as-actant can do depends on what an object-as-actant can do, but
> >I think that just making them symmetrical misses the point because in a way
> >"what objects-as-actants can do" depends on the individuals in a different
> >sense than "what individuals-as-actants" can do. The sense is different
> >because for the individual this relationship is mediated on multiple
>social,
> >cultural, and historical levels, while for the object-as-actant the
> >relationship to the other parts of the network is deterministic, direct and
> >causal. It is not a fear of dehumanizing that makes me see the flaw in the
> >ANT, it is my understanding of the difference between causal relationships
> >in the material world and culturally, historically and semiotically
>mediated
> >relationships in the world of human individuals. A material object is going
> >to fall to the ground every time it looses a force that keeps it "off" the
> >ground regardless of the social or even material consequences, but a person
> >may opt to keep their hand on a hot pot, even to get burned, if the
> >consequences of removing their hand would destroy something in their social
> >relationships (let's say, they see that they might hurt someone if they
>drop
> >a pot of hot soup). This is a crude example. What I want to say is that
> >creating symmetrical relationships between all the actants in the activity
> >network destroys the concept of mediation. In addition it releases all the
> >energy that moves this dynamic process forward making the network rather
> >flat and empty.
> >Ana
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >----------------------------------------
> >Ana Marjanovic-Shane
> >home: 1-215 - 843 - 2909
> >mobile:+267 -334-2905
> >
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu]
> >Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 8:55 PM
> >To: XMCA LISTGROUP
> >Subject: dialogue and activity, Gordon's take
> >
> >
> >Having now had a chance to look more at Gordon's paper, as well as to
> >respond a bit off-list to Steve (whose constructive response to my
> >constructively intended comments is a great example of how positive
> >critical dialogue can be around here ...), I wanted to add a few more
> >thoughts on the basic issue that Gordon poses.
> >
> >He begins from the interesting perspective that subject-object relations in
> >dialogic activity are more akin to subject-subject relations, that is that
> >in sign-mediated processes, esp. face to face dialogue, we are acting on
> >one another (or with inner speech, say, on ourselves) as a special aspect
> >of the object-world. The discourse we produce then functions as a
> >mediational means for this effective (cf. perlocutionary) action.
> >
> >But matters are not so simple, as Gordon develops the analysis of his
> >episode-in-focus. Sometimes the discourse really is the object (too), eg
> >when we negotiate how best to say something, or how to write it out. And
> >the discourse has to be expanded semiotically beyond just the words to
> >include the gestures and the actions-with-artifacts. Now those artifacts
> >can be mediational means in action directed toward another subject, or they
> >can be primary objects of action, when we work to "improve" them.
> >
> >This suggests to me that, somewhat as Gordon proposes, both words and
> >things, both things-as-signs and things-as-material-interactants (cf.
> >actants), usefully bridge for us between a focus on (non-subject)-oriented
> >activity and subject-oriented activity. We can instrumentalize our dialogue
> >with others when we construe it as contributing to getting something done
> >on a non-subject object (making the land yacht go, the wheel turn). And we
> >can semioticize our action-on-an-object to turn it into a topic of talk, or
> >a part of "text" production (i.e. the things and actions as signs used
> >communicatively), to enact some agenda of building or maintaining an
> >interpersonal relationship, or communicating an idea.
> >
> >Putting both signs and tools inside the activity triangles of
> >subject-object-means shows us that no phenomenon is inherently either a
> >sign or a tool; it depends on how we are using it at the moment. Likewise
> >no actant is inherently a subject or an object; it depends on how it is
> >construed within the activity at some juncture. All these vertices of the
> >triangles are ROLES (in the formal sense, i.e. "arguments" of a system of
> >relations, which is what Arne I think was well aware of). Something
> >occupies that role because we put it there, not because its nature compels
> >it to be in one role or another.
> >
> >This perspective makes a good link to ANT, actant-network theory, an issue
> >we have often discussed here in the past. An actant is a participant in
> >discourse that functions semiotically (in Greimas' sense) because of its
> >role in some (for Greimas, narrated) activity. Roles can be filled by
> >persons, by things, by signs, by texts, by quoted speech, by reified
> >processes, etc. Latour makes of this a "symmetry" between persons-as-actors
> >and things-as-actors, calling both actants-in-networks. This causes a lot
> >of confusion if we insist on reading it within the traditional modernist
> >distinction between humanistic stances towards persons-as-subjects or
> >agents and the disparaged scientific stances towards persons as objects of
> >study. Some people recoil from equating people and other things because
> >they fear dehumanization, others because they can't take seriously the
> >apparent implication that things have human-like agency.
> >
> >But a sophisticated reading of ANT shows that what Latour is doing is
> >redefining the notion of agency, moving it away from the sovereign
> >individual-as-actor, and re-integrating it into a larger social-technical
> >network: what we can do is a function of what everything else around us is
> >doing and how we are connected to the rest. This is no different for
> >nonhuman actants. Once we insert everything into a network, once we shift
> >ontology so that we don't believe it makes sense to talk about either
> >people or things in isolation, not part of any network; once some part of a
> >network becomes out minimal unit of analysis ... then the symmetry of
> >subjects and objects does not seem so strange.
> >
> >I think this is exactly parallel to what Gordon, and Arne, are doing in
> >looking at how signs and tools, subjects and objects, are roles within
> >activity systems (call them activity networks ...) and the occupants of
> >these roles can shift role as activity unfolds. In fact, I think the most
> >interesting implication of Gordon's analysis is that activity-with-dialogue
> >unfolds precisely BECAUSE of such shifts. This in turns makes it credible
> >that we could classify the different ways in which dialogue can function as
> >activity and within activity by the configuration of roles and especially
> >by the sequence of transformation of roles. This gives us in fact a new
> >descriptive framework that is more dynamic than the static triangles of
> >yore.
> >
> >It's not quite phenomenologically dynamic. It's a sequence of snapshots and
> >a recipe of transformations of roles (a transition network model, states
> >and rules for going from state to state), but this is a rather common first
> >approximation to dynamical modelling in many fields. Keep your eye on the
> >land-yacht: now it's an improvable object, now its a symbolic token, now
> >it's a tool for transport, now it's the topic of a discourse, now it's a
> >gift, now it's a missile, now it's commodifiable property, now it's
> >evidence in an argument. Now it's an agent that makes us do something, now
> >its an agent that leads us to say something, now it's a model of something
> >else. The engine of dynamics is running here. Making the world now
> >enables/affords making the world a bit differently next. We can't ever
> >quite know in advance what we might decide to do once we see how our last
> >turn has turned out. It always means and does more than we intended in
> >doing it. To us as well as to others.
> >
> >I've ended here with a rather individualistic language to make the point.
> >It should be corrected back to the less familiar language of the network
> >.... interactions, events, role-shifts, world-effect happen in the
> >changing, dynamical network. We can take up a stance within the network,
> >and we can try to imagine a chunk of the network larger than ourselves
> >(though always needing some viewpoint from which to see).
> >
> >Suppose we now add one more feature: how it feels to participate in these
> >dynamic activity networks. We still don't have a handle on all the relevant
> >factors that co-determine (over- and under-determine) which transformations
> >of role happen at each stage. I don't believe there is any complete set of
> >determiners, from which all futures are predictable. But certainly we can
> >trace out the contributions of various co-determiners, and one of those has
> >got to be how we feel in some state of the network-now, and how we've been
> >feeling across some dynamics of the network recently (and longer term).
> >This affective aspect should also be symmetrizable within a network
> >ontology ... but that's a tall order.
> >
> >JAY.
> >
> >---------------------------
> >JAY L. LEMKE
> >Educational Studies
> >University of Michigan
> >610 East University
> >Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
> >http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
> >---------------------------
>
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE
>Educational Studies
>University of Michigan
>610 East University
>Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
>http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
>---------------------------
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------
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