synomorphic semi-determinism

From: Jay Lemke (jaylemke@umich.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 28 2003 - 09:25:17 PDT


Thanks for the help in identifying what's where and what it means in the
discourse around synomorphs and chronotopes.

The German website I found clearly was foregrounding the Wicker response to
Barker's view and raising questions about determinism. And setting all this
in the context of ecological psychology is very helpful, because it takes
us back to two key ideas that need to be central in thinking about a
chronotopic characterization of activity.

First, the observation that behaviors and settings do have a certain formal
"redundancy"; i.e. if you know one you have a better than even chance of
predicting the other (or at least features of the other). This principle I
think is very fundamental to the formal analysis of culture as systems of
situated activity (it's even in a draft paper I wrote in about 1977 about
"meta-redundancy" borrowing from Bateson and others and partly reproduced
in the Appendix to Textual Politics). The second is that HOW we match up
settings and activities depends on how our cultural frameworks (and
individual habitus) encourage us to interpret the setting (what is salient,
what it means, what it implies about expectations and affordances, etc.).
That is the "meta-" part in my own early version. Variations of this idea
are everywhere from von Uexkull to Kurt Levin to JJ Gibson to Bateson to
Barker and Wright and Wicker. Think for instance about the similarity to
the ideas of Umwelt and Wirkwelt.

So one key aspect is the "fit" or synomorphy between setting and activity.
Another is the mediation of setting by meaning, at the individual level and
the cultural level.
But now we want to know how all this happens ... how cultural expectations
and norms and the material affordances of settings are actually used by
agents to create trajectories of activity, across a range of placings and
pacings, that are in part culturally typical and in part uniquely emergent
(allowing for several intermediate levels of analysis: individual habitus
over time, subcultural and group norms, etc.).

An interesting version of this project was also sketched by Halliday with
respect to "register variation", which is essentially the synomorphy or fit
between the ways we use language and the settings in which we do so
(including our purposes, activity, interlocutors, etc.). It required a
taxonomy of settings (described in terms of fields of activity, tenors of
relationships, and modes of communication) initially suggested by efforts
to organize a functional-pragmatic approach to language teaching, and led
to Halliday's grand hypothesis (which seems to be correct, at least up to a
point) of synomorphy: that particular grammatical resources in our use of
language are relatively more sensitive to differences in field, or tenor,
or mode ... which leads to a function-based way of organizing a description
of the grammar of a language.

In all these models the issue of determinism comes up. Settings appear to
determine or control behaviors. But part of behavior is meaning-making, and
as we construe the nature of the setting differently, we behave differently
in it. Some such differences are systematically characteristic of
differences of culture, social class, habitus, etc. Others are emergent in
the moment. The notion of "redundancy" is a purely formal-descriptive way
to avoid causal-deterministic fallacies in cases where meaning and
interpretation mediate the activity-setting relationship. Likewise
"meta-redundancy" does the same thing for the culture-class- etc.
co-variation. But these are not explanatory models. They don't get down to
the level of how it all actually happens. They don't allow us to map
trajectories or traversals across activities and settings in relation to
the kinds of meanings being made.

But the chronotope approach does suggest ways of doing so, and because of
its origins in "genre" theory, it defines units of analysis (traversals as
instances of chronotopes-as-types) that are janus-faced: linking to
instances of behavior on one side, and to culturally typical modes of
action on the other. This is of course exactly what CHAT also aims to do.
Both consider subjects-in-activity and sociocultural and group norms. What
the "settings" emphasis adds is more consideration of the role of the
material and semiotic affordances of differentiated spaces and places
("ecological"). What chronotopic analysis adds is more integration of
activity-in-setting with cross-setting traversals and the range of
timescales of trajectories, activities, projects,
identity-development/habitus, and group and social-cultural (historical)
change. Which converges again with the aims of CHAT, particularly in trying
to link timescales of activity, biography, and history.

I wonder if people can suggest particular case-study analyses that are
especially successful in tracing the meaning-mediated role of features of
place in the course of extended activity or interlinked activities? Or
studies which trace the temporal rhythms of extended activity, etc. ?

JAY.

Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke



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