Sometimes I would really like to be a mosquito in the room when Martin is giving his course on developmental psychology. But I would probably want to bite the student who asked if the replacement of social relations in language (e.g. discourse) by psychological ones (e.g. grammar) is a "fact" or just one of Martin's ideas; the question strikes me as rather more bumbling and humbling.
Fortunately, I have my own Thursday night session, which this semester is all about systemic functional linguistics and conversation analysis. Last night we were discussing the difference between them, and I pointed out that the systemic view is quite consistent with the idea of language as an artefact and the conversation analysis view is much less so.
Take, for example, the problem of repair. A teacher walks into a classroom.
T: Good morning, everybody.
Ss: Good morning, everybody!
T: !!!!
The conversation is broken. But in order to repair it, the teacher does not pull over and stop. The teacher has to keep going. The teacher has to find out what exactly the kids mean, if anything (are they simply repeating what they heard, as seems likely, or are they including their classmates in their reply to the teacher?)
This means that even quite simple conversations (the sort we have with third graders) are quite gnarly and knobbled; they have convolutions and introvolutions, knots and whorls and burls of negotiation.
Conversations exhibit very few of the genetic or structural of mechanical tools, and in fact only resemble "tools" only if we take a quite narrowly functionalist squint and presuppose a coinciding will that wields them. It even seems to me that they are misconstrued when we say that they are artefacts.
I think the Romantics, especially Herder, would agree with this view: I think they would have been rather horrified at Andy's idea that a body is an artefact in the same sense as a tool is an artefact.
They would point out that it is not genetically so; the body is a natural product and not man made. It is also not structurally so: unlike other artefacts, much of its structure reflects self-replication and not other-fabrication.
Of course, we may say that a body is FUNCTIONALLY like an artefact, because we use it as a tool in various ways. But if we privilege this particular interpretation of the body over the genetic, or the structural, account, it seems to me we get a pretty functionalist view of things. A body involved in a conversation is not an artefact; it's more like a work of art, and the gratuitous and organic complexity of conversation is an indelible sign of this.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Thu, 10/14/10, Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za> wrote:
From: Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Tom Toolery
To: ablunden@mira.net, "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, October 14, 2010, 5:40 AM
Hello Andy-of-the-5-o'clock-shadow
Yet it's a different kind of gnashing of teeth (and wailing and weeping)
when the baboons at Third Bridge get stuck into the tinned supplies...
Paula
_________________________________
Paula M Towsey
PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
Faculty of Social Sciences
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: 14 October 2010 13:19
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
My answer, Paula: yes.
My body, with its various parts, is an artefact; according to context,
symbol or tool.
My face and my 5 o'clock shadow is a symbol just as much as the shirt I
wear. My teeth a tool just as much as a can opener.
Andy
Paula M Towsey wrote:
For some inexplicable reason while watching Mike's blind man with a
stick video, I remembered smsing Carol with a quirky question: if a
researcher without a knife is trying to open an airline packet of
peanuts, and she resorts to using her teeth, what tool is she using?
Though, perhaps the better question would be - is she using a tool.?
_________________________________
Paula M Towsey
PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
Faculty of Social Sciences
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss
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