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Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery



I'm not sure what the objection to the body being an artefact is, except that people generally mean by "artefact" something other than the human body. If you define "artefact" in any way without the qualification "except the human body," then the body will fit the definition. People don't generally mean spoken words when they say "artefact" either, but on this list we include spoken words because otherwise the concept of artefact loses its usefulness for us, with the introduction of arbitrary and unclear distinctions.

At the moment people in my country are mostly obese. This is not nature; it is a part of our supermarket culture. Many Aboriginal people here are blind. The causes of this blindness are natural - disease - but everyone understands that it is a /social /phenomenon, not a natural phenomenon. People in parts of Soctland are still to this day of very short stature. Not because their families come from Central Africa of the Himalayas, but because their forebears were employes in the mills of industrial Britain, resulting in such a stunting of growth, that it continued for many generations afterwards. Artefact, yes? It would be hard to pin-point a difference in the genetic make-up of an Ozzie and a Yank, but I tell you, the national difference is usually immediately apparent, because the whole body is shaped by food, living and working conditions and cultural expectations in relation to smiling, eye-balling, shouting, exercise, exposure to the sun, etc., etc. National characteristics, in my experience, are rooted mainly in lifestyle not genes. People not only speak like their fellows, but look like them and share their health problems, too.

Of course, Carol, all artefacts are material things, part of nature. What else could they be? Artefacts are natural things that have been shaped (or simply point to) by human beings as part of their social life. What it is that makes them artefacts is their place within systems of social life. It doesn't matter whether these ideal properties are entirely symbolic (e.g. lettering) or physical properties (e.g. shape, size, weight). Hay fever doubtless has a natural substratum, and I guess wild animals are subject to hay fever too. It may be part of the while "cycle of nature," I don't know. But if, like a lot of the health problems that we white Australians suffer from, it originates from the migration of people from a cool northern climate where their genome developed, to a hot dry climate, then I suspect the origin of hay fever is cultural-historical not natural. If having hay fever makes you sick, but doesn't interfere with your employment or marriage prospects, or get you involved in taking powerful steroidal medicines, then maybe there is no social significance to it either. But somehow I doubt it. "Artificial" and "natural" are opposites, but artefacts are always also natural objects.

And of course, the blind person's stick is an artefact, and the reason we find the blind person's stick so interesting is that it seems to be just like a part of the person's body until something goes wrong. From the point of view of /psychology/ rather than medicine, drawing a line between your hand and a prosthetic, is rather arbitrary.

Andy

Carol Macdonald wrote:
Carol says to Andy,
This bothers me a little, not because of mediation, which is acquired, but
what about natural body functions, such as bowel evacuation, and hay fever
(says she more politely). Andy, surely these are not artefacts? (I only
stuck in hay fever to be more polite, because you can tell me that hay fever
is acquired, but it's through autoimmune functions.)
Carol

On 15 October 2010 07:01, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

My claim is, David, not just that (for example) my fingers are functionally
artefacts because I use them to play the piano, but also they are
genetically artefacts because they are the products of art. "Labour created
man himself" as old Fred said. If we are going to claim that thinking is
artefact-mediated activity, then we must accept our bodies as artefacts, or
abandon other important definitions of artefact, as mediator of activity,
material product of human labour and the substance of culture. We fashion
our bodies for the purpose of constructing a culture just as surely as we
fashion our buildings, our domestic animals, our food and clothing and
everything else.

You can define a word how you like, but the importance of realising that
our bodies are products of human labour which we use as both instruments and
symbols, just like our white canes and spectacles,  is demonstrated by
intersubjectivists who simply overlook the role of artefacts as mediators
altogether. In part this is possible because they subsume the human body
into the notion of 'subject', something which also allows them to scoot over
all sorts of tricky philosophical problems entailed in recognizing the
active participation of subjectivity in what would otherwise be simply a
complex series of material interactions. The result, contradictorily is a
far worse Cartesian dualism than the one they tried to avoid.

No, I thought long and hard about this, and the conclusion is inescapable:
the human body is an artefact.

Andy
/ //// /


David Kellogg wrote:

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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--
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*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss


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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss


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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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