[Xmca-l] Re: Reflective Discourse on XMCA

[HENRY SHONERD]

Mike,
In your original post on Oct 10, you  suggested that we might “…come up with a deeper understanding of the interlocking issues involved”. As you say, each chatter will have their own response to that. Mine is that I can relate the three issues to displacement, which is arguably the most important property of language as a semiotic system. It is the ability of with language to refer to and construe aspects of the world removed in time and place (from the here and now) and to the “make believe” (“irrealis”).  I was reminded of this on re-reading an article by Bruno Latour on Interobjectivity that Greg Thompson posted back on Aug 18. Most people, if asked, think of language primarily as something for communication. Animals communicate, but, as far as we know, do not displace. (Though It might be argued that animals do a better job of communicating than people.!) I would like to emphasize the importance of the temporal domain, as well as the spatial, with displacement. 

Henry





> On Oct 13, 2015, at 10:50 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> Yes, Alfredo, I have had the same thought. Since each of us "moves on"
> constantly, it can be difficult to "stop and reflect" because it means (in
> this case) taking the time to re-read the collected parts of the discussion
> and then to be able (possibly) to be able to abstract new insights from it.
> Our academic lives, especially in the current circumstances (which can only
> expect to get worse in this regard) are nano-managed and evaluated on an
> externally imposed time scale.
> 
> PS--
> And then, of course, there is the question of personal relevance. I am
> particularly interest at the moment in the issue of imagination, others
> will have other priorities.
> Experiments of this sort can be instructive, regardless of outcome.
> 
> Time will tell!
> mike
> 
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 8:58 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> 
>> thanks a lot for putting this together. I sometimes struggle searching in
>> the e-mail threads to recover some discussions, and I've been copying and
>> pasting into word documents to keep track of
>> ideas. This practice has proven useful to me, the thread that you and Katie
>> have made now available for example having been a source of ideas for some
>> of the things that I am working on now. So I find this initiative very
>> compelling. But I also anticipate that it takes time to go through the
>> thread. I guess we should expect different dynamics to emerge when someone
>> posts an e-mail with some points and then others respond, as compared
>> to when the e-mail is a larger thread of ideas having emerged during a long
>> discussion. So, perhaps we do not yet know what reflection of the kind you
>> are making possible looks like. I'll surely need some time to go through
>> the thread and further contribute to the interesting topics. But I am in
>> for it.
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Alfredo
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* lchcmike@gmail.com <lchcmike@gmail.com> on behalf of mike cole <
>> mcole@ucsd.edu>
>> *Sent:* 13 October 2015 17:43
>> *To:* Rolf Steier
>> *Cc:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity; Alfredo Jornet Gil; Geoffrey C.
>> Bowker
>> *Subject:* Re: Reflective Discourse on XMCA
>> 
>> Hi Rolf--
>> 
>> From the evidence so far, reflection in the form we have piloted has not
>> proven a compelling activity for mca-o-phytes. I will post the remaining
>> two topics and lets see if any public discussion follows.  Perhaps the lack
>> of collective reflection has deeper roots than the difficulty of pulling
>> together the relevant pieces in a single, quasi-organized file.
>> 
>> mike
>> 
>> On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 5:00 AM, Rolf Steier <rolfsteier@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Thank you for putting this together! I think this will be a great
>>> resource, and I'm particularly interested in looking back at the "space/
>>> place" and "imagination" threads.
>>> rolf
>>> 
>>> On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 2:08 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Dear Colleagues -- From its inception, one significant feature of
>>>> xlchc/xmca was that conversations seems to go on for a while and kind of
>>>> peter out (if they started at all) and it was rare for participants to
>>>> return to consider what they had written before and what, perhaps,
>>>> collectively, might be learned from the chatting. I liken the process to
>>>> Vygotskian chaining. Interesting. Individuals display what they have taken
>>>> away when they write later on, I often
>>>> feel like a have learned a lot.
>>>> 
>>>> But still, we seem to have no way to turn around to examine the results
>>>> of a given conversation, no matter how exciting it seemed at the time.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks to Katie Simpson, the Comm Dept/LCHC grad student who assists in
>>>> production of MCA, and thanks to the discussion that Rolf and Alfredo
>>>> provided us in their discussion of the ideas of Leigh Star, maybe we have
>>>> the beginnings of a socio-technical solution to what for me, at least, is a
>>>> problem.
>>>> 
>>>> What Katie has done is to peel away all the headers and present quoted
>>>> messages in different threads that
>>>> emerged during the discussion. Then she categorized these into
>>>> Introduction & Conclusion
>>>> Boundary Objects
>>>> Space and Place
>>>> Imagination
>>>> 
>>>> I have no idea if anyone is interested in using these materials to
>>>> revisit what we discussed earlier and perhaps to
>>>> come up with a deeper understanding of the interlocking issues involved.
>>>> Do the three threads, now with the
>>>> noisy pixels dissolved away, form any more general pattern? For me, for
>>>> example, the role of imagination in relation to boundary objects has been
>>>> very helpful. And others?
>>>> 
>>>> I attach for now only the introduction. I am not sure which if any of
>>>> the three sub-topics people might like to discuss or in what order.
>>>> 
>>>> We have a while before the new and ever exciting issue of MCA comes out,
>>>> so perhaps a time to pause, and reflect?
>>>> 
>>>> mike
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> 
>>>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
>>>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch