[Xmca-l] Re: xmca new discussion started

[Alfredo Jornet Gil]

I am glad to see you find common ground, although I would say that Yasuko's article is very different: while Wylie's analysis seems to be concerned with a seeing of a landscape, and seems to operate from within that seeing or gaze, Yasuko's framework and analyses seem to promise something else: to talk about the possibility of that seeing in concrete terms. So I see Wylie's paper as addressing something like this: what is a possible seeing of this landscape from where I stand (e.g., as a reader of Derrida)? Whereas I hear Yasuko's article as being more about the historical and material premises that position Wylie as that particular looker who sees a landscape in that way, an account that then would have to include the reading and citing of Derrida not as something given or somehow 'natural', but as yet another aspect of a multitude of aspects forming the arrangement that supports that particular seeing. The two approaches seem very different to me, among other things, because the latter can explain the possibility of the former but not the other way around. Not that you cannot learn from both, of course, which you can! 

An aspect that is sharply distinctive in Y. Kawatoko's article, at least with regard to the one that Larry has shared, is a concern on *development*, on growth and change, rather than on self and experience. Kawatoko's article describes a trajectory involving an intertwining between enhanced awareness and re-configured contexts or 'arrangements'. In this regard, Kawatoko's article seems to be much closer to the CHAT tradition that characterises much of the MCA readership. 

In fact, Kawatoko's article, which analyses a history of weaving, also seems to describe a weaving within the weaving: the one that tangles together history and weaving hands. As socio-historical arrangements develop, so too develop the weaving skills, which is to the cloth what the gaze is to the landscape in Wylie's paper. In this regard, the paper seems to touch upon, though not thematise, the issue of emotions and affects and their development as part of social activities or practices. In CHAT circles, this issue is very much discussed and the Vygotskian legacy seems to offer possible venues for further inquiry. But I am curious about the possibilities that stem from ANT (or the version your article draws from). In which way does this framework help you characterise this affective dimension (Yasuko and anyone else), and how does it address the issue of growth, of development? 

Thanks for engagement,
Alfredo 



________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of 川床靖子 <kawatoko@r-aquaparks.com>
Sent: 28 May 2017 09:57
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: xmca new discussion started

Dear Larry Purss,

Thank you very much for John Wylie’s article, “Landscape, absence and the geographies of love.” It beautifully describes what we experience in our mind when we face and view (magnificent) landscape. I like the following phrase: Our “stories of life and love weave together landscape and memory.” In this sense, absence and presence are mutually constituted.


In the same way, past and present, participation and non-participation, culture and sub-culture, everything is mutually constituted in a series of context of interactions among human, non-human, and machinery, in other words, under the sociotechnical and historical arrangements.

I am for the author’s way of exploring things; that is, “bringing to light things previously hidden or lost, unearthing memory, making the invisible visible.” In my cases, “talking” is important to make invisible visible. Talking is part of practice. What and how individuals talk about artifacts they use, fellow members working together, personal and public stories regarding the place become important resources to make the invisible visible for the researcher, while simultaneously the individuals’ talks give the individuals opportunities to make their own practice visible and to constitute their own participation in the (work) place.


Larry, yes, I am applying this approach to the subject of the Yuzuru Party.



> 2017/05/28 午前0:22、Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> のメール：
>
> Yasuko,
> Thank you for your personal narrative,  introducing your ways of walking through *tactile* places.
>
> I will open my response through revivifying Ueno’s sense of spirit in our walking alongside Ueno and  listening:
>
>
> “Participation in a community is realized through the process of making the community *visible* to the participants.”
>
> Participants create *boundaries* between communities and make them *visible* each time they discuss codes or categories, and in doing so, they are able to constitute their own participation in the community.
>
> Yasuko, you are applying this approach (way of tactile walking) in your approach to the *subject of* (not object of)
> The Yuzuru Party. (distributing agency)
> Sent from Mail for Windows 10
>
> From: 川床靖子
> Sent: May 27, 2017 12:31 AM
> To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> Subject: [Xmca-l] xmca new discussion started
>
> Dear xmca members,
>
> Thank you very much for putting my article under discussion at xmca.
>
> Let me introduce my research career briefly.
>
> Until the 2000s, I had done some research in company’s workplaces or institutionalized systems where some “strategy” called by Michel de Certeau (1984) could work, and investigated the ways of relations among individuals, artifacts and machineries in those spaces: the practice of repair technicians in a copy machine company, the practice of operators under the introduction of new production system (Toyota Production System) in the US manufacturing company, and the technology of a care needs assessment under the nursing-care insurance system in Japan.
>
> After that, I have been interested in everyday practices by ordinary people, especially women and old people who live in farm villages or small towns in Japan. In everyday practices that are “tactical in character”, people “make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules”, referring to Michel de Certeau (1984). I have tried to explore, and described vividly ordinary people’s tactics, more specifically, the procedures, bases, effects, and possibilities of those collective activities. For example, the practice of old women who were engaged in a “happa (leaf) business” in a mountain village, and the practice of women weavers group with the objective of developing traditional hand-weaving skills and sharing Matsusaka cotton with the next generation (current issue).
>
> I think I am a type of researcher who takes pleasure in walking around here and there in search of interesting humans collective activities. The important thing for me is how vividly I can describe interactions among people, artifacts, and machinery that I find interesting in the places. For the sake of cultivating more fruitful viewpoints in the field, I might need some more theoretical bases that I lack unfortunately.
>
> I hope I have your many productive suggestions to our works.
>
> Yasuko Kawatoko
>
>
>