[Xmca-l] Units, utterances, elements and systems

[Andy Blunden]

Wow! Nothing like a few weeks off the keyboard to get some 
thinking time, eh Martin? You've created about a dozen 
threads here, so I'll help us manage that by renaming this 
thread, OK? :) I'll make my points in between your paragraphs.

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 15/04/2019 3:12 am, Martin Packer wrote:
> Hi Andy,
>
> I think I may have hijacked this thread; feel free to put 
> it back on its tracks.
>
> But I was responding to the proposal that "The minimal 
> holistic unit of conversation is the utterance. An 
> utterance, unlike a sentence, is complete in itself.” (It 
> was Arturo quoting Akhutina.) In terms of your terminology 
> of ‘unit’ and ‘system’ it seems to me contradictory: the 
> utterance is a unit, but an utterance is complete. If it’s 
> complete, that means it’s a ‘system,’ right? I was worried 
> by the suggestion that an utterance “*is complete in 
> itself*,” and that’s why I mentioned the assumption in 
> Conversation Analysis that the minimal unit is always a 
> *pair* of utterances (I may be putting the word ‘unit’ in 
> their mouths). And these pairs are linked one after 
> another, or embedded one within another, so that every 
> conversation has its own unity...
>
> And then a little later in the same quotation we find, 
> "Thus, the utterance and the *word, as a compressed 
> version of the utterance*, are the units of speech acts, 
> communication, and consciousness.”   And you, Andy, 
> proposed that word and utterance are micro and macro 
> units. Organelles within cells within organs within bodies 
> within ecosystems…?

    Yes. It is normal but not necessary for an analysis by
    units to have two units, like you say: cell and
    organism, organism and ecosystem, word-meaning and
    concept (LSV), artefact-mediated action and activity
    (ANL), commodity and capital (KM). And I see utterance
    as the unit of dialogue, demarcated by turn-taking, and
    as I read Bakhtin, this was his view.
    I don't know what the units /of/ an utterance would be,
    given that an utterance can be an entire novel or a
    single word. I would have to be more familiar with
    Bakhtin than I am.
    A turn in a conversation does not constitute a
    self-standing whole, but nor would two consecutive
    utterances; probably only a whole conversation of many
    utterances would. An utterance might be responding to
    the previous turn but one, after all. But as I
    understand this approach, you break the conversation
    down into utterances and then you figure out what 'move'
    was being made with each utterance. Utterances form a
    series that are taken as meaningful in relation to other
    utterances in the conversation. If you conceive of a
    conversation as a series of "moves" in that way, then
    obviously the utterance is the unit, the basic "move."
    That's why I see conversation analysis as suitable for
    tracking power relations, a collaborative search, etc.
    That is the point: the *unit is a concept of the whole*
    (a kind of language game, in this case perhaps).
    So a word could be an utterance (e.g. "No!"), but "word"
    is a different concept from "utterance." And "word" is a
    very problematic concept. "Word-meaning" on the other
    hand is not problematic, because in "word-meaning"
    "word" simply means the sound which is the tool for the
    act of meaning - it could be a phrase or a single word.
    Word-meaning or utterance, the difference is conceptual,
    not the number of sounds, etc.
    A commodity is not "complete in itself" either, you need
    the commodity for which it is exchanged. But you can
    understand "commodity" viscerally, without the concepts
    of money or capital. But not vice versa.
    System analysis is a fundamentally different approach
    from analysis by units. Engestrom's idea is an example
    of systems analysis. A system is made up of
    qualitatively different *elements*, whereas analysis by
    units considers a whole as made up of conceptually
    equivalent *units*. So (subject, object/outcome,
    instruments,  rules, community, division-of-labour)
    constitutes a system. Within well-defined the boundary
    conditions the system is analysed as a self-standing
    whole. If more or less the same entity is approached for
    analysis by units it is an activity - an aggregate of
    artefact-mediated actions. This is an essentially
    open-ended approach, because all these actions use
    cultural artefacts from the wider community and have
    objects which originate in the wider community as well.
    So the difference between 'system' and 'unit' is not
    whether something is "complete in itself," but the
    conceptual difference - taking it as made up of elements
    (H and O) or units (H2O). The contradiction can be
    resolved by saying that the unit itself is analysed as a
    system (e.g. a commodity is use-value and
    exchange-value, word-meaning is sound and meaning, and
    activity-system is that list of 6 elements); in that
    sense, the activity /system can be a unit/ of a larger
    process, such as a social formation.

>
> Anyhow, looking back over the thread, one persisting issue 
> seems to have been whether we can study language 
> objectively. And that is nested (it seems to me; or 
> perhaps it’s in tension with?) the issue of how best to 
> conceptualize language. As a system? As talk? As 
> conceptualization?  It’s intriguing that these issues 
> prove so hard to resolve. I confess that I incline towards 
> Haydi’s point that "Any word can be seen in its state of 
> liquidity and flexibility.” I see this ‘liquidity’ in the 
> changes in word meaning over time, in the ‘flow’ of sounds 
> and words within and among communities as they come in 
> contact, and in the ebb and flow of single conversations. 
> But this may simply be my personal taste.


    There is no doubt that there are many ways to
    conceptualise language-activity - many lenses each
    revealing different aspects of the whole. To my mind,
    the concept which get to the heart of what language is,
    is the relation between concepts and narratives. As I
    see it, concepts are meaningful only thanks to their
    place in a meaningful narrative, while narrative is
    (literally) inconceivable without concepts. Words of
    course are the tools and common substance which are used
    to realise both, and the analysis of words is a
    fascinating discipline in itself, but I do not believe
    that word-analysis is the best starting point for
    understanding language. It is just another lens, a
    side-view, so to speak. I believe that language
    pre-existed words, or at least, could have.

    BTW, when you talk of "changes in word meaning over
    time," you have in mind that meaning= what is in the
    relevant dictionary or look-up table. That is not how I
    see it. "Word-meaning" in my view is an
    artefact-mediated action. "Meaning" is an act, realised
    at a certain time and place in speech. The dictionary,
    if it is any good, is simply a history of word-meaning,
    not a look-up table consulted by the speaker and listener.

>
> I also find it helpful to try to step beyond 
> subjective/objective: Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas 
> were just two of the people who pointed out the need for a 
> third category: language is ‘intersubjective’; it is 
> (using Taylor’s phrase) "the common property” of a society 
> - even though that property is being continually 
> reproduced and transformed in and through people’s daily 
> talk.

    According to my reading, it was Karl Popper who invented
    the word "intersubjective" in the sense I think you are
    using it, but later it took on a new meaning, radically
    opposed to Popper's meaning, viz., the conception of
    social life in terms one-on-one unmediated interactions.
    In this latter case, culture (books, libraries, speech,
    machinery, etc.) is simply a /background/, whereas for
    CHAT, units of culture (i.e., artefacts) mediate units
    of action (behavioral deeds in which the aim differs
    from the goal). So, in my view, the earlier Popperian
    meaning of "intersubjectivity," which you ascribe to
    Taylor and Habermas, is more or less the same as
    "culture," (which I prefer) but it seems to me a little
    vague becauise "culture" in the special sense I use it
    /pre-exists/ the interaction in question, while the more
    contemporary meaning implicitly excluding the
    already-existing means as if every communication is an
    original /ab novo/ act of creation, is fundamentally
    incompatible with CHAT, and in fact, I believe, our
    chief protagonist.

    Andy

>
> Martin
>
>
>
>> On Mar 18, 2019, at 8:27 PM, Andy Blunden 
>> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, all true, Martin, but in my view in saying that *a 
>> word is a sign for a concept*, the real or imagined 
>> entity which is deemed to be a /instance/ of the concept 
>> is a *moment**of the concept*, as are the /practices/ 
>> whereby those instances are subsumed under the universal. 
>> I should have made that clear.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> Andy Blunden
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20190415/281ffa5a/attachment.html