I've also been thinking about hammers lately as part of thinking about the
nature of tool-mediated activity, about the ways that hammers can become
other things (not only weapons, but also history museum displays or
post-modern works of art), and about how hammers are situated in histories
of technology. I wonder, for instance, if cultures that have relied on
adobe construction developed hammer-like implements. I've also wondered if
we lived in a world of harder surfaces if hammers would have developed as
collective tools, like battering rams and the two-person saw.
>Taking affordance as indeed relational, and so 'systemic' (I
>would say here 'emergent', i.e. a property at the level of the
>joint system, which is what I take MikeC to have meant), we have
>to allow for the reconformation of the potential dynamics of a
>whole system (e.g. organism-material artifact-surround) as an
>ecosocial microsystem (i.e. a system at once semiotically
>mediated and materially embodied). This is not just the typical
>'semiotic doubling' of the imagined or hypothetical overlaid on
>the perceptually construed, but something more interesting.
>
>The wood piece with the metal fitting _becomes_ emergently a
>'hammer' only in the act/process/practice of hammering (the
>Bogen-Heidegger example), and 'hammering' is a socially
>constructed activity, one that exists and has its dynamic
>potential (what can happen in it) by virtue of what it _means_ to
>people, as well as by virtue of what is materially possible
>in/through it. Not only can one not 'hammer-nails' without nails
>as well as hammer, but it might never occur to you, given the
>objects in themselves, to entrain them, and yourself, into the
>'hammering nails' practice we are used to. The hammer does not
>have the affordance of participating in 'hammering nails' outside
>of a whole eco-social-semiotic (i.e. cultural-material) system
>(both at the minimal-scale and community-scale levels) or dynamic
>practice, in which people use the hammer for this purpose (in a
>particular way that is, and counts as, 'hammering nails').
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign