I--Thou--It: An actant (It) is experienced/construed as object-
like only by virtue of both its objectification by an Other
(Thou) and the subjectification of that Other by another Subject
(I). This might correspond to the way in which an author or
ethnographer makes his informants into Its for me only insofar as
I take him/her to be a Thou, and s/he objectifies them. An
interesting comparison, for the symmetry thesis, would be taking
the It to be an electron, and asking whether I do not need to
take the physicist to be a Thou in just the same way in this
case.
I--It--It: This is the classic case of tool-mediation of
interaction with the objectified environment. A nail (It-2) is
objectified for me in the act of hitting it with a hammer (It-1)
through the It-It relation of nail and hammer and the I-it
relation of me and hammer-as-tool.
I--It--Thou: Of course tools/symbols can mediate our
subjectification of an Other as well: their words, their
photograph, their hammer. They should also be able to mediate the
subjectification of a tree, a rock, or a hammer as a Thou, as
some cultures do but my dominant one doesn't. An interesting
question is whether the mediating actants must really be taken as
Its, as object-ified; I wonder if in the cultures where
inanimates are Thou's, the mediators aren't Thou's as well.
Still, in principle this case should be possible.
I--Thou--Thou: This is the case of pure sociality (assuming say
human persons for all actants), but gets interesting when either
Thou is an inanimate (or when both are). Consider for example
that someone may be unable to construct an inanimate as a subject
because they are not constructing the Other (e.g. member of
another culture) who constructs it as a subject, as him/herself a
subject. If the Other is just a 'primitive' (i.e. an object) for
us, we do not _feel_ the subjectness of say a landscape, or a
sword, or a cowrie necklace.
I think it's clear there are many interesting cases to be
considered, and that it would be interesting to take various
combinations of animates and inanimates (and abstracts or
symbols) in various mediating activities and try to construe each
one according to _all_ these paradigms.
We might consider some of the notorious deviations from our
dominant cultural norms in these terms, e.g. the ethnographer who
'goes native', the geneticist who develops a 'feel for the
organism', the poet or artist for whom a word or a color has an
identity and persona-hood that matters for its role as mediator,
etc. We could certainly reconsider childhood animism and the
question of word-magic (in the strong sense that particular words
have to be respected as Subjects, as words, rather than as we
assume through some confusion of name and thing).
I think that in all this we might find available ways into the
subjectification of semantic categories that are not normally
subjects for us, and new understandings of how subject- and
object- status play a role in the possibilities of mediation in
activity.
JAY.
---------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU