Ana and Borges, of course, broaden the focus still further to the problem
that seems to me central in Mike Cole's _Cultural Psychology_: how we are
to integrate analyses at the microgenetic, developmental-biographical, and
historical time scales. This is an issue that has been occupying me a lot
in the last year. I am just now revising for publication a chapter
contributed to a conference in Denmark on complex systems theory and
emergent phenomena. The core of my chapter is an attempt to integrate more
recent versions of Latour's actor-network theory with mainstream systems
theory. The principal issue there is how artifacts (and bodies, and other
stuff), by participating in both cultural-historical meaning relations and
in ecological-material physical interactions, break across our neat
divisions of temporal and spatial scales, or system levels.
The same act, the same text, the same event is NOT the same when it
functions in a different activity, a different historical context, as part
of processes on different time-scales, etc. That much is by now pretty
obvious from relational models of semiotics, context, etc. But an act which
participates in more than one scale of processes or in multiple contexts is
also a LINK between them. I don't have the time right now to develop this
thread more fully for the case of imitative/emulative learning, but I think
that it offers a way into to understanding how history is also the mother
of learning.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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