Since CHAT is an open house, I'm going to offer an extended
cautionary
tale for discursive psychology from my own bailliwick, applied
linguistics.
H.G. Widdowson, who practically founded our field, pointed out
that there is
a basic contradiction in the claim that applied linguistics (or
cognitive
science or chat) is "interdisciplinary".
The contradiction is this: on the one hand, we claim to be a
discipilne in
our own right, with our own mediating relations between theory on
the one
hand and praxis on the other. On the other hand, we claim to exist
"interdisciplinarily", in the interstices between disciplines, by
virtue of
THEIR mediating relations between theory on the one hand and a
praxis which
is actually alien to our own.
I think matters are not helped when we replace the word
"interdisciplinary"
with "transdisciplinary". That involves a claim to some kind of
metadiscipline; terribly good for our sense of self-importance, but
disastrous for our relationship with our own praxis. In applied
linguistics,
this inflation of the discipline from a technological bull frog to
an
interdisciplinary ox meant that we ended up replacing applied
linguistics
(that is, the solution of real problems in the real world where
language, if
not linguistics, is a real and central concern) with something
that looked a
little more like linguistics applied (that is, now that we've got
this keen
body of theory let's figure out what it's good for).
At conferences it became very easy to tell the dwindling groups
bullfrogs
from the exploding groups of oxen. Bullfrogs were always reading,
and oxen
were always writing. Bullfrogs tended to hang out with teachers
and even
students, while oxen travelled in herds, mooing to each other in
various
incomprehensible postmodern dialects.
Concretely, it was even easier. The bullfrogs were STILL
interested in
language teaching, even though a lot of our student base was taken
over by
something called TESOL and enrollments were plunging. The oxen
became
interested in a kind of literary critical discourse applied to the
ordinary
language of (notably prestigious) fields like medicine and law and
advertising. After all, if texts are texts and discourses are
discourses
(and maybe texts are discourses too) then there is no reason we
can't apply
the lit crit techniques of Kristeva and Barthes and why not
Bakhtin to the
discourses overheard in surgeries, courtrooms, and the texts in
glossy
magazines.
It was sexy, but ultimately sterile as far as practical
discoveries of new
modes of problem solving went; a lot of the systemic functional
analyses
(and also the discursive psychological analyses) pretty much
discovered what
we already knew was there (e.g. that South African newspapers under
apartheid tended to cover events in the townships from the white
point of
view rather than the black one) and it even ignored stuff that we
didn't
know was there (e.g. that the same newspapers had some clear
indications
that white jounalists were getting fed up with the crap they were
writing).
There were also groups of oxen which went into computers and corpus
linguistics. But here the "linguistics applied" problem was even
worse,
because computer corpora were full of native speakers and finished
linguistic products, and this tended to neglect exactly the kinds of
problems we should have been attending (the kinds of problems that
Alex
Kozulin's article in the latest MCA tackles). Having cut their
ties with
praxis by becoming "interdisciplinary" the oxen invariably tended
towards
what was easy to study, uninteresting, and irrelevant.
That's why I worry a little about little words like "resource" as
opposed
to "tool". I know that "tool" has a distinctly early twentieth
century
sound; it belongs to a better time, when the future seemed somehow
malleable, if only we had the right implements. I know that
"resource"
sounds a lot more twenty-first century; it sounds more suited to a
time when
things are scarce and precious and need to be valued without being
used, and
it seems more important to remind ourselves of the "embodiment" of
communication than its instrumentality, its sign and tool using
quality.
These are evil times, and it is hard to trust in the artifacts of
sociocultural progress; at times like these, as Volosinov says,
academics
shake their heads and repeat that man is only an animal.
But the students I will teach in about half an hour will graduate
next
year, and then they will teach eight and nine year old children.
Some of
them, perhaps most of them, will live to see the twenty-second
century. So I
still think, rather stubbornly and sometimes even stupidly, that
we had it
right the first time; in the long run, the future must be
malleable if only
we have the right tools and if only we stick to the right
problems! After
all, that's how we got this far.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On *Sun, 5/10/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Friesen Article
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Cc: "David Middleton" <D.J.Middleton@lboro.ac.uk>
Date: Sunday, May 10, 2009, 6:27 PM
David--
Thanks for getting us directly connected with this article.
I have a question, the answer to which is presupposed in your term,
technology. One of the aspects of the study of communication as I
experience
from a department so named is that technology is a term that
applies almost
exclusively to electronically powered digital devices.... by my
*colleagues*,
who also treat "media" as a singular noun and a "cause" in the
positive
sense of "the media are responsible for the degeneration of our
moral
order."
Put aside my parochial question about media and focus on
technology. What
is
a technology? I trace my own, vague understandings to the idea
of technea in ancient Greece where teoria referred to the audience
at a
dramatic performance. I am guessing you have thought about this a
lot.
Can you help me out here? I think it is relevant to the article
because of
the everyday interpretation of "educational technology" .
I hope that someone knows how to reach Norm Friesen so that he can
join the
discussion. I think that discursive psychology is an important
intellectual
enterprise and would like to understand its relationship to the
issues we
are used to discussing.
mike
On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 4:37 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
<http://us.mc01g.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>
wrote:
Yes, xmca is a bit of a three ring circus: when there isn't a
tiger loose
on the other thread, then he's either backstage--or prowling the
audience.
I've got some non-rhetorical and non-display questions about the
Friesen
article:
a) My first question has to do with "interdisciplinarity", a recent
thread
that snapped befoer it could get as far as "Discursive Psychology
and
Educational Technology". In applied linguistics we used to think
we were
inter-trans-disciplinary: we thought we were language teaching
plus any
discipline you need to make language teaching more fun, effective,
affordable, useful. Then we discovered that we were really just a
TECHNOLOGY. It's not the same thing. For one thing, being a
technology is
more fun, effective, affordable, and useful. For another, it's
not nearly
as
prestigious, which means good riddance to an enormous amount of
careerist
baggage. Isn't "cognitive science" (and even CHAT) just in the
process of
discovering the same thing?
b) My second question concerns p. 133, where Friesen has this to
say:
"Discursive psychology does not understand (?) discourse or
conversation
in
terms of communication in its conventional technologized (??)
meaning as
the
transmission of information; instead, it understands discourse
above all
(as?) a kind of activity--a type of action or work through which
the
social
field of interaction itself is constituted". I can think of a lot
of ways
in
which you could transmit information without "action" or "work"
or even a
social field of interaction (involuntary signals). I can't think
of a
single
way in which you could constitute a social field of interaction
without
transmitting information. So am I to conclude that discursive
psychology
is
a narrower notion than the convental technologized one?
c) My third question has to do with a sentence later in teh same
paragraph
that goes like this: (...Mind, computer, and other terms and
categories
woudl emerge from this type of analysis not so much as causes or
tools to
produce certain results but as rhetorical and interactional
resources
for discursive, social action." To me this suggests that they are
not
tools
but only potential tools. Given that I am a proud technologist
with no
pretensions to interdisciplinarity, why is that a step forward?
It looks
like a giant leap backwards from where I am standing.
d) Finally, I wonder about the whole exercise of analyzing a
tidbit of
interaction between a human and a chatbot for evidence that the
human is
responding to the chatbot as we humans are supposed to, that is,
as a
more
or less successful performance of a perverse kind of role play. The
particular role play that chatbots are supposed to enact is NOT,
however,
a machine pretending to be human, but rather a human pretending
to treat
a
machine as a human. Isn't the missing precondition for real (as
opposed
to
potential) social action the ASSUMPTION that the other person has a
genuine
intention to interact?
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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