Re: [xmca] Leontiev and Sign (Silverstein and complexes)

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Perfect timing, Gregory. This morning my senior seminarian will be
discussing Peter et al's paper on academic bullshit......

(just chaining)
mike

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 10:51 PM, Gregory Allan Thompson <
gathomps@uchicago.edu> wrote:

> Interesting to hear about other's connecections with
> Silverstein.  I'm in the Department of Comparative Human
> Development (CHD) here at the U of C and spend some of my time
> running with the Silverstein circles (I have also taken some
> classes from him). RE: Silverstein's work, I agree
> wholeheartedly with Jay's characterization of his work as
> "difficult to summarize", so I won't try (but if anyone has a
> particularly pointed question, I'd be happy to give it a go).
> With regard to semiotic mediation, I think that Silverstein's
> work is probably too significant of an investment for most
> (although it pays substantial "dividends" over the long haul).
> A better alternative (and I've mentioned this before in posts
> on XMCA) is the work of Silverstein's student, John Lucy (here
> in CHD). I think that his work is easier to get into than
> Silverstein's and is more directly relevant to the broad issue
> of "semiotic mediation" and the perspective of linguistic
> relativity. Additionally, his more recent papers have been
> looking at issues of development (many articles are available
> at his website:
> http://home.uchicago.edu/~johnlucy/<http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Ejohnlucy/>
> )
>
> Instead, I'll offer a brief description of the one text of his
> (that I am aware of) where he makes reference to Vygotsky
> ("Vygotskij" is his preferred spelling). His is an interesting
> way to put Vygtosky's notion of "complex" to work and speaks
> to Mike's suggestion in a previous post that we spend much of
> our time thinking in complexes.
>
> It comes in a short monograph: "Talking Politics: The
> Substance of Style from Abe to 'W'". The topic is political
> talk and is probably one of the most playful and least
> theory-ish essays of his. It appears to have been motivated by
> the misfortunate language usagings of our most recent two term
> president (but note: it isn't (solely) about Bush-bashing, he
> is raising a more fundamental question about American politics
> as well as the tastes of the electorate).
>
> Silverstein invokes Vygotsky's notion of "complexes" to answer
> the following set of questions:
> "How does what impresses us as the very height of *illogic*
> have a processual 'logic' of its own, such that successful
> politicians' discourse respects this logic? And where can we
> see these processes at work, where 'issues' get lumped and
> turned into 'message'-operators available for stylistic
> fashioning of image? How does a politician fashion 'message'
> as a kind of magnet for sometimes randomly assembled 'issues,'
> that clump to it like iron filings arrayed in its magnetic
> field?"
>
> Silverstein says that the notion of "complexes" give us an
> answer to this. It is a local similarity of one "message" to
> the next that gives the impression of coherence. Any two
> "messages" taken in sequence will show a family resemblance
> even when the whole lot is very diverse overall. Silverstein
> notes that complexive thinking is what characterizes things as
> varied as: thinking out loud, casual conversation, and
> Anglo-American case law.
>
> So then, it is these "chain complexes" of "issues" that are
> "the raw semiotic materials" that are then brought together to
> make the image.
>
> Whereas in this essay Silverstein is primarily interested in
> the reception-side of things, we might also extend this to the
> production side of language by considering some more recent
> instances of political talk by the supposed (by some)
> successor of the Bush legacy, Sarah Palin. One might be able
> to make some sense of her discourse if we take her talk
> concept by concept and look at how she puts together a string
> of discourse that has "coherence" from one second to the next,
> but is utterly incoherent if you look across more than two
> seconds of talk (and this reminds me of the Saturday Night
> Live episode in which Tina Fey got huge laughs with her Sarah
> Palin imitation, lampooning all the incoherences - or so the
> audience thought. As it turned out, Fey wasn't lampooning at
> all, rather she was simply reproducing Palin's words, word for
> word. Big laughs.). But maybe my colleague who works on
> schizophrenic language might be able to better speak to the
> structure Palin's language.
>
> Hope that was of some interest - at least complexively if not
> conceptually.
>
> -greg
>
>
>
> Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 00:15:36 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Tony Whitson <twhitson@UDel.Edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Leontiev and Sign
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.60L.0910062359200.24436@copland.udel.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> first, about Stanton Wortham:
>
> He is second author, with one of his students, of an awesome
> new book
> which I think is titled "Bullish on Uncertainty." I have some
> basic
> disagreements (I think) with some of the formulations; but I
> think this is
> a book that everybody interested in CHAT would find worth
> reading. (It
> won't be reviewed in MCA because Wortham is the MCA book
> review editor.)
>
> On Silverstein, just to mention my own contact: Jay and I were
> both at the
> 1985 International Semiotics & structual studies institute
> (probably
> garbeled that name) in Bloomington in 1985. I went again in
> 1986 at
> Northwestern (Evanston, IL; north suburb of Chicago) where one
> of the
> seminars I participated in was Silverstein's (he was U.
> Chicago). Rick
> Parmentier was also in that seminar (he had already been a
> major influence
> on my understanding of Peircean semiotics). I had read some
> Silverstein
> before I went there (one of his students was an Asst. Prof. in
> anthro at
> Rochester, where I was a Ph.D. student), so I might have been more
> prepared, but I found his seminar to be intensely helpful and also
> quite accessible.
>
> On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Jay Lemke wrote:
>
> > I've had a long familiarity with Silverstein's work. Two of
> my best friends
> > were his doctoral students many years ago, and his work has
> interesting
> > parallels to my own, though we've never really had a
> personal dialogue.
> >
> > Silverstein was a pioneer in bringing linguistics and
> anthropology together,
> > sort of the next generation after Dell Hymes. But he was not so
> > ethnographically oriented (as Dell's own students were, e.g.
> Michelle Fine,
> > Judith Irvine, Elinor Ochs et al.), and was more of a
> theoretician, trying to
> > compete with the Chomskyans, setting a functionalist
> paradigm against the
> > formalism dominant in linguistics. He was a student of Roman
> Jakobson at
> > Harvard, and he must have encountered Voloshinov and
> probably Vygotsky, if
> > not then, later.
> >
> > What he has mainly tried to do is to show how the reflexive
> capacities of
> > language for talking about talk, and for talk as a form as
> action (cf.
> > Austin), help us understand how it becomes a powerful tool
> for social action
> > and a bridge between culture in the macro-social sense and
> semiotic action in
> > the micro-social sense. From Jakobson he took the key
> linguistic idea of
> > "shifters", more formally called indexicals, and broadened
> its application to
> > understand how what we say always both says something about
> us and at the
> > same time helps remake ourselves and the situation we are
> talking about into
> > what it then is (or is for us).
> >
> > Silverstein is not easy to summarize, and he is even harder
> to read, and
> > hardest of all to understand when he presents orally
> (hyperfluent).
> > Unfortunately for some reason he never wrote a magnum opus
> (or hasn't yet),
> > so his ideas are scattered among many papers, each one quite
> brilliant in
> > itself.
> >
> > I think Stanton Wortham, one of his former students, reads
> xmca and might
> > give a better overview.
> >
> > JAY.
> >
> > Jay Lemke
> > Professor (Adjunct)
> > Educational Studies
> > University of Michigan
> > Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> > www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Oct 5, 2009, at 3:32 PM, Tony Whitson wrote:
> >
> >> The questions L is asking make me think of the linguistic
> anthropologist
> >> Michael Silverstein. (Anybody here have views of his work?)
> A relevant
> >> collection, including some Silverstein, but also Wertsch,
> Holzman, and
> >> others is SOCIAL AND FUNCTIONAL APROACHES TO LANGUAGE AND
> THOUGHT, edited
> >> by Maya Hickmann, Academic Press 1987. There's only one
> Leontyev ref in
> >> the index, which is in a string of citations incl.
> Vygotsky, Luria,
> >> Leontyev, Scribner & Cole, LCHC 1981, and Wertsch. That
> appears in a
> >> chapter by Elinor Ochs, with whom, if I'm not mistaken,
> David Kirshner has
> >> had some acquaintance.
> >>
> >> L's conjecture (below) seems harmonious with Peirce, it
> seems to me,
> >> except that Peirce would start not with perception, but
> with "feeling,"
> >> which we can't really know directly because it is eclipsed
> by any thinking
> >> about it. But Peirce was very much concerned with how more
> advanced signs
> >> spring from and depend on such things as feeling and
> perception. Again,
> >> though, the caution that he wrote as a logician, not as a
> psychologist or
> >> linguist.
> >>
> >> On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, Achilles Delari Junior wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Hi, XMCA.
> >>>
> >>> In his letter to Vigotski, A. N. Leontiev wrote about a
> number of
> >>> theoretical
> >>> that he understood "fundamental". The fifth one touch the
> problem of
> >>> "sign".
> >>> He said, for instance that "my intuition here is that the
> sign is the
> >>> key!"
> >>> I think that is very important to recognize that
> Vygotsky's theory is
> >>> also
> >>> an activity theory, but is there some study that searchs
> Leontiev's
> >>> contributions
> >>> to "semiotic mediation" theory?
> >>>
> >>> "5. In addition to these it is essential to work out
> theoretical
> >>> questions,
> >>> directly guiding specific research.
> >>> It seems to me that among them belong: (a) The problem of
> F[unctional]
> >>> S[ystems]: �possible� (i.e., something like quantum)
> I[nter]f[unctional]
> >>> relations and �possible� functions of functions (after all
> a system is
> >>> not a
> >>> spring salad, but something presupposing only the
> possible, i.e.,
> >>> certain
> >>> combinations); (b) Determination of i[nter]f[unctional]
> relations (the
> >>> conditions
> >>> under which they arise, the process of their birth, factors (=
> >>> determinants);
> >>> here an experiment in their artificial formation is necessary,
> >>> that is, a �dynamic argument� is needed, an experiment
> along the lines
> >>> of
> >>> �ingrowth�). Here, it is necessary to think through the
> place, the role
> >>> of
> >>> the sign; my belief, or more precisely, my intuition here
> is that the
> >>> sign
> >>> is the key! Roughly speaking, the first operations with
> quantities
> >>> involve
> >>> perception, further, the f[unctional] s[ystem] of
> perception, an
> >>> intell[ectual] operation. What has transformed the
> perc[eption] of
> >>> quantities�
> >>> this simple operation, into a higher intell[ectual]
> function? The
> >>> inclusion of a unique sign�the concept of numbers, that
> is, the sign, a
> >>> medium of intell[ect] (thought!). If this concept is real,
> then
> >>> perception,
> >>> operations with quantities using it specifically, is also
> included in a
> >>> syst[em] of conceptual thought. This is all very crude and
> the example
> >>> has not turned out successfully (it seems�there is no time
> to think!);
> >>> (c) The problem �intellect�will,� that is, the problem
> (figuring out the
> >>> problem!) of intention (this is already a given!); and (d)
> personality
> >>> as a
> >>> syst[em] expressed in concr[ete] problems, that is, how it is
> >>> formulated."
> >>> (LEONTIEV, 2005, pp. 74-75)
> >>>
> >>> Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 43,
> no. 3,
> >>> May�June 2005, pp. 70�77.
> >>> � 2005 M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Thank you.
> >>> Achilles
> >>>> From Brazil.
> ---------------------------------------
> Greg Thompson
> Ph.D. Candidate
> The Department of Comparative Human Development
> The University of Chicago
>
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