Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery

[Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>]

Carol says to Andy,
This bothers me a little, not because of mediation, which is acquired, but
what about natural body functions, such as bowel evacuation, and hay fever
(says she more politely). Andy, surely these are not artefacts? (I only
stuck in hay fever to be more polite, because you can tell me that hay fever
is acquired, but it's through autoimmune functions.)
Carol

On 15 October 2010 07:01, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> My claim is, David, not just that (for example) my fingers are functionally
> artefacts because I use them to play the piano, but also they are
> genetically artefacts because they are the products of art. "Labour created
> man himself" as old Fred said. If we are going to claim that thinking is
> artefact-mediated activity, then we must accept our bodies as artefacts, or
> abandon other important definitions of artefact, as mediator of activity,
> material product of human labour and the substance of culture. We fashion
> our bodies for the purpose of constructing a culture just as surely as we
> fashion our buildings, our domestic animals, our food and clothing and
> everything else.
>
> You can define a word how you like, but the importance of realising that
> our bodies are products of human labour which we use as both instruments and
> symbols, just like our white canes and spectacles,  is demonstrated by
> intersubjectivists who simply overlook the role of artefacts as mediators
> altogether. In part this is possible because they subsume the human body
> into the notion of 'subject', something which also allows them to scoot over
> all sorts of tricky philosophical problems entailed in recognizing the
> active participation of subjectivity in what would otherwise be simply a
> complex series of material interactions. The result, contradictorily is a
> far worse Cartesian dualism than the one they tried to avoid.
>
> No, I thought long and hard about this, and the conclusion is inescapable:
> the human body is an artefact.
>
> Andy
> / //// /
>
>
> David Kellogg wrote:
>
>> Sometimes I would really like to be a mosquito in the room when Martin is
>> giving his course on developmental psychology. But I would probably want to
>> bite the student who asked if the replacement of social relations in
>> language (e.g. discourse) by psychological ones (e.g. grammar) is a "fact"
>> or just one of Martin's ideas; the question strikes me as rather more
>> bumbling and humbling.
>>  Fortunately, I have my own Thursday night session, which this semester is
>> all about systemic functional linguistics and conversation analysis. Last
>> night we were discussing the difference between them, and I pointed out that
>> the systemic view is quite consistent with the idea of language as an
>> artefact and the conversation analysis view is much less so.
>>  Take, for example, the problem of repair. A teacher walks into a
>> classroom.
>>  T: Good morning, everybody.
>> Ss: Good morning, everybody!
>> T: !!!!
>>  The conversation is broken. But in order to repair it, the teacher does
>> not pull over and stop. The teacher has to keep going. The teacher has to
>> find out what exactly the kids mean, if anything (are they simply repeating
>> what they heard, as seems likely, or are they including their classmates in
>> their reply to the teacher?)
>>  This means that even quite simple conversations (the sort we have with
>> third graders) are quite gnarly and knobbled; they have convolutions and
>> introvolutions, knots and whorls and burls of negotiation.  Conversations
>> exhibit very few of the genetic or structural of mechanical tools, and in
>> fact only resemble "tools" only if we take a quite narrowly functionalist
>> squint and presuppose a coinciding will that wields them. It even seems to
>> me that they are misconstrued when we say that they are artefacts.
>>  I think the Romantics, especially Herder, would agree with this view: I
>> think they would have been rather horrified at Andy's idea that a body is an
>> artefact in the same sense as a tool is an artefact.  They would point out
>> that it is not genetically so; the body is a natural product and not man
>> made. It is also not structurally so: unlike other artefacts, much of its
>> structure reflects self-replication and not other-fabrication.  Of course,
>> we may say that a body is FUNCTIONALLY like an artefact, because we use it
>> as a tool in various ways. But if we privilege this particular
>> interpretation of the body over the genetic, or the structural, account, it
>> seems to me we get a pretty functionalist view of things. A body involved in
>> a conversation is not an artefact; it's more like a work of art, and the
>> gratuitous and organic complexity of conversation is an indelible sign of
>> this.
>>  David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education
>> --- On Thu, 10/14/10, Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za>
>> Subject: RE: [xmca] Tom Toolery
>> To: ablunden@mira.net, "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'" <
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Thursday, October 14, 2010, 5:40 AM
>>
>>
>> Hello Andy-of-the-5-o'clock-shadow
>>
>> Yet it's a different kind of gnashing of teeth (and wailing and weeping)
>> when the baboons at Third Bridge get stuck into the tinned supplies...
>>
>> Paula
>>
>>
>>
>> _________________________________
>> Paula M Towsey
>> PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
>> Faculty of Social Sciences
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
>> Behalf Of Andy Blunden
>> Sent: 14 October 2010 13:19
>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
>>
>> My answer, Paula: yes.
>> My body, with its various parts, is an artefact; according to context,
>> symbol or tool.
>> My face and my 5 o'clock shadow is a symbol just as much as the shirt I
>> wear. My teeth a tool just as much as a can opener.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> Paula M Towsey wrote:
>>
>>
>>> For some inexplicable reason while watching Mike's blind man with a stick
>>> video, I remembered smsing Carol with a quirky question: if a researcher
>>> without a knife is trying to open an airline packet of peanuts, and she
>>> resorts to using her teeth, what tool is she using?
>>>
>>> Though, perhaps the better question would be - is she using a tool.?
>>>
>>>
>>> _________________________________
>>>
>>> Paula M Towsey
>>>
>>> PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
>>>
>>> Faculty of Social Sciences
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> xmca mailing list
>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
>> Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
>> Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>
>>
>>
>>      _______________________________________________
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
> Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
> Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>



-- 
WORK as:
Visiting Lecturer
Wits School of Education
HOME (please use these details)
6 Andover Road
Westdene
Johannesburg 2092
+27 (0)11 673 9265   +27 (0)82 562 1050
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca