I should preface the thoughts by saying that over the last two years I have
found Mike's discussions of artifacts (and the leads to Ilyenkov and
Wartofsky) as in CP5 particularly useful to my own research on writing and
disciplinary enculturation. What I'm thinking about now are the schemes
for lines of development (e.g., the usual microgenesis, ontogenesis,
cultural-historical, phylogenesis) and artifacts. A general way to state
the issue I'm struggling with, I suppose, is whether cultural-historical is
too undifferentiated a category and if it is how to break it down.
I like Mike's suggestion (1995, in Werstch, del Rio, & Alvarez) of adding
an intermediate level, mesogenesis, to study (institutionalized?) activity
systems (like the Fifth Dimension). Scribner (1985) broke
cultural-historical time three ways (general human history, the histories
of particular societies/cultures, and the histories of psychological
systems--which I understand as higher psychological functions like mediated
memory as opposed to the cultural schemata that CP.5 talks about--do others
have the same reading?). Chuck (in Shaping Written Knowledge) followed up
Scriber (1985), pointing to the relative lack of attention to genesis of
cultural forms and locating his studies of the co-genesis of scientific
genres and scientific practices as an example of such a history. I'm also
thinking here of Hutchin's (mesogenetic?) studies of functional systems of
navigation, of Engestrom & Escalante's work on Postal Buddy, and of
Wertsch's reflections on pole vaulting and sound bites.
All of which leads me to wonder why the genesis of artifacts isn't
identified as line of development in a way parallel to ontogenesis. What
this would give us is a scheme that includes microgenesis, ontogenesis,
genesis of artifacts, mesogenesis, then cultural-historical (as a higher
yet level of system integration), then phylogenesis, and finally (following
Cole and Engestrom 1993) genesis of the physical world. Besides being a
useful scheme for directing research attention, it seems to me that a lot
of notions that have been developed mainly in the context of ontogenesis
also would apply to the genesis of artifacts and activity systems (e.g.,
the parallel between the kind of abbreviation that happen in
internalization and in sedimentation in artifacts, possible extensions of
notions like leading activity to artifacts and activity systems).
And now back to artifact production.
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign