My own approach here is precisely a blend of ecological dynamics with the
Latourian network model, with its emphasis on material-artifactual linkage
among different activities and practices, semiotically crossing over
different scales. It is the latter property which means that one cannot fix
the boundaries of even the material space, much less the place. The place
as a meaningful-place and a place-where-meanings-are-made is always partly
meaningful through its relations to other places and other spaces. Every
material affordance, whether object or spatial relationship, is a potential
link to other activities and other settings.
What ecodynamics adds to this is the potential synergies of interacting
processes. Notions like space and place per se are not conceptualized
directly in process terms (this is rather built into the semantics of
English-like languages: participants-in-doings/beings-at-times-in-places)
until we reinsert them into the activities relative to which they are
settings. We can then also define them semiotically as actants and change
their semantic roles, so we can speak of the production of places, and even
places as 'influencing' us (the patient and agent roles, respectively, of
participants). Latour's logic of symmetrized heterogeneity does not apply
just to actors and objects, but to places (and times?) as well. The
ecodynamics depends on all the processes or practices in which
spaces/places figure, in whichever semantic role. Artifacts and places
link, or mediate, the connections among processes or activities. They make
processes on different spatial and temporal scales, and themselves situated
at some remove in space and time, relevant to one another in newly possible
ways.
And they can interact just like the moose and wolves: creating interlocking
cycles and fluctuations and quasi-stabilities and chaotic transitions, etc.
-- all indeed without the need for external control variables. Here is
where we revise one of the notions about place, that spaces materially and
semiotically (i.e. as places) influence or control activities within them
while remaining given or fixed or inert. It does not matter whether they
change on the scale of the activity or not: they belong to a larger ecology
of activities which not only changes them but has produced them in the
first place. Settings are a 'live' component of activity networks. They
have agency, but not autonomous agency (I don't believe anything has
autonomous agency). They are products, but not inert ones. They offer
affordances and constraints in the way that circumstances or
material-semiotic contexts of situation are normally understood to do. All
of these, and all by virtue of the synergies of the ecology/network of
activities.
I will post separately on sustainability. There is always more ... JAY. :)
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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