There's a certain recursivity to what I have been writing about in my
EARLI99 paper and our current activity, as in addition to my picturing of
the forever unfinished lace-making of Xlist multilogue (the most focussed
parts of which Mike compared to Vygotskian "chaining" and "thinking in
complexes" already ten years ago) I have looked at four earlier episodes of
joint paper reading on the Xlists (a Lotman paper in 1990, two
pre-publication papers by Gordon Wells (from a methodological perspective)
in 1992, Bateson's "Form, Substance and Difference" in 1993 and Engestr=F6m'=
s
"Development as breaking away and opening up" in 1996). I have also
re-visited, but not written about, the joint reading of *Cultural
Psychology* in the summer of -97.
I find these episodes where efforts have been made to insert some more
orderly activity into the stream of spontaneously flowing multilogue very
interesting, and also appreciate the explorative way of going about the
matter in this forum. However, although I see both selforganized multilogue
and those organized as joint readings as brimming with affordances, I am
not very optimistic about the collective achievement of "true concepts"
(whatever that would mean) in this intermedium, even through organized
events.
What do you think?
Eva
>A number of folk have commented, myself included, that in those periods whe=
n
>the discussion gets hot, as it has at least once in each of the
>subconferences
>over the last year, one begins to get a sense that a sort of Vygotskian
>"chaining" or "thinking in complexes" takes place. At first the conceptual
>flow
>is exciting, but at some point, one longs to lay out the messages side by
>side
>and get close to a simultaneous/paradigmatic summary of the flow, e.g., to
>create a product that might approximate what LSV calls true concepts.
(M.C. 89-04-04)