Judy, Bill, and others,
Judy, thanks for the clarification. I was responding generally to the
questions you put forward, not your message in its totality (I thought the
questions were interesting). So, I didn't mean to imply that you meant to
imply that society is a collection of individuals. I think your right when
you mention we align ourselves with different discourses and subject
positions, yet I still think multivoicedness can be seen as a "unity",
"object", or "boundry object" that motivates the activity.
Bill said:
"Perhaps it is an arbitrary constraint on the theory, an artifact (excuse
me) of history. It's not necessarily anarchy, but perhaps a critical point
in theory building -- where and when, as your apt quoting of Yrjö points
out, something new will emerge."
But Bill, Yrjö also said,
"Such a multivoicedness should not regard internal contradictions and
debates as a sign of weakness; rather, they are an feature of the theory.
However; this requires at least a shared understanding of the character of
the initial cell and a continuous collective attempt to elucidate that cell,
as well as the miltiple mediating steps from the cell to specific concepts".
Which is to say I agree with you, but there needs to a shared understanding
of the "initial cell" or object. Why is there XCMA, what is its object, is
what I was trying to get at. Yes, we all have goals for participating, but
would those be objects. It seems to me XCMA's emergence, its rules or lack
of rules, and even the xlists seperating and coming back together revolve
around the object of multivoicedness. Why did xcma emerge? Why were there
seperate x-lists? Why did they come back together? I don't think those
happenings can be understood outside an xcma object of multivoicedness.
Bill said:
"Another way to think about this, is to go back to the time the xlists, in
their diversity, were conjoined. Before grand unification, each could be
considered with a unique object. After the unification, roughly assuming
the same population of folks that constituted the initial collection of
xlists, everyone was 'suddenly' communicating on one channel. Did the
objects suddenly unify also?"
In some ways, yes, but why did the seperate xlists emerge. They emerged
from my understanding that many perceived the listserv as being male and
other dominated. The seperate lists were a way to resolve the contradiction
with the xcma object of multivoicedness. Yet, overtime this is what partly
motivated the rejoining - the smaller x-lists reinscribed the hierarchical
divisions of acadamia such as those interested in gender, politics, graduate
students, Activity Theory etc. The example Bruce (webmaster)gave was the
war discussion in that the sublists created a space where it could be
discussed while at the same time it conveniently created spaces it wouldn't.
This is to say I think your suggestion of multiple objects is justified, but
only to a certain point. Mike said earlier that experience shows on this
medium disagreements are rarely resolved. I think this is true, yet this
too can be related to an ideal object of multivoicedness. If we are
matricized as in CHAT, graduate students, gender, politics, after school,
learning etc. the disagreements will be lessoned and most likely easier
resolved (the archives hint toward this). If we see XCMA as having an object
of multivoicedness this poses a major contradiction. What in many ways
motivates the activity are the things that are most difficult to resolve. I
(maybe that is what it is) have tended to see the motivation of XCMA as
breaking down boundries if its diciplines, division of labor, cultural,
social etc. yet as Mike hinted at (I think) that it is when we run into
those boundries that the discussion becomes less productive, developmental
etc.
Bill, I don't want to impose a grand object on xcma, but rather contemplate
if multivoicedness was our object, what questions would open up or in what
ways could we look at the contradictions differently.
Judy expresses this nicely,
"I meant to inter-relate the particular (multi-voiced) trajectories we
respectively represent
and the (multi-voiced) trajectory of xmca -- individual performances &
collective 'community'
co-constitutive."
I think its easy to talk (and think) about diversity-unity,
object-multivoicedness, meaning-sense in oppositional terms when they are
more relational. I think its really easy to see multivoicedness as
anti-object and in some ways I was trying to avoid such a framing.
Or as Luria said,
"view an event from as many perspectives as possible. The eye of science
does NOT probe "a thing", an event isolated from other things or events. Its
real object is to see and understand the way a thing or event relates to
other things and events...[accomplishing] the classical aim of explaining
facts, while not losing the romantic aim of preserving the manifold richness
of the subject."
pp. 177-178 *The Making of Mind*
Nate
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