Just a side note as I'm reading Gordon's paper, in which he references the
now-becoming canonical example of collective hunting. Curiously enough I
plopped down to some pizza in front of the tube last night just as the 1962
flick "mutiny on the bounty" came on. About an hour into the film, there was
a scene of fishing in Tahiti -- the native men were beating the water in
canoes while moving toward shore, as the women awaited, standing waist-deep
and shoulder to shoulder in a semi-enclosing shape.
Canonical. Both groups were about the same object. The men were to scare
the fish towards the women, who would trap them against the shore.
But THEN the sailors from the Bounty, who had been seeking breadfruits near
the beach, took note of the women (the beaters were not apparently in sight)
and with sufficient innuendo about some other object, (Now, what could that
be for sailors who have been at sea for many months?) joined the women with
the permission of their first mate. After some frolicking in front of the
women, the sailors apparently discovered the beaters approaching and began to
recognize the reason for the strange behavior of the women (a synomorph, or
mature activity system they had previously not encountered?) and eventually
helped to catch the fish.
So... where is this going? you might ask. Or not.. but here's the reply
anyway. Gordon is very much about a developmental approach. It's clear with
his use of supporting quotes as "an activity system is a virtual
disturbance- and innovation-producing machine." as well as his work done
(while I was still pimply-faced) of the development of language in children.
(And which also, quite curiously, involved random sampling, but not of
children, rather, of discourse)
And yet a big problem of development is how to represent change over time.
In the fishing scenario, the sailors were not on the fishing clue-boat to
begin with. Beginning by enacting some form of participation reminiscent of
parallel play -- their spashing about in the water in front of the women,
(well maybe not -- they were trying to entice the women into some OTHER form
of co-participation), they eventually shared the "common" object of catching
fish.
My first-order iteration model for this scenario would be to draw an extended
triangle. It would immediately be rejected. With the extended triangle
model (Gordon's figure 2) the elements are shown in relation to each other --
and it can be argued that the specific locations of any of the elements are
not critical, because what is important is how any one of the elements can be
mediative of any other two elements. Being a graphical model, its form is
static. It locates the "places" where tensions may form, so that one can
address the changes in the system due to those tensions. In this way, rather
abstractly, the topology of the diagram never changes, because it does not
work up to the level of describing the forms of the relations between the
elements and how those forms change over time due to the re-solving of
contradictions.
Side-Sidebar:
[THAT topology -- the fact that the form of the model does not change over
time -- has lead to some significant misconceptions about activity theory --
such as activity theory not being related to development i.e. changes over
time. I heard at least one, perhaps two, presentations at AERA 2002 espouse
this misunderstanding. IMHO it also appears with the separation of CH from
AT.]
I think the same level of abstraction can be claimed for Gordon's model
(figure 5) of discourse as joint activity. For example, as the "opportunity
for the less expert to appropriate (some of) these resources and thereby to
become more able to participate effectively." (p62) happens, what constitutes
the artifacts/tools of the less expert subject changes over time -- but the
diagram per se does not significantly change over time. Its form does not
rise to that level of concreteness. And that's not a criticism, but an
observation of the difficulty involved in the theoretical modeling of
collective development. I see Gordon working in this direction, however,
because he has departed from the convention of the extended triagle model and
specifically identified disparate subject and artifact/tools categories.
Furthermore, in figure 6, he departs from the topological irrelevance of
elemental position by rendering difference in expertise by asymmetry in the
diagram . The increased specificity is necessary to modeling (modelling) the
*actions* made by the subjects.
Back to the Bounty example, neither the community nor the object was common
when the sailors first jumped into the water. In a way, the sailors
constituted a second system (perhaps, perhaps not) in interaction with that
of the fishers. There's reasonable support for drawing a kind of model in
which there are few shared categories -- in the case of the fishing/Bounty
example, not even language was common between the two populations. Trying
to model the fishing scenario over time -- microgenetically -- using an
adapted extended triangle requires at the very least multiple diagrams, and
perhaps inexorably will lead to animation. This could be very difficult to
publish in a paper journal. But in the interaction of the Bounty sailors and
the Tahitians, the system of sailors -- over the longer term --
mesogenetically -- was irrevocably changed, eventually leading to mutiny,
although after a significant delay. (Dreams deferred??) In this case, the
artifacts/tools of the sailor system include water (denied to the sailors)
and breadfruit (which demanded extra water and denying the sailors), and the
extended triangle works well for understanding the mutiny that emerges on a
ship isolated at sea.
In the contrasting light of the Bounty example, the beautiful microgenetic
sequence of exchanges that Gordon has included in his paper, and the
transformation of their patterns over time, are only sketchily captured by
Figure 6. I'd like to posit that this form of diagram, as in the Bounty
example, may be better adapted to rendering changes over the longer term.
The reason is that type of figure only grossly links to the meaty utterances
that are included in the transcripts Gordon included. It has little explicit
description of the discourse categores of Agreement, Joint Action,
Suggestion, Permission, ( or even others as IRE, or metacommunication). In a
way, the extended triangle genre of diagrams may be best suited to describing
Activity, but not *actions* or operations. I think a significant challenge is
to be able to address the patterns of actions occuring in microgenetic
sequences, with a model that is still embedded in the relations indicated by
the extended triangle.
Perhaps a bridging representation would be an adaptation of the semiotic
function circle that Alfred Lang draws. IMHO, this kind of diagram rises to
the microgenetic level, and might be useful for indicating speech
acts/utterances.
Anyway, these opinions are free and worth every penny. But perhaps someone
can write in response to these thoughts? What do you think?
bb
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