I have found Gordon's article and the subsequent responses wonderfully
thought provoking. I won't take up the concern here with representing
development/ change, but I'm hoping to push the more general issue of
representing semiosis as action OR dialogue in/as activity... or not.
I appreciate these points made by Jay:
'a tool is a material sign of its own affordances, and a sign is always also
constructed through some system of material relations' -- which makes
tool/sign closely related in semiotic theory.
(Note the shift in the sign fuction: if it is the tool serving as sign of
its own affordances, it was first object or outcome of activity. There is a
temporal disjunction.... which only underscores that the tool/sign affinity
in semiotic theory is not what distinguishes the sort of dialog that Gordon
is concerned with)
I especially appreciate the point that both Bill and Jay seem to make when
they raise the issue of what counts as activity/ whether dialog should be
treated as activity.... I took from one of Bill's messages the suggestion
that a dialogic sequence might be treated as some subunit of activity, an
action, or part of the conditions under which the activity unfolds. However,
Jay both insists on dialogic intertextuality & its inseparability from
activity but refuses to 'segregate and privilege it, or to mythologize its
uniqueness...."
This is where I am muddling. I REALLY appreciated Gordon's use of the xmca
conversation with Arne. I wasn't a part of that conversation, and I have
puzzled over Arne's multiple diagrams not enough. However, it strikes me
that Gordon's transformation of Arne's 'expanded triangles of cooperative
production' sacrifices what I find most important about them and about the
nature of dialog. In Arne's representation, the subject is presumably an
individual speaking subject (thus from an AT perspective, Arne is NOT
referring here to AT in its "full" sense, where the subject would be
collective) who interacts ON another as much as WITH another.
To take this perspective on dialog (actually, a microgenetic perspective on
UTTERANCE) might be to turn the addressee into an object of the speaker's
utterance. The ADDRESSEE, of course, is not *equivalent* to the SPEAKER'S
OBJECT, but in the utterance is positioned somehow objectively by what is
said / how it's said by the speaker.
But I want to pull this notion apart even more. Because the object is not
only the speaker's construal of the addressee (how the addressee is
positioned by the talk), but also the social identity of the speaking
subject.
When I respond to Gordon's paper and contribute to this multilogue, I am
producing a social identity for myself. At the same time, I am constructing
a version of Gordon and others in this multilogue in my address to them;
construction may be perfectly amenable to their own sense of who they are
here, and so virtually invisible, or it may deviate somehow from how they
see themselves and so require some delicate facework in the response, to
amend the version "out there".
In other words, Arne's representation foregrounds ONE of the functions of
talk --its SOCIAL function. The negotiation of what counts as X [i.e.,
object/ tool/ even, I would argue, community] that makes possible the degree
of intersubjectivity necessary to coordinate actions (as Gordon noted) --
involves some 'negotiation' over social identities & roles (in FIGURE 3,
"distribution of violence/ control")
Now, before I go further, I have to note that this is NOT the perspective
Gordon takes. Gordon's rather brilliant articulation of how L and J work
together, managing almost invisibly to negotiate respective roles,
sustaining primary focus on a common object, in a sense sidesteps the issue
of INfelicitous interaction. In the case Gordon discusses, dialog achieves a
kind of ideal of dialog-in-activity. But in truth, dialog rarely achieves
that ideal, even in schools where the object is material and intended to be
commonly understood etc.
This is especially so today, when students enter schools from such diverse
home communities -- which makes the assumption of a homogenous community in
the classroom extremely problematic. Of course, it is the ideal and
presumably good teaching does lead to an approximation of a learning
community -- eventually....
But let's return to Figure 3
Oh, I wish that Arne could join us, because I am about to comment on
Gordon's version of his diagram... where the link between subject and object
is mediated, on the one hand, by way of community, and on the other, by way
of their means [talk]. Here is how I interpret this 2-way linkage of
subject/object in an act of utterance. If we understand the object to be the
speaking subject's construal of the addressee, and we have to make the
distinction between the actual addressee and the object of the speaker's
utteranc, then 1. how the subject construes her/his object (addressee) would
be mediated by notions of community, BUT that does not PRESUPPOSE the SAME
community for the ACTUAL addressee. (I can only wish that Arne were
available to make HIS reasoning explicit)
But I am still puzzling over the location of the vertice mentioned above:
Distribution of violence/control [roles/statuses, I assume].
I am sorry Arne cannot contribute here, because I am sure I will be making a
MESS of his intentions. I can only hope that some others will be able to
respond to my mess. But here goes:
I can understand why norms are represented as directly mediating the
subject's relationship to community, but not directly mediating the
(imagined/ projected) object's relationship to the community (i.e., the
addressee is subject to norms only in his/her response, as he/she takes up
the position of (non-verbally and verbally) speaking subject...). BUT I
can't understand why [roles/statuses/distribution of violence/control] are
not also represented as directly mediating what the subject does/says. Maybe
someone can help me out here....
I think it is important in a representation of DIALOG that this aspect of
interaction does not get lost, and that it be shown to link the speaking
subject to ONE of the outcomes of dialogic interaction -- a new subject --
self-in-the-world (that which becomes part of a much longer ontogenetic
project...) as well as to an objectified interlocutor. When I, a mere and
puny junior colleague, speak even an eeentsy bit effectively & thereby claim
a bit of status for myself [forgive the hyperbolic gesture -- for the sake
of argumen], it is this question of my status vis a vis another, which lurks
in the background. Of course, there is all the mumbo jumbo on this list,
which is also very imortant, about how we all are learners and status is not
an issue, but while that mumbo jumbo creates a necessary ambiguity it does
not alter the fact of relative status -- track records, seniority, & the
actual trappings of such, etceteras. The degree of allowance we are willing
to make for the less-than-fully-baked contributions...
In fact, then, the distribution of violence/control -- roles/statuses
--should be represented as ONE OTHER object of the subject's utterance/
action on an interlocutor, as well as the means of that interaction in the
production of a new subject (these operations are visible to us and so
analyzable only thanks to recording technologies of course)...
As I said, I am muddling, and I have no conclusion. I am running out of
steam [time] though. I am perplexed by the complexity of representing
dialogue in activity, especially given its multifunctionality.
Judy
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