Judy's muddles get rather into the thicket of the triangle representations,
where I'm not too inclined to follow, but I do think her basic point is
important: dialogue is inherently multi-functional, and there is a tendency
in AT idealizations of activity systems to project a single unifying
functional goal or motive.
This is one area where perhaps AT can benefit from the encounter with
discourse theory. Discourse analysis is frequently confronted with multiple
conflicting goals, intersecting agendas and Activities, and even with
simultaneous and compatible agendas being enacted side by side and
sometimes even through the same utterances. (My book _Talking Science_ is
full of such examples, and so I think is everyone's naturalistic discourse
data.)
When we want to emphasize the unity and coherence of action we tend to pick
episodes to analyze where there is a rather felicitous convergence of
cooperative activity and subjects' agendas. But typical examples are a lot
more messy and we have to decide just how much we can rely on idealizations
and when we need to say that our basic theory has to account for the fact
that the messy cases outnumber the neat ones manyfold. This is somewhat the
point of Derrida's famous quip that you cannot not mix genres. It doesn't
mean that idealized genres are a useless theoretical notion, or even that
reasonably pure instances never occur, but it points to the fact that we
need to have an understanding of text that tells us why pure genres are
rare in many contexts.
Multifunctionality, polyvalence, vagueness with respect to specificity of
activity types (or goals or motives) probably also has something to tell us
about dynamics. Rigid categories, strong classifications, resist change;
they create barriers and thresholds. Fuzzy, weaker classifications, in
which it is easier to slide from one thing to another provide the channels
for dynamics, i.e. for small-scale changes which can become amplified into
larger-scale ones (self-organization, emergence).
Bernstein also taught us that we can read back from the neatness of
discourse categorizations to something about the rigidity of institutional
contexts and their power relationships. You get pure genres and
monofunctional (uni-final?) activity systems in the context of more rigid
institutions, but we increasingly lead our lives in the cracks between such
institutions, or in traversals where we surf across institutions. In these
cases we get more mixed genres, more fraught multifunctionality ... and
also more possibilities for significant dynamical change on longer
timescales. Perhaps something of the same sort, on much shorter scales, is
going on when elements of the activity system find themselves cast into
different roles in the on-going development of the action ... the AT
analogue of logogenesis, Mike's microgenesis. This is the notion I put out
in my earlier posting.
Maybe every third or fourth example we analyze should be a messy one?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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