I don't think I'm perfectly right about anything Ana. I just like to play.
And so I'm playing with another way to think about how people and things
interact, Eugene, with out recourse to trditional clock-time of space as we
use it day to day life. We might end up agreeing with each other if we can
converse long enough. I just find the typing to be frustrating. I'd rather
be updating web pages, whihc mostly involves just moving a mouse.
II prefer to *find problems* in theories rather than making theories, and I
honestly admire the effort and ceativity with which others do so. for
sometime I've been drawn to the conclusion that a theory which puts analytic
boundaries on the human condition (that must then be crossed to explain the
human condition) asks for some rethinking. Kevin's paper, well researched
and written, pushes me further in this direction by exposing the sheer
*complexity* of schooling, and how activity theory must be stretched and
extended, witnessed in the plethora of triangles. But still i'm just messing
aroungd and the stuff of this email is just fiction.
In any case, yesterday I'd only written part of the picture. If one begins to
think of a web on interrelated actions as a many, many dimensional nonlinear
"action-space", then somthing more is needed. One needs to account for the
configuration of people and things that enact and embody the product of
interactions. Something is necessary to account for the embodied memory of
past actions that offer the potentials for future actions. By example, one
must account for the "hammerness" of a hammer, which is not just *in the
hammer* but also *in the person using it*. So what's missing from last
night's post is something like "configuration-space", which might be
considered in some complex dialectic to "action-space".
The two together ( action- and configuration-space) migh be minimally
necessary to begin to describe what happens among and between people and
things. EngestrÓ§m's extended triangle could be considered to be one way to
map out a configuration space, specifying a big picture, i.e. categories and
relations of categories, e.g. collective subject, artifact (ensemble),
object, rules, etc., with the specifics to be determined or filled in by the
setting-and-behavior to be analyzed. But there has been some discussion
about languge and discourse not yet being well integrated into this kind of
chat picture, and this should also be an element of the configuration space.
For example, the semiotic processes a child and adult can exercise, whatever
their state of development, will shape their discourse with each other, as
well as any other language capital the two can bring to the discourse.
As I look at Kevin's diagram on p4, what occurs to me is that perhaps a better
set of things that can be considered in terms of capturing the complexity and
scale of human interction is not the taditional space or time, or some
complex product of the two. For example, considering such constructs as
sociograms, we could relate much more closely to what we are interested in
studying -- actions. Sociograms are a *summative* representation of specific
actions, i.e. interactions between people, and are more a representaion of
what Barker terms "standing paterns of behavior" than action-space.
Sociograms however provide a nice example of how one can look for multiple
units of analysis, as one looks for social groups within a population in
which the density of interactions of people within each group make them a
cohering whole, sometimes more so than the total population . Taking context
as "that which is interwoven" what i'm looking for is a way to represent the
interweaving of actions and their complexity and scale, and a way to be able
to apply the representation to the bounding of units of analysis, especially
in cases where common objects are hard to come by.
What can be considered to scale is (in Engestrom's AT) essentially the model.
That is to say, the "activity system" and its elements and interrelations are
what sometimes scale. The structure/ patterns of interaction, captured in
the confguration of the elements f the triangle remains invarient across a
transformation of scale. The dimensions are not something as simple as space
and time. The dimensions of this configuration space are the subject,
artifact, object, rules, etc. The model maps out across activity systems of
diverse extents and durations, small and large groups of people or
institutions and of differing lives.
Similarly, we can think of sociograms as summativley mapping out the
interactions between people who comprise a collective subject. But a problem
i see is coming up with a representation that makes explicit the dynamics of
(inter)actions. Summative soiograms don't do that. The extended triangle
doesn't change in activity theory. Implicit in the extended model is the
playing out of the dynamix of contradictions, but one does not see the
explicit representation of change/evolution. One can draw the incorrect
conclusion that activity theory does not address change over time, and at
least one perons has. I'm left looking for some semiotic means that
explicitely represents transformations, something like an "action-algebra" or
"action-configuration-space".
Got one?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 01 2003 - 01:00:09 PDT