Re: [xmca] PoTAYto and PoTAHto

Eric,
I have variously written about (radical) passivity, which is a
concept we need to bring in and theorize if we want to understand
dialogicity. If the word straddles speaker and listener, then the
speaker cannot decide on the theme, which is realized only with the
social evaluation on the part of the recipient. So the speaker is
(radically) passive with respect to the effect, which she might set
up but cannot ever determine beforehand. See, in the following
exchange (Fragment 2), the student explodes the IRE sequence, though
the teacher opening might set one up in other instances, as in
Fragment 1.

Fragment 1
Teacher: What is the smallest indivisible particle?
Student: An atom.
Teacher: Right.

Fragment 2
Teacher: What is the smallest indivisible particle?
Student: Go to hell.
Teacher: Okay, go to the office. Your are suspended.

Fragment 1 is more likely to occur but not certain in middle class
(suburban) schools (in US), whereas Fragment 2 might occur in a
working-class inner-city (urban) school. The teacher cannot not what
will come, though there are certain probabilities. This is why it
would be better for a teacher to operate with a self-understanding
that who I can be in the classroom is a function of the interaction
not a determinant of it. And this is what I denote by the term
radical passivity, there is nothing you can do beforehand to make
100% sure of what the student will contribute.

        Same for relationships. If you understand who you can be to be a
function of the relationship, this changes everything around. You
still have agency, but not absolute agency, because of the radical
passivity you are in with respect to the effect of your action, which
always come to you from the other whom you have affected, and who has
allowed to be affected in listening to (or ignoring) you.

:-)

Michael

On 9-Oct-08, at 11:00 AM, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org wrote:

Thank you Michael for bringing Bakhtin back into the discussion.
Steve you
had also mentioned Ana's article on play, she also mentions Bakhtin
in that
article as well. Michael could you say more to the subject of themes
and
unintentional actions. My comments tend to be intentionalist in nature
because of my focus on goal-directed activity.

eric

                       Wolff-Michael
                       Roth To: "eXtended
Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
                       <mroth@uvic.ca> cc:
                       Sent by: Subject: Re: [xmca]
PoTAYto and PoTAHto
                       xmca-bounces@web
                       er.ucsd.edu

                       10/09/2008 12:25
                       PM
                       Please respond
                       to "eXtended
                       Mind, Culture,
                       Activity"

Hi all,
isn't all this talk of yours very intentionalist? Aren't there other
ways of thinking about this? For example, take Bakhtin and reported
speech, one is direct speech, and children come to produce the sounds
in social contexts, as themes. (Pragmatic function) But the words are
like other regularities, in fact, following F. Mikhailov it is better
to think in terms of sound envelopes, which will allow us to avoid
some common problems when we speak and write about language.
              Concerning meaning. Bakhtin/Voloshinov say, that in the
limit,

"meaning means nothing".
              The bifurcation between mere sound and the signified is an
interesting one, and we can learn a lot about it in Mescheryakov's
experiments with the deaf blind.
              Also, it is not just "for itself," for the utterance, any
utterance,
always straddles the Self-Other dialectic,
Michael

On 9-Oct-08, at 10:00 AM, Martin Packer wrote:

David,

If I am understanding your question correctly, the same issue comes
up with
the first words, no?

A child's first one-word utterances are produced at an age (around
12m) when
all the evidence suggests that the child is not yet capable of
understanding
or producing symbols (24m). To the child the utterance "pancakes!"
functions
pragmatically but it does not represent the specific breakfast item.
It is,
Liz Bates argued, a secondary circular reaction. To the adult,
however, the
word is both indexical and symbolic. Over time (waving my hand magically
here) the child comes to use the word symbolically *because* the adult
responds to it as such. From in-itself to for-others to for-itself.
Developmental psycholinguists debated long and hard about how much
knowledge
to attribute to the child when they produce such holophrasic
utterances, and
the more sensible argument seemed to me to locate the knowledge in
the dyad
first.

Am I on track?

Martin

On 10/8/08 8:21 PM, "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm reading a wonderful but rather puzzling paper about the
> development of

> ostension (that is, the "showing" part of "show and tell") in infancy
> and early childhood (that is, seven to thirteen months).
>
> Moro and Rodriguez point out that ostension is polysemic: it can be
> declarative, but it can also be interrogative. It can be a sign to
> others
> ("Look at this!") but it can also be a sign to yourself ("Now I wonder
what
> the devil this thing is?"). That's what makes it possible for
> adults and
kids
> to use the same set of signs and mean utterly different things.
>
> But Paula points out this is true of ALL language, else adults and
children
> could not communicate, and communication could not develop: Today,
> you say

> poTAYto and I say poTAHto; you say a concept and I say a complex.
Tomorrow, I
> will say po-TAH-to and I will mean a concept.
>
> So what's unique about ostension? Well, Moro and Rodriguez make the
following
> rather inelegant comment:
>
> "Ostension is a sign that is rarely studied by psychologists for
> itself
and
> which (sic) is geenrally considered as (sic) an indexical sign,
> which it
is
> not."
>
> (Production of Signs and Meaning Making Process in Triadic
> Interaction at
the
> Prelinguistic Level, in Abbey and Diriwachter, eds. Innovating
> Genesis:
> Microgenesis and the constructive mind in action. Charlotte:
> Information
Age
> Press. p. 210.)
>
> That's it. No explanation. OK--so according to Peirce, an icon is
something
> that stands for itself, but an index is something that stands for
something
> else, and a symbol is something that stands for something else by
> virtue
of a
> rule.
>
> So if I'm seven months old an I hold up a block, the block's an icon.
It just
> stands for the block as far as I'm concerned. But for my Mommy, the
holding of
> the block stands for "What the devil is this?" and requires a
> (symbolic)
> explanation that I won't understand, but she'll point to the block and
then to
> a hole in the back of my toy truck and I might understand what that
> means
or I
> might not, depending on my ability to handle indexical meanings.
>
> But doesn't that mean that, microgenetically, the whole ostensive
> episode
> contains an icon AND an index AND a symbolic mode of meaning making
> too?
And
> isn't this true of ALL language?
>
> A word like "potato" has a "sonic envelope" (translated, very
> confusingly,
as
> "phasal" in Minick's version of "Thinking and Speech", p. 223).
> Like Grape

> Nuts, sound is what it is. It also has intonation, which suggests
> what it
> does. And of course, it has a symbolic meaning which we can, if we
> like,
> define in a dictionary.
>
> What we CAN'T do is pretend that any one of these elements excludes
> the
> others: that would be like suggesting that language is pronunciation
> without vocabulary or grammar, or vocabulary without pronunciation and
> grammar, or grammar without vocabulary or pronunciation. Some of my
> dear
> colleagues behave that way sometimes, but we all know better or we
couldn't
> actually talk to our students.
>
> A potato chip does not stop being a potato. Why should ostension stop
being an
> index?
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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Received on Thu Oct 9 13:04 PDT 2008