RE: [xmca] Tom Toolery

[Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>]

Hi Andy,

I have just read your post on cultural shaping of how we use our bodies and absolutely agree that we learn to carry ourselves in particular ways by picking up on the mannerisms and patternings of the people we grow up around (working with young children often brings this process to awareness as one sees a child including details of a person's movement 'style' in their role play). A while ago I was struck by the fact that, while walking into work I noticed a couple of women several hundred yards away and was confident that they were both French, just from the way they were moving their heads as they talked - sure enough, as I passed them I was able to overhear their conversation and they were.

I think I am inclined to agree with your point, though, that even our material bodies are still constructed, still artefacts. When I was working as a teacher we used to have regular visits from groups of medical students who spent a couple of days in schools (apparently so that they had an idea of what healthy children look like!) - what really impressed me was that these students (almost all male) were quite strikingly tall! I didn't do any measuring or data analysis but after a couple of groups it became something I watched out for and I would say that many of these medical students were 6'4" or over. This could be pure coincidence but it is also the case that, by and large, medical students tend, as a group, to include a higher than average proportion of people from relatively well to do families (not to mention the proportion whose parents have a medical background).

So I think I am with you on the constructedness of bodies (or at least on their adaptedness) but I wanted to add that I am more unequivocally confident in saying that the ways we USE our bodies is certainly 'artificial'  or, less controversially, 'artefactual'.

I have had some interesting conversations with Early Childhood Studies students on the topic of what we mean by 'nature' and 'natural' in the contexts of childhood and parenting practices - the natural condition for human children is to be surrounded by an artificial, human-made or human-modified environment.

All the best,

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Blunden [mailto:ablunden@mira.net] 
Sent: 15 October 2010 10:23
To: Rod Parker-Rees
Cc: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery

I am intrigued Rod. You conclude from this interesting story that the 
body is not ("may not be") an artefact, but "virtual maps" within the 
brain are? I presume because these neural structures are "constructed," 
whereas other parts of the body are not?
What do you mean?

Andy

Rod Parker-Rees wrote:
> In 'The body has a mind of its own' by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee (2007 Random House), there is a chapter which begins with an account of research by Dr Atsushi Iriki and colleagues in Japan. This research involved training monkeys to use rakes as tools to retrieve food and then using arrays of microelectrodes implanted in their skulls to study the visual receptive fields of visual-tactile cells in the posterior parietal cortex of the monkeys. What Iriki found was that these visual-tactile cells, which usually responded to information only in a region within the monkeys' arms length, began to respond to more distant information (within arm+rake's length) but ONLY when the monky was using the rake as a tool - when the mankey was passively holding the tool the response drew back to its normal range. The chapter goes on to describe studies in virtual reality in which participants learn to control avatars which have strikingly different physiology - e.g. a lobster - controlled by a complex code of combined body movements which is never shared with participants, they learn to control the movement of their avatar just by trial and error but they soon become able to 'automate' the process - focusing on what they want to do rather on what they have to do to do it.
>
> Our bodies may not be artefacts but our cerebellar virtual maps of how our bodies work and what we can do with them surely are.
>
> I have just started wearing varifocal glasses and am in the process of retraining my body's ways of seeing (learning to move my head and neck rather than just move my eyes) already I am finding that things 'stay in focus' more as my head and neck get my eyes into position without me having to tell them where to go!
>
> For me this links with the discussion about bodies and tools and possibly extends (rake-like) beyond it - how much of the tool is defined by its form and how much by the cultural history of how, by whom, when, where and for what it has been and could be used?
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
> Sent: 15 October 2010 06:02
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
>
> My claim is, David, not just that (for example) my fingers are 
> functionally artefacts because I use them to play the piano, but also 
> they are genetically artefacts because they are the products of art. 
> "Labour created man himself" as old Fred said. If we are going to claim 
> that thinking is artefact-mediated activity, then we must accept our 
> bodies as artefacts, or abandon other important definitions of artefact, 
> as mediator of activity, material product of human labour and the 
> substance of culture. We fashion our bodies for the purpose of 
> constructing a culture just as surely as we fashion our buildings, our 
> domestic animals, our food and clothing and everything else.
>
> You can define a word how you like, but the importance of realising that 
> our bodies are products of human labour which we use as both instruments 
> and symbols, just like our white canes and spectacles,  is demonstrated 
> by intersubjectivists who simply overlook the role of artefacts as 
> mediators altogether. In part this is possible because they subsume the 
> human body into the notion of 'subject', something which also allows 
> them to scoot over all sorts of tricky philosophical problems entailed 
> in recognizing the active participation of subjectivity in what would 
> otherwise be simply a complex series of material interactions. The 
> result, contradictorily is a far worse Cartesian dualism than the one 
> they tried to avoid.
>
> No, I thought long and hard about this, and the conclusion is 
> inescapable: the human body is an artefact.
>
> Andy
> / //// /
>
> David Kellogg wrote:
>   
>> Sometimes I would really like to be a mosquito in the room when Martin is giving his course on developmental psychology. But I would probably want to bite the student who asked if the replacement of social relations in language (e.g. discourse) by psychological ones (e.g. grammar) is a "fact" or just one of Martin's ideas; the question strikes me as rather more bumbling and humbling.
>>  
>> Fortunately, I have my own Thursday night session, which this semester is all about systemic functional linguistics and conversation analysis. Last night we were discussing the difference between them, and I pointed out that the systemic view is quite consistent with the idea of language as an artefact and the conversation analysis view is much less so.
>>  
>> Take, for example, the problem of repair. A teacher walks into a classroom.
>>  
>> T: Good morning, everybody.
>> Ss: Good morning, everybody!
>> T: !!!!
>>  
>> The conversation is broken. But in order to repair it, the teacher does not pull over and stop. The teacher has to keep going. The teacher has to find out what exactly the kids mean, if anything (are they simply repeating what they heard, as seems likely, or are they including their classmates in their reply to the teacher?)
>>  
>> This means that even quite simple conversations (the sort we have with third graders) are quite gnarly and knobbled; they have convolutions and introvolutions, knots and whorls and burls of negotiation. 
>>  
>> Conversations exhibit very few of the genetic or structural of mechanical tools, and in fact only resemble "tools" only if we take a quite narrowly functionalist squint and presuppose a coinciding will that wields them. It even seems to me that they are misconstrued when we say that they are artefacts.
>>  
>> I think the Romantics, especially Herder, would agree with this view: I think they would have been rather horrified at Andy's idea that a body is an artefact in the same sense as a tool is an artefact. 
>>  
>> They would point out that it is not genetically so; the body is a natural product and not man made. It is also not structurally so: unlike other artefacts, much of its structure reflects self-replication and not other-fabrication. 
>>  
>> Of course, we may say that a body is FUNCTIONALLY like an artefact, because we use it as a tool in various ways. But if we privilege this particular interpretation of the body over the genetic, or the structural, account, it seems to me we get a pretty functionalist view of things. A body involved in a conversation is not an artefact; it's more like a work of art, and the gratuitous and organic complexity of conversation is an indelible sign of this.
>>  
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education 
>>
>> --- On Thu, 10/14/10, Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za>
>> Subject: RE: [xmca] Tom Toolery
>> To: ablunden@mira.net, "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Thursday, October 14, 2010, 5:40 AM
>>
>>
>> Hello Andy-of-the-5-o'clock-shadow
>>
>> Yet it's a different kind of gnashing of teeth (and wailing and weeping)
>> when the baboons at Third Bridge get stuck into the tinned supplies...
>>
>> Paula
>>
>>
>>
>> _________________________________
>> Paula M Towsey
>> PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
>> Faculty of Social Sciences
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
>> Behalf Of Andy Blunden
>> Sent: 14 October 2010 13:19
>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
>>
>> My answer, Paula: yes.
>> My body, with its various parts, is an artefact; according to context,
>> symbol or tool.
>> My face and my 5 o'clock shadow is a symbol just as much as the shirt I
>> wear. My teeth a tool just as much as a can opener.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> Paula M Towsey wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> For some inexplicable reason while watching Mike's blind man with a 
>>> stick video, I remembered smsing Carol with a quirky question: if a 
>>> researcher without a knife is trying to open an airline packet of 
>>> peanuts, and she resorts to using her teeth, what tool is she using?
>>>
>>> Though, perhaps the better question would be - is she using a tool.?
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>> _________________________________
>>>
>>> Paula M Towsey
>>>
>>> PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
>>>
>>> Faculty of Social Sciences
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> xmca mailing list
>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>>
>>>
>>>    
>>>     
>>>       
>> --
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
>> Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
>> Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss
>>
>>
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>
>   

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss



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