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
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--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
----
*Andy Blunden*
Home Page:
http://home.mira.net/~andy/<http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
<http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/><
http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss
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