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Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
Carol, Steve, Robert (if I may) and Rod:
First of all, I didn't distinguish between tools and utensils. The Acmeists did, and it seems to me that the distinction is quite useful in understanding functional differentiation, a basic developmental principle in Vygotsky's work after 1929.
There are three ways in which it seems to me that the distinction's a useful one, functional, formal, and genetic.
a) Just as there is a difference between adapting yourself to your environment (with genes) and adapting the environment to yourself (with tools), there is a FUNCTIONAL difference between adapting the environment to yourself (with tools) and maintaining yourself without really effecting any fundamental change in the environment (with utensils).
b) A tool has two ends: one is designed to interface with the environment, and the other is designed to interface with the human subject. But with a utensil, both ends interface with the human subject. This is a STRUCTURAL (formal) distinction.
c) If we want to understand how the body becomes a source of signs, we might start with studying how it became a chest of tools. And in the same way, if we want to study how the body becomes a tool kit, we might do worse than to begin by studying how it started out as a cupboard full of utensils. This is a GENETIC view.
Of course, form follows function and not the other way around. A great deal of development involves exaptation, which means that you take something that really evolved for one purpose and you rededicate it to another, to which it must adapt and be adapted.
For example, fingers really evolved as eating utensils, but they were exapted for the pointing, and ultimately for sign language. Lungs and tongues evolved for breathing and eating, but they were exapted for communication and ultimately for speech.
In the same way, but on different levels! If we read Mescharyakov (in The Cambridge Guide to Vygotsky, CUP 2006) we see that he has a rather schematic but very useful statement of the "general law" of genetic development, where every stage involves some "whole" differentiating itself first into one, dominant, "external", contextually bound element and then an initially derivative but increasingly powerful "internal", contextually free element.
LAW ONE: Materiality-->Natural + Cultural
LAW TWO: Culture-->Social + Individual
LAW THREE: Individual-->Extramental + Intramental
LAW FOUR: Intramental-->Everyday concepts + Academic concepts
etc. I think there is no reason to stop here; with a little help from Hegel and the principle of functional differentiation we can easily come up with:
LAW FIVE: Academic concepts-->Artistic concepts (ideal-->real) + Scientific concepts (real-->ideal)
or even:
LAW ZERO: Physical materiality-->Chemical materiality + Biochemical materiality
etc.
But Mescharyakov's original four laws (really reducible to one, namely, context-embedded functions before context-free forms) are sufficient for the distinction I want.
The tool-utensil distinction belongs to the second tier, the differentiation between the social and the individual, because "tools" are always social in their application, but "utensils" have an individual use as well.
The utensil/sign distinction the Acmeists cared so deeply about appears to belong to the third tier, because "utensils" are for extramental use while "signs" have an intramental function as well.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Tue, 10/19/10, Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 5:38 AM
To David
I am very concerned about the need to make a decision to require/invent a
new term, specifically "utensils". What's wrong with using the notion of
tools and then putting them in the context in which they are used?
Proliferating terms means they start to grow arms and legs and maybe violate
the axioms of one's theory. "Tools" has an impeccable ancestry.
In a collaborative project, what virtue would there be using "utensils"
rather than "tools"?
Larry, sorry for interrupting your conversation. I just left too much time
to reply to David.
Carol
On 19 October 2010 14:22, Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu> wrote:
> I have to admit, you folks are stirring up my inner Sapir-Whorf
> .....fascinating!
>
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 10:20 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
> >wrote:
>
> > Nothing, Andy. That's why I want to oppose the ideal to the real, and not
> > to the material.
> >
> > ARTEFACT:
> > Tool-artefact Utensil-artefact
> > (mass production) (personal consumption)
> >
> > SIGN
> > Signal-sign Symbol-sign
> > (thing-thing) (meaning-meaning)]
> >
> > MATERIALITY
> > Reality Ideality
> > (percepts) (concepts)
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> > --- On Mon, 10/18/10, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> > From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> > Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
> > To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Date: Monday, October 18, 2010, 7:02 PM
> >
> >
> > What would be an example of something which is ideal but not also
> material,
> > David?
> > andy
> > David Kellogg wrote: ...
> > > It seems to me that if we follow Steve and Ilyenkov, and we see problem
> > after problem as a matter of establishing the interaction of "ideal" and
> > "material", we will need some kind of super-category for the indivisible
> > whole which both ideal and material make up. Otherwise we really do fall
> > into the worst kind of Cartesian dualism. ...
> > >
> >
> >
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>
> --
> *Robert Lake Ed.D.
> *Assistant Professor
> Social Foundations of Education
> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
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