From the many ideas here, one stands out for me, David. You write:
It seems to me that what we need to study is not simply "context" but the
relationship between context and emergent text.
As hard as it is to keep in mind, I think in principle that text and
con-text have to be seen as co-constituitive. We run in to (at least)
notions of context that are there, waiting for a text/behavior/event to
occur, and the emergent system that enables us
to make a distinction between text and context.
Very inconvenient to us linear thinkers. Beautifully illustrated in
McDermott article in
Chaiklin Lave book on activity theory in practice from a prior decade or
two.
mike