Re: [xmca] Cultural memory dewey

[Ivan Rosero <irosero@ucsd.edu>]

riding on Greg's email, a different being comes to mind --a star.  Human
timescales are less than blips in the time-scale over which the life of a
star takes place, but what is interesting is that a star has much less
moment-to-moment solidity than a table.  It is a formation that holds
violently, quivering at each moment, in a constant battle of forces between
gravity and nuclear fusion.  Gravity pushes inward, and the release of
energy from fusion at the star's core pushes outward.  This is a violent
dance --a dramatic irreducible tension-- in which, inevitably, gravity wins
because fusion runs out of stuff to "burn".

Anyway, the metaphorical point here is that something much less solid than a
table (or even a piece of paper, or a butterfly's wing) can still hold
together over billions of years --but only because of constant renewal, and
only at the cost of change within renewal.  This is good for us in the
time-scales of ontogeny and historical change, since even if experience is
thought to be the thing that holds over time more coherently than the
various mediators involved in each (re)new(ed) instance of experience,
experience itself will inevitably change through the very participation that
allows it to hold.

So it is interesting, as Greg says Abbot says, why something holds over
time, not so much that it changes overtime --what is the irreducible tension
between what kinds of forces that allow "something" to hold over time?  But
these questions become really interesting only when we introduce
heterogeneity in processes and their characteristic timescales, and (with
Latour) heterogeneity in the stuff/symbols with which culture accretes.
Interaction between differential processes imply change, while heterogenous
stuff is necessary for the creativity of human action, since anything at all
can be recruited into mediating functions.

ivan

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 9:52 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>wrote:

> Michael, you write:
> > The second issue brough up by this quote, which I really struggle with,
> is
> if the meaning of the symbol is so tied to the situation
> > doesn't that mean that the meaning is going to change as the situation
> changes. If there any such thing then as an artifact which
> > maintains meaning across situaitons. If not, then isn't the concept of
> mediation secondary to the concept of experience. A lot of \
> > people argued with Dewey on this (Santayana comes to mind, and I wonder
> if
> Vygotsky might have as well) - but it is a difficult
> > conundrum.
> A (neo)pragmatist response:
> Consider a table (not necessarily Marx's "turning table" that I mentioned
> in
> a previous post - although this one has a certain "movement" to it). When
> you look at the submicroscopic scale, the "table" is not so much a thing as
> it is a process (or consider the timescale of eons, over which the table as
> a thing is barely a blip). At the submicroscopic scale, the table is a
> constant flux of things (electrons, quarks, etc.) flying around in all
> different directions. But these things (oftentimes conceptualized merely as
> "fields" rather than matter as such) organize in ways that have some
> consistency over time even though they are always in flux.
>
> Biological organisms provide what may be a more straightforward example
> b.c.
> there is also a constant replacement of the actual "stuff" of the organism
> (maybe true for tables too?). At the atomic level, the atoms and
> molecules that make up a person today are not the same atoms and
> molecules that made them up 10 years ago - even though that person would be
> perfectly recognizable as "the same" as before. The coherence has to do
> with
> the continued relationship between the various things that make up the
> whole.
>
> As a metaphor (not to be taken too far!), this works well for understanding
> the relational nature of meanings as processes. Thus meanings are indeed
> remade with each new situation. But it is also true that in most cases,
> they
> are remade in their own image. Okay maybe that is a little too cute, maybe
> better to say that as long as the relations between things hold (e.g.,
> between "meanings," "persons," "objects," "interests" - each of which are
> also constantly being re-made), then the meanings themselves will appear
> coherent across time. But when something starts to become re-aligned, as in
> the example of a group of people whose interests suddenly shift, then
> something "new" can grow - like a cancer (to continue in the vein of the
> metaphor of the prior paragraph).
>
> As the sociologist Andrew Abbott points out, from this perspective the
> thing
> to explain is not so much how things change (as most social scientists seem
> to think), but rather how they manage to stay the same. But, as Abbott
> notes, this question is only interesting if one rejects the Aristotelian
> notion of substance.
>
> I'm not sure where people stand on this matter, but I'm pretty sure that
> Dewey would reject the Aristotelian notion of substance. (I think Hegel
> would too, but I'm not sure about Marx or Vygotsky - anyone else know more
> about these folks?). I'd also be interested in the Santayana response to
> Dewey.
>
> -greg
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu
> >wrote:
>
> > Hi Andy,
> >
> > This is a really illustrative quote from Dewey for sure.  I see the quote
> > actually having two emphases (which would fit into his whole
> transactional
> > worldview).  The first, which I think you latch on it, seems to be that
> is
> > order for any idea to have meaning it must be attached to some symbol
> that
> > in some way can be recognized by the observer.  You can't go inside of
> the
> > head of any individual, you can only see what is there in plain view.
>  This
> > I think was Dewey's attempt to overcome dualism by suggesting mind meets
> > object in the situation itself, and that is the only thing we can
> > comprehend, and it is dangerous to go further.
> >
> > The second issue brough up by this quote, which I really struggle with,
> is
> > if the meaning of the symbol is so tied to the situation doesn't that
> mean
> > that the meaning is going to change as the situation changes.  If there
> any
> > such thing then as an artifact which maintains meaning across situaitons.
> >  If not, then isn't the concept of mediation secondary to the concept of
> > experience.  A lot of people argued with Dewey on this (Santayana comes
> to
> > mind, and I wonder if Vygotsky might have as well) - but it is a
> difficult
> > conundrum.
> >
> > Michael
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Andy Blunden
> > Sent: Thu 10/27/2011 10:12 AM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Subject: Re: [xmca] Cultural memory dewey
> >
> >
> >
> > At long last I am reading John Dewey seriously, and I am really
> > entralled and bowled over.
> >
> > His conception of "experience" is wonderful. I need time to digest it
> > before attempting to describe it, but this concept is the heart of the
> > matter. It is truly a type of Activity Theory. Just now I am reading
> > "The Pattern of Enquiry." For Dewey, knowledge is a part of the
> > situation (not something outside the world, in the head. knowledge
> > changes the world). He is talking about how ideas (concepts) originateHi
> > from situations which become problems (and when known clearly become at
> > first suggestions and then solutions). Get this:
> >
> >    "Because suggestions and ideas are of that which is not present in
> >    given existence, the meanings which they involve must be embodied in
> >    some symbol. Without some kind of symbol no idea; a meaning that is
> >    completely disembodied can not be entertained or used. Since an
> >    existence (which /is/ an existence) is the support and vehicle of a
> >    meaning and is a symbol instead of a merely physical existence only
> >    in this respect, embodied meanings or ideas are capable of objective
> >    survey and development. To "look at an idea" is not a mere literary
> >    figure of speech."
> >
> > In the context of his conception of Experience this really rounds it off.
> > And this guy is writing in the 1890s!
> > Andy
> >
> > Tony Whitson wrote:
> > > Andy,
> > >
> > > Song, as you describe, is indisputably material -- but it is not a
> > > physical thing in the same sense as a flute or a song sheet. It seems
> > > to me you make your position unnecessarily vulnerable by treating
> > > materiality as more a matter of physicality than it needs to be (cf.
> > > the baseball examples).
> > >
> > > The Talmud example brings to mind Plato's objections to recording &
> > > transmission via writing (a bit ironic, no?, from the transcriber of
> > > Socrates' dialogues), which I would never have attended to but for
> > > Derrida, in D's treatment of the traditional prioritization of speech
> > > over writing. D's argument for "grammatology" is that speech itself is
> > > fundamentally a kind of "writing" first; but in a sense that I would
> > > say is material, but not necessarily physical.
> > >
> >
> >
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> >
> >
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> >
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
> Department of Communication
> University of California, San Diego
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