Dear Xmca-ites—
Toward the end of the month I will begin teaching a grad course on mediational theories of mind. I would love suggestions for interesting readings. We will be looking in a sort of “McLuhanesque” way at the affordances of different kinds of mediators in human action/activity/mind.
So,

• language and thought
• writing
• film
• music
• tv
• rituals
• games

………
Starting with early 20th century writers of general familiarity to members of this list, I have been thinking about including such works as Cszikentmihalyi, “meaning of things,” Turkle’s recent “evocative objects,” and perhaps something on mediated behavior in large groups such as “the wisdom of crowds.”
Any and all suggestions warmly welcomed. So much going on its hard to even think about how to begin to think about this upcoming fall!!
mike

XMCA list members volunteered a panoply of suggestions. In one response, Mike wrote:

…. Lots of good sugggestions there, some of which I am already considering or have decided upon.(olson, where is your review?)

My mind this morning is going to burke and dramatism, ritual, etc.

On a slightly different topic I attach John Shotter’s interesting review of herb clark on joint, mediated, activity, as the unity of analaysis in the study of language/communication. The review lays out a really principle difference in the directions used for adopting this unit of analysis.

I am undecided between raw bakhtin and a mixture of short originals and explications by clark and holquist on chronotopes and dialogism.

Remember, I am teaching in a comm dept, not an ed department: both easier
and harder.

mike

I want to add “genres” to the list. Obviously Mike has a lot of sorting, ordering, and selecting to do, lest his undergrads get buried in the bewildering array of mediations and approaches to mediation. But the addition of “genre” complicates matters not only by piling on, but also I think by perhaps raising questions about the diverse matters already on the pile.

First, as to genre. By this, I mean the idea of genre derived from Bakhtin and developed in the North American genre school discussed by Spinuzzi in

• Spinuzzi, Clay. Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
• —. “Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power (Book).” Mind, Culture, and Activity 4, no. 3 (1997): 210-13.

Here are some other articles (including from MCA) dealing with genre (there’s also an article dealing with genre in MCA by Ritva Engestrom from before the online archives, which I haven’t seen):

• Artemeva, Natasha. “Book Review: Between School and Work: New Perspectives on Transfer and Boundary-Crossing. Edited by Terttu Tuomi-Grohn and Yrjo Engestrom.” Technical Communication Quarterly 16, no. 3 (2007): 360-65.
• Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition, Culture, Power. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1995.
• —. “Rethinking Genre from a Sociocognitive Perspective.” Written Communication 10, no. 4 (1993): 475-509.
• Berkenkotter, Carol, and Doris Ravotas. “Genre as Tool in the Transmission of Practice over Time and across Professional Boundaries.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 4, no. 4 (1997): 256-74.
• Freedman, Aviva, and Graham Smart. “Navigating the Current of Economic Policy: Written Genres and the Distribution of Cognitive Work at a Financial Institution.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 4, no. 4 (1997): 238-55.
• Hicks, Deborah. “Learning as a Prosaic Act.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 3, no. 2 (1996): 102-18.
• —. “Self and Other in Bakhtin’s Early Philosophical Essays: Prelude to a Theory of Prose Consciousness.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7, no. 3 (2000): 227-42.
• Russell, David R. “Writing and Genre in Higher Education and Workplaces: A Review of Studies That Use Cultural–Historical Activity Theory.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 4, no. 4 (1997): 224-37.

In his book (one of three by MIT Press that I have reviewed for MCA [too-long review MS submitted last month]), Spinuzzi proposes a methodology of “genre tracing,” in which genres, operating within “genre ecologies,” are seen to operate across the levels of operations, actions, and activities within activity systems.

Do “genres” fit in with the list alongside “… film, music, tv, rituals …”? Genre would seem to fit with “language,” but it would seem that speech, rather than language, would belong with film, music, tv, and rituals. Speech (like TV) would seem to be a medium of communication, whereas language (like genre) would seem to be like form in which mediation is ordered. Of course, film, music, tv, and rituals can also be analyzed as matters of ordering form (i.e., as genres); but once chronotopes, dialogism, and dramatism are thrown into the mix (as well as the diverse and valuable suggestions from several other members of the list), it seems to me that we are surveying different sorts of things.

I think Mike’s reference to Shotter is suggestive: Tools, signs, and artifacts are often referred to as things that people use, and people make, and people make for use — including their use in mediating interaction. Shotter’s point is that the Wittgensteinian rules, language games, and forms of life, etc. are not artifacts (pace Clark) in the sense that people construct or make them for their use in interaction. Rather, it is in our participation in the forms of interaction (the forms that mediate our interaction) that we ourselves come to form, as human beings. As Peirce wrote, instead of saying that “thought is in us,” we should rather say that “we are in thought.”

This makes a big difference for mediational theories of mind. An affinity with CHAT can be seen in the idea that Activity Systems come to form through emergence from goal-oriented action within the social function of the activity system — i.e., it is not the case as a rule that the goal of action is construction of the activity system (which would be more in line with Clark’s theory).

I don’t think Shotter would say that people never “deliberately contrive” their coordinations (at any rate I wouldn’t say that, or that people never “deliberately contrive” the design of an activity system) — just that this is not the normal case.

A quick way to think about these things: We can think of speech or film as a medium that we can use; and we can think of genres, practices, activities as things that we participate in. Our interaction (and our “minding”) is mediated by things we use, as well as the forms of practice, interaction, etc. in which we participate. It seems there is a difference. We can “use” a genre, but we act intelligibly within genres whether we are “using” them deliberately or not; and if we are still “using” a genre, even if unconsciously, a genre is not, in general, something that was consciously devised for use in the same way as, say, a telephone.

Lurking beneath all this is the difference between info*mation, in the cybernetic sense, and in*formation, in the older sense of “information” as the noun form of a verb, referrring to the action in which someone or something (someone’s character, consciousness, a concept, etc.) is formed in part by being in-formed by something or somebody else.

As when you translate a cliché from one language to another where it sounds fresh and new, when you go from the mathematics to English,
meanings appear that simply are not actually there. I am still trying to figure out what “actually” actually means.

I commented:

“Actually” is — actually — a very useful term, it seems to me. John Deely has a book in which he argues for a “semiotist” alternative to both realism and idealism (classically conceived). While I find Deely’s arguments convincing, the term “semiotist” is meaningless for anyone who is not acquainted with semiosis as understood since Peirce. I use “actualist” to introduce this stance, using it for basically the same thing Deely means by “semiotist.”

Jenny Langer-Osuna then asked:

In the spirit of Mike Cole’s request for us novice “lurkers” to ask more questions when these threads go over our heads, I’ll pipe up.

In layman’s terms, what in the world do you mean by an “actualist”? How is that the same/similar to a “semiotist”? In the sense that semiotics deals with the mediating action of signs, I am “actually” having a hard time placing “actually” there…

A quick preview of my answer here, which will be elaborated later: Jenny, you’re exactly right to recognize “the mediating action of signs” as what it’s all about. It is in semiosic action that the world exists — actually — not as entities recognized as “real” only insofar as their existence is independent of semiosis, nor as a world in which ideas exist divorced from the “real,” and apart from semiosic actuality. I don’t intend this to be different from Deely’s semiotism (although of course he might find differences); I’m just using a word that I think can begin to have meaning for people before they know anything about triadic semiosis.

As Peirce observed:

It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe — not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as “the truth” — that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs. (CP 5.448)

This is an ontological matter, more than a matter of epistemology or cognition.

Deely, John N. The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics: The Quasi-Error of the External World with a Dialogue between a ‘Semiotist’ and a ‘Realist’. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2003.

Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1866-1913/1931-1958.

1. Bruner and tools for thought

In the toolforthoughts article, computer technology is the focus of discussion about tools in relation to thought. Noting Levi-Strauss’ observation “that totems (e.g., animals and other natural objects) were not chosen because they were good to eat, but because they were good to think with,” Paul Dillon implicitly raised a question of tools for thought as something more general than computers in the world we live in.

Other examples are suggested in Peter Dow’s account of a curriculum development project headed by Jerome Bruner (circa 1965):

Concern with teaching about technology had been a persistent [p. 87] theme from the beginning at ESI Social Studies. …. Bruner linked technology to the development of man’s conceptual powers. “What is most characteristic of any kind of tool-using,” he wrote, “is not the tools themselves, but rather the program that guides their use. It is in this broader sense that tools take on their proper meaning as amplifiers of human capacities and implementers of human activity.” ….

Early efforts to define the technology unit and translate these general notions into effective classroom materials bogged down in debates over how broadly to define the term tool. Should the discussion of tools be restricted to physical objects, or is a logarithm a tool? Is the Magna Carta a tool? Is E = mc² a tool? Should the technology materials include perspectives from disciplines as diverse as mathematics and history? One of the difficulties in trying to construct a unit on this topic was the lack of a clear conceptual structure for defining what technology is and for considering its social implications. Here, as with the other topics, some of the most interesting issues and questions fell outside of the framework of established academic categories. … (Dow, 1991, pp. 86-7)

2. Peirce, thought, & signs

Schaffer and Clinton draw from Latour’s strategy for correcting what Latour sees as the problem of treating the human and the non-human asymmetrically. It seems to me, though, that what Latour sees as a problem arises from an assumed Cartesian dualism. The problem does not arise, in the first place, within a Peircean perspective that does not presume that kind of dualism between the human and the natural, or the human and the artificial.

Peirce recognized the world as constituted semiosically, with humans ourselves emerging within our participation in the semiosis that was well underway before we got here. Peirce understood the entire universe as “perfused with signs”:

It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe — not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, … that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs (Peirce, CP 5.448; cf. Whitson, 2007, p. 322 ).

Peirce says “all thought is in signs,” understanding “thought” as as an activity of the world (not just humans), and “signs” also in a sense that’s not limited to human communication. From Whitson (2007, pp. 296-7):

As distinguished from semiology [i.e., in the tradition of Saussure -- including Greimas and Latour], as well as earlier historic forms of semiotics [e.g., with the Stoics], semiotics following the work of C. S. Peirce is today, first and foremost, the study of semiosis, or the activity of triadic sign-relations, recognizing that

the whole of nature, not just our experience of it, but the whole of nature considered in itself and on the side of its own and proper being is the subject of semiosis — the process and product, that is, of an action of signs coextensive with and constructive of the actual world as well as the world of experience and imagination. (Deely 1994: 187-188)

As Peirce observed, ‘To say … that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs’ (CP 5.253). Once the semiosic character of thought is recognized, thought itself is understood in a more general sense, such that

Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. … Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. (CP 4.551)

What exactly is it that Peirce says is ‘really there’ in the physical world, as undeniably as the colors and the shapes of objects? What Peirce is referring to is the semiosic action of triadic sign-relations:

It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force … either takes place between two subjects … or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by ‘semiosis’ I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a coöperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs. (CP 5.484; original emphasis)

What, then, are tools, or toolforthoughts? Are they different from signs, species of signs, or what?

3. Newton, signs, and tools

Among the problems tackled by Isaac Newton, over the course of his varied career, was the problem of preserving England’s currency against counterfeiting and “clipping” (filing off precious metal from the edges of coins). As head of the Royal Mint, Newton oversaw torture to induce confessions, capital punishment, and even having offenders drawn and quartered to protect the value of the royal currency.

Newton’s mint began the practice of making coins with ridges around the edge so that clipping could be easily detected; and also, at that time, actually engraving the edge with the words “DECUS ET TUTAMEN” — a phrase that might be literally translated as “an ornament and a safeguard,” but which we might also recognize as an engraving that is announcing itself as “both a sign and a tool.”

4. Of tools and signs (umbrella example)

Let’s try this example: Suppose I know that you always check the weather on your computer on your new iPhone before you go out for lunch. Today I notice you picked up your umbrella on your way out the door. Without checking the weather for myself, I take my own umbrella with me when I go out. From a Peircean perspective, my action of taking my umbrella is one of the three terms in a triadic sign-relation: My action is an interpretant determined by your action (the representamen), interpreted as a sign of possible rain (the object-term in this triad). Here the umbrella participates in the activity of triadic sign-relations.

When we get outside, either of us might be preoccupied with holding our umbrella in the right position so it doesn’t get blown inside-out by the wind. Now our concern is with the umbrella in its tool-relations — or simply its instrumental use as a tool for keeping dry.

And, as they say, maybe “sometimes an umbrella is just an umbrella.”

There seems no reason for trying to sort things into categories, as being either “tools” or “signs” — the question, rather, would be whether we are presently concerned with something as it participates in the activity of sign-relations, or as it functions within tool-relations.

What do you think?

Deely, John N. New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought, Toronto Studies in Semiotics;. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Dow, Peter B. Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik Era. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1866-1913/1931-1958.

Shaffer, David Williamson, and Katherine A. Clinton. “Toolforthoughts: Reexamining Thinking in the Digital Age.” Mind, Culture, And Activity 13, no. 4 (2007): 283-300.

Whitson, James Anthony. “Education à la Silhouette: The Need for Semiotically-Informed Curriculum Consciousness.” Semiotica 164, no. 1/4 (2007): 235-329.