Gee & Consciousness Re: [xmca] When does an unbroken action begin and end?

[Tony Whitson <twhitson@UDel.Edu>]

I wasn't following the thread from its initial concerns, which is why I 
hesitated to say anything, not knowing what was the problematic motivating 
the question about consciousnes.

So I don't know if this is relevant, but in case it is: In Gee's section 
on Acquisition and Learning (which I think he's said more about in other 
places) in the 3d edition of SOCIAL LINGUISTICS & LITERACIES, 
consciousness is significant in learnng, following Pinker's definition of 
learning (p. 170 in Gee's 3d ed.) as "a process that involves conscious 
knowledge gained through teaching."

If this is relevant, it can be pursued in Gee's work.

 On Fri, 21 Aug 2009, Jay Lemke wrote:

> Quietly jetlagged in my study.
>
> Thanks, Tony, for the Peirce. How well aware he is of the loose nature of our 
> use of "consciousness" as concept or word, and how thoughtful about the 
> different aspects or levels, according to his first- second- third- nesses.
>
> I tend to take his primisense as the felt-being-becoming, the still-here, the 
> animal-aliveness; a sort of phenomenological primitive. It survives in 
> altered states of consciousness, where the self-other opposition (as felt) 
> disappears, and certainly where the process-means-medium awareness is gone.
>
> This primary sense is I think the ground of our construction of continuity of 
> being (starting with our own), and of subjective duree (Bergson's 
> sophisticated version of subjective time sense). It lapses in true 
> "unconsciousness", e.g. under anesthesia. What happens in sleep seems messier 
> (some mixing of near-consciousness and physical non-conscious continuity 
> registering in the brain?).
>
> But I am guessing that in the present discussion of actions beginning and 
> ending, it is Peirce's second two aspects of consciousness, building on the 
> first, that are relevant. Altersense insofar as any notion of passing control 
> requires a self-other consciousness. And mediatedness insofar as the joint 
> construction of activity in which control passes requires, at least from time 
> to time (e.g. when corrections or clarifications are needed, as pointed out 
> famously by the Conversation Analysis people, and I guess deriving from Sacks 
> -- and they were originally in ethnomethodology taking about all action and 
> not just speech or conversation), awareness of the process and how it's 
> working or not working.
>
> I do like the idea that the unit of action should be defined by more than 
> just subserving a common goal or function in an activity. I am not sure how 
> well a CA-like definition (or Bakhtinian one, though I think B. borrows his 
> definition from Voloshinov and does not always stick to it) of exchange of 
> control, seeing activity unfold as A-B-A-B-A-B works. As I wrote before, real 
> activity, and conversation, is messier. Not all cultures have rules that 
> require one speaker at a time. As Mike just noted, our own utterances are 
> often completed by others, and we may not have quite got to a fully specific 
> meaning of what we were the in process of saying until we or someone else 
> manages to get to a point that we can consider a completion of that utterance 
> or meaning. Many utterances, at the level of meaning-units, are jointly 
> produced (and not just for children by caregivers!).
>
> A lot of co-action among participants in an activity is simultaneous, rather 
> than sequentially exchanged or dialogical. It's not as often "your turn" as 
> it "help me do it now". My favorite prototype of joint activity is two people 
> try to carry a sofa down a staircase. Control is more shared and coordinated 
> than passed back and forth. At least it seems to work better if it is. You 
> can get some exchange layered on top of the share simultaneity, but without 
> the latter, you're courting trouble! :-)
>
> This is why I prefer a notion of action defined as a functional unit, 
> including multi-functional, rather than as an "intentional" unit. It is not 
> what I do in order to achieve goal X. It is all that is done which does help 
> achieve outcome X. But outcome X is then always part of, moving us toward, 
> some longer-term further outcomes, including emergent, not yet well 
> determined ones. The role of consciousness here is mediational, an aspect of 
> the way we participate in these actions and larger activities, that enables 
> the cumulation, i.e. that enables us to have the sense of how the action 
> contributes to the activity, and enables us to act in such a way that it in 
> fact does do so. It thus also enables us to sense when it is not doing so and 
> to try something else!
>
> This seems pretty close to what Peirce is talking about as the consciousness 
> of thirdness (Medisense, mediational-process-awareness).
>
> JAY.
>
> Jay Lemke
> Professor
> Educational Studies
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
>
>
>
>
> On Aug 20, 2009, at 7:12 PM, Mike Cole wrote:
>
> > Its often not clear to me, either, tony. "Influence" (to site a related
> > discussion) may appear to be linear but i think that idea hides the
> > underlying dynamic processes. Jay's comments are relevant here. So is
> > Dewey's critique of the reflex concept. You have an active,
> > living organism, "doing something."  a "stimulus" smacks her/him in the
> > mouth/eye/skin. That "SEEMS" to be the influence that gets the eye to 
> > blink
> > or the mouth to water or......, but what "the" stimulus" is depends a 
> > whole
> > lot on what the person is doing. "The" stimulus
> > is not entirely specifiable beyond the ongoing action/activity of 
> > individual
> > Andy refers to.
> >
> > These issues touch on one that I think about often: ""I forgot the word I
> > wanted to say, and thought, unembodied, returns,to the hall of
> > shadows."--e.g. the thought is completed in the word.  ----- I keep 
> > thinking
> > that the word/reduced-thought enters the world and is or isnot taken up, 
> > and
> > either way, the "meaning" keeps changes and when it "comes back" to you, 
> > and
> > you think about "it" , "it" is no longer the same thing. "The tought" is
> > notne's own, control has changed.
> >
> > family calls.
> > mike
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, 21 Aug 2009, Andy Blunden wrote:
> > >
> > > Mike Cole wrote:
> > > > > Andy--
> > > > > Don't speeches and texts "pass control to and from an individual"??
> > > >
> > > > Yes, it's obvious when you're talking about discourse, but
> > > > what about the more general domain of social action? I am
> > > > thinking that the idea applies in just the same way, even if
> > > > not quite so clearly. So "action" begins and ends when you
> > > > get/lose control of the action from/to another person.
> > > >
> > > > On consciousness, let me think now ...
> > > > Andy
> > >
> > > "control" seems not so clear to me. What about the dialogic character of 
> > > my
> > > own <sic> train of thought? What about when a novelist or screenwriter 
> > > pens
> > > a line of dialogue for a character, but the fictitious character herself
> > > fights back and, ultimately, refuses to say that line? Who's in control?
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > xmca mailing list
> > > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> > _______________________________________________
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
 are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                  -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca