Summary of core article
The
core article in this interactive Kairos
article on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) describes how the five canons of
classical rhetoric omit many things that have always been interesting about
rhetoric but have become especially prominent with today’s greater awareness of
context and ecology and with the proliferation of digital and multimodal approaches
to communication. The first step towards
building a new model is to highlight the idea of delivery, particularly the ways that different media have diversified
forms of delivery. Next, the authors
survey the ways that delivery has changed, and bringing in theorizing about
digital and electronic media introduce the concept of mediation and
remediation. From here, they expand the
traditional canons by adding in mediation,
distribution and reception. However, they argue that the expanded version
still fails to account for “complex institutional networks” (p. 12). The CHAT
model captures rhetorical activity but also adds a larger social
framework.
A challenging term: Laminated chronotope
The core
article (i.e. Prior et al, 2007) identifies laminated chronotope— as “embodied
activity-in-the-world, representational worlds, and chronotopes embedded in
material and semiotic artifacts” (19). Unfortunately,
I found this description pretty opaque. So
I did a quick web search. The Wikipedia article on “Chronotopes” points to “particular genres,
or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews
or ideologies.” This turned out to
be a pretty good definition when compared with Prior & Shipka (2003), who point
to how literate acts tie together embodied acts in the here in now with
representations involving intertextual traces of the past. In other words, all
chronotopes as embodied-representational “concrete time-place-events
deeply furrowed with, and constructed through, representations and with
representations always deeply rooted in chains of concrete historical events”
(Prior & Shipka, 2003, n.p.). Now I
understand where the descriptor “laminated” is coming from. However, as a temporary placeholder in my
mind, I prefer the idea of a knot, where a bunch of things are tied together
and assembled into a text in a given genre at one point in time. It makes sense for a complex concept like
laminated chronotope to have a compound descriptor, but it is a double-edged
sword—you trade simplicity for uniqueness, I guess.
(Personal photo of "Untitled," by Ruth Asawa, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)
The question of mediation
“You may have noticed that mediation is not on this list. What happened to it? In fact, we did not drop it. From a cultural-historical perspective and adopting James Wertsch’s (1991) terms, we take mediated activity and mediated agency as fundamental units of analysis. In those terms, everything in the three maps (literate activity, functional systems, and chronotopes) is about mediation” (22)
I
have problems with this sweeping “everything is about mediation” move. I find the concept of mediation to be quite
productive. While Prior is not saying
that everything is mediating, by not theorizing more precisely what is
mediating, the concept of mediation ceases to be particularly productive. For me that is a shame. When discussing the concept of mediation, on
pp. 6-7, Prior makes a case for its importance.
Now I am not sure how it can be built into the model because Prior is
right about the fact that mediation is not one thing, but the interaction of
multiple things. For example, genre is
mediating (Spinuzzi, 2003, p. 115), and genre can be seen as activity or practices (“social action,” as Miller, 1984 would have it) that is laminated, produced and distributed,
institutionally-situated, serving
specific communities, and so on. A
medium, such as television, for example, could be seen as mediating—though arguably
its mediation works through its diverse genres.
As a comprehensive theory to replace the classical canons that are
legitimately argued as insufficient, CHAT offers a compelling alternative. I am, however, disappointed that the concept
of mediation is not more specifically situated within the theory. In a sense Prior is correct in that the whole
system works together to generate symbolic action that serves a mediating role
in every society. At the same time, I
would argue that the moment of mediation, the interface that most precisely
functions as providing mediation is not distributed everywhere in the model.
Selected articles
Kairos and Community Building
Sheridan-Rabideau’s
focus in this article is to explore the literate activities of a particular
organization, Artists Now, in their efforts to put a billboard in their
community. The political, economic and material obstacles for Artists Now
illustrate ecological aspects to rhetoric that are not described in traditional
models but can be explored product through a CHAT approach.
Remediating Science: A Case Study of Socialization
Lunsford’s
article looks at how scholarly communication in the sciences is changing,
particularly in the growth of databases as archival collections of raw
scientific data. As Lunsford says, “Because
these repositories are typically web-based… they represent information in rich
ways; they can be peer-reviewed; they can be available openly or by
subscription; and, importantly, they can be accessed by the same audiences that
are also accessing the electronic versions of scientific articles.” However, the development of such databases
suggest shift in the way that science is communicated and stored. Lunsford
suggests that this remediation of print journals may “represent a clear shift
in scientific memory practices” for scientists. Lunsford explores
ways that such remediation in scientific communication may be changing the
positioning of other elements in the complex CHAT network, such as audience,
rhetor and other members of the network.
CHAT connections
This
semester I am also taking an independent study that I’ve chosen to call
Discourse Theory. Originally I wanted to
take Discourse Analysis, but that never worked out, and my independent study
version of the course also fell through.
As I reflected on what I really wanted to learn about discourse, however,
I decided that I really wanted to learn how “discourse” has been used as a
theoretical concept in critical and social theory as well as linguistics. Some of the authors that I wanted to read
were Foucault and Latour and I also wanted to explore CHAT. I put Foucault and Latour on my reading list,
but noted that I was reading these authors in Theories of Network. I put CHAT
on my list, but mistakenly placed it under Spinizzi, probably because I was a
little confused about the differences between Activity Theory and CHAT. For my independent study, I am reading
Bakhtin, some sociologists like Giddens and Bourdieu, and linguistics discourse
theorists. But I am pleased with how I
can use the two courses together to get a much fuller overview of many of the theorists
that I’m interested in. That’s why I was
particularly interested in the reference list provided in this issue of Kairos.
Not only does it have some of the readings that I already have on my
list, but it is giving me a few more. In
addition, it is reinforcing connections that I am already making. In some ways, graduate school is like
collecting baseball cards—I keep looking for important players to add to my
collection.
Here is a
list of some scholars from the reference list that have been on my scholarly reading
wish list for a while and also showed up in the CHAT references.
- Bakhtin (already own one of his books)
- Bazerman (already own one of his books)
- Casanave, Christine Pearson
- Eco, Umberto (already own Kant & The Platypus)
- Engestrom, Yrjo
- Goffman, Erving
- Graff, Harvey (already own book)
- Kress, Gunther
- Latour (of course, we plan to read very soon).
- Ong, Walter. (already own book)
- Prior, Paul. (1998). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy
References
Lunsford, K.J. (2007). Remediating science: A case study of
socialization. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://technorhetoric.net/11.3/binder.html?topoi/prior-et-al/index.html
Prior,
P., & Shipka, J. (2003). Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of
literate activity. In C. Bazerman & D.d Russell (Eds.),Writing
selves, writing societies: Research from activity perspectives (pp.180-238).
Fort Collins: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity.
Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/prior/
Prior, P., Solberg, J., Berry, P.,
Bellwoar, H., Chewning, B., Lunsford, K.J., . . . Walker, J.R. (2007). Re-situating
and re-mediating the canons: A Cultural-Historical remapping of rhetorical
activity. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://technorhetoric.net/11.3/binder.html?topoi/prior-et-al/index.html
Sheridan-Rabideau, M.P. (2007). Kairos and community building: Implications
for literacy researchers. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/11.3/topoi/prior-et-al/about/abstract_mpsr.html
Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A
sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
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