Contentions

I contend that fundamental to human interaction is narration: attentiveness to how stories are related. Stories are for sorting and storing.

A while ago (1996), I explored recursivity and narrativity. My starting point was the ability to ask questions (and learn from one's bodily reactions).

Pedagogical situations are sensory. They are also interpersonal. Because they are sensory this makes even learning by oneself interpersonal. Egocentric speech is like a dialogue between the senses. In Vygotsky's and Luria's experiments, children placed in problem-solving situations that were slightly too difficult for them displayed egocentric speech. One could consider these as self-induced metadiscursive moments. The self in crisis will disassociate and one's questionning becomes the object of a question.

Not only is the human self as a metabeing both fracturable and affiliable in itself, it is also prone to narrativity. That is, the human self will project its self-making onto the world in order to generate stories from sequences and to break stories into recombinant sequences. Its operations on signs are material practices with consequences for world-making.

The fracturable affiliable self calls for reproductive models suitable to the interactions of multi-sensate beings, models that render dyads dialectical, questionable, answerable. Narrativity understood dialectically does not merely mean making sequences or strings of events into stories but also stories into things, strung together for more stories. From such an understanding, emerge non-dyadic narratives of reproduction, narratives where a thing-born transforms itself into an event, comes to understand itself as a process.

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/S6D.HTM

I am intrigued about how in 1996 my considerations connected a human self that could be modelled as a split subject (the fracturable self) with one modelled as an (anaclytic) subject with the potential for connections (the affiliable self). Both arose from the take on narration (and of course exposure to psychoanalytic theory) as both an engine of analysis and a motor for social relations. Yet dealing with language and feedback, I was focussed on storage and sorting (machine operations) and not at all concerned with networks, their genesis and maintenance. I failed to theorize an economy. What I gained remains to be told. Always the subject of a certain rattrapage.

And so for day 1354
28.08.2010