ABSTRACT
Contexting-the present participle of the old English verb “to context” in the sense of “to weave together”—might have been a more apt title for this chapter had it not been for the fact that it is (nearly) obsolete today. It would have been more apt because the main point of the present chapter is that in talking, conversationalists not only produce topics but also the very situation that they are said to be in-a mathematics class, an interview, a lecture, and so forth. That is, in producing texts, conversationalists also produce contexts (in the modern usage), and, in talking, they weave the two together. For Aristotle, logos as speech makes something to be seen; in fact, logos lets us see something from itself (Heidegger 1977b). But something, a figure, can be seen only against some (unseen, indistinct) ground, which is the source and condition for seeing. Figure and ground are created simultaneously in seeing, in the same way that text and context are created in speaking. In Chapter 1, I point out how Connor, the other students in his class, and their teacher come together in a particular building that they call their school to do schooling. But schools, as institutions, do not exist like boxes into which we walk. If there is nobody else around and we walk into a school, there is nothing to be observed that contributes to the reproduction and transformation of cultural knowledge, the purpose for which schooling has evolved as a human activity in its own right. Schooling comes to life when people act and interact in particular ways: some as students, others as teachers, and still others as administrators. As part of their everyday life, these people interact and communicate. As they talk “business” (mathematics, science, history, English, grammar), they do the business of talk; and they produce the very business that contextualizes them in an activity. That is, social life does not constitute a box: “Through their actions in real places and under real and quite specific conditions of action, social actors instantiate those elusive and invisible structures of social science lore” (Boden 1994: 13). We make institutions in institutionally relevant talkingmuch as the way we lay the proverbial garden path in walking. In Fragment 1.1c, we hear the teacher ask a question about something that those present (“we”) have said a group was about. Connor accountably displays that he is attending, first by orienting his gaze to the speaker, his teacher, then by looking down in the direction of the objects at his feet recognizably grouped because they all appear on the same sheet of paper, then by placing
his hand on the object. By asking what she means, Connor makes available for everyone present to notice not only that he has been attending to his teacher’s talk, but also that he is trying to understand. His question is an account of his attending-an engagement in and a production of an instant of schooling. In her question, the teacher asks Connor to do something; to name what “that group” is about. In his response, Connor both accountably responds and assists the teacher in identifying what is needed to move this lesson along. But in this, both not only ask about “what that group is about” and what the other means by “what that group is about,” but they also contribute to making a lesson that others can recognize as a lesson in geometry. That is, through their accountable actions-here talk and gestures-the members in this setting contribute to the production of this lesson, which is a concrete realization of schooling generally, and of schooling in this building more specifically. In the process, the participants create the facticity of this lesson such that they and others can report it as an actual event that has happened in the here and now of that school, identifiable in its specificity, for example, by the date and time stamp on the video.
