Chronotopic Lamination: Tracing the Contours of Literate Activity

This chapter explores the chronotopic lamination (Bakhtin, 1981; Prior, 1998) of writers’ literate activity—the dispersed, fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together in trajectories of literate action along with the ways multiple activity footings are held and managed. Twenty-one academic writers (undergraduates, graduates, and professors) participated in interviews where they were asked to draw and then discuss two representations of their processes in writing a particular piece. To further explore writers' multiple streams of activity and the ways texts mediate that activity, we also asked participants to share drafts, final texts, notes, annotated readings or other material they used in their writing. We focus here on four case studies that illustrate our findings. The interviews showed that the writers’ work crossed institutional settings, especially mixing home, community, and discipline, and thus was deeply laminated (multimotivational and multi-mediated). In particular, we found that writers actively engage in what we call ESSP’s (environment selecting and structuring practices), which not only lead to their texts but also contribute to the distributed, delicate, and partly intentional management of affect, sense, identity, and consciousness. A psychology professor reports to us that when she is revising an article for publication she works at home and does the family laundry. She sets the buzzer on the dryer so that approximately every 45 minutes to an hour she is pulled away from the text to tend the laundry downstairs. As she empties the dryer, sorts and folds, reloads, her mind wanders a bit and she begins to recall things she wanted to do with the text, begins to think of new questions or ideas, things that she had not been recalling or thinking of as she focused on the text when she was upstairs minutes before. She perceives this break from the text, this opportunity to reflect, as a very productive part of the process. In some respects, this story is a familiar one in culturalhistorical activity theory (CHAT), a tale of how tools (external aids) mediate activity, altering the flow of behavior. The dryer-buzzer is acting here, in one sense, as an externalized memory system (like such classical examples as a notch on a stick, a knot in a rope, the words on a page), reminding the professor, in effect, to take a break. However, there are other elements of this story that we believe are less familiar and that deserve serious theoretical and methodological attention. Here we see two activity systems—the domestic activity of the home, the disciplinary activity of the workplace—becoming to some degree interwoven, and each is thereby altered. The gendered work (with doing laundry often still associated with “women’s work”) of family household chores is routinely blended into a scientific/disciplinary activity. The psychology paper is revised as the family laundry is done.