[Xmca-l] Re: vygotsky's theory and symbolic interactionism

[Joseph Gilbert]

The “true mainsprings of cultured man’s actions" may be unconscious to him but nevertheless are there. We experience a sense, subliminally, of how we are affected by the things that make up our world simply by the effect on us of the sounds of our words for those things. Vocal sounds are body language and words refer to specific things. We experience the emotive effects of our vocal sounds at the same instant as we are thinking about the things to which we refer with those sounds. Consequently, we associate to effects of the sounds with the things, even though the effects are a result of the sounds, not the things. In this culturally-specific way, we receive our world view. We gain  a sense of how to proceed from how we seem to affected by our world. It’s all about survival, as one should know from science. Our notion of what actions constitute survival-oriented behavior is the result of the interaction between our assessment of ourselves (our self-image) and the world-view of our native culture-language. In order to change human behavior, we must change human culture and in order to do that, we must change language. “In the beginning was the word…..”.

		Joseph Gilbert

On Apr 1, 2014, at 5:14 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> Tom, so far as I know, the term "false consciousness" was invented by feminists in the 1970s and was never used by Marx, and I don't think the concept is consistent with his ideas, as expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach which you quoted, for example.
> Andy
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> 
> 
> Tom Richardson wrote:
>> ... In the first place, it should be noted that Marx, like Spinoza and later
>> Freud, believed that most of what men consciously think is "false"
>> consciousness, is ideology and rationalization; that the true mainsprings
>> of man's actions are unconscious to him. 
>