[Xmca-l] When does an apprentice become an inventor?

[Andy Blunden]

David, collaborative projects are generally something people join rather 
than create, just like one usually learns rather than invents, the words 
of your native language, but sometimes a person does add a new word to 
their language. I wouldn't see any point in drawing a line between those 
two "types of word," so long as you recognise that the general idea of a 
language is that it exists independently of any individual. The same 
goes for projects. It is precisely the absence of any sharp line between 
something which is simply interpersonal, whose dynamics are easily 
grasped by anyone with life-experience, and those great social projects 
which are enscribed in our language, which makes the notion of 
collaborative project useful for analysis of social formations.

It is rarely appropriate to ascribe psychological concepts to projects, 
but there are concepts which span the psychological and the 
cultural-historical domains which are useful in understanding projects. 
"Concept" is one of those concepts; we talk about the "Newtonian concept 
of momentum" without meaning to make any claim about the psychology of 
Isaac Newton, but rather refer to something implicit in certain 
well-established scientific forms of  action. At the same time a teacher 
might say: "Johnny's concept of momentum still includes the friction 
acting against the object" - a concept manifested uniquely in Johnny's 
actions in Physics lessons.
The "temporal" issue you pose, David, is one of development: projects 
have a life-course which passes through various recognisable phases just 
as does an individual human life.

Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


David Kellogg wrote:
> ... when
> does a collaborative project shift from being interpersonal to being
> social, and what does this mean for the role of consciousness, volition,
> ethics/politics and whether we divide the latter with a slash or with a
> dash?
>
> ...
>
> Collaborative projects, by definition, cannot have have a single guiding
> consciousness, or at least cannot have a single psychology, else they cease
> to be collaborative. But at a certain point they also cease to have several
> different consciousnesses, and attain a generalized, abstract consciousness
> (Andy calls this a consciousness a concept; I think of it as a potential
> culture). The problem is precisely a temporal one: when?
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>   
>