[Xmca-l] Re: Mediating Activity and Mediated Activity

[Greg Mcverry]

I would have to agree with Andy on the co-evolution of the tools. To
separate one as developing phylogenetically as ontogenetically seems false.
Could one argue that agriculture was a pre-cursor to formal writing systems
but sign systems evolved as a form of communication long before? I am not a
cultural anthropologist. I really do not know if there has been a writing
system developed in a hunting and gathering culture.

Yet that does not mean those same cultures were not ripe with sign systems
and meaning makings.

I think the mediation and differentiation of tools coevolving is even more
stark when we consider the age of the web. For the first 25 years of the
web the people building the web were also doing their own identity work.
People that hung out on the the Well, Usenets, chat rooms. xmca listservs,
etc were defining the tools in a way to help define themselves. Here is
agreat piece by Ben Werdmuller reflecting on how his tool development could
not be separated from his own ontological development:
https://words.werd.io/we-are-the-monkeys-of-rum-70f81d4a02df#.n0x23ugom

In terms of Beyonce. Whether you call it a mediating activity or a mediated
activity. I am not sure it matters. The point is to be a force. For those
not in the states her latest release has been seen as a call to women of
color. Her Super Bowl performance was both celebrated and vilified.

I haven't heard Lemonade yet ( I suffer from severe pop culture deficit)
but I hear it getting talked about all over the web. I wonder how Hegel
would think of something like the web where the culture is both affected by
market pressures but not limited to any one national identity. Is the web
the world spirit?

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 8:44 PM Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I think the evidence is in that speech and labour (i.e.,
> tool-use) co-evolved, but writing came a whole epoch later.
> I do not think it is a sustainable "developmentalist" point
> of view that a form of activity can first be differentiated
> and then be mediated: the mediation and the differentiation
> co-evolve (so to speak). That's the whole point.
>
> On my update to:
>
> https://www.academia.edu/4781886/From_where_did_Vygotsky_get_his_Hegelianism
>
> I never claimed that Vygotsky only got his Hegel through
> Marx: his knowledge of Hegel was mediated through a number
> of sources (including Lenin and Engels and probably
> Plekhanov, followers of Deborin and Lewin). The correction
> you referred to was my admission that the passage you drew
> my attention to in HDHMF I had overlooked in my catalogue,
> and that it had to be included with the one or two other
> allusions which seem to have come from a reading of the
> section of Hegel's Subjective Spirit named "Psychology".
> Someone, c. 1931, drew his attention to these passages.
> There are other passages of The Subjective Spirit which
> would have been of great interest to Vygotsky and would
> certainly have been appropriated if he had ever read them,
> but he hadn't, far less the Logic (though he had studied
> Lenin's Annotations on the Logic) or the Phenomenology,
> which no Marxist or Psychologist read in the period of his
> lifetime.
>
> Is it time yet, David, for you to make a correction to your
> claim that the Vygotsky archive would eventually turn up
> Vygotsky's annotations on the Phenomenology?
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://home.mira.net/~andy
> http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making
>
> On 3/05/2016 9:00 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> > Andy:
> >
> > You and I both come out of the pugilistic left, and
> > we live in a country where socks are considered formal
> > apparel. So I imagine that no question mark is required to
> > start a discussion; nor pulling of punches to finish one.
> >
> > I think I made the case that the distinction was pretty
> > useful, at least to Beyoncé fans--if not, see Vygotsky's
> > conclusion to Chapter Two of HDHMF, where he points out
> > that the precise nature of the relationship of signs and
> > tools needs to be worked out yet, but in any case that
> > relation is indirect; it MUST pass through a
> > super-category he calls MEDIATING activities. For YOU and
> > for HEGEL, all activity can be said to be both mediating
> > and mediated, but this is a non-developmental point of
> > view: for a developmentalist, one must perforce be
> > differentiated first. Phylogenetically, it seems likely
> > that tools were differentiated before signs, but
> > ontogenetically it is usually the other way around.
> >
> > What really IS academic in the extreme is your
> > own distinction between "really quoting" Hegel and
> > quoting Hegel in a footnote to Marx academic. It's also
> > quite unprovable. By the way, this might be a good place
> > to acknowledge the corrections you have recently made to
> > your assertion that every single Hegel reference you have
> > found in Vygotsky's work can be found verbatim in Marx.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Macquarie University
> >
> > On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 12:00 PM, Andy Blunden
> > <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
> >
> >     I didn't see a question mark anywhere David, but (for
> >     reasons of my own) could I just note that Vygotsky is
> >     not really quoting Hegel, but rather quoting Marx
> >     quoting Hegel's Shorter Logic in an author's footnote
> >     to /Capital/. Marx puts an interesting twist on the
> >     point Hegel is making in the original. I think it is a
> >     twist which preserves Hegel's meaning, but it is
> >     really the opposite of what Hegel is saying.
> >
> >     By "the cunning of Reason" Hegel means how History and
> >     social processes in general unfold according to their
> >     own logic, irrespective of the intentions of their
> >     human actors. Marx twists this to make the point that
> >     natural objects act according to human purposes, not
> >     their material properties as such.
> >
> >     I agree that when Hegel is talking about human
> >     affairs, "Spirit" means "Activity", but of course
> >     unlike Marx, Hegel deifies Spirit. For Marx, men make
> >     history, only not under conditions of their own
> >     choosing. For Hegel, men are mere tools of the
> >     Weltgeist (world spirit).
> >
> >     I was able to grasp the distinction between mediating
> >     and mediated activity, though given that all activity
> >     is mediated and all activity is mediating, the
> >     distinction strikes me as academic in the extreme. I
> >     remain to be convinced that Hegel knoew of any such
> >     distinction.
> >
> >     The paragraph following the note on "cunning of
> >     Reason" in the Shorter Logic is an interesting one:
> >
> >     TheRealised Endis thus the overt unity of subjective
> >     and objective. It is however essentially
> >     characteristic of this unity, that the subjective and
> >     objective are neutralised and cancelled only in the
> >     point of their one-sidedness, while the objective is
> >     subdued and made conformable to the End, as the free
> >     notion, and thereby to the power above it. The End
> >     maintains itself against and in the objective: for it
> >     is no mere one-sided subjective or particular, it is
> >     also the concrete universal, the implicit identity of
> >     both. This universal, as simply reflected in itself,
> >     is the content which remains unchanged through all the
> >     three/termini/of the syllogism and their movement.
> >
> >     Andy
> >
> >     ------------------------------------------------------------
> >     Andy Blunden
> >     http://home.mira.net/~andy <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy>
> >
> http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making
> >
> >     On 2/05/2016 9:03 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> >
> >         I'm reading a chapter by Janette Freidrich in the
> >         collection "Vygotski
> >         maintenant" published in 2011. It's an imaginary
> >         dialogue between Buhler
> >         and Vygotsky on the former's theory of language
> >         and the latter's criticisms
> >         thereof, very cleverly written in INDIRECT SPEECH
> >         so that Friedrich doesn't
> >         have to waste time trying to imitate the voice of
> >         each or pretend that she
> >         knows the exact wording of each argument.
> >         Friedrich begins with Hegel's
> >         distinction (from the LONGER Logic, the one that
> >         I've never read) between
> >         mediating activity and mediated activity.
> >
> >         Mediating activity is what Vygotsky talks about
> >         using the quote from Hegel
> >         in HDHMF Chapter Two: it's when your role is
> >         essentially bystanding, when
> >         you use one force of nature, more or less in the
> >         natural state, against
> >         another.For example, you arrange the downspout of
> >         your house roof gutters
> >         so that it bores a hole in a piece of limestone.
> >         Or you hang your wet
> >         laundry on a tree branch and let the sun dry it
> >         out instead of trying to
> >         wring it dry yourself..
> >
> >         Mediated activity is in some ways the same, but in
> >         others completely
> >         opposite. It's the same in that you are using one
> >         natural force against
> >         another, but it's opposite in the sense that your
> >         role is not bystanding;
> >         you are yourself one of the forces of nature. For
> >         example, instead of
> >         arranging the downspout, you make a chisel or a
> >         drill of some kind to bore
> >         a hole in a piece of limestone and sculpt it into
> >         a flagstone or a
> >         tombstone. Or you beat the laundry dry with a tree
> >         branch instead of just
> >         hanging it there.
> >
> >         Friedrich points out that in Vygotsky's early work
> >         (e.g. "The History of
> >         the Crisis") Vygotsky speaks of psychic tools--he
> >         is treating ALL activity
> >         as "mediated" rather than mediating. But in HDHMF,
> >         we know that he
> >         CRITIQUES this point of view, precisely because it
> >         equates the sign and the
> >         tool. Now, you might think that the sign even more
> >         like mediated activity
> >         and even less like mediating activity than the
> >         tool. After all, sign users
> >         are not bystanders; they are even more intimately
> >         and intensively and
> >         deliberately involved as subjects than tools. But
> >         that confuses the sign
> >         user with the sign itself. It also ignores a key
> >         difference between
> >         mediating activity and mediated activity--which is
> >         that in mediating
> >         activity the force of nature is allowed to act
> >         according to its own
> >         properties. When I use a word, I do not try to
> >         transform it from a sound
> >         into something else; or rather, if I do, then I
> >         get something that is less
> >         obviously language and more like onomatopoeia.
> >
> >         While I read, I am listening to Beyoncé's new
> >         album "Lemonade", which is an
> >         attempt to take a force of nature (the sour lemons
> >         of a husband's
> >         infidelity) and to transform it into something
> >         larger than life or twice as
> >         natural (the eponymous lemonade). It's an uneasy
> >         cross between a mediating
> >         activity ("for colored girls who have considered
> >         suicide | when the rainbow
> >         is enuf", where 20 imaginary characters are used
> >         and Ntozake Shange simply
> >         stands back) and a mediated one ("Black Macho and
> >         the Myth of Superwoman",
> >         where Michelle Wallace tries to use her own
> >         experiences alongside a
> >         traditional academic approach). Beyoncé can't
> >         quite figure out whether she
> >         wants to do this as a mediating choreographer for
> >         an ineffable everywoman
> >         or as a mediated activity by the one and only
> >         Pasha Bey.
> >
> >         David Kellogg
> >         Macquarie University
> >
> >
> >
>
>