[Xmca-l] Re: Отв: Re: Unit of Analysis
Ivan Uemlianin
ivan@llaisdy.com
Mon Sep 11 10:37:37 PDT 2017
Dear Sasha
Passive as in driven by the passions. Isn't that how Spinoza would characterise animals and infants?
Ivan
--
festina lente
> On 11 Sep 2017, at 18:05, Alexandre Sourmava <avramus@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Ivan.
>
> To say that "that the neo-nate is not active at all, but passive, and that therefore neo-nate behaviour is not activity" means to say that neo nate is not alive creature, but mechanic agregate of dead parts. And I am not sure that idea about passiveness of animals or neo-nate fallows from Spinoza :-).
>
> Sasha
>
> понедельник, 11 сентября 2017 18:07 Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> писал(а):
>
>
> Yes, I think a further elaboration of this idea would lead
> to an examination of needs and activity and sensuousness in
> connection with needs and their development in connection
> with activity.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>> On 12/09/2017 1:01 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
>>
>> Thanks Andy, the sense of 'visceral' is much more nuanced
>> in your text, yes, and quite different from what one could
>> grasp from the previous e-mail. And I now follow your
>> elaboration on micro- and macro-unit much better, so
>> thanks for that. I was hoping, however, that the
>> elaboration would lead to some acknowledgement of the role
>> of needs, real needs, as key to what the word 'visceral'
>> was suggesting here. I was thinking that rather than a
>> 'grasping', we gain more track by talking of an orienting,
>> which is how I read Marx and Engels, when Marx talks about
>> the significance of 'revolutionary', 'practical-critical'
>> activity, the fundamental fact of a need and its
>> connections to its production and satisfaction.
>>
>> A
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:* Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
>> *Sent:* 09 September 2017 03:30
>> *To:* Alfredo Jornet Gil; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> *Subject:* Re: [Xmca-l] Re: Unit of Analysis
>>
>> Yes, it is tough discussing these topics by email. All the
>> issues you raise are treated in
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Goethe-Hegel-Marx_public.pdf
>>
>>
>> I am *not* dividing the world into 'immediate, bodily,
>> and sensuous' and 'mediated, disembodied, and a-sensuous'.
>> The whole point is to begin by *not* dividing. By contrast
>> for example, Newton explained natural processes (very
>> successfully!) by describing a number of "forces"; a force
>> is an example of something which is not visceral or
>> sensuous (and also not discrete so it can't be a 'unit').
>> The "expression" of a force can be visceral (think of the
>> effect of gravity) but gravity itself is an invention
>> needed to make a theory of physics work (like God's Will)
>> but has no content other than its expression. People got
>> by without it for millennia. This is not to say it does
>> not have a sound basis in material reality. But it is
>> abstract, in the sense that it exists only within the
>> framework of a theory, and cannot therefore provide a
>> starting point or foundation for a theory. To claim that a
>> force exists is to reify an abstraction from a form of
>> movement (constant acceleration between two bodies).
>> Goethe called his method "delicate empiricism" but this is
>> something quite different from the kind of empiricism
>> which uncritically accepts theory-laden perceptions,
>> discovers patterns in these perceptions and then reifies
>> these patterns in forces and such abstractions.
>>
>>
>> If you don't know about climatology then you can't guess
>> the unit of analysis. Marx took from 1843 to about 1858 to
>> determine a unit of analysis for economics. Vygotsky took
>> from about 1924 to 1931 to determine a unit of analysis
>> for intellect. And both these characters studied their
>> field obsessively during that interval. This is why I
>> insist that the unit of analysis is a *visceral concept*
>> unifying a series of phenomena, something which gets to
>> the heart of a process, and which therefore comes only
>> through prolonged study, not something which is generated
>> by some formula with a moment's reflection.
>>
>>
>> Each unit is the foundation of an entire science. But both
>> Marx's Capital and Vygotsky's T&S identify a micro-unit
>> but quickly move on to the real phenomenon of interest -
>> capital and concepts respectively. But capital (which
>> makes its appearance in chapter 4) cannot be understood
>> without having first identified the real substance of
>> value in the commodity. The rest of the book then proceeds
>> on the basis of this unit, capital (i.e., a unit of
>> capital, a firm). To ignore capital is to depict bourgeois
>> society as a society of simple commodity exchange among
>> equals - a total fiction. Likewise, Vygotsky's real aim it
>> to elucidate the nature and development of concepts. He
>> does not say it, and probably does not himself see it, but
>> "concept" is a macro-unit (or molar unit in ANL's term),
>> an aggregate of actions centred on a symbol or other
>> artefact. The whole point of introducing the cell into
>> biology was to understand the behaviour of *organisms*,
>> not for the sake of creating the science of cell biology,
>> though this was a side benefit of the discovery.
>>
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> Andy Blunden
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>> On 9/09/2017 5:31 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
>>>
>>> Andy, thanks for your clarification on the 'visceral'.
>>> The way you describe it, though, suggests to me an
>>> empiricist position that I know you do not ascribe to;
>>> and so I'll take it that either I've missed the correct
>>> reading, or that we are still developing language to talk
>>> about this. In any case, I assume you do not mean that
>>> whatever our object of study is, it is divided between
>>> the visceral as the 'immediate, bodily, and sensuous' and
>>> something else that, by implication, may have been said
>>> to be 'mediated, disembodied, and a-sensuous' (you may as
>>> well mean precisely this, I am not sure).
>>>
>>>
>>> I do not know what the climatologist's unit of analysis
>>> is when discussing hurricanes either, but I do think that
>>> Hurricanes Irma, José, etc, are expressions of a system
>>> in a very similar way that any psychological fact is a
>>> expression of the society as part of which it occurs. I
>>> was thinking that, if we assumed for a second that we
>>> know what the unit for studying of hurricanes is (some
>>> concrete relation between climate or environment and
>>> hurricane), 'feeling' the hurricane could be thought of
>>> in may ways, only some of which may be helpful to advance
>>> our scientific understanding of human praxis. The way you
>>> seemed to refer to this 'visceral' aspect, as 'immediate,
>>> embodied, and sensous' would make things hard, because,
>>> are we 'feeling' the hurricane, or the wind blowing our
>>> roofs away? In fact, is it the wind at all, or the many
>>> micro particles of soil and other matter that are
>>> smashing our skin as the hurricane passes above us, too
>>> big, too complex, to be 'felt' in any way that captures
>>> it all? And so, if your object of study is to be 'felt',
>>> I don't think the definition of 'immediate, embodied, and
>>> sensuous' helps unless we mean it WITHOUT it being the
>>> opposite to 'mediated, disembodied, and a-sensuous'.
>>> That is, if we do not oppose the immediate to the
>>> mediated in the sense just implied (visceral is immediate
>>> vs. 'not-visceral' is mediated). So, I am arguing in
>>> favour of the claim that we need to have this visceral
>>> relation that you mention, but I do think that we require
>>> a much more sophisticated definition of 'visceral' than
>>> the one that the three words already mentioned allow
>>> for. I do 'feel' that in most of his later works,
>>> Vygotsky was very concerned on emphasising the unity of
>>> intellect and affect as the most important problem for
>>> psychology for precisely this reason.
>>>
>>>
>>> I have also my reservations with the distinction that you
>>> draw in your e-mail between micro-unit and macro-unit. If
>>> the question is the production of awareness, of the
>>> 'experience of having a mind' that you are discussing
>>> with Michael, then we have to find just one unit, not
>>> two, not one micro and one macro. I am of course not
>>> saying that one unit addresses all the problems one can
>>> pose for psychology. But I do think that the very idea of
>>> unit analysis implies that it constitutes your field of
>>> inquiry for a particular problem (you've written about
>>> this). You ask about Michael's mind, and Michael responds
>>> that his mind is but one expression of a society.I would
>>> add that whatever society is as a whole, it lives as
>>> consciousness in and through each and every single one of
>>> our consciousness; if so, the unit Vygotsky was
>>> suggesting, the one denoting the unity of person and
>>> situation, seems to me well suited; not a micro-unit that
>>> is micro with respect to the macro-activity.
>>>
>>>
>>> If you take the Spinozist position that 'a true idea must
>>> agree with that of which it is the idea', and then agree
>>> with Vygotsky that ideas are not intellect on the one
>>> hand, and affect on the other, but a very special
>>> relation (a unity) between the two, then we need a notion
>>> of 'visceral and sensous' that is adequate to our 'idea'
>>> or field of inquiry. We can then ask questions about the
>>> affects of phenomena, of hurricanes, for example, as
>>> Latour writes about the 'affects of capitalism'. And we
>>> would do so without implying an opposition between
>>> the feeling and the felt, but some production process
>>> that accounts for both. Perezhivanie then, in my view, is
>>> not so much about experience as it is about human
>>> situations; historical events, which happen to have some
>>> individual people having them as inherent part of their
>>> being precisely that: historical events (a mindless or
>>> totally unconscious event would not be historical).
>>>
>>>
>>> I am no fun of frightening away people in the list with
>>> too long posts like this one, but I think the issue is
>>> complex and requires some elaboration. I hope xmca is
>>> also appreciated for allowing going deep into questions
>>> that otherwise seem to alway remain elusive.
>>>
>>>
>>> Alfredo
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> *From:* Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
>>> *Sent:* 08 September 2017 04:11
>>> *To:* Alfredo Jornet Gil; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>> *Subject:* Re: [Xmca-l] Re: Unit of Analysis
>>>
>>> Alfredo, by "visceral" I mean it is something you know
>>> through your immediate, bodily and sensuous interaction
>>> with something. In this sense I am with Lakoff and
>>> Johnson here (though not being American I don't see guns
>>> as quite so fundamental to the human condition). Consider
>>> what Marx did when began Capital not from the abstract
>>> concept of "value" but from the action of exchanging
>>> commodities . Commodity exchange is just one form of
>>> value, but it is the most ancient, most visceral, most
>>> "real" and most fundamental form of value - as Marx shows
>>> in s. 3 of Chapter 1, v. I.
>>>
>>> I have never studied climatology, Alfredo, to the extent
>>> of grasping what their unit of analysis is.
>>>
>>> In any social system, including classroom activity, the
>>> micro-unit is an artefact-mediated action and the
>>> macro-units are the activities. That is the basic CHAT
>>> approach. But that is far from the whole picture isn't
>>> it? What chronotope determines classroom activity - are
>>> we training people to be productive workers or are we
>>> participating in social movements or are we engaged in
>>> transforming relations of domination in the classroom or
>>> are we part of a centuries-old struggle to understand and
>>> change the world? The action/activity just gives us one
>>> range of insights, but we might analyse the classroom
>>> from different perspectives.
>>>
>>> Andy
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Andy Blunden
>>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>> https://andyblunden.academia.edu/research
>>>> On 8/09/2017 7:58 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
>>>> I am very curious about what "visceral" means here (Andy), and particularly how that relates to the 'interrelations' that David D. is mentioning, and that on the 'perspective of the researcher'.
>>>>
>>>> I was thinking of the Hurricanes going on now as the expressions of a system, one that sustains category 5 hurricanes in *this* particulars ways that are called Irma, José, etc. How the 'visceral' relation may be like when the object is a physical system (a hurricane and the climate system that sustains it), and when it is a social system (e.g., a classroom conflict and the system that sustains it).
>>>>
>>>> Alfredo
>>>> ________________________________________
>>>> From:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of David Dirlam<modesofpractice@gmail.com>
>>>> Sent: 07 September 2017 19:41
>>>> To: Andy Blunden; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Unit of Analysis
>>>>
>>>> The issues that have arisen in this discussion clarify the conception of
>>>> what sort of entity a "unit" is. Both and Andy and Martin stress the
>>>> importance of the observer. Anyone with some experience should have some
>>>> sense of it (Martin's point). But Andy added the notion that experts need
>>>> basically to be able to agree reliably on examples of the unit (worded like
>>>> the psychological researcher I am, but I'm sure Andy will correct me if I
>>>> missed his meaning).
>>>>
>>>> We also need to address two other aspects of units--their classifiability
>>>> and the types of relations between them. What makes water not an element,
>>>> but a compound, are the relations between the subunits (the chemical bonds
>>>> between the elements) as well as those with other molecules of water (how
>>>> fast they travel relative to each other), which was David Kellogg's point.
>>>> So the analogy to activity is that it is like the molecule, while actions
>>>> are like the elements. What is new to this discussion is that the activity
>>>> must contain not only actions, but also relationships between them. If we
>>>> move up to the biological realm, we find a great increase in the complexity
>>>> of the analogy. Bodies are made up of more than cells, and I'm not just
>>>> referring to entities like extracellular fluid. The identifiability,
>>>> classification, and interrelations between cells and their constituents all
>>>> help to make the unit so interesting to science. Likewise, the constituents
>>>> of activities are more than actions. Yrjo's triangles illustrate that.
>>>> Also, we need to be able to identify an activity, classify activities, and
>>>> discern the interrelations between them and their constituents.
>>>>
>>>> I think that is getting us close to David Kellogg's aim of characterizing
>>>> the meaning of unit. But glad, like him, to read corrections.
>>>>
>>>> David
>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 10:08 PM, Andy Blunden<ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, but I think, Martin, that the unit of analysis we need to aspire to
>>>>> is *visceral* and sensuous. There are "everyday" concepts which are utterly
>>>>> abstract and saturated with ideology and received knowledge. For example,
>>>>> Marx's concept of capital is buying-in-order-to-sell, which is not the
>>>>> "everyday" concept of capital at all, of course.
>>>>>
>>>>> Andy
>>>>>
>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> Andy Blunden
>>>>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>>>> https://andyblunden.academia.edu/research
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 7/09/2017 8:48 AM, Martin John Packer wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Isn’t a unit of analysis (a germ cell) a preliminary concept, one might
>>>>>> say an everyday concept, that permits one to grasp the phenomenon that is
>>>>>> to be studied in such a way that it can be elaborated, in the course of
>>>>>> investigation, into an articulated and explicit scientific concept?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> just wondering
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Martin
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sep 6, 2017, at 5:15 PM, Greg Thompson<greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Not sure if others might feel this is an oversimplification of unit of
>>>>>>> analysis, but I just came across this in Wortham and Kim's Introduction
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> the volume Discourse and Education and found it useful. The short of it
>>>>>>> is
>>>>>>> that the unit of analysis is the unit that "preserves the
>>>>>>> essential features of the whole".
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Here is their longer explanation:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> "Marx (1867/1986) and Vygotsky (1934/1987) apply the concept "unit of
>>>>>>> analysis" to social scientific problems. In their account, an adequate
>>>>>>> approach to any phenomenon must find the right unit of analysis - one
>>>>>>> that
>>>>>>> preserves the essential features of the whole. In order to study water, a
>>>>>>> scientist must not break the substance down below the level of an
>>>>>>> individual H20 molecule. Water is made up of nothing but hydrogen and
>>>>>>> oxygen, but studying hydrogen and oxygen separately will not illuminate
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> essential properties of water. Similarly, meaningful language use
>>>>>>> requires
>>>>>>> a unit of analysis that includes aspects beyond phonology,
>>>>>>> grammar, semantics, and mental representations. All of these linguistic
>>>>>>> and
>>>>>>> psychological factors play a role in linguistic communication, but
>>>>>>> natural
>>>>>>> language use also involves social action in a context that includes other
>>>>>>> actors and socially significant regularities."
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> (entire chapter can be found on Research Gate at:
>>>>>>> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319322253_Introduct
>>>>>>> ion_to_Discourse_and_Education
>>>>>>> )
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I thought that the water/H20 metaphor was a useful one for thinking
>>>>>>> about
>>>>>>> unit of analysis.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> -greg
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
>>>>>>> Assistant Professor
>>>>>>> Department of Anthropology
>>>>>>> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
>>>>>>> Brigham Young University
>>>>>>> Provo, UT 84602
>>>>>>> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
>>>>>>> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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