Re: individual activities (long)

Gordon Wells (gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca)
Thu, 26 Oct 1995 11:45:03 -0400 (EDT)

In response to Mike's question, Leont'ev certainly refers to individual
activity - or at least to the activity of an individual. Here are a few
quotes from his chapter in Wertsch (1981).

"Activity is the nonadditive, molar unit of life for the material,
corporeal subject. In a narrower sense (i.e. on the psychological level)
it is the unit of life that is mediated by mental reflection. The real
function of this unit is to orient the subject in the world of objects"
(p.46).

"With all its varied forms, the human individual's activity is a system
in the system of social relations. It does not exist without these
relations... It turns out that the activity of separate individuals
depends on their place in society, on the conditions that fall to their
lot, and on idiosyncratic, individual factors" (p.47).

Leont'ev continues:
"We must make a special effort to warn against understanding
human activity as the relationship that exists between individuals
and the society confronting them....According to this [positivist]
view, society is just the external world to which the individual
must adapt in order to survive...However, this misses the main
point that in a society, humans do not simply find external
conditions to which they must adapt their activity. Rather,
these social conditions bear with them the motives and goals of
their activity, its means and modes. In a word, society produces
the activity of the individuals it forms. Of course, this does
not mean that their activity simply personifies the relations of
society and its culture. There are complex transformations and
transitions that tie them together so that a simple reduction of
one to another is impossible" (pp.47-8).

To my mind, therefore, there is little doubt that Leont'ev thinks of
humans as both embarking on activity that is individually motivated and
directed (cf. his examples of driving a car or writing) and of
participating individually in communal activity that is
collaboratively organized. In fact, he seems to be at pains not to
collapse the individual to the social. At the same time, however, in
order to explain the individual's activity, it is necessary to consider
how the motives, goals and operations in terms of which it is
organized are constructed and carried forward through engaging in
innumerable particular tool-and-sign-mediated activities _with
others_. This interdependence is strongly brought out in the following:

"The specific form in which it [human individual's activity] exists
is determined by the forms and means of material and mental social
interaction that are created by the development of production and
_that cannot be realized in any way other than in the activity of
concrete people_" (p.47). (my emphasis)

In this context, I find Rolfe Windward's comment helpful:

>In any interactional model one must suppose that agency is for the most part
>a retrospective account of trajectory, itself a recursive interplay between
>the developing organism (with it's own increasingly individuated
>requirements) and the (also developing) ecosocial systems which nourish,
>constrain, and inform it. Is there ever a point where we can say the
>individual has complete control or a point where we can say it has none?

It's the notion of trajectory, and interweaving trajectories of
individuals, families, communities of practice, cultural groups, etc.
that I find helps me to make _some_ sense of these complex ideas. Both
individual and social activities also have trajectories, which are
constantly being shaped and redirected by the contributions of the
totality of their participants, human and other.

While I have been pondering on these issues, I have also been following
the lead-up to the forthcoming referendum in Quebec, as this has been
presented in the media. And I find them mutually illuminating.

On Monday, several million individuals will perform the symbolic action
of voting "oui" or "non", and the sum of their individual actions will
impact on _all_ those who live in the country that is currently Canada.
This is clearly an occasion when both individual and collective
trajectories are going to be redirected to a greater or lesser degree.

What I find particularly interesting from the perspective of this
discussion of agency is that, more than most, voting is a very
individual action, in the sense that it involves each individual in a
personal choice. Of course, it is also a very social action, both in its
understood implications for others as well as self, and in the intense
social interaction that surrounds it.

It is also an action that cannot be understood without an awareness of
the historical trajectory, of which it is a climactic moment. The issues
are emotional and value-laden and are rooted in past events and, even
more importantly, in interpretations of those events, and in predictions
of the consequences of the outcome of the referendum event itself. However,
individuals differ in their interpretations of those events, as a result
of their own personal, socially positioned trajectories. This has been
dramatized on TV and in Macleans (Canadian Time) by focusing on
particular families in which individual members hold opposing views.
Last night, the (partial) trajectory of one individual's decision was
followed through excerpts from a series of family discussions and
interviews with the individual over the course of the last few weeks.
The young woman in question is the daughter of a pro-separation father of
French origin and a pro-federalist mother who came to Quebec in the 60s
from the Indian sub-continent. Both parents have well-thought-through
bases for their own positions, based on their personal life trajectories
in the complex multicultural society that is Quebec, and the daughter has
clearly been influenced by them. But for her, as a successful
professional young woman, the issues appear somewhat different; her
formative experiences have been different from those of either of her parents.

Democracy, in Canada - and in other countries -, is based on the
principle of one person, one vote; it is also based on the assumption
that casting that vote is a responsible, at-least-partially rational
action. Whatever theoretical position we take on the possibility of
individual action, the assumption that humans do act individually is a
"fact" that plays a significant part in our lives and, to that extent, it
is "real". ??

Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.