Re: action/activity

Keith R Sawyer (sawyer who-is-at cats.ucsc.edu)
Thu, 4 Apr 1996 12:17:43 -0800 (PST)

Yes, thanks for your helpful and informative message, which gets at
exactly my confusions. I also read the sociocultural movement in
psychology as an attempt to address multiple levels of analysis with more
acknowledgement of the need to have a social theory (I mean something
like a self-grounded critical theory in the Frankfurt sense). Certainly
the way that Soviet psychology has been taken up in America, perhaps
because there is not much awareness of this opposition between structural
theory and action theory (and how much importance the opposition has for
Marxist theorists), Vygotsky and others are often "read" through our
American eyes more as if they were action theorists than the structural
theorists I think they were.

I have heard that one of the reasons Habermas is so controversial in
German circles is exactly because his theory of communicative action
attempts to reconcile the structural epistemology of Marxism with Weber's
action theory. Habermas certainly presents his two-volume argument this
way. So I naturally wondered whether these issues hadn't crossed over
into Soviet Marxist theory...where I would expect the political
environment to be even _less_ receptive to Weberian notions of action theory.

I, too, frequently turn to American pragmatism for inspiration on these
issues; it's interesting to note the similarities with Marx, especially
the early writings, based I assume in their roots in Hegel. Habermas
also thinks so, basing a big chunk of his theory on Mead... But I have to
admit that the pragmatists don't have a complete theory of the structural
level.

Keith Sawyer
Department of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064