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Date: 9/6/96 1:14 AM
To: Geoffrey Williams
From: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
Judy....and Eugene, and Arne, and all others whose heads are swimming
with meanings inside of sense and trying to make sense of meanings
in some ideal way....
When I compared Leontiev's personal sense to theme, it must have been
to Volosonov, because I haven't read anything by Bhaktin (or at
least with Bahktin's name on it) in quite a while. I'm trying to
remember, but I think what I was trying to link up is the idea
that theme and sense are both the ways individuals pull sense
out of an existant, and shared, but at the same time undefinable
(in the context of any individual thinking and/or communication).
I don't think sense is undiffentiated. I think that it is highly
differentiated according to history, but at the same time undifferentiated
in terms of individual things because it is based on context of use
rather than individual articles. I know, I know, that was extraordinarily
oblique. The only way I think I can explain it is to backtrack
historically to Kohler, and the work he did with apes, which right now
is where I think Vygotsky got the original idea. Apes catrfer
tool use, but not in terms of individual objects, meaning individual
objects may have mean, but they have sense. They can only transfer
touse, and therefore can only understand tools, in the context
of the situation. Thusf the tools comes from the actual
activity, not from the individual things being used. What Vygotsky,
and then to a greater extent Leontiev did to this was add in the
human attribute of history (I don't know if this is what Volosonov
was doing or what --- I think that's what I was asking, in a not
very good fashion). Thus the way we understand an object is historical,
because of course to modern humans all objects become historical.
So, as I had said at the beginning of this message, personal sense
is undifferentiated in terms of individual objects in the world
(this is going to get me in trouble I know), but highly differentiated
in terms of history. Now if you believe in the increasing division
of labor, and the extraordinary differentiation of social activity
systems through the differentiation of labor, you must, I think
start to examine this as individual, that is personal sense.
Michael
Michael Glassman
University of Houston
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From: HDCS6 who-is-at Jetson.UH.EDU
Date: Sat, 08 Jun 1996 09:03:23 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Ideals and personal sense
To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
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