Mike,
Way back on Dec 16 you posted an old XACT message from Arne Raithel to XMCA.
This occurred just at the end of the exchanges about science in which Dianne
Hodges and I were principal protagonists. I've been meaning to respond to
it since that time but various seasonal holiday-related activities
intervened. Now, though it's all of five days later, I want to return to it
although the "now" of your comment that Arne's post "may be a resource for
us now" may seem already past. It's really amazing that five days can seem
like such a long time in the relevancy of a reply on mailing lists--I guess
in this the conversational quality of mailing list interactions announces
itself most strongly. Nevertheless, I think that the relevance of Arne's
post abides and that mailing list exchanges (like conversations taking place
between people in a car on a long trip) are capable of layering themselves
through time. This is also evidenced in the very fact that Eva sent you
Arne's message and you re-posted it to begin with.
Arne was basically talking about his own discovery of social semiotics
theory through his participation on the x-lists and its relevance to
reformulating activity theory. He situated this within the need to redefine
"object" as a consequence of the shift from "personal to social unit of
analysis", in particular, that the concept of "object" needed to be expanded
or to re-appropriate the implications of Marx and Engels 1844-1846 use of
the concept of community (Gemeinwesen). He pointed out that the Stalinistic
intepretation of it put forward a "communist reproduction of the Cartesian
split between the mental and the physical" with the implication that only
the physical assumed a determinist position..
Arne's message was situated in relation to the role of what he calls "the
dialectics of internal and external" and the position that the "external"
provides the source of necessity in dialectical materialist analysis.
Considerations of social semiotics led him to seek for ways to reformulate
object/motive in Leont'ev but he ran up against the problem that to say
ideal object-structures are "external to the communities is clearly
nonsense." As a result, he stated, "external ideas in this sense are
incomprehensible at the same moment in time, and thus cannot be giving
activity its 'motive' or direction." I find the reference to "at the same
moment in time" somewhat obscure but assume he is saying that an
object-motive cannot be external to some and not other individuals.
In any event it is clear that Arne spoke from within the position that only
the external can be considered the domain of material counterforces that do
not yield to will of the individual; i.e., the realm of necessity that some
also refer to (in affirmation or denial) as "objective reality".
In relation to the recent exchange on science it seemed to me that you might
have been posting Arne's old message to encourage reflection on the nature
of the "object" toward which the signs of scientific discourse are directed.
On the basis Arne's concluding remarks that "it seems better to speak of the
between-ness of objects and motives" that actors, communities and larger
associations share, one could take the position that these objects are not
external to the community-- and by implication no more, nor less, "real",
social constructs in which only arbitrariness, not necessity can be found,
objects susceptible to archaeologies and genealogies but not nomothetic
analysis; i.e., analysis of laws or necessary structures. This would be
consistent with theories that hold that "realities" are constructed in
discourses and do not exist outside of them. But isn't this precisely the
conclusion that Arne found "incomprehensible". I don't know a lot of what
he wrote but nothing I've read indicates that his attempts to integrate
social semiotics into activity theory led him to negate the existence of a
realm of necessity beyond the ability of individual (or collective) wills to
modify or that the nature and structure of this realm of necessity was
beyond possible knowledge.
There is a fundamental difference between a position that holds that humans
construct realities through discourses which might be other than they are
and the position that holds that reality is a construct that emerges from
human practice (mediated action). The former denies that the realm of
necessity can be known; the best we can expect is to perform an an
archaelogy and reconstruct the genealogy of objects that are no more than
the expression of one or another relation of power and dominance. This is
part and parcel Foucault's legacy. From this perspective determinate
knowledge of the structures of necessity is not possible. An example of
this is found in Judith Butler's work where the validity of science becomes
no more than "the epistemological, logical, and ontological structures of a
masculinist signifying economy." This application of Foucault's approach to
feminist theory fueled the development of "queer theory" that Diane Hodges
repeatedly invoked in our recent xmca exchanges.
It seems clear to me that Arne Raithel's comments did not move in this
direction. This is immediately evidenced in the references to Ilyenkov and
Bakhurst and a total absence of reference to what Butler calls "the French
school"; i.e., Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, etc. More to the point is his
paper on the evolution of spoken language where he traced that development
with reference to a 1 1/2 million year long development of tool-using
hominids during which anatomical capacity for spoken language developed
through a sequence of interactions with environmental constraints and
challenges. Language and therefor discourse developed on the basis of a
non-linguistic tradition of practice in which concrete structures of
necessity were confronted and mastered; tools constructed, fire
subordinated, animals domesticated, knowledges created and passed on to
succeeding generations. This concrete knowledge did not derive its logic or
ontology from relations of dominance and power within the community, rather
it emerged in relation to structures of necessity inherent in the
materiality of both the body, the material and social extra-somatic
environment, and the mediated relations of production and reproduction
between them.
It seems to me that it is very much in the post-structuralist tradition, in
general, and the Foucaultian strain in particular, to reduce all human
practice (and hence all human knowledge) to discourse. Such theory thereby
fails to adequately account for the fundamental practices through which
humans produce their concrete existence. I concur totally with Arne
Raithel's recognition of the need to move beyond the dead-end of a
definition of the object/motive of activity systems that doesn't include a
social semiotics capable of accounting for ideal objects that exist
independently of the subjects of those activity systems. Nevertheless, I
fail to see how theoretical directions that deny the knowability of
concrete necessity can provide a suitable corrective.
Paul H. Dillon
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