At 02.21 -0400 0-06-17, Eugene Matusov scrobe:
> What do you think?
Oh, for one thing I think it is time for me to act the Cranky Charlady and
yell: "HEY! You guys! Learn to snip off the old postings at the end of your
messages!! You're cluttering the parlor!"
For another thing, I think I was thinking a little too long before getting
my fingers to the keyboard to say thankyou to Andy Blunden for unfolding a
bit of Hegel for my benefit. I found it very interesting, especially to
hear how Hegel himself was wary of employing triads as a panacea. I'm glad
the old man was that wise, and sorry that he was not powerful enough to
keep all his followers and all our dictionaries from being more
singleminded -- but who could be, as a single person... What kept me
thinking, Andy, was, of course, your return question.
At 09.14 +1000 0-06-15, Andy Blunden scrobe:
>I don't really understand what you mean by "system dynamical reasoning".
And for ineptitude and lack of time I'll just say I subscribe to what Jay
hath scribben in far more length and coherent detail than I ever could. For
those of you with tastes to the polemical side, you can hang me with Jay.
For a third thing, Eugene, I think it is time for me to dip into the past
of the list again, and re-envoke the electronic spirit of Arne Raeithel
from the past century. It is in times like these that I miss him the most.
Eva
>Date: 91-04-24 10:36:00 MEZ
>From: PO61170%DHHUNI4.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>Subject: Leninist Illusions and the Work of Dis-Illusioning Oneself, Some
>thoughts on VP Zinchenko's note, 10 Apr 91
>To: xact@ucsd.edu
>Length: 130 lines, two days work.
>
>Dear colleagues,
>
>two themes in Volodya's note concern me most in the following: The rich
>Russian tradition before the revolution, i.e. that most of the creative
>work done by the founders of socio-cultural school rests on foundations
>laid in pre-soviet times. And, secondly, VPZ's rejection of using the
>Marxian concept of "totality", which I consider most important. I said
>this already in my note "activity and 'totality'" of 13 Mar 91, to which
>Phil Agre has answered.
>
>I have to add that Volodyas insistence on the individual or personality as
>a source of newness is a very important topic for activity theory, because
>this has been badly neglected by many activity theoretical works before
>the 1980ies.
> In this connection I want to point at the influence that Lenin's
>condemnation of Ernst Mach's antimetaphysical monism in his very
>influential book "Materialism and Empiriocriticism" (1909) must have had
>on later Soviet psychology and philosophy of science. Before the
>revolution, the philosophical amalgam of Machism and Marxism (most
>promently in the works of Bogdanov) was very influential. Surely traces of
>this could be unearthed in the works of the Troika (and others). Like
>Volodya, however, I would prefer to discuss Mach's influence, and the
>brutal squenching of it during the twenties, in XHISTORY.
>
>Incidentally, on Thursday last week, I bought these two books:
>* A big volume (DM 104) "Ernst Mach - Werk und Wirkung" (E.M. - Works
>and Impact), edited by Rudolf Haller and Friedrich Stadler, Vienna
>1988.
>* A small booklet (DM 14) by Peter Furth -- philosopher at the Free
>University of Berlin - "Phaenomenologie der Enttaeuschungen -
>Ideologiekritik nachtotalitaer" (Phenomenology of Disillusions -
>post-totalitarian critique of ideology), Frankfurt/Main 1991.
>
>This coincidence, reading Volodya's list of four illusions when Furth's
>booklet about the painful work of disillusioning oneself was open next to
>my Macintosh, has led me to write what follows.
>
>In 1982 I have heard Peter Furth's lectures on Lenin's philosophy. At this
>time I was still convinced that Lenin's book was basically a sound and
>rational dispute with "Machists", even though the style was very polemical
>indeed. Peter Furth said nothing to the contrary then, as far as I
>remember. In the context of the Mach book I hoped that Furth would be
>writing now about Lenin, too.
>
>And indeed he does. Starting with this observation: Marx founded the
>tradition of the *political avantgarde* where the proletariat was seen as
>the true citoyen whose specific interest coincides with the general
>interest of humankind. Himself and his fellow philosophers Marx gave the
>role of the "head" while the alienated masses wourd serve as "heart" of
>the coming revolution ("Zur Judenfrage", 1844). The proletariat was to be
>and to become an unalienated social subject, in Hegelian terms: a
>subject-object.
> The piece of ideology (ideologem) of the "identical subject-object of
>history" is the dialectical knot that holds together the legitimation and
>pretension of political avantgardism. It is the ideologem that is used
>when history is to be understood as "Heilsgeschehen" (process of
>salvation), more precisely, as a salvation that the redeemed-to-be not
>only may expect but have to realize themeselves. (p 68) If you understand
>this as saying that Marxism-Leninism was/is a kind of religion, you have
>heard right. This is indeed what Furth wants to say in chapter III "The
>Romantics of Alienation", starting with Feuerbach's slogan: "Politics must
>become our Religion". -- I skip the details, and go back to Furth's
>analysis of political avantgardism.
>
>Lenin was the central figure in establishing the Bolshevist version of the
>avantgarde, which Peter Furth now characterizes in these very dense
>paragraphs:
> History construed as leading to salvation contains a precarious
> problem, the opposition of pre-history and history. So long as the
> historical goal, the unity of essence and existence, the truth,
> is still due, history is disunited in itself, truth is just
> provisional, history as a whole is a sphere of difference.
>... The essence (Wesen), too, may only appear in contradictory form, as
> expression of the alienation, on the one hand, and as its negation,
> on the other. This rupture of the essence, that should preserve itself
> in history, into a passive part and an active, conscious part, into an
> implicit and an explicit truth, etc., is the inevitable destiny, or,
> as it were, the elementary principle of the avantgarde.
> Avantgardism did not act solely as the historical-philosophical
> legitimation of the proletariat. As idealization of the worker's
> movement it was an organizing principle at the same time. But it has
> always been a precarious question how the legitimizing idea of
> anticipatory representation (Stellvertretung, i.e. the avantgarde is
> the proxy for the proletariat, AR) was to be implemented as
> organization. After all, what was at stake was the realization of a
> contradiction: a particular as the general, a part as the whole, an
> interest as the idea, an elite as the democracy, a future as the
> present, etc.. The most consequent answer was given by the Bolsheviki
> and Lenin with the "democratic centralism", a hierarchical system of
> representations, a chain of identifications with a charismatic peak.
> It is necessary to see clearly that the avantgarde is not a simple
> undifferentiated group vis-a-vis society, but is internally cleaved
> by the very same principle of the avantgarde. However, the internal
> cleavage is not pluralistic; it does not produce a system of
> competitive oppositions. Instead a hierarchical system of ranks is
> produced that ends in a peak that cannot be divided further. The
> empirical idea of the avantgarde is the commissarian dictatorship;
> abolition, prevention and control of course included. But this is only
> the surface. Cleavage and ranking may only stop when the anticipatory
> embodiment of truth coincides with one person -- this is an internal,
> and in the long unavoidable consequence. The avantgardism is the
> movement from the Totality to the One; totality and personal subject
> are the mutually dependent extremes of one and the same ideal scale.
> (68/69)
>
>I would like to add before closing my note: This kind of totality is
>modelled after the eurocentric notion of a person as coherent, rational,
>self-identical I (ego, Ich). Although Alexei Nikolaievitch Leontyev has
>tried to design a different model (a system of activities that may have
>internal contradictions), he did not succeed to overcome the pervasive
>pressure for identical totalities...
>
>Other russian-writing authors have, however, as anybody may read in the
>last ten volumes of Soviet Psychology. I would like to hear more of them
>here in XACT, because in the rest of Europe the concept of personality as
>a pluralistic, even anarchistic, whole with shifting boundaries has had
>many authors, too. The most extreme case might be "l'Anti-Oedipe" by
>Deleuze & Guattari.
>
>My favorite slogan in this respect is: *** Let us fathom Vygotsky's
>insight more deeply! *** "Internalization of social structures" could mean
>that every person develops herself into a pluralistic group of
>selves-in-dialogue-and -conflict. Then I becomes the voice of the selves
>of Me.
>
>:-) Arne.
>
>______________________________________________________________
>Dr. Arne Raeithel, Dpt. of Psychology, University of Hamburg,
> Von-Melle-Park 5, 2000 Hamburg 13, Federal Rep.of Germany
>
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