Helen,
I've read your comments several times and think that my observations boil
down to a couple of issues but maybe are just different aspects of the same
issue. For one thing, I have the feeling that you equate personal agency
with my use of the term
"motive" which I most certainly didn't intend.. On the other hand, yes,
motive is part of activity systems . As I understand it, Leont'ev first
made the distinction in
the context of discussing mediated action. The object of an action is the
concrete outcome of the actions realized as part of the activity system; the
motive is the reason that it is being
done, the need that is satisfied by the activity system.
Leont'ev distinguished animal activity, in which the object and the motive
(satisfaction of a biological need) merge and coincide with one another from
the situation in human activity (collective labor) which, given the division
of labor, separate the two. He uses the somewhat famous example of the
"beater" in a collective hunt whose activity, with its object of frightening
the animal out of hiding, is clearly different from the object of another
member of the activity system whose object is to actually kill the animal.
The object of his activity does not coincide with the motive of his activity
which is identical with the motive of every other member. He then asks
concerning the possibility of "action" in which object and motive of
activity are separated. His answer is: "Genetically (i.e., in its origin)
the separation of the object and motive of individual actiity is a result of
the exarticulating [interesting word here!] of the separate operations from
a previously complex, polyphase, but single activity. These same,
separate operations, by now completing the content of the individual's given
activity are also transformed into independent actions for him, although the
continue, as regards the collective labour process as a whole, of course, to
be only some of its partial links." (PofDM: 210-11)
As I understand it, an activity system as a whole has an object and from the
perspective of the activity system as a whole, motive and object are not
separate. All activity systems and all actions that take place as elements
of activity systems imply division of labor. The
"subject" of an activity system is ultimately always the sum of the
individuals included in the division of labor. When "motive" is discussed
however, it is not intended to refer to the individual motives of any
individual member/participant considered with a reference to anything
outside the activity system (e.g., pay the bills, send the kids to college,
be the best violinist in Peoria, etc.), motive refers generally to the "why"
that refers to the object of the activity system as a whole. But the object
of any specific individual's actions in the activity system may vary
considerably; i.e., scare the prey away from me, catch the prey.
In some sense all activity systems only have their ultimate motive in the
large complex of activities of which they are part.
For example, a hay market. Before the advent of the automobile hay markets
were indispensable. Could they be considered isolated activity systems and
if so how would we draw boundaries around them -- would they include the hay
farms? Not necessarily, although they disappear when the use of horses for
transportation gave way to the automobile and hay markets gave way to
gasoline stations. Now, can a gasoline
station be analyzed as an activity system? Of course it can, just as a hay
market can. But what articulates these different activity systems?
The unit, as in unit of analysis, as in concrete universal (and to be
clearly distinguised from what Bill and others have been calling "unit of
analysis") that would account for both the emergence and disappearance of
hay markets (and hopefully sometime soon, gasoline stations) is the
commodity in its particular form as related to a specific technical
division of labor and the production of specific use values that are
exchanged in a market economy. The incessant human drive to satisfy
individual and collective needs spurs the transformation of all the tools
both material and symbolic. The satisfaction of needs through this process
of adaptive change in turn gives rise to new needs, new "exarticulations",
new divisions of labor, and so on which is determined, in capitalism, by
the relative exchange value; itself a determination the abstract human labor
incorporated in all commodities in relation to each other.
This as background to your assertion that "the subject of an activity system
is called into being by the activity system. . I think it is appropriate
to ask: what calls an activity system into existence?. The answer is quite
simply: real human needs both individual and collective. This answer can
only be understood with a historical perspective
since the division of labor in which the actions of real humans occur has
developed in the course of
50,000 years from hunting/gathering groups composed of at best a few
hundred individuals exploiting a limited range of ecological zones with a
limited repetoire of physical and symbolic tools to a global
system of more than 6 billion individuals that exploits every known
ecosystem and uses a self-reflective symbolic system that is mediated
though and incorporated in a material technology involving an understanding
of the real
properties of the smallest known elements and the largest known structures
of the material universe.
Nevertheless, all activity systems are called into existence in response to
the satisfaction
of human needs be these biological or social. The subject of any activity
system is ultimately the subject experiencing the need that must be
satisfied. All individuals participate in multiple activity systems and
fulfill multiple roles. The division of labor determines the **roles** that
concrete individuals with their own concrete
physical-psychological needs fill. No activity system calls
these concrete individuals into existence directly--rather there is a
complex process of socialization in which we could say "persons" are formed
with culturally specific psychological types, belief systems and structures
of self-interpretation . I think you might be
confusing my use of "motives" in reference to activity systems with the
specific way that individuals understand and
attribute the absolute abstract freedom of self-consciousness to their own
existence and behavior.
What I'm trying to illustrate here is that the activity system, created on
the basis of human needs, brings into existence a range of roles that
correspond to its division of labor but to say that an activity system
"calls into existence" the subject is incorrect and misleading. In the
first place, the locus of *subjectivity* is always the individual, which is
not to say that this subjectivity necessarily has any agency at all other
than the capacity for abstract freedom in the Hegelian sense as pure
self-negation. No activity system calls abstract subjectivity into
existence directly; it is the product of a material-biological system
necessary for the organism to reflect on its own material existence,
including the the ideal objects that are products of historically evolved
cultural systems. Nevertheless, this capacity for reflection is one of the
bases of the possibility of activity systems and division of labor. All
human societies are complexes of activity systems and abstract human
subjectivity receives a determinate
form as personality depending on the specifics of the individual's personal
history. But to say that any activity system in particular calls even
personality into existence is very simplistic. A more complete scheme might
be: Abstract subjectivity => multiple, historically determinate roles =>
concrete subjectivity or individuality.
Second, activity systems
must ultimately satisfy concrete individual and collective human needs.
Human individuals as historical subjects, are the source of human needs
that drive the emergence of any and all activity systems. The needs that
called any activity system in existence today can be traced to the
biological and social needs of humans in small hunting and gathering bands
that have been refracted in the individual through the ontogenetic layers
reflecting the historical forms that the activity systems have assumed in
the historical process of "exarticulation of actions", the development of
the division of labor that is both a cause and a consequence of the
development of productive forces for satisfying needs.
The process of the "exarticulation" of teaching/learning from all human
activities with its corresondent transformation of the structure "complex,
polyphase, but single" activities (e.g, from hunting deer to buying a Big
Mac) of which teaching/learning was a subordinate action also has a
historical genesis that can be followed in historical materials such as
college catalogs (see the online Amherst collection 1832-1900 for example).
This transformation has produced an educational structure whose unit or
concrete universal I'm calling "instructional units", of which "lessons" as
mike mentioned might be considered an example. In general I see this as a
part of the general commoditization of all branches of human activity that
Marx very clearly foresaw as the trajectory of capitalist development.
The genesis of the instructional unit as the historical form of
teaching/learning also manifests a dual history, something like the
parallel development of thought and language that Vygotsky outlined. Formal
education, education as its own activity, the school, the academy, fit
within a framework of ideological domination that formed a common object for
both teacher and learner . . . historically, the university emerged directly
as part of the maintenance of feudal/aristocratic privilege until quite
recently. The development of science (which was not allowed in the
universities and academies until the 19th century with a few 18th century
exceptions) and its application to technology in the process of
industrialization and the development of capitalism, created a need for
specialized training outside of the practical application of this or that
technology. The technological transformation of the productive process,
"exarticulated" the transfer of technological knowledge from the practical
relations in which it previously existed, and brought about the separation
of the actions of teaching and learning in the practical work process in key
branches of the social productive process as a whole..
As a consequence I don't think that one can practically talk about
"transforming education" within the framework of the classroom anymore than
one can talk about changing the type of commodity being produced with the
intention of transforming the social-productive relations that produce
commodities. Neither a change in the materials used nor the techniques of
production will alter the essential dual structure of what is being
produced. But this does not mean that one cannot talk about transforming
education, only that this must be envisioned as part of a larger change of
the relations between self-reflective theoretical practice (at the apex of
which "knowledge is generated" and passed down the pyramid of
institutionalized education) and its insertion (not interpellation) into the
practical activities that make use of it.
Two additional comments:
(1) If I were to look for the relationship between genre and activity system
in the
form and content of particular educational fields, I would use this
framework, for each substantive area of practical endeavor (e.g., business,
art, law, etc. ) and compare the embedding of these at the different
historical periods much in the way Engestrom did with his analysis of the
"genres" of doctors and health care 19th-20th century.
(2) Your invocation of Althusser and the notion of interpellation seems at
odds with your stated desire to make a place for some kind of agency; . For
Althusser there is no history, only "Madame La Structure a la Dominante" as
E.P. Thompson wrote in his masterful critique: "Poverty of Theory". That
essay and the outcome of that practical exercise of Althusserian politics:
Cambodia under Pol Pot, cured me of my Althusserian infection, the scars
from which I rarely show anyone. For Althusser not only is there no
individual agency, there is also no collective agency. In Althusser the
really existing humans that form the basis of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach,
the birth papers of activity theory, are all simply puppets of the
so-called "instances" in a social formation . There is no history and
historical events unfold independently of any control but subject to laws
accessible only to Althusserian Theory. (No surprise there!) For Althusser
concretely existing humans and human collectivities are something like the
foam on the Platonic ideas that Yeats mentions in "Among School Children".
It would seem that you would like to invoke "internalization" as the
effective mechanism of interpellation but I find this quite difficult to
comprehend this since the processes of internalization occur within genres
in which it would be totally impossible to separate out distinct political,
economic, and ideological instances except with a hermeneutic that itself
would be subject to the criticism of reflecting one or another instance. But
without these abstracted instances of the Althusserian theoretical
structure, exactly what is being interpellated? And how could any of these
instances be internalized unless there were some faculty, already present in
the individual, already capable of assimilating them?
Paul H. Dillon
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