Nate, I'm going to respond to only one part of your message for the moment,
because it happens to be the one that concerns me most urgently. I do not
think that Ilyenkov is arguing that there is only "one consciousness." I think
that in this paper he just hasn't got as far as that -- in this paper, he's
focusing on showing us that we can know the material world only insofar as it
is mediated for us by the system of meanings embedded in historically formed
culture. He doesn't get as far as talking about how many systems there are or
how they interact, conflict, merge, synergize, differentiate from each other --
or how, as Hutchins explains (I'm hunting for the message just a few turns ago
in which Paul or Alfred or was it you? contributed this -- but I can't find it,
so this won't be a direct or accurate quote) -- ideas or concepts get
"propogated across...different media" -- likely from one system into another.
Or how we can deliberately create or destroy or alter these systems.
Here's why this is important -- a tiny example. Here's a news article in which
we can observe one activity system getting traffic directions that sends it off
in direction A rather than direction B.
In the Chicago Tribune a few months ago there was an article about how
Department of Health and Human Services personnel were going to be provided
with new training. Why did they need the training? Because often they'd be
called to go and check out a family situation in which neighbors were afraid
that kids were being abused. When they got there, they found that they
couldn't determine whether what they were observing was abuse or poverty. If
what they were observing was abuse, then there are certain things they can do.
They can haul the mother or grandmother or auntie (whoever) away and put the
kids in foster homes or shelters. If what they were observing was poverty,
then... well, I guess it's just tough.
So the solution here turns out to be training so that the personnel will be
better able to label what they are observing.
Of course both abuse and poverty are serious problems, and the neighbors who
call the DHS probably didn't care what the problem was going to be called --
they didn't forsee that if it was abuse it would trigger ONE activity system,
and if it was poverty it would trigger another (or not trigger it, actually).
But if we want to think about WHY what the neighbors considered just one
problem ("Somebody help these kids!!!") becomes a conceptual dilemna when we
ask a city bureaucracy to address it, it's useful to be able to analyse how
these activity systems would be different -- how the activity system of DHS
workers fixing an individual case of child abuse would be different from the
activity system of some other entity attempting to address the problem of
widespread poverty. Right away we can see how the elements of these systems
are different in vivid ways -- who is doing it, what they're doing it for, what
the process or tools for doing it are, and what the language/ideology
surrounding it is. And of course each of these activity systems has a history
and changes as history shuffles along (depending on whether we have a Harold
Washington or a Richard Daley as mayor, for example).
So this is really a response to Nate saying that "what kinds of consciousness
are being formed in this or that activity are important ones to ask." The DHS
workers being trained to distinguish between abuse and poverty are having their
consciousnesses formed, aren't they?
Helena Worthen
Nate Schmolze wrote
>
> In the end through this is just a "how question" which philosophers and
> psychologists love. The talk of "man" and "human life activity" gave me the
> strong impression that there is this "one consciousness" which is very
> difficult for me to accept. A definate hierarchy in places in which
> "western culture" is put on top as the more "human".
>
> I think questions like what kinds of consciousness are being formed in this
> or that activity are important ones to ask especially in a field like
> education. So, when Ilyenkov argues "man acquires the ideal plane only
> through mastering historically developed forms of social activity" it leaves
> me with a lot of questions. One being there seems to be social activitieS
> and they are often in tension with each other.
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 01 2000 - 01:00:43 PDT