Re: On Leontiev

From: Helena Worthen (hworthen@igc.org)
Date: Thu Sep 28 2000 - 07:23:29 PDT


Folks:

I'm reading along -- so far, the Intro and Chap 1. I'm glad to have read the
Ilyenkov piece first.

How consciousness can be seen to have its origins in the division of labor is
a tricky thing to think about. It's further muddled by the way "division of
labor" seems to mean something about how work gets shared. We immediately
start thinking about jobs.

But pondering this, and reading the discussion, led me to the following:

If we have"division of labor" then we also have "labor" that can be divided.
Then we can think about labor that can NOT be divided. Now we can substitute
more famliar words: jobs or work that cannot be divided. Or effort or
activity that cannot be divided. Like healing from an illness, for example,
or making a promise to be somewhere at a certain time, or knowing that you're
telling the truth or lying, or remembering. These are all labor that cannot
(or, now that I think of it) do not have to be divided or shared.

Now if we put all of this sort of activity (work, effort, jobs, labor) over
at one end of the continuum of not divisible -- divisible, or shareable-not
shareable -- or the other, we can see how in each activity there is a
potential for different degrees of dividing the labor, and how instantly we
can see the way social relations spring up around the fact of this division.

Then you can play with each example. The work of remembering -- one person
remembers a place and comes back to it at night or in cold weather. Two
people remember a place and come back to it but remind each other of the path
that leads to it, remind each other of the need to head back at a certain
time -- in language, putting their rememberances together to add up to
accomplishing the work of getting there by nightfall.

The work of having a baby. At what point does it become clear that the job
of making the next generation is shared? Nursing a baby -- when does that
labor become divided, and among what people? What consciousness, what social
relations, arise to make sure that the baby and the nursing mother get
together to keep the baby from being hungry?

The work of preparing food. Now we're far enough along the continuum so that
how labor is divided is getting pretty obvious.

I keep thinking of Ilyenkov's "sidelong glance" -- I'm sorry, I don't have
the chapter here with me, but it's where he says something like "We only
experience consciousness through looking sideways at others through their
relationships to production..." sorry, the image is strong but the memory is
weak.

And so you can keep going along the continuum all the way to Taylorism, or
all the way to the work of reading a chapter like this.

Or (another idea) there are some kinds of labor that have BECOME divisible
due to technological miracles, like breathing -- breathing used to be
something that only could be done by an individual; CPR is probably not
exclusively modern, of course, but respirator machines (artificial lungs)
certainly are -- and if we think of a person in a hospital who is on a
respirator, and look at how the work of keeping that person breathing is
divided, all the way down to the miners in the mines who find the raw
materials that go into building that machine that keeps him breathing -- and
what the social relations of that work are --you then see a vast web.

I offer what I have written here as being completely consistent with what
Andy and Mohammed ElHammoumi wrote -- but an expression of searching for a
way to unpack the phrase "social relations."

Helena Worthen

Andy Blunden wrote:

> [Elhammoumi]: "social relations of productive activity must be regarded as
> a kind of map or anchor which help us to picture, visualize and concretize
> the cognitive structures of human higher mental functions, consciousness,
> personality and human activity".
>
> [Andy]: ... and labour and social-relation are themselves a unity, a "unit
> of analysis" I think, to use a term popular on this list.
>
> Also, images that help us visualise things are always useful, but for me,
> the social relations of production are themselves mobile, crisis-ridden
> things forming the vital energy which finds expression in human
> personality, rather than an anchor or a map. It is the crisis-ridden and
> creative nature of those social relations that make teh human mind able to
> be such a complex and dynamic thing itself.
>
> Andy
> **************************************************
> * Andy Blunden, Teaching Space Consultant,
> * and Manager of Videoconferencing Operations
> * http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> * University of Melbourne 9344 0312 (W) 9380 9435 (H)
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