The whole section on The Category of Objective Activity is beautiful.
I find the text densely packed with potential.
"society produces the activity of the individuals forming it. Of
course, this does not mean at all that their activity only
personifies the relationships of society and its culture. There are
complex transformations and transitions that connect them so that no
direct information of one to the other is possible."
But I have been puzzling over the following paragraph, and could
benefit from your interpretation. Mine is that performance before
competance is embedded here, i.e. that the psychic image is generated
through concrete activity, and even more, that the concrete activity
is transformational of all involved, object, psychic image, and
perhaps even (though not stated explicitly here) activity itself.
The view that I am stimulated to see is highly dynamic, processual,
and productive (the latter without value judgment of the lay
definition). Later it seems, L further expands the processes
described below to include human development in its totality and
historicality-- humans and objects, and through mediation of one with
the other, through internal and external activity, the development of
the individual is inextricably linked to that of society.
"All activity has a circular structure: initial afferentation >
effector processes regulating contacts with the objective
environment > correction and enrichment by means of reverse
connections of the original afferent image. Now the circular
character of the processes that realize the interaction of the
organism with the environment appears to be universally recognized
and sufficiently well described in the literature.
The main point, however, is not the circular structure in itself but
that the psychic reflection of the object world is generated directly
not by external forces (including among these reverse forces) but by
those processes through which the subject enters into practical
contact with the object world, and which, for this reason, are
necessarily subordinated to his independent properties, connections,
and relations.
This means that the afferentator that directs the processes of
activity initially is the object itself and only secondarily its
image as a subjective product of activity that fixes, stabilizes, and
carries in itself its objective content. In other words, a double
transfer is realized: the transfer object > process of activity, and
the transfer activity > its subjective product.
But the transfer of the process into the form of the product does not
take place only at the pole of the subject. Even more clearly it
takes place at the pole of the object transformed by human activity;
in this case the activity of the subject controlling the psychic
image is transferred into an extinction property (ruhende Eigenshuft)
of its objective product. "
-- Bill Barowy, Associate Professor Lesley University 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790 Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169 http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html _______________________ "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful." [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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