Re: for discussion

From: Helena Worthen (hworthen@igc.org)
Date: Sun Dec 31 2000 - 10:27:26 PST


People -- I'm still simmering a response to Vera John-Steiner's quick invitation back on Dec 15, regarding my query for references on collective consciousness --

"But write more of your interest in the topic,
Vera"

and I wasn't quite sure what the next step in that direction was (short of a Niagara of claims in no particular order)

...until Bill Barowy wrote:

> At 1:18 PM -0800 12/29/00, Mike Cole quoted Michelle Minnis and Vera John-Steiner:
> >. But it does not resolve well at the level of the individual person. .
>

Which is also in Vera's review of Perspectives on Activity Theory.

And then I remembered one of the points in Bill's "Engestrom's trajectory "-- that "the subject is socially constructed."

I think that this observation, that in using activity theory, in order to get at what the individual is doing, we have to remember that he or she is socially constructed -- which means that we need to think broadly about who that person is in his community, his group, his workplace, his school, his family, his history, the history of each of these. A personality then is the living tip of the iceberg of a socially constructed self.

We can get clues to this from the points along the base of Yrjo's triangles .

At the center of the base is community, and you can see the lines that connect back and forth between the subject, whether individual or collective, and the community, suggesting that somehow in this particular situation for this particular purpose, an individual or core group has stepped forward from a community in order to engage in a particular aspect of an activity; the lines go up to "tools" -- that is, the technical capabilities that a community can draw on, whether it's a production system in a factory, the court system, the internet, a communicatino medium, whatever...

To the right is "division of labor" -- which gave us some conceptual trouble when we were reading Ilyenkov and Leontiev because the notion that consciousness originates in the division of labor is pretty dense. But if we're thinking about how activity theory helps us understand the process of an individual, we need to look at how the division of labor within a community (or within an activity) separates out that individual, which will shape that person's consciousness.

At the left is rules -- the rules that govern a particular activity, whether they are the rules of law or an electoral system or a union contract or the unspoken rules of a family or social class. There is ALWAYS at least one, sometimes multiitudes, of rules in play (I'd like to think about how the relationship of the individual to the rules looks in what Vera J-S draws our attention to, the destructive system)...

We're arriving at the individual from the bottom up, sorting out how that person is socially constructed by looking at the communtiy from which the individual steps forth, emerges; how that person's activity is shaped by the division of labor in that community and in the group of like persons; and how the individual's activity relates to the system of rules or laws that are in effect, that make the activity rational.

I agree that we don't have good examples illustrating this. But I think it COULD be done and it's not as impossible as Bill suggests --

Happy new year!

Helena Worthen



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