Hi and a bright new year wish for all,
I downloaded and read the review of Perspectives on Activity Theory. It was
a strange exercise since I haven't read the book, although the review did
lead me to order it.
Nevertheless I was puzzled by some of the more general comments the authors
made, in particular the statement, repeated in various places, that there is
a Marxian idea "that nature is revealed in change." Quite simply, I've
never seen this statement, in this form or any close to it, in anything Marx
ever wrote. The concept of nature in Marx is something quite difficult to
unravel, in the first place, and the basic position is that our notion of
nature, nature as we experience it, is itself a product of social labor.
Perhaps the author's really wanted to say something else, like "the essence
of all phenomena is historical" or something similar, but the statement that
nature is revealed in change is certainly not true or even very clear.
Another general comment concerns the lack of clarity as to what is meant by
"individual". It seems to me that the authors are intent on inserting some
notion of individual that is of equal ontological status with the social.
This to me seems very far from correct and certainly contrary to the
premises of activity theory. Perhaps I'm wrong in a number of ways, but
this is the clear impression that the piece gives me, as though that is its
not too hidden agenda.
I ran across an interesting passage in Theodor Adorno's three studies on
Hegel that I believe captures the fundamental position of the marxist theory
(and thereby also AT):
"The personal consciousness of the individual, which was analyzed by
traditional epistemology, can be seen to be illusion. Not only does the
bearer of personal consciousness owe his existence and the reproduction of
his life to society. In fact, everything through which he is specifically
constituted as a cognitive subject, hence, that is, the logical universality
that voerns his thinkings, is, as the school of Durkheim, in particular,
has show, always also social in nature. ... What the individual holds to be
privary and irrefutably absolute is dervied and secondary, down to every
individual piece of sensory data." (1999:63)
Finally, in discussing Toulmin's comments on the relation between later
Wittgenstein and AT, the author's point out that the old Cartesian question
about how individuals "arrive at certain knowledge about the world" has
been replaced by a new question: ""How are iundividuals succssfully
socialized into the knowledge shared by a particular culture or profession?"
Clearly this "new" question seems to define a lot of the directions in
research in AT and AT related approaches as well as others. But in this
context it occurs to me that an equally important question and one that
isn't so common (I can't think of any research on it all, but that doesn't
mean much!) would be "How do collective processes create new, emergent
fields of knowledge?" This is somewhat related to the Marxist notion about
the creation of new needs in the course of technical and social development.
Is there anything in Perspectives that deals with this (or in any AT
literature)? This would of course relate to the kind of transitions that
lead to fundamental paradigm shifts in the sciences or world views in
general. As usual I'm very suspect about the catch-all term: culture.
Anyway, these were some thoughts and perhaps I'll have more to say when I
get the book, but by then I imagine the train will have moved on to another
station.
Paul H. Dillon
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