Andy, Judy, Bill, et al;
I started this message early this morning, then filed it as more verbiage
but as I've followed the discussion throughout the morning, I've decided
that's there something worthwhile contributing here. Especially insofar as
Judy repeats the common perception that "Marxism achieves objectivity by
reducing sociocultural phenomena to economic relations, so that we end up
with claims like, "there is no such thing as culture." " Although it is
true that some laboring under the banner of Marxism have sustained this
point of view, this is an oversimplification, and really ignores about 80
years of Marxist theory initiated with Lukacs and certainly central to
soviet philosophy as in Ilyenkov and Mikhailov. When I, personally, reject
the term "culture" it's not to propose that all social phenomena can be
reduced to economic relations -- even presupposing that one could isolate
the economic out from the entire web. Rather the issue concerns relations
of production and their ontological primacy for understanding
social-historical phenomena. Production is prima facie a social-historical
phenomena.
Here's what I wrote earlier (5:30 a.m.):
I've been following this discussion from a distance but there has been a
parallelism between what I've been reading lately (Lukacs "Ontology") and
this discussion of motive. As I understand it, the classic example of
motive is taken from Leont'ev's discussion of the collective hunt. The
motive for participation in the collective hunt is distinguished from the
goal of the individuals actions but is congruent with the object of the hunt
as a totality: to satisfy a need. The issue that caught my attention here
is the relationship between the individual motives and the overall direction
of the social totality.
It seems that the scale of what we call an activity system is very important
here. Once we start "embedding" activity systems, don't we completely lose
the individual qua individual human being at each higher level of embedding?
Doesn't the individuals of a higher level activity system become the
embedded activity systems of the lower level. Thus no individual really has
a motive for participating in the global division of labor except as
representative of a the object of a lower level, embedded activity system?
**as a representative of the object of that level**
here we move into a complex issue of determinations of reflection of the
totality, of the whole in the parts, the universal in the particular. But
this is also perhaps the underlying meaning of Marx's maxim that individuals
make history but not in the way they understand it as the meaning of their
own activity. Yes, individual motives change things but not in the way the
individuals themselves imagine. The common thread is found in the notion of
value. Motives reflect values, values form the basis of motives. Value
here is meant in its most basic use: I value being warm (not too warm but
just right like Goldilocks), not hungry, etc. Of course the range of
motives becomes much more complex as a consequence of reflection through the
complex of systems that satisfy the basic needs underlying values and of
course the internalized values related to my fundamental incorporation in
social groups or activity systems of all kinds. The specific quality of
human existence, its historicity, resides in that it is not given as the
result of an individual directly satisfying individual needs but that it is
always mediated through socially given motives.
Which brings me to the Lukacs passages that seemed to relevant here. Lukacs
pointed to Marx's analysis of economic value as fundamental form for the
analysis of all value and thereby implicitly related to questions of the
relation between individual motive and the way in which these motives
reflect the social values. Some passages:
"The socially real and objective relationship, independent of consciousness,
that is described here by the term 'value', is, without prejudice to its
objectivity, the ultimate ontological foundation--naturally only the
ultimate one--for all those social relations that we refer to as values; and
thus also for all those modes of behaviour of social relevance that we call
value judgements. The dialecticaly unity of socially objective existence
and objectively founded value relation is rooted in the fact that all these
objective relationships, processes, etc. although they certainly maintain
themselves and operate independent of the intentions of the individual human
acts in which they are embodied, nevertheless only arise as the realization
of these intentions, and can only develop further by way of their reactiion
back on further individual human acts."
*** I think it is important to recognize that when Lukacs says "naturally
only the ultimate one" he is indicating that this is what remains after all
mediations have been abstracted away. But the importance of its ontological
primacy resides in the applicability of the analysis of value in its
economic manifestation for all other forms of value, for everything that has
value and as such can form the object of a motive. This form of analysis is
precisely that which discovers the dialectical unity of the individual act
(say buying or selling) and the socially given categories that enable such
an act to occur in the first place. To continue with Lukacs:
"The dialectical reciprocity between the individual, the subject of the
alternative, and the general, the socially lawlike, creates a more manifold
and variegated series of phenomena, precisely because the social essence can
only reveal its appearance via the medium of ultimately individualized
man."
And the point is that social phenomena are qualitatively distinct from
non-social on the dimension of historicity (which is in any event preferable
to the notion of culture and yes does include a teleological movement to the
ever greater socialization of existence). Here Lukacs statement on the
history of human sexuality echoes something Marx said about satisfying
hunger:
"It is quite possible, for example, to conceive the reproduction of specieis
from the division of cells through to the sexual life of higher animals as a
history, but it is apparent at first glance that the history of human
sexuality, with its marriage, eroticism, etc. acquire an incomparable
addition of richness, differentiation, gradation, creation of qualitatively
new phenomena, etc. as a result of the complex of its social
characteristics."
The point being that Marx's (not marxist) method, as Lukacs and Ilyenkov
both understood, is not reductionist in a very specific sense: it does not
reduce any element of the system to any other element of the system. The
point is to understand the totality, which is in fact expressed in every
moment (particular) but most clearly in some (eg. production) which therefor
has ontological primacy for understanding the whole and thereby every
particular as well.
Paul H. Dillon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 01 2001 - 01:01:01 PST