This issue is one I've been thinking about a lot too for some time. This
is where I've gotten and I'd be interested in any responses.
Activity names the whole, but it also names one of the parts of the whole.
A potential confusion. The whole consists of the sociohistoric activity
(with motive and collective subject), the individual action (with goals and
individual subjectivity), and the operations (with, I'll say, affordances
and embedded unconscious subjectivity). (Technically then, individuals
have no motives. Another source of potential terminological confusion.)
Activity 1, the whole, is concrete historical practice as I understand it;
it is what is happening.
Activity 2 is a plane that pulls out enduring human projects and their
specific sociocultural elaborations; it is an analysis of what is happening
from a certain macrohistorical perspective. Leont'ev (78) suggests that
all activity 1 is multimotivational (i.e., involves multiple activity 2's).
So, he suggests, in the most abstract sense, that if you look at people
working on a farm, in a factory, in a store, whatever, they will be
implicated in both labor and social relations. I'd argue that, as Goffman
suggested, any situation is laminated, with multiple activities co-present,
though variously foregrounded or backgrounded. This is one of the reasons
why gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, etc. aren't
irrelevant in, say, scientific practice. They're always already there.
Research then would be an activity 2 woven into some activity 1.
Following Vygotsky, Wartofsky, Ilyenkov, and all the sociocultural and
activity theorists who have emphasized the centrality of material and
psychological tools/artifacts in the promulgation and transformation of
culture-history, it seems clear that conditions are the central "seeds" of
conscious goals and reflectively recognized motives. In other words,
contrary to some of Leont'ev's somewhat problematic examples, like learning
to drive, learning does not move not from activity 2 to action to
operation. Learning happens in activity 1 (all analytic levels always
simultaneously present, always laminated sociocultural activity systems,
with tools/artifacts/conditions being at the core of historical processes
of development). In part then, it is precisely the very heterogeneous
sociohistorical trajectories of tools/artifacts that ensure laminated
activity.
Finally, there can be coordinations and discoordinations at any point
(between points on the triangle, between activity 2, action, and
operations, between participants' ?activities?, activity 3?--what the
*person* is actually doing in relation to sociohistorical projects, her
conscious intentions, and her operationalized practices).
Paul Prior
Associate Professor (English)
Associate Director, Center for Writing Studies
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 01 2001 - 01:01:02 PST