Re: History

From: Paul H.Dillon (illonph@pacbell.net)
Date: Tue Feb 12 2002 - 10:38:47 PST


mike, djc,

I've been following this thread with expectation but must express some
disappointment. It seems everyone is talking about histories of THINGS
(domains or whatever) when in fact the most outstanding characteristic of
any history is that it is a history of a subject be this collective or
individual. I think this is the only sense that makes sense when I read
Vygotsky. Many of the other uses of the term "history", (e.g., "A Brief
History of Time") are really extensions of the fundamental (and necessary)
understanding of history as the history of a subject, an identity. This is
the difficulty with what I've read so far: there is no concrete subject of
these so-called "historical domains".

For me the key question concerns the characteristic movements of the
collective subject. I wonder, with EP Thompson, why is the event of walking
the dog every day not of 'historical' significance, while a black woman
refusing to get out of a seat on a bus, is. Just proposing that question to
oneself will immediately open the domain of collective subject; the obvious
will be evident. Did the collective historical subject that emerged
after Rosa Parks refused to budge exist before she got taken off the bus by
the police? Did the universal human subject addressed in the U.N.'s charter
exist before WWII's unification of the world through war carried to every
corner of the globe (pretty basic contradiction, eh?)

Dialectical materialists, such as Vygotsky, do not think that the movement
of history is a random process, but rather one that is guided by its own
internally generated dynamic through a series of related stages that
transform through internal the contradictions of class society. I think
that without a clarification of the collective subject at the most abstract,
broadest and and most basic level, the identification of the initial domain
of history that we are talking about, any use of the term "history" is
either metaphorical or arbitrary and we could never unambiguously explain
the difference between me walking Bailey, and Rosa Parks not getting out of
her seat. This does not at all resemble a bracketing and interweaving of
thinglike temporal domains (a la Lemke), but rather a bracketing and
Ukrainian doll-like insertion of subjectivities within subjectivities. That
is, of subjects for whom a given history is "our history."

Paul H. Dillon

----- Original Message -----
From: Cunningham, Donald <cunningh@indiana.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 6:36 AM
Subject: RE: History

> Thanks Ana and Mike. I suppose I have a much narrower context of
application
> for the word "history" and that is leading me astray, just as the word
> community did last summer when we were discussing LBE. In LBE (if I have
it
> right), community refers to the entire activity system, not (or not only)
to
> the node labeled as such in Yrjo triangles. Likewise, history is both a
meta
> category (everything has a time scale) and a specific reference to the
> "genetic domains". Words are such troublesome things. I wonder why we
> bother!
>
> djc
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ana Marjanovic Shane [mailto:anashane@speakeasy.net]
> Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 10:29 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: History
>
>
> I think you are right!! Each of the elements incorporates a different
scale
> a different sense of history. I think that "H" in CHAT refers to all of
> them - to the sense that whatever you are talking about you should take
the
> history of that element into account. Sometimes it may also mean that you
> have to find the relationship between two different scales.
> This is a very important issue. Jay Lemke wrote about it on XMCA if I
> remember well several years ago.
>
> Ana
>
>
> At 06:39 PM 2/11/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >Could I ask a dumb question that may or may not be relevant to the
current
> >discussion. To what does the HISTORY in CHAT refer? Cultural history? The
> >history of the individual (development?)? The trajectory of the activity?
> If
> >we lay YE's model out, each of the elements seem to have a history
> >(artifact, community, division of labor, etc.) but a slightly different
> >sense of history for each. Or am I playing the role of Mr. H. Dumpty
> >again.............djc
>



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