Two interesting sets of issues seem to be accumulating around our
object-discussion ... one, emphasized by Harry D., is the complementarity
of object production and community production; the other, reinforced by Ben
R., is the question of the ephemeral collective emergence of objects in
activity.
I like Harry's making the connection to Bernstein, and I think that his
sophisticated sociological view of the complementarity of community
processes and instructional or productive ones is indeed very close both to
CHAT and to the complementarity issues raised by Foot's article.
Bernstein's core theoretical analysis places a lot of importance on the
classical sociological notion of the "division of labor", and so on the
issue of co-ordination and integration of efforts in a community, so that
the whole adds up to a functional unity. This is also the key question that
Ben raises by reference to agent-based models of ant behavior. It happens
that such agent-based models are now being widely applied to human social
systems, asking the key question: how do complex collective productions
result from the unplanned, or emergent coordination of relatively simple
templates for interactive behavior?
But there is a big difference here between Bernstein's, or Marx's,
sociological analysis and agent-based models: the issue of persistence
through objectification. Ben notes that historical-dialectical models, in
their more revolutionary moments, emphasize the transitory character of
social formations. But every social formation has some set of
characteristic timescales (for inception, for maintenance cycles, for
action cycles, for change, for demise), and what is ephemeral on one
timescale (decades or centuries) may be quite stable and persistent on
another (hours or months). The agent-based models are purely "bottom-up"
social models; they do not include the creation of new objects that have
material persistence on longer timescales and which can mediate across
scales (the way, for example, a material report or architectural plan
persists over years and participates in readings and doings over minutes or
days). Even ants build "burrows" that have material persistence and lend a
kind of collective memory and behavioral affordances to short-term doings
of the colony.
Bernstein did not, so far as I know (please someone say if he did) address
the issue of the grounds of persistence of human social-behavioral
patterns, such as the instructional and regulatory discourses of
educational or other institutions. He did doubtless make use of the notion
of persistent social formations, and indeed his famous codes or coding
orientations, linked to social-class differentiated participation in
socialization activities, are among these. His model is not purely
bottom-up. It is also top-down in the sense that larger-scale persistent
features of the material conditions of social organization (e.g. the
division of wealth as well as the division of labor) influence human
development (e.g. learning in school). These social formations may well be
the products of individual human agency, collectively organized in the
past, but materially persistent into each individual's present. But this
just shows, I think, that purely bottom-up models (e.g. ethnomethodology,
or agent-based social modeling) are incomplete if they do not provide for
persistent material objects and other forms of larger-scale, longer-time
productions that in turn influence the ways in which at shorter timescales,
collective activity is organized emergently from agent choices.
Ben also very helpfully elaborated further on the Objekt vs. Gegenstand
distinction, and in particular made very clear, as I had suggested, that
for LSV and in the CHAT tradition, ideality arises not from construction by
the individual mind as such, but from meaningful function in collective
activity. I think, though, that he is a bit too pessimistic about the
impossibility of studying ephemeral multi-faceted organizing objects of
activity. If we over-emphasize the bottom-up aspect of object formation,
this may seem to be the case. But if we recognize that by virtue of their
(and our) materiality, Objects in the special CHAT sense are likely to also
have some scale of temporal persistence, and some limits to the rates at
which they change, mutate, evolve, etc., then the problem is more
tractable. I certainly agree that if we see activity as organized around
such Objects, the objects are dynamic (but not capricious or chaotic), and
they are also multi-faceted, including contradictory facets as seen by
differently positioned participants in the activity. If we ask: Is there
one common Object?, we may be disappointed. But if we ask instead: is there
an organized system of coordinated or complementary Objects? one which
embodies and affords the organization and coordination of the activity
itself among the manifold actions of its participants? then I think we must
be able to find such a material organizational framework, scaffold, or
"motive" (motif?) for an activity.
Perhaps we need to push a bit further with the idea of complementarity
between social process and activity products. The CHAT tradition begins I
think from a paradigm of activity centered, in Marx, on productive labor --
i.e. to activity that is organized around producing a material product.
That product "exists" already for the participants in the activity in large
part from its previous production and circulation in the community: most
productive labor is about producing more of something that has already
existed. It is because we participate in the social activities in which the
products we wish to make have meaning for us that we are able to, and are
motivated to, produce more of these products. We also usually need the
original sample of the material product, as an object, or as a template, or
symbolically represented in plans-for-making, or by tools-for-making ... in
order to have successful production. Here we have the most stable kind of
organizing "object": the object of re-production. And here also we have the
most stable kind of community: one that reproduces itself in order to
reproduce the objects that make it possible. Here also is the simplest form
of the complementarity between community-building and object-producing
activity. I think one can hear in this simple account many parallels with
Bernstein's analysis.
Bernstein of course went far beyond this simplest case, to consider social
class reproduction through education, where the material object is some set
of dispositions in the people so educated (and he recognized the useful
link here to Bourdieu's formulation). People, or at least people of a
certain kind, are also material objects of productive activity. But we also
cannot lose sight of ephemerality and change. Too often reproductionist
models also do not take into account the multiple timescales and
contradictions that are generative of change in activity and communities.
What happens when a community that sets out to produce one kind of object
finds that the very existence of this object, or some feature of the
community which is needed to create such an object, suggests the
desirability of a further object? One could see this as a simple form of
the revolutionary dialectic itself: the class conditions needed to produce
the industrial objects of early capitalism propose changes in the relations
of the community (more just distribution of profit), and the objects
themselves may become a means to this end (printed broadsides, mass
produced weapons). As the object of the community's activities becomes less
the alienated industrial objects as such, and more the social relations of
the community itself, a dialectic is engendered in which new kinds of
material objects are needed to mediate the new kind of community, and the
conditions of production of these new objects may again suggest further
changes in the organization of the community. We move from a
reproductionist model to an evolution-revolution model.
In this formulation, as I believe in CHAT generally, the motor of change is
the linkage between changing communities and changing product-objects. That
link occurs in collective-productive-reflective activity. Ideality arises
not just in social-functional meaning-in-activity, but more essentially in
the critical-reflexive moments of activity, those in which we forge the
material and value relations among our aims, our object-products, and the
nature of our own community.
JAY.
At 04:48 PM 6/21/2003 +0200, you wrote:
>I'm afraid that my comments about B. Robinson's distinction between objekt
>and gegenstand were not clear (16 June 2003). If so I apologize for being
>unnecessarily cryptic. The problem here is to provide a short and clear set
>of comments
>on the article that accurately reflects my general approach to the issue.
>I,m not really sure if there is in this forum any consensus concerning these
>issues so For those who are interested I'm sending an attachment that shows
>how, or better, where I link the object and instrumental activity into CHAT.
>The differences between my model and the AT model are, as I hope are made
>clear in the attachment, are less a matter of basic theoretical differences
>than they are of research approach.
>
> And now some comments on the Foot article:
> If we were to choose a single feature that characterises historical
>dialectical materialism, we would have to settle on the transitory character
>of virtually every aspect of culture. Marx and Engels and most of their
>followers regarded this feature of HDM as the scientific justification for
>social revolution. Actually, for HDM the ephemeral character of culture
>goes much deeper than this. Lurking behind the theory is the recognition
>that human culture is a matter of more or less temporary accommodations
>between interacting individuals and is never, ever frozen into the kinds of
>rule based organization that characterises our less intellectually gifted
>neighbours: ants, dogs and even dolphins.
> Seen in this light, the object, be it material or ideal, is likely to
>be different for every person sharing it, different for every case of social
>intercourse, and different for every investigator researching the
>individuals and interactions which share the object. Variation of the
>properties of the object may include changes in kind as well as changes in
>descriptive features. Take, for example, Marx and Engel's theories
>concerning the basic definition of capitalism. The transformation of all
>valuation of worth to that of the market (the objectification of all
>relations as trade and all experience as commodity) is seen by them as a
>product of the conversion of money (an ideal object representing the
>performance of exchange) from an abstracted ideal object that links many
>diverse interactional situations into a reified abstraction or material
>object (they would call it a fetish) that defines interactional situations.
>So for HDM the object, in its features and even in its general relation to
>experience, is like the electron a very slippery thing indeed.
> So how do we research the object? We can't, or at least not directly.
>We can incorporate into our models the various ways the participants in the
>interaction/s researched objectify the experiences and interactional systems
>of interest, we can examine how these diversities are influenced and changed
>by the interchanges that arise in the course of interaction, and we can
>compare the "before and after" to discover the cumulative effects of the
>interactions on the objectifications of the participants; but in all these
>researches we a compelled to regard "the object" as an entity characterised
>by a range of possible features and relations to experience. To carry the
>electron analogy a bit further, the object should be regarded as a cluster
>of possible features and relationships much as the electron is regarded as
>occupying a cloud of possible positions.
> The view of the transitory nature of the object presented here is
>fairly close to that of the Foot analysis of EARWARN. This is particularly
>the case with his notion of the essential uncatchability of the object.
>"Although object conceptions can be observed and identified empirically, the
>object-engaged and enacted yet always unfinished, simultaneously material
>and ideal-is in its essence "uncatchable." I do wonder, however, whether he
>even comes close to a thorough exposition of the diversity of
>objectifications by which EARWARN was identified and through which EARWARN
>was enacted. While we have a good representation in the paper as to the
>character and evolution of the object as it was manifested in relationships
>between researchers, between directors and between directors and
>researchers, it is gives little information concerning the character and
>evolution of the object in relations between directors and the funding
>agency and no information about how the program was regarded by the
>researched population (the potential troublemakers). He does not even
>mention if these latter participants in the program were even aware of
>EARWARN's existence. I suspect that if he had researched the participants
>in EARWARN that were external to the research bureaucracy: the funding
>agency and the researched population, he himself would have adopted the view
>that there was in actuality no common object, EARWARN, during the period of
>this study-that EARWARN was just a shell covering the individual goals of
>its participants and may well have produced an even more interesting paper
>than he did.
>
>
>
>-----
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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