For those that have been following the dialogue between Jay and Victor,
Victor's post today Thursday 7/3 might have pushed some of our email
technology's abilities a little too far - my email program didn't pick up
that Victor's newest comments are in a smaller font (but it did pick up
Jay's responses in the previous post colored in blue, which was very
readable). Copying Victor's post to Word fixed this - Victor's smaller
font was revealed. As an exercise, and because the dialogue is worthwhile,
I've redone Victor's post today by adding text: putting a ***V3 in front of
his newest (Jul 3) comments, putting a ***V1 in front of his Jun 22
comments, and a ***J2 in front of Jay's Jun 25 responses. Unfortunately,
my email program won't pick up color from Word, so it has erased Jay's blue
and my attempt to put all of Victor's newest comments in red. Bummer.
(And I fear that automatic line and paragraph breaks will make a terrible
mess of this on some screens). Anyway, hopefully this *** coding will
help interested readers struggle through all this and continue to follow
this worthy discussion (I want to chip in some thoughts on whether hammers
are social objects myself). And I hope I didn't get who-wrote-what-when
wrong!
- Steve
****************************************
At 05:28 PM 7/3/03 +0200, Victor wrote:
>>>>
***V3 The discussions here have been most interesting. They have helped
considerably to clarify my understanding and expression of issues
important to Cultural Historical theory, general and computational. And,
they have focussed my attention on at least one major theoretical issue
(that of authority) that I more or less glossed over in previous thinking.
Jay's commentary on my posting was particularly important in this regard
and I would like to share some of the new research directions that it has
inspired. Some of the commentary is a bit long and I plead guilty of a
certain rustiness in my expressive skills and thank those of you who review
it for your patience. One fairly long comment is devoted to the problem of
distinction between objectification of tools and of social relations. The
distinction between the two is important to the very fabric of Material
Cultural Historical theory and deserves more development than was presented
in the course of the discussion.
Anyway, many thanks to all the participants.
Yours,
Victor
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu>Jay Lemke
To: <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 5:35 AM
Subject: Re: Chasing the Object
***J2:
Continuing the dialogue on this topic, I'm sending some notes I made on
Victor's recent posting. Obviously there is a lot more to be said, and I
thank him for offering such stimulating discussions, connecting the topic
of material-ideal-objectifications to larger issues of social organization
of complex systems.
I have inserted my notes between paragraphs of Victor's posting, after
copying it to WORD and back again, so please excuse any formatting problems
... I have also highlighted some key points in the original. Please note
that I wrote these comments mostly for myself, but thought others might
like to see them, so they are not quite in my usual dialogical style and I
don't have the time right now to edit them ...
From: "Ben Reshef family" <victor@kfar-hanassi.org.il>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Subject: Re: Chasing the Object
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 19:22:16 +0200
***V1:
Dear Jay,
Your observation that the failure to explain the persistence through
objectification exposes the shortcomings of agent based and other bottoms up
models, such as Ethnomethodology, J. Shotter's writings, and Newman and
Holtzman's work, is exactly to the point. The building of an agent model for
a HDM explication of social organization quickly exposed this weakness and
pressed for modifications to rectify this flaw. The solution that I applied
is tripartite, consisting of three separate but related matters; authority,
the abstract ideal object, and the tolerance for internal diversity imparted
to systems by authority and abstract ideal objectifications.
1) . Authority: One of the most important considerations in S. Kaufman's
analyses of order in biological systems [Kaufman 1993,The Origins of Order:
Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, 1995, At Home in the Universe:
The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.] is the double
issue of error and complexity catastrophe. Brown and Eisenhardt [1998
Competing on the Edge: "Strategy as structured chaos"] introduced the issue
and their definition of it seems to me to be the best.
"Error catastrophe or extinction mutagenesis is a theory borrowed from
bio-genetics that describes a situation in which a high mutation rate
introduces so many errors into the system that it cannot adapt well because
it cannot distinguish useful variants from errors."
***J2: It cannot distinguish them fast enough because of the generational
timelag inherent in selectional processes.
***V1: And, "In the extreme,
the system becomes grid locked by too many interconnections. These ties
constrain the system and prevent adaptation. The result is a 'complexity
catastrophe." In general informationally poor interactional systems are poor
innovators and are especially susceptible to complexity catastrophe when
encountering changeable environments.
***J2: This is a version of the "requisite variety" argument of Ashby. If
the system does not have enough internal informational variety it cannot
respond to external stresses. Of course any system locks up if the number
of constraints from interaction exceeds the residual degrees of freedom.
There is insufficient residual plasticity for adaptation.
***V1: Human interactional systems would appear to be the most
plagued by error catastrophe, considering the relative richness of
"Cartesian" object
experience possible to the individual person in any temporal local
condition.
***J2: Semiotic imagination makes possible a faster rate of production of
internally generated novelty compared to the slow rate of selectional
correction of the introduced 'errors". Unfortunately the effects are
cumulative and one gets an acceleration of novelty production in human
social systems, as we are especially seeing today.
***V1: The capacity for individuals to learn from each other mitigates
considerably the dangers of error catastrophe; but not enough to explain the
evolution of complex human culture.
***J2: There seem to be two kinds of learning here. Local transmission of
information about corrections and collective analysis to identify errors.
***V1: Even simple experiments with a small
collectivity of interacting, learning agents with moderately high perceptual
capacities show that while stochastic convergence of performance is highly
likely for any one interaction session, the agents quickly diverge once the
session is finished and a new meeting between them involves a repetition of
consensus search.
***J2: This is, as Victor says, an effect and weakness of bottom-up models
in which only negotiated consensus among individual agents can produce
collective coherence of behavior.
***V3 It is both a weakness and strength. Since you have pointed out its
weakness, I'll address its strengths. The failure of small collectivities
of interacting agent with moderately high perceptual capacities to arrive
at persistent consensus indicates that enduring social order must be based
on more than recurrent interaction. Our solution to this problem was to
introduce a means whereby agents can "save" repeated dialogues and to
select their responses to interactional situations in accordance with the
amount of "saves" for all dialogues relevant to the situation. It is this
mechanism (roughly analogous to habit) that serves as the basis for our
general theory of asymmetrical interaction and authority. (See below).
***V1: Besides, the convergence process tends to be a lengthy
one - it grows in duration with the expansion of agent perceptual capacity -
and guarantees that agent interactions can neither be quick (say in an
emergency situation) nor be complex. Time restrictions on the period for
consensus formation simply result in many interaction breakdowns due to
error catastrophe.
***J2: Yes, it is exactly the timescale problem that matters here, and as
Victor notes it gets worse as there are more parameters to negotiate
"agreement" on. It's just too slow for survival under the eventual conditions.
***V3 Again, the "saving" mechanism and the general theory of asymmetrical
interaction and authority lessen and even eliminate this problem.
***V1: A search for more effective means for reducing error
catastrophe led to introduction of two additional mechanisms into the
system: conviction or
commitment and concurrence.
a) Conviction: Simply put, conviction is the preference of agents to
perform what they have already learned and to perform what they've learned
most often. ***J2: Could also be called "habit" or "automatism"??
***V3 Habit, yes. Automatism, no. Habit can be replaced by new experience,
automatism cannot.
***V1: b) Concurrence: In the same discourse mode, concurrence is the
preference of
agents to perform in accordance with the performances of the agents with
whom they interact and especially in accordance with the performances of the
agents with whom they regularly interact. ***J2: The herd instinct, or
cogent sociality.
***V3: Adaptation or responsiveness to the behavior of others would be
more fitting.
***V1: Conviction and Concurrence are in many respects antithetical; the
former
being a product of the history of personal experience (even if a sociogenic
one) while the latter is a product of immediate apperception of collective
activity. ***J2: This neatly reproduces the modern Western dilemma of
individual choice vs. collective need. Perhaps we should be a bit
suspicious of it for this reason.
***V3 Firstly, this is not a strictly Western dilemma. A good deal of
Japanese dramatic tragedy is based on this dilemma, it is often cited in
Chinese history, popular and official, as the cause for personal and social
disaster, and it is characteristic of hero crises in epic poetry
world-wide. Second, the antithesis between conviction and concurrence is
not presented here as a dilemma, but rather as a dialectic from which
emerges authority as an incorporation of both conviction and concurrence in
a new interactional relation (see below). This implies that conviction
(habit as you put it) and concurrence (responsive adaptation to the
behavior of others) are distinctly different kinds of operations, which is
an assertion that stands as a direct challenge to the still very popular
game theory-based model of sociality founded on "the prisoners' dilemma"
paradigm (Axelrod 1984 The Evolution of Cooperation).
***V1: The synthetic mechanism that emerges from conviction and
concurrence and transforms them into a single system is Authority: the
personalization of concurrence and the collectivization of conviction.
***J2: Ah, this is much better than just having a tension between
conviction and concurrence dispositions. But how exactly is it implemented?
***V3 It is considerably easier to implement conviction and concurrence
into the computational model than to present a theoretical justification.
The "saving to memory" mechanism described above can represent both habit
and identification of cumulative public opinion and the logical operators
of the program (inferred generalization, ordered memory systems, and so on)
insure that conviction and concurrence are expressed in one or another
objectification mode.
***V3 The theory expressed by these mechanisms demands more expansive
treatment than can be given here, especially since it challenges the
epistemology, mechanics and physics of theories of the roots of social
behavior of a very large sector of the scientific community. Putting it
most briefly, conviction (habit) and concurrence (adaptive response to
others behavior) are distinctive evolutes emergent from the decline of
instinct (rule based) behavior, i.e. that of social insects etc. From the
dialectical interaction of conviction and adaptive responsiveness emerge
mechanisms of social order such as personal and public dominion. Authority
itself emerges from the dialectical relation between dominion and
objectification. It appears to me that the evolution of authority shares
many roots with the evolution of objectification. In essence they are both
the product of the same paradox of the autonomously adapting individual who
adapts to extant conditions by coordinating his behavior with others of his
kind.
***V1: Authority introduced into the model the principle of instructing as
well as learning, albeit in a fairly simplistic and passive manner (akin to
the way
a Tai Chi master disciplines an errant pupil, i.e. by simply not responding
to performance that does not conform to the convictions of the teacher). By
introducing even the most simplistic teaching modes into the model we give a
powerful boost to the reduction of error catastrophe at a drastically
reduced cost in time and energy.
***J2: This is very reminiscent for me of a proposal I made quite a long
time ago in a different context that the "teaching instinct" was as
fundamental to sociality as the "learning drive". They are of course
complementary. We are as much driven to provide the information needed by
others (esp. for instance children and newcomers) as we are in other
circumstances to seek out that information. Children trigger our teaching
instincts as part of their learning drive. Interesting to think how far
such a principle generalizes.
***V3 Instinct is going a bit far, don't you think? I prefer an
interpretation of the "need to know" and "need to teach" as the product of
the absence of rule-based (instinctive) behavior among humans.
***V1: 2) Abstract ideal objectifications: The second issue involved in the
introduction of object persistence in a bottoms up model of social
organization involved the integration of the system with the Vygotskian
scheme of dialectical development of mental practices and with Ilyenkov's
conceptualisation of "Ideal objects" (or "formations" as I sometimes call
them).
***V1: In modelling the Vygotskian modes of mental practice it was
discovered that development through the complexes stages involve a not
unsurprising progressive decline in the creativity of transformation of
experience into
objects and an equivalent increase in the connectivity and complexity of
mental practice.
What was less expected and no less interesting was that
the burgeoning systems of associated facts characterising the more developed
forms of thinking in complexes (epitomized by pseudo conceptual thinking)
unify large bodies of experience at the cost of the flexibility of the
practice to adapt to temporal, local conditions.
This is best exemplified
by Piaget [1965. The moral judgment of the child.] and Kohlberg's [Power, F.
C., Higgins, A., & Kohlberg, L. 1989. Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral
Education.] observations of the moral aspects of children's play in the
middle stage of the age grade. ( At this stage arguments concerning game
rules are frequent and extensive and are very often resolved by force or by
boycotting the non-conformists. Clearly where complex performances are
regarded as strictly rule-based facts, negotiated settlements are difficult
if not impossible alternatives to partial or total breakdowns in
interactional relations.
The abstract mode of thinking represents a synthesis of analytic and
synthetic practice whereby large quantities of objects (or performances) may
be variously classified in accordance with features shared between them.
The groups formed through abstraction are strictly defined by the common
element shared by all members, and unlike the case with factual classes, a
member of an abstract category can be regarded as being a part of any number
of abstract categories if other of its features so warrant it.
***J2: Relevant here is Watanabe's theorem in logic, which reminds us that
we have to assign VALUE priorities to features in order to decide according
to which similarities and differences categories are to be preferentially
constructed, among all possible categorizations of multi-featured elements.
***V1: Truly abstract thought modes enable establishment of vast systems
of connected
objects, yet provides a means for great system flexibility and provides a
firm basis for the formation of complex, persistent objects and object
systems.
***J2: But in a sense this only pushed the dilemma up one level, to
negotiations regarding values. Here flexibility is also needed, but if we
are not to get too high and too fast levels of schizmogenesis (ala
Bateson), we also need a countervailing push toward value consensus, one
that very likely must come from "above" not in the sense of personal
authority/arianism, but in the sense of cultural traditions, or more likely
a heteroglossia of interdependent subcultural value-systems.
***V3 Clearly any model that purports to simulate interaction involving
abstract objectification must by definition draw information from a much
wider social environment than that of the immediate encounter. These
abstract objectifications may be resident in the personal archives of the
participants in the encounter as part of each individual's accumulated
experience, but all of them have been acquired in the course of prior
social interaction. Encounters involving participants whose prior
experience has been acquired within the same cultural traditions or the
same multiplicity of interdependent subcultural traditions will tend to
sustain those traditions. Still most cultural tradition, even that of
small fairly isolated communities, is rarely monolithic, the multiplicity
of interdependent traditions often hiccups, and so it is to be expected
that there will be some variation in the array of objectifications in the
personal archives of members of even the most culturally monolithic of
communities. Some thirty years of personal experience in such a community
and at least some ethnographic material on small isolated communities tend
to confirm this view (I'm thinking here particularly of an interesting
monograph on the expression of current internal political conflicts in Zuni
Pueblo through different version of myth - published in the 50's in AA).
So, while direct encounters may well preserve most of the objectifications
of the tribe they may also include elements of conflict reflecting both the
differential experiences of the participants in the encounter and the
general sogginess that characterizes all human organization.
***V3 The presence of conflict in an encounter, even where the issues at
stake are "trivial," will engender exercises of authority. Since exercise
of authority is both personal - someone does it to someone else - and
communal - it's as effective as the social clout of the collectivity it
represents - the issue of personal versus communal authority is not an
issue here.
***V1: Ilyenkov's [1977, The concept of the Ideal] concept of the ideal
object as reflexive abstraction of social interaction (the objectification
of interactional performance systems) imparts purpose and value to
objectified material experience. "Human aims are nothing but the material
process and outcome of activity in ideal form. The ideal image is the object
of production converted into an internal image, as a need, as a drive and as
purpose" [Marx 1973 Grundrisse].
***J2: So here we in fact do have the importance of values and purposes.
Interesting to think how values, as well as practices are embodied in
objects and formation. Obvious (post Bakhtin) for the case of discourses,
but perhaps less so for the case of material tools and artifacts. We have a
notion of affordances for the relation to practices, but we need a
complementary notion to also link material tools and artifacts to value
systems, particularly values relevant to resolution of social conflict, or
to prescribing the "right" way to do things in cases where there are
clearly multiple possible practices and not having some consensus about
them would lead to great risks for community survival. Perhaps the answer
here lies in the combinations in cultures of tools/artifacts WITH
discourses and activities that carry a sense of "rightness" with their
performances. One can note the great importance attached to "right
performance" of symbolic rituals. We interpret this instrumentally from our
own cultural perspective, but that may project our view too much. There is
value, essential value, for a community in attaching to activities of
significance a strong community consensus about the right way to do them,
regardless of immediate effects. This in turn frequently becomes an arena
of discussion and negotiation, itself a model for the survival process of
the community, and more importantly, an opportunity to renew the meta-value
principles, which are often unstated and implicit, that guide the outcomes
of the negotiations about what is the right performance. It is having ways
to get to consensus about values that matters most, even if there is
continuing diversity of values (cf. heteroglossia) and conflict over
policies, actions, etc.
***V3 Regarding the underlined sentences. This is part of the point of
Ilyenkov's The Concept of the Ideal (1977). Material tools and artefacts
are integrated into social life by according their use and products some
sort of social purpose. Social purpose is a function of human intercourse
and is not implicit to the tool. Even in the class of cases you present
"…values (concerning tools and artifacts) relevant to resolution of social
conflict, or to prescribing the "right" way to do things in cases where
there are clearly multiple possible practices and not having some consensus
about them would lead to great risks for community survival." The issue at
stake is not the tool, but the coordination of work practices to attain
socially established goals. Take, for example, the "right use" of the
penultimate tool, speech. A pragmatist explanation of the social value of
speech would attend to the tool itself, and assert that speech is designed
to insure that "one is understood by others" and that it is this goal that
justifies learning "proper speech." Understanding "proper speech" as an
expression of social purpose would attend to the representational function
of kinds of "proper speech" as signifiers of social solidarity and
exclusivity, it's relationship to extant social structures and so on. The
pragmatic argument fails since it regards understanding, of all things, as
having no real relationship to social intercourse! The origin of this
failure is the treatment of the abstraction, speech, as having a material
reality other than its manifestations in social intercourse. It just
doesn't happen.
***V3 Even the functional value of a more humble tool such as the hammer
must be understood through social signifiers, i.e. Ideal objectifications.
Except as the iconic representation of the working class on the flag of the
USSR the hammer itself is not a social signifier, but it certainly does
play a part in attaining social objectives such as construction of a long
conference table whose elegance and obvious costliness will serve to
signify the status, wealth and power of the institution for which it was
made. And what of the proper use of the hammer? In this case we would
have to search for its social value in the economic relations between
hammer user, his employer, the purveyor of the materials for table
construction and the purchaser of the table as signified mostly by the
various documents (banknotes, paychecks, contracts, and registries of
accounts). In a market economy the hammer user would be expected by his
employer to use methods that would minimize costs of materials and labor
and maximize the final impression the table would have on the purchaser.
The hammerer might have other considerations, some consistent with those of
his employer such as the desired impression the table is to have on the
purchaser (at least in regards to nail placement and insertion) and some
not, such as the value of his labor and the amount of time required to
produce a highly crafted table. Note that the hammer itself is not a
social object, even though it is very much a part of the social
intercourse, and that the rightness of its use is intimately connected with
the specific social conditions of its use. Clearly, the right way to use a
hammer when banging together 20 or 30 crates for sending machine tools will
be very different than that appropriate for making a fine conference table.
***V1: All the representations
that refer to social practice, colours, flags, and written law are serve as
reinforcement for both the objects and the organization of social relations
that generate and maintain them. As P Jones writes:
"This, indeed is the special and vital function which ideal forms fulfil in
human life-activity: they allow the goals, aims, drives, purposes,
strategies and forms of action and cooperation of social humanity to be
represented outside of, prior to and independently of the real activities
which engender them:" [2000: "Symbols, Tools and Ideality in Ilyenkov"]
***J2: This is certainly correct, but perhaps it is not the whole story
…our ideal-objects, the material objectifications of community values, are
themselves embedded in discourses and activities which explicitly raise
issues of right performance, the values which guide right performance, and
the normally inexplicit meta-values and meta-practices that enable
consensus about values and policies, i.e. about "right performance". I
think that the paradigm in mind in Jones' analysis is building solidarity
for rapid collective consensus response in emergencies (like war). But we
need our model to also consider the functions that occur with respect to
longer-term, less acute maintenance of the community's ability to respond
to slower, but no less profound demands for change/adaptive response.
***V3 I certainly agree with you here, the problem of discourse and
activities that are reflexively related to ideal objects, which are
themselves reflexive objectifications of social interaction, indicates that
at least some human behavior involves much more recursiveness than the
simple reflexivities dealt with by Ilyenkov. After all, what we are doing
here, the practice of social science and social philosophy, is the
paramount case of recursive social behavior, and a truly legitimate social
philosophy should be able to account for its own practice no less than for
other forms of social behavior.
***V1: 3) System tolerance:
Authority and abstract objects, especially abstract ideal objects, preserve
object persistence on the smallest as well as the largest scales of social
organization.
***J2: This is extremely important. Note particularly the they can BRIDGE
across timescales.
***V1: They are, therefore, equally effective in explaining how
long-lived practices and related objectifications may be produced in
directly observable interpersonal interaction as in historical developments
involving many such interpersonal events. Surely many practices and
objectifications are products of many interactional encounters and can never
be traced to a single case of social intercourse or even to the history of
social interaction of a single group of people. On the other hand, even in
this age of mass media, the basic unit of significant social activity is the
encounter or interactional event and even the most complex and largest
scaled social organizations can only be realized through the interpersonal
activity of those whose practices form and enact them. It would be very
strange if we could only find the mechanisms responsible for object
persistence outside the interactional event.
***J2: I certainly agree that we need to examine the role of ideal-objects
on and across many scales, both extensional (numbers of participants) and
temporal (short to longer term processes). They, and the activities in
which they are embedded (including discursive activities), emerge
collectively (in their material construction, but especially in their
social-cultural significance) across many instances of more local
interactions, as Victor notes. But they function both at those local scales
AND at more macro-social and historical ones. Just HOW this happens, and
how to model it, is still an important and open question.
***V3 Several linkages between micro and macro-social scales are already
available for investigation. One of these is the way abstract
objectifications serve as a bridge between micro and macro-social
formations discussed above. Another interesting avenue of research into
this issue is the fairly new mathematical work on small-world networks
(Watts and Strogatz 1998 "Collective dynamics of small-world networks"
Nature).
***V1: The response is not complete and is telegraphic in some passages ,
but I
think it covers the field. .
With Regards,
Victor
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