relationality: Re: Objekt -- back to the future

From: Tony Whitson (twhitson@UDel.Edu)
Date: Mon Apr 18 2005 - 10:45:13 PDT


also on relationality (if a little bit off-topic):

I recall theat Dewey espoused a "correspondence theory" of truth, but in
the sense of two people who correspond with each other through the mail,
rather than the picture-theory notion of correspondence.

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Ana Marjanovic-Shane wrote:

> Wow!
> We should all go back to Confucius (Help: spelling in ENGLISH??). I like the Chinese terms VERY much. The "zhu" and the "ke". There is much more relational in them and a sense that one is a master/ruler/host of a guset(object)!!! It implies very personal and very direct relationship, and also a very ACTIVE one.
>
> But there is also a sense of co-dependence in that there simply IS NO guest without a host or the other way around, there is no host without a guest. This seem to be very near the idea of "object" as something dependent on the "subject" and existing only within the activity system. AND also the Subject -- as dependent and existing only in the activity system.
>
> I love the "keguanzhuyi" (objectivism) and "zhuguanzhuyi" (subjectivism).
>
> Ana
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony Whitson [mailto:twhitson@udel.edu]
> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 03:50 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: RE: Objekt -- back to the future
>
> Very interesting.
>
>
>
> Sometimes I like to explore semantic possibilities by considering the
> translation counterparts in non-Western languages.
>
> In Chinese, "object" can be rendered "wuti" (maybe "object-body") as in
> material (physical) body (e.g., a brick) -- inanimate but also animate, such
> as "animals" or "dongwu" (literally "animate object).
>
> The "wu" here is used for the "material" part of words like "materialistic."
>
>
>
> Before the Montréal Business Mtg & ensuing discussion, I always thought of
> "object-mediated" in CHAT in this sense.
>
>
>
> When "object/subject" or "objective/subjective" are counterposed in Chinese,
> a different pair of word are used: "ke" for "object" and "zhu" for
> "subject."
>
>
>
> In the more familiar everyday counterposition of the terms, "ke" and "zhu"
> mean "guest" (keren="guest-person") and "host," (zhuren="host-person")
> respectively; so "keguanzhuyi" (objectivism) and "zhuguanzhuyi"
> (subjectivism) are literally broken down as "guest-view-ism" and
> "host-view-ism."
>
>
>
> Besides "host," "zhuren" is also "master" or "ruler" -- for example in a
> master/slave or master/servant relationship.
>
> _____
>
> From: Peg Griffin [mailto:Peg.Griffin@worldnet.att.net]
> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 9:44 AM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: Objekt -- back to the future
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Thanks, Mike for the Arne and thanks, Ana for the Burke and more.
>
>
>
> Mike, doesn't what Arne includes as Ritva's comment remind you of the way we
> worked the text and the teacher into the early triangles we made to explore
> the reading work with Armandito and (was it) Billy in the re-mediation work?
>
>
>
> Ana, I like thinking about the classes of definables that are defined in
> terms of what they are not -- middle child or middle class being two
> exemplars. (I admit to pride about working class tying to substance beyond
> ...)
>
> Phonemes are also defined in terms of what they are not in a well defined
> system. (Yes, there're articulatory or acoustic properties, but essentially
> my American English /b/ is defined as not /p/, /d/, /t/, /k/, /g/, /s/ etc.,
> even vowels and other grain/system defined units.)
>
> Peg
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> From: Ana <mailto:ana@zmajcenter.org> Marjanovic-Shane
>
> To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu
>
> Cc: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>
> Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 10:59 PM
>
> Subject: Re: Objekt -- back to the future
>
>
>
> Arne said:
>
> Curiously, this word then came to mean inanimate objects, mainly.
> Therefore, a more abstract kind of name was invented by coining
> "Gegenstand", a translation of Latin objectum -- "thing presented to the
> mind", as the Oxford Concise Dict explains, -- "and not to the council or
> to the community" as we might add. "Gegenstand" means that *which stands
> counter me*, then. This happened around 1650, I believe.
>
> Thus "Gegenstand" is that "which stands counter me". German word for Object
> contains in itself what Burke described as Dramatistic "NO". A negation.
> Here is a very curious quote from Burke:
>
> "..the "One" family and the "No" family do seem surprisingly close for words
> so logically at odds. There is the fact that something of great price can
> be called "priceless", that double negation sometimes cancel out and
> sometimes intensify the negative, that Latin and Greek verbs of fearing
> reverse the normal indicative use of negatives. Nor it is hard to see how
> the Latin words for with and against (cum and contra) can come from the same
> root, when we think of these two usages in English: "I fought with the
> enemy; I fought with my friends against the enemy"; and contra in the sense
> of "over against" or "in contact with" has given us the word country."
>
>
> So the question is :-) , can we ever be objective without being negative?
> :-) just kidding or not!
>
> Ana
>
>
> Mike Cole wrote:
>
> :-)
> Seems to me like you and Mary, each in your own ways, are paraphrasing Peg's
> comments re play about subjective object and objective subject. Of course,
> with respect
> to the object of my desire it is difficult to be.... ugh, objective.
> mike
>
> On 4/17/05, bb <xmca-whoever@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Actually, I found the post of Sheila being the "object of your affections"
> most revealing, as Sheila is not only the object, but also participating in
> the subject, as wooing definitely invoves at least two people (with some
> strange exceptions). Pretty cool case to develop, esp. since those with
> significant others can relate. Now THIS could be a canonical study, IMHO,
> which, since MHO is free, could be worth every penny! Hopefully more.
>
> --
> ----
> bb
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> To: Xmca < xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> >
> Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 20:27:46 +0000
> Subject: re: Objekt -- back to the future
> Just for curiousity, I googled "object of activity" on lchc. Somewhere I
> have a large file with
> early parts of this discussion. But I enclose one note that is part of a
> thread participated in
> by Arne Raeithel and Ritva Engestrom that points toward a discussion that
> could be re-
> membered by present participants in xmca to good effect.
> mike
> --------------
> Date: 95-03-31
> =46rom: Raeithel Arne
> Subject: Re: two parts/three parts (*very* long)
> To: xpractice
>
>
> Again, Ritva has laid her gentle finger on something like a wound (not yet
> a scar, there was no time for much healing) of the activity approach: What
> to do about the conceptual difficulties of the "object" of communicative
> activities?
>
>
> As she said, I struggled with this in the past. My "Kommunikation als
> gegenst=E4ndliche T=E4tigkeit" was published in spring of 1989, before the
> command socialism went bankrupt for good. One reader, Alfred Lang,
> commented that it is a curiously agonizing text, saying essentially simple
> and old things along convoluted lines of arguments. "I am happy that I
> never succumbed to the seduction of Marxism," he added -- if I remember the
> same as he does (are you reading this, Alfred?).
>
>
> In short form, I have to recount the argument here for the (doubtful)
> benefit of readers of English, before I'm able try to tell you-all what
> came as a revelation to me in the state I was in late night: The
> distinction of "self"-regulative objectives and referential objects leads
> to a very useful combination of the two types of extended triangles of my
> last note (did I note that it was one-third-baked? :-).
>
>
> This is how Ritva put the solution:
>
>
>> Bakhtin is unusual clear in the issue that in producing utterances,
>> we are working with two kinds of objects: interlocutor (I have
>> called it 'social object') and life (or 'content' in the sense of the
>> possibilities of human activity). I see that the 'social object' alone
>> is a special case of meaning construction. ...
>>
>> Applied to conversations, the "dual orientation of language" makes it
>> possible to view, e.g., a medical consultation as a local dialogue in
>> which a patient and a doctor share an attempt to construct the
>> referential object of the consultation and to solve practically the
>> problem related to the object. From the viewpoint of conversation,
>> the object is not just an object of the doctor's "tool-mediated"
>> action. It is an *object of the consultation* that includes the
>> subjective perspectives of both the patient and the doctor.
>
>
> The diagramming task for me now is: to clearly distinguish the two kinds of
> objects:
> (i) object of the transaction / content / reference object(ive) of Act.
> (ii) interlocutor / social object / "self"-regulative objective of Act
>
>
> In a sense, Bateson et al. said this with their "relational aspect" and
> "content aspect" of every communication, and before them Karl B=FChler whose
>
> works I still could not re-read. I wish I had time! Seems that I will get
> some soon (knock on wood).
>
>
> ------
>
>
> But first, my argument from 1988: Why we-in-the-AAM (Activity Approach
> Movement :-) should treat communication as *one special type of object-
> oriented activity*, and not as a separate kind of experience/acting in
> general ?
>
>
> The latter alternative had been advocated by Lomov:
>
>
> "Activity" should be the term for the S/O-relation (changing nature), and
> "Communication" was to be clearly separated, because it exists in an
> S/S-relation (changing "superstructure", "ideology", "beliefs", "sets", and
> so on). This smelled to my nose badly of Cartesianism, as I would say
> today, after the last three years of e-discussion in the xfamily and in the
> Peirce-L. -- I hope I have not done unjustice to Lomov's text (I do not
> have it in English, somewhen in the Sov.Psychol., I guess). Would somebody
> please correct me, if I am wrong?
>
>
> I asked myself with violent disbelief: How could these be ever separated?
> As if the other subject would not be an object at the same time. As if any
> talk would not have a "shared" (divided and distributed and spanned over
> the relation) object if it sustains itself at all...
>
>
> But my German colleagues, Rainer Oesterreich and Marianne Resch, also had
> chosen this binary distinction: Handlungen und Kommunikationen (actions and
> communications). They refused to consider the alternative: that
> communications have the same kind of basic regulative structure as the
> actions that a single actor/person tries to realise with his or her goals
> in mind, eye, and trouserpocket (e.g. knot in the h'kerchief).
>
>
> My article thus grew out of an internal discussion paper of the Institut
> f=FCr Humanwissenschaft in Arbeit und Ausbildung of the Technical University
>
> of Berlin. I wanted to overcome the obvious counter-argument: that we
> scientists are treating compatriote, democratically equal subjects as we
> would inanimate objects, and are even saying that this is how every- body
> treats everybody. That is: I wanted to make clear what "object" meant in
> the original discourse in the middle 19th century, when Marx turned from a
> spirited Hegelian into a passionate and determined materialist of his own
> making...
>
>
> Great help I found in the works of Peter Keiler who, as a participant in
> the CoP of Critical Psychologists at the Free University of Berlin, was
> criticising several versions of Vygotsky Light making the rounds in student
> papers and teachers' seminar texts of the late seventies.
>
>
> The conceptual problem has to do with the category called "gegenst=E4ndliche
> T=E4tigkeit" -- usually translated as object-oriented activity. It means
> literally a being active with regard to some thing. The word thing (German
> Ding) incidentally means nothing more than "issue brought before the
> "Thing" (i.e. a palaver of the elders; central men who had, however, talked
> in their home spheres about the issues before that...).
>
>
> Curiously, this word then came to mean inanimate objects, mainly.
> Therefore, a more abstract kind of name was invented by coining
> "Gegenstand", a translation of Latin objectum -- "thing presented to the
> mind", as the Oxford Concise Dict explains, -- "and not to the council or
> to the community" as we might add. "Gegenstand" means that *which stands
> counter me*, then. This happened around 1650, I believe. Meanwhile
> "Gegenstand" again means concrete objects for most people, although it is
> also still the abstract word used in laws and court discourses, in
> technical papers like patents, some philosophy, etc.
>
>
> =46rom this analysis I concluded to work with a neo-logism: "counter-
> process" (Gegenprozess): that which a me or we wrestles with. "Prozess" is
> also the word in German for a trial before a judge; therefore the
> collateral meanings evoked are beneficial: Something social, running in
> conventional forms, yet never to be predicted; except by *very clever*
> young or old LA Law figures, maybe... That's what's making the suspense for
> many who watch that series.
>
>
> ---
>
>
>
> Peter Keiler found three senses of "gegenst=E4ndlich" in Marx's early
> writings (before 1848 and the Manifesto):
>
>
>
> A human may:
>
> (1) wrestle literally, i.e. bodily, with another human. The prime example
> for Marx here was Love, not War, building on Feuerbach's passionate
> arguments against the pure spirit processes of Hegel, and on the very fresh
>
> experience with Jenny Marx -- they had their wedding before they decided to
> emigrate to Paris, driven away by Prussian censorship.
>
>
>
> This means that reproduction of the community of bodies is the primary
>
> meaning. This is said against the orthodox Marxist error to put production
> first in a theory of human history.
>
>
>
> Related to a counter process then means to *be* a body, single or in
>
> transactions, in love, work, and "trouble". A good name for this shade of
> meaning of the category might be "human Drama" -- as Politzer suggested,
> and Vygotsky took up enthusiastically.
>
>
>
>
> (2) Humans may wrestle with things -- what he or she or they *have* as
> their external object, nature, and sense, [was sie "als Gegenstand, Natur,
> Sinn ausser sich haben", Marx 1844]
> i.e. with things, social situations,
> products, organisations,...
>
>
>
> This is the usually meaning in activity theory -- the reference object
> numbered (i) above when we look at a conversation at work.
>
>
>
>
> (3) Humans may wrestle with one another non-literally, they may *be*
> object, nature, and sense for a third (party, being, CoP,...) [k=F6nnen
> "selbst Gegenstand, Natur, Sinn f=FCr ein drittes sein", Marx 1844]
>
>
>
>
> This, I propose is sense (ii) of object from above, i.e. Ritva's "social
> object", and what I take to be Vygotsky's intended meaning when he defined
> the difference of the sign from the tool as it's self-directedness or
>
> inner-directedness. -- Peirce also saw as prime function of semiosis the
> beautiful, ethical, and true self-control, true, that is, in the sense that
> any conceivable and living community of scholars will finally accept as the
>
> ground from where to go further...
>
>
>
> I have stressed many times here in the xfamily that we shouldn't construe
> "self" as meaning only the [social] individual, and we also should not
>
> think that the problem of the border of individuals or groups or CoPs is
> solved with a renounce of Cartesiam dichotomies. Therefore, "internal" may
> mean "internal to a class", for instance, pertaining to the social object
>
> of the class, to its (their) self- regulative objective.
>
>
>
> Imagine my sheer wonder when I found that Peirce's Firstness, Secondness,
> and Thirdness match exactly with the three shades of "object" with respect
>
> to subject's activity that Marx had distinguished when Peirce was a
> five-years-old, listening intently to his father, the great mathematician...
>
>
>
> In the next post, I will propose some diagrams for working with these ideas.
>
>
>
>
>
> So long: Arne.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Ref:
> Marx, K. (1968/1844). Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik und Philo-
> sophie =FCberhaupt. [General Critique of Hegelian Dialectics and
>
> Philosophy]. MEW Erg.Bd. 1, pp 568-588. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
> Raeithel, A. (1989). Kommunikation als gegenst=E4ndliche T=E4tigkeit.
> Zu einigen philosophischen Problemen der kulturhistorischen
> Psychologie. In: Knobloch, C. (Ed.). Kognition und Kommunikation.
>
> Beitr=E4ge zur Psychologie der Zeichenverwendung. M=FCnster: Nodus,
> pp. 29-70.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK DE 19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
  are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                   -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)



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