Review of The Societal Subject, Warning:long.
Niels Engelsted (engelsted who-is-at axp.psl.ku.dk)
Mon, 25 Sep 1995 16:09:33 +0100
>Mike has asked me to send Tolman's review of the book 'The Societal
Subject' from 'Activity Theory' 1994, No 15/16 p. 65-67.
Aksel Mortensen
>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>What is the Societal Subject?: Some Answers from Denmark
>
>
>Charles W. Tolman
>
>
>Review of The Societal Subject, edited by Niels Engelsted,
>Marianne Hedegaard, Benny Karpatschof, and Aksel Mortensen
>(Aarhus, DK: Aarhus University Press, 1993. 296pp. ISBN 87-7288-
>113-5).
>
>
>This collection of papers was intended as a "tribute to the
>spirit if not the letter of Activity Theory." It is also a
>tribute to the high quality and vitality of psychological thought
>among our Danish colleagues. As Niels Engelsted points out in
>his introduction, the fourteen contributions all reflect the
>"spirit" of activity theory; the "letter," in accordance with the
>editors' intentions, is reflected in widely varying degrees.
> The reception of activity theory in Denmark, if only in
>spirit, is itself remarkable. Engelsted tells us something about
>the historical and geographical background of this phenomenon in
>the introduction. Geographically, Denmark lies at the crossroads
>of Europe. He writes: "This placement shaped the Danish
>intellectual landscape, with traffic of ideas following the
>traffic of commerce, and parochialism being counter balanced by
>the opportunism of the small trader," to which he adds that "a
>small country cannot afford provinciality..." Thus developed a
>tradition of seeking unity in diversity and of synthesizing
>competing intellectual claims. This was coupled with a strong
>respect for the individual human subject, as expressed, though
>one-sidedly, in the Copenhagen School of Phenomenology, founded
>by Edgar Rubin (of figure/ground fame) and coming to an end with
>the social unrest of the late 1960s. New demands for education
>and social services placed renewed emphasis on a synthesis of
>subjective and objective psychologies. The simultaneous
>renaissance of Marxist thought in Europe then helped bring the
>work of Vygotsky and Leontyev into focus as a response to both
>the synthetic tradition and the new practical needs, especially
>in education.
> But geographical and historical circumstances did not make
>Danish psychologists and educators merely receptive to activity-
>theoretical ideas. The synthetic tradition appears also to have
>been a critical one, so these ideas were drawn into a context in
>which they were not only received but closely scrutinized. They
>were not taken as providing ready-made solutions to the problems
>of psychology, but as a groundwork from which, through critical
>development, solutions could be generated. A reflection of this
>is one important source of this volume's vitality (as well as
>that of its predecessor: see Tolman, 1991).
> The contents of the book are too varied to summarize
>coherently in a brief review. I will therefore confine myself to
>a single focus, which is to look at how the book's various
>contributors answer the question: "What is a societal subject?"
> The problem of the societal subject, as I see it, is that
>general psychology ~ but especially social psychology ~ has been
>under the thrall of a highly abstract individualistic conception
>of the subject, as clearly articulated, for instance, in Floyd
>Allport's Social Psychology of 1924. What is social about the
>individual subject according to Allport is that his or her
>"behavior stimulates other individuals, or is itself a reaction
>to their behavior" (p. 12). It is little wonder that the "laws"
>of stimulus and response were thought to be universal. The
>"social" stimulus is just like any other, just as the "social"
>response is like any other. What is missing here is any
>conception of the individual subject as essentially social. Thus
>developmental psychology became preoccupied with the
>"socialization" of the essentially asocial subject. One of the
>great values of cultural-historical activity theory, particularly
>Leontyev's evolutionary account of consciousness, is that it
>indicates the possibility of an alternative conception of human
>beings as not only essentially social (which many animals,
>especially birds and mammals, are), but also essentially
>societal. We are not biologically equipped, as are most other
>animals, to live outside society. Human activity is necessarily
>joint-activity. It always has the character of a division of
>labour. The developmental task of the individual subject
>therefore is not socialization in the usual textbook sense but
>appropriation of the tools necessary for full participation in
>societal existence. From an activity-theoretical point of view
>this recognition must inform our considerations of every aspect
>of the human psyche. Having said all this, however, it remains
>to specify the societal nature of the human subject more
>concretely.
> The first chapter by Henrik Poulsen on "Conation, Cognition,
>and Consciousness" begins the process. At some point in their
>evolutionary development animals no longer react to releasing
>stimuli reflexively or instinctively but strive to bring about
>certain relations between themselves and particular objects.
>These relations are goals and the activity itself may differ from
>time to time depending on conditions. What is important for our
>purposes in Poulsen's analysis is that conative activity can
>succeed on the basis of the perceptually given, natural
>properties of the object itself, what Gibson called
>"affordances." Human cognition, which must surely grow out of
>this, is, however, different. Humans respond to meanings of
>objects, properties that are, while objective, not immediately
>given in the object itself but involve cognition of the object's
>history: "...in order to know of an object as an object with
>historical properties, it is not enough to perceive it by
>sensation. We must by necessity also be able to know the object
>as a particular object with numerical identity...independently of
>its natural properties...." (p. 27).
> This is the point that Jens Mammen develops in the next
>chapter. Why is numerical identity important here? Mammen
>explains this with a simple but effective example: "If I have two
>new coins, one in each hand, perhaps I am not able to
>discriminate them from differences in their natural properties.
>If, however, I put the coin in my right hand in my right pocket,
>and the coin in my left hand in my left pocket, I can still tell
>which one was in which hand without discriminating the coins, if
>I am only able to discriminate my pockets" (p. 35). The sensory
>discrimination that would allow me to tell a penny from a dime is
>shown here to be embedded in practice (not mere motor activity)
>and it is this embeddedness in practice that allows me to
>discriminate one numerically identical penny from another, and
>finally a penny as a penny and not just as something visually
>different from a dime. It is this "human ability to go `beyond
>the senses'" that is peculiar to our species and which underlies
>the truly cognitive character of our mental lives.
> But where does the "societal" come in? The answer of course
>is "in practice." At an archeological dig a piece of stone is
>identified as a "scraper" not because of its visual or tactile
>properties but because there is good reason to believe that it
>was made by someone and used for a special purpose, that is, that
>it has a particular history in human practice. Just as the
>archeologist, as subject, is linked to the tool through this
>ability to go beyond the senses, that is, through meaning, there
>is a similar link to the objects of the tool's use and to other
>people, whether living or dead. Mammen elaborates: "My relation
>to the coffee-cup is thus not just interactions, but a `thread'
>connecting me with the cup and its past, which again is connected
>with `threads' to the producers, the sellers, buyers, givers and
>receivers of the cup. And to complete the picture, for the
>producer, the cup also has a relation to other coffee-cups in the
>past, to a tradition of producing coffee-cups in our society.
>All this makes it a `cultural' object" (p. 38). If this thread
>is the basis of culture, our ability to "see" it is the ground of
>our societality. The Allportian reduction of the social to mere
>interactions of objects would never have yielded such an
>understanding as this. Nor would Allport's reduction have
>yielded such a clear intimation of the essential link between
>perception, cognition, and societality.
> In a later chapter, Erik Axel and Morten Nissen move on to
>the question of motivation in society. They find Leontyev's
>account of motives least ambiguous when he speaks of biological
>needs, as in the famous example of the hunter and beater
>coordinating their actions around food. They detect a fuzzyness,
>however, whenever he speaks of more distinctly societal motives,
>as in the example of book-reading. It will be recalled that the
>student is told that the book he or she is reading is not needed
>for the upcoming examination. If the book is put down, the
>activity is classified as exam-taking. If it is not, the
>activity has knowledge as its motive. The problem here,
>according to the authors, is that the motive, the defining
>feature of the activity, is purely psychological. The necessary
>link to societal existence is lost.
> The motive of educational activity, for instance, becomes
>education itself. Axel and Nissen show how this is reflected in
>the educational writings of V. V. Davydov, who speaks of
>educational activity as having components that are transmitted
>from the teacher to the pupil so that the pupil can engage in
>them independently. The end result of this for the individual,
>according to Davydov, is "a harmonious personality." If there is
>a "societal" angle to this, it is to "control the mental
>development of the child." This is an obvious return to notions
>of socialization found in bourgeois psychology. The pupil moves
>from being the real subject of educational activity to being its
>object. In the view of the authors, this was not Leontyev's
>intention.
> The remedy, according to Axel and Nissen, is to return to
>"the original tradition of historical materialism." They find
>that this has already been done in the work of the critical
>psychologist Ute Osterkamp who has developed a theory of
>productive needs, as opposed to needs related to the
>physiological reproduction of the species or of the individual.
>By Osterkamp's analysis such needs develop with the emergence of
>learning, an evolutionary event curiously missing from Leontyev's
>original phylogenetic account of psyche. She identifies control
>needs that manifest themselves in curiosity, interest, and
>anxiety. Axel and Nissen write: "In the genesis of human nature,
>these control needs are transformed into a general need system
>directed at individual appropriation and development of the
>generalized societal control of life conditions, the need for
>action potency" (p. 77). Motives of activity, including
>educational activity, are then seen as having to do with the
>utilization and creation of societal possibilities for individual
>action, that is, for becoming a subject of societal existence.
>This seems right to me.
> A key element to any societal conception of the subject is
>addressed in another chapter by Erik Schultz. We need not only
>know that a coffee cup is a coffee cup, we need as well to be
>able to "read" the meanings of other people. Schultz reviews
>some of the familiar literature claiming that intentions ought
>not be regarded as proper subject matter for a scientific
>psychology because they do not exist "out there" in reality, they
>cannot be "seen," and cannot be measured (we are reminded
>immediately of Mammen's claims about the peculiarly human ability
>to go beyond the senses). Schultz (in apparent agreement with
>Mammen) argues that this is not the case. He shows how
>experiments that appear to support the anti-intentional stance
>because they show false attribution of intentions to objects or
>misattribution to people are in a sense rigged to produce silly
>results. This rigging is often accomplished by exposing
>experimental subjects to the actions of objects or persons in
>which there is in fact no intentional content. Another method is
>to require the subjects to restrict their reactions to actually
>observed movements, that is, to enforce among subjects an
>unnatural behaviouristic stance. Our everyday evidence, however,
>is replete with informal but convincing evidence that we are able
>accurately to read the intentions of others. The "mind-reducing
>philosophers," he writes, "are simply wrong."
> Schultz argues that one of the prices we have had to pay for
>our uniquely human ability to read intentions has been that we in
>fact attribute them where they do not exist, as, for example,
>with the weather. It was correct for the physical sciences (and
>positivism) to purge our study of physical nature of the
>intentional stance, but it was wrong in uncritically extending
>the purge to living, psychical, human subjects. He goes on to
>demonstrate that we have no more difficulty judging the
>correctness of an intention than of physical phenomena, and that
>the behaviour of others is more accurately predicted on that
>basis than many physical phenomena on the basis of "objective"
>predictors ~ he reminds us that in comparison with behaviour
>"meteorological prediction is a joke" (p. 123). He makes a
>number of other interesting points as part of a general argument
>against phenomenology and for realism, the details of which I
>leave to the reader.
> The picture of the societal subject that emerges in the
>chapters cited is treated in various other of its aspects and in
>different contexts by some of the remaining contributors to this
>collection (some do not touch on the problem at all). It is a
>picture that could not have become clear under the constraints of
>the dominant Western psychologies (particularly in North America
>and least of all under Allportian social psychology), and it is
>one that gives a strong impression of the theoretical and
>practical potential of activity theory and related historical
>conceptions of psychology, such as the critical psychology of
>Holzkamp and Osterkamp.
> This book definitely belongs on the shelf of anyone who
>takes activity theory, or, indeed, psychology altogether,
>seriously.
>
>
>References
>
>Allport, F. H. (1924). Social Psychology. Boston: Houghton
> Miflin Co.
>Tolman, C. W. (1991). The critique and development of activity
> theory in Denmark. Activity Theory, 7/8, 56-58.
>
>
>Prof. Charles W. Tolman
>Department of Psychology
>University of Victoria
>P.O. Box 3050
>Victoria, B.C., Canada V8W 3P5
>
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>
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Niels Engelsted|
Psykologisk Laboratorium
Univ. of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 94, DK 2300
Denmark
E-mail: engelsted who-is-at axp.psl.ku.dk
Tel : +45 35 32 87 57
FAX : 35 32 87 45
Web Homepage http://www.psl.ku.dk
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