Care of Eva, here is a voice from the past, Arne Riethel, speaking to
us about problems of interpreting terms like activity and object cross- linguistic/cultural/natioan/ divisions.
It speaks to issues that have arisen in our discussions with Finnish
colleagues, but it speaks also to other issues of current concern. Perhaps
a resource for us now.
mike
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Date: 92-11-13 08:11:25 MEZ
=46rom: PO61170%DHHUNI4.BITNET@vm.gmd.de
Subject: Motives, Object(ive)s and "Between-ness"
To: xact@ucsd.edu
>between< is neither external nor internal, or is both
The discussion going on here in XACT is remarkable in more than one
respect. First, I am happy to be able to hear Russian voices at long last,
even if coming from other states (it is not easy to use e-mail -- it took
me three years even here). Second, the topic of motives and the top level
of AN Leontyev's macrostructure is among the most unclear yet also most
important points of Activity Theory.
Writing the following sketchy thoughts, I have not yet seen Pentti
Hakkarainen's abstract (an accident cut me off from the XACT stream for two
weeks), only this week's thread starting with Boris' note introducing the
dialectics of internal and external. In Germany, there have been very many
disputes during the late fifteen years around the notion of >concrete
activity directed by motives/objects<.
In my perception, the conclusion was that AN Leontyev's conceptual system
badly needs expansion exactly on this highest process level of the
macrostructure, and that Yrjo Engestrom's move to the activity system as
new unit of analysis has opened up the gate at the right point. In 1981 I
had done some historical work on the development of Marx' and Engels'
theory of historical materialism, focussing on the concept of a community
(Gemeinwesen) in the years 1841 to 1846 (published in 1983 under title
"Taetigkeit, Arbeit und Praxis" by campus-Verlag, Frankfurt/Main). But in
those years I did not yet understand the importance of including a social
semiotics into the expansion of AT. Much of what I know now has been
learned over XACT and the other channels of the XFAMILY.
The most important consequence of the shift from personal to social unit of
analysis, from the activity of one human in her social and societal net to
the joint activities of a community of practice, is that the old notion of
>object< must also be defined anew. Earlier, it seemed to be clear that
>objects< belong to the outside world, are external to the persons at least
in the sense of being independent, >material< counterforces not yielding at
all times to the will of the individual. The very primitive, Stalinistic
interpretation of the activity approach stopped right there. Objects had to
be clearcut and doubtless things, because objectives of the collective work
were forced to appear even more clearcut and imperative...
The activity approach, however, was much broader in its early beginnings,
albeit only sketchy in Marxist classics until spelled out clearly by the
Charkov school in thirty years of difficult work. In Stalin's lifetimes and
less so even after the Fifties, the primitive understanding of the
dialectics of the material and the ideal was the dominant one, a sort of
communist reproduction of the Cartesian split between the mental and the
physical, as Alfred Lang has remarked on XACT about a year ago.
Other Russian voices, for instance the one of Evald Ilyenkov, who spoke of
>ideal objects< being constituted by the reproductive praxis of
communities, societies and states, were at first not heard, but then slowly
gained an audience, and many started to work on these lines (like Yrjo, and
compare David Bakhurst's recent book).
The full sense of what >object-motive< in Leotyev's theory might mean comes
into sight only if we include ideal objects like e.g. the >freedom,
equality and fraternity< of the bourgeois revolutions together with their
historical results into the concept: The present institutional forms of
more or less democratic societies, but also the early cruel attempts (like
the Jacobinian Terror) to turn the ideals into powerful motives of
collective, joint activity. All of this has left traces and channels for
action, the most important among these being the sign systems (in mimesis,
speech and physical symbols like books and statues).
To say that the object-structures pointed at by such signs are external to
the communities is clearly nonsense, because political structures belong to
the kernel of societal association. However, they might be external to some
or even many individual actors in some communities. If you think this case
over, it becomes clear that external ideas in this sense are
incomprehensible at the same moment in time, and thus cannot be giving
activity its >motive< or direction.
As Jay Lemke has said to my ears in his note, although in different
terminology, there are so many grades and shades of >internal< or
>external< as soon as one considers not only personal, but also social
subjects, that it seems better to speak of the between-ness of objects and
motives: shared between actors inside of one community, and also between
communities, and still larger associations.
Arne.
Written on the train between Hamburg and Berlin, Nov. 12th.
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=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
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Dr. Arne Raeithel Tel: +49 40 420 20 66
=46achbereich Psychologie Fax: +49 40 4123 5492
Universitaet Hamburg PO61170@DHHUNI4.bitnet
Von-Melle-Park 5 pee oh six eleven seventy
D-2000 Hamburg 13 Federal Rep. of Germany
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