Andy's characterization of Hegelian dialectics:
"When something new gets going, like for example, when a lot of women are
all deciding to find factory jobs instead of staying at home doing
domestics all day, but are not necessarily saying anything about it or
reflecting on it, or even know that they are not alone ... then this
concept which is to become "Women's Liberation" exists at a certain stage
of development, "Being" in fact, in Hegel's Logic. Associated with that
stage of development, there is a kind of reasoning, a way in which these
specific social relations are internalised and reproduced in thought-forms
by the participants (participants = everyone really). What Hegel describes
in the Logic is these thought forms. He then launches a critique of each of
these thought forms as he comes to them. Hegel's critique then is a
"logical form" of what takes place out there in the world and sooner or
later leads to a new stage of development - people doing different things,
people reasoning differently about this fact under emergence."
is certainly compatible in many ways with dynamical systems theory.
The latter takes the same 'further object' as is described here, that is
not perhaps the more idealist "thought forms" of Hegel's immediate object,
but the phenomena of changing social-material activities and circumstances
that "give rise to" these thoughts forms.
In ecosocial-semiotic dynamics, as in many versions of activity theory, and
perhaps Ilyenkov's included, the social-material activities are mediated by
semiotic artifacts, which include materially embodied discourses and
inscriptions (aka representations) and their semantics, and it is really
the 'whole package' of activities, including the meaning-producing and
sense-making and artifact-using ones, that is newly emergent, not
predictable from seeing the separate elements of the package without also
knowing how they interact in actual cases, and arises from the implicit
tensions or generative potential of the combination.
It is a further and more specific thesis about change that activity in the
world changes the world in such a way that eventually new forms of activity
are required to keep the actors going. There is a sort of 'good life'
version, that as we act in the world we create newness and increase
diversity of forms and these in combination then enable new kinds of
activity, and also a 'hard life' version, that our impact on the
environment threatens our survivability and forces us to change our ways.
One could also imagine that as we create newness we wind up eventually also
creating conflicts and contradictions which impel or enable change. We can
make more sophisticated loops with these notions, such as that changes in
productive activity (women in factories) are conducive to changes in
attitudes and beliefs (women are as competent as men) which then change how
we react to other activities (women's legal rights), setting up
contradictions and leading to change, which then has a sort of dominoe or
chain reaction effect. Except that there are many such chain reactions
going on all the time, intersecting with one another, and the dominoes do
not fall in predictable ways (democratic politics did not get applied to
theology, God did not become the elected president of Heaven), but there
are certain (many) possible viable 'compromise' states of the system, and
which ones we wind up with are very much a function of historical accident
and not logical or evolutionary or developmental necessity.
I am just starting to read Manuel De Landa's _Thousand Years of Nonlinear
History_, which appears to take up some of these questions in a similar vein.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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