Re: Leontiev

From: Yrjö Engestrm (yrjo.engestrom@helsinki.fi)
Date: Tue Oct 03 2000 - 13:46:55 PDT


Dear discussion participants, I have tried to make sense of the large number
of messages on and around Leont'ev's Chapter 1 thus far. I am utterly unable
to draw any summary or even to delineate central themes. But it's definitely
time to move to Chapter 2. So instead of any summing up, I'll just throw in
a couple of thoughts - hopefully to be read as a signal for going forward.

-In my reading, the central message of Chapter 1 is that practice, or
practical activity, is the foundation of cognition and of human development
in general. Leont'ev tries to make it clear that this does not mean
mechanical reflection or reproduction: acting on the world people change it,
and in the process they also shape themselves.

-To me, the promise of activity theory lies in the idea that in order to
understand human beings we need to understand how they change and create the
world. This is quite different from BOTH views that emphasize only
internalization of given culture AND from views that emphasize only the
creation of uniquely personal, individual worlds. I see the core of the
Leont'evian legacy in the serious attempt to study how people actually go
about constructing together shared, objective 'worlds' - or activity
systems. This view implies a serious striving toward overcoming and
transcending the opposition between 'objective' and 'subjective' (as
evidenced in Ilyenkov's concept of the ideal). By the way, I see an
interesting (albeit still fairly rudimentary) contemporary attempt to tackle
this issue in Tomasello's idea of the 'ratchet effect' (Tomasello, M.
(1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, p. 37---).

-Victor Kaptelinin in his message touched again on the tension which I see
going through Leont'ev's work: the tension between traditional psychological
thinking focused on the individual on the one hand, and emerging
activity-theoretical thinking focused on joint, collective, or distributed
units of analysis. Victor wrote:
     "Therefore, both Leontiev and Valsiner emphasize the role of individual
      activities as the source of "consciousness" or "personal worlds"."
In my opinion, the concept of activity is collective by definition. Thus,
you cannot really speak of 'individual activity' - you can only speak of the
activity OF AN INDIVIDUAL. In other words, the individual participates in a
collective activity system, thus making it 'his' or 'her' activity - but
this does not make the activity itself individual. Without wanting to go
into textual exegesis, let me just point out that Leont'ev, in the passage
quoted by Victor, does not speak of 'individual activity':
      "His consciousness too is a product of his activity in an object
      world." (Leont'ev, p. 19)
In fact, immediately after this Leont'ev reminds us that Marx used to talk
about activity as 'industry'.
I know Victor and probably many other will disagree with my line of thinking
- and that's just fine.

Yrjo Engestrom



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