Many thanks, Yrjo, for clearly positioning your perspective within the
context of this discussion! One may or may not agree that the tension you
mention is actually going through Leontiev's work, but there is no doubt it
is underlying much of current thinking about future development of activity
theory. I believe we will have ample opportunities to return to this
important issue when discussing chapter 3 and, especially, Chapter 5.
Best wishes,
Victor Kaptelinin
>-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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