Re: Re(2): Individual activity?

From: Yrjo Engestrom (yengestr@ucsd.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 10 2001 - 02:30:48 PDT


Victor wrote: "In this case it is important to keep in mind that this
understanding of activities and actions is fundamentally different from
other understandings existing within the cultural-historical tradition, for
instance the one by Leontiev..."

I cannot help but wonder about the words "the one by Leontiev" in the above
quote.

Are you really sure that Leont'ev had "one" understanding of activity, or
that we must only have "one" understanding of Leon'tev's understanding?

I think Leont'ev's own writing about activity is deeply contradictory. As a
psychologist, trained in the tradition of his discipline oriented to the
individual as the fundamental unit, he was inclined to write about activity
as if an individual phenomenon. As a Marxist activity theorist, he decidedly
wrote about activity as collective phenomenon, formed and created by virtue
of the historical emergence of division of labor in human communities.

Yrjo Engestrom

> From: Victor Kaptelinin <vklinin@informatik.umu.se>
> Reply-To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 13:04:23 +0200
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re(2): Individual activity?
> Resent-From: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Resent-Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 04:04:23 -0700 (PDT)
>
> Thank you, Diane, for your message! I think we both (as well as most of the
> people on the list) agree that all activities (as well as actions and
> operations) are always social. What I fail to see is how it leads to the
> conclusion that activities are collective and actions are individual. On
> the one hand, actions (and even operations) can also be collective. On the
> other hand, claiming that individuals can only participate with their
> actions in collective activities basically means that individuals have no
> genuine motives. Perhaps, I am so resistant to this claim because it sounds
> familiar to me and reminds about the "good old" days of living in the USSR
> :)
>
> Of course, one can just define activities as something, which "is not
> specifically concerned with the individual but with the larger social and
> cultural (historical) context" and actions as individual. In this case it
> is important to keep in mind that this understanding of activities and
> actions is fundamentally different from other understandings existing
> within the cultural-historical tradition, for instance the one by Leontiev
> (which, of course, does not automatically make new understanding worse or
> better...).
>
> Best wishes,
> Victor
>
>> Victor asks
>>> Then where does the distinction between collective activities and
>>> individual actions come from? ("We may well speak of the activity of the
>>> individual, but never of individual activity; only actions are
>>> individual.")
>>
>> hi victor - i realize you didn't ask "me," but my understanding of this
>> distinction is that "activity" refers to the sociocultural context of
>> individual(s) - the activity is not specifically concerned with the
>> individual but with the larger social and cultural (historical) context -
>>
>> actions, on the other hand, are what collectively or uniquely constitute
>> the activity - an action is the "unit" of a larger activity: individuals
>> are, to borrow a weary term, "actants" - an individual produces an action
>> that, in a larger sphere, constitutes an aspect of the activity - the
>> activity is social,
>> the action is individual:
>>
>> i'd expect there to be overlapping, in that each individual is socially
>> interactive,
>> but ontologically speaking, the ideas of agency - as far as i understand -
>> still allow for individual difference.
>> the "activity of the individual" refers, in my understanding, to the
>> social context of the individual, but "individual activity" is a
>> contradiction, in that "activity" describes a social sphere,
>> and actions describe an individual's actions within that larger sphere.
>>
>> in relation to Ricardo's statement:
>>>
>>> a subjective activity of a particular person is not individual, but
>>> social.
>>
>> the idea of activity being a social context is maintained - subjectivity
>> is socially organized,
>> so subjective activity is a social referent;
>> whereas an individual action can have an element of subjectivity, which
>> refers to the 'social' spheres of influence, but not necessarily to the
>> individual's agency.
>> does that make sense?
>> diane
>>
>> "The world is too much with us,
>> late and soon..."
>> Wordsworth.
>> *********************************
>> diane celia hodges
>>
>> Diane_Hodges@ceo.cudenver.edu
>> hodgesdiane@hotmail.com
>
>
>



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