Arievitch and more

From: mabel@servidor.unam.mx
Date: Wed Jun 30 2004 - 02:57:56 PDT


Hi, all.

I do not write because of time and because of shyness.

About “internalisation”, I was thinking: considering the embodiment of mind,
where is it embodied, according to the internalisation process that Galperin
explains, as said by Arievitch.

Arievitch affirms, as Steve quotes, that
> "… Galperin’s study of attention empirically showed how some (material) forms
of the individual’s external activity get gradually transformed into other
(mental) forms of that same external activity. It was, perhaps, the first
empirical demonstration of how the dualistic dichotomies of external and
internal could be eliminated (for details, see Galperin, 1989)."
> "Understanding human action in any of its guises, including mental or
internal, as following objective rules of the outer world, and demonstration of
how mental actions emerge from external actions was Galperin’s way to eliminate
the dualism of mental and material, external and internal processes… To
summarize, Galperin’s internalization demonstrates the genetic link between
external and internal activity and the particular mechanism of how external
becomes internal without a dualistic dichotomy between these two planes. Such
dichotomy is eliminated by conceptualizing internalization as transformation
of certain (material) forms of individuals external activity into other
(mental) forms of that same external activity, and as a specifically human
form of appropriation of new knowledge and skills. In this sense, it appears
that we can overcome the dualistic dichotomies without discarding individual
cognition and the internal plane. Instead, we can reconceptualize them in a
nonmentalist way."

I wonder if internalisation really “follows the objective rules of the outer
world” or if the rupture of the dichotomy could come instead of from “objective
rules” internalised, from the understanding of the internalisation as
an “outcome” (deutero learning a la Bateson) of the activity in which the
subject participates in the outer world. From this, the embodiment of mind does
not reside in the “body”, nor in the “objects” (or their rules), but in the
activity that subjects realise. This leads to the need of explaining the
relationship between internalisation and externalisation. I think that
understanding the outer world as determining a range of possibilities, the
inner world steps forward and builds and "ideal" (an idea which is born in
this "inner") to pursue, and pulls to the external action in the context of the
activity. The difficult thing is to explain this “step forward”.

Some time ago, I tended to think that “the individual” was a creation of
the “capitalist” (or at least of the “classist”) thinking, but now I consider
that the relationship between the inner and the outer world (inside the skin,
outside the skin) are something that needs to be explained, and it is not the
case of subsuming the existence of the inner into the outer world (and much
less to the "forms of the outer world"), but it is a matter of explaining how
the inner and the outer world are co-constructed by mediated actions. I
consider this a political need, particularly because the commitments are lived
as individual decisions (even if they are “externally determined”, as I
sustained above).

I hope not to be strayed from the issue.

At this moment, I have nothing to say about cooking or abacus using.

Unfortunately I am not one of the “voters”, but I am an old lurker, who has
learnt a lot here.

Cheers,

Mabel

-------------------------------------------------
www.correo.unam.mx
UNAMonos Comunicándonos



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