[Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion

[Andy Blunden]

This discussion has sent me back to looking at A N Leontyev's 
"Development of Mind." For all his faults, ANL expended a lot of energy 
in tracing the phylogenetic evolution of activity (which for ANL is a 
broad category, inclusive of unconscious activity). He traces the 
evolution of behaviour (as in animals without a central nervous system 
operating on a reflex basis) through conditioned reflexes and habits to 
operations (scripts which can be moved from one situation to another and 
adapted to conditions without conscious awareness) to actions 
(consciously determined by their immediate goal) to activities (where 
the goal is remote from the immediate actions, and a whole series of 
actions are required to meet the goal). Then he is able to trace the 
movement back and forth between behaviour, operational activity, actions 
and activities in both ontogenesis and microgenesis. I have always been 
a bit impatient with this kind of move (reifying a theory of human 
activity into Nature and then importing it back), but I have to say it 
was a useful exercise. And clarifying.
Here is a link to an excerpt from part of this work: 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1981/evolution.htm
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


David Kellogg wrote:
> All of which has to be sung with screams of pain (Strauss has, you
> see, stacked the deck in Rousseau's favor). But maybe both singing and
> speech are exaptations of something that is functionally neither and
> not specific to humans at all, which for want of a better name we can
> call activity WITHOUT thinking.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>   
>