[Xmca-l] Re: Object oriented activity and communication

[Alexander Surmava]

Dear Andy!
I am glad that our communication was resumed after many years. The other day I was reviewing old letters and files and found that the problem of "object oriented activity OR communication" we discussed in the summer of 2006 before our meeting in Melbourne. Well, the problem is serious and it deserves to return to it today. Last year I was close to being silent forever. Fortunately, fate and well-chosen chemotherapy postponed this case for an indefinite period. Therefore, I had the opportunity and the time to try to sum up some of my theoretical studies without entrusting this matter to my descendants :-).
I will begin with honest recognition that I do not understand your question. What means the distinction between singular and plural number in your remark? Could you give an example of the "wrong" translation of the Leontiev's theoretical texts you mentioned? Although my concept and the concept of AN Leontiev do not coincide, moreover, I formulated the "Principles of the theory of reflexive activity" (that is the title of my dissertation work) in direct controversy with AN Leontiev's "Theory of Activity", we coincide with him in method. Therefore, having understood the theoretic meaning of your claims to AN Leontiev or his translators, I can more easily understand the essence of your objections to me. In the meantime, I can say that both AN Leontiev and I consider "activity" as a theoretical category, and not as a particular empirical case of its manifestation. Therefore, object-oriented activity there can be only one. Just like Matter, Nature, or Substance. Of course, with the Substance as totality, we come across only in theory. Empirically, we are dealing with its innumerable Modes. However, to draw from this the conclusion that Substance is just a fiction of old philosophers and that only the numerous individual "atomic facts" of Wittgenstein with their plural number really exist, it means to leave Spinoza and Marx for vulgar positivism and empiricism.
When we talk about a living subject, his very life is a single and continuous activity, and not a bouquet or a bundle of various activities. Human development is development and the regular change of its objects. But the activity itself always remains the same object-oriented activity, the same life. Termination of this activity would be tantamount to death.
Therefore, activity is something that basically can only be in the singular :-)
It is another matter that the activity of a developed multicellular organism, and even more so the activity of a person included in the system of relations with other people about the joint production of life, is something rather complicated. This ensemble of subactivities, in which, as in a good, improvising jazz band, there are subactivities that perform the main melody, and subactivities of the second plan ...All this will be explained in the most detailed way in the "Theory of Reflexive Activity" in the chapters that can not be reached in our discussions, stuck on the very first pages, on the Spinozic solution of the psychophysical problem :-)
I will be glad to hear your explanations on this issue.
Best wishes
Sasha


   
   
   - I'll ask Sasha a question.
   -    

   - Sasha, when you say "activity" as in "such an initial
   - category can only be object-oriented activity" as it stands,
   - in English, this is clearly wrong, though it may be that you
   - are translating it from a Russian statement that is correct.
   - Surely you mean "object-oriented activities", as in when I
   - say "every activity has an object."=C2=A0 But in your expression
   - above "activity" is not a word which has a plural and unless
   - you are a religious person is not something which can have a
   - specific object. All English translations of A N Leontyev
   - make this mistake which has caused no end of confusion among
   - English-speakers.
   -    

   - Am I right? You meant "activities" not "activity," just as
   - you wouldn't say "water is a unit of water."
   -    

   - Andy