I was most struck (reading the discussion mainly backwards via
the archives) by Eugene's (Nov 1, archive #693) point about
planning as being a separable activity from implementation, and
the peculiar attachment of our own subculture to the two-step
model: plan-then-act. The context here was a reply to Gordon's
effort to restore a balance by holding out for the meaningfulness
of plans and goals that are _not_ emergent in activity but
precede it and 'supervise' it. What Eugene lets me think about is
this: that work must be done, and must be done retrospectively,
to connect the planning activity and its goals to the
implementation activity and its goals.
Indeed the planning activity can now have a 'goal' in two senses:
there is the object toward which it is itself oriented, which may
be 'to produce a plan', and then the _product_ of its activity,
which is a plan that somehow gets identified with the 'goal' of
the second, 'implementation' activity. There is one sense in
which we think of the planning and the doing as sharing an
ultimate goal (and so as part of the same larger Activity), but
there is another in which they are quite separate activities with
a quite problematic relation to each other, and quite separate
immediate goals (in the sense of orientations toward where the
action is 'headed').
A lot of very deep and difficult theoretical issues emerge from
this double vision of the relation of planning and
implementation. What _is_ planning? Is it an interruption of
direct activity? a transfer of activity from the realis-plane to
the irrealis-plane? What does it produce, or eventuate in? A
plan-toward-a-goal is usually in fact some sort of irrealis
semiotic representation (statements describing actions to be
undertaken, matters of 'will', 'might', and 'should'; and/or
their visual or kinesthetic analogues). But representations of
action are always, and in plans usually very, abstracted and
type-level. When we come to actual, specific (token-level)
actions, things are invariably more than and also different in
some ways from what we planned (hence the emergent character).
The object-orientation of the implementing-emerging actions
necessarily changes both relative to the planned action and to
itself, moment to moment (i.e. operation to operation), when we
examine it at a level of specificity sufficient to actually
_execute_ it (as opposed to the lesser degree of specificity
needed to merely categorially _describe_ it).
So there is the problem of the relation of the planning to the
doing _as actions_, and also the problem of their relation
_through representations_, particularly how we represent them to
ourselves so as to make it seem that they share a goal.
Plenty to think about. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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