His version seems to me to be very close to the resolution of
these dilemmas that I have been trying to fashion myself, with
some shifts in terms, and one further break with our traditional
beliefs. Perhaps others will find this very brief comparison
useful.
If we detach the notion of an 'ideal' from its Platonist, and
even Hegelian, connotations of 'best' and 'universal', and just
consider Ilyenkov's more Marxist version, then I would say that
it represents something I would be more likely to call an
ideational sign, or ideational sign-value. That is, it describes
the additional dimension of meaning that a material phenomenon or
object or organism has by virtue of its participation not just in
the material interactions of an ecosystem, but its simultaneous
participation, through its role in human activity, in a meaning
system in which it has a value (or 'valeur' in Saussure's and
semiotics' general sense of a place in a system of abstract or
formal meaning relationships). Every such object is then not just
material, but material-and-meaningful, and as I argue in _Textual
Politics_ (the main point of chap 6), therefore we cannot model
the dynamics of any such 'ecosocial' system without taking into
account both aspects -- principally because we take material
action on objects not just in relation to their physical
properties, but also in relation to the cultural meaning those
properties have for us.
With this interpretation, the rest of the argument is about how
meaning arises through human activity in the ecosystem. Here I
tend to share Nic's dissatisfactions, mainly with assumptions
about which chickens come before which eggs. As many of you know
by now, I favor a self-organizing dynamics model to resolve such
dilemmas. It has, as consequences, that animals can indeed
participate in meaning-based activity up to a point and
especially when participating in human 'social' activities, and
that the meaning-system is a property of a unit on a larger
ecological scale than the individual organism. This last feature
is related to a further break I would make with the tradition to
which Ilyenkov still seems to belong. I cannot regard
'consciousness' as itself an objective phenomenon, but only as a
feature of how some meaning-systems model meaning-making. Whether
animals (or ecosystems) have 'consciousness' is thus for me only
a question of how well a particular model can be fit to them (not
really a very interesting question, I think). It is more
important to understand their dynamics, how it changes, and how
the dynamics of ecosocial systems, which include meaning-making
activity, differ generically from those of less specified
ecosystem which do not, or do so in some very different way.
Likewise, the question of the origin of consciousness, in
evolution, in ontogeny, etc. become the question of the specific
conditions for meaning-dynamics in systems larger than the
isolated organism.
Finally, the description of the embodiment of dispositions for
meaning-based activities, written on our bodies by our
participation in human ecosocial interactivity, seems very close
to Bourdieu's _habitus_ notion (which is partly derived at least
from Hegel and Marx). I find it a valuable perspective, _once_ we
have clarified the relations of body and social persona (my
primitive efforts occupy chap 5 in _Textual Politics_), so that
we can see that the materiality of meaning-making patterns
inheres not only in individual human bodies, but also in the
material processes of interaction in dyads, persons-and-
artifacts, and in networks of interdependent ecosocial processes
at various larger-than-one-organism scales.
I think this viewpoint and program are in many ways consistent
with and indeed extensions of the direction in which Ilyenkov has
headed. Again my thanks to Mike and admiration to Nic for the
resume. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU