Its really great to be able to get ahold of texts like this. Thanks a lot
for the work that went into making them available.
I am pushed too hard by other obligations to enter properly into the
conversation as much as I have enjoyed people's readings/meditations. As
a place holder, here is how I interpreted Ilynkov in *Cultural Psychology*
which also contains some recent research on the issue of non-human
primates for those interested in pursuing that thread.
mike
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Artifacts: The Linchpin of Cultural Mediation
Ordinarily when one thinks of an artifact, a material object comes to mind. Something manufactured by a human being. In anthropology, the study of artifacts is sometimes considered part of the study of material culture, which is somehow distinct from the study of human behavior and knowledge. According to this "artifact as object" interpretation, it is easy to assimilate the concept of artifact into the category of tool, in which case, nothing much is to be gained.
According to the view presented here, which bears a close affinity to the ideas of John Dewey and also traces its genealogy back to Hegel and Marx, an artifact is an aspect of the material world that has been modified over the history of its incorporation in goal directed human action. By virtue of the changes wrought in the process of their creation and use, artifacts are simultaneously ideal (conceptual) and material. They are manufactured in the process of goal directed human actions. They are ideal in that their material form has been shaped by their participation in the inter-actions of which they were previously a part and which they mediate in the present.
Defined in this manner, the properties of artifacts apply with equal force whether one is con-sidering language/speech or the more usually noted forms of artifacts such as tables and knives which constitute material culture. What differentiates the word Atable who-is-at from an actual table is the relative prominence of their material and ideal aspects and the kinds of coordinations they afford. No word exists apart from its material instantiation (as a configuration of sound waves, hand movements, writing, or neuronal activity), whereas every table embodies an order imposed by thinking human beings.
The dual material-conceptual nature of artifacts discussed by the Russian philosopher, Evald Ilyenkov (1977, 1979), who based his approach on that of Marx and Hegel. In Ilyenkov's system, ideality results from "the transforming, form-creating, activity of social beings, their aim-mediated, sensuously objective activity" (Quoted in Bakhurst, 1990, p. 182). From this perspective, the form of an artifact is more than a purely physical form.
Rather, in being created as an embodiment of purpose and incorporated into life activity in a certain way--being manufactured for a reason and put into use - the natural object acquires a significance. This significance is the "ideal form" of the object, a form that includes not a single atom of the tangible physical substance that possess it (Bakhurst, 1990, p. 182).
Note that in this way of thinking, mediation through artifacts also applies equally to objects and people. What differs in the two cases are the ways in which ideality and materiality are fused among members of these two categories of being, and the kinds of interactivity they can enter in to.
of meaning, e.g., the ideal aspect of culture, that are located in the head.
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