Bill, taking the time to be super conscientious about THIS activity system,
thereby affording me some compunction :/ cautions us against using physical
metaphors for activity systems. As I understand him, Bill seems to be
proposing "objectivity" as a problematic object, central to an Activity
Theory analysis, but in some sense yet to be defined for cultural
historical activities. This is, in any case, what I experience as
enigmatic. Not to contradict myself, Andy's message was very helpful:
>>However, other very important things about this world include (1) the
>>shattering of almost all person-to-person relations into customer-service
>>provider relations, and (2) the unification of all people (and their work =
>>activity systems) in a single worldwide division of labout (= activity
>>system).
>>
>>I think it is very important to see the interaction of two activity systems
>>not as the collision between two independent lumps but through finding how
>>to conceive of their actual relation (there must be such a relation or you
>>wouldn't have a 'bump'!), i.e. as a unity.
If the description of an activity system is a hueristic, then when we want
to understand the the inter-activity of two delineated systems, we have to
"reach" for a description of the ways in which they are really one. That's
an ambitious project -- keeping in mind the global economy, the number of
interrelated activity systems races upwards exponentially :), but it seems
a useful challenge, to reframe whatever framing devices we started with. At
this point, however, I've left the problem of objectivity in the irreal
dust somewhere.
It seems to me (please be gentle w/ my ignorance) that Marxism achieves
objectivity by reducing sociocultural phenomena to economic relations, so
that we end up with claims like, "there is no such thing as culture." I
heard on NPR the other day a debate between someone at Stanford, I think,
who was claiming that economic woes of different groups/nations have a
cultural basis (like "fatalism" in/of the culture), and someone at SUNY who
tried (unsuccessfully, I'm afraid, in the bit of time I heard) to claim
that socioeconomic problems cannot be attributed to culture. I was amazed
at the oversimplification, but I began to wonder if there was
research/literature that prised apart culture and capitol. There's
Bourdieu, but I only know a couple of his works, nothing related to the
non-western culture(s?) he wrote about -- he seems to confirm the view that
economic relations are primary and cultural values are add-ons, accumulated
around capital.
But clearly, cultures, meanings, are realized materially in ways that
economies don't explain?
Worried about sounding dumb,
Judy
Bill:
The enigma for me is the following: we can describe one situation
involving a physical setting, people, things, ideas, and ways of
interacting, and so on, and with a history of doing so, as an activity
system. We can do so for another situation, that may for the most part be
isolated from the first. Then, people and things from one system can
"move" (people drive in cars, packages are sent in the mail, etc) to the
other, and interact. In the process, the people and things often change,
and consequently since they are the genetic elements of the activity
system, so does the system. When they go back to the first system (if they
do) they bring their changes with them.
Andy:
>>It seems to me that it is one of the great illusions of our times to
>>believe that people are engaged in separate activity systems and
>>consequently have concepts which *in principle* are incommensurable. Of
>>course to propose against this a monolithic consciousness would be an
>>absurdity, and a monolithic objective truth which simply has different
>>sides perceived from different standpoints is also inadequate and
>>oppressive in its import.
>>
>>Multiplicity of culture is now widely and rightly accepted as part of the
>>modern world.
>>
Helena
>>>Hey, people -- The analysis has a perspective, too -- a motive. The
>>analysis can't be "objective." So we've got nested activity systems, each
>>defined by a motive. Where the motives are disjunctive, we've got the
>>edges of one activity system bumping up against another one.
>>>
>>>This is one of the beauties of AT -- it allows us to keep in mind that
>>we've got multiple systems running at all times and that what drives one
>>system may not be what drives the one that forms its context or that lies
>>within it.
>>>
>>>This is key to using AT for understanding work.
>>>
>>>Helena Worthen
>>>
>>>Judy Diamondstone wrote:
>>>
>>>> I know there are many xmca-ers who can help me here. Nate? Andy? someone?
>>>>
>>>> At 03:20 PM 1/30/01 -0500, you wrote:
>>>> >>>>
>>>>
>>>> This, I think, gets right to the heart of debates lately. The
>>"real" motive in AT is supposedly objective, right? So while individuals
>>may participate in an activity for different reasons, the difference
>>between their version of affairs and the "real" social motive is
>>irrelevant, unless it affects their actions, in which case they become the
>>subjects of analysis and the disjunctions between what they think they're
>>doing/their reasons for doing it and the collective object becomes the
>>'object' of analysis. Or do I have this wrong?
>>>>
>>>> In Yrjo's interpretation of the contradictions in Stanislavski's
>>methods and of the workshops conducted as an intervention into theatre, the
>>subject's version of affairs does not define the object -- on the contrary:
>>the ideal of theatre is enunciated by the analyst. I buy it because it's
>>illuminating, inspirational, but we don't know what participants in the
>>workshop might have commented on Yrjo's analysis. So what makes the ideal
>>he identifies the 'real' objective ....?
>> >>
>>>> At 11:41 AM 1/30/01 -0800, you wrote:
>>>> >>>>
>>>>
>>>> Questions:
>>>>
>>>> Does motive always determine the activity?
>>>> Or, does different people having different motives change the
>>activity system for each individual even if they physically are doing the
>>same thing?
>>>> Because people can have more than one motive while engaging in
>>work (e.g., survival, pleasure, social influence, etc.), can one person
>>with multiple motives doing the same thing be engaged in more than one
>>activity?
>>>> Given the difficulty of determining motive(s), how do we
>>identify the "real" activity?
>>>>
>>>> Charles Nelson
>>>>
>>>> <<<<
>>>>
>>>> <<<<
>>>
>>>
>>+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>>| - Andy Blunden - Home Page - http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm - |
>>| "Spirit, so far as it is the immediate truth, is the ethical life of |
>>| a people: - the individual, which is a world. Phenomenology, Hegel |
>> Spirit, Money & Modernity, Melbourne Uni Summer School 23/24 Feb '01
>> Reading material at http://home.mira.net/~andy/seminars/23feb00.htm
>>+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>--
>Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
>Lesley University
>29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
>Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
>http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
>_______________________
>"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
> and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
>[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
>
>
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