I'm afraid that my comments about B. Robinson's distinction between objekt
and gegenstand were not clear (16 June 2003). If so I apologize for being
unnecessarily cryptic. The problem here is to provide a short and clear set
of comments
on the article that accurately reflects my general approach to the issue.
I,m not really sure if there is in this forum any consensus concerning these
issues so For those who are interested I'm sending an attachment that shows
how, or better, where I link the object and instrumental activity into CHAT.
The differences between my model and the AT model are, as I hope are made
clear in the attachment, are less a matter of basic theoretical differences
than they are of research approach.
And now some comments on the Foot article:
If we were to choose a single feature that characterises historical
dialectical materialism, we would have to settle on the transitory character
of virtually every aspect of culture. Marx and Engels and most of their
followers regarded this feature of HDM as the scientific justification for
social revolution. Actually, for HDM the ephemeral character of culture
goes much deeper than this. Lurking behind the theory is the recognition
that human culture is a matter of more or less temporary accommodations
between interacting individuals and is never, ever frozen into the kinds of
rule based organization that characterises our less intellectually gifted
neighbours: ants, dogs and even dolphins.
Seen in this light, the object, be it material or ideal, is likely to
be different for every person sharing it, different for every case of social
intercourse, and different for every investigator researching the
individuals and interactions which share the object. Variation of the
properties of the object may include changes in kind as well as changes in
descriptive features. Take, for example, Marx and Engel's theories
concerning the basic definition of capitalism. The transformation of all
valuation of worth to that of the market (the objectification of all
relations as trade and all experience as commodity) is seen by them as a
product of the conversion of money (an ideal object representing the
performance of exchange) from an abstracted ideal object that links many
diverse interactional situations into a reified abstraction or material
object (they would call it a fetish) that defines interactional situations.
So for HDM the object, in its features and even in its general relation to
experience, is like the electron a very slippery thing indeed.
So how do we research the object? We can't, or at least not directly.
We can incorporate into our models the various ways the participants in the
interaction/s researched objectify the experiences and interactional systems
of interest, we can examine how these diversities are influenced and changed
by the interchanges that arise in the course of interaction, and we can
compare the "before and after" to discover the cumulative effects of the
interactions on the objectifications of the participants; but in all these
researches we a compelled to regard "the object" as an entity characterised
by a range of possible features and relations to experience. To carry the
electron analogy a bit further, the object should be regarded as a cluster
of possible features and relationships much as the electron is regarded as
occupying a cloud of possible positions.
The view of the transitory nature of the object presented here is
fairly close to that of the Foot analysis of EARWARN. This is particularly
the case with his notion of the essential uncatchability of the object.
"Although object conceptions can be observed and identified empirically, the
object-engaged and enacted yet always unfinished, simultaneously material
and ideal-is in its essence "uncatchable." I do wonder, however, whether he
even comes close to a thorough exposition of the diversity of
objectifications by which EARWARN was identified and through which EARWARN
was enacted. While we have a good representation in the paper as to the
character and evolution of the object as it was manifested in relationships
between researchers, between directors and between directors and
researchers, it is gives little information concerning the character and
evolution of the object in relations between directors and the funding
agency and no information about how the program was regarded by the
researched population (the potential troublemakers). He does not even
mention if these latter participants in the program were even aware of
EARWARN's existence. I suspect that if he had researched the participants
in EARWARN that were external to the research bureaucracy: the funding
agency and the researched population, he himself would have adopted the view
that there was in actuality no common object, EARWARN, during the period of
this study-that EARWARN was just a shell covering the individual goals of
its participants and may well have produced an even more interesting paper
than he did.
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