Continuing the dialogue on this topic, I'm sending some notes I made on
Victor's recent posting. Obviously there is a lot more to be said, and I
thank him for offering such stimulating discussions, connecting the topic
of material-ideal-objectifications to larger issues of social organization
of complex systems.
I have inserted my notes between paragraphs of Victor's posting, after
copying it to WORD and back again, so please excuse any formatting problems
... I have also highlighted some key points in the original. Please note
that I wrote these comments mostly for myself, but thought others might
like to see them, so they are not quite in my usual dialogical style and I
don't have the time right now to edit them ...
From: "Ben Reshef family" <victor@kfar-hanassi.org.il>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Subject: Re: Chasing the Object
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 19:22:16 +0200
Dear Jay,
Your observation that the failure to explain the persistence through
objectification exposes the shortcomings of agent based and other bottoms up
models, such as Ethnomethodology, J. Shotter's writings, and Newman and
Holtzman's work, is exactly to the point. The building of an agent model for
a HDM explication of social organization quickly exposed this weakness and
pressed for modifications to rectify this flaw. The solution that I applied
is tripartite, consisting of three separate but related matters; authority,
the abstract ideal object, and the tolerance for internal diversity imparted
to systems by authority and abstract ideal objectifications.
1) . Authority: One of the most important considerations in S. Kaufman's
analyses of order in biological systems [Kaufman 1993,The Origins of Order:
Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, 1995, At Home in the Universe:
The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.] is the double
issue of error and complexity catastrophe. Brown and Eisenhardt [1998
Competing on the Edge: "Strategy as structured chaos"] introduced the issue
and their definition of it seems to me to be the best.
"Error catastrophe or extinction mutagenesis is a theory borrowed from
bio-genetics that describes a situation in which a high mutation rate
introduces so many errors into the system that it cannot adapt well because
it cannot distinguish useful variants from errors."
It cannot distinguish them fast enough because of the generational timelag
inherent in selectional processes.
And, "In the extreme,
the system becomes grid locked by too many interconnections. These ties
constrain the system and prevent adaptation. The result is a 'complexity
catastrophe." In general informationally poor interactional systems are poor
innovators and are especially susceptible to complexity catastrophe when
encountering changeable environments.
This is a version of the “requisite variety” argument of Ashby. If the
system does not have enough internal informational variety it cannot
respond to external stresses. Of course any system locks up if the number
of constraints from interaction exceeds the residual degrees of freedom.
There is insufficient residual plasticity for adaptation.
Human interactional systems would appear to be the most plagued by
error catastrophe, considering the relative richness of "Cartesian" object
experience possible to the individual person in any temporal local
condition.
Semiotic imagination makes possible a faster rate of production of
internally generated novelty compared to the slow rate of selectional
correction of the introduced ‘errors”. Unfortunately the effects are
cumulative and one gets an acceleration of novelty production in human
social systems, as we are especially seeing today.
The capacity for individuals to learn from each other mitigates
considerably the dangers of error catastrophe; but not enough to explain the
evolution of complex human culture.
There seem to be two kinds of learning here. Local transmission of
information about corrections and collective analysis to identify errors.
Even simple experiments with a small
collectivity of interacting, learning agents with moderately high perceptual
capacities show that while stochastic convergence of performance is highly
likely for any one interaction session, the agents quickly diverge once the
session is finished and a new meeting between them involves a repetition of
consensus search.
This is, as Victor says, an effect and weakness of bottom-up models in
which only negotiated consensus among individual agents can produce
collective coherence of behavior.
Besides, the convergence process tends to be a lengthy
one - it grows in duration with the expansion of agent perceptual capacity -
and guarantees that agent interactions can neither be quick (say in an
emergency situation) nor be complex. Time restrictions on the period for
consensus formation simply result in many interaction breakdowns due to
error catastrophe.
Yes, it is exactly the timescale problem that matters here, and as Victor
notes it gets worse as there are more parameters to negotiate “agreement”
on. It’s just too slow for survival under the eventual conditions.
A search for more effective means for reducing error catastrophe led to
introduction of two additional mechanisms into the system: conviction or
commitment and concurrence.
a) Conviction: Simply put, conviction is the preference of agents to
perform what they have already learned and to perform what they've learned
most often. Could also be called “habit” or “automatism”??
b) Concurrence: In the same discourse mode, concurrence is the preference of
agents to perform in accordance with the performances of the agents with
whom they interact and especially in accordance with the performances of the
agents with whom they regularly interact. The herd instinct, or cogent
sociality.
Conviction and Concurrence are in many respects antithetical; the former
being a product of the history of personal experience (even if a sociogenic
one) while the latter is a product of immediate apperception of collective
activity. This neatly reproduces the modern Western dilemma of individual
choice vs. collective need. Perhaps we should be a bit suspicious of it for
this reason.
The synthetic mechanism that emerges from conviction and
concurrence and transforms them into a single system is Authority: the
personalization of concurrence and the collectivization of conviction.
Ah, this is much better than just having a tension between conviction and
concurrence dispositions. But how exactly is it implemented?
Authority introduced into the model the principle of instructing as well as
learning, albeit in a fairly simplistic and passive manner (akin to the way
a Tai Chi master disciplines an errant pupil, i.e. by simply not responding
to performance that does not conform to the convictions of the teacher). By
introducing even the most simplistic teaching modes into the model we give a
powerful boost to the reduction of error catastrophe at a drastically
reduced cost in time and energy.
This is very reminiscent for me of a proposal I made quite a long time ago
in a different context that the “teaching instinct” was as fundamental to
sociality as the “learning drive”. They are of course complementary. We are
as much driven to provide the information needed by others (esp. for
instance children and newcomers) as we are in other circumstances to seek
out that information. Children trigger our teaching instincts as part of
their learning drive. Interesting to think how far such a principle
generalizes.
2) Abstract ideal objectifications: The second issue involved in the
introduction of object persistence in a bottoms up model of social
organization involved the integration of the system with the Vygotskian
scheme of dialectical development of mental practices and with Ilyenkov's
conceptualisation of "Ideal objects" (or "formations" as I sometimes call
them).
In modelling the Vygotskian modes of mental practice it was discovered
that development through the complexes stages involve a not unsurprising
progressive decline in the creativity of transformation of experience into
objects and an equivalent increase in the connectivity and complexity of
mental practice.
What was less expected and no less interesting was that
the burgeoning systems of associated facts characterising the more developed
forms of thinking in complexes (epitomized by pseudo conceptual thinking)
unify large bodies of experience at the cost of the flexibility of the
practice to adapt to temporal, local conditions.
This is best exemplified
by Piaget [1965. The moral judgment of the child.] and Kohlberg's [Power, F.
C., Higgins, A., & Kohlberg, L. 1989. Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral
Education.] observations of the moral aspects of children's play in the
middle stage of the age grade. ( At this stage arguments concerning game
rules are frequent and extensive and are very often resolved by force or by
boycotting the non-conformists. Clearly where complex performances are
regarded as strictly rule-based facts, negotiated settlements are difficult
if not impossible alternatives to partial or total breakdowns in
interactional relations.
The abstract mode of thinking represents a synthesis of analytic and
synthetic practice whereby large quantities of objects (or performances) may
be variously classified in accordance with features shared between them.
The groups formed through abstraction are strictly defined by the common
element shared by all members, and unlike the case with factual classes, a
member of an abstract category can be regarded as being a part of any number
of abstract categories if other of its features so warrant it.
Relevant here is Watanabe’s theorem in logic, which reminds us that we have
to assign VALUE priorities to features in order to decide according to
which similarities and differences categories are to be preferentially
constructed, among all possible categorizations of multi-featured elements.
Truly abstract thought modes enable establishment of vast systems of connected
objects, yet provides a means for great system flexibility and provides a
firm basis for the formation of complex, persistent objects and object
systems.
But in a sense this only pushed the dilemma up one level, to negotiations
regarding values. Here flexibility is also needed, but if we are not to get
too high and too fast levels of schizmogenesis (ala Bateson), we also need
a countervailing push toward value consensus, one that very likely must
come from “above” not in the sense of personal authority/arianism, but in
the sense of cultural traditions, or more likely a heteroglossia of
interdependent subcultural value-systems.
Ilyenkov's [1977, The concept of the Ideal] concept of the ideal
object as reflexive abstraction of social interaction (the objectification
of interactional performance systems) imparts purpose and value to
objectified material experience. "Human aims are nothing but the material
process and outcome of activity in ideal form. The ideal image is the object
of production converted into an internal image, as a need, as a drive and as
purpose" [Marx 1973 Grundrisse].
So here we in fact do have the importance of values and purposes.
Interesting to think how values, as well as practices are embodied in
objects and formation. Obvious (post Bakhtin) for the case of discourses,
but perhaps less so for the case of material tools and artifacts. We have a
notion of affordances for the relation to practices, but we need a
complementary notion to also link material tools and artifacts to value
systems, particularly values relevant to resolution of social conflict, or
to prescribing the “right” way to do things in cases where there are
clearly multiple possible practices and not having some consensus about
them would lead to great risks for community survival. Perhaps the answer
here lies in the combinations in cultures of tools/artifacts WITH
discourses and activities that carry a sense of “rightness” with their
performances. One can note the great importance attached to “right
performance” of symbolic rituals. We interpret this instrumentally from our
own cultural perspective, but that may project our view too much. There is
value, essential value, for a community in attaching to activities of
significance a strong community consensus about the right way to do them,
regardless of immediate effects. This in turn frequently becomes an arena
of discussion and negotiation, itself a model for the survival process of
the community, and more importantly, an opportunity to renew the meta-value
principles, which are often unstated and implicit, that guide the outcomes
of the negotiations about what is the right performance. It is having ways
to get to consensus about values that matters most, even if there is
continuing diversity of values (cf. heteroglossia) and conflict over
policies, actions, etc.
All the representations
that refer to social practice, colours, flags, and written law are serve as
reinforcement for both the objects and the organization of social relations
that generate and maintain them. As P Jones writes:
"This, indeed is the special and vital function which ideal forms fulfil in
human life-activity: they allow the goals, aims, drives, purposes,
strategies and forms of action and cooperation of social humanity to be
represented outside of, prior to and independently of the real activities
which engender them:" [2000: "Symbols, Tools and Ideality in Ilyenkov"]
This is certainly correct, but perhaps it is not the whole story …our
ideal-objects, the material objectifications of community values, are
themselves embedded in discourses and activities which explicitly raise
issues of right performance, the values which guide right performance, and
the normally inexplicit meta-values and meta-practices that enable
consensus about values and policies, i.e. about “right performance”. I
think that the paradigm in mind in Jones’ analysis is building solidarity
for rapid collective consensus response in emergencies (like war). But we
need our model to also consider the functions that occur with respect to
longer-term, less acute maintenance of the community’s ability to respond
to slower, but no less profound demands for change/adaptive response.
3) System tolerance:
Authority and abstract objects, especially abstract ideal objects, preserve
object persistence on the smallest as well as the largest scales of social
organization.
This is extremely important. Note particularly the they can BRIDGE across
timescales.
They are, therefore, equally effective in explaining how
long-lived practices and related objectifications may be produced in
directly observable interpersonal interaction as in historical developments
involving many such interpersonal events. Surely many practices and
objectifications are products of many interactional encounters and can never
be traced to a single case of social intercourse or even to the history of
social interaction of a single group of people. On the other hand, even in
this age of mass media, the basic unit of significant social activity is the
encounter or interactional event and even the most complex and largest
scaled social organizations can only be realized through the interpersonal
activity of those whose practices form and enact them. It would be very
strange if we could only find the mechanisms responsible for object
persistence outside the interactional event.
I certainly agree that we need to examine the role of ideal-objects on and
across many scales, both extensional (numbers of participants) and temporal
(short to longer term processes). They, and the activities in which they
are embedded (including discursive activities), emerge collectively (in
their material construction, but especially in their social-cultural
significance) across many instances of more local interactions, as Victor
notes. But they function both at those local scales AND at more
macro-social and historical ones. Just HOW this happens, and how to model
it, is still an important and open question.
The response is not complete and is telegraphic in some passages , but I
think it covers the field. .
With Regards,
Victor
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Jay Lemke" <jaylemke@umich.edu>
>To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2003 5:07 PM
>Subject: Re: Chasing the Object
>
>
> >
> > Two interesting sets of issues seem to be accumulating around our
> > object-discussion ... one, emphasized by Harry D., is the complementarity
> > of object production and community production; the other, reinforced by
>Ben
> > R., is the question of the ephemeral collective emergence of objects in
> > activity.
> >
> > I like Harry's making the connection to Bernstein, and I think that his
> > sophisticated sociological view of the complementarity of community
> > processes and instructional or productive ones is indeed very close both
>to
> > CHAT and to the complementarity issues raised by Foot's article.
> > Bernstein's core theoretical analysis places a lot of importance on the
> > classical sociological notion of the "division of labor", and so on the
> > issue of co-ordination and integration of efforts in a community, so that
> > the whole adds up to a functional unity. This is also the key question
>that
> > Ben raises by reference to agent-based models of ant behavior. It happens
> > that such agent-based models are now being widely applied to human social
> > systems, asking the key question: how do complex collective productions
> > result from the unplanned, or emergent coordination of relatively simple
> > templates for interactive behavior?
> >
> > But there is a big difference here between Bernstein's, or Marx's,
> > sociological analysis and agent-based models: the issue of persistence
> > through objectification. Ben notes that historical-dialectical models, in
> > their more revolutionary moments, emphasize the transitory character of
> > social formations. But every social formation has some set of
> > characteristic timescales (for inception, for maintenance cycles, for
> > action cycles, for change, for demise), and what is ephemeral on one
> > timescale (decades or centuries) may be quite stable and persistent on
> > another (hours or months). The agent-based models are purely "bottom-up"
> > social models; they do not include the creation of new objects that have
> > material persistence on longer timescales and which can mediate across
> > scales (the way, for example, a material report or architectural plan
> > persists over years and participates in readings and doings over minutes
>or
> > days). Even ants build "burrows" that have material persistence and lend a
> > kind of collective memory and behavioral affordances to short-term doings
> > of the colony.
> >
> > Bernstein did not, so far as I know (please someone say if he did) address
> > the issue of the grounds of persistence of human social-behavioral
> > patterns, such as the instructional and regulatory discourses of
> > educational or other institutions. He did doubtless make use of the notion
> > of persistent social formations, and indeed his famous codes or coding
> > orientations, linked to social-class differentiated participation in
> > socialization activities, are among these. His model is not purely
> > bottom-up. It is also top-down in the sense that larger-scale persistent
> > features of the material conditions of social organization (e.g. the
> > division of wealth as well as the division of labor) influence human
> > development (e.g. learning in school). These social formations may well be
> > the products of individual human agency, collectively organized in the
> > past, but materially persistent into each individual's present. But this
> > just shows, I think, that purely bottom-up models (e.g. ethnomethodology,
> > or agent-based social modeling) are incomplete if they do not provide for
> > persistent material objects and other forms of larger-scale, longer-time
> > productions that in turn influence the ways in which at shorter
>timescales,
> > collective activity is organized emergently from agent choices.
> >
> > Ben also very helpfully elaborated further on the Objekt vs. Gegenstand
> > distinction, and in particular made very clear, as I had suggested, that
> > for LSV and in the CHAT tradition, ideality arises not from construction
>by
> > the individual mind as such, but from meaningful function in collective
> > activity. I think, though, that he is a bit too pessimistic about the
> > impossibility of studying ephemeral multi-faceted organizing objects of
> > activity. If we over-emphasize the bottom-up aspect of object formation,
> > this may seem to be the case. But if we recognize that by virtue of their
> > (and our) materiality, Objects in the special CHAT sense are likely to
>also
> > have some scale of temporal persistence, and some limits to the rates at
> > which they change, mutate, evolve, etc., then the problem is more
> > tractable. I certainly agree that if we see activity as organized around
> > such Objects, the objects are dynamic (but not capricious or chaotic), and
> > they are also multi-faceted, including contradictory facets as seen by
> > differently positioned participants in the activity. If we ask: Is there
> > one common Object?, we may be disappointed. But if we ask instead: is
>there
> > an organized system of coordinated or complementary Objects? one which
> > embodies and affords the organization and coordination of the activity
> > itself among the manifold actions of its participants? then I think we
>must
> > be able to find such a material organizational framework, scaffold, or
> > "motive" (motif?) for an activity.
> >
> > Perhaps we need to push a bit further with the idea of complementarity
> > between social process and activity products. The CHAT tradition begins I
> > think from a paradigm of activity centered, in Marx, on productive
>labor --
> > i.e. to activity that is organized around producing a material product.
> > That product "exists" already for the participants in the activity in
>large
> > part from its previous production and circulation in the community: most
> > productive labor is about producing more of something that has already
> > existed. It is because we participate in the social activities in which
>the
> > products we wish to make have meaning for us that we are able to, and are
> > motivated to, produce more of these products. We also usually need the
> > original sample of the material product, as an object, or as a template,
>or
> > symbolically represented in plans-for-making, or by tools-for-making ...
>in
> > order to have successful production. Here we have the most stable kind of
> > organizing "object": the object of re-production. And here also we have
>the
> > most stable kind of community: one that reproduces itself in order to
> > reproduce the objects that make it possible. Here also is the simplest
>form
> > of the complementarity between community-building and object-producing
> > activity. I think one can hear in this simple account many parallels with
> > Bernstein's analysis.
> >
> > Bernstein of course went far beyond this simplest case, to consider social
> > class reproduction through education, where the material object is some
>set
> > of dispositions in the people so educated (and he recognized the useful
> > link here to Bourdieu's formulation). People, or at least people of a
> > certain kind, are also material objects of productive activity. But we
>also
> > cannot lose sight of ephemerality and change. Too often reproductionist
> > models also do not take into account the multiple timescales and
> > contradictions that are generative of change in activity and communities.
> > What happens when a community that sets out to produce one kind of object
> > finds that the very existence of this object, or some feature of the
> > community which is needed to create such an object, suggests the
> > desirability of a further object? One could see this as a simple form of
> > the revolutionary dialectic itself: the class conditions needed to produce
> > the industrial objects of early capitalism propose changes in the
>relations
> > of the community (more just distribution of profit), and the objects
> > themselves may become a means to this end (printed broadsides, mass
> > produced weapons). As the object of the community's activities becomes
>less
> > the alienated industrial objects as such, and more the social relations of
> > the community itself, a dialectic is engendered in which new kinds of
> > material objects are needed to mediate the new kind of community, and the
> > conditions of production of these new objects may again suggest further
> > changes in the organization of the community. We move from a
> > reproductionist model to an evolution-revolution model.
> >
> > In this formulation, as I believe in CHAT generally, the motor of change
>is
> > the linkage between changing communities and changing product-objects.
>That
> > link occurs in collective-productive-reflective activity. Ideality arises
> > not just in social-functional meaning-in-activity, but more essentially in
> > the critical-reflexive moments of activity, those in which we forge the
> > material and value relations among our aims, our object-products, and the
> > nature of our own community.
> >
> > JAY.
> >
> > At 04:48 PM 6/21/2003 +0200, you wrote:
> > >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.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >-----
> >
> >
> > Jay Lemke
> > Professor
> > University of Michigan
> > School of Education
> > 610 East University
> > Ann Arbor, MI 48104
> >
> > Tel. 734-763-9276
> > Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
> > Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
> >
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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