Peg, reminds me of a conversation (re: the classes we are teaching and
the difficulty students have understanding terms, constructing
definitions) Mike and I were having offline yesterday about extended
definitions of which negation i.e., what the term to be defined is
not, and contrast are an important part. Kris
Kris D. Gutierrez
Professor
Social Research Methodology
Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
Moore Hall 1026
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521
310-825-7467
On Apr 18, 2005, at 7:43 AM, Peg Griffin wrote:
> Hi,
> Thanks, Mike for the Arne and thanks, Ana for the Burke and more.
>
> Mike, doesn't what Arne includes as Ritva's comment remind you of the
> way we worked the text and the teacher into the early triangles we
> made to explore the reading work with Armandito and (was it) Billy in
> the re-mediation work?
>
> Ana, I like thinking about the classes of definables that are defined
> in terms of what they are not -- middle child or middle class being
> two exemplars. (I admit to pride about working class tying
> to substance beyond ...)
> Phonemes are also defined in terms of what they are not in a well
> defined system. (Yes, there're articulatory or acoustic properties,
> but essentially my American English /b/ is defined as not /p/, /d/,
> /t/, /k/, /g/, /s/ etc., even vowels and other grain/system defined
> units.)
> Peg
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Ana Marjanovic-Shane
> To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu
> Cc: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 10:59 PM
> Subject: Re: Objekt -- back to the future
>
> Arne said:
>
> Curiously, this word then came to mean inanimate objects, mainly.
> Therefore, a more abstract kind of name was invented by coining
> "Gegenstand", a translation of Latin objectum -- "thing presented to
> the
> mind", as the Oxford Concise Dict explains, -- "and not to the
> council or
> to the community" as we might add. "Gegenstand" means that *which
> stands
> counter me*, then. This happened around 1650, I believe.
> Thus "Gegenstand" is that "which stands counter me". German word for
> Object contains in itself what Burke described as Dramatistic "NO". A
> negation. Here is a very curious quote from Burke:
>
> "..the "One" family and the "No" family do seem surprisingly close for
> words so logically at odds. There is the fact that something of great
> price can be called "priceless", that double negation sometimes cancel
> out and sometimes intensify the negative, that Latin and Greek verbs
> of fearing reverse the normal indicative use of negatives. Nor it is
> hard to see how the Latin words for with and against (cum and contra)
> can come from the same root, when we think of these two usages in
> English: "I fought with the enemy; I fought with my friends against
> the enemy"; and contra in the sense of "over against" or "in contact
> with" has given us the word country."
>
> So the question is :-) , can we ever be objective without being
> negative? :-) just kidding or not!
>
> Ana
>
>
> Mike Cole wrote:
> :-)
> Seems to me like you and Mary, each in your own ways, are paraphrasing
> Peg's comments re play about subjective object and objective subject.
> Of course, with respect
> to the object of my desire it is difficult to be.... ugh, objective.
> mike
>
>
> On 4/17/05, bb <xmca-whoever@comcast.net> wrote:
> Actually, I found the post of Sheila being the "object of your
> affections" most revealing, as Sheila is not only the object, but also
> participating in the subject, as wooing definitely invoves at least
> two people (with some strange exceptions). Pretty cool case to
> develop, esp. since those with significant others can relate. Now
> THIS could be a canonical study, IMHO, which, since MHO is free, could
> be worth every penny! Hopefully more.
>
> --
> ----
> bb
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> To: Xmca < xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 20:27:46 +0000
> Subject: re: Objekt -- back to the future
> Just for curiousity, I googled "object of activity" on lchc. Somewhere
> I have a large file with
> early parts of this discussion. But I enclose one note that is part
> of a thread participated in
> by Arne Raeithel and Ritva Engestrom that points toward a discussion
> that could be re-
> membered by present participants in xmca to good effect.
> mike
> --------------
> Date: 95-03-31
> =46rom: Raeithel Arne
> Subject: Re: two parts/three parts (*very* long)
> To: xpractice
>
>
> Again, Ritva has laid her gentle finger on something like a wound (not
> yet
> a scar, there was no time for much healing) of the activity approach:
> What
> to do about the conceptual difficulties of the "object" of
> communicative
> activities?
>
>
> As she said, I struggled with this in the past. My "Kommunikation als
> gegenst=E4ndliche T=E4tigkeit" was published in spring of 1989,
> before the
> command socialism went bankrupt for good. One reader, Alfred Lang,
> commented that it is a curiously agonizing text, saying essentially
> simple
> and old things along convoluted lines of arguments. "I am happy that I
> never succumbed to the seduction of Marxism," he added -- if I
> remember the
> same as he does (are you reading this, Alfred?).
>
>
> In short form, I have to recount the argument here for the (doubtful)
> benefit of readers of English, before I'm able try to tell you-all what
> came as a revelation to me in the state I was in late night: The
> distinction of "self"-regulative objectives and referential objects
> leads
> to a very useful combination of the two types of extended triangles of
> my
> last note (did I note that it was one-third-baked? :-).
>
>
> This is how Ritva put the solution:
>
>
> >Bakhtin is unusual clear in the issue that in producing utterances,
> >we are working with two kinds of objects: interlocutor (I have
> >called it 'social object') and life (or 'content' in the sense of the
> >possibilities of human activity). I see that the 'social object'
> alone
> >is a special case of meaning construction. ...
> >
> >Applied to conversations, the "dual orientation of language" makes it
> >possible to view, e.g., a medical consultation as a local dialogue in
> >which a patient and a doctor share an attempt to construct the
> >referential object of the consultation and to solve practically the
> >problem related to the object. From the viewpoint of conversation,
> >the object is not just an object of the doctor's "tool-mediated"
> >action. It is an *object of the consultation* that includes the
> >subjective perspectives of both the patient and the doctor.
>
>
> The diagramming task for me now is: to clearly distinguish the two
> kinds of
> objects:
> (i) object of the transaction / content / reference object(ive) of Act.
> (ii) interlocutor / social object / "self"-regulative objective of Act
>
>
> In a sense, Bateson et al. said this with their "relational aspect" and
> "content aspect" of every communication, and before them Karl B=FChler
> whose
> works I still could not re-read. I wish I had time! Seems that I will
> get
> some soon (knock on wood).
>
>
> ------
>
>
> But first, my argument from 1988: Why we-in-the-AAM (Activity Approach
> Movement :-) should treat communication as *one special type of object-
> oriented activity*, and not as a separate kind of experience/acting in
> general ?
>
>
> The latter alternative had been advocated by Lomov:
>
>
> "Activity" should be the term for the S/O-relation (changing nature),
> and
> "Communication" was to be clearly separated, because it exists in an
> S/S-relation (changing "superstructure", "ideology", "beliefs",
> "sets", and
> so on). This smelled to my nose badly of Cartesianism, as I would say
> today, after the last three years of e-discussion in the xfamily and
> in the
> Peirce-L. -- I hope I have not done unjustice to Lomov's text (I do not
> have it in English, somewhen in the Sov.Psychol., I guess). Would
> somebody
> please correct me, if I am wrong?
>
>
> I asked myself with violent disbelief: How could these be ever
> separated?
> As if the other subject would not be an object at the same time. As if
> any
> talk would not have a "shared" (divided and distributed and spanned
> over
> the relation) object if it sustains itself at all...
>
>
> But my German colleagues, Rainer Oesterreich and Marianne Resch, also
> had
> chosen this binary distinction: Handlungen und Kommunikationen
> (actions and
> communications). They refused to consider the alternative: that
> communications have the same kind of basic regulative structure as the
> actions that a single actor/person tries to realise with his or her
> goals
> in mind, eye, and trouserpocket (e.g. knot in the h'kerchief).
>
>
> My article thus grew out of an internal discussion paper of the
> Institut
> f=FCr Humanwissenschaft in Arbeit und Ausbildung of the Technical
> University
> of Berlin. I wanted to overcome the obvious counter-argument: that we
> scientists are treating compatriote, democratically equal subjects as
> we
> would inanimate objects, and are even saying that this is how every-
> body
> treats everybody. That is: I wanted to make clear what "object" meant
> in
> the original discourse in the middle 19th century, when Marx turned
> from a
> spirited Hegelian into a passionate and determined materialist of his
> own
> making...
>
>
> Great help I found in the works of Peter Keiler who, as a participant
> in
> the CoP of Critical Psychologists at the Free University of Berlin, was
> criticising several versions of Vygotsky Light making the rounds in
> student
> papers and teachers' seminar texts of the late seventies.
>
>
> The conceptual problem has to do with the category called
> "gegenst=E4ndliche
> T=E4tigkeit" -- usually translated as object-oriented activity. It
> means
> literally a being active with regard to some thing. The word thing
> (German
> Ding) incidentally means nothing more than "issue brought before the
> "Thing" (i.e. a palaver of the elders; central men who had, however,
> talked
> in their home spheres about the issues before that...).
>
>
> Curiously, this word then came to mean inanimate objects, mainly.
> Therefore, a more abstract kind of name was invented by coining
> "Gegenstand", a translation of Latin objectum -- "thing presented to
> the
> mind", as the Oxford Concise Dict explains, -- "and not to the
> council or
> to the community" as we might add. "Gegenstand" means that *which
> stands
> counter me*, then. This happened around 1650, I believe. Meanwhile
> "Gegenstand" again means concrete objects for most people, although
> it is
> also still the abstract word used in laws and court discourses, in
> technical papers like patents, some philosophy, etc.
>
>
> =46rom this analysis I concluded to work with a neo-logism: "counter-
> process" (Gegenprozess): that which a me or we wrestles with.
> "Prozess" is
> also the word in German for a trial before a judge; therefore the
> collateral meanings evoked are beneficial: Something social, running
> in
> conventional forms, yet never to be predicted; except by *very clever*
> young or old LA Law figures, maybe... That's what's making the
> suspense for
> many who watch that series.
>
>
> ---
>
>
>
> Peter Keiler found three senses of "gegenst=E4ndlich" in Marx's early
> writings (before 1848 and the Manifesto):
>
>
>
> A human may:
>
> (1) wrestle literally, i.e. bodily, with another human. The prime
> example
> for Marx here was Love, not War, building on Feuerbach's passionate
> arguments against the pure spirit processes of Hegel, and on the very
> fresh
>
> experience with Jenny Marx -- they had their wedding before they
> decided to
> emigrate to Paris, driven away by Prussian censorship.
>
>
>
> This means that reproduction of the community of bodies is the primary
>
> meaning. This is said against the orthodox Marxist error to put
> production
> first in a theory of human history.
>
>
>
> Related to a counter process then means to *be* a body, single or in
>
> transactions, in love, work, and "trouble". A good name for this shade
> of
> meaning of the category might be "human Drama" -- as Politzer
> suggested,
> and Vygotsky took up enthusiastically.
>
>
>
>
> (2) Humans may wrestle with things -- what he or she or they *have* as
> their external object, nature, and sense, [was sie "als Gegenstand,
> Natur,
> Sinn ausser sich haben", Marx 1844]
> i.e. with things, social situations,
> products, organisations,...
>
>
>
> This is the usually meaning in activity theory -- the reference object
> numbered (i) above when we look at a conversation at work.
>
>
>
>
> (3) Humans may wrestle with one another non-literally, they may *be*
> object, nature, and sense for a third (party, being, CoP,...) [k=F6nnen
> "selbst Gegenstand, Natur, Sinn f=FCr ein drittes sein", Marx 1844]
>
>
>
>
> This, I propose is sense (ii) of object from above, i.e. Ritva's
> "social
> object", and what I take to be Vygotsky's intended meaning when he
> defined
> the difference of the sign from the tool as it's self-directedness or
>
> inner-directedness. -- Peirce also saw as prime function of semiosis
> the
> beautiful, ethical, and true self-control, true, that is, in the sense
> that
> any conceivable and living community of scholars will finally accept
> as the
>
> ground from where to go further...
>
>
>
> I have stressed many times here in the xfamily that we shouldn't
> construe
> "self" as meaning only the [social] individual, and we also should not
>
> think that the problem of the border of individuals or groups or CoPs
> is
> solved with a renounce of Cartesiam dichotomies. Therefore, "internal"
> may
> mean "internal to a class", for instance, pertaining to the social
> object
>
> of the class, to its (their) self- regulative objective.
>
>
>
> Imagine my sheer wonder when I found that Peirce's Firstness,
> Secondness,
> and Thirdness match exactly with the three shades of "object" with
> respect
>
> to subject's activity that Marx had distinguished when Peirce was a
> five-years-old, listening intently to his father, the great
> mathematician...
>
>
>
> In the next post, I will propose some diagrams for working with these
> ideas.
>
>
>
>
> So long: Arne.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Ref:
> Marx, K. (1968/1844). Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik und Philo-
> sophie =FCberhaupt. [General Critique of Hegelian Dialectics and
>
> Philosophy]. MEW Erg.Bd. 1, pp 568-588. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
> Raeithel, A. (1989). Kommunikation als gegenst=E4ndliche T=E4tigkeit.
> Zu einigen philosophischen Problemen der kulturhistorischen
> Psychologie. In: Knobloch, C. (Ed.). Kognition und Kommunikation.
>
> Beitr=E4ge zur Psychologie der Zeichenverwendung. M=FCnster: Nodus,
> pp. 29-70.
>
>
>
>
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