Very interesting.
Sometimes I like to explore semantic possibilities by considering the
translation counterparts in non-Western languages.
In Chinese, "object" can be rendered "wuti" (maybe "object-body") as in
material (physical) body (e.g., a brick) -- inanimate but also animate, such
as "animals" or "dongwu" (literally "animate object).
The "wu" here is used for the "material" part of words like "materialistic."
Before the Montréal Business Mtg & ensuing discussion, I always thought of
"object-mediated" in CHAT in this sense.
When "object/subject" or "objective/subjective" are counterposed in Chinese,
a different pair of word are used: "ke" for "object" and "zhu" for
"subject."
In the more familiar everyday counterposition of the terms, "ke" and "zhu"
mean "guest" (keren="guest-person") and "host," (zhuren="host-person")
respectively; so "keguanzhuyi" (objectivism) and "zhuguanzhuyi"
(subjectivism) are literally broken down as "guest-view-ism" and
"host-view-ism."
Besides "host," "zhuren" is also "master" or "ruler" -- for example in a
master/slave or master/servant relationship.
_____
From: Peg Griffin [mailto:Peg.Griffin@worldnet.att.net]
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 9:44 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Objekt -- back to the future
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 <mailto:ana@zmajcenter.org> Marjanovic-Shane
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 <mailto: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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