[xmca] agency redefined

Dear Martin,
  I wonder why you should get confused . Did you notice Mike's interpretation :
  "This is helpful in BEATING BACK MIRRORS AS MODELS OF HUMAN REFLECTION,
and appears to make the distinction between human and non-human actants at
the same time as it directs to a space for thinking about subjectivity..."
  We leanrned a great deal from you about Vygotsky and now it is hard for me to give even a slight explanation ; however , I hope the following is more help :
  Ilyenko on the "ideal" :
  [Marx, of course, had quite a different conception. According to him all the logical categories without exception are only the idealised (i.e., converted into forms of human life activity, activity that is primarily external and sensuously objective, and then also “spiritual”), universal forms of existence of objective reality, of the external world. And, certainly, not projections of the forms of the mental world on to the “physical world”. A conception, as can easily be seen, which is just the reverse in the sequence of its “theoretical deduction”.]
  {This interpretation of “ideality” is in Marx based, above all, on the materialist understanding of the specific nature of the social human relationship to the world (and the fundamental difference between this and the animals’ relationship to the world, the purely biological relationship): “The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness.” [Marx, Estranged Labour, 1844]}
  [This means that the animal’s activity is directed only towards external objects. The activity of man, on the other hand, is directed not only on them, but also on his own forms of life activity. It is activity directed upon itself, what German classical philosophy presented as the specific feature of the “spirit”, as “reflection”, as “self-consciousness”.]
  [In the above passage quoted from Marx’s early works he does not emphasise sufficiently the fundamentally important detail that distinguishes his position from the Fichtean-Hegelian interpretation of “reflection” (the relationship to oneself as to “another”). In view of this the passage may be understood to mean that man acquires a new, second plane of life activity [ideality] precisely because he possesses consciousness and will, which the animal does not possess.]
  [But this is just the opposite of the case. Consciousness and will appear in man only because he already possesses a special plane of life activity that is absent in the animal world-activity directed towards the mastering of forms of life activity that are specifically social, purely social in origin and essence, and, therefore, not biologically encoded in him.]
  [The animal that has just been born is confronted with the external world. The forms of its life activity are inborn along with the morphology of its body and it does not have to perform any special activity in order to “master” them. It needs only to exercise the forms of behaviour encoded in it. Development consists only in the development of instincts, congenital reactions to things and situations. The environment merely corrects this development.]
  [Man is quite a different matter. The child that has just been born is confronted – outside itself – not only by the external world, but also by a very complex system of culture [which , in its own right , has been acquired through man's activities] , which requires of him “modes of behaviour” for which there is genetically (morphologically) “no code” in his body. Here it is not a matter of adjusting ready-made patterns of behaviour, but of assimilating modes of life activity that do not bear any relationship at all to the biologically necessary forms of the reactions of his organism to things and situations.]
  "...the model of knowledge/perception as a matter of mental representations. ..."
  As about "perception to knowledge" I said something in the other post . And don't you think this way of interpretation reminds us of the mirror-like reflection which is consistently and rightfully criticized ? And it's the IDEALITY PLANE , I assume , that might work well in understanding both the one way of REFLECTION of the objective world [in all its mobility and uninterruptedness] and the other way of REreflection or better , REWORKING of the HUMAN AGENT into the objective world (natural/social) which leads ultimately to (as the dear folk have discussed previously) REIFICATION which is the end point of one cycle ! of activity . We should recall from Ilyenko that the "ideal" cannot lie down within the consciousness as some sediment though consciousness itself is not such kind of storage space , too . Volatility and floatedness of the "ideal" is what is repeatedly being stressed . Hence the non-stagnation of all processes .
  Sorry to say I don't know Russian . My resources are finger count to my regret . Thanks for everything and for all resources this forum/Andy have so far provided , Felix Mikhailov's article , the last one of them .
  Heidi
  heidizulfai@yahoo.com
   

       
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Received on Wed Mar 19 08:49 PDT 2008