[xmca] Personal Meaning, Social Meaning, Alienation

Heidi,
   
  I really enjoyed reading the text you posted. It brought the two sides of meaning into focus for me with what I’ve been trying to communicate about individual and social development.
   
  One problem in the reading: I couldn’t always identity which passages were drawn from other writers and which were your own interperetation. I’ve marked up the text of your message with various comments.
   
  The last three paragraphs confused me however. II wasn’t able to grasp exactly what you were moving toward. . It almost seems as if what you wrote about the possibility for the introduction of distorted or fantastic notions and ideas, including those that have no basis in his real, practical life experience. “ was part of a different issue. Was this passage drawn from another author?
   
  The mention of the “power of stereotypes” seemed to refer to how traditional beliefs continue after the conditions for accepting them no longer exist. Would the Catholic Church’s failure to abandon a geocentric cosmology, for 400 years after the heliocentric cosmology had been rationally demonstrated, until the mid XXth century, after space flights and direct observation, be an example of this? It’s a fractal image though isn’t it? The church’s ability to maintain this position grounded in the faithful largely illiterate flocks were whose traditions maintained cosmologies quite different from Occidental rationalism.
   
  Rather than being a pillar of universal truth, one can see the rationalist (subject-object) model as a crystallization of the alienation between personal and social meaning - as it exists in capitalist society - as well as being the platform from which other belief systems can be characterized as “distorted” and “fantastic”; the perspective from which working class consciousness can be pictured as childlike, as in the vulgar interpretations of Bernstein’s “restricted and elaborated” codes.. The status of “rationality” is an important issue in many nations today as indigenous movements challenge not only capitalist economics but also the hegemony of western science; a knowledge system for which nature is ultimately inert matter.
   
  Does Marxist theory share that ontological orientation, John Bellamy Foster has argued to the contrary several books that illustrate Marx’s critique of the relationship between the natural environment and industrial development. One could even interpret the chapters on the development of machinery in Capital as a critique of the way in which science has been directed to objects defined by the imperative to maximize profit.
   
  It would be great if you expanded on how you understand
  the " transformation of the subjective personal meanings in the individual's consciousness into other objective meanings that adequately express them… "
   
  Paul

Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
  Heidi--

No trouble opening your file and finding the bolding. Could you remind us of
what the context is. What is the source of the non-bolded text? Some (Marxs
writes: This thought.....) is quotation from
Marx? Or Leontiev? Sorry to have lost the thread. I know I need to be
working forward from Martin's article to Paul's (?) initial response, and
maybe that is all you have to tell me to do to get properly
oriented.

My overall impression is that the discussion of development and learning,
David Kellog's posts with examples of neoformations and developmental
change, and related discussion have been very
productive, but require pulling out of the larger stream of discussion and
synthesizing. I hope to be able to do that myself before the entire topic
slips away, but like many of us, struggle to balance
the discussion here with in-my-face-local demands.

Thanks for sending the doc file to keep things moving.
mike

On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 8:07 AM, varnam soupend
wrote:

> Mike
> Thank you .
> As for the bolding , the only thing I can do is to resend my "Personal
> Meaning" file which is in doc. format as an attachment ; If you still
> receive it without the "bolding" , Bruce will be kind to tell me what to do
> . It's apparently the technical device that removes the variations !
>
> Please continure to enjoy your reading of Martin Packer's thought-to-be
> very interesting topic as well as content , unfortunately I'm still calling
> to every corner of xmca's webpage , Laurence Earlbaum etc. to catch up with
> you in reading and enjoying ; alas ! to no avail yet . Bruce ! What's this
> "A non-text message was scrubbed" and "private ....." thing ?
>
> As to the answers to your masterfully-devised questions , in hours ,
> please !
>
> Heidi
> heidizulfai@yahoo.com
>
>
>
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