Dear xmca people:
I printed out the Ilynekov article, The Concept of the Ideal, and took a yellow
marker and a fresh roller-ball black pen and went to Buckingham Fountain over
beside Lake Michigan and spent two hours sitting on a bench reading it. Two
hours, 30 pages -- not bad!!!
This is a wonderful article. It lingers in the mind. It's like watching
someone start to knit or weave a tent, starting at the ground and working up.
After a while the tent begins to take shape and you can see the form of what's
going to happen inside. He's going to explain to us what consciousness is made
of, where it comes from -- what kind of thing is it? Where does it exist? Of
what does it consist, and what is its relation to us?
I have always had a hard time explaining to friends why "language" is the
phenomenon that solves the problem of consciousness ("How does consciousness
get into people's heads? Is it born into us -- if so, we can test for it and
sort people according to test results. If it is not born into us -- how do we
explain its presence without resorting to magical thinking?") -- why language
is what is material and yet both inside and outside us. I have seen the light
of curiousity die in many eyes when I try to argue that this is a problem that
needs solving -- especially among teachers, because teachers, at the very
minimum, need to have a strategy about how to change consciousness and assess
consciousness (think of the testing industries that take advantage of our lack
of clarity on what is innate and what is learned).
One of my first thoughts while reading this article is that it resonated with
what one of my favorite teachers at Berkeley, Claire Kramsch, who taught
language and culture issues and theory of second language aquisition , used to
say -- she would say this as part of a conclusion that a certain line of
reasoning would lead to: "Language is co-extensive with culture." And also:
"Language is co-extensive with consciousness." So -- a language, a culture,
extends to the limits of our consciousess; and, what we can know is known to us
through language and experienced as culture.
Ilyenkov's chapter unpacks the word "language" and helps us see what creates it
and how we relate to it .
Other ideas in this chapter which I hope others will pick up on and expound:
Ilyenkov walks us up to where we can see that "this specifically human
object..." (page 24, now) -- is "the world of things created by man for man,
and, therefore, things whose forms are reified forms of human activity (labour)
..." He has already made several lists of what we can include, in addition to
verbal expression: sculptural, graphic, plastic forms, routines and rituals,
drawings, models, coats of arms, banners, dress, utensils, or money, including
gold coins and paper money, IOUs, bonds or credit notes...(9). These are all
the product of socially organized effort, or work... Yes, it takes work to
establish a routine (to work out the regulations, for example, on a piece of
new legislation, which will eventually become the process by which a welfare
recipient will be placed in a job -- "work" creates that routine, which a year
later, when it is implemented, becomes a set of social relationships which
appear as "reality" when the client walks into the One-Stop and finds out what
his choices are.
Another, just continuing the same sentence: "The existence of this specifically
human object -- the world of things created by man for man, and, therefore,
things whose forms are reified forms of human activity (labour) and certainly
not the forms naturaly inherent in them -- is the condition for the existence
of conciousness and will.....
That's pretty clear! Ilyenkov doesn't starting talking about how this
"specifically human object" varies from place to place, group to group,
activity system to activity system -- but if it is the condition for the
existence of consciousness and will we can then think about these differences.
We can also think about how we can BUILD an activity system (like a classroom)
in order to generate a desired culture of consciousness.
And at the bottom of page 25 (then I will stop): "Consciousness only arises
where the individual is compelled to look at himself as if from the side -- as
if with the eyes of another person, the eyes of all other people..."
I finished the article and went and met Joe at the corner of Roosevelt and
Michigan Avenues where we got on an old schoolbus with 60 other people, among
them 10 street vendors of the newspaper StreetWise -- there are lots of cities
here in the US where the homeless people have been organized to produce and
sell newspapers about life on the streets and political and cultural stuff
generally. This was going to be a performance piece called "Not Your Mama's Bus
Tour,' in which homeless street vendors would take us throughout Chicago to
show us the Chicago they knew. I won't go into more detail -- for the purposes
of this list, one of the beauties of this performance piece was that for 3
hours we were the captives of a tiny activity system that enabled us to "look
at Chicago from the side -- through the eyes of another person" -- we had to
"forcibly subordinate one's own inclinations and urges to a certain law... by
the organization of a collective body, the collective that has formed around a
certain common task."
High moment of the tour: we pause and get out of the bus in front of Symphony
Hall, just before the performance inside lets out. Some police and security
guards hover around, draw closer. A homeless woman takes the focus of the
circle and reads to us the names of the great composers carved in the granite
facade of the Hall -- Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner -- and then shows us HER
music -- she dances an Irish jig that she learned many years ago back in
Catholic high school.
That's enough -- Helena Worthen
"Paul H.Dillon" wrote:
> Jan,
>
> Most of the readings on xmca presume certain knowledge and the discussions
> always have participants with more or less to contribute but that was one of
> the reasons I thought it might be worthwhile reading it since people who
> have worked with the material, e.g., Andy and you, on the list. I myself
> first learned of the essay in Bakhurst's book and that's my motivation for
> working with the original.
>
> One of the reasons it would be of value to explore "the concept of the
> ideal" seems to me to be the contrast "the ideal" as used in contemporary
> dialectical materialism with "information" as it occurs in
> cybernetic/systems theory inspired social theories. Perhaps you would agree
> with me that it is quite difficult to state the difference simply but that
> it is nevertheless a central issue for comparing the two approaches and
> understanding their differences. As such it's significant for avoiding what
> Leont'ev called: "the formula of vulgar eclecticism: 'both one and the
> other'".
>
> In general it seems the Ilyenkov essay would provide a suitable theoretical
> platform for examining a number of issues that arise here repeatedly.
>
> As to the form of reading it, perhaps we could arrange for different
> volunteers to prepare paragraph-by-paragraph precis of the essay itself and
> post them to initiate the process. I know that's the way I was initially
> taught to read philosophy and we've already seen this here with the
> discussion of Yeat's "Among School Children" admittedly a difficult poem,
> the discussion of which was quite enriching and conflict free although it
> involved participants who often see themselves cast as antagonists.
>
> Paul H. Dillon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 01 2000 - 01:00:42 PDT