Nate,
Right. Well I haven't reached the end yet and I never even got to level 2
on the first Mario Bros. so take you pick!
But I think you are absolutely right about the value of exploring the
relationship between Ilyenkov on the ideal and Mikhailov's more situated
perspective although I really also think that what Mikhailov has illustrated
so clearly and cogently is implicit in Ilyenkov, although I don't think one
can get this out of "The Problem (concept) of the Ideal". I get the same
feeling reading Mikhailov after reading Ilyenkov that I got many years ago
reading Bourdieu after reading Godelier (there's a name you don't hear too
much any more), the concrete domain of human practice was restored to the
analysis. To me, what Mikhailov does in the section, "The Language of Real
Life", makes so much sense. It kept reminding me of what Arne Raithel wrote
about the "jumps" in language development during phylogenesis and at the
same time makes me want to re-read Peter Jones paper on "Symbol and
Ideality" since it seems that the real difference with Ilyenkov and
Mikhailov (dialectical materialism) and all of the post-modern and SemEco
approaches revolves around the "location" of the signifying. Mikhailov
shows how the repetitive handing along of very specific forms of tool use
that we know characterized the first couple of million years of hominid
evolution (Australopithecine, Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, etc.) was
essentially already a framework that provided the ideal in the sense that
the meaning of the tool was the collective organization of labor, the
reproduction of life already as a mediated relation through the group (not
as a herd but already involving non-biological elements). This is sooooo
obvious since even among chimpanzees tool use (e.g., cracking a nut,
getting termites with a twig, etc.) is learned behavior, just as "what to do
with an infant" is learned behavior among gorillas!!
Mikhailov wrote:
"Marx wrote that the production of ideas and the production of consciousness
were originally interwoven in the language of real life. The instruments
and objects of labour, as well as the other objective factors created in the
process of labour, establising and providing for their constant
interrelations -- these are the main material means of human interecourse.
Taken as a whole they do constitute the language of real life, a language in
the sense of a system of symbols, each of which -- the subject or object of
action -- unites people, regulates their actions, guides their activity.
What is more, this is the only symbol system that does not requive any
primeval language to build it."
And the ability to "stand to one side", that element that gets overlooked
when notions such as freedom or desire are conceived as individual enactment
of language rather than language realizing itself in the individual, comes
out of a a transformation of the socially given.
"It does not matter that for perhaps a million years this goal was preserved
as an entirely objective model not floating about freely in the imagination
in the form of a purely ideal image. The main thing is that this model
obediently reproduced in stone (the famous Chelles chisel, for example) was
simulataneoulsy the ideal, the goal, the means and the "word", for all the
meanings of which the object presented itself as an integral process, as a
universal, as its objective essence revealed to man. So despite individual
differences it turns out that in the eyes of those who see the instrument
there is something essentially general: the meaning, direction, aim, result
of collective action. In direct contact with the scoial "symbol" -- the
instrument or object of labour -- the main role in the organization of
mental procersses is played by the meaning of things objectified in
practical activity."
From this perspective, the distinction between "needs" as biological and
"desires" as given in language is spurious because our needs are always
already given in language. The difference being that they are given in the
language of real life that underlies spoken language. How "language" is
conceived becomes the central issue. Mikhailov wrote, "The 'language of
real life', in whose dynamic system each member of the tribe was involved,
carried the meaning of words that was 'carved out of flint' by the hands of
preceding generations. So man could contemplate nature only through the
prism of all the social work-skills that had been accumulated by his
predecessors. People could see the sun as round only because they rounded
clay with their hands. With their hands they shaped stone, sharpened its
border, gave it facets. SO the meaning of the words "border", "facet",
"line" does not come from abstracting the general external features of
things in the process of contemplation." But these tools in which language
emerges as Being, without yet passing over to Essence, are immediately,
directly and always concerned with providing for the basic requirements of
the reproduction of the material existence of the group. So the distinction
between "needs" and "desires" is bypassed in both directions.
Reading Mikhailov made me think of Alred's admonition of anthropocentrism.
Yes, I thought, but the anthropos that is being centered on spoke with
"words carved out of flint" for millions of years before it used words
formed out of air vibrations and inkspots and somehow, the imputed arrogance
of the term "anthropcentrism" seemed to me less valid. And as I understood
it, the reproach centered on the arrogance, not the anthropcentrism in and
of itself.
On this basis also, the difference between symbol and ideal can be worked
out in more detail which I believe to be one of the main stumbling blocks
people (including myself) encounter when trying to understand this material
but I'm just feeling like a lung fish crawling up on the beach . . . so . .
. I think there is so much to develop that would enable us to look at the
scope of co-construction (yes there are slight differences between one
Clovis point and another, one australopithecine tool-bone fragment and
another). Also relevant to the relevance of this approach is the section
where Mikhailov explores the point at which hominids begin to "see the world
as it is in itself" abstracted from its relation to action through the same
process that allowed one tool (abstracted out of context through the ability
to see its use from the side) to be visualized in another use.
BTW, from whom would there be "resistence" to situating Mikhailov with
respect to Ilyenkov, if you and I and maybe others want to pursue this?
And if there is, so what?? Last night I read an essay by T.S. Eliot
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" which provides a very nice
illustration of the issue from a very different direction.
Paul H. Dillon.
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