People:
I've been struggling a bit through Chapter 3, wondering if the urgency of finding
out what Leont'ev is saying wasn't sort of vanishing over the horizon. I too (I
think I'm agreeing with Paul) wondered about the redundancy of L's argument
about activity and its objects (needs, stimuli, initial afferentation, objective
content -- I think he uses these terms to cover the same general territory).
Then I came to this startling sentence: "Thus the movement of an animal along a
fence is subordinate to the "geometry", becomes assimilated by it, and carries it
within itself..." And, having learned how fences (the Alaska pipeline, 10-lane
interstate highways, the expansion of residential areas) transform animal's paths
of migration, how they hasten alongside the fence until they die of lack of water
(as in Botswana)... I can suddenly picture the importance of what he's saying:
that the actual physical (and social) geometry into which our activity engages
becomes part of the psychological engine of the activity.
So the sense of urgency returns. One can imagine the various "fences" that
clutter the landscape of, for example, education...The students and teachers
trotting alongside those fences, trusting that at some point the fence will end
and they will be able to cross over and get back on the path before they die of
thirst -- and some of them who assimilate the fence and begin to say, "The fence
IS the path."
Something else noteworthy: it seems as if the central metaphor behind Leont'ev's
vision is the metaphor of work -- again, work not simply as employment (or
alienated work, as someone -- Paul?- commented last time this came up) but as the
effort, social in its essence -- divided, or shared, and evolving in history,
that produces consciousness. So the terms that he uses are terms we associate
with work: production, needs, motive, product, and of course work, too. What's
noteworthy here is that work is NOT the central organizing metaphor of psychology
as we in the US know it. (What would you say IS the central organizing
metaphor? Sleep? Play? Equilibrium? A kind of hydraulic system?)
Now I want to think about why it matters so much whether "activity" which we are
to think of as a form of production is so tightly linked to needs and motives.
I happened to pick up Staughton Lynd's "Living inside our hope," a retrospective
of his long years as a radical labor activist (he was the lawyer who worked with
the Steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio, a town almost entirely dependent on three
steel manufacturing companies, when the companies bailed out and closed the
plants during the late 1970s and early 1980s, destroying the jobs that supported
those communities). In his chapter "The Webbs, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg" he
summarizes the debate between the Webbs and Lenin over how workers would develop
a political consicousness.
Lynd begins by quoting Marx: "But the struggle of the workers with factory owners
for their daily needs confronts them of itself and inevitably... with problems of
state and politics, showing them what Russia's political system is, how laws and
ordinances are issued, and whose issues they serve." Lynd says "Marx...pictured
a working class that would be radicalized in the course of its own
self-activity." (page 206). The issue here is democracy -- not perfectly
obvious, but it's there. Where is the consciousness going to come from? How will
people (workers) learn to understand what the whole picture of the society they
are part of? From their own self-organizing activity. Not from being directed or
preached at.
The Webbs, writing in Britain in the 1898, argued instead for top-down,
beaureaucratic unionism -- "centralized in its administration and served by an
expert official staff of its own." At that time Lenin disagreed, writing from
prison: "The task of the party is not to invent in its head some fashionalbe
methods of helping the workers, but to join the labor movement..."
This debate -- about where consciousness comes from, what is the relationship
between activity and motive and activity and need -- is alive today and has
important consequences not just in the labor movement (which is still struggling
with business unionism, in part the legacy of the Webbs) but in education
generally.
Soooo...On to chapter 4?
Helena Worthen
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