9 april 2001
from peter jones, sheffield hallam university, UK
dear XMCA colleagues
according to the schedule it's my job to introduce chapter 2 of LBE so there is
what i can only describe as a brief ramble below. i hope you won't mind though
if i put in a few comments on the earlier sections too. this is a very
interesting and thought-provoking book and YE does not hesistate to confront
the big questions to do with the relationship between learning ('learning
activity') and the activity of theoretical critique and practical
transformation of existing social forms. the broad sweep of the book (and
indeed of individual sections) doesn't make it easy for me to come up with
cogent and constructive commentary. i need to spend longer reading and
reflecting on the book. but for now i'll just mention a few points more or less
in passing. i won't bother noting all the ideas i think are excellent, just
where i have a problem.
learning by expanding: ten years after:
1) here YE argues that the issue of expansion is bound up with the relationship
between both horizontal and vertical dimensions of development. just to note:
interesting to think here about the hegelian dialectical concepts of EXTENSIVE
and INTENSIVE magnitude. development not only as spreading, extending outward,
growing in size, growing in quantity, changing in extent (EXTENSIVE) but
condensing, sharpening, changing in quality, increasing in degree, growing in
intensity (INTENSIVE). the two are dialectical opposites: temperature which is
higher in degree (ie hotter, more intense) has greater effects on its
surroundings; an object which is more massive displaces more water etc. so that
intensive magnitude (degree) changes with extensive magnitude and vice versa.
2) on utopian methodology: LBE argues for a 'radical localism' with potentials
for qualitative change 'present in each and every local activity of that
society'. but the insistence on interconnection between all social activities
in the same paragraph also implies a contradiction which a 'radical localism'
(like foucault's?) cannot resolve: one cannot transform any 'local' activity
without transforming the whole of society. it is true that the fundamental
contradictions of the social formation run through each and every human
activity (as YE powerfully argues in chapter 2), the universal is present in
the individual: but the universal, as YE argues, is not a sameness repeated
throughout but the living interconnection of the individual parts (the
universal is this interconnectedness). the problem within the social formation
may arise locally for me here in sheffield but the proximate source may be some
'local' activity in a corporate boardroom in manhattan. i won't take this
point any further because it's obvious where i'm going with it.
chapter 1: introduction
1) the discussion of the differing approaches of Bateson and Habermas, while
interesting, didn't get very far for my taste. the way in which Habermas, for
instance, uses data and other theoretical positions doesn't get to the issue of
whether what he comes up with is any good or not (and i'm not a great fan of
H). YE doesn't agree with Habermas - but how does this disagreement relate to
or reflect the method of analysis and the development of categories? On a
lighter note,YE reports that Habermas is 'increasingly speaking to the "new
social movements"' and that 'Habermas summarises his message to such movements:
"Restricting the growth of monetary-administrative complexity is by no means
synonymous with surrendering modern forms of life. In structurally
differentiated lifeworlds a potential for reason is marked out that cannot be
conceptualized as a heightening of system complexity"!! inscribe that on your
banners! I bet they were grateful for that pearl of wisdom! incidentally, the
relationship between working out of theory and the exposition of that theory
was an intense subject of debate between marx and engels about marx's different
versions of the first chapter of capital.
OK folks, so onto chapter 3:
Chapter 2 has a broad, ambitious and dramatic sweep. i can't do it proper
justice but it contains a number of very important ideas and conjectures about
human activity and learning.
it begins with setting out the learning paradox (how do people get cleverer -
could we paraphrase it that way? ie how does a child learn anything) and
proceeds to a critique of various conceptions of the learning process, drawing
heavily on Zinchenko's work on voluntary memory. the main idea is that
development (learning, or the transition to a 'higher' stage or degree - see my
comment on intensive above) is via the subject becoming conscious of needing to
remember something in the course of an action, leading to 'conscious
goal-directed learning actions'. this doesn't eliminate involuntary memory at
all, but controls it, uses it, subordinates it to the higher form.
this then leads to the discussion of action and various conceptualizations,
with a short discussion of hegel, marx and mikhailov on the significance of
human practice. YE then presents a critique of pierce, popper, mead (this is
very good and very interesting for me) and onto leont'ev. the ideas of leont'ev
and the vietnamese scholar tran duc thao on the origins of language are
presented and discussed. these are highly speculative ideas and in my view
quite fanciful, but YE is interested in their conception of the unity and
differentiation of work and communicative 'gestures'.
YE then goes on to Vygotsky and Wartofsky. his rather brief comments on
Vygotsky's relations with Leont'ev and with activity theory are very
interesting here. a more detailed exposition of leont'ev follows but YE
comments that 'the instrumental and the communicative aspect of activity were
not brought into a unified complex model by Leont'ev'. YE goes on to argue for
a particular conception of the evolution of activity, from the system of animal
activity into human activity, with the production and use of tools the main
driving force. this leads to a triangluar diagram (figure 2.6) summarising his
conception of the distinctive nature and structure of human activity. having
criticised leont'ev for failing to bring the instrumental and the communicative
together, it is not immediately obvious to me how YE intends to achieve that
synthesis here. under the diagram YE mentions 'the three dominant aspects of
human activity - production, distribution and exchange (or communication)' - so
communication = exchange (of goods?)? however, his use and development of
marx's dialectical conception of the whole system of production in the analysis
of each and every activity in society is very powerful, as is the section which
follows on the inner contradictions of human activity. this is a very important
discussion and a very important contribution to the development of
cultural-historical and activity theory, it seems to me, although i feel i need
to think about it more carefully and thoroughly. the section develops a
discussion by marx of the historical development of the capitalist division of
labour and social formation into a general model of change through
contradiction which works itself out (in varying degrees and causal chains)
throughout activity systems. this is the viewed in terms of three different
'fields' of traditional learning activity - school, work, and science/art,
illustrated with a number of cases - eg school going, 3 mile island and bhopal.
this leads to what i think must be the central idea, the summation of the whole
analysis of the history of human activity, the concept of activity and the
analysis of its contradictions under capitalism: the idea, based in leont'ev,
that development (expansion) involves 'taking over the mastery of the whole
work activity into the hands of the people who participate in that activity'
(53) - ie moving from involvment in an 'action' in L's sense (which is
objectively part of the whole, objectively connected with all other actions
independently of the actors' own conceptions of that action) to an activity
where the role, meaning and significance of the partial action can be
re-evaluated, transformed, adapted etc. this transitions requires 'reflecting
the relation of the motive of a given, concrete activity to the meaning of a
wider activity (leont'ev)' - ie becoming aware of the contradictions present in
one's own 'local' action (but arising from the interconnections within the
whole system) and developing a perspective for resolving them within that
context: this calls for an activity of a new type: learning activity. learning
activity is therefore a dynamic, dialectical process of detecting, analysing,
transforming and resolving contradictions in real life - through theoretical
and practical activity. the essential quality of it is summed up in a diagram
2.12 page 61. learning activity as an activity has as its object the social
life-world in its full diversity and complexity (60). its motive (as per
Davydov) is 'theoretical relation to reality' and it achieves this by models
which are the essential instruments of learning activity.
sorry for such an inadequate presentation.
very best to all
P
Dr Peter E Jones
P.E.Jones@SHU.ac.uk
http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/scs/teaching/pej/petejone.htm
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