>I believe that the great challenge to contemporary dialectical materialism
>is to more fully develop an understanding of the specific character of
>human/social/historical existence within the inorganic and organic systems
>while ridding ourselves of the bias that we are on top of some evolutionary
>pyramid and replacing that fallacy with an understanding of our existence in
>terms of complexity rather than hierarchy but without losing consciousness
>of historical telos. Sounds contradictory, no?
This is where Klaus Holzkamp comes in for me, showing the shift
("Umschlag") in purely reactive change to the dominance of culture
over purely genetic/environmentally driven systems. But this doesn't
get us completely our of nature.
I think Paul Ric¦ur (1990/1992) and Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., 1980/1990)
do a lot of work in theorizing the body as the crucial point, the
hinge between material nature and culture. The body makes possible
learning, it is both shaped by and shaping sociomaterial settings.
Ric¦ur's work is particularly interesting because her works with
dialectical concepts, but because of his phenomenological grounding,
doesn't lift concepts and discourse off of our fundamental existence,
which is one of being in the world, always already there in its
materiality, being is always one of being with, the constant presence
of culture.
Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le sens pratique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
(In English published as: Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. )
Ric¦ur, P. (1990). Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil. (in
English available as: Ric¦ur, P. (1992). Oneself as another. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. )
For Holzkamp's work, in English, see the description by Charles
Tolman: Tolman, C. W. (1994). Psychology, society, and subjectivity:
An introduction to German critical psychology. New York: Routledge.
or Holzkamp's own chapters:
Holzkamp, K. (1991). Societal and individual life processes. In C. W.
Tolman & W. Maiers (eds), Critical psychology: Contributions to an
historical science of the subject (pp. 50-64). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Holzkamp, K. (1991). Experience of self and scientific objectivity.
In C. W. Tolman & W. Maiers (eds), Critical psychology: Contributions
to an historical science of the subject (pp. 65-80). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Michael
------------------------------------------------------ Wolff-Michael Roth Lansdowne Professor Applied Cognitive Science MacLaurin Building A548 Tel: (250) 721-7885 University of Victoria FAX: (250) 472-4616 Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4 Email: mroth@uvic.ca http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/ ----------------------------------------------------
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