Steve,
No need, thanks.
In response to your questions:
1. Replacement of philosophy by the science of history and culture was one of Marx's key objectives!
2. As for Vygotsky: My reference to Vygotsky is from chapter 1(his method) and chapter 2 (the genetic roots of thought and speech). Meaning is the product of thought, the development of notions:(notion in the Marxian sense, which as EVI writes in (1960) Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx's Capital and in (1974) Dialectical Logic (last chapter) is considerably different from that of Hegel and his school) and spoken language is for Vygotsky the unity of thought and speech (the production of vocal noises, material objects). Ideality is unity of ideation and material objects: QED ideality is identical to any object embodying thought be it linen, linen coats, gold, coinage, or the vocal or glyptic representation of these. I am a bit over-extended at the moment so if you want more I suggest you look at Andy's dissertation on Vygotsky as dialectician, (1997) Vygotsky and the Dialectical Method. http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm .
3. There is no need to distinguish ideality from materiality when we speak of produced objects. After all, words, spoken and written, are no less produced objects than are plowshares and swords. What we need is a theory of ideality that recognizes that there are different kinds of idealities and that these can be shown to be be a part of a dialectical schema that explains their diversity and their sequential emergence one from the other as a function of and a need for the growing complexity of thought and meaning.
4. In conclusion: A collectively produced, socially meaningful object is exactly ideality at least in the sense it is used by EVI.
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Gabosch
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Sent: Friday, May 14, 2004 10:48 PM
Subject: Re: Response to Steve G on EVI and Bakhurst - The annotations
Victor,
Got installment one. Great material [ideality? :-)) ] to work with. Will comment after more installments, unless you want something before you go on.
Questions:
Regarding par 31 you comment: "Assimilation of social consciousness is then, as Vygotsky puts it, learning the production of meaningful objects: Idealities." This directly relate the relationship of the concept of ideality to the concept of meaningfulness (your end notes do this several times), a relationship I am more and more seeing as close to synonymous (keeping in mind these perhaps equivalent concepts originate in different knowledge domains). In making this transition from "ideality" to "meaning," we may be passing from philosophy to psychology and social science. My questions, what did Vygotsky have to say about meaning that relates to our discussion of ideality, and did he relate meaning and ideality directly?
A side comment: I think ideality (meaningfulness) needs to be distinguished from materiality when we speak of produced objects - we produce both the material object and its meaning (its ideality). A meaningful object has both ideality and materiality. A meaningful object is not the same as ideality and ideality is not equivalent to meaningful objects.
- Steve
At 04:23 PM 5/14/2004 +0200, you wrote:
Steve,
I'm sending you my annotations in installments. This is the first 4th of the paper and probably the most important part.
A few words on the annotations. The original annotations included precis and criticisms of each paragraph. Of these there are two sets, the first is black, the second (done later is dark red). Some of these still appear in the version I sent you, but not all. In response to your questions etc. I'm annotating the paper once again, this time in a lighter purple script. Instead of annotating each paragraph I've annotated some paragraphs that appear to me to be of critical significance while other annotations are relevant to groups of paragraphs. The annotations themselves are presented as end notes and you can identify the reference by traversing between commentary and text.
This third annotating review of EVI has enabled me to clarify further my critique of EVI (see notes on paragraphs 39 through 41 and especially the 2nd paragraph of my notes for EVI's paragraph 41).
As you should see from the annotations I am building on EVI's work rather than simply criticising it.
Looking forward to your response,
Victor
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Gabosch
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 2:17 PM
Subject: Re: Response to Steve G on EVI and Bakhurst
Hi Victor,
Your great response convinced me that I need to, for the moment, put aside Bakhurst, Jones, and many of the very excellent and important issues and points you raise, and work specifically on Ilyenkov's article on the concept of the ideal. I hope you will join me.
Two posts are on their way.
The first post has a large file attachment. I have annotated the EVI article "The Concept of the Ideal" paragraph by paragraph. Doing this has been an amazing learning experience. I think I did a pretty good job with this annotation project.
The second post is a discussion of the EVI article, including some thoughts I have on possible implications of EVI's concept of the ideal.
- Steve
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