Hi Michael, Victor, others following this discussion about ideality,
I am going to take on Michael's six questions, trying to be as succinct as
possible for readability and clarity. Often, I will rephrase a question,
which has the danger of missing the original intent. I will try hard not to.
Michael:
>Hello Steve and Victor,
>
>I have been following your very interesting discussion about Ilyenkov and
>ideality and I have a few questions that I am trying to grapple with. I
>am hoping you guys can help me gain a better understanding.
>
>1. Steve, what do you mean when you say Wartofsky's three types of
>artefacts are dialectically related? Are you saying that human go from
>recognition of one artefact to the next through the (shorthand) A, not A,
>A' process and that is what allows us to recognize all three? Does this
>mean that the third level of artefacts is in some way more advanced than
>the first and second level? If so, what determines this hierarchy?
a. Is Wartofsky's three-artifact scheme a viable, dialectical, concrete
system that dynamically represents the relations between cultural
artifacts? It might be, but I am not yet sure. I have not seen an
argument in favor of this or a critique of these categories. Wartofsky's
three kinds of artifacts - primary (artifacts used to do things - hammers),
secondary (artifacts used to represent things and processes - words,
recipes) and tertiary (artifacts that represent what is imagined - artistic
paintings) - may just be an initial step in this discovery process. The 5
kinds of cultural phenomena Carolyn Panofsky cites from Carl Ratner -
cultural activities, cultural meanings, physical artifacts, psychological
phenomena, and agency - seems to be a list derived from a different
approach. An analytical comparison of these two lists would be very
helpful here, and there are possibly other lists along these lines to also
look at. Something Victor said in one of his posts, suggesting different
types of ideality, got me thinking that a way to try to distinguish
Wartofsky's types might be to think of them in terms of three levels of
reflection - 1) a direct artifact (a hammer itself), 2) a representation of
one (a picture of a hammer) and 3) a representation of an imagined hammer
(an imaginary magical gauntlet). I know I tossed out the claim that
Wartofsky's three-artifact scheme is "dialectical," but that needs to be
more thoroughly examined. I appreciate your zeroing in on that. Reading
Ilyenkov is helping me appreciate more acutely what a dialectical analysis
and synthesis consists of. I have not yet seen it done with Wartofsky's
categories.
b. Do I mean by "dialectical" the process of recognizing similarities and
differences between things? No, as I understand it, that is not dialectics
per se, that is basic formal logic, part of what I would generalize as
mechanical logic. The classification of things according to the
similarities and differences between their characteristics - one of the
essential elements of "mechanical" logic - is an absolutely necessary
foundation for dialectical thinking, but precedes it. Dialectical thinking
is about examining how system A both self-perpetuates and self-destructs -
with the latter process of self-negation finally overcoming A - where A
eventually becomes not-A. Dialectics is about development, not just
comparison.
c. Is Wartofsky's third, "imagined" level of artifacts more "advanced"
than the first and second levels? That is an intriguing question. If the
category system of Wartofsky's is indeed dialectical - in Ilyenkov's
criteria for dialectical, truly concrete - it should reflect the actual
process of human activity, which, according to Marxist theory, begins with
social labor and tools (primary artifacts), which generate language and
social communication (representational artifacts), which makes imagination
about new tools and new symbols possible (imagined artifacts.) In turn,
the ability to imagine new artifacts makes it possible for humans to invent
new tools and processes, advancing the techniques of production and thereby
providing the basis for social progress. Interesting question!
>2. Victor, when you talk about the difference between objective ideality
>and subjective ideality are you making the distinction between attributes
>that objectively belong to the material but we understand as human beings
>(e.g., the ability of a piece of wood to float, the relationship between
>weight and gravity) and subjective qualities that we impose on objects
>through our own activities? Pepper tried to make this distinction by
>separating data from datum, I wonder if Ilyenkov (or you) are trying to do
>the same thing? But does this then mean that these two types of
>idealities have very different properties in human activity? Or are you
>trying to get to something else?
The distinction between "objective ideality" and "subjective ideality" made
here does not quite compute for me. Perhaps this distinction is not valid -
perhaps these two different formulations are both referring to the same
thing. Here is my reasoning. Attributes that objectively belong to some
material can only be understood by human beings if we actively interact
with these attributes - which can include simple observation - and then
also interact with other humans to compare experiences and
observations. In doing this, we begin to "impose" meaning on these
attributes, objects, processes, whatever it is. We pull these things into
human culture and convey meaning onto them through our activity with them
and our social interactions that result. (We ask "Did you see
that?" "Didn't you know that?" and so forth). The more we interact with
these objects, attributes, whatever, and with other humans in regard to
them, the more "meaning" these things take on. Distinguishing between an
"objective ideality" and a "subjective ideality" does not seem to be necessary.
>3. If ideality is the result of labor, then what happens to ideality once
>the purpose of the labor (assuming all labor has some purpose, meets some
>rational need) is no longer important? Does the ideality still stay with
>the material? For instance if I want to cross a river, and I band
>together wood that floats so I build a boat in order to get across and do
>so, does the ideality of the wood remain objective (i.e., wood has less
>density than water and therefore will float, and how well it floats is
>dependent on the density of the wood) or does it become subjective even
>though the purpose of the activity has been achieved (the wood should be
>used to build boats in order to cross rivers)?
Ideality is the meaning contained in anything humans produce, talk or even
think about. If something becomes completely abandoned and forgotten, it
just becomes another piece of unknown nature, decomposing as a raw material
thing into whatever the natural conditions will do to it - and only then,
when no human is any longer conscious of it and it has no other
representation in culture, does it lose its ideality. This began to happen
to a pair of pliers I had lost 10 or 12 years ago and gave up looking for -
indeed, forgot about. I found them rusting away, buried in some grass,
just a few weeks ago. All of the ideality of this artifact, although not
its original usefulness, immediately reappeared. What happens to ideality
once an artifact is no longer important? My answer is, ideality remains in
cultural artifacts as long as they are part of human cultural
consciousness, even after the particular items have disappeared. (I
remember looking all over for those damned pliers!). Does ideality stay
with the material? No, it is never really part of any material in a
material sense, although, the humanization of objects (for example, putting
a handle on something) makes it appear so. Ideality is imposed on
artifacts and nature by human social activity and relations. A handle is
not there until we recognize it, and recognizing a handle takes experience
in collective culture. Ideality - and the recognition of objects that
"contain" ideality - is a product of collective human consciousness, it is
a creation of human social relations. Other terms used to point at this
mysterious object - the collective consciousness of humans - ideality -
include the "inter-subjective", "distributed cognition" and
others. Thoughts about this have a long history. According to Ilyenkov,
it was Plato that first grasped this idea in philosophical terms
(representing antiquity). Hegel was the first to grasp it in
idealist-historical terms. Marx was the first to comprehend it in
socio-economic and historical materialist terms. Continuing this line of
thinking Ilyenkov suggests, basing himself on Marx, Vygotsky was the first
to understand this powerful entity in psychological terms. And CHAT -
cultural-historical activity theory - is trying to put all these
understandings together, and align them with modern social science.
The rest of the above question presupposes a difference between "objective
ideality" and "subjective ideality," a distinction I suspect is not valid.
>4. If subjective ideality remains (as I have defined it) exactly who or
>what controls the staying power of this ideality and for what
>purpose? Do we consider it to somehow remain with the material as a
>natural part of the material (i.e., traditional idealism - it was always
>there in the material for us to discover, and once we discover it, it is
>naturally part of the material)? Or do we say it remains in the minds of
>the aggregate population (but not everybody in the population built the
>boat or even saw the boat float - so does it remain in the minds of those
>who actually did the building, or those who suggested the building, or
>those who offered a bushel of grain in order for the boat to be built)?
The staying power of ideality is "controlled" (a teleological term -
perhaps a clearer one might be "perpetuated") - by collective human
culture, which itself is created and driven by collective human activity,
which, in turn, is essentially generated by productive labor, the
transformation of nature by humans for human consumption, distribution, and
exchange. The essential overall "purpose" (also a teleological term) of
human culture, activity, and production, whether individuals are conscious
of it or not, is the perpetuation of the human species. (And whether this
"purpose" - or perpetuation - is really being achieved, is yet another
question!). The questions: is ideality (meaning) in the material
artifacts? is it in individual minds? or is it in the aggregate population?
are good ones. I would say that ideality is in the aggregate
population. Believing ideality is really contained in a material object is
fetishism, such as believing a certain object has magical
powers. Believing it ideality is only contained in individual minds is
subjective idealism (often disguised as forms of empiricism, such as
positivism), most ably represented by Kant, and many other thinkers, such
as Mills, Spencer, and Popper. Believing it is a product of a collective
consciousness brings us to the Plato-Hegel lineage, which, as Ilyenkov
explains in his essay The Concept of the Ideal, in turn is the basis of
Marxism, which placed this thinking on a dialectical materialist
basis. And, as we know, Marxism is the basis of Vygotskyism.
The problem of what about a boat - or any cultural artifact - that only
*one* or *some* people know about - is probably the question that most
confounds our ability as individuals to grasp this enormous concept of
collective consciousness. How can something only I know about - or just
you and I know about - be part of a "collective human consciousness"? In
my opinion, this is one of the $64,000 questions cultural historical theory
is destined to try to answer. I will venture one tiny piece of the
solution. Even individuals, after being trained in a culture, and after
absorbing its habits and methods of thought internally, can continue being
cultural - on their own - for long periods. The existence and predominance
of the collective human consciousness does not at all exclude the very
apparent reality of individual and small-group consciousness. As noted, at
the individual level, this very apparent reality of individual
consciousness seems to much more real than this notion of a collective
consciousness. Making this collective process real to individuals - and to
social science in general - may be one of the great tasks of modern
psychology.
>5. If different parts of the population determines different ideal
>meanings for different objects because they are engaged in different labor
>(e.g. division of labor) whose meaning takes precedence and why?
Your questions, Michael, flow together very, very well. Thank you for this
clear thinking.
1) How do different activities, different forms of labor, different
experiences add up to collective cultures, collective consciousnesses,
collective systems of meaning - and 2) when there are differences in
cultural meanings, which ones take precedence? These are, in my opinion,
two more of the hottest and most important questions for cultural
psychology to answer today (although they are admittedly rather abstract in
the form I am presenting them). I see sociocultural theory as working hard
on these questions. Papers by Lee, Gutierrez and Panofsky focusing on
modern classrooms - to name just some that have been discussed recently on
xmca - are excellent examples of ways of addressing specific aspects of
these questions, using both empirical research and theoretical
explanation. The work of Engestrom and colleagues in Europe are exploring
these same questions in workplaces.
Two very general answers to these two very general questions.
How does collective meaning add up? All human culture, and the collective
meanings of all cultural artifacts and processes, is the product and
reflection of human activity. The meanings of all things are the
reflections of the totality of individual and collective human activities
regarding them. Underneath all culturally understood things are real
people, their real activities, and their real relations. It is ultimately
human labor and human social relations that form the basis of any human
meaning.
Which cultural meanings take precedence? Well, I am pretty well allied
with classical Marxism on this one. In class society, such as modern
capitalism, to paraphrase Marx, the ideas of the ruling classes are the
ruling ideas of the society. The Carolyn Panofsky article we are currently
reading and discussing on xmca does a brilliant job of revealing research
that shows how class relations in society - and the ruling ideas about
these class relations - are reflected and perpetuated in schooling. The
cultural meanings that take precedence - including what does the class
background of an individual student mean in regard to how they are going to
be schooled - are those cultural meanings that are in alignment with the
interests of the ruling powers. In my humble opinion, of course.
>6. How is Ilyenkov's concept of ideality different from the way mediation
>is usually defined in the field? Or is Ilyenkov attempting to offer an
>explanation for how mediation occurs? But then wasn't that explanation
>(that humans infuse objects with meaning) always part of the whole
>mediation argument?
This question might be a little like asking how is socio-economics
different from individual consumption, or how is baseball different from
Mickey Mantle's batting average. Ideality refers to something collective
society does - create meanings for things through activity. Mediation
often refers to the effects of things like tools and symbols on individual
activity. Does Vygotsky or any of his co-thinkers speak of mediation in
the context of collective consciousness, the formation of collective
culture? Or is the term usually used just on the plane of individual and
small group activity?
Honestly, I don't have a ready answer on this mediation question. Like
Victor, I am not fully comfortable with the term mediation itself because I
have seen little discussion or use of this term in the classical Marxist
literature. Victor observes that this term is not used much by Ilyenkov,
and outside of the Vygotsky school, I am not familiar with it as a
scientific term. Clearly, I need to understand how Vygotsky and others
understand and use this term better! Great question!
>I don't know how intelligible these questions are, but I am trying to put
>these ideas into a framework. Thanks for any help that can be offered.
>
>Michael
Michael - your questions were great! Thanks so much, they were great
challenges, and well-framed. (For my part, I intended to be succinct, but
didn't succeed. When I really understand this stuff, my posts will become
much shorter - I hope!)
Best,
- Steve
At 09:46 AM 5/27/2004 +0200, Victor wrote:
>Michael,
>
>My response here mixes (perhaps irretrievably so) Marx's, Engel', LSV's, EVI
>'s, and even some ideas from general systems and simulation systems with
>mine own, so it will probably more appropriate to regard them as expression
>of my understanding rather than that of any one of these theorists and
>theoretical points of view.
>1
>A Perusal of your 5 questions (the one you addressed to Steve I'll leave to
>him) reveals that they all point towards issues concerning the relation
>between the external objective ideal and that of individuals and particular
>groups within the community (of mankind, of a set of populations united by
>biological and historical continuities, or of a particular population at a
>specified historical juncture). The response to one question is then likely
>to incorporate the response or at least part of the response to other
>questions in your list.
>2
> >2. Victor, when you talk about the difference between objective ideality
>and subjective ideality are you making the distinction between attributes
>that objectively belong to the material but we understand as human beings
>(e.g., the ability of a piece of wood to float, the relationship between
>weight and gravity) and subjective qualities that we impose on objects
>through our own activities? Pepper tried to make this distinction by
>separating data from datum, I wonder if Ilyenkov (or you) are trying to do
>the same thing? But does this then mean that these two types of idealities
>have very different properties in human activity? Or are you trying to get
>to something else?
> Ideality in objectivist theory (from Plato to Ilyenkov) is a unification
>of subject and object and is as such external to the individual, while
>particular idealities (culturally endorsed knowledge, here understood as
>practice), comprise the personal knowledge of individuals. Objectivity
>refers not to the properties of material, but to the representation of
>practical activity in palpable things, thus enabling transmission of
>knowledge, new and old, between individual agents. Objectivity is roughly
>analogous to "symbolic representation" in theories of Symbolic
>Interactionism of G H Mead and Dewey.
>3
> >3. If ideality is the result of labor, then what happens to ideality once
>the purpose of the labor (assuming all labor has some purpose, meets some
>rational need) is no longer important? Does the ideality still stay with
>the material? For instance if I want to cross a river, and I band together
>wood that floats so I build a boat in order to get across and do so, does
>the ideality of the wood remain objective (i.e., wood has less
> >density than water and therefore will float, and how well it floats is
>dependent on the density of the wood) or does it become subjective even
>though the purpose of the activity has been achieved (the wood should be
>used to build boats in order to cross rivers)?
> For the individual agent a hammer being used to pound nails into wood
>is a cultural artifact that embodies the socially extant practical knowledge
>concerning the hammer as the means for pounding nails into wood. Once the
>pounding is finished the hammer becomes just another superfluous object
>cluttering up the worktable. So where did the ideality go? The practice
>embodied in the hammer is a property of the community of hammer users, much
>as any particular symbolic representation is the property of the community
>of speakers. The hammer used to pound in nails and the word incorporated
>into a sentence may be regarded as the agent's temporary appropriation of
>what is in fact a property of collective practice as his own in accordance
>with his own particular needs of the singular place and instance of his
>activity. The agent does not use hammers nor does he speak language, rather
>he, as an individual agent, uses a singular hammer to pound in a singular
>nail and uses particular words in a more or less singular sentence to
>transmit an individual message. As such the particular and singular
>features of the agent's situation in the material world necessarily
>condition his appropriation of elements of social practice. Tomasello (2000
>The Cultural Origins of HUMAN COGNITION) argues that the contrast between
>human learning and that of his immediate relatives, the great apes, is to be
>found in the humans' special capacity to imitate practice for realizing
>socially endorsed ends. Tomasello interprets great ape learning to be a
>matter of identifying the socially certified goals of practice and then
>arriving at the means through personal trial and error. I think he overshot
>the mark here. Ideality, knowledge, can never be as concrete as the
>individual situation of the individual agent, therefore any actual
>application of practice by a particular agent is never simply a matter of
>imitating social practice. While it may be that human agents can learn more
>practice than his proto-human relatives, his application of learned practice
>to experienced conditions always involves some degree of trial and error to
>"feel out" the individual circumstances of his activity.
>4
> >4. If subjective ideality remains (as I have defined it) exactly who or
>what controls the staying power of this ideality and for what purpose? Do
>we consider it to somehow remain with the material as a natural part of the
>material (i.e., traditional idealism - it was always there in the material
>for us to discover, and once we discover it, it is naturally part of the
>material)? Or do we say it remains in the minds of the aggregate population
>(but not everybody in the population built the boat or even saw the boat
>float - so does it remain in the minds of those who actually did the
>building, or those who suggested the building, or those who offered a bushel
>of grain in order for the boat to be built)?
> As I pointed out above in my answers to questions 2 and 3, ideality is
>external to the subject. Now then, if I understand question 3 correctly,
>you are essentially asking whether ideality is a product of social consensus
>or of properties inherent to material conditions. If this is the case my
>response is 'yes' to one and 'yes' to the other. Let me demonstrate this by
>example. The European saw is a "pull" saw. It is in essence a toothed
>blade, each individual tooth being ground to a sharpened edge in the
>direction of the user and then bent at a slight angle from the blade. The
>"pull" saw teeth jut out slightly from the body of the blade, each tooth in
>the opposite direction from its nearest neighbours. The "pull" saw cuts
>only when the saw is pulled through the wood, the return forward stroke
>being a non-cutting operation designed to reposition the saw for the next
>cutting stroke. The Japanese "push" saw is built somewhat differently from
>the European saw. The blade of the "push" saw bears two lines of teeth,
>each tooth ground to a sharp edge on both its sides (obviously the sides
>that are along the axis of the blade). The teeth of the push saw stand
>exactly perpendicular to the edge of the saw blade, the teeth of each row
>being aligned in an alternating fashion so that no tooth has a neighbouring
>tooth in the other row. The push saw only cuts when pushed through the
>wood, the return stroke being a non-cutting pull. The different cutting
>practices involved in the use of these two kinds of saws involve more than
>simply pushing or pulling to achieve the desired cut. For example; the pull
>saw is best used standing up, the cutting blade intersecting the wood at an
>angle to the surface of the wood, while the pull saw can be used by a
>sitting worker and the cutting blade may intersect the wood at an angle
>exactly parallel to the surface of the wooden object to be cut. Despite the
>differences in practice of the making and using push and pull saws, both
>practices involve profound knowledge of the material conditions of wood,
>metals, wood cutting and so on. On the other hand, the different practices
>embodied in the push and pull saws represent the cultural-historical
>development of different communities of practitioners of woodcutting, which
>can only be regarded as social, since any one can, with varying degrees of
>instruction and trial and error, learn the wood cutting practices of either
>or both communities.
>5
> >5. If different parts of the population determines different ideal meanings
>for different objects because they are engaged in different labor (e.g.
>division of labor) whose meaning takes precedence and why?
> Either this is a very general question, in which case I can only
>respond by suggesting that you struggle through Marx's Grundrisse and
>Capital or the somewhat more user-friendly works by Engels, like his Against
>Duhring, or it has a undetected agenda in which case I suggest that you
>struggle through Marx's Grundrisse and Capital or the somewhat more
>user-friendly works by Engels, like his Against Duhring. Here issues of
>social relations of production (Marx and Engel's works mentioned above) and
>of knowledge (Ilyenkov presents a sketchy description of the social
>relations of knowledge in his Dialectical Logic, Section 2 "Dialectics,"
>Chapter 7 The materialist critique of objective idealism) must be
>considered, and I fear that a quick and superficial explanation would not do
>justice to the seriousness of your question. Perhaps we could return to this
>issue in another discussion.
>6
> >6. How is Ilyenkov's concept of ideality different from the way mediation
>is usually defined in the field? Or is Ilyenkov attempting to offer an
>explanation for how mediation occurs? But then wasn't that explanation
>(that humans infuse objects with meaning) always part of the whole mediation
>argument?
> Ilyenkov (in translation) does not use the concept of mediation very
>much. It does not appear in his large 1960 work The Dialectics of the
>Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital, it does not appear in his essay
>(1976) The Concept of the Ideal, and it only makes a minimal appearance in
>(1974) Dialectical Logic, in the chapter on Feuerbach. Despite the
>considerable concern for mediation characteristic of CHAT discussion, it
>appears not to have been an important term for Ilyenkov. However, if by
>mediation you mean
>"Existence or definition of a thing by revealing its relation to another
>thing. The properties of things are revealed in their interconnection with
>other things. A mirror mediates the thing it is reflecting and its image.
>Mediated knowledge is knowledge, for example, related through past
>experience and reflection which enables us to recognise things in the stream
>of impressions."(from the MIA encyclopedia of Marxism
>http://www.marxists.org/glossary/frame.htm)
>then mediation appears to be the negation of Ilyenkov's discursive style.
>Usually he begins by informing us of what the subject of his focus is not,
>and then goes on to describe what it is. It can be quite irritating at
>times. In truth I find the concept itself to be an irritatingly messy and
>superfluous one. You can, for example, write that the value of a commodity
>is mediated by the quantity of other commodities that may be exchanged for
>it. But why not be precise and state simply that the exchange value of a
>commodity can be detected by the measure of other quantities that may be
>exhanged for it. I realize I haven't actually answered your question, but I
>do not think it is truly relevant to EVI's primary considerations as
>expressed in his works. Perhaps Steve will provide you a better answer.
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