Re: [xmca] Radius of Subjectivity

David,
   
  If I understand the sense of your post within the current thread, I'm really glad that you have raised this question about the historical unfolding of radii of subjectivity at the collective and historical level.. But I think Volosinov's assertions about some imagined "prehistoric herdsman" shouldn't be taken very literally.
   
    Anthropological studies show that humans in all manner of pre-capitalist systems have a very precise knowledge of their natural environment, know the names of all the plants around them, are familiar with the night sky and its movements, and spend a lot of time speculating about genealogical relations between themselves and the other living beings as well as developing theories about other direct and practical concerns. This potato head image really doesn't square with ethnographic reality but I don't get the feeling Volosinov read much ethnography.
   
  And how should we understand this state of being "interested in a manner of things"? ne emotional/experiential/existential opposite of being "interested" is being "bored. In my own experience among Andean peasants and herdsman (alpaca and llama) I've never run into anyone who claimed to be bored. Boredom is an interesting phenomena (Heidegger wrote a whole book about it). It's somewhat of the opposite experience to what Volosinov seems to be talking about when he says "interested in". But our ancestors must have been curious and exploratory. In his wonderful book "Stone Age Economics", Marshall Sahlins declared that the late Neolithic was the Golden Age of our species, Levi-Strauss marvelled at the Neolithic revolution in "The Savage Mind", when all of the basic discoveries that later lead to "civilization" were created, and if you search the archives of xmca back when it had another name (xlhc??), you'll find some amazing posts by Arne Raithel about the
 transformations of human society during this period including what we now know as language. So on that level Volosinov is just plain off the mark.
   
  And the passage is certainly dense but I think it squares well with the fundamental ideas of historical materialism..:
   
  "Society in process of generation expands its perception of the generative process of existence. There is nothing in this that could be oaid to be absolutely fixed. And that is how it happens that meaning—an abstract, self-identical element—is subsumed under theme and torn apart by theme’s living contradictions so as to return in the shape of a new meaning with a fixity and self-identity only for the while, just as it had before. "
   
    Is this a problem of the translation? I'm wondering if one could equate Volosinov's "theme" with Bourdieu's "field". This helps me make sense of the passage . The themes are directly related to human practices involved in what Volosinov calls "generation". But it seems that "generation" = "reproduction". That would also make sense since "reproduction" is a key Marxist concept - e.g., unlike other animals humans create the conditions for their own reproduction through the labor process, e.g., use of tools.

   
  Volosinov seems to be saying that the idea of an absolute TRUTH, "an abstract, self-identical element", can't emerge under the conditions in which the communicative processes -- the necessary medium for such "an abstract, self-identical element" -- are continually cycled back into practice (the theme) and have no possibility of transcending the practice, as a consequence of their subsumption to it since the practices tied to the cycles of reproduction of human existence, continually positing themselves as the other, the "identity" outside of the medium of representation. The only possibility for the posititng of this abstract self-identity requires that the medium be separated from the practices in which it emerged and to which it was bound, and that it be reflected back on itself. To me this sounds like nothing more nor less than the division of mental and physical labor that occurred in the early states along with class stratification and the idea of HISTORY.
   
  So to me this idea, if I have interpreted it correctly, seems to be consistent with Marx's position that the division of mental and physical labor began the historical process that has brought us to where we are today, at the end, of the capitalist era. (the end either through a transition to socialism or through its own self-destruction)
   
  Oh, by the way David., my Klingong friends are feeling very misunderstood, I mean Barba Crusher really is rather tepid compared to those toothy, lusty Klingon wenches. They really have a highly developed cuture!!
   
  Paul
    

  Here's a good quote from Volosinov I'm still trying to make sense of.

"The prehistoric herdsman was virtually interested in nothing, and virtually nothing had any bearing on him. Man at the end of the epoch of capitalism is directly concerned about everything, his interests reaching the remotest corenrs of thearth and even the most distant starts. (...) Society in process of generation expands its perception of the generative process of existence. There is nothing in this that could be oaid to be absolutely fixed. And that is how it happens that meaning—an abstract, self-identical element—is subsumed under theme and torn apart by theme’s living contradictions so as to return in the shape of a new meaning with a fixity and self-identity only for the while, just as it had before. (Marxism and the philosophy of language, p. 106).”

One of the really interesting and as yet undiscussed issues that came up in the San Diego-Helsinki discussion was the link (or lack thereof) between economic development and ontogenetic development.

As Mike points out, this is a dangerous one; it cost Vygotsky and Luria very dearly. Mike himself has reconceptualized it as a much looser link between species development and child development; that is, comparing the way in which ape developed into man and the way children develop into adults.

This is a bigger leap (by far) but it is in some ways less dangerous, both because it overleaps the old 19th century dictum that the "primitive" is the fore-runner of modern society as the child is the father of the man and because it doesn't involve the confusion between social and economic development (by no means synonymous!) that the former comparison implies.

It's actually quite easy to find places like Cuba or Kerala in India where the Communists have been in power for a long time and there are highly developed medical and educational systems but very poor economic infrastructure. Needless to say, the reverse is even easier to find. We have met the Klingons, and they are us.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

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Received on Tue Nov 13 21:08 PST 2007