> Martin,
>
> I was really suprised ...
Paul,
I always enjoy being surprising! :)
But I don't fully understand your reply. I'm not trying to contrast 'story'
with 'scientific account': on the contrary, I think a story (perhaps I
should have said narrative) is the form that scientific acounts of history
take. I refered (rather vaguely, I grant you) to Hayden White's book
"Metanarrative," which is a study of the rhetoric of 19th century historical
narratives, including Marx's. Marx too constructed a narrative (told us a
story) about history. Such stories are how we explain the past. They are
told from particular a point of view (which may not in fact be the 'end' of
history!).
Did I replace 'development' with 'progress'? Mike's message, to which I was
responding, had 'progress,´at least in the portion I cited (which is copied
below). And surely one can tell a story, or give a account, about an embryo
which is a story of development - or of progress? (And surely we need to
judge what its telos is?)
But my point was that the value judgements involved in calling history a
matter of 'progress' or 'development' are made by particular people in
particular circumstances. What seems like progress to me may seen very
different to you. And development too, surely. Both Marx and Vygotsky seem
to me appropriately nuanced in their evaluations of cultures past and
present. And I think you highlight this too.
But I'm uncomfortable talking, as you do, about "the structure of history."
Actually I think stories can and *do* "develop a concept of the structure of
history," as you put it. My point was that this structure is in the story,
not in the actual events. To propose that history is (even if only in part)
a matter of "regular processes of increasing social differentiation" is to
focus highly selectively on the complexity of what has happened in human
history. It is a highly abstract retelling of the quotidian events of human
life. Each day on this planet 6.7 billion people go about their daily labors
and half a million babies are born. Any account of a "structure" in all this
will either be fantastically complex or, more usefully, extremely selective.
History may not quite be just one damn thing after another, but it a
manifold and multiple process which we are trying to grasp from within. None
of us has the complete view, or the detached objectivity to describe it
impartially. And nor should we: histories (hi-stories) are told (scientific
accounts too) from within history to change its direction. I'm not sure
Vygotsky would agree with me on all this, but remember his view, which I
mentioned in my paper, that conceptual frameworks in psychology need to be
judged in terms of whether they foster or stifle human freedom. We should do
the same, I suggest, with our accounts of history. An account of "the
structure" doesn't seem to me to do much fostering. It's true V himself
wrote of history's objective tendencies, but he did so in order to insist
that we grasp these tendencies and rewrite our history, both personally and
collectively.
Martin
On 3/3/08 3:04 PM, "Paul Dillon" <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Martin,
>
>
> I was really suprised to read that you take the position that "progress is
> not something that "history posseses in itself. Progress is a story that we
> tell about history." Surprised for several reasons.
>
> First is the substitution of the word "progress" for "development." The
> two terms really have diffferent meanings. The development of an embryo, for
> example, wouldn't really be considered progress. An embryo's development is
> the unfolding of its own potential, its telos. Also "progress" is clearly
> something of an ideological term with its own "history", to which you allude
> when mentioning the "survivors". And I agree that the idea of progress
> shouldn't be applied to historical processes in any moral or ethical sense.
> But the Europocentric model of unilineal social evolution that contains this
> position (ie, as found in "German Ideology" and elsewhere) became problematic
> for Marx himself and he spent the last part of his life studying the available
> information on non-European societies. Why hadn't these societies (e.g.,
> pre-Conquest empires such as the Inca in the Andes, South East-Asia, China,
> etc.) produce similar transitions as occurred in Europe - especially
> the movement from feudal to capitalist?
>
> In which discourse or set of related stories does capitalism represent
> "progress" over feudalism, or feudalism over slavery? Was capitalism
> historically inevitabole? That's not clear to me and I'm not sure whether
> Marx, in 1870, thought so either. American precious metals flowiing into
> Euope from the 16th century onward enabled the proliferation of money in a way
> unknown in other parts of the world and perhaps this (in combination with the
> institution of private property of land, triggered the transition to
> capitalism in Europe, a mode of production characterized by its dynamic
> process of expansion (result of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall?)
> that is often mistakenly called "progress" with non-ecoonomic connotations.
> But what can't be denied is that capitalism has come to dominate all other
> modes of production and it has generated social subjects that aim to transform
> it into a socialism; but it has never generated social subject that aim to
> transform
> it back into feudalism except maybe the Society for Creative Anachronism
>
> Second, it seems that your claim implies that their is no "story" that can
> develop a concept of the structure of history (I totally agree "progress" is
> not such a concept or even part of suh a concept. . This post-modern
> position seems somewhat at odds with my understanding of your paper. I
> imagine this is what you are developing in the second part.
>
> Third, when discussing different stages or epochs of human history, Marx
> distinguished "development" from "maturation" in "The Introduction to the
> Critique of Political Economy" contains such a clarification. In one passage
> , referring to the Inca Emprire, he clearly indicates that societies can
> achieve very high levels of development without transitioning to capitalism in
> the absence the generalized use of money to mediate exchanges. The
> generalization of commodity relations.
>
> I can't agree that "history" is simply a story that some social subject
> tells although it is the word that encompasses a the Aristotelian conception
> of time as applied to social existence; nevertheless there is simply too much
> archaelogical and other textual evidence drawn from societies thoughout the
> world at different times, that reveal the existence regular processes of
> increasing social differentiation to reduce those processes to "stories" that
> have no scientific conceptual content.
>
> Paul
>
>
>
> Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
> On 3/1/08 2:37 PM, "Mike Cole" wrote:
>
>> If there
>> is cultural evolution, or progress in history, how does one adopt a cultural
>> historical, activity perspective that declares thinking to be functional
>> systems that include the accumulated
>> artifacts of the community without concluding that thinking in, say, a small
>> agricultural village high in the Andes just to pick up on Paul's current
>> environment, is less complex because
>> the range of activities seems limited, the mediational means limited,
>> etc.?
>
> I think this is a central conundrum, and I'm trying to sort out my thoughts.
>
> First, I keep having to remind myself that progress is not a characteristic
> that history possesses in itself. Progress is a story we tell about history.
> At best, it's told by the survivors. At worst, by the victors. There's a
> wonderful, horrifying book that offers a people's history, documenting the
> 'rise' of American civilization on the backs of the indigenous and the
> poor... (I've lost the title.)
>
> Second, I think Marx's own account of history was complex and probably
> contradictory. (I need to check Hayden White's Metahisory for his reading of
> Marx's narratives.) For example, capitalism develops workers' capacities,
> albieit in a lop-sided manner, while it exploits them. Capitalism leads to
> socialism, indeed it's a necessary step. but in large part this is because
> it generates the greatest misery for masses of people, who finally can take
> no more. No simple progress here.
>
> Third, it's interesting to compare the chapters in Ape, Primitive, Child
> written by Vygotsy with those written by Luria. The former seem to me more
> nuanced. Vygotsky writes very evocatively and sensitively about the
> psychology of 'primitive' peoples. The richness of their vocabulary, for
> example, is lost when their language becomes more abstract.
>
> And according to the notes I was taking when reading this book, "Even in
> Luriašs writing about his expedition [to Uzbekistan] two voices can be
> discerned, two distinct and competing conceptualizations of the changes he
> observed. Let us begin there." My notes, sadly, stop there! And the book is
> not here.
>
> Third, when there are qualitative reognizations, judgments of progress are
> no easy matter. Kuhn taught us that paradigms are 'incommensurate': there is
> no common measure to judge them by, because each of the criteria is internal
> to a paradigm.
>
> I guess that just as physicists have become accustomed to the need to make
> assessments such as 'faster' or 'slower' always relative to a frame of
> reference, we have to do the same. History may have been progress judged
> from the frame of some anglo-saxon white males, but... and the cognition of
> a mountain villager may be assessed as embodying important forms of wisdom
> from the perspective of people searching for a way to stop damaging the
> planet.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Thu Mar 6 17:29 PST 2008
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