Re: [xmca] motive/project

Paul, you are right, we get a continual differentiation of the unit,
and this is so in Bakhtin, too, whose analyses of the evolution of
literature are entirely consistent with the historical method Marx
proposes to us.
But how does it, the unit, come out? Any basic form, any basic is the
result of a transaction between an organism and its Umwelt, so that
'the same tree' will be different for the bug taking delight in its
juices, the bird going to the tree to capture bugs, and the human
being feeding himself capturing birds in trees.

So what the unit is, is itself a historical result that goes to
before the beginning. This is why the psycholinguist McNeill has to
backtrack, use the repetition when it is clear that it is a
repetition to look at the moment that an idea first emerges. He uses
both Vygotsky and Merleau-Ponty on this emergence, which can be
detected only after it is already apparent.

Same position on language by RIchard Rorty, in Contingency, irony,
solidarity

There is a moment of bootstrap into the system, and this problem of
the fatherless father is one that preoccupied the great philosophers
of the world, Plato to Derrida, and in recent years, Levinas and
Nancy. First philosophy, is not only their term but one that Bakhtin
himself (1993, Philosophy of the Act) uses.

Cheers,
Michael

On 19-Dec-08, at 10:06 AM, Paul Dillon wrote:

I have a problem with Andy's idea of "choosing a unit of analysis".
Doesn't the unit analysis come out of a process of movement from the
abstract to the concrete, a process that Marx first described in the
Grundrisse, "The Method of Political Economy"?

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Received on Fri Dec 19 10:22:44 2008