Re: [xmca] motive/project

I completely agree, paul, that the historical questions cannot resolve the
contemporary central problem, not even for Russians!

Too bad Yrjo is too busy to enter into the discussion. Perhaps we need to
get a pdf of one of his current articles where he talks about runaway
objects,
or hives off manages from workers in an activity system (following Blackler,
whose work I have read insufficiently), to see if he offers good solutions
to the
contemporary central problem. Articles critiquing Yro from the left as a
mere
reformer would also sharpen the discussion. But their authors are too busy
too!

And so it goes,
complexively thinking in so cal where we are lucky to have gotten some rain
while the sky is falling in.

mike

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com>wrote:

> mike,
>
> I don't think the historical questions about the Russian revolution and
> fates of the individual forerunners of CHAT and their work after Stalin took
> control and Trotsky went into exile can help us deal with the central
> problem that you mention: 'The answer with respect to contemporary
> capitalism then becomes the focal topic,"
>
> But I think that Engestrom provided a framework for pursuing that answer:
> ie, studying the manifestations of the primary contradiction between use
> value and exchange value. Peter has published a lot on this: e.g.,
> secretaries playing solitaire on the computers as an example to their own
> struggle to reappropriate the use value of their time. The problem, to my
> mind, isn't the absence of appropriate theoretical tools in CHAT itself, but
> the absence (with a few exceptions, Helena and Peter stand out, who have
> pursued research into these domains. Engestrom "runaway objects" and the
> dynamics of use value/exchange value in the contemporary globalized economy
> also deserve attention since, just as the bourgeoisie in the 16th-18th
> centuries emerged in the interstices of the feudal society with its
> lord-peasant primary contradiction, it would seem that a new class is
> emerging in the interstices of the capitalist contradictions in the dominant
> society. The resolution of contradictions sublates the contradiction itself
> in a new conceptual order, not the triumph of one of the sides of the
> previous order.
>
> But there are conceptual tools in CHAT for addressing these problems and
> I"m not sure that finding "new models" should replace an incomplete
> exploration of the existing model.
>
> Paul
>
>
> --- On *Sat, 12/20/08, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
>
> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] motive/project
> To: phd_crit_think@yahoo.com, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Saturday, December 20, 2008, 3:42 PM
>
>
> Paul-- I think this is what Martin was suggesting re activity and unit of
> analysis:
> 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.
>
> LSV in T&S was seeking to understand the development of higher
> psychological processes and proposed word meaning as such a unit. I think he
> also thought of it as a germ cell, the development of which he seeks to
> trace in, for example, the blocks experiment that Paula introduced into the
> discussion and which some of us have been fussing over.
>
> And, yes, I think that Peter and Anna were focused primarily on the goal
> of consistently exploring how particular social structures, with their power
> constellations and systems of privilege shape development has not typically
> been pursued within CHAT".
>
> The answer with respect to the USSR is presumably Stalinist hijacking of
> the revolution (or the general wrong headedness of Marx, depending upon
> one's
> views of that history). The answer with respect to contemporary capitalism
> then becomes the focal topic, although discussion of the paper, including my
> own contributions to it, may obscure that aim (probably a symptom of the
> problem, maybe even a clue to the answer?)
> mike.
>
>
>
> And yes,
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com>wrote:
>
>> Andy, Martin, everyone,
>>
>> 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"?
>>
>> I haven't read all of Vygotsky, really glad to have gotten mike and
>> david's freebies, but as I understand what I have read, didn't he adopt a
>> similar procedure when coming up with "word-meaning" as a unit of analysis?
>>
>> I continue to mull over this question of linking the smaller systems of
>> social interaction that are the "pan de todos los dias" (can't think of a
>> good translation) of CHAT to the larger macro-structures towards which
>> Sociology orients itself: class. strata, ideology, forms of authority,
>> legitimacy, social structure in general, etc.. Wouldn't these "notions" be
>> comparable to the abstractions with which we begin the journey, they are
>> totally abstract. Marx wrote:
>>
>> When we consider a given country politico-economically, we begin
>> with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the
>> coast,
>> the different branches of production, export and import, annual production
>> and
>> consumption, commodity prices etc.
>>
>> It seems to be correct to
>> begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to
>> begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and
>> the
>> subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer
>> examination
>> this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for
>> example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an
>> empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest.
>> E.g.
>> wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange,
>> division
>> of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage
>> labour,
>> without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the
>> population,
>> this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I
>> would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards
>> ever
>> more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards
>> ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest
>> determinations.
>>
>> I don't clearly understand Andy's idea of substituting the notion of
>> "project" for activity system as a way to go beyond the meso- and micro-
>> levels of analysis. But perhaps I've begun to grasp why Peter and Ana could
>> place Schutz at the most central point of contact between theories
>> concerning the manifestation of sociological macro-structures in individual
>> "conduct" and theories concerning the intermediate formations on which CHAT
>> normally focuses.
>>
>> Are we just trying to hook up theories or are we trying to overcome the
>> problem that Peter and Ana indicated in their article: " . . . the goal of
>> consistently exploring how particular social structures, with their power
>> constellations and systems of privilege shape development has not typically
>> been pursued within CHAT". If that type of exploration is the goal
>> shouldn't we focus on the dimensions of power, privilege, etc. in activity
>> systems, recognizing that these are abstractions which will give way to ever
>> finer ones, until we get down to that simplest determination which would
>> define the correct unit of analysis?
>>
>> Hmm. . . still muddling along.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --- On Fri, 12/19/08, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org>
>> wrote:
>> From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] motive/project
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Friday, December 19, 2008, 9:07
>> AM
>>
>> I certainly have had extended thinking time on this topic lately because I
>> do believe it gets to the heart of the issue at hand. Consider the
>> following sentence:
>>
>> "Appropriate an engaged activity." No motive, no desire just a
>> process.
>>
>> It may not fulfill the requested hermeneutic unit of anlaysis but it
>> certainly makes a statement about what does go on in human development in
>> the cultural/societal domain. just a thought
>>
>> eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Martin Packer
>>
>> <packer@duq.edu> To: "eXtended
>> Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Sent by: cc:
>>
>>
>> xmca-bounces@web Subject: Re: [xmca]
>> motive/project
>> er.ucsd.edu
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 12/19/2008 09:47
>>
>> AM
>>
>> Please respond
>>
>>
>> to "eXtended
>>
>> Mind, Culture,
>>
>> Activity"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Andy,
>>
>> I'm struggling to catch up with piles of xmca messages after a week away
>> from the computer, but your comment here caught my attention. Perhaps you
>> would agree with me that the selection of the commodity form as the unit
>> of
>> analysis was based on the presumption that it contains the key
>> contradiction
>> of a capitalist economy. This suggests to me that the identification of a
>> unit has to be based on a consideration of the whole in which it is found.
>> And this in turn suggests that there can be no unit of analysis for
>> 'activity' in the abstract, but rather a variety of units each of which
>> depends on the concrete whole which one is studying. As you suggest,
>> 'wooing' is an activity that is possible only in the 'world' -
>> the form of
>> life - of romance. So, when we select a unit we will need to acknowledge
>> both the spatial and temporal discontinuities among distinct forms of
>> life.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> On 12/18/08 9:34 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>>
>> > f I sing to my beloved while standing outside
>> > in the rain, in what sense am I "using" something? There is
>> > a school of thinking that would say, it makes me
>> feel nice
>> > to be wooing my beloved, therefore I am using her to make me
>> > feel nice. But all that is really bankrupt, isn't it? We
>> > have to get into the idea of romance and find in the
>> > figuring of the world according to a concept of romance, a
>> > set of motives, which motivate the series of related
>> > practices which make up the universe of romantic activity.
>> > "Use" applies OK only to a resicted sense of motivation.
>> >
>> > Andy
>>
>>
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Received on Sat Dec 20 17:26:40 2008