Re: [xmca] Helena on Negotiating Knowledge

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Is it just me or has anybody else noticed that threads, rather like the interfunctional relationships and the lines of development that LSV writes of in Thinking and Speech, never seem to develop along parallel lines? 
 
It always seems to me that they are diverging and converging, criss-crossing and merging, transforming and reorganizing each other and then parting like ships in the night or strangers on a subway car whose eyes meet, furtively, just before one gets off and is never seen again.
 
OK, so it's just me. I had just been thinking about the problem of whether Mescheryakov's "genetic laws" are misapplied when it comes to phylogenesis on the one hand and  microgenesis on the other. It seems to me that ontogenesis is really quite different, not least because in the final analysis the unit of analysis is individual consciousness. And then I started thinking about Helena's paper again.
 
Helena uses Leontiev and Zaporozhets on "Rehabilitation of the Hand Function". Of course, when you are undergong physiotherapy because you've had a couple fingers shot off or lost a piece of your wrist to shrapnel, the question of other-motivation versus self-motivation (physiotherapy vs. carpentry) can be usefully seen as two overlapping activity systems.
 
Like the pseudoconcept and the concept, physiotherapy and carpentry are externally indistinguishable, and even functionally the same, but they are internally and genetically distinguishable and have different destinies. Now, my question is really whether this model, which is really an intra-individual one concerned with ontogenetic change, is really apposite to Helena's situation, which is inter-individual, and even inter-class.
 
People often portray Bronfenbrenner's metasystem of microsystem-mesosystem-exosystem-macrosystem as a set of Russian dolls (and I think maybe he may have spoken that way himself at one time). But in "Ecology of Human Development" he repeatedly makes the point that the most important "situations of development" affecting the child's future often do NOT include the child at all. 
 
For example, the parental work situation has not really been accessible  to the child since the industrial revolution, while in hunter-gatherer societies there was very little differentiation between the parental work situation and the child's educational mesosystem at all.
 
We may IDEALIZE the child's metasystem as a set of concentric circles with the child at the centre. And Bronfenbrenner himself seems to think that would be a good way to organize it (hence his call for ongoing irrational involvement of at least one caregiver, viz. "somebody's gotta be crazy about that kid"). But even the mesosystem does NOT usually have the child at the centre, and the child is all but absent at the level of the exosystem (hence the name) and the macrosystem.
 
Isn't this a BETTER way to think about what Helena is talking about? It's not a matter of conflicting intra-individual motivations, producing goods and services vs. earning a living. It's a matter of opposed inter-individual motivations: realizing surplus value vs. reproducing labour power. The worker is simply NOT present in the macrosystem (the economy) and the exosystem (the market), and now unrepresented in the exosystem (the firm).
 
Unfortunately, if we think about it that way we will miss Helena's beautiful ending, which still rings like a trumpet in my ear!
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
 


      
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca