Re: [xmca] Dialogue on Concepts Part 1 Released!

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Larry:
 
I'm always astonished at your erudition, and I'm afraid I've long since stopped trying to keep up. But like you I find that para, and indeed the whole page, either incoherent (the use of "reflection" to mean completely different things) or completely incomprehensible: 
 
a) Kohler proved (if it needed proving) that higher apes are quite capable of taking actions that appear counterproductive in the short term so long as they are productive in the long term (e.g. pushing away a fruit so that they can take a back way and reach it from another part of the cage). So what Leontiev says about the beater driving animals away from himself instead of towards himself is in no way specifically human. Certainly the "societal consciousness" supposedly necessary for a successful hunting operation is in no clear way different from the kind of "social consciousness" one sees in animals that hunt in packs. 
 
b) The idea of an abstract individual which Tolman attributes to bourgeois individualism is much older than capitalism and forms the basis of many if not most religious scriptures. It's hard to see in what way it is more of a figment of the imagination than the idea that the division of labor is based on roles that are abstractly negotiable and reversible. Isn't the obvious model the idea of interchangeable parts, not reversible roles? (Not only are these not the same thing, they are important ways antithetical; try reversing the roles of interchangeable parts such as a crankshaft and a cylinder in an automobile engine.)
 
c) If we want a REAL, CONCRETE example of negotiable roles which are NECESSARILY and INCESSANTLY reversible, then we need look no further than speaking and listening roles in human discourse. And that in itself suggests that there is something qualitatively different about the way in which language, as opposed to commerce, realizes human relationships. In addition, there is the curious fact that people cannot, in any important sense, maintain a conversation without conscousness and will.
 
d) I still find it absolutely incredible that the underlying principle of hunting game and that of modern capitalist production is the same, and has merely been "complicated" by education and training. 
 
Education turns out to be the main discriminating factor in the tremendous polarization of incomes that the USA has undergone since 1979. Race, gender, and even taxation policy have been more or less the same, having reached the very nadir of inequity and inequality long ago. 
 
What has really changed is that the relations of production have been revolutionized, and the demand for trained and educated personnel has allowed them (though not, alas, their teachers) to demand enormous premiums. Non-interchangeable roles, as it were, command a much bigger chunk of change. 
 
This polarization has transformed the United States into a society which recognizeably has more in common with places like Argentina, Brazil, and China than places like France, Finland, or even South Korea. This qualitative change has happened in my own lifetime, my own recent memory, and I am, by phylogenetic standards anyway, vanishingly young. 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 

--- On Wed, 9/8/10, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Dialogue on Concepts Part 1 Released!
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, September 8, 2010, 8:16 AM


David, your answers are always thought provoking. This last thread I've
printed to refer to and REFLECT further on  However, it led me to reread the
Tolman article and I'm not sure what to think about one paragraph on p.73

"The emergence of ACTION as a COORDINATED part of social activity performed
by an individual MUST BE accompanied by a shared meaning of the action that
is reflected CONSCIOUSLY by the actor. This is reflected in the fact (among
others) that the roles of beater and bagger in the hunt are in principle
interchangeable.  The role of each participant must be DECIDED
BEFOREHAND....the assignment of roles may come to APPEAR fixed, but this
does not affect the underlying interchangeability.....Thus the NECESSARY
CONSCIOUS division of labor in human society is the most obvious indicator
of the individual human's "societal" nature.

My question is focused on the emphasis on the NECESSARY CONSCIOUS roles that
must be CONSCIOUSLY DECIDED beforehand. Yesterday, I posted a thread on
Farber's notion of two realms of the will [volition].  Is it possible to
also posit two realms of action and two realms of activity systems.  The
second realm is NECESSARILY CONSCIOUS [by definition] The first realm is
volitional but NOT CONSCIOUSLY volitional. [Both realms ARE VOLITIONAL but
the first realm has "direction" [as understood by Farber] and experienced as
open and freedom [purpose must be INFERRED retroactively] whereas the second
realm of action and activity SYSTEMS emphasizes conscious intent and
particular objects which are experienced as NECESSARILY CONSCIOUS and
PURPOSEFUL.

Just thinking out loud and I may be way off base with my reflections.

Larry

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 12:03 AM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Mike:
>
> You are right to imply that I was using the Tolman article as a springboard
> for diving into my own concerns. But I had reasons. (For example, Tolman
> restricts his remarks to "adult" activity, to which child activity is merely
> foreplay. I beg to differ.)
>
> Tolman summarizes the Activity Theory position extremely well and
> counterposes it excellently to the "contextualist" point of view point by
> point:
>
> a) The rejection of "variables" in a mathematically functionalist sense.
> (But of course Leontiev does accept the use of variables in a
> psychologically functionalist sense, and "motive", "goal" etc. are nothing
> if not variables.)
>
> b) The idea of appropriation as an internal link between the individual and
> society rather than an external clamp that joins the two (but of course
> "appropriation" without "interiorization", without semiosis, has the same
> problem).
>
> c) The "societal" nature of of human ontogeny; that is, its link to a
> division of labor. (But of course there is a division of labor in animals,
> and in many important ways Leontiev's beaters are much closer to a pack
> of hyenas trying to corner a stray gazelle that a lion has overlooked than
> they are to, for example, a group of xmca-nauts seeking a way of applying
> CHAT to teacher training).
>
> I am quite ready to accept that the approaches are fundamentally different
> and that the difference lies in the very philosophical soil in which each
> approach takes root. (I am not really sure, though, that the rich black
> subsoil of Activity Theory is German, though!)
>
> The problem is that just as the contextualist view seems to distinguish
> itself insufficiently from organicist and even mechanist views, the Activity
> Theory position seems to me to distinguish itself insufficiently from the
> contextualist one.
>
> The Activity Theory position does, however, succeed in distinguishing
> itself from Vygotsky's own view, which I take to be that what is peculiarly
> human about human consciousness is not social organization or even societal
> organization but the way in both of these are realized in SEMIOTIC
> organization.
>
> Semiosis is really the form that societal relations take in psychological
> relations; the mind is, in that sense, a text (think of how memory works).
> In a completely non-metaphorical sense, the mind is a producer of text,
> which is another way of saying that it is a discourse.
>
> Teaching discourse strikes me as being a peculiarly human form of social
> relations; every bit as distant from Leontiev's hunt example as the hunt
> example is from the catfish going around a barrier to retrieve a piece of
> meat.
>
> The distinctive thing about the sign use is not that people are producing
> and exchanging information as they once did goods and services. Nothing new
> here, as Tolman says on p. 73. What is really new is that consciousnesses
> are sharing something; that consciousness is returning to its ontogenetic
> societal origin with microgenetic deliberateness and awareness and freedom.
>
> That's on the societal level. But psychologically, we see this return in
> every self-directed speech. (It is nontrivial and noncoincidental that
> Luria, but not Leontiev, embraced the importance of self-directed speech in
> his subsequent research.)
>
> --- On Sun, 9/5/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 'Distance is an ineluctable part of the process of cultural mediation in so
> far as mediators and the people engaging them are imperfectly aligned; just
> this difference, this “degree of separation of the natural/phylogenetic and
> the cultural/historical” is dependent upon the power of the mediator."  In
> the case of conceptual mediators, the same should apply. This is what I see
> significant about David’s example below.'
>
> Here's another (I hope significant) example. The following fond father and
> his third grade son are looking at a picture book which shows Baloo bending
> a tree so that Mowgli can reach a banana (it is a still from the Walt Disney
> animation directly preceding the wildly popular but highly opaque song "Bare
> Necessities").
>
> Which of the following cultural mediators (I will continue to flummox you
> by calling them "initiates") is MORE perfectly aligned with the response?
>
> Parent: Who likes bananas?
> Child (understanding the word "bananas" and possibly also the word "like"
> and trying to decide how Mowgli's problem can be solved): Tall?
> Parent: Tall? (trying something else) What does Mowgli like?
> Child: Banana.
>
> Obviously, the gap between "Who likes bananas?" and the child's
> understanding is not nearly as narrow as the gap between "What does Mowgli
> like?" and "Banana". Until we get this close, we cannot really say that
> there is any social communication going on at all; there is neither primary
> nor secondary intersubjectivity, there is ZERO intersubjectivity, as here.
>
> Parent: Tell me about Mowgli.
>
> We can see that there is NO overlap between question and answer here. The
> gap between the mediator and the linguistic task is simply too big. The
> parent reduces it by switching to Korean.
>
> Parent: Mowgli daehaeseo mal hae bwa! (Tell me about Mowgli!)
>
> Child: I'm hungry.
> Parent (trying to turn the primary intersubjectivity into secondary
> intersubjectivity): He is hungry. and he is (trying to get back to the
> original question) .... He wants...? He likes.....?
> Child (also trying something new): The banana?
>
> A miracle! The child uses (incorrectly) an English article. But how did
> this miracle happen? I think somehow it must have something to do with one
> of three processes of objectification:
>
> a) repetition
> b) the successful completion of the exchange on "What does Mowgli like?"
> c) the switch from "I'm hungry" to "He is hungry and he wants...likes..."
>
> Now, ALL of these seem to me to create DISTANCE. But the distance that is
> being created is between the child and his past and future utterances. The
> distance created is between the child and his own speech. Wordsworth says
> poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility; had he recollected a little
> more he might have seen that this is true of all self-directed speech in one
> form or another.
>
> And that's more or less what Mike says about Minkyeong's work!
>
> "Here I would make another point. Each of the three 'levels' of response
> are characterized by conceptual mediation of more complex and more
> self-thoughtful content. I take it that David’s evidence indicates that
>  this complexity can be more or less scaled using Vygotskian categories of
> levels of concept formation. But he wrties that the “idea of direct demand
> correlates poorly with level of abstraction.”
>
> Of course! Learning correlates very poorly to direct instruction, and for
> good reason. It seems to me that a) above has to do with being more
> self-thoughtful, and b) and c) are related to complexification. But none of
> these three are particularly characteristic of the well-beaten "beaters"
> example.
>
> Tolman says on p. 73, that "although the situation is (made) immensely more
> complicated in our own society (compared to that of Leontiev's hunting
> beaters) by the dependence of essential actions on training and education,
> the underlying principle remains the same."
>
> Really? Kind of incredible, when you think about it. Maybe quite literally
> unbelievable. If not, such stagnation, such fossilization, such radical
> conservatism really needs to be explained. Why and how did man stop all
> qualitative self-transformation with the invention of the division of labor?
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
> PS: I think that Leontiev actually elaborated his "beaters" example from a
> singularly unconvincing (and unprepossessing) account of the origins of
> language which holds that the original form of human language was not the
> indicative but rather the imperative.
>
>  This is p. 188 of Janet, P. (1929) L’évolution psychologique de la
> personalité. Editions A. Chahine: Paris.
>
>
> “Quand il pousse ce cri du début, analogue a` l’aboiement du chien qui se
> lance sur une proie, l’homme qui ordonne fait quelque chose de bizarre, il
> arrête l’action. Tandis que le chien continue a` courir après avoir donné le
> signal du début, le véritable chef done le signal, le cri du commencement,
> mais ne va pas plu loin. En un mot, le chef ne fait que le première partie
> de l’acte, et ce sont les sujets qui font la continuation et la sonsommation
> de l’action. Le chef n’a pas d’autre occupation que de surveiller
> l’exécution de l’acte, d’insister en répétant l’ordre du début, mais il ne
> doit pas lui-même fair l’action complète, la fair a` la place du sujet. Ce
> qui caractérise un ordre, c’est que l’acte est subdivisé entre plusieures
> individus sociaux, chacun de ces individus ne faisant qu’une partie de
> l’acte. Ce caractère se retrouve a` mon avis dans toutes les actions
> socials. Toutes les actions
>  socials, quelles qu’elles soient, depuis les plus simples jusqu’aux plus
> compliquées, consistent dans une collaborations, dans une division des
> actes, de manie1re qu’un individu fasse une première partie de l’action et
> que l’autre individu fasse la seconde partie. Il y a collaboration dans
> toutes les actions sociales." 189.
>
> And so we have a whole theory of the genesis of language as activity--and a
> VERY monologic, and even dictatorial, theory it is, too!
>
> dk
>
>
>
>
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