Re: [xmca] Subject: Verb, Object

I follow you right up to the last paragraph in this note, Andy, where you
write:

I want to go back to Hegel methodologically and work on the claim that an
*immanent* critique of the categories of activity is the only viable
approach. Otherwise, we are just pulling pre-determined categories out of
our own heads. The latter is the usual approach in my view.

Probably this means that I need to go back and read your article more
carefully.
What is an *immanent" critique?

mike

On Dec 27, 2007 2:35 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> Re Leontyev's concept of "activity'. I wanted to leave this to a kind of
> "stage two" but since I want to use a category of activity too I have to
> get to it.
>
> So far as I can see, for ANL, "activity" is paradigmatically but not
> exclusively the "external" activity, of an individual organism. So it is
> the same category of "activity" as Fichte used in his critique of Kant,
> which Hegel picks up on. And for ANL it is "instrumental" to use Mike's
> word (instrumental allows the object to be another subject, treated as an
> object though), or "purposive", though I think inclusive of unintended or
> non-conscious components of the actions. So it must be very similar to the
> category of "practice" insofar as theory and practice are differentiated.
>
> The problem comes for me when you have to get "stuck into" this category
> and work out the appropriate way of elaborating the various *forms* of
> activity. With some good reason, ANL I think moves to a Marxist paradigm
> of
> "mode of production", practice-as-labour, in order to mobilise a series of
> categories through which activity can be grasped. This leads to the
> problem
> that David identified, namely, that the dichotomy between labour and
> communication is a false one. In fact this dichotomy has caused havoc in
> the whole stream of Cultural Psychology over the past 200 years, from
> Hegel
> to Marx to CHAT to contemporary contintental philosophy. Hegel dropped the
> paradigm of labour in favour of a paradigm of critique around 1805, at the
> same time as he adopted a monological concept of Spirit. Marx returned to
> a
> paradigm of labour in 1844. Then in the anti-Marxist tide of the post-WW2
> period everyone from French philosophers to critical theorists abandoned
> labour for communication as the paradigm. Some also turn to aesthetic
> acitivity as the paradigm (subject-object, subject-other or subject-self
> are the three possible relations here).
>
> It seemed to me that the position of LSV which I so valued was that LSV
> held that it was the WHOLE of social practice (not just labour), and the
> WHOLE of culture (not just means of production) which were the operative
> concepts for psychology.
>
> The problem remains though, if we are not to simply adopt and take over
> the
> orthodox marxist categories of the labour process as the basis for
> psychology, and I think that is the case, and we are not to go with
> Foucault, Derrida, Habermas etc., and ditch labour in favour of
> communicative action (or aesthetic action in some cases), then how do we
> begin to get a handle on activity which is appropriate for psychology?
>
> I want to go back to Hegel methodologically and work on the claim that an
> *immanent* critique of the categories of activity is the only viable
> approach. Otherwise, we are just pulling pre-determined categories out of
> our own heads. The latter is the usual approach in my view.
>
> Andy
>
> At 11:11 AM 27/12/2007 -0800, you wrote:
> >Great help, David, thanks. And Andy and Paul.
> >
> >David- In Cultural Psychology I also level the charge of a focus on
> >instrumentality - object oriented-ness at Leontiev. But you can find
> places
> >in his writing where the "object" is a
> >person, a sujbect, and he talks about subject-subject relations. Yrjo
> has
> >some such quote in Learning by Expanding.
> >...
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Fri Dec 28 10:11 PST 2007