Note
Chapter 3 Cultural Historical Activity Theory
3.1 The relationship between the individual and society
Soviet psychology was deeply influenced by Marx and Engels’ approach to the relationship between humans and reality. One of Marx’s concerns was to “understand the processes by which social and political conditions come into being” (Chaiklin, 1996, p. 392). In order to understand this, Marx had to conceptualise the relationship between the individual and society. Bakhurst (1991) argues that the philosophical ‘thinking’ of Russia developed in a culture which embodied a powerful anti-Cartesian element which echoed Marx’s concern with the relationship between the ‘subject and the object’8. In a frequently cited statement from the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx (1845/1994, p. 116) criticised former conceptualisations of materialism in which:
the concrete thing, the real, the perceptible is considered to be an object of …perception only and not to be perceptible human activity, or praxis; i.e. it is not considered
subjectively.
Marx thus criticised ‘mechanical’ materialists for focussing on mind and matter as two independent entities, losing sight of the dialectical relationship between the two. Materialists viewed the human being as passively receiving input from the physical and social
environment, separating consciousness from activity. Marx argued that human agency needs to be recognised, and consciousness needs to be seen as emerging from the agent's activity in the world (Leontiev, 1975, cited in Wertsch, 1979). Engeström (1987, p. 37) argues that within Marx’s conceptualisation the “organism and environment, man [sic] and society…
[were no longer seen as]…separate entities but as an integral system within which retroactive
8 These terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are frequently used terms in the CHAT literature. They are used partly because of Marx’s use of them in discussing how the individual was ‘formed’ by material conditions. In Marx’s use of these terms, they are references to the individual (subject) and whatever is usually seen as ‘outside’ the individual, the objective ‘material’ conditions or reality. Within the CHAT literature they also used to refer to the
causality and internal dynamic transitions prevail”. Marx’s “materialist conception of history applied to the historical development of human beings” generated a dialectical
conceptualisation of the relationship between the individual and society (Elhammoumi, 2001, p. 207). Elhammoumi (2001) argues that for Engels and Marx the development of the activity of labour historically distinguished humans from animals, and had profound effects on the nature of humans and the nature of the world.
3.1.1 The activity of labour
Marx’s theorising of the activity of labour contains a fundamentally dialectical conception of the relationship between people and context. Drawing on Engels, Leontiev (1981) argues for the dependence of labour on the use and making of tools. Davydov (1999, p. 40) argues that
“the initial form of activity is the production of material tools that help people produce objects satisfying their vital needs”. In the process of human labour, features of one natural object are used as tools for acting on other objects, for example, a hammer made of iron and wood, is used to construct a chair. Cole (1996) highlights Engels’ distinction between humans and animals in relation to tool use. Apes ‘use’ tools, that is, they use nature, but their tool use is different from that of humans. Through the activity of labour, humans master nature. They actively appropriate their surroundings to their own goals, incorporating ‘auxiliary means’
(such as tools/artefacts, and people) into their actions (Cole, 1996). Labour is thus human activity that changes nature. In Marx and Engel’s theorising, this process of tool production and tool use made humans creators and transformers of nature, and not merely products of evolution, or assimilators of culture (Engeström, 1987).
The activity of labour also has particular characteristics which are fundamental to its role in the formation of human consciousness. The Marxist frame assumes that “we are constituted
… by our practical activity, in particular by our participation in social and historical practices”
(Tolman, 2001, p. 91). To understand this we need to examine Marx’s articulation of the relationship between the ‘object’ and the ‘subject’. In the cultural-historical activity of humans various aspects and properties of reality (e.g. pieces of wood) are actively turned by the ‘subject’, into the ‘object’ (e.g. the chair). However, the object, or what is produced in that activity, “is not something ‘merely’ external, and indifferent, to the nature of the producer. It is his [sic] activity in an objectified or congealed form” (Bernstein, 1971, p. 44, cited in Cole,
1996, p. 137). Soviet theorist, Evald Ilyenkov’s articulation of the relationship between the material and ‘the ideal’, elaborates this idea.
3.1.2 The relationship between the material and the ideal
Jones (2001, p. 285) argues that in contrast to the biological and reductionist approach of cognitive science which focuses on “the source of the properties and forms of human
cognition in the structure of the brain”, the problem of the ‘ideal’ concerns the possibility of a materialist explanation of the nature and origins of spiritual or ‘non-material’ phenomena, in the material world. In other words, it provides the means to understand the origin of human consciousness in the material reality of the world.
Ideality is a particularly human phenomenon and results from the activity of humans in the world. Referring to Marx, Jones (2001, p. 282) argues that
the crux of the problem has to do with the dialectic process through which human
productive activity necessarily generates images of itself which are objectified in ideal or symbolic forms and come to have an essential role within that activity.
Bakhurst (1996, p. 214) provides the following example:
An inanimate lump of matter is elevated into a tool through the significance with which it is invested by activity. It stands as an embodiment of human purpose in virtue of the way it is fashioned and employed by human agents.
One can see this in the creative process of making a sculpture. Through the activity of the artist Michelangelo, an inanimate piece of marble becomes an image of a woman and a man.
Yet it is not ‘just’ the image of a woman and a man, it is the “Pieta”, invested with religious significance. Bakhurst (1996, p. 214) continues: “the artefact created through the
manipulation of matter by tools is, Ilyenkov argues, more than merely material because of the meaning it derives from incorporation into human practice”. The activity of the artist elevates the material form into a symbolic tool – it becomes ‘more than’ material. In this way, our acting on the world endows the natural environment with meaning; the natural world “comes to embody non-material properties as objectified forms of social activity...” (Bakhurst, 1996, pp. 213-214).
Our activity in, and with, the world thus creates a plane of reality, ‘the ideal’, which includes values, reasons, thought, psychological processes, artistic expression, ethical norms, political
expressed, or objectivised, in such things as sculptures, drawings, models, a coat of arms, or credit notes such as IOU’s (Ilyenkov, 1977b, cited in Jones, 1998). For example, plastic beads strung together in a brooch, in the format of a red ribbon (see Figure 8 below), come to symbolise a particular stance in relation to HIV and AIDS through the activity of being worn.
Figure 8. Beaded brooch with AIDS ribbon
In being “created as an embodiment of purpose and incorporated into life activity in a certain way – being manufactured for a reason and put into use” (Bakhurst 1991, p. 182, cited in Cole, 1996, pp. 117-118), the AIDS brooch acquires a significance. Importantly, this meaning, embodied or “sedimented in objects [tools/artefacts] as they are put into use in social worlds” (Daniels, 2001, p. 21), comes to act on us. In Figure 9 below, child participants in an intervention which aimed to mobilise a collective response to the HIV epidemic, painted the HIV ribbon on their faces for the final, public event (Kelly, Ntlabati, Oyosi, Van der Riet
& Parker, 2002).
Figure 9. Child participants in an HIV and AIDS community mobilisation with AIDS ribbon on their faces (photograph courtesy of Kevin Kelly and the participants)
It is in this way that through exerting an influence on nature through activity, humans change the external world, but significantly, they also change their own nature (Engeström &
Miettinen, 1999). Wartofsky explains this through his discussion of artefacts which he defines as “objectifications of human needs and intentions already invested with cognitive and
affective content” (1973, p. 204, cited in Cole, 1996, p. 121). He highlights the dialectical nature of this process, and the way in which we as humans are fundamentally affected by our artefact use:
... our own perceptual and cognitive understanding of the world is in large part shaped and changed by the representational artifacts we ourselves create. We are, in effect, the
products of our own activity, in this way; we transform our own perceptual and cognitive modes, our ways of seeing and of understanding, by means of the representations we make.
(Wartofsky, 1979, pp. xx - xxiii)
In activity, in the transformation of the object, the content of objective reality is reproduced in the human mind. The ‘subjective’ is thus not the inner (psychic) state of the subject, in
contrast to the object, but is derivative from the subject’s activity. For example, in the activity of writing this thesis (transforming this object) I come to a different understanding of the concepts which I initially used in the research process. It is in this sense that we are, as argued earlier, constituted by our practical activity (Tolman, 2001).
A significant dimension of this is that this activity is social. Labour is performed “in
conditions of joint, collective activity” and it is only through this “relation with other people”
that we relate to nature (Leontiev, 1981, p. 208). Labour activity also has an historical and social character because it takes place in a particular set of historical and social relations.
Marx’s concrete and dialectical conceptualisation of ‘practical activity’ was significant because he situated activity
both in human needs, natural and cultural, and in the societal relations of historically conditioned social practices. Moreover, activity was conceived as constituted by societal relations, and thus as constituting the individual, but also as individuals’ means of
constituting societal relations, and thus also of constituting themselves. (Tolman, 2001, p.
91)
This social nature of labour has implications for the conceptualisation of the human nature. If humans are constituted in this practical, social activity, this links activity, mind and society.
Elhammoumi states:
human higher mental functions, consciousness and activity are grounded in historically organised human activity. Human forms of thought and consciousness are framed and shaped by the social relations of production. (2001, p. 207, emphasis added)
This is the foundation of Marx’s conclusion that “activity and mind, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social mind” (Marx 1844/1964, p.
137, cited in Tolman, 2001, p. 84). This assumption that our higher mental functions (or the cognitive processes which are not automatic) are intrinsically social, rather than individual, is fundamental to the theoretical framework of CHAT. Jones (2001, p.286) argues that the development in an individual of “the capacity to think and act consciously is a result of participating in forms of practical social activity mediated by ideal images”. ‘Mind’ has thus historically ‘emerged’ in the joint mediated activity of people, and therefore cannot be innate, predetermined, or merely determined by context (Elhammoumi, 2001).
The dialectical conception of the individual-social relationship has significant implications for focussing a study of human action. Engeström and Miettinen (1999, p. 5) argue that “human nature is not found within the human individual but in the movement between the inside and outside, in the worlds of artefact use and artefact creation”. Understanding human behaviour therefore lies in a “concrete examination of the dynamic of the real social life process itself”
(Jones, 2001, p. 286), practical social activity.