Reading :: Visible Language

Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond

Edited by Christopher Woods

I ran into this book a while back and was intrigued: Although I’m hardly an archaeologist, I’m interested in the invention and development of writing, and this collection covers cuneiform, ancient Egyptian writing, early alphabetic writing, and early writing systems in China and Mesoamerica. 

In Woods’ introduction, he argues that to our knowledge, writing was invented ex nihilo only four times: in Sumer, ancient Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica (p.15). (Previous scholars have assumed that writing traveled from Sumer to Egypt, but new discoveries have pushed back the date of Egyptian writing; p.16.) He adds: “Broadly defined, writing represents speech. One must be able to recover the spoken word, unambiguously, from a system of visible marks in order for those marks to be considered writing. … Those systems that meet this criterion, and so represent true writing, are labeled glottographic, while systems of communication that represent ideas only,without that essential bond to speech and so do not meet our definition of writing — for example,musical and mathematical notation, international road signs and the like — are labeled semasiographic (Sampson 1985, pp. 29–30)” (p.18). And “What systems of communication that eventually develop into full-fledged writing do have, as opposed to their semasiographic counterparts and progenitors, is the germ of phoneticism — the rebus principal is integrated into these systems. That is, the existence of homonyms in the language is exploited in that the sound of one word, most often one with a referent that can be easily drawn, is used to write another word that is pronounced identically or similarly” (p.20). 

In Ch.2, “The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing,” Woods overviews the origins of Mesopotamian writing, which “may very well represent the world’s first writing system” (p.33). Intriguingly, he reports on Mesopotamian legends about the origins of written language (pp.34-35). When discussing precursors to writing, Woods describes the discovery of clay “envelopes” or hollow clay balls containing tokens, with the impressions of those tokens on the exterior of the envelopes. He notes that “The idea that these envelopes represented precursors to writing was first suggested by the French archaeologist Pierre Amiet in the 1960s” (p.46). Where Amiet thought that these token impressions inspired cuneiform, Schmandt-Besserat argued that they directly became cuneiform: “In Schmandt-Besserat’s view, both the numerical and logographic signs of cuneiform evolved directly out of the earlier token system. This theory is based on the visual similarities between the elements of the token and writing systems” (p.47). But Woods says that “many of her identification linking complex tokens to cuneiform signs are sim-ply not plausible” and “the distribution of tokens, if we accept Schmandt-Besserat’s identifications, is at odds with our understanding of early Mesopotamian economy and society” (p.48). 

In Ch.3, “Adaptation of Cuneiform to Write Akkadian,” Andrea Seri examines how the Sumerian cuneiform system was adopted by Akkadian neighbors. The two languages are quite different structurally, 

whereas the Sumerian verbal root was monosyllabic and could not be internally altered, Akkadian needed an essentially phonetic syllabic system in order to convey the semantically important structural characteristics of the language.The transition from logograms to syllabograms,therefore, played an important role in the adaptation of cuneiform to write Akkadian (pp.89-90)

In Ch.5, “The Conception and Development of the Egyptian Writing System,” Elise V. MacArthur reviews writing precursors: rock drawings, pot marks, pottery, seals, tomb tags, incised pottery, and funerary stelae (p.116). And in Ch.6, “The Earliest Egyptian Writing,” Andréas Stauder addresses the question of why Sumerians and Egyptians appear to have invented writing almost simultaneously: 

The close proximity in time and the relative proximity in space of the southern Mesopotamian and Egyptian inventions of writing remains remarkable, but is explained by taking into account the broader context. The development of the earliest Egyptian writing is contemporaneous with, and di-rectly related to, the emergence of regional political entities and associated elites. This in turn is part of a set of complexly interrelated phenomena that simultaneously affected various parts of the ancientNear East in the later fourth millennium, partly in relation to the development of, and attempts to control, supra-regional trade networks. In the con-text of major political and social changes affecting both southern Mesopotamia and Upper Egypt, the roughly simultaneous emergence of writing in the two regions is no coincidence. (p.142)

Skipping ahead, in Ch.12, “The Invention and Development of the Alphabet,” Joseph Lam notes that

The functional advantage of the alphabet over other writing systems lies in its economy. In contrast to logographic systems, in which a given symbol denotes a word, or to syllabic writing, in which sign represents a full syllable of sound, alphabetic writing is characterized by the graphic representation of phonemes, that is, the shortest contrastive units of sound in a language (consonants or vowels), thereby greatly decreasing the number of signs. (p.189)

In Ch.14, “The Beginnings of Writing in China,” Edward L. Shaughnessy points out that although many Chinese characters would be recognized as pictographic 3000 years ago, currently “99 percent or more of current Chinese characters … depict primarily the sound of the word” (p.215). He overviews what we know about the development of this writing system. Similarly, in Ch.15, “The Development of Maya Writing,” Joel W. Palka overviews Mesoamerican script history.

Overall, I found this book to be fascinating, although (paradoxically) I also ended up skimming a lot. On one hand, I learned a lot about writing systems around the world, including how they originated and changed over time. On the other hand, this book requires some antecedent knowledge and I didn’t always have it. Still, if you’re interested in writing as an ingenious, inventive set of human practices, definitely pick this book up. 

(Three new articles on qualitative case study research methodology for investigating workplaces)

 For the last several years, I’ve been working on questions of qualitative research methodology. How do we research workplaces? How do we bound or delimit them so that we collect the right data and don’t collect superfluous data? Since work overlaps with lots of other things in our lives — for instance, we might be texting with our loved ones during business hours, and our bosses during family time — how do we separate out what is relevant? Since we pick up literate practices during different parts of our lives, how do we trace the impacts of these literate practices and when are practices from one part of our lives (ex: how to make a to-do list) incompatible with our work? Where and when can we be considered to be working?

Such questions are even harder to answer than they seem, especially since digital communication and devices have made it easier, cheaper, and faster to communicate than ever before. That means more working during “non-work” hours, at “non-work” places, and more interference across work projects (say, getting a Teams message about Project 1 when you’re working on Project 2). It also means the reverse: your family might text you at work and expect you to answer. Boundaries become more porous. New work configurations become more possible.

These issues have been part of my focus ever since 2000, when I began the research project that turned into my 2008 book, Network (2008). But they kicked into high gear as I began looking at projectified work in the series of case studies that led to my 2015 book, All Edge, and later when I started researching early-stage technology startups. 

This year, I’ve published three papers looking at different aspects of qualitative research methodology, all of which examine the question of bounding the case at different angles.

Spinuzzi, C. (2023). Mapping representations in qualitative case studies: Can we adapt Boisot’s I-Space model? Journal of Workplace Learning 35(6), pp. 562-583. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-01-2023-0013.

In this article, I critically examined Max Boisot’s I-Space model, which provides three-axis representations of “knowledge assets” used by a population. Could it provide appropriate visualizations for qualitative research into workplaces? I-Space maps information in three dimensions (abstraction, codification and diffusion). I conclude that I-Space is not directly adoptable for case study methodology due to three fundamental disjunctures: in theory, methodology and unit of analysis. However, it can be adapted for qualitative research by substituting analogues for abstraction, codification and diffusion.

Here, I want to highlight the unit of analysis part of the article. The I-Space model assumes that knowledge assets are used by a “population.” But populations overlap; population is not enough to define who does and does not fit into a workplace study. After all, everyone in a given workplace is also involved elsewhere, and workplaces increasingly include those who are involved temporarily or tangentially. If population isn’t enough to define a workplace, how do we define it?

Spinuzzi, C. (2023). What Is a Workplace? Principles for Bounding Case Studies of Genres, Processes, Objects, and Organizations. Written Communication, 40(4), 1027–1069. https://doi.org/10.1177/07410883231185875

The question of defining the workplace amounts to how we define the boundaries of a case study — the unit of analysis for a given workplace. Traditionally, workplaces have been bounded by the questions who, what, when, where, why, and how? Or: organizational boundaries, location, time, processes, and work objects/outcomes. Since the Industrial Revolution, corporate work has been organized so that these questions all lead to the same conclusion: a location where work takes place during specific times, by specific people defined by an organizational boundary, using specific genres and processes in service of specific objectives. But that corporate arrangement has been fraying for a while, partly due to new information and communication technologies, and it frayed a lot more during COVID, when a substantial part of the workforce began working from home. In this article, I look at the history of this corporate arrangement and how case study methodology has free-ridden on it. Now that it is faltering, we have to rethink our workplace case study boundaries — including the principle I have been using for a long time, the activity system, which is indexed to a cyclically transformed work object(ive). The article concludes with a discussion of how to select appropriate case boundaries.

Guile, D., & Spinuzzi, C. (2023). “Fractional” Vocational Working and Learning in Project Teams: “Project Assemblage” as a Unit of Analysis? Vocations and Learning. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-023-09330-1

Although this article was the latest to be published, David Guile and I have been working on it for a long while. We have separately been examining workplace learning in projectified work — work that is bound by a project objective rather than by departments or teams — and we’ve bumped up against the limits of the unit of analysis I mentioned above, the activity system, which (we argue) tends to assume an enduring institutional arrangement. The activity system is tremendously useful for exploring such institutional arrangements, but in the cases we have been examining (specifically early-stage tech startups and client-facing interprofessional project teams), it doesn’t capture the learning we see happening across projects. To capture these fractional (intermittent, discontinuous and concurrent) working and learning dynamics associated with projectification, we propose a unit of analysis anchored in the concept of project assemblage, based on ideas from actor-network theory, cultural-historical activity theory, and cultural sociology. Through this unit of analysis, researchers can examine how unstable project teams learn to use different forms of specialist activity to enact objects, objects that may not cohere, even though team members may treat them as unified and coherent. 

I hope these articles are all useful for researchers who, like me, are fascinated by the dynamics of workplaces! 

Reading :: The Evolution of Agency

The Evolution of Agency

By Michael Tomasello

I have reviewed a couple of other Tomasello books on this blog: The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition and Becoming Human. Tomasello, who is professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke as well as emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has drawn on neo-Vygotskian theory to discuss the evolution of human cognition in those past books. In this one, he tackles a related issue: The evolution of agency.

Agency is a term that is often used in the social sciences and humanities, but not as often defined. In Chapter 1, Tomasello defines it: “Agency is thus not about the many and varied things that organisms do … but rather about how they do them. Individuals acting as agents direct and control their own actions, whatever those actions may be specifically” (p.2). Agentive beings are distinguished “by a special type of behavioral organization [which is] feedback control organization in which the individual directs its behavior toward goals … controlling or even self-regulating the process through informed decision-making and behavioral self-monitoring” (p.2). Indeed, “the concept of agency … represents the dividing line between biological and psychological approaches to behavior” since biology explains some complex processes, while psychology explains others. Tomasello’s goal in this book “is to reconstruct the evolutionary pathway to human psychological agency” (p.9), and he identifies four types of agency in human ancestors:

• “Goal-directed agency in ancient vertebrates”

• “Intentional agency in ancient mammals”

• “Rational agency in ancient great apes”

• “Socially normative agency in ancient human beings” (p.10)

(I mentioned earlier that Tomasello had drawn on neo-Vygotskian thought in his previous books. Vygotsky, of course, was very interested in self-control via psychological mediation, in which the individual learned and applied their culture’s tools. Tomasello doesn’t talk about that directly, but the links are there to be made.)

In Chapter 2, Tomasello provides a feedback control model of agency. He argues that an agent

• Directs or plans actions toward goals, attending to situations

• Controls or executively self-regulates its actions via informed decisions in an unfolding situation (p.11)

Since ancient vertebrates, mammals, etc. are not on offer, Tomasello uses the methods of comparative biology (examining fossils to understand physiology and evolutionary trajectories) to find extant organisms to use as models (p.13). These extant organisms are lizards, squirrels, chimpanzees, and (of course) humans (p.24).

Moving on, he discusses the feedback control mechanism of behavior, which “comprises a hierarchy of systems, each with three central components: (i) a reference value or goal, (ii) a sensing device or perception, and (iii) a device for comparing perception and goal so as to make and execute a behavioral decision” (p.19). He asserts that this really is the only possible model “for generating flexibly intelligent, agentive behavior” (p.19). 

Tomasello also argues that “changes in the agentive organization of action lead to changes in the types of things the agent may experience. … Therefore a further dimension of agency … [is] the experiential niche of the organism” (p.22). 

In Chapter 3, he discusses ancient vertebrates as goal-directed agents. At this level, the organism acts flexibly toward a goal even in novel contexts (p.27). For an agentive organization, the individual’s goals and actions determine their experimental niche, guided by attention (i.e., goal-directed perception) (p.36). Objects are not relevant to that attention, but situations are (p.36). Meanwhile, goals are “perceptually imagined situations” (p.38). And effective actions can play a causal role in the process of evolutionary change (p.41). 

In Chapter 4, he discusses ancient mammals as intentional agents. At this level, “mammals direct their actions toward goals just flexibly but intentionally, as they cognitively stimulate possible action plans toward their goal before actually acting. And they control their behavior not just by making go-no-go decisions but also by making either-or behavioral choices as they evaluate the possible plans’ likely outcomes and control behavioral execution as it unfolds” (p.43). This new mode – “intentional agency” – emerges from “more flexible emotions and motivations that can be overridden as needed” (p.43). Early mammals have three new capabilities:

• New ways to motivate action: more flexible motivations and emotions (p.45)

• Cognitive capabilities for social competition, allowing them to plan and then act (p.46) 

• New ontogenetic pattern, allowing more learning (p.46), including instrumental learning in which they can understand how actions causally affect outcomes (p.47).

Here, we get executive functions and executive decision-making (p.51). 

In Chapter 5, he discusses ancient apes as rational agents. Apes operate logically and reflectively, understanding why things happen; they to some degree understand causality and intentionality (p.67). Due to social competition, apes forage in small bands, producing social organization (p.70). They use cognitive simulations; their causal orientation means they can use tools; their intentional orientation means they engage in intentional communication and social learning (p.71). All of this yields rational agency (p.71). 

In Chapter 6, we get to ancient humans as socially normative agents. Here, we get joint agency in collaboration, such as coordinating during a hunt to produce a collaborative benefit. This joint agency means that they develop interdependence – something that involves choosing partners based on competence and collaborative motivation (p.93). Such humans had to 

• Form a joint goal (p.95) by forming joint agency, pursuing a joint goal, and using joint attention and cooperative communication (p.96)

• Coordinate roles by learning each others’ roles (p.97) and using their collaborative motivations to make inferences (p.99).

• Collaboratively self-regulate the collaboration via partner control (making the partner behave better, p.99). That is, they became normative: through protests, the joint agency regulates itself (p.100). 

Tomasello asserts that when we talk about feeling responsibility, deserving something, excusing our behavior, apologizing for behavior, or feeling guilt, we are discussing “shared normative standards by which ‘we’ evaluate and self-regulate ‘your’ and ‘my’ actions as coequal partners” (p.104). He adds that great apes don’t do these things because they have not evolved to cooperate in joint agency.

He adds that this behavior began in paired collaborations, then scaled up to larger social groups about 150,000 years ago, eventually yielding different cultural groups oriented to scaled-up collective intentionality (p.105). Groups fractionate at about 150 (he name-checks Dunbar’s number here, p.105), yielding tribal societies (p.106). We get in-groups and out-groups (p.108), with homophily as the psychological basis of human culture (p.109) and a new basis of cultural common ground that allows collaboration among those who don’t previously know each other (p.110). This cultural common ground is “recursive mind-reading” in that in-group members conform to conventional practices (p.110). We get specialized division of labor tied to commonly understood special rights and responsibilities (p.111).

In Chapter 7, Tomasello presents several conclusions:

1. “The ‘backbone’ of behavioral agency is feedback control organization.” (p.122)

2. “The ecological challenges leading to the evolution of behavioral agency all involve one or another form of unpredictability in the environment.” (p.123)  

3. “Despite the plethora of specific behavioral and psychological adaptations across species, only a few basic types of psychological Bauplans exist for the agentive organization of behavior.” (p.124; see the summary table, p.127)

4. “The evolutionary emergence of new forms of behavioral organization involves both ‘hierarchical modularity’ and ‘trickle-down selection’” (p.128)

5. “Changes in the agentive organization of a species’ behavior and psychology lead to changes in the types of experience it is capable of having (its experiential niche)” (p.130)

6. “The decision-making agent is necessary, and it is not a homunculus, at least not in a bad way” (p.132)

Quite a book! It’s based on an extraordinarily broad base of knowledge, and it covers a broad sweep of time and behavior. I’m neither an evolutionary biologist nor a psychologist, so I’m not confident in my ability to evaluate it, but it does read compellingly and pull a complex discussion into a clearly related framework. For me, it also provides another angle for thinking about the social and cultural psychology that I do know, particularly Vygotskian and activity theory approaches. If you’re interested in agency in any form, definitely pick up this book.

Reading :: Dance of the Dialectic

Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method
By Bertell Ollman

This spring, I was Zooming with several colleagues. One of them mentioned this book, and another recommended it as well. “It’s so good,” Colleague 1 remarked. “Soooo good,” Colleague 2 affirmed.

I ordered the book immediately, because I really needed an explainer on dialectics. I mean, yes, I have read a lot about dialectics, and I’ve recently tried my hand at differentiating among different applications of dialectics, but the term’s used in at least two senses, with considerable slippage among them.  

On one hand, dialectic is sometimes understood as the now common-sensical notion that:

• Things change over time and relative to each other; change is the only constant.

• Elements in a given system mutually adjust. In a relatively stable system, elements are held in tension and constantly work out these tensions. The result might be a new equilibrium, but not a permanently stable system, as new tensions develop.

• Systems sometimes reach tipping points, points at which small differences add up and precipitate larger systemic change.

• Dialectic is thus a description of how elements, and more importantly the relations among elements, change in a system.

This understanding of dialectic yields an open field of possibilities. Here, systemic constraints are hard to predict, confounding the older and simpler idea of stability and clear monocausal relations. To provide one example, evolutionary theory challenged the older understanding of fixed species reproducing, instead arguing that species evolve to address changes in the environment, and in evolving, they change the environment for other species around them. Evolution isn’t a fixed linear path (contra how it is often depicted in science fiction) but rather a dispersion of various mutations, some of which might succeed in the changed environment. 

On the other hand, dialectic is sometimes – especially in Engels, Lenin, and Stalin – understood in a much more closed way:

• The essential logic of nature, one that underlies all processes, and ultimately teleological (Engels).

• Since it’s teleological, dialectic is a process that inevitably leads to specific outcomes, especially communism (Stalin).

• Dialectic is thus a prescription or prediction, telling us how a system – specifically an economic system – will change as it resolves its tensions.

This understanding of dialectic yields a closed field of possibilities. It lays out imperatives. For Stalin, it justified extending the dictatorship of the proletariat from a short transitional period to an “entire historical era.” 

There’s (ahem) a tension between these two senses. Marxists have emphasized the former, but have tried legitimizing the latter. This is true of Marx, but especially Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.

How does this relate to Ollmann’s book? On page 1, he argues that “Marxism … offers us a tale of two cities: one that claims to have freedom but doesn’t, and another that possesses bountiful freedom for all, but few know where it is or how to get it. The first city is called ‘capitalism’ … The other city is called ‘communism.’” (p.1).

For those who might object that communist regimes have so far not really been associated with freedom for all, Olmann hastily adds:

This city [communism] can’t be found on a map, because until now it only exists in the shadows of the first city. … The capitalists have managed to keep communism a well-guarded secret by using their power over the mike [microphone] … to ensure that no one learns that communism is really about freedom, while endlessly repeating the cannard [sic] that something called ‘communism’ was already tried in a few underdeveloped countries and that it didn’t work. (p.1; cf. p.155 for an explicit denial of “what happened in the Soviet Union and China”)

In other words: if you say that communism hasn’t worked, Olmann says that’s because it has never actually been tried. Just as Christ’s Second Coming us always on the horizon, or Dippin’ Dots is always characterized as the ice cream of the future, communism hasn’t come into its own yet, but it is an inevitability – according to this line of thought.

Olmann adds that Marx’s focus isn’t capitalism or communism, but rather their internal relations, and “how communism evolves as a still-unrealized potential within capitalism and the history of this evolution, stretching from earliest times to a future that is still far in front of us” (pp.1-2). That is, Marx’s focus is dialectic, which, when he applied it to capitalism, allowed him to contemplate how this capitalist system could (would) eventually evolve into communism.

Here on p.2, I had an epiphany due to my recent readings. 

The first is Latour’s Aramis, which I grow to appreciate more each time I read it. In Aramis, Latour investigates the failure of a cutting-edge autonomous train system in France, and he discovers that the system failed in part because its stakeholders each had a different, ideal notion of the train system. None of them were willing to compromise on this system, and their desires were incompatible, so the system could not come into being. They all loved the idea of Aramis, but only if it fit their ideal versions – and thus they loved it to death. 

The second is Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. I’ll just quote from my review of that book:

Boltanski and Chiapello agree with Weber's basic thesis but argue that capitalism continues to reinvent itself. They argue that the "spirit of capitalism" is the "ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism" (p.8) and that this ideology has periodically had to change in order to address and incorporate critiques (p.19). In fact, the authors identify three "spirits" of capitalism at different periods—familial, bureaucratic, and globalized—each of which were in tune with their time periods (p.19). The third spirit, which is what we are living through today (or at least were in 1999), must restore meaning to the accumulation process, combined with social justice (p.19).

More broadly, they say, critiques function as a motor for capitalism, which must align with other values to survive. Capitalism relies on its enemies' critiques to identify moral supports, which it then incorporates (p.27). (For a quick example, think in terms of social entrepreneurship.) In rhetorical terms, capitalism concedes critiques and adjusts its argument to address them. Paradoxically, this means that capitalism is the most fragile when it is triumphant (p.27)—when it doesn't have a critique to incorporate.

To put it back into Latourean terms, capitalists generally haven’t loved capitalism to death: they haven’t insisted on it being pure, perfect, or ideal. They have kept evolving it, reinventing it, by incorporating critiques. You might be able to find some capitalist idealists who will conclude that real capitalism hasn’t been tried yet, but they are considered marginal. People criticize systems as not being purely capitalist (ex: welfare! Social security!) but no one makes excuses by saying capitalism has never been tried. 

Putting these two texts together gives us a new insight into Ollman’s two cities. Perhaps, as Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, capitalism succeeds because it incorporates critiques. And perhaps communism remains understood as some future accomplishment because the previous attempts at communism have not incorporated critiques; instead, they are dismissed as not really communism because they do not meet the ideal that communists have in mind. 

But without trying versions and incorporating critiques, how could communism emerge? So here we are, 175 years after the Communist Manifesto was published, with a string of communist efforts that real people fought and died over, all of which have been denied because they turned out not to be perfect. Real communism has never been tried! But the price of success is a string of previous failures, and denying those failures makes success impossible. Communism is meant to somehow spring inevitably from the failures of capitalism, rather than emerging from trial and error, adaptation and maladaptation – that is, from dialectic in the first sense (description). The only way to get to this inevitable, ideal version of capitalism is dialectic in the second sense (prescription, prediction). 

As we get into Ch.2, Olmann adds (?) that dialectics is not “a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history,” but “Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world” (p.12). That is, he specifies the first meaning of dialectics above (description). He says,

Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common-sense notion of “thing” (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of “process” (which contains its history and possible futures) and “relation” (which contains a part of its ties with other relations). … it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes units (the dialectical term is ‘abstracts’) in which to think about the world. (p.14)

Olmann says that dialectical relations include

• identity/difference

• interpenetration of opposites

• quantity/quality

• contradiction (p.15)

Of these, contradiction is the most important, since it focuses on the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation (p.17). Here, Olmann swerves back to the second meaning of dialectics above (prediction): “Capitalism’s fate, in other words, is sealed by its own problems, problems that are internal manifestations of what it is and how it works and are often parts of the very achievements of capitalism, worsening as the achievements grow and spread” (p.18). In contrast to (unnamed) nondialectical thinkers, who only think in terms of serial causality, dialecticians can (like Marx) understand how mutual dependence among elements will unfold: “for Marx … tracing how capitalist connections unfold is also a way of discovering the main causes of coming disruption and coming conflict” (p.18).  

(Olmann continues to dance across this line – for instance, later he claims that capitalism “was not only a possible development out of class society, but it was made likely by the character of the latter, by the very dynamics inherent in the division of labor once it got underway” (p.98, in which I would characterize as the first meaning of dialectics). And later still, he claims that Marx’s historical examinations aren’t teleological – Marx simply looks at today’s conditions and then asks: what past conditions led here (p.118)? Yet Marx looks at the capitalism of his day and concludes that “capitalism cannot go on much longer” (p.123)). 

Olmann makes a few concessions here:

1. Dialectical thinkers may play down details in the process of generalizing.

2. Dialectical thinkers sometimes move too quickly “to push the germ of an idea to its finished form.”

3. Dialectical thinkers sometimes “overestimate the speed of change.” (p.19)

Moving on. In Chapter 3, Olmann turns to social relations. Rather than examining “facets” of a single thing, dialectics focus on relations or interdependencies (p.25). In Chapter 4, he turns to internal relations, where he argues that in discussing interrelations, we are describing the system in which things exist (p.41). And in Chapter 5, he discusses abstraction, which Marx uses in four distinct ways:

1. The mental act of subdividing the world (p.61)

2. The result of this process (parts) (p.62)

3. “A suborder of particularly ill-fitting mental constructs” (p.62)

4. “A particular organization of elements in the real world – having to do with the functioning of capitalism – that provides the objective underpinnings for most of the ideological abstractions mentioned above” (p.62)

Olmann sounds a theme here that shows up elsewhere in the book – the theme that critics just haven’t put the time into really understanding Marx (see also p.109). He acknowledges that Marx uses terms with considerable slippage (like “abstraction”) and switches between levels of analysis without much signaling, and consequently non-Marxists have trouble reading Marx properly (p.94). Similarly, he explains Engels’ reductive presentation of dialectics in his Dialectics of Nature by claiming that Engels is writing about dialectics at a broad level, Marx at a human level (p.97). 

Moving on, we get to Chapter 9, “Why Dialectics? Why Now?” And here we return to the theme of impending communism that was begun in Chapter 1. Olmann acknowledges the collapse of the USSR, but warns (like Marx) that capitalism can’t go on much longer (pp.158-159) and assures us that communism still lays concealed inside capitalism (p.159). Capitalism is “becoming impossible,” creating the conditions for communism (p.159). And here we begin to see the real differences between this dialectics, the second sense of dialectics, and Latour’s Aramis and Boltanski & Chiapello. For dialectics, the conditions create an inevitable progression: the principle of quantitative change yielding qualitative change means that the system will collapse into a new equilibrium rather than being negotiated and evolving in unpredictable ways. Every knee will bend, every tongue will confess.  

Having stepped into the second meaning of dialectics, Ohlmann must end by hopping back into the first meaning, conceding that “the projections of the future obtained through the use of the method outlined here are only highly probable” and noting that Marx himself conceded that an unlikely alternative outcome would be “barbarism” (p.168). (Surely many, many other possibilities exist in a highly complex system, but most of that complexity can be waved away through Abstraction.) Olmann finally provides us with a figure of dance steps that he terms the “dance of the dialectic”: 

1. Analyze

2. Historicize

3. Visionize

4. And organize! (p.169)

But as implied in this review, the dance of the dialectic seems to also include two other steps interspersed throughout the dance: first a leap to Describe, then gathering strength for the powerful leap to Predict, followed by a hasty conciliatory hop back to Describe, and repeat as opportune.

I’ll stop here. The remaining chapters are useful, but not (in my judgment) core to the book, and this review is long enough.

So what did I think of the book? Although I think readers can recognize my frustration with dialectics, this book was indeed “soooo good,” as my colleague promised, because it helped me to think through dialectics as a method, and specifically this duality between description and prescription – admittedly, probably too simple a characterization, but it was enough to help me understand what has always put me off about dialectics. If you’re similarly struggling with what is meant by this method, or how to apply it, or how to better understand the works of Soviet psychologists (as I am), definitely pick it up.