Writing :: Remaking the Pitch

Spinuzzi, C., Nelson, S., Thomson, K.S., Lorenzini, F., French, R.A., Pogue, G., Burback, S.D., & Momberger, J. (2015, in press). Reuse Strategies in Entrepreneurs' Pitch Decks. IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication 58(2).

This is another entry in my series on writing publications.

Last year, my colleagues and I published "Making the Pitch," an article about how new entrepreneurs learned genres associated with business pitches and developed their claims and evidence as they rerepresented their core arguments across these genres. Originally, we had planned to address reuse across these document genres as well, but the paper was too big, so we split it into two. The second paper, cleverly titled "Remaking the Pitch," was accepted by the same journal.

This paper is very much a sequel to the first one. The dataset is the same and the methodology differs mainly in the coding scheme. But the framing is different since we examine the phenomenon of reuse—hearkening back to some of the work on document cycles in the late 1980s-early 1990s as well as more recent work on reusable content. Specifically, we were interested in the choices that entrepreneurs made as they accepted, extended, or rebutted lines of argument from their interlocutors. I won't get too deeply into the argument here except to say that the document cycle provided opportunities for these entrepreneurs to enter into dialogue and deepen their arguments—and some of them took these opportunities.

The lessons from the previous paper apply here too. But the additional lesson is to know when to split an argument. Often, when an argument becomes too complex, you can simplify it; here, we really couldn't and it made more sense to split it. But since the two halves of the argument sdhared the same data, we were glad to place both in the same journal.

Reading :: The History of the Gulag

The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
By Oleg V. Khlevniuk

As part of my research into the early Soviet context in which activity theory was developed, I picked up this book. Like The Gulag Archipelago, it examines the development and social impact of the brutal penal system that thrived under Stalin; unlike that book, it was written after the fall of the Soviet Union and with access to archival records that document the Gulag's development and operation. Thus the book is far more heavily documented than Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece and allows us to understand some aspects that he could only guess at.

This book covers 1929-1941, beginning with the Stalinist period and ending with the opening of war with Germany. It confirms some of Solzhenitsyn's arguments: (1) the Gulag established forced labor—let's call it what it is, slavery—as a key part of the Soviet economy; (2) the results of the forced labor were terror and poor quality work (see p.185: "The Gulag economy was never effective, and it survived only through the massive, uncontrolled exploitation of forced labor); (3) children, especially orphans, were hardest hit (see especially p.123); (4) the Gulag relied on false confessions and false witnesses to collect more people for forced labor camps (p.151).

The book also discusses how, in the years of the Great Terror, officials "fabricated charges of an 'anti-Soviet underground' in the camps" (p.223), charges that fit into the paranoia of the early USSR.

In the early 1930s, the author concludes, about a sixth of the adult population in the USSR was subject to repression and persecution—a broad category that includes the Gulag, execution, and exile, but also discrimination and loss of jobs (p.304). From 1930-1940, the number of convictions approached 20 million people (p.305). When the war started in 1941, Gulag divisions held a total of about 4 million people, plus 2 million more in corrective labor (p.328).

The author concludes: "Thus, the Gulag spread beyond the barbed wire. Society absorbed the criminal mindset, the reliance on violence, and the prison culture" (p.344).

Yes, of course you should read this book. The author's analysis is important, but equally important are the documents and correspondence he includes from the archives, including correspondence among top officials as they developed the Gulag, told each other stories about the threats the Gulag was addressing, and (surprisingly often) told each other the truth about its appalling conditions.

TWO calls for proposals on entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is an important topic across a range of areas—from small businesses to big businesses, from for-profits to nonprofits, from technologies to services. Entrepreneurs have leveraged methodologies and heuristics, including a bewildering number of canvases and dashboards, as well as user research strategies such as Design Thinking. They present pitches, write business proposals, and conduct market research. They pivot, they make value propositions, and they draw on multiple sources and types of evidence.

In other words, entrepreneurs are rhetors. They argue, persuade, and communicate constantly.

But so far, scholars in professional communication have not extensively studied how entrepreneurs communicate and argue: how they develop pitches, how they analyze arguments, how they teach entrepreneurship to others, how they sense the kairos of the pivot, how they coconstruct value propositions with others. We haven't developed many cases, methodologies, or theories on how this vital work gets done. And we should.

That's why I am calling for papers on two special issues:

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication: December 2016 Special Issue on Entrepreneurship Communication

In this special issue, the focus is on mapping entrepreneurship communication practices in professional communication, especially (but not exclusively) in the contexts of technology and engineering. We're interested answers to in questions such as these:

• What genres and heuristics do people need to learn as they become entrepreneurs? How do they learn them?
• How do entrepreneurs communicate in specific situations? What are their challenges, and how can we help them to meet those challenges?
• What challenges do technical and professional communicators themselves face as they function as entrepreneurs?
• What skills, genres, and heuristics should professional communicators learn as they prepare to function as entrepreneurs?
• What should educators be teaching students in professional communication about entrepreneurship? Conversely, what should educators be teaching students in entrepreneurial contexts about professional communication?
• How can we apply entrepreneurship principles more broadly to professional communication?
• What trends can we expect from the next decade, and what innovations and shifts must we consider as we prepare for the future of technical communication?

We are seeking articles of the following types:

• Research articles (including integrative literature reviews)
• Case studies
• Tutorials
• Teaching cases

If you're interested, abstracts are due October 1, 2015.

Special Issue of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication on the Rhetoric of Entrepreneurship: Theories, Methodologies, and Practices

In this special issue, the focus is on building theories and methodologies for better understanding the rhetoric of entrepreneurship across several different contexts, including open innovation, technology commercialization, social entrepreneurship, open source projects, entrepreneurship in education, and intrapreneurship. We are also interested in well-developed critiques of the rhetoric of entrepreneurship. We expect that these articles will collectively address questions that are essential for establishing a theoretical and methodological program on the rhetoric of entrepreneurship, including:

• How has entrepreneurial rhetoric been characterized in the research literature, both in professional communication and in other fields?
• How can we best theorize entrepreneurship in rhetorical terms?
• What research methodologies are best suited for investigating entrepreneurial rhetoric?  How can we best provide an empirically grounded account of entrepreneurship as a rhetorical practice?
• What kinds of arguments do entrepreneurs make—in terms of genres, media, occasions, and types? How do entrepreneurs conceptualize, configure, reconfigure, and iterate their arguments?
• What kinds of entrepreneurial activities exist, and how does rhetoric enact and stabilize them?
• What is the ethos of entrepreneurial work? Does it differ from the ethos of other kinds of work, and if so, how?
• How can we bring our disciplinary insights on the rhetoric of entrepreneurship to bear on professional communication pedagogy?

If this is more your speed, abstracts are due November 30, 2015.

Next steps

If you think you have a topic or idea that you'd like to develop, reach out to me as soon as possible. I'll be happy to provide guidance. I'll also be at Procomm 2015/SIGDOC 2015 if you'd like to talk in person this July.

Reading :: Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy

Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov
By David Bakhurst

Despite the title, this book really is mainly about Evald Ilyenkov, who is regarded as among the best of the Soviet philosophers. Not that that's high praise—Soviet philosophy doesn't have a good reputation, largely because it was severely constrained by the dominant Soviet ideology. But Ilyenkov, like Vygotsky, made a genuine effort to build on the ideas of his predecessors rather than to be constrained by them. And Ilyenkov, like Vygotsky, ran into resistance because of this.

Soviet philosophy, Bakhurst says, was largely built on Lenin and the principles and laws of dialectics that he endorsed  (pp.12-13). This philosophy became "official" under Stalin, leading one dissident, the exile Berdyaev, to lament that Soviet philosophy was not a philosophy at all—it was a theology that caricatured Christianity (quoted on pp.98-99).

Ilyenkov wanted to escape that dogma. One of his focuses was the dialectical method, specifically the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete. As Bakhurst summarizes the discussion, Ilyenkov argues that "concreteness is... a property of the object of cognition" (p.139)—an object that is "a unity of opposites," that is, a contextualized, internally dynamic instantiation. The dynamism comes from the tensions of the internal relations and yields "changes issuing in the development of the whole" (p.139). In contrast, the abstract is isolated from these relations, in relative autonomy, partial. An abstract conception is one-sided and partial (p.141).

Another focus was the ideal. Soviet philosophy had avoided the ideal, seeing it as nonmaterialist. But Ilyenkov argued that the ideal can have an objective existence, which it owed to human activity (that is, it didn't reside in the head or the ether but in activity) (p.180). For instance, human activity is what turns objects into artifacts, not through mental projections but in material activity (pp.181-182; compare to how we talk about genre in the Bakhtinian/North American genre theory tradition). Following Vygotsky, Ilyenkov says that words are one important subclass of idealized natural objects (p.186). Bakhurst summarizes, "as human beings change the world to conform to their needs, so their ends and powers become embodied or 'congealed' in natural objects" (p.186). This assertion is in line with Marx's idea of objectification, of course, but Bakhurst says that Ilyenkov takes this idea further: first, "objectification is construed as the basis of a form of self-consciousness," and second, "the humanization of the world is held to transform nature into a different kind of environment. Ilyenkov reads humanization as idealization" that transforms the material environment into a meaningful environment (p.187).

Thus, Ilyenkov asserts, activity is the key to explaining the world-in-itself. But Ilyenkov does not flesh out this argument, Bakhurst notes (p.202).

Ultimately, Bakhurst does a good job here of contextualizing Ilyenkov's project within the Soviet milieu as well as describing the project and its limitations. If you're interested in Soviet thought, and especially how Ilyenkov impacts activity theory, certainly you should pick up this book.

Reading :: Essential Works of Lenin

Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" and Other Writings
Edited by Henry M. Christman

This review is part of my ongoing investigation into the roots of Soviet activity theory. I did not anticipate having to read Lenin, but he is cited extensively by Ilyenkov and less so by Leontiev, and his legacy certainly impacted the Soviet Union. Below, I attempt a thumbnail sketch of the following works in this volume: What is to be done?; Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism; and The state and revolution. I won't cover The development of capitalism in Russia except to note that Lenin preferred capitalism to the feudalism from which Russia had so recently emerged (p.32) partly because it was a relatively progressive development (p.46).

What is to be done?, published in 1902, focused on Bolshevik control and discipline as the party attempted to maintain ideological purity and to survive the Tsar's forces. I remarked on Twitter that it should have been called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Lenin: Lenin strenuously argues that any divergence from socialist ideology bolsters bourgeois ideology (p.82). and is tantamount to the abandonment of socialism (p.83). The class political consciousness, he says, can only be brought to workers from the outside (p.112); the theory of socialism came from the intelligentsia (p.74); the role of the vanguard can only be fulfilled by a party guided by an advanced theory (p.70). All of these claims suggest a revolution centrally controlled by intelligentsia, by professional revolutionaries (p.147). In the repressive climate of prerevolutionary Russia, he argues, we must create a conspiracy (p.158)! Here in the 21st century, I can see how this repressive environment helped to shape Lenin's paranoid, tightly controlled style of governance.

Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism was written in 1916, when Lenin was in exile. He wrote it to get past the Tsar's censors. But it was only published in September 1917, after the February revolution and at the eve of the October revolution. According to my research assistant, Mr. Google, this text is considered to be the antithesis of Schumpeter's 1919 State imperialism and capitalism: Whereas Lenin regarded imperialism to be the natural end of capitalism, Schumpeter regarded imperialism as a sign that feudal aspects survive in capitalism. In any case, Lenin uses data from the US and Europe to argue that entrepreneurship rises when the number of competing enterprises is low (p.182); that capitalism leads to imperialism via cartels (p.183); that the imperialist stage of capitalism is a transition from free competition to socialism, in which production is socialized but appropriation is private (p.186). He also argues that rapid technological process leads to more disturbances in coordination across industry (true), and this leads to more monopolies as firms try to get a handle on these disturbances (p.189). When Lenin accuses monopoly as penetrating into every sphere of public life, I imagine him eagerly taking notes (p.212).

The state and revolution, Lenin's major work, was mostly written in exile in Switzerland in early 1917, then published in August 1917, just before the October revolution. Here, Lenin argues against democracy, saying that it is fundamentally incompatible with Leninism. The argument goes like this: The State is a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonism (p.273). It is set above and alienated from society; liberation requires the destruction of the apparatus of state power (p.274). So even socialists such as the Mensheviks—who supported a democratic socialism—were playing into the hands of the bourgeoise by insisting on a "modern" state; democracy was simply another way of prolonging the state and the class antagonisms that manifested it (p.270). When class struggle is abolished, Lenin argues, the state will wither away (p.280).

Lenin draws from Engels for this account, but he corrects (?) readers who have read Engels too hastily. It is not the bourgeois state that will wither away, but the proletarian state. The bourgeois state must be overthrown and replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat, one that represented the proletariat's repression of the bourgeoisie (p.282). After all, "The state is a special organization of force; it is the organization of violence for the suppression of some class"—in this case, "the exploiting class, i.e., the bourgeoise" (p.287). Only when the bourgeoisie had been eliminated as a class could the state wither away. Obviously, then, the dictatorship of the proletariat was irreconcilable with reformism (p.286).

How will this happen? Building on what capitalism has established, the workers will organize production, relying on their own experience; "establish strict, iron discipline supported by the state power of the armed workers"; and reduce the role of state officials to mere management (p.307). Eventually, that managerial work (Lenin says) will die out as a stratum of the population, replaced by a rotation of workers who take on this task (p.307), all sharing the same ideology (p.344). As the state is abolished, so is organized and systemic violence (p.333). (Until then, workers should remained armed—p.345.)

(Note: Max Weber published his work on bureaucracy, Economy and Society, posthumously in 1922—five years after Lenin published this text. He argues that democracy only works because of bureaucracy, and I think his analysis would suggest that Lenin's vision is unrealistic.)

Of course, this shift couldn't happen until the proletariat had revolted across the world—until that happened, the dictatorship of the proletariat had to continue in order to guard against the influence of international capitalism (p.307; compare p.338). But it was only a matter of time before the proletariat arose against the bourgeoise internationally—this was not a matter of utopianism, Lenin declared confidently, but science (p.340).

Of course, things didn't turn out that way. Individual countries became socialist and even communist, but the worldwide revolt against capitalism never happened. So the Soviet Union remained stuck in the dictatorship of the proletariat, growing a new bureaucracy rather than letting it die out. Workers were certainly not allowed to stay armed. And despite Lenin's protests in this book, his vision did turn out to be impossibly utopian.

Should you read this book? If you are interested in the Soviet Union, yes. If you're interested in the roots of activity theory, maybe. If you're looking for tips on good governance, I think not.

Reading :: The Theory and Practice of Cultural-Historical Psychology

The Theory and Practice of Cultural-Historical Psychology
Edited by Seth Chaiklin

This 2001 collection is drawn from papers presented at the Fourth International Congress for Cultural Research and Activity Theory. In his introduction, Seth Chaiklin acknowledges the "risk that this volume could end as an incoherent set of chapters" (p.20)—as so many edited collections turn out to be. I'm not going to pass that judgment, but due to my current interests, I'll only discuss two of the 15 chapters.

Chaiklin, S. (2001). The institutionalisation of cultural-historical psychology as a multinational practice. In S. Chaiklin (Ed.), The theory and practice of cultural-historical psychology (pp. 15–34). Oakville, CT: Aarhus University Press.

In this introduction, Chaiklin argues that cultural-historical psychology, despite its chronological age, is still a "baby" (p.15), still "young as an institutional practice" (p.16). As Chaiklin says in footnote 2, he pessimistically expects that "institutional practices found in other psychological traditions will be recreated more or less in the cultural-historical tradition" (p.16). Yet "because we are in the relatively early stages of this institutionalisation process, we have the rare opportunity to attempt to form and develop these practices in ways that might be conducive to the epistemological assumptions that motivate cultural-historical psychology" (p.16). Specifically, Chaiklin intends to analyze the development of cultural-historical psychology dialectically (p.17).

An aside: I'm less interested in how AT is being applied by psychologists and more interested in how it's being used by rhetoricians and professional communicators, HCI, CSCW, communication, and related fields. Taking up AT and applying it in these other disciplines necessarily means changing and institutionalizing it in different ways. And interdisciplinary fields (such as HCI and professional communication) tend to be more comfortable, I think, with the ambiguity that comes from bringing different theoretical traditions to bear on the same problem. So I'm less concerned about AT's fidelity than the collection's authors seem to be. But since AT did emerge from Soviet psychology, I'm still interested in seeing what psychologists think of its pedigree.

In terms of that pedigree, Chaiklin reviews some important points: the fact that the Vygotskian tradition was "suppressed" from 1936 (when the Pedological Decree was issued) to the mid-1950s (p.18); the spread in interest to Europe, Japan, and the Americas in the late 1960s-early 1970s (p.19); and, interestingly, this tradition's spread to Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s (p.19).

Chaiklin attempts a definition of "cultural-historical psychology": "'the study of the development of psychological functions through social participation in societally-organised practices'" (p.21). This broad definition is meant to characterize a "multiplicity" of labels. Chaiklin also warns of a "danger for divergence in cultural-historical psychology" due to the multiple theoretical variations (p.24).

Ultimately, though, Chaiklin seems okay with the different variations as long as those different traditions can plug back into the main one. The other author I'll discuss, Mohamed Elhammoumi, is not as sanguine.

Elhammoumi, M. (2001). Lost—or merely domesticated? The boom in socio-historical theory emphasises some concepts, overlooks others. In S. Chaiklin (Ed.), The theory and practice of cultural-historical psychology (pp. 200–217). Oakville, CT: Aarhus University Press.

In contrast with Chaiklin, Mohamed Elhammoumi writes a jeremiad about the West's adaption of what he calls "socio-historicocultural psychology" (p.200). In his massive Footnote 1, Elhammoumi notes that this concept has been inadequately characterized as "cultural-historical" in the West, with a range of variants (ex: "sociocultural," "socio-historical"; pp.200-201). He indicts luminaries such as Cole, Wertsch, van der Veer, and Engestrom in this discussion.

Back in the main text, he continues: "dependence on approaches borrowed from the cognitive revolution and cultural psychology have resulted in oversimplification and misunderstanding of socio-historicocultural psychology, both theoretically and methodologically. Thus contemporary socio-historicocultural psychology is cut off from its explanatory and experimental potential" (p.201). In this chapter, the author attempts to restore that potential by recovering the "dialectical materialist tradition that was an important source of ideas for Vygotsky" (p.201). Here, the author emphasizes in Footnote 2 that Vygotsky understood the difference between Marxism and the "simplistic and dogmatic philosophical system" that Soviet psychologists tended to work under; Vygotsky intended to found his psychology on genuine dialectics (p.201).

So what does this mean? Elhammoumi argues that

socio-historicocultural theory is, after all, an extension of the materialist conception of history. A 'domesticated' version of socio-historicocultural theory is weakened by the absence of links to a materialist analysis. For example, analytic constructs that arise from a materialist conception of history are principles of ownership, production and distribution of wealth and resources. Socio-historicocultural theory needs to draw on these constructs in order to realise its potential to extend beyond the analysis of small scale and individual activity. (p.202)

He indicts "contemporary theorists of this school" for locking onto small-scale contexts—classrooms, families, work groups—and thus emphasizing "intention, shared meaning, individual or distributed cognition, memory, the development of speech and so forth. This construction overlooks the equally, if not more important, larger scale such as forms of social control and power, distribution of wealth, divisions of labor and social class" (p.202).

(Yes, Vygotsky tended to study dyads in classrooms and the development of speech, Leont'ev studied memory and personality, and Luria studied a variety of phenomena including memory, cognition, speech development, and shared meaning. But I think Elhammoumi would say that they consciously situated these within the ongoing societal and cultural changes in the Soviet Union; the Western psychologists he has mentioned do not take a similar view.)

Elhammoumi turns back to the classic texts of dialectical psychology: Vygotsky and Leontiev (p.202; Luria apparently doesn't make the cut.) Like contemporary Soviet psychologist Andrei Brushlinsky, Elhammoumi sees the American adaptation of the Vygotskian tradition to be faddish and unscientific (p.203), and adds that "it is combined with an inadequate regard for the traditions within which their thought developed: the theories of the materialist conception of history and dialectical materialism" (p.203). Indeed, the concepts that these Western admirers have picked up have been secondary concepts ("the role of sign and word, speech and language, in the development of higher mental functions, consciousness and human action" and "semiotic mediation, symbolic processes, and cognitive processes"; p.203). The primary concepts were excluded: "social systems, ideologies, institutionalised ways of working, institutionalised ways of educating, dialectical materialism, alienation, social relations of production, psychological means of production, psychological mode of production of social concepts and psychological relations of production" (pp.203-204). Thus "social interaction may be named as a prerequisite to cognitive development but there is no follow-up analysis of the concrete relations of the social interaction" (p.204).

Elhammoumi names names here: "In their analysis of human cognition, socio-historicocultural psychologists (Bruner, Cole, Engestrom, Rogoff, Valsiner, van der Veer, Wertsch among others) kept out of their theoretical picture any reference to larger forms of human activity and larger processes in social life, such as the realities of economic structure, class struggle, realities of labour activities, and the realities of social interaction" (pp.204-205). He argues strenuously that Vygotsky cannot be understood without understanding dialectical materialism: after all,

Engels' chapter 'The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man' played a crucial role in clarifying Vygotsky's ideas. Engels concluded that in the process of anthropogenesis a form of activity was born and shaped the course of the human species. This activity is called labour. In the final analysis, labour marks the distinction between human individuals and animals, and marks the starting point of the historical development of human individuals. (p.205)

He quotes Vygotsky as saying that labor was the "fundamental pivot" that structures society. Therefore, Elhammoumi says, "Psychological phenomena have to be explained in terms of actual concrete life, the present social relations of productive activity and current activities" (p.205). These include "the socially organised practical activity such as work, principles of division of labour which govern human action in specific social institutions, the ways of working, ways of schooling and education, distributions of wealth and resources, and division of social classes"—and he goes on to discuss material production, institutions of power, laws, and collective action to change social institutions (p.206).

Elahmmoumi proffers six theses:

1. Human mental functions, consciousness, and activity (hereafter HMFCA) in the individual are products of the social relations of production.
2. HMFCA are mediated by signs and tools, giving rise to labor activity.
3. HMFCA can only be examined via developmental/genetic analysis, that is, dialectically.
4. HMFCA are rooted in historically organized human activity.
5. Humans make instruments and tools of production, which in turn give rise to labor activity, which then regulates the social relations of production. 
6. HMFCA are framed and shaped by culturally organized human activity. 

He summarizes: This is a materialist conception of history (p.208). And the principal axis of society is economics, which is more important than law, politics, religion, etc. (p.209). The problem with the West's adaption of socio-historicocultural psychology, he reiterates, is that it has assimilated the socio-historicocultural tradition into cognitive psychology and consequently applied it to individual activity (p.211)—"a failure, if not a contradiction" (p.211, footnote 6).

I've spent more time than I expected on this argument, partly because I'm interested in it—I think Elhammoumi makes a compelling case that dialectical materialism is at the heart of Vygotsky's psychology. But I found the argument to be repetitive, perhaps because Elhammoumi doesn't quite engage with the question of whether an ideologically pure socio-historicocultural psychology would actually be doable or tractable. My impression from skimming his other work is that Elhammoumi is thoroughly Marxist, but it seems to be asking a lot to insist that Western psychologists follow the Marxist tradition lock, stock, and barrel. Must we actually start with Capital, as Vygotsky did, to apply Vygotskian insights? If we study cultural activity, do we really need to condemn religion as Luria did when reporting on his work with the Uzbekis? Must we start with economics, the principal axis of society, in order to analyze classroom dyads? This foundation could be firmly established and built upon in the Soviet Union because everyone agreed to it (especially after Lenin established the dictatorship of the proletariat and Stalin established the Gulag). Such shared foundations are not available today; the ideological purity that Elhammoumi desires is not enforceable, and there's really no way to guide scholars to a shared path except through jeremiads such as this one. As Latour would say, there is no transportation without transformation—for socio-historicocultural theory to be picked up in the West, it has to be adapted. 

But I also think Elhammoumi overstates his case. For instance, Engestrom obviously applies an analysis along these lines in Learning by Expanding and later works, beginning with the principal contradiction between use-value and exchange-value and consistently connecting dyadic interactions with a Marxist understanding of society. I'm not clear on whether Elhammoumi simply didn't read the relevant texts or whether he decided that Engestrom wasn't Marxist enough. Either way, I think Elhammoumi's case is weakened because he doesn't seek allies in the scholars he criticizes and he doesn't acknowledge heterodox applications that take a tack similar to the one he does.

In any case, I found the book worth the price of admission for these two essays alone. If they sound interesting to you, take a look.

Reading :: The Making of Mind

The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology
By A.R. Luria

The above link goes to the version of the book I own; it looks like a later version is also available (Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind). Both were edited or coedited by Michael Cole, who worked with Luria after receiving his degree in psychology in the US; in the Introduction, Cole movingly recounts his encounters with the great psychologist and discusses how he wishes he had had a better background to truly appreciate what Luria had accomplished or why Luria kept trying to get him to read this fellow named Vygotsky.

Cole also writes an epilogue, which we'll discuss first because it provides some good context for the book. As Cole notes, this "personal account" includes few personal details; Luria briefly discusses his education and travels, but mostly focuses on how his activities fit into and reflected the development of Soviet psychology. This tack makes the book less personal, but reflects Luria's well-honed instincts for staying out of trouble as he navigated the treacherous landscape of the Soviet Union during and after the Stalin years. Reading between the lines, as Cole does, we see Luria's story as one of repeated interruptions and reinventions. For instance, by 1936, "Soviet psychology was a virtual minefield of explosive issues and broken theories" (p.216), so Luria—while staying active in psychology—went back to medical school full time, a move that allowed him to escape controversy and move into the related field of neurology (p.217). When Pavlovian reflexology was ascendant, he used its language; when his foray into cultural psychology in Kazakhstan was poorly received, he put it in a drawer for forty years. "Nowhere did Alexander Romanovich hint at the complex ideological and institutional constraints that had produced his various research careers," even when they became available to the West (p.222). We have to read between the lines and put these pieces together ourselves.

Now to Luria's part of the book. Luria starts with the 1917 Revolution, when he was only 15. The society was rapidly changing and, he recalls, everyone expected the society to make tremendous progress (p.17). During the early years of his schooling, utopian schemes were still in the air (p.19); conscientious Soviets were still trying to assimilate the details of Marxist philosophy (p.30), and Luria regrets that he did not learn it to his satisfaction. Fortunately, he soon met with two others who would become a troika dedicated to developing a uniquely Marxist psychology: Leontiev (p.31) and Vygotsky (p.39). Vygotsky, the leading Marxist in their troika, wanted to develop a system to synthesize opposing psychological schools (p.41). Here, Luria uses the H2O illustration that was used by Engels in Dialectics of Nature and later by Vygotsky in his own writings (p.42).

(Cole adds in his epilogue that Vygotsky "held that a new psychology could be derived from Marxist principles (p.204, his emphasis). Cole says that, based on his readings of a 1925 collection, Luria based his Marxist approach on Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and Engels' Anti-Duehring, while Vygotsky based his directly on Capital. Vygotsky also assimilated Engels' Dialectics of Nature as soon as it was available in 1925.)

Luria recounts that Vygotsky called his approach instrumental, cultural, and historical, emphasizing the three interrelated aspects. As Luria points out, professional anthropology was in its infancy, so their Marxist psychology incorporated that aspect (p.59), especially finding inspiration in Durkheim's claim that the mind originates in society rather than the other way around (p.58). And this brings us to Chapter 4, in which Luria recounts his trip to Uzbekistan. "The early 1930s were especially suitable for carrying out the necessary experiments," he recounts (p.60)—the nomads were being led into collectivized agriculture, literacy, and "freedom" from religion. Luria recounts his experiments here with considerable economy while still providing the headline news.

From there, Luria describes his later work: on mental development in twins (Ch.5), verbal regulation of behavior in children (Ch.6), disturbance of brain functions (Ch.7), and, in the aftermath of World War II, neuropsychological work to address brain injuries (Ch.8). Chapter 9 recounts his later work on the mechanisms of the brain.

Luria concludes with Chapter 10, "Romantic Science," in which he characterizes his brand of research as "to preserve the wealth of living reality" (p.174). He adds,

I have always admired Lenin's observation that a glass, as an object of science, can be understood only when it is viewed from many perspectives [such as physics, economics, and aesthetics]. The more we single out important relations during our description, the closer we come to the essence of the object, to an understanding of its qualities and the rules of its existence. And the more we preserve the whole wealth of its qualities, the closer we come to the inner laws that determine its existence. It was this perspective which led Karl Marx to describe the process of scientific description with the strange-sounding expression, 'ascending to the concrete.' (pp.177-178)

And with this brief description of a modernist polycontextuality, Luria draws the reminiscence to a close.

This is the second reading for me (I first read it in grad school), but this time I felt tremendous sympathy for Luria. He dealt with the treacherous Soviet landscape by reinventing himself, excelling each time, but cutting his losses when he needed to change. I'm not sure if the interruptions he faced hurt him or forced him to become ever more innovative. Contrast that path to my current scholarly milieu in rhetoric and writing studies, which seems to offer hardly any constraints or actual dangers. Here, we are able to reach farther, borrow from whom we wish, and built legacies that face few challenges (perhaps because the stakes are much lower). We are free—free to prod, poke, criticize, and build on Luria's legacy with few penalties. But we should also understand and respect how Luria and his contemporaries handled the obstacles that shaped his work.

Should you read this book? If you're interested in activity theory and its history, of course you should!

Reading :: The Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution (2nd edition)
By Sheila Fitzpatrick

The link goes to the third edition of this book, but I read the second edition (1994; reissued 2001). Fitzpatrick explains in the introduction that she has revised the book to reflect on the end of the Soviet experiment shortly after the USSR's collapse—a fact that colors our experience of the earlier chapters.

I picked up this book because I want to get a better understanding of the milieu in which activity theory developed. So, as I write the review below, I'll focus on a few key parts. But I found myself making notes throughout this book, which does a great job of discussing why the Soviet revolution happened, who the players were, and how this seemingly promising revolution lurched into the Stalinist purges.

Key to understanding the revolution was that Russia was a feudal society until the 1860s, when the peasants were freed from their legal bondage to lords or the state (p.15). Indeed, capitalism was seen as a liberalizing force by Marxists, including Lenin (p.20; 27); after all, capitalism was, in the Marxist understanding, a stage on the way to socialism. Partially for that reason, Marxists concentrated on cultivating the urban working class as their base of support rather than reaching out to the rural peasants (p.27).

Fitzgerald does a fine job of discussing how this cultivation progressed, sorting out the differences between the Mensheviks (who wanted a socialist democracy) and the Bolsheviks (who wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, arguing that if the bourgeoise were not destroyed first, democracy would simply become a tool for reinstating the bourgeoise). She describes how, in the middle of the German advance in World War I, the Tsar's failure to name a successor led to the provisional government in February 1917—an uneasy alliance between the soviets (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and other Marxist groups) and prerevolutionary powers. Many in the Bolshevik leadership, including Lenin, had been in exile in Germany; Germany was more than happy to give them safe passage back to foment revolution across enemy lines (p.50).

Eventually, the Bolsheviks overthrew this makeshift coalition and established Soviet rule. They negotiated a peace with Germany (which involved giving away enormous concessions) in early 1918 (p.70). Touchingly, the Bolsheviks were convinced that the proletariat were primed for similar revolutions across the entire world, and initially they believed that they couldn't survive without workers' revolutions in the other advanced industrial countries (p.69). When those revolutions failed to occur, they had to reassess. The dictatorship of the proletariat—which Lenin had initially seen as a transitional stage before the withering away of the state—could not pass until the worldwide revolution happened, and since it didn't happen, the dictatorship became permanent. And as dictatorships tend to do, this one began to resemble imperialism (p.70).

A few months after the Soviets negotiated an end to their war with Germany, the civil war broke out, pitting the Reds (Bolsheviks) against the Whites (anti-Bolsheviks from a variety of backgrounds and ideologies) (p.70). "The Bolsheviks saw it as a class war, both in domestic and international terms: Russian proletariat against Russian bourgeoise; international revolution (as exemplified by the Soviet Republic) against international capitalism. The Red (Bolshevik) victory in 1920 was therefore a proletarian triumph, but the bitterness of the struggle had indicated the strength and determination of the proletariat's class. ... They expected that at a more opportune moment the forces of international capitalism would return, and crush the international workers' revolution at the source" (p.70). Fitzpatrick goes on to argue that this experience ingrained a permanent fear of "capitalist encirclement" (p.70) and left a heritage of authoritarianism, coercion, and rule by fiat (p.71).

Recall that this heritage mindset was in accordance with the dictatorship of the proletariat (pp.154-155). Lenin, who was quite authoritarian in practice, argued that someday, when the conditions were right, this dictatorship could give way to the withering of the state; at that point, all would have the same ideology and the state would no longer be needed. This vision is utopian, but the Bolsheviks thought they were immune to utopianism; for them, the vision was simply scientific (p.83). But until the rest of the world underwent the proletariat revolution, the end of the vision could not come to pass. The Soviet Union was in a holding pattern, using authoritarian means to jealously guard against the contagion of international capitalism until conditions were right for freedom to spread across the globe. (In the 1930s, even industrial accidents were being blamed on foreign provocateurs; p.164.)

We see the effects of this mindset over the next two decades. Lenin suffers strokes, finally passing away in January 1924. Stalin consolidates his power, makes industrialization his issue by 1925, expels Trotsky in 1927, and starts his first five-year plan by 1929. The Soviet hatred for bureaucracy is contradicted by their need for it, resulting in permanent ambiguity (p.105) and, consequently, shifting political sands (e.g., p.126). In 1928, Party control is asserted over cultural life (p.141).

The first show trials begin in 1928, as does the program of dekulakization (p.125). The Soviets begin to focus on the large-scale transition to collectivized agriculture (p.135)—recall that their power base was among the urban proletariat, not the peasants. (Also recall that it is in 1930 that Luria examines cognitive development among the Kazakh "beneficiaries" of this transition.)

Also during this time, radical innovation becomes valorized (p.142)—a boon to those who, like Luria and Leont'ev, sought to develop a uniquely Soviet psychology.

But of course, this time is also the beginning of the Gulag  (p.147)—the network of labor camps that allowed the Soviets to simultaneously purge class enemies; supply convict labor for industrialization; and keep the populace in fear of being imprisoned, a real fear due to the ambiguity of the conditions in which such a conviction could be obtained. The NKVD enthusiastically undertook witch hunts in the upper bureaucracy in 1937-1938 (p.165).

And this is where this sad history ends. Fitzpatrick tells the story lucidly, compellingly, and with an undercurrent of sympathy—both for the revolutionary idealists and their eventual victims. If you're at all interested in the history of this revolution, certainly pick up this book.

Writing :: All Edge

Spinuzzi, C. (2015) All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

This is another entry in my series on writing, and the second book I've discussed in the series. As I complained in my first post in this series, "traditional academic publishing conceals the real work of writing," and I wanted a space to discuss what is usually concealed. In this case, let's talk about what went into writing this book.

Why did I write it? After all, I didn't have to—my previous books have allowed me to be promoted as far as I can within the university system. The bottom line is that I like writing books. They allow me to construct longer and more intricate arguments than articles do. Your mileage may vary.

How was it constructed? My previous research books (Tracing Genres through Organizations and Network) were one-case books: for both, I entered a specific activity and used the chapters to discuss different aspects of it. Reading one of these books involved reading an extended portrait of a bounded case. This is the norm for academic case studies, and it yields a fairly simple structure, which roughly looks like this:

• Introduction
• Literature review
• Methods
• 2-3 chapters discussing aspects of the case
• Conclusion and implications

Not only is this the standard outline for this kind of book, it's also the standard outline for a dissertation and a research article. (In fact, I slightly changed the order of this standard outline in Network—using a case chapter before the literature review in order to introduce the stakes and putting the methods in an appendix—and one reviewer faulted me for it!)

For All Edge, I was exploring a phenomenon (all-edge adhocracies) across cases rather than within a single case. So I decided to try a different structure, one that consciously latched cases and explanations together. The challenge was to make sure that I could systematically build on knowledge about a phenomenon, even when switching cases and focuses within the cases. So I essentially made sure that each case could both illustrate previous concepts and forecast upcoming concepts. Making this work was tricky, but once I had the outline of the idea, I was able to make it work without doing violence to the cases.

Here's the TOC for All Edge, with brief explanations for each chapter. (Forgive my old-school HTML table.)

Chapter	What it does
1    Becoming All Edge	Introduction
2    What Are All-Edge Adhocracies?	Lit review/concept Introduction to 4 characteristics of AEAs (latch to Ch.3)
3    Stage Management: The Case of Nonemployer Firms	Case: illustrates 4 characteristics of AEAs (latch to Ch.2) Forecasts 4 characteristics of organizational networks (latch to Ch.4)
4    The Foundation of All-Edge Adhocracies: Organizational Networks	Lit review/concept Introduction to 4 characteristics of organizational networks (latch to Ch.5) Analyzes Ch.3 case in terms of organizational networks (latch to Ch.3)
5    Working Alone, Together: The Case of Coworking	Case: illustrates 4 characteristics of organizational networks (latch to Ch.4) Forecasts 3 characteristics of activity systems (latch to Ch.6)
6    The Dynamic Structure of All-Edge Adhocracies: Activities	Lit review/concept Introduction to 3 characteristics of activity systems (latch to Ch.7) Analyzes Ch.5 case in terms of activity systems (latch to Ch.5)
7    Lone Wolves: The Case of Search Engine Optimization	Case: illustrates 3 characteristics of activity systems (latch to Ch.6)  Forecasts 4 configurations of activity (latch to Ch.8) Forecasts 3 integrations (latch to Ch.9)
8    The Configurations of All-Edge Adhocracies: Hierarchies, Markets, Clans, and Networks	Lit review/concept Introduction to 4 configurations of activity  Analyzes Ch.7 case in terms of 4 configurations (latch to Ch.7)
9    The Work of All-Edge Adhocracies: The Three Integrations	Lit review/concept Introduction to 3 integrations Analyzes all cases in terms of 3 integrations (latch to Ch.7)
10  The Future of All-Edge Adhocracies	Implications

The beauty of this arrangement was that it yielded some really nice integration in which the cases clearly related to each other. And the real payoff was in Ch.9, in which I was able to draw on all three of the previous cases and demonstrate that they all showcased the same basic phenomenon. Doing this was really important for ensuring that the book hung together as a whole—I didn't just want a collection of chapters based on previously published case studies, I wanted to develop a new understanding of project-oriented work.

But that doesn't mean that this outline simply occurred to me. I spent a lot of time with different configurations and rearranged the cases several times in order for everything to latch together properly!

How did I develop the style? As I've discussed in some of my other Writing :: posts (ex: Topsight), style has been a consistent concern for me. How can I write these books in a way that engages the reader appropriately? For Tracing Genres, I tried to write in a clear case study style similar to the research I had been reading in HCI; for Network, I consciously used a writing style similar to Latour's, heavy with allusion and drama; in Topsight, I adopted a conversational style that I thought would be accessible to undergraduates.

For All Edge, I wanted to write a popular text that business readers would be comfortable picking up. This choice was influenced by David Russell, who told me I should write an "airport book," one that people would feel comfortable reading on a plane. Although I am pretty sure that this book won't be another Tipping Point (my editor and I had discussions about what that sort of book would entail), I think it should be accessible for business readers, undergraduates, and people from a wide range of fields. That focus led me to develop some angles to the argument that I wouldn't have otherwise used; one example is in Ch.3, where I use the extended illustration of simulated wood on cars to describe why nonemployer firms try to look like bigger firms.

One thing I worried about when writing in this style was oversimplification. I didn't want to appropriate the common business angle of boiling everything down to a simple, easily articulable principle that could be applied everywhere. (I think it was at that moment that I realized this book would not truly be an airport book.)

How did I get a publisher interested? This was perhaps the easiest part of the process. An editor at the University of Chicago Press was interested in manuscripts from technical communication folks, so Bill Hart-Davidson put him in contact with me. We had lunch at CCCC 2013 and hit it off.

How did I do? You tell me. I've had an advance copy of the book for a week, and I'm still excited to see it on the table. I have also been picking it up now and again and reading pieces of it. I think it stands up pretty well.

But then again, I've been living this book for the past few years. (I remember sitting with Bill Hart-Davidson and Mark Zachry in Mark's living room during SIGDOC 2012, describing the complicated chapter scheme in the above table.)

But see what you think. In fact, some of you may be at CCCC2015 today, wondering what book you'll read on the plane ride back home. Maybe All Edge could be your airport book after all.

Reading :: Dialectics of Nature (second reading)

Dialectics of Nature
By Frederick Engels

I bought the 1940 version of this book, which was in its 6th printing (1971). It has an amazing cover. If you're not interested in buying a copy, though, you can read the book online at the Marxists.org repository for Engels. It's the same version.

A bit of background. The reason that I'm including the "activity theory" tag in this post is that Dialectics of Nature deeply influenced the Vygotsky Circle. In his epilogue to The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology, A.R. Luria [edit: this epilogue was actually written by Michael Cole] recounts that "When Engels' Dialectics of Nature appeared in 1925, Vygotsky immediately incorporated it into his thinking" (p.204). Indeed, Vygotsky uses one of Engels' illustrations of dialectics—two flammable elements, oxygen and hydrogen, combining to form a nonflammable substance, water—in his Thought and Language. More on this in a moment.

Dialectics of Nature was unfinished, and chunks of it are actually notes rather than a finished book. This fact is described in the book's foreword and footnotes by JBS Haldane, who has the unenviable task of pointing out and attempting to minimize the import of Engels' frequently inaccurate understanding of science as well as his reliance on sketchy 19th century science (e.g., the ether, p.201). This is a tough job. Engels essentially argues that dialectics is not just a social theory, it actually underlies all of reality. Here's how Engels begins Chapter 2, "Dialectics":

It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three: 

The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
The law of the negation of the negation. 

All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought.... The mistake lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them. This is the source of the whole forced and often outrageous treatment; the universe, willy-nilly, is made out to be arranged in accordance with a system of thought which itself is only the product of a definite stage of evolution of human thought. If we turn the thing round, then everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that look so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday. 

... 

We are not concerned here with writing a handbook of dialectics, but only with showing that the dialectical laws are really laws of development of nature, and therefore are valid also for theoretical natural science. Hence we cannot go into the inner interconnection of these laws with one another. (pp.26-27, my emphasis)

A few things here. First, Engels wanted to portray dialectics as a materialist, all-encompassing explanation for development, one that applied both socially and materially; based on my limited reading of Marx and commentaries on him, I don't think Marx would have gone this far. Second, to develop this account, Engels offered an easy-to-follow version of dialectics, almost a how-to. Third, this account provided a unique and irresistible offering to scientists and policymakers in the young Soviet Union: they were looking for a way to pursue a uniquely Soviet science, one in accordance that applied appropriate ideology and avoided bourgeois thought, and Engels provided such a way. Fourth, Engels' dialectics of nature was teleological. For instance, he claimed at the end of Ch.1 that the laws of development will always give rise to intelligent life:

But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it. (p.25)

This teleological understanding of the laws of development fit right into the Marxist (and, later, Marxist-Leninist) idea that history proceeded in inexorable stages toward a universal communism accompanied by (as Marx, Engels, and Lenin predict elsewhere) the eventual withering of the state. To the members of the young Soviet Union, this claim of certainty was heartening: they were on the right side of history, and nature herself was their ally.

Back to the question of dialectics in nature. Engels elaborates in Ch.2 on how dialectics explicate natural phenomena. Here's a molecule illustration, used to illustrate the "law of the transformation of quantity into quality" (roughly, the tipping point that causes systemic change):

If we imagine any non-living body cut up into smaller and smaller portions, at first no qualitative change occurs. But this has a limit: if we succeed, as by evaporation, in obtaining the separate molecules in the free state, then it is true that we can usually divide these still further, yet only with a complete change of quality. The molecule is decomposed into its separate atoms, which have quite different properties from those of the molecule. In the case of molecules composed of various chemical elements, atoms or molecules of these elements themselves make their appearance in the place of the compound molecule; in the case of molecules of elements, the free atoms appear, which exert quite distinct qualitative effects: the free atoms of nascent oxygen are easily able to effect what the atoms of atmospheric oxygen, bound together in the molecule, can never achieve. 

But the molecule is also qualitatively different from the mass of the body to which it belongs. It can carry out movements independently of this mass and while the latter remains apparently at rest, e.g. heat oscillations; by means of a change of position and of connection with neighbouring molecules it can change the body into an allotrope or a different state of aggregation. 

Thus we see that the purely quantitative operation of division has a limit at which it becomes transformed into a qualitative difference: the mass consists solely of molecules, but it is something essentially different from the molecule, just as the latter is different from the atom. It is this difference that is the basis for the separation of mechanics, as the science of heavenly and terrestrial masses, from physics, as the mechanics of the molecule, and from chemistry, as the physics of the atom. (pp.28-29)

In relation to the second law, he uses various examples, including attraction and repulsion (p.38), life and death (p.164), and light and darkness (p.210). The example of life and death also illustrates the negation of the negation (i.e., synthesis): dialectics involves understanding that the materials of the body persist, but the spirit doesn't, and thus dialectics abolishes superstition (well, that's that! p.164).

Let's skip around a bit. In notes, Engels discusses the illustration below, which was later discussed by Ilyenkov and Engestrom (and, later still, by me in Network) in terms of the germ-cell, the abstract that can undergird multiple concrete applications:

Induction and analysis. A striking example of how little induction can claim to be the sole or even the predominant form of scientific discovery occurs in thermodynamics: the steam-engine provided the most striking proof that one can impart heat and obtain mechanical motion. 100,000 steam-engines did not prove this more than one, but only more and more forced the physicists into the necessity of explaining it. Sadi Carnot was the first seriously to set about the task. But not by induction. He studied the steam engine, analysed it, and found that in it the process which mattered does not appear in pure form but is concealed by all sorts of subsidiary processes. He did away with these subsidiary circumstances that have no bearing on ‘the essential process, and an ideal steam-engine (or gas engine), which it is true is as little capable of being realised as, for instance, a geometrical line or surface but in Its way performs the same service as these mathematical abstractions: it presents the process in a pure, independent, and unadulterated form. And he came right up against the mechanical equivalent of heat (see the significance of his function C), which he only failed to discover and see because he believed in caloric. Here also proof of the damage done by false theories. (p.213)

Another issue into which Engels wades is that of evolution. In Ch.9, "The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man," Engels argues boldly that labor "is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself" (p.279). (Bear in mind Solzhenitsyn's critique of this assertion.) Based on Darwin, Engels argues: "owing to their way of living which meant that the hands had different functions than the feet when climbing, these apes began to lose the habit of using their hands to walk and adopted a more and more erect posture. This was the decisive step in the transition from ape to man." (p.279; cf. p.18).  He continues:

The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape to man could have been only very simple ones. The lowest savages, even those in whom regression to a more animal-like condition with a simultaneous physical degeneration can be assumed, are nevertheless far superior to these transitional beings. Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation. 

Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini. (p.281)

According to Engels, the evolution of the hand set off other developments as well, both physical and social: "the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual" (p.283). Entities had something to say to each other, so they developed the larynx and other organs of speech (p.283). The combination of labor and speech eventually yielded society (p.285) and then tools, beginning with hunting and fishing implements (p.286). Hands plus organs of speech plus the organ of the brain, Engels says, yielded the division of labor: "men became capable of executing more and more complicated operations, and were able to set themselves, and achieve, higher and higher aims. The work of each generation itself became different, more perfect and more diversified" (pp.288-289).

Note that this basic account underlies that of Leontyev, especially in terms of the origin of the division of labor. Yet JBS Haldane is kept especially busy in this chapter, footnoting aspects of the evolutionary account that are false or exaggerated. Dialectics of Nature is a foundation for first- and second-generation activity theory, a foundation that held together well in the ideological context of the Soviet Union, but that seems soft in our current milieu.

In short: I see Dialectics of Nature as a tremendously important book for understanding Soviet thought and especially the underpinnings of activity theory. But that doesn't mean that I think it's a good book. Engels cherry-picks facts from different fields and makes them fit into his thesis rather than using the facts to develop the thesis. If you'll forgive me for exaggerating a bit (as Engels does): this book has more in common with Chariots of the Gods than it does with scientific literature.

Note: I previously reviewed this book (in part) in 2005. 

Reading :: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
By Frederick Engels

This slim book is based on the last chapter of Engels' tendentious Anti-Duehring, in which Engels replied to German philosopher Eugen Karl Dühring's arguments against Marxism. Engels wrote Anti-Duehring after Marx's death, and in the foreword of the second edition of that book, stated that he hadn't spent much time revising because his work of editing Marx's remaining writings was much more important. But Anti-Duehring turned out to be exceedingly important later, since it laid the foundation for Marxism's claims to being broadly applicable to science. Engels later developed this argument in Dialectics of Nature, a book that, although never completed, had an enormous impact on the young USSR when it was published in Russian in the early 1930s.

Anti-Duehring was specifically focused on criticizing Duehring's argument, and it was quite polemic. Imagine an angry, sarcastic, and frequently ad hominem attack in the comment section of a contentious blog post and you'll come close to it. But the last chapter was less tethered to this author-centered polemic and more focused on applying dialectics to science. That chapter forms the basis for Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which (in this version) takes but 44 pages (not including the 31-page translator's introduction and the second essay included, "The Mark").

In this slim volume, Engels argues that although the German reformation, the English revolution, and the French revolution all appealed to reason and went some way toward socialism, "not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of the proletariat"; they claim to emancipate "all humanity at once"; and "they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far from heaven from earth from that of the French philosophers" (p.33). And

What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering. (p.34)

Engels goes on to criticize the results of these revolutions for appealing to reason, then yielding irrational and unjust results (pp.34-35). But he also criticizes previous efforts of socialism, which sometimes took Hegelian dialectics as a basis, and which were thus grounded in the ideal. "To make a science of socialism," he concludes, "it had first to be placed upon a real basis" (p.44).

Thus ends the first section. In the second section, Engels briefly traces the history of dialectics from the Greeks to Hegel. Materialist dialectics, the highest development, provides advantages beyond the previous versions:

Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure. 

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. But the naturalists who have learned to think dialectically are few and far between, and this conflict of the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking explains the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as well as learners, of authors and readers alike. 

An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics. (p.48, my emphasis)

Notice that here, Engels takes dialectical materialism beyond Marx's application as an analytical method and turns it into the logic of nature itself. That is, no longer is dialectics merely a way of understanding and predicting how feudalism leads to capitalism and from there to socialism. Now it's the way to truly apprehend "a exact representation of the universe." Indeed, later in this book Engels adds that "active social forces work exactly like natural forces" (p.68). Engels revisits this expanded understanding of dialectics in Dialectics of Nature; you can imagine—as I alluded earlier—how attractive this idea was to the Soviets, who could not only characterize themselves as on the right side of history, but also as having the opportunity to create a fundamental understanding of the universe.

The Hegelian system, Engels argues, although "a colossal miscarriage," was "also the last of its kind" (p.50). Once idealism was jettisoned,

The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange—in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel had freed history from metaphysics—he had made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being," instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing." 

From that time forward Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. (pp.51-52)

With Marx's two discoveries—"the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus value"—"socialism became a science" and all that's left is to work out the details (p.53).

Here, Engels begins the third section, in which he discusses the contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation (p.58). This contradiction is manifested as antagonism between bourgeouisie and proletariat (p.59). And

The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle," which Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is, that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of the planets, by collision with the center. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin. (pp.59-60; compare Schumpeter's argument addressing this point).

Engels adds that the overwork of some leads to the idleness of others (p.62). (It's worth noting here that Engels argues in Dialectics of Nature that human society and morality comes from work; by implication the idleness of capitalists is seen as fundamentally immoral and perhaps inhuman.) He quotes Marx's Capital about how the accumulation of wealth at one pole involves accumulating misery at the other pole, and adds, "And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalistic mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the battery" (p.63).

In sum, Engels concludes:

Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master—free.  

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. (p.75)

And again, in this summary, we see how Engels uses his understanding of dialectics to lay down laws that apply to society and economics, but also to Nature itself. It's a heady argument, one that establishes dialectics as a Theory of Everything. In upcoming book readings, I'll discuss how this understanding of dialectics affected the troika of young Soviet psychologists (Vygotsky, Leont'ev, and Luria) who would go on to develop activity theory.

Reading :: The Development of Mind

The Development of Mind
By A.N. Leontyev

When I first started reading about activity theory, in graduate school in the mid-1990s, I found a classic text in the Iowa State library called Problems in the Development of Mind. It had a light green cloth cover and was intimidatingly thick. And, like Vygotsky's books, it recounted some unusual experiments. For instance, the first chapter described how research subjects could be sensitized to "feel" light. More on that in a minute.

PDM was a difficult read, and at that time it was difficult to sort out some of the principles with which I would later become familiar. Compounding the problem was the fact that PDM was a collection, so it tended to repeat lines of argument in different chapters, chapters that represented different times in the author's life.

Since PDM was out of print, I couldn't buy a copy. I think I have picked it up since, at the UT library, but if so, it was before 2003, when I began this blog. Fortunately for me (and perhaps for you), a newly typeset version (by Andy Blunden) is available at the link above—not at marxists.org, for some reason, but at http://marxists.anu.edu.au . (You can also buy a print-on-demand copy at marxists.org.)

The present version has an introduction by Mike Cole. It's about 400pp. long. Below, I summarize the chapters. This summary will pick out some of the things that interest me, while skimming over different interests (e.g., children's psychological development).

Chapter 1. The Problem of the Origin of Sensation

Leontyev asks: Where does the psyche originate? He outlines some unsatisfactory lines of thought (p.1) before concluding that "We shall thus take sensation, which reflects objective external reality, as the elementary form of the psyche, and treat the problem of the origin of the psyche in this concrete form as the problem of the genesis of a ‘capacity for sensation’ or (what is the same thing) sensitivity proper." (p.4). He contrasts this Soviet approach with bourgeois psychology, which he argues leads to Cartesianism. Skipping forward for a moment, here's how he frames bourgeois psychology:

It is impossible, however, to close one’s eyes to the fact that psychological science, restricted by the framework of bourgeois philosophy, has never risen above the level of a purely metaphysical opposing of subjective psychic phenomena to the phenomena of the external world, and could therefore never penetrate their real essence, and that both here and in psychology, the clumsy cart-horse of ordinary bourgeois thought stops every time, perplexed, at the ditch that divides essence from appearance, and cause from effect.  

In reality the opposition between the subjective and objective is not absolute and a priori. Development generates their opposition, but mutual transitions are preserved between them throughout the course of development, eliminating their ‘one-sidedness’. We cannot, consequently, limit ourselves to a purely external comparison of subjective and objective data, but must discover and study this profound and concrete process whereby the objective is transformed into the subjective." (p.16)

In Leontyev's characterization throughout this book, the bourgeoisie are continually perplexed while the Soviets have the inside track. (These Soviet authors are so scornful. It's wearing.) In the Soviet view—and we can say "in reality," since Leontyev takes the Soviet view to be a clear apprehension of reality—

Mind is a property of living, highly organised material bodies that consists in their ability to reflect through their states the reality around them, which exists independently of them. That is the most general, materialist definition of mind. Psychic phenomena, i.e. sensations, presentations, concepts, are more or less precise, profound reflections, images, pictures of reality. They are consequently secondary to the reality they reflect, which is, on the contrary, primary and determinant.  

This general theoretical, philosophical proposition is basic for materialist psychology. (p.11)

Elaborating on this materialist approach:

any reflection of the objective world in psychic phenomena is nothing other than a function of a material, corporeal subject which itself is a particle of that world, in other words, that the essence of the psychic lies in the world of objective relations and not, outside it. The task of scientific psychology is above all to find that way of concretely studying these subjective phenomena that would, figuratively speaking, penetrate beneath their surface and lay bare their objective relations. (p.12) 

Following that materialist approach leads us from the lone individual to social relations:

Thus, in order to reveal the necessity of the psyche’s origin, and its further development and change, we must start not from the features of the subject’s organisation taken by itself, and not from the reality, taken by itself, i.e. in isolation from the subject, that surrounds him, but from an analysis of the process that really links them together.  

And that process is nothing other than the process of life. We have to start, consequently, with analysis of life itself. (p.17)

He cites Engels here, then goes on: Mind is "a product of life’s increasing complexity" (p.18). Life is always in a state of self-renewal. "A philosophical, dialectical materialist exposition of this property was given by Engels, who was the first to regard life as a perpetually created and destroyed contradiction existing in things and phenomena themselves, which expressed the specific form of the motion of matter that began a new phase in the evolution of the material world’s relations." (p.21).

This brings him to the emergence of subject and object. When inorganic materials interact, he says, we can't say which acts on which. But when we turn to organic, one clearly acts on the other, and therefore there's a subject and object (pp.23-25). Here, he clarifies his use of the term, which should be familiar to people who have studied activity theory:

We shall also, accordingly, limit the concept of object. It is normally used in a dual sense: in the broadest one as a thing standing in some kind of relation to other things, i.e. as ‘a thing having existence’; and in a narrower sense – as something withstanding (German Gegenstand), resistant (Latin objectum), that to which an act is directed, i.e. as something to which precisely a living creature relates itself as the object of its activity – indifferently as outward or inward activity (e. g. object of nutrition, object of labour, object of meditation, etc.). From now on we shall employ the term object precisely in this narrower, special sense. (p.28)

From here, he defines activity in an AT sense. In relation to individual organisms,

the principal ‘unit’ of a vital process is an organism’s activity; the different activities that realise its diverse vital relations with the surrounding reality are essentially determined by their object; we shall therefore differentiate between separate types of activity according to the difference in their objects. (p.29)

To explore this question further, he set up an experiment:

We could test this hypothesis experimentally. To do so we had to deprive the process correlating the two influences with one another of the form of an inner search, or inner attention that it had had. We had to turn it first into an external act, i.e. the genetically initial form of any activity. Second, we had to remove any possibility of an appeal to the subject’s consciousness when analysing the facts, i.e. the test  situation had again to be made entirely ‘clandestine’ by completely ruling out knowledge on the subjects’ part that they were being subjected to some special influence on which  they could orient themselves in the experiments. (p.98, my emphasis)

In the experiment, Leontyev constructed a booth into which a subject would put his hand. The subject could not see inside the booth and was unaware that it had a light that would shine on the subject's palm. The booth was constructed so that the subject couldn't feel heat from the light. Would people be able to sense the light? Could they be trained to become more sensitive to it without knowing what it was? The answers are yes and yes. Subjects were eventually able to detect when the light was on, although they didn't know what was causing the sensation and they had trouble even describing the sensation.

Chapter 2. The Biological and Social in Man’s Psyche

Leontyev asks: When did development of the psyche happen? The answer is drawn from Marx:

This new form of accumulation and transmission of phylogenetic (or rather, historical) experience came into being because the activity characteristic of man is productive, constructive activity. It is, above all, the basic human activity – labour, work. 

The fundamental, truly decisive importance of this fact was discovered more than 100 years ago. The discovery was made by the father of scientific socialism, Karl Marx. 

Labour, implementing the process of production (in both the forms of the latter, material and intellectual), is crystallised in its product. That which is manifested on the part of the subject in unrest or movement (Unruhe) appears in the product in the form of ‘a fixed quality without motion’ or ‘a fixed, immobile characteristic’ (ruhende Eigenschaft), in the form of being or a material object. (p.116, my emphasis)

So we have two basic Marxist claims being incorporated directly into Soviet psychology: (1) the psyche emerged through human labor and (2) human labor is crystallized in tools. Regarding (1), Leontyev elaborates: "Intercourse in its primary form, in the form of joint activity, or of oral communication, is thus a second sine qua non of individuals’ mastering of the achievements of mankind’s socio-historical evolution" (p.118).

On pp.119-122, he describes an experiment that suggests that people who are raised in a culture with a tonal language develop pitch sensitivity and do not suffer from tone deafness. The experimenters then developed ways to teach people perfect pitch. This experiment leads him to discuss the concept of functional organs:

Their first feature is that, once formed, they then function as a single organ. The processes that they effect, therefore, seem, from the subjective, phenomenological angle, to be manifestations of elementary innate capacities. Such, for example, are the processes of directly grasping spatial, quantitative, or logical structures (‘gestalts’).  

Their second feature is their stability. Although they are formed through the closing of cerebral links, these associations do not fade, like ordinary conditioned reflexes.  ...(p.134)

A third feature of the functional organs with which we are concerned is that they are formed differently than simple chains of reflexes or ‘dynamic stereotypes’. The associations constituting them do not simply trace or copy the sequence of the external stimuli but unite independent reflex processes with their motor effects in a single complex reflex act. These ‘compound’ acts at first always have developed, external motor components that are then inhibited, while the act as a whole, in changing its original structure, is curtailed and made more and more automatic. As a result of these successive transformations a stable constellation also arises that functions as an integral organ, as allegedly innate capacity.  

Finally a fourth feature consists in the point, as was specially emphasised by our last series of experiments, that, while corresponding to one and the same task, they may have a different structure, which explains the almost unlimited capacity for compensation that has been observed in the sphere of the development of specifically human functions.(p.135)

He concludes: "man’s biologically inherited qualities do not govern his psychic capacities. Man’s capabilities are not virtually contained in his brain. Virtually the brain includes not certain, specifically human capacities of some kind or another, but only the capacity to form these capacities" (p.135). And as a coda, he explains: "I chose the problem of the biological and social because there are still views that affirm a fatalistic conditioning of people’s psyche by biological inheritance. These views spread ideas in psychology of racial and national discrimination, and the right to genocide and destructive wars. They threaten mankind’s peace and security, and they are in flagrant contradiction with the objective findings of scientific psychological research" (p.136).

Chapter 3. An Outline of the Evolution of the Psyche
This chapter turned out to be the most fruitful for me in trying to understand activity theory, so my write-up is rather long and includes several block quotes copied from the PDF.

Leontyev begins by discussing stimulus-response work with animals. When there's a barrier between fish and food, they learn by trial and error how to get around that barrier. When the barrier is removed, they retain the learned behavior for a while. Mammals in the same situation, however, go directly to the food. Leontyev relates this illustration to the levels of activity:

This means that the influence to which mammals’ activity is directed no longer merges with influences from the barrier in them, but both operate separately from one another for them. The direction and end result of the activity depends on the former, while the way it is done, i.e. the mode in which it is performed (e.g. by going around the obstacle) depends on the latter. This special make-up or aspect of activity, which corresponds to the conditions in which the object exciting it is presented, we shall call operation. 

It is this distinguishing of operations in activity that indicates that properties affecting an animal, which previously seemed to be all of a muchness to it, begin to fall into groups: on the one hand interconnected properties emerge that characterise the object to which the activity is directed, while on the other hand properties emerge of objects that determine the mode of the activity itself, i.e. the operation. Whereas differentiation of the affecting properties was linked at the stage of the elementary sensory psyche with their simple uniting around the dominant stimulus, the integrating of the affective properties into a single integral image, and their unification as the properties of one and the same thing now arise for the first time. The surrounding reality is now reflected by the animal in the form of more or less separated images of separate things. (p.155, my emphasis)

That is, the object and operations are dialectically related, defining each other.

Let's get beyond fish to more complex forms of life:

When we pass to the third, highest stage of animal evolution we thus observe a new complication in the structure of activity. The activity previously merged in a single process is now differentiated into two phases, one of preparation and one of accomplishment. The existence of a preparatory phase also constitutes a characteristic feature of intellectual behaviour. Intellect arises for the first time, consequently, when preparation of the possibility to perform some operation or habit commences. (pp.169-170, my emphasis).

Those who have read much on AT will recognize these two phases as corresponding to two aspects of the object: projective and objective. This distinction is extended and refined in human activity, he says, again justifying his claim in Marx and Engels:

When man enters into any relation with a thing, he distinguishes between the objective subject-matter of the relation on the one hand and, on the other hand, his relation to it per se. And that division does not exist in animals. ‘The animal,’ Marx and Engels said, ‘does not “relate” itself to anything, it does not “relate” itself at all. 

... We can observe the activity of a few, sometimes of many, animals together, but we never observe joint activity among them, i.e. joint in the sense of the word as we employ it when speaking of men’s activity. (p.176, my emphasis).

Animals, he says, do not establish a division of labor. Instinct doesn't count (e.g., bees) (p.177).

The transition to human consciousness, which is underlain by a transition to human forms of life, and to human labour activity, social by its very nature, is not simply associated with a change in the fundamental structure of activity and the rise of a new form of reflecting reality; man’s psyche is not only emancipated from those features that are common to all the stages of animals’ psychic evolution that we have considered, and has not only acquired qualitatively new features, but (and this is the main point) the laws themselves that govern its evolution were altered with the transition to man. While the general laws governing the laws of the psyche’s evolution were those of biological evolution throughout the animal kingdom, with the transition to man the evolution of the psyche began to be governed by laws of socio-historical development. (pp.179-80, my emphasis).

"The transition to consciousness," Leontyev goes on, "is the beginning of a new, higher stage in the evolution of the psyche. In contrast to the psychic reflection peculiar to animals, conscious reflection is reflection of material reality in its separateness from the subject’s actual attitudes to it, i.e. reflection that distinguishes its objective stable properties." And again, quoting Engels, he traces this transition to labor:

The cause underlying the humanising of man’s animal-like ancestors is the emergence of labour and the formation of human society on its basis. ‘Labour,’ Engels wrote, ‘created man himself’. Labour also created man’s consciousness. The origin and development of labour, this first and basic condition for the existence of man, led to a change in his brain, his organs of external activity, and his sense organs, and their humanisation. (p.181).

And

Man’s sense organs were also perfected through labour and in connection with the development of the brain. Like the organs of external activity they acquired qualitatively new features (p.183).

Like Engels, Leontyev sounds a bit teleological here and in some other points of his work:

The rise of labour was prepared by the whole preceding course of evolution, of course. The gradual transition to an upright posture, rudiments of which are distinctly observed even in the anthropoid apes that now exist, and the forming in connection with that of specially mobile anterior extremities adapted to grasping objects, and more and more freed from the function of walking, which was due to the mode of life led by man’s animal forebears – all created the physical preconditions for the possibility of performing complicated labour operations. 

The labour process was also prepared for from another aspect. It was only possible for labour to emerge in animals that lived in whole groups and which had sufficiently developed forms of joint life, although those forms were, of course, very remote even from the most primitive forms of human, social life. (p.184, my emphasis)

Labor, then, becomes critical for us to understand if we are to make any headway on mind (pun intended).

The two following features are above all typical of labour. The first is the use and making of tools. ‘Labour,’ Engels said, ‘begins with the making of tools.’ 

The second feature of the labour process is that it is performed in conditions of joint, collective activity, so that man functions in this process not only in a certain relationship with nature but also to other people, members of a given society. Only through a relation with other people does man relate to nature itself, which means that labour appears from the very beginning as a process mediated by tools (in the broad sense) and at the same time mediated socially. (p.185)

And

human labour is social activity from the beginning, based on the co-operation of individuals, assuming a technical division, even though rudimentary, of labour functions; labour consequently is a process of action on nature linking together its participants, and mediating their contact (pp.185-86).

Here, Leontyev gives an account of how the division of labor arose at dawn of man. He provides the famous illustration of division of labor, in which hunters, bush-beaters, and cooks divided the complex labor of hunting for food (p.186). Here's the frequently quoted passage:

When a member of a group performs his labour activity he also does it to satisfy one of his needs. A beater, for example, taking part in a primaeval collective hunt, was stimulated by a need for food or, perhaps, a need for clothing, which the skin of the dead animal would meet for him. At what, however, was his activity directly aimed? It may have been directed, for example, at frightening a herd of animals and sending them toward other hunters, hiding in ambush. That, properly speaking, is what should be the result of the activity of this man. And the activity of this individual member of the hunt ends with that. The rest is completed by the other members. This result, i.e. the frightening of game, etc. understandably does not in itself, and may not, lead to satisfaction of the beater’s need for food, or the skin of the animal. What the processes of his activity were directed to did not, consequently, coincide with what stimulated them, i.e. did not coincide with the motive of his activity; the two were divided from one another in this instance. Processes, the object and motive of which do not coincide with one another, we shall call ‘actions’. We can say, for example, that the beater’s activity is the hunt, and the frightening of game his action.

How is it possible for action to arise, i.e. for there to be a division between the object of activity and its motive? It obviously only becomes possible in a joint, collective process of acting on nature. The product of the process as a whole, which meets the need of the group, also leads to satisfaction of the needs of the separate individual as well, although he himself may not perform the final operations (e.g. the direct attack on the game and the killing of it), which directly lead to possession of the object of the given need. Genetically (i.e. in its origin) the separation of the object and motive of individual activity is a result of the disarticulating of the separate operations from a previously complex, polyphase, but single activity. These same separate operations, by now completing the content of the individual’s given activity, are also transformed into independent actions for him, although they continue, as regards the collective labour process as a whole, of course, to be only some of its partial links. (p.187, my emphasis)

and

A beater’s frightening of game leads to satisfaction of his need for it not at all because such are the natural conditions of the given material situation; rather the contrary, these conditions are such in normal cases that the individual’s frightening of game eliminates his chance of catching it. In that case what unites the direct result of this activity with its final outcome? Obviously, nothing other than the given individual’s relation with the other members of the group, by virtue of which he gets his share of the bag from them, i.e. part of the product of their joint labour activity. This relationship, this connection is realised through the activity of other people, which means that it is the activity of other people that constitutes the objective basis of the specific structure of the human individual’s activity, means that historically, i.e. through its genesis, the connection between the motive and the object of an action reflects objective social connections and relations rather than natural ones (pp.188-189, my emphasis).

Thus, he says, the psyche emerges from joint labor: "together with the birth of action, this main ‘unit’ in human activity, there also arises the main unit, social in nature, of the human psyche, i.e. the rational meaning for man of that which his activity is directed to" (p.189). And here's something I missed in my earlier readings: The subject emerges from the tension between object and motive: 

Now the link between the object of an action (its objective) and what stimulates it (its motive) is revealed for the first time to the subject. It is revealed to him in its directly sensory form, i.e. in the form of the activity of a human work group. This activity is also now no longer reflected in man’s head in its subjective oneness with the object but as the subject’s objective, practical relation with it (p.190).

Leontyev traces development of consciousness to this point.

If you're keeping score at home, you'll note that Leontyev has discussed the following elements of an activity system: the object (which defines the activity), the motive (which orients the activity), the subject (which emerges from the tensions between the object and motive), and the division of labor (which defines the subjects' roles and relates them to the object and motive). Now we move to another element, tools:

Labour not only alters the general structure of man’s activity, not only gives rise to goal-directed actions, but in the process also qualitatively alters the content of the activity, what we call operations. 

This alteration of operations takes place in connection with the origin and evolution of tools. Man’s labour operations are remarkable in fact in that they are performed with the aid of tools or instruments of labour. (p.191, my emphasis)

Leontyev discusses tools at some length:

a tool is not only an object that has a certain form and possesses certain physical properties, but it is, at the same time, a social object, i.e. an object that has a certain mode of use developed socially in the course of collective labour and reinforced by same. When we look at an axe, for example, as a tool and not simply as a physical body, it is not only two interconnected parts (the part we call the helve, and the one that is the working part proper), but is at the same time a socially developed means of action, namely the labour operations that have been given material shape, are crystallised, as it were, in it. That is why to handle a tool means not simply to hold it but also to know how to use it. (p.192, my emphasis)

Again, we see the Marxist idea of the tool as crystallized labor, specifically the embedding of operations. I'll briefly note here that this account is problematic for understanding improvisational and innovative repurposing of tools. 

Like Vygotsky, Leontyev sees language as the substrate of consciousness, developing from labor activity:

What is this concrete form in which men’s consciousness of the objective world around them really occurs? It is language, which is, in the words of Marx and Engels, men’s ‘practical, real consciousness’.37 Consciousness is therefore inseparable from language. Language, like man’s consciousness also, arises solely in the labour process, and together with it. Language, like consciousness, is a product of men’s activity, a product of the group; only therefore does it also exist for the individual person" (p.194)

He quotes Marx and Engels on the point and claims that language developed as people coordinated labor (p.195). 

Yet, he acknowledges, labor relations change, and that must mean that the psyche changes:

We have seen that the transition to this higher type of psyche comes about as a consequence of the emergence of men’s production relations. The features of men’s psyche are also determined by the features of these relations and depend on them. We know at the same time that production relations alter, that the production relations of primitive society are one thing and those, for example, of capitalist society are quite another matter. It can be taken, therefore, that with a radical change in men’s production relations their consciousness is also altered in a radical way and becomes qualitatively different. The task is to find the concrete psychological features of these different types of consciousness (p.199).

He takes this chance to lay into capitalism for portraying psyche as immutable. But he also goes on to speculate on p.217 that primitive and modern psyches are different. He cites the example of Indians who lay a deer on a sheaf of wheat because they believe that deer came from wheat. "The resemblance of the meanings ‘deer’ and ‘wheat’ is obviously, from this point of view, only the form of comprehending the carrying over of their sense, i.e. the transfer of the group’s practical relations from deer to wheat. This transfer, which reflects the transition from a predominance of hunting and herding to a predominance of plant growing (which leads to an important change of mutual relations within society – which is now already tribal), is also consolidated ideologically in the ceremony described" (p.217). (Alert readers will recognize this thesis from Luria's 1930s experiments in Kazakhstan, but may also recognize some difficulties with this thesis.)

In capitalism, he says, the form of labor relations (specifically, capitalism's essential contradiction between use value and exchange value) creates a dualistic psyche:

The doctor who buys a practice in some little provincial place may be very seriously trying to reduce his fellow citizens’ suffering from illness, and may see his calling in just that. He must, however, want the number of the sick to increase, because his life and practical opportunity to follow his calling depend on that. 

This dualism distorts man’s most elementary feelings. Even love proves capable of acquiring the most ugly forms, not to mention love of money, which can become a veritable passion. (p.228)

Indeed, in class society, "Man strives to eliminate the disintegrated nature of his consciousness. He does not strive for adequacy and truthfulness in his consciousness, moreover, in any way from an abstract love for truth. It is his striving for true life that is expressed in that; that is why it is so intent, and why it sometimes imparts such a really dramatic character to the processes of becoming conscious – to the most cherished processes of man’s ‘inner life’. "  (p.234). Leontyev sees communism as the cure for this divided consciousness. He of course does not discuss the Soviet phenomenon of "double consciousness." 

Chapter 4. The Historical Approach to Study of the Human Psyche

I'll be brief with this chapter. Leontyev distinguishes the individualistic, biological strain of psychology with the sociohistorical strain that he represents. "Psychological work that regards man primarily as a social being and seeks the answers to his inherent mental features in the history of society has a different approach in principle. This work constitutes a sociological, historical trend in psychology, in contrast to the naturalistic, biological trend." (p.248). He discusses Vygotsky's contributions as an important part of this development (pp.252-253).

Chapter 5. The Development of Higher Forms of Memory

Leontyev undertakes a study of memory in sociohistorical terms.  In contrast to a purely biological account, "modern man’s memory is the same product of his cultural, social development as his speech, writing, or counting" (pp.295-296). Echoing Vygotsky, he argues that higher forms of memory are mediated. Indeed, "The difference between an instrument of labour and the instrumental aid primitive man fashions for his memory is simply that while the former is always directed at external nature, he masters his own behaviour by means of the latter. This difference, however, is of tremendous fundamental significance" (p.297). Also like Vygotsky, he discusses external memory aids such as knots, then describes a card-mediated memory experiment similar to Vygotsky's (pp.307-326).

He concludes: "Man, by interacting with his social environment, reconstructs his behaviour; assimilating the behaviour of other people by means of special stimuli, he acquires the capacity to master his own behaviour as well; previously interpsychological processes, for instance, are converted into intrapsychological ones" (pp.327).

Chapter 6. The Psychological Principles of Preschool Play

I'm not interested in preschool play, so let's skip it.

Chapter 7. The Theory of the Development of the Child’s Psyche

I'm not terribly interested in children's psyches either, but let's pull out a couple of passages that apply more generally. Regarding the term activity, he again emphasizes that an activity is that which is oriented to the object:

We do not call every process activity. By this term we mean only those processes which, by realising man’s relations with the world, meet a special need corresponding to it. We do not properly call such a process as, for example, remembering, activity, because it does not, as a rule, in itself, realise any independent relation with the world and does not meet any special need.  

By activity we mean processes that are psychologically characterised by what the process as a whole is directed to (its object) always coinciding with the objective that stimulates the subject to this activity, i.e. the motive.  (p.363, my emphasis)

Similarly, he again defines action, and makes the point that actions can become activities:

"We distinguish the process we call action from activity. An act or action is a process whose motive does not coincide with its object (i.e. with what it is directed to), but lies in the activity of which it forms part. ... 

Because the object of an action does not itself prompt to act, it is necessary for action to arise and to be accomplishable, for its object to appear to the subject in its relation to the motive of the activity of which it forms part. This relation is also reflected by the subject, moreover, in a quite definite form, namely in the form of awareness of the object of the action as a goal. The object of an action is therefore nothing other than its recognised direct goal. ... 

There is a particular relation between activity and action. The motive of activity, by being shifted, may pass to the object (goal) of the action, with the result that the action is transformed into an activity. This is an exceptionally important point. This is the way new activities and new relations with reality arise. This process is precisely the concrete, psychological basis on which changes in the leading activity occur and consequently the transitions from one stage of development to another." (p.364, my emphasis).

He revisits operations:

By operations we mean the mode of performing an act. An operation is the necessary content of any action but it is not identical with the latter. One and the same action may be performed by different operations, and conversely, one and the same operation may sometimes realise different actions. That is because an operation depends on the conditions in which the action’s goal is given, while an action is determined by the goal. (p.369, my emphasis)

And "More precisely, the operation is determined by the task, i.e. the goal, given in conditions requiring a certain mode of action." Operations arise as actions (p.369), but operations can turn back into actions: 

An action, on being converted into an operation, is reduced as it were in the rank it occupies in the general structure of activity, but that does not mean that it is simplified. In becoming an operation it falls out of the round of conscient processes, but retains the general features of a conscious process, and at any moment, for example with a difficulty, may again become conscious. (p.375).

Chapter 8. Child Development and the Problem of Mental Deficiency

Leontyev argues here that mental deficiency is often the result of neglected or poor development, and can be reversed. This argument goes back to his general argument that the psyche is a sociohistorical phenomenon:

The advances of human historical development were reinforced and passed on from generation to generation in a special form, namely in an exoteric, external form.  

This new form of the accumulation of phylogenetic (or rather socio-historical) experience arose in man because the activity specific to him is productive activity. Such, above all, is men’s main activity, their work. (p.383)

And 

Every object made by man – from a hand tool to the modern electronic computer – embodies mankind’s historical experience and at the same time also embodies the mental aptitudes moulded in this experience. This point conies out even more clearly perhaps in language, science, and works of art. (p.383)

For children, this world of objects isn't determinate but appropriable:

The child does not adapt itself to the world of human objects and phenomena around it, but makes it its own, i.e. appropriates it.  

The difference between adaptation in the sense that the term is used in regard to animals, and appropriation, is as follows: biological adaptation is change of the subject’s species properties and capacities and of its congenital behaviour caused by the requirements of the environment. Appropriation is another matter. It is a process that has as its end result the individual’s reproduction of historically formed human properties, capacities, and modes of behaviour. In other words it is a process through which what is achieved in animals by the action of heredity, namely the transmission of advances in the species’ development to the individual, takes place in the child. (p.384)

In the rest of the chapter, he applies this argument to children's mental development and especially delayed development.

Chapter 9. Activity and Consciousness

In this final chapter, Leontyev discusses the phenomenon of consciousness. He describes activity as a unit: "Activity is a non-additive unit of the corporeal, material life of the material subject. In the narrower sense, i.e., on the psychological plane, it is a unit of life, mediated by mental reflection, by an image, whose real function is to orientate the subject in the objective world." (p.397).

He revisits the idea of activity again, emphasizing once more (in an often-quoted passage) how an activity is oriented to an object:

The basic, constituent feature of activity is that it has an object. In fact, the very concept of activity (doing, Tätigkeit) implies the concept of the object of activity. The expression “objectless activity” has no meaning at all. Activity may appear to be objectless, but the scientific investigation of activity necessarily demands the discovery of its object. Moreover, the object of activity appears in two forms: first, in its independent existence, commanding the activity of the subject, and second, as the mental image of the object, as the product of the subject’s “detection” of its properties, which is effected by the activity of the subject and cannot be effected otherwise. (p.397, my emphasis)

Again, the distinguishing characteristic of the activity is its object:

The main thing that distinguishes one activity from another lies in the difference between their objects. It is the object of activity that endows it with a certain orientation. In the terminology I have been using the object of activity is its motive. Naturally, this may be both material and ideal; it may be given in perception or it may exist only in imagination, in the mind. (p.400)

And activities and their actions are coconstitutive, yet separable:

At the same time activity and action are both genuine and, moreover, non-coincidental realities, because one and the same action may realize various activities, may pass from one activity to another, thus revealing its relative independence. This is due to the fact that the given action may have quite different motives, i.e., it may realize completely different activities. And one and the same motive may generate various goals and hence various actions. (p.401)

Notice that this is a potential opening to discuss multiplicity, but mainly in terms of interpenetrating activities. I don't think Leontyev would entertain multiplicity in the sense of authentically overlapping social realities, given his anchoring to Marx and Engels. Seriously entertaining multiplicity would entail setting some limits to the foundational claims of Marxism.

Later, we get more on the objective vs projective nature of the object:

Historically the need for such a “presentation” of the mental image to the subject arises only during the transition from the adaptive activity of animals to the productive, labour activity that is peculiar to man. The product to which activity is now directed does not yet actually exist. So it can regulate activity only if it is presented to the subject in such a form that enables him to compare it with the original material (object of labour) and with its intermediate transformations. What is more, the mental image of the product as a goal must exist for the subject in such a way that he can act with this image – modify it according to the conditions at hand. Such images are conscious images, conscious notions or, in other words, the phenomena of consciousness. (pp.402-403, my emphasis)

And here's the last word: "Labour activity is imprinted, perpetuated in its product" (p.403).

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This book is as interesting—and as thick—as I remember. But in the intervening 20 years (!), I have read far more broadly and am seeing different connections. Some of those connections are noted here, but more broadly, I am seeing both the brilliance and the limits of Leontyev's work. Specifically, the work's anchoring in Marx and Engels is as disturbing to me here as it was in my review of Leontyev's other major work: an anchor can keep the boat steady, but it can also cause problems when the tide comes in, and the ideological conditions of the USSR meant that Leontyev could allow no slack in the anchor chain. Consequently, the work has a large dose of monoperspectivism and at least hints of teleology, posing problems when applying it to current problems.