Andy Blunden. September 2008
It is shown that Activity Theory has never formed an adequate conception of its subject matter suitable for connecting psychological studies with cultural and historical phenomena. A new unit of analysis will be proposed which opens the way to an interdisciplinary theory of activity for the human sciences.
Vasily Davydov was right when he said that activity is an ‘interdisciplinary’ concept:
“I always argue that the problem of activity and the concept of activity are interdisciplinary by nature. There should be specified philosophical, sociological, culturological, psychological and physiological aspects here. That is why the issue of activity is not necessarily connected with psychology as a profession. It is connected at present because in the course of our history activity turned out to be the thing on which our prominent psychologists focused their attention as early as in the Soviet Union days. Things just turned out this way.” (Davydov, 1999: 50, emphasis added)
And surely Marx meant it in that way when he used the word ‘activity’ in the Theses on Feuerbach, taking activity together with ‘circumstances’ as the subject matter of science:
“The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity [Tätigkeit] or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” (Theses on Feuerbach, 3)
and:
“All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” (Theses on Feuerbach, 8)
In The German Ideology, written at about the same time, Marx defined the “real premises” for science as follows, again linking activity with its material conditions:
“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.” (The German Ideology, §1a)
Because of the ‘historical accident’ referred to by Davydov, the concept of ‘activity’ came to be linked specifically to psychology. Despite the efforts of CHAT (Cultural-Historical Activity Theory) researchers, the concept as it has been developed is inadequate beyond the domain of psychology, and is inadequate for grasping the connection between psychology and the wider social life of a community. This inadequacy will be demonstrated below, and an alternative offered which would render the concept of activity more useful.
The idea of ‘Activity Theory’ is associated with the name of AN Leontyev, so before going into his analysis, let us begin with his definition of activity:
“[T]he main question is what these processes are that mediate the influences of the objective world reflected in the human brain. The basic answer to this question lies in acknowledging that these processes are those that realise a person’s actual life in the objective world by which he is surrounded, his social being in all the richness and variety of its forms. In other words, these processes are his activity.
“This proposition requires the further definition that by activity we mean not the dynamics of the nervous, physiological processes that realise this activity. A distinction must be drawn between the dynamics and structure of mental processes and the language that describes them, on the one hand, and the dynamics and structure of the subject’s activity and the language describing them, on the other.
“Thus in dealing with the problem of how consciousness is determined we are confronted with the following alternative, either to accept the view implied in the ‘axiom of immediacy’, i.e., proceed from the ‘object-subject’ pattern (or the ‘stimulus-response’ pattern, which is the same thing), or to proceed from a pattern which includes a third, connecting link – the activity of the subject (and, correspondingly, its means and mode of appearance), a link which mediates their interconnections, that is to say, to proceed from the ‘subject-activity-object’ pattern. ... consciousness is determined by being, which, in the words of Marx, is nothing else but the process of the actual life of people.” (Leontyev AN, 1977)
So activity is the “actual life” of people, clarified with the qualification that it is what is mediating between a person’s consciousness and how they change themselves and the world; it is what they are doing (Tätigkeit). So broadly, it is purposive activity, rather than the autonomous physiological processes which realise this activity. Calling upon the Kantian concepts of subject and object, Leontyev defines activity as what mediates between the two. In fact, his definition of activity is comprehensible only in terms of already given concepts of subject and object, or as part of a redefinition of the subject-object relation in which each of the three terms are mutually constitutive.
But for Leontyev, activity is a category which includes the activity of animals, and in this sense his concept of ‘subject’ differs from that of Kant. The subject-activity-object relationship exists wherever a living thing, as ‘subject’, has a need which lies outside of itself, satisfaction of which is the object of the subject’s activity, stimulated by the object:
“A basic or, as is sometimes said, a constituting characteristic of activity is its objectivity. Properly, the concept of its object (Gegenständ) is already implicitly contained in the very concept of activity. The expression ‘objectless activity’ is devoid of any meaning. Activity may seem objectless, but scientific investigation of activity necessarily requires discovering its object. Thus, the object of activity is twofold: first, in its independent existence as subordinating to itself and transforming the activity of the subject; second, as an image of the object, as a product of its property of psychological reflection that is realized as an activity of the subject and cannot exist otherwise.” (Leontyev AN, 1978)
For AN Leontyev, human activity is just a special case of the more general category of this natural, object-oriented activity.
“Further evolution of behavior and the psyche of animals may be adequately understood specifically as a history of the development of the objective content of activity. At every new stage there appeared an ever more complete subordination of effect or processes of activity to objective connections and relations of the properties of the objects with which the animals interacted.” (AN Leontyev 1978)
What distinguishes specifically human activity is that human needs are themselves products of human activity, i.e., artefacts. Although artefacts are the means of pursuing and forming an image of its object, this is a matter of secondary significance for Leontyev; it is needs that play the definitive role.
This is Leontyev’s general conception of object-oriented activity. Not limited to human life, activity is so ubiquitous that it cannot be seen as any specific relation. Activity is neither object nor method of research, but rather is a general conception of the nature of the underlying reality, what is called the ‘premises’ of a science.
The ‘premises’ of a science are the conception the researcher has of the ultimate reality underlying the field of phenomena with which she is concerned. Analytical science generally locates itself somewhere between naïve realism (a natural world, existing independently of human activity, and obedient to natural laws), and Kantian scepticism (a subjective domain of appearances, manifesting a thing-in-itself beyond perception). For Hegel, the premises were Spirit (Geist), which he described as “the nature of human beings en masse,” but which he conceived of as pure thought. For CS Peirce, everything was semiosis – sign activity.
But for Marx, the “real premises” were “the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live,” and this conception is shared by CHAT. ‘Activity’ is to be taken as an interdisciplinary concept, because for Marxists it is part of the premises for all science, including even the natural sciences.
To be clear, there cannot really be any question of a ‘science of activity’ since this would amount to a science of everything. In investigating the basis for an ‘interdisciplinary’ concept of activity, the aim is (1) to construct a richer definition of activity as premises for both psychological and sociological sciences, and (2) offer a clear conception of those problems lying on the boundary between psychology and sociology. In summary, if we are to formulate an interdisciplinary concept of activity, then we must:
(1) take the individuals and the material conditions, i.e., the constellation of material artefacts, along with activity, as our premises.
(2) form a clear conception of the essential problem of the interconnection of social life and individual consciousness.
Central to both problems is the conception of what constitutes ‘an activity’, that is, of what constitutes a unit of social life, from the standpoint of activity.
Central to formulating the foundations of any science is the idea of ‘unit of analysis’, as it is called in the CHAT tradition, following Vygotsky. This is the requirement to form a clear conception of the class of problems to be investigated, by getting to the root of it, so to speak. It is what Marx meant when he referred to the commodity relation as the ‘cell’.
“But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour – or value-form of the commodity – is the economic cell-form.” (Marx, Preface to first edition of Capital, 1867)
Note that Marx derived the whole range of phenomena of capitalism from the commodity relation, despite the fact that exchange of commodities is a relatively rare occurrence in developed capitalism: invariably commodities are purchased and sold. Marx derived money as a special limiting case of commodity; but if instead, he had begun with money, then he would have been quite unable to disclose the ‘mystery’ of capital, because, by starting with such a developed conception as ‘money’, he would have missed the very processes of differentiation and development which make the relations of capital comprehensible. Exchange of commodities is the most primitive relation which, when further developed, unfolds into purchase and sale, contract, the market, the accumulation of capital, wage-labour, exploitation, credit, interest and so on and so forth.
It is the same idea as what Hegel called the Notion or conception of a thing, as he explained in relation to the foundations of the science of right (in German, Recht = right or law):
“The science of right ... must develop the idea, which is the reason of an object, out of the conception. It is the same thing to say that it must regard the peculiar internal development of the thing itself.” (Hegel 1821, §2)
But in the “Philosophy of Right,” Hegel dealt not just with right or law, with the entire range of problems which arise in the creation of a modern nation-state, on the basis that all the social and political phenomena of the modern nation state grow out of the notion of private property, which he calls ‘abstract right’ – the cell or unit of analysis for what Hegel called ‘objective spirit’.
Marx and Hegel spent considerable labour to identify, not the most typical or the simplest unit of the complex they were studying, but the most primitive relation, the relation which once it comes into being, sets in train the series of developments which produces the whole complex. Exchange of commodities or the recognition of private property are each a kind of ‘virus’ which, once established, spreads and replicates itself and transforms the whole organism.
The definition of a ‘unit of analysis’ allows a science to be elaborated rationally (as opposed to empirically), and sheds light of a particular kind on the class of problems which prompted it. The type of problems relevant to an interdisciplinary conception of activity include: the impact of economic and social conditions, cultural difference, schooling practices, social norms and institutions, etc., on psychological problems such as learning, anti-social behaviour and so on, and the source of changes in Zeitgeist, problems of political communication, mass movements and so on. These are typical problems which span psychology and sociology, and on which these considerations should shed some light. This is what ought to be expected of an interdisciplinary theory of activity.
An interdisciplinary science of activity requires a conception of “an activity,” that is to say, a unit of analysis which represents just one component of the totality of social life. How can we analyse activity, the social life of human beings? What is a ‘unit’ of social life? And what are the types of activity and according to what criteria do we differentiate them? Unless we can determine the elements and types of activity from the definition we make of an activity, then we will obliged to categorise activity according to arbitrary and extraneous criteria. This would lead to an uncritical and empiricist description of society.
Although activity forms an underlying reality for all the sciences, it has only been Marxist psychology and Marxist political economy which have explicitly taken up the concept, avoiding both naïve realism and idealist relativism. But these two sciences which have emerged from common origins are quite foreign to one another at any but the most superficial level. A minimal requirement for an interdisciplinary science of activity would be that one and the same conception of ‘an activity’ should be consistent with both cultural-historical psychology and Marx’s critique of political economy.
In line with what Marx had to say on this topic, and what is in any case self-evident, activity has to be taken together with the real human beings active in that activity, and the actual constellation of material culture constituted by that activity. Amongst other things, this excludes the possibility of beginning with hypothetical situations belonging to a mythological past or imputing to nature relations and laws which are to be later rediscovered in human activity: it means beginning with human beings of the kind we find before us today, and whose propensities we wish to disclose.
The indispensable characteristics of the unit of analysis are:
(1) It is the conception of a singular, indivisible thing (not a collection or combination), but it may be a particular kind of some genus of thing (such word meaning, commodity relation, private property, conditioned reflex).
If it is collection or combination, this simply means that we have not started at the real beginning, having already uncritically accepted as given, component concepts and relations. As a particular, it may be or not be (for example a relation may be one of fair exchange or one of duty, a reflex conditioned or unconditional) and this particularisation points to a process of genesis, an inner movement and tension.
(2) It exhibits the essential properties of a class of more developed phenomena.
The point is discovering which thing exhibits the essential properties of a class of phenomena which is of interest. The discovery of the cell is always the outcome of a search for the essential relation behind a persistent series of unresolved problems. As a cell, it is not a typical relation, but rather the most primitive of its type, a prototype. The unit of analysis poses the key problems which can be examined without presuppositions.
(3) It is itself an existent phenomenon (not a principle or axiom or hypothetical force or such like non-observable), in Goethe’s term, an Urphänomenon.
A science can only base itself on something real and empirically given. An existent thing can be captured as a concept because it is the starting point both for a real development and for the development of understanding. For example, if we understand a child’s “social situation of development” simply as a collection of factors capable of influencing the prospects for a child’s development we have nothing. On the other hand, when we grasp the situation as a predicament, a trap from which the child must emancipate herself, then we have what is both a concept and an existent reality. Vygotsky’s (1997: 318) discussion of Pavlov’s study of salivation in dogs confirms that Vygotsky used this same conception of ‘unit of analysis’.
The interdisciplinary concept of activity described earlier is unsuitable as a ‘unit of analysis’. ‘Activity’ is inherently indeterminate, because it is everything. A “unit of analysis’ on the other hand, is determinate, as simple and determinate as it is possible to be. ‘Activity’ is not a singular thing but a quasi-infinite class of things, a substance. It is a conception of the ultimate reality for a science. It is suitable as a ‘real premise’. But as a unit of analysis for a science we need some determinate genus of activity.
Let us first review of the directions of LS Vygotsky, A Meshcheryakov, AN Leontyev and Yrjö Engström in seeking to analyse activity.
Although Activity Theory is associated with the name of AN Leontyev rather than Vygotsky, Vygotsky also used a concept of activity. The key aspects of Vygotsky’s concept of activity are summed up in the scenario in which a novice is trying to do something, and an adept assists the novice complete the action by offering them an artefact. This scenario is represented in the ‘double stimulation’ experiment. (Vygotsky 1930)
Vygotsky always focused his scientific work on interactions between individuals, rather than using representations of societal phenomena and institutions abstracted from their constitution in specific forms of activity, but this does not detract from the significance of his work in understanding societal activities. After all, societal institutions exist only in and through individual actions and interactions between individuals.
In the double-stimulation relationship, two people collaborate in the project of one by using an artefact introduced by the other. The artefact is a cultural-historical product. The artefact is used by the person to achieve their own goals. In this scenario, all the essential elements of a notion of activity are encapsulated because the artefact is a product of the entire history of society, in which other people have sought to achieve similar goals, and the other carries the knowledge of how to use it. So this is not just a localised relationship between two individuals, but is a cultural-historical formation.
Alexander Meshcheryakov (1979) developed an important variation on Vygotsky’s conception of learning through collaboration with another person from his work in the education of deaf-blind children. In Meshcheryakov’s scenario, the teacher manually helps the novice complete a task, and then gradually withdraws that assistance, in such a way that the novice is able to take over the teacher’s actions and complete the task autonomously.
This idea naturally leads to a theory of gestures, perceived by another as initial movements towards some action, and a theory of language as an extension of the use of gestures in the process of collaborative activity, a theory shared with the pragmatists such as G H Mead (Mead 1934). It also leads to an understanding of the body and its use as a kind of artefact.
The scenario has value as a conception of the simplest possible unit of activity. But the education of deaf-blind children hinges on direct physical contact between teacher and pupil. As a result, an important aspect of social life is omitted, namely that artefacts generally continue to intervene in the collaboration of people even remotely from the creator of the artefact in time and space. Also, like Vygotsky’s scenario, being focussed on educational activity, the relationship between the individuals involved is essentially asymmetrical.
Neither Meshcheryakov nor Vygotsky went on from these ideas of interpersonal collaboration to develop an approach to understanding societal phenomena on a broader scale however.
Leontyev never claimed to have identified a ‘unit of analysis’ for activity, and always used the word “unit” in inverted commas (AA Leontyev 2006), but he did construct an anatomy of activity as follows (AN Leontyev 1978):
Each Activity is defined by its motive, which is an independently existing situation which constitutes the fulfillment of some objective need. The object has a dual existence in the objective means of satisfaction of the need, and the image the individual constructs of it and which serves as the motivation for the individual to act towards it. The individual’s needs are both produced and satisfied by activities.
Activities are realised by individual Actions which are controlled by the individual and are each oriented towards a goal. An activity is realised by many actions pursuant to different goals, but while the goals differ from the motive of the activity, the activity has no other existence separately from the actions through which it is realised. A goal, such as “Go to point A,” must be kept in the individual’s mind if they are to take the appropriate action, but the goal does not provide its own inherent motive. Further, it is not assumed that the individual have an objectively true conception of the motive of the activity to which their action contributes; all that is necessary is that for one reason or another they pursue an appropriate goal, and the divers goals pursued by different individuals objectively add up to furtherance of the activity. On the other hand, this means that there can be no immanent definition of an activity on the basis of its constituent goals. So what constitutes ‘an activity’ can only be determined from an observer standpoint, outside of activity.
Operations are the means by which actions are realised according to conditions, and may not be consciously or purposively selected or controlled. Actions become ‘internalised’ in being transformed into operations, that is, they become ‘second nature’.
The archetypal activity is a collective hunt by a tribal group, in which different individuals cooperate through a traditional division of labour, pursuing different goals (beating or trapping) which contribute to realisation of the social product, which is then distributed according to social norms and rules, so that the needs and expectations of each individual are met. The actions are carried out using socially developed skills which are ‘second nature’ to the individuals, of which they are only conscious when something ‘goes wrong’. For example, the blind person who ‘feels’ their way along the street with a white stick, feels with the end of their stick, just as they would if it were their finger, until the stick breaks or something.
The concepts of operation and action form the basis for a psychology, and it is not my intention to critique these concepts. The question is the only adequacy of Leontyev’s notion of ‘an activity’, as a connecting link between his psychology and the phenomena of broader social life.
Leontyev’s idea is that in the social field there are various activities; each of these activities is deemed to be meeting some human need, by way of performing some function within the community’s construction of those needs. There are types of activity according to different types of need. An individual is motivated to participate in these activities, although their conception of what need is being met by the activity is socially constructed and distinct from the ‘real’ motive (i.e., function). The individual participates via a social division of labour by working towards some socially assigned goal and is rewarded by having their needs met according to socially determined norms of distribution, but it is the apprehended motive of the activity which motivates the individual to adopt the goal and pursue it.
This story is all about needs; it sheds light on what an individual may construe as a need and the goals they may pursue and how their psychological functioning is modified by the actions and operations carried out in pursuit of goals. Given the social production of needs and the means of their fulfilment and the idea of transformation of actions into operations with the internalisation of actions and tool-use, and the objectification of actions generating new needs, we have the basis for a psychology. The question, however, is whether this notion of activity links psychology into an adequate concept of social life.
A problem lies in the definition of activity in terms of its motive. Leontyev is quite emphatic:
“... we always must deal with specific activities, each of which answers a definite need of the subject [i.e., the individual], is directed toward an object of this need, is extinguished as a result of its satisfaction, and is produced again, perhaps in other, altogether changed conditions.
“Separate concrete types of activity may differ among themselves according to various characteristics: according to their form, according to the methods of carrying them out, according to their emotional intensity, according to their time and space requirements, according to their physiological mechanisms, etc. The main thing that distinguishes one activity from another, however, is the difference of their objects. It is exactly the object of an activity that gives it a determined direction. According to the terminology I have proposed, the object of an activity is its true motive. It is understood that the motive may be either material or ideal, either present in perception or exclusively in the imagination or in thought. The main thing is that behind activity there should always be a need, that it should always answer one need or another.” (Leontyev AN 1978)
This conception is dependent on an uncritical vision of society as a division of labour rationally planned or culturally evolved to meet the social needs of its citizens. How is an individual to be assured that an activity in which they are participating is motivated to meet their needs? Such a conception is compatible only with the image of a primitive tribal society or the myth of the socialist state. It is most certainly not compatible with bourgeois society or at any rate, with Marx’s vision of bourgeois society as set out in Capital and elsewhere. But the starting point for a science cannot be some other world, whether of the primeval past or the utopian future. The starting point for science must be, as Marx insisted, the “real activity of individuals” which can be “verified in a purely empirical way.”
AN Leontyev’s activity theory and Marx’s political economy are not compatible.
Marx repeatedly insists that the object of all labour subsumed under capital is the expansion of capital, but in activity theory, the object of an activity is always the meeting of a human need. The idea that the object of the market and capital accumulation is the satisfaction of human needs is precisely what Marx was arguing against. For example:
“To the extent that his money has been converted into the elements of the labour process and the whole labour process itself appears merely as the consumption of the labour capacity bought by the money, the labour process itself appears as a transformation that money passes through by being exchanged not for an available use value but for a process which is its own process. The labour process is as it were incorporated in it, subsumed under it. Yet, the purpose of the exchange of money for the labour capacity was by no means use value; it was the transformation of money into capital. Value, become independent in money, was to maintain, increase itself in this exchange, assume a self-sufficient character, and the money owner was to become a capitalist precisely by representing value dominant over circulation and asserting itself as subject within it. What was at stake here was exchange value, not use value. Value asserts itself as exchange value only if the use value created in the labour process, the product of actual labour, is itself a repository of exchange value, i.e. a commodity. For the money that was being turned into capital, therefore, it was a matter of the production of a commodity, not a mere use value. The use value was important only in so far as it was a necessary condition, a material substratum of exchange value. What was involved, in fact, was the production of exchange value, its preservation and its increase.” (MECW v. 30 p. 66)
and
“a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.” (Capital, v. 1, Ch. 16)
Leontyev’s conception of activity as being made up of “units” each answering to a definite need of individual citizens suggests a theory of history in which social relations evolve somewhat like an ecological system. Leontyev’s theory is a kind of functionalism.
The unit of the social life of capital is the company, not a functional branch of industry. For Marx, capital is a ‘quasi-subject’. Capital is an activity which sets goals and actions for individuals and underlies representations people form of the motives of their actions, and its units are units of capital, companies. But capital cannot be understood as “answering a definite need of the individual, and directed toward an object of this need.” Of course, capital produces use-values, and the advocates of the market take that as the beginning and end of the matter, but according to Marx the object of labor in bourgeois society is the production of exchange value and the accumulation of surplus value. The production of use-values is a means to an end, not the object, not the object itself.
The structure of capital, divided into units according to ownership, that is companies (in the broad sense), internally structures activity by means of a flow of funds downwards supporting the confluent command structure. All labour subsumed under capital can be divided into units and analysed easily according to the understanding of capital as a form of activity. Human needs are an entirely secondary matter here. Other organisations modelled on capitalist enterprises function internally in the same way, and it cannot be presumed that the formal aims of the organisation (e.g. a public service) is the effective object of all actions in the organisation as every nodal point in the distribution of funds creates new (bureaucratic) interests.
In “Development of the Mind,” Leontyev (1981) talks about the problems for his theory arising from the contradiction between use value and exchange value, but he only goes so far as to point to distortions that the market introduces into cultural evolution. He points out that a doctor must desire that his patients are ill, because it is by curing their illness that he earns a living. He points out that norms of distribution may lead to unfair remuneration for some participants in the social labour. He talks about the psychological effect of alienation. But he does not see these observations as calling into question the fundamental idea that the object of an activity (including wage labour) is the meeting of an objective need of the individual. At the psychological level, this does not seem to pose a problem: a wage labourer indeed pursues a goal useful to the employer with the idea that her own needs will be met as a by-product in distribution of the social product and doubtless also believes that her work meets a social need, not just the profit of the employer. This ambiguity is seen by Marx as follows:
“If we consider the process of production from the point of view of the simple labour-process, the worker is related to the means of production, not in their quality as capital, but as being the mere means and material of his own purposeful productive activity... But it is different as soon as we view the production process as a process of valorization... It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker. Instead of being consumed by him as the material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value.” (Marx Capital v.1, pp. Ch. 11)
That people manage to live despite capitalism is not simply because their needs are met as a by-product of capital accumulation. Were social life to be totally subsumed under capital, then not only would the social conditions for human life be destroyed but the natural conditions for human life would be quickly extinguished as well. But it is surely self-evident that a psychology which is to shed light on the mentality of modern capitalist society must recognise that this society is a capitalist society, not contingently, but essentially.
So as a theory of psychology Leontyev’s activity theory still works, just so long as the content of ‘activity’ is not taken too seriously. But what then would be the point of an activity theory?
A further problem with Leontyev’s model is that it is based on the Kantian conception of the individual subject, whilst the activities in which individuals participate remain objective functions or structures. A solution which has been adopted by many writers, both Marxist and non-Marxist, is to put in the position of the individual subject “an individual or group.” That is, the problem of the social character of human agency is resolved by the supposition that a group may act in the same way as an individual, but without considering any additional problems about how a ‘group’ is constituted or what is meant for an individual by ‘group membership’.
For example, Lektorsky says:
“Activity cannot exist without a subject. But the initial form of a subject is no ego, but a subject of collective activity (e.g., a group, a community, a team). The individual subjective world, individual consciousness, ego are not something given (as philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries thought), but the result of the development and transformations of collective activity or practice.” (Lektorsky 1999: 107)
There is no doubt that social subjects of this kind exist and the concept of corporate or collective subject has an important role in cultural and historical analysis. However, group membership is only a limited mode of subjectivity. Still more limited is ‘membership’ of abstract general groups such as race or gender. For example, my activity might be in part determined by my interest in art deco, something I share with millions of others, but I do not thereby belong to a group of art deco lovers.
But more importantly, the posing of group membership solves nothing in relation to problem of the sociality of individual action. In fact, the existence of social groups and how they are constituted by individuals is an additional problem for activity theory over and above the societal character of activity, as well as the problem of how a group acts, when in reality actions are only ever executed by individuals. Rather than being a solution to the problem of membership of society, the idea of membership of group simply sets up an infinite regress much like the homunculus sets up an infinite regress in the other direction. The concept of group membership is also a very poor representation of sociality in relation to modern society. Membership of a team or committee is a relatively marginal part of social life.
For example, when Marx said:
“But also when I am active scientifically, etc. – an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others – then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.” (Marx, Ec. & Phil. Man., 1844)
Thus, Marx specifically excluded being a member of some ‘group’ from the essential meaning of activity.
This ‘lumpy’ conception of subjectivity, as either an individual subject or a collective subject, misses the point. How an individual thinks and acts to one degree or another as part of a group (other than an entire cultural-historical formation) is a question which needs to be answered, not presupposed by activity theory. Activity theory needs to shed light on identity, interpersonal relationships such as solidarity, loyalty, friendship and so on, ethical commitment, respect for law, pursuit of science rather than superstition, ability to cooperate with others, the acquisition of cultural competences and so on, relations such as that which Marx has in mind in the above quote, and which Vygotsky has in mind in his conception of activity as represented in the double-stimulation experiment, the kind of relations with others which arise from and are constituted in activity. Born into society, and pursuing culturally-historically produced ends with culturally-historically produced means, the individual is participating in cultural-historical activity, not as a Kantian ‘individual subject’, but as a ‘social subject’, without any implication of being a ‘member of a group’.
Yrjö Engström tackled a lot of the problems in Leontyev’s model with his comprehensive and very impressive schema. Engström starts with the natural model of the activity of social creatures, in which an individual’s relationship to their environment is mediated by their community. This makes in fact a three-way relationship of mutual mediation, as the community’s relationship with its environment is mediated by individuals and the individuals’ relationship with their community is mediated by the environment.
The specifically human form of life then develops through the mediation of each of these three relationships:
The combination of production, distribution and exchange are then mediated by a system of social consumption of the products of labour. Thus, we have Engström’s famous expanding triangle of triangles. The relationship between the (Kantian, individual) subject and its object (the means of satisfying the subject’s needs) is now subject to multiple lines of mediation. Each implementation of this schema produces an outcome which is a changed relationship of all the factors, and each of the mediating links contains contradictions, the mediation of which generate further lines of development.
Altogether, Engström’s model represents relationships between individual (subject), object, outcome, community, environment, social rules, instruments of production, division of labour, production, distribution, exchange and consumption. Engström calls this the “unit of analysis” for activity theory on the basis that it is the smallest unit which includes all the properties of the whole. But this is a misunderstanding of the meaning of “unit of analysis.”
Even if we assume that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are derivative rather than essential concepts, and we take “outcome” as a reproduction of the object, we are still left with 7 distinct concepts – subject, object, community, environment, social rules, instruments of production and division of labour – which have to be derived before we have the so-called “unit of analysis.” But if the ultimate reality we are dealing with is activity, then every one of these concepts is derivative of the concept of activity. For example, “subject” is one of the 7 concepts which are presupposed in the conception of activity; but what is the nature of the subject? An answer this one question alone would be an outcome of a theory of activity, and cannot be its presupposition. And how is a “community” constituted if not by activity?
The idea of pairs or triplets of concepts which are mutually constitutive, being a differentiated unity, has a long pedigree, but a set of seven mutually constitutive concepts is not really tenable, and Engström surely doesn’t mean it that way. And if we include community and division of labour, why not include the church and the state and any number other components of social life? If we include norms and rules, why not include money? Why are these 7 entities more essential than others? And why do we include division of labour but not collaboration?
Engström’s claim rests on the idea of the initial natural relationship of individual-community-environment ‘expanding’ through the intervention of mediating elements. This would make activity the coincidence of three processes: tool-making, law-making and labour organisation. So activity is derivative from these concepts. It is a plausible conception, similar to the schema Hegel derived from the idea of the differentiation of production and consumption, and used to theorise the emergence of Spirit in his 1802-03 system, but it is entirely speculative. It has no empirical content. The only unity tying the set of concepts together as whole is the thesis that at some time in the past things happened this way. Such a speculation cannot be the premise for a science or its starting point.
To make a start with a science we have to have a concept of what it is that we are investigating and the possibility of observing it. But here at the very least we have 7 entities, whose conceptions are posited as preliminary to the science of activity.
Engström’s ‘expanding triangle’ is not a “unit of analysis,” it is a schema. It is an impressive schema of social life, but in the sense that Goethe, Hegel, Marx and Vygotsky envisaged a conception which would function as the foundation of a science, this is just not it.
Engström has given us an elegant general schema for social life, but he has not given us a conception of any of those parts or of activity itself.
Societal phenomena, such as states, markets, institutions of various kinds, political life, Zeitgeist and so on, exist only in and through the actions and experiences of individuals and the artefacts that they use, and which carry with them shared or overlapping meanings. In the foregoing review of efforts to form a conception of activity, it seems that attempts to incorporate ‘supra-individual’ aspects of society such as social division of labour, norms and rules, systems of production and distribution, and so on, fail to provide the basis for a unit of analysis. The fact is that these societal phenomena exist for the individual only through (1) the use of artefacts which originate and carry meaning from outside the immediate setting of their use, and (2) the regularity of experiences of interaction with other individuals. Consequently, I conclude that a unit of analysis for the study of activity must be based on ideas like that of Vygotsky and Meshcheryakov cited earlier, which take the collaborative actions of two individuals, with one using an artefact introduced by the other, as the basis for understanding activity. Notions of social norms, division of labour, markets, and so on, must therefore be derived from their foundation in the artefact-mediated collaboration of individuals.
These studies were limited to pair-wise collaboration, but the presence of an artefact is always implicitly the presence of a third or more parties to the collaboration, so it seems that the essentials of multi-sided collaboration (as in group dynamics) are contained in two-sided collaboration so long as it remains the case that the artefact mediating the interaction between the two parties comes from outside.
Collaboration always implies that the individuals involved share a common object or project. According to the OED, a project is “a planned or proposed undertaking; a scheme, a proposal; a purpose, an objective. In business, science, etc., a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.” (OED online September 2008) In recent Hegel interpretation (Pinkard 1994) the word ‘project’ has been used as an interpretation of what Hegel called a ‘formation of consciousness’, that is, a self-conscious historical form of social practice. ‘Project’ carries the connotation of being extended in time beyond the actions of participants and through historical time, and of being a bearer of meaning, identity, values and ethical convictions.
In the two cases we have considered, the relation to the project is asymmetrical between the two collaborators, but the commitment to the shared project is integral to the concept and the project itself is part of the relationship.
The notion of project needs must include conflict as well as cooperation. That is, the relationship in which one person endeavours to prevent the other from doing something is just as essential as the situation in which both strive for the same outcome. Likewise, collaboration implies that the participants argue over what should be done and how. Simple cooperation, in which conflict is avoided, perhaps by means of a division of labour or the adherence to well-defined norms and rules of behaviour, fails to capture the nature of the collaboration in either Meshcharyakov or Vygotsky’s conception. On the other hand, a conflict always has a shared situation as its outcome, which is indicative of a notion of its irreducible co-production. Were it not the case that both parties will have to share the outcome, there would be no basis for conflict. The outcome is always the resultant of two independent wills, and contains moments of both conflict and cooperation. In general, we can see cooperation (pursuing the same end using a division of labour, whether natural or artificial) and conflict (uncompromising pursuit of mutually exclusive states of affairs) are special, limiting cases of collaboration.
Both Vygotsky and Meshcheryakov’s scenarios concern the relation between an adept and a novice. There is no reason to limit the relationship in this way however. Nonetheless, these concepts highlight the fact that in entering into collaboration, people will not only assist each other, but also change each other and learn from each other and Vygotsky and Meshcheryakov’s studies of exactly how this happens remain valid irrespective of whether or not the people involved are adepts or novices and in what respect. In the view of these writers, education is certainly not something that the teacher does to the student; the teacher and student work together towards a shared goal, and no progress can be made at all until such a shared project can be found.
An important special limiting case of collaboration, is solidarity, in which one subject voluntarily subordinates themself to the other’s ends. This contrasts with community, in which the shared end is a given rather than voluntarily adopted.
An irreducible part of collaboration is the project itself, a project which finds its raisson d’être in social life as well as its means. Jürgen Habermas considers neither the object for which people communicate with one another nor the means they use to communicate with one another, essential to the study of ‘communicative action’. We cannot share this opinion. While the concept of ‘group’ is inadequate as a means of introducing social bonds into activity theory, in the notion of collaboration, the social bonds are inherent in the concept itself, for it is the commitment to the common project, whether it be cooperative or conflictual, that not only creates the social bond, but also gives the social bond its specific character. So rather than a concept of simply ‘collaboration’, which leaves out the objective and character of the collaboration, we should use a concept of ‘project collaboration’, that is, individuals (or ‘subjects’ in the more general sense) collaborating in some project. That the individuals use artefacts in their participation is inherent in the concept of activity itself, even if that is solely the individuals’ own bodies.
The notion of collaboration not only provides a starting point for science, but is also clearly normative, and provides a starting point for ethics. As we have already noted, individuals participate in project collaboration in a number of quite distinct ways; they may strive to achieve the project or they may strive to frustrate the project, and there is nothing inherently unethical in conflict. While individuals may participate in a project in order to further its values and practices, they may alternatively, participate in the project with only the aim of receiving side-benefits which are external to the project, rather than those inherent in the project itself. This is a distinction which Alasdair MacIntyre (1988) makes, as for example, when sports stars play only for the high monetary rewards rather than to further the practice of the sport in its own right. Individuals may make decisions collectively, or either party may take a leading role in defining the project, or one may simply follow the lead of the other, or even participate solely in solidarity with the other. There are normative questions in all these modifications of the paradigmatic collaborative relationships.
The idea of collaboration is already important in social service industries. Doctor and patient collaborate in restoring the patient’s well-being, an architect and the building-owner collaborate in a building project. Every instance of collaboration in a project has characteristic problems – the doctor may regard herself as expert and fail to share decision-making with the patient, the architect may see the building as a monument to their art rather than a home for the owner, and so on.
It may be noted as an aside here that the Activity Theory has hitherto taken division of labour as the norm, so the possibility of taking a critical attitude towards ‘doctor-as-expert’ is excluded. Division of labour is a special, limiting case of collaboration, but the reverse is not true. If division of labour is built into the foundation, then collaboration is excluded as a basic mode of activity. It also undermines the possibility of taking a critical attitude towards liberal notions of the separation of pubic and private spheres.
Collaboration is well-established as a paradigm in creative arts and in the sciences, where cross-media, cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration is regarded of particular creative value. The ethics of collaboration is in distinct contrast to liberalism, which bases itself on the notion of contract and the dichotomy of private and public spheres, and for which the notion of collaboration is alien.
Although there are a myriad of forms and deformations of collaboration, the concept of ‘project collaboration’ has a normative core expressed in the dictum: “What we do is decided by us.” (Blunden 2003)
This maxim differs from the Biblical maxim: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (Luke 6:31) because it cannot be presumed that others have the same expectations as we do.
It also goes further than the Kantian maxim: “Always treat another person as an end and never as a mere means.” (Kant 1780) (which in any case is already in conflict with the commodity relation, something that seems to have simply been ignored over the 200 years since Kant wrote the maxim.)
It differs from Habermas’s maxim: “only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (Habermas 1992) because Habermas takes practical discourse, i.e., discussing ethical principles, as the paradigmatic project while at the same time, casting far too wide a scope for those deemed participants.
It differs from Agnes Heller’s maxim: “I do unto you what I expect you to do unto me. What I do unto you and what you do unto me should be decided by you and me” (Heller 1986: 253) because Heller not only fails to allow for legitimate differences in the expectations of parties, and omits the we-perspective.
The notion of project-collaboration allows us to transcend the limitations of all these perspectives in the formulation of a collaborative ethics applicable to people’s social life. The idea of collaboration, at its limits, extends from two individuals passing each other on a narrow pathway, to caring for the climate and atmosphere together with any other person in the world. The significance of the various ‘subject positions’ arises out of the notion of project-collaboration itself.
The point of these quite cursory remarks is only to draw attention to the richness of the concept of ‘project collaboration’, which can provide a starting point for ethics as well as science of activity.
It is now possible to establish the relationship between activity theory and Marx’s critique of political economy. Whereas project collaboration is the prototypical, genuinely human relationship, capital springs from the relationship of exchange of labour, for which the norm is: “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” It is especially clear in Marx’s very early work, “Comment on James Mill,” how Marx sees the relationship of exchange of the products of labour as an essentially manipulative and corrupting relationship. This relationship has nonetheless come to be the dominant relationship in bourgeois society. Capital rests on a quite particular (de)formation of the relationship of project collaboration, in which each subject pursues their own end, but regards the other’s labour instrumentally, simply as a means to their own end, and pursues their project by means of exchange of equivalents.
The commodity relation leads to an abstract general logic in which the projects pursued by different subjects relate to each other only externally or quantitatively, rather than by concrete universal logic, which characterises project collaboration. The division of labour which results from the subsumption of collaborative projects under capital, puts abstract general relationships in the dominant position, and these abstract general relationships penetrate deeper and deeper into consciousness, with the results being concentration of capital and fragmentation of social bonds, as Marx demonstrated in Capital and other works, such as The Communist Manifesto.
So in this view, activity theory and Marx’s critique of political economy have compatible conceptions of social life and methodological principles. But what of the conclusions to be drawn about the nature of social life? Marx’s critique of political economy points to the outcome of the growth of a specific kind of activity, namely production for exchange, leading to a labour process more and more subsumed under capital, although never completely subsumed under capital.
The normal situation today is that collaboration is subsumed under the market, where workers collaborate inside capitalist enterprises, whilst exchange is subsumed under collaboration, when some or all of the participants either earn a living or contribute monetarily while contributing to a collaborative project, as well as cases where there is project collaboration on one hand or the market on the other hand, dominating in different domains of social life, more or less interacting with one another across boundaries. In any real situation, both types of relationship are present and contribute to the psychology of the participants. Although project collaboration is the norm of social life amongst human beings, modern capitalism is seeing an expansion of the market and its penetration of more and more spheres of activity. Nonetheless, exchange of commodities remains a special, limiting case of project collaboration.
On the other hand, Vygotsky’s concept of ‘double-stimulation’ and Meshcharyakov’s concept of task completion and so on, are also seen to be special cases of the more general concept of project collaboration.
Project collaboration constitutes a unit of analysis for activity theory. We should now return to the question raised earlier of a taxonomy of activity.
At first we see that project collaboration constitutes the basic unit, the molecule of social life, presenting us a picture of millions and millions of transitory relations of conflict and cooperation between people with certain ends, in a certain division of power enjoying internal and externals benefits, and using certain artefacts to mediate their collaborative activity. Such projects appear and disappear, and are reproduced in new forms at different times and places, whilst every person is engaged in a multiplicity of such relationships at any given time. How ought we to move from this picture of unmediated and apparently chaotic activity? How can this microscopic unit of analysis for activity underpin a view of social life as a whole?
Hegel tells us that:
“[Division of a subject matter] requires a principle or ground of division so constituted that the division based upon it embraces the whole extent of the region designated by the definition in general. But, in division, there is the further requirement that the principle of it must be borrowed from the nature of the object in question. If this condition be satisfied, the division is natural and not merely artificial, that is to say, arbitrary.” (Hegel, Shorter Logic, §230n)
So categorisation of the different types of activity and their scope has to be derived from the notion of project collaboration itself, its normative core and the differences which can be unfolded out of that core, as anticipated above. We have already seen that the distinction between capital and social life outside of capital flows from the notion of project collaboration. Within that, different companies constitute units of capital as indicated by the management structure erected on the basis of ownership of capital, and outside of capital, other nodes arising on the basis of collaboration whether natural or voluntary. Aside from the taxonomy that flows from different forms of the collaborative relationship, further distinctions follow from the articulation of projects over various periods of time from momentary to historical. Social movements, nations, religious communities all constitute themselves as projects.
An even finer grain of analysis of social life is given by concepts, realised in and through activity, and concepts provide a rational basis for an approach to working out types and categories of activity. When concepts first appear, they constitute projects, but in time, they become objectified and merge into the fabric of social life, the language and culture generally. Once a concept has become objectified, it ceases to have an independent life, but participates as an aspect of all subsequent projects. Some concepts however, not yet objectified, retain vitality, and constitute living, self-conscious projects.
In any case, this approach does not move towards a “lumpy” conception of subjectivity, with ‘individual subjects’ and ‘collective subjects’ at play. Here subjectivity is constituted by participation in a multiplicity of different projects and activity organised around a multiplicity of different more or less independent concepts.
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