Exploring the Universal (original) (raw)

2022, Exploring the Universal

The notion of “universal” (всеобщие), in the sense “common to all”, is central in Ilyenkov’s writings. The purpose of this contribution is to explore the universal from the first principle “The individual is the social being” (Marx, 2007, p. 105). Accordingly, the universal needs to be grounded in two distinct but dialectically related aspects. The “common to all” aspect of the social is the labour process; our “species character”, and the immutable natural conditions of human labour. This process, without which we all would be dead, underpins all specific forms of production – serfdom, feudal, capitalist, socialist, and so on. The specific manifestations of the labour process will be referred to as activity systems in the following. The “common to all” aspect of the individual departs from the fundamental fact that “brains evolved to control the activities of bodies in the world” (Love, 2004, p. 527). Thus, evolution has equipped humans with a requisite set of neurobiological predispositions for action. Among these are: • Objectivating - focusing attention on the object for action • Contextualizing - foregrounding relevant phenomena and disregarding irrelevant ones • Spatializing - spatializing the environment and position phenomena in relation to each other • Temporalizing - anticipating and executing actions • Habitualizing - routinizing pertinent actions in recurrent situations • Recontextualizing - refocusing attention from one situation to another. These predispositions, which I have referred to as activity modalities (e.g., Taxén, 2020), are requisite in the sense that a lesion impacting any of the modalities aggravates or inhibits action. Thus, every healthy infant meets the world, equipped with a neurobiological “infrastructure” by which a fabric of meaning is conferred onto action relevant, external phenomena. Out of the ceaseless stream of sensations arriving through our sensory modalities, we attend objectual, contextual, spatial, temporal, normative, and transitional phenomena in the environment. Individual predispositions develop into abilities after birth. These are manifested differently depending on the historical and cultural circumstances the individual encounters. However, in all these particularises, there always exist phenomena apprehended as activity modalities, otherwise action would not be possible. In activity systems, where individuals jointly act to achieve a social goal, individual lines of action are fitted together around common identifiers (Blumer, 1969). Such identifiers develop in the process of idealizing activity modality phenomena. For example, the Polaris star acquired an ideal form as a means to navigate at sea (a common identifier for the spatializing and temporalizing modalities). The upshot of this conceptualization is that the activity modalities can be regarded as a concrete universal: “the genetic root of a concrete whole, the particular component within it that, in the course of its development, determines the nature and function of all the others” (Bakhurst, 1991, p. 158-158). Such development proceeds in two aspects. First, the individual develops from the infrastructure of neurobiological predisposition into a conscious, sentient individual. Second, activity systems develop from the infrastructure formed by cultural-historical circumstances, by the idealization of common identifiers. The underlying universal is the construct of activity modalities. I will illustrate how this understanding may resolve some die-hard conundrums in the Information Systems discipline. References Bakhurst, D. (1991). Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Modern European Philosophy Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall. Ilyenkov, E. V. (2017). The Ideal in Human Activity. A Selection of Essays by Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov. Pacifica, Calif: Marxists Internet Archive. Love, N. (2004). Cognition and the language myth. Language Sciences, 26(6), 525–544. Marx, K. (2007). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. (Ed. Milligan, M.) Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Taxén, L. (2020). Reviving the Individual in Sociotechnical Systems Thinking. Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly, CSIMQ, 22, 39–48. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7250/csimq.2020-22.03