[Xmca-l] Re: Yasnitsky and Van der Veer: Mythbusters!

[Andy Blunden]

Thanks, David! :)
All makes sense to me.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
On 1/01/2016 11:00 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> Or not. So, you thought you knew your Vygotsky, did you? Here are seven
> facts you've always believed about Vygotsky that are...well, more or less
> right, actually, according to Yasnitsky and Van der Veer's "Revisionist
> Revolution in Vygotsky Studies", due to come out on Routledge in the new
> year.
>
> 1.  Stalinist science was highly centralized, clique ridden, ritualistic,
> deliberately esoteric and impractical, parochial, and given to cults and
> personality. Sounds familiar? Now, lest you think that I am making an
> unfair comparison between Stalinist Russia and today's relatively benign
> and bucolic academic atmosphere, note that Anton's revolutionary
> revisionist point in this first section is precisely that: the present day
> reputation of Vygotsky is based on a very centralized, monolithic
> interpretation of his work, drive-by citations and padded reference
> lists,an almost complete disjunction between high theory and more or less
> banal practice, a geographical focus in just a few centres in Russia and
> the West, and a foundational myth of a doomed Moses, who saw the promised
> land from the mountaintop and knew he would never set foot there. Is the
> comparison unfair? Not at all. If anything, the problem is that it is too
> obvious to count as revision, much less as revolution.
>
> There is, however, another problem, or rather two other problems. The first
> is that myths are not entirely fiction--it is not a myth but a medical fact
> that L.S. Vygotsky died of tuberculosis in June of 1934, and it is not
> really much more far fetched to say that he died without ever knowing that
> in eight decades he would be translated into the Korean language and widely
> read by school teachers in South Korea. The second is that mythbusters are
> themselves mythic figures; that is, they take certain historical facts and
> construct narratives around them, in this case the narrative that the
> previous narrative was constructed around incorrect facts or that it was
> constructed around correct facts which have been grossly misinterpreted in
> some way. So....
>
> 2. There never was a Troika or a Pyatorka: instead, the "Vygotsky School"
> was a loose network of scholars who came and went, joined and drifted away,
> spread across three cities (Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov, although the
> loyalty of the Kharkov centre is in doubt). This section, based on
> Yasnitsky's Ph.D. work, is--unlike the first section, which manages to be
> both sensationalistic and naive--both nuanced and closely argued. But of
> course for that very reason it tends to undermine the claims of the first
> part of the book. And at the same time, it ignores the most obvious
> evidence that there really WAS something like a Pyatorka--the fact that
> Vygotsky's own letters referto the Pyatorka, and the fact that the Pyatorka
> held meetings, internal conferences, etc, None of this contradicts Anton's
> main thesis, which was that the "Troika" and the "Pyatorka" were convenient
> constructs (exoteric as opposed to esoteric ways of understanding) for
> thinking about the history of the Vygotsky school even while it was
> happening. But it also doesn't answer the question I have always had about
> the use of the term "Troika". For Trotskyists (and, as Anton points out,
> there is clear evidence that Vygotsky has strong pro-Trotsky sympathies),
> the term Troika has very bad connotations: it referred to a bureaucratic
> bloc between Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev to oust Trotsky from power in the
> year following Lenin's death. .
>
> 3. Thinking and Speech", far from being Vygotsky's magnum opus, is an
> unfinished and highly uneven work, cobbled together from materials which
> really fit rather poorly, during the months immediately before...and
> after...Vygotsky's death. I think anybody who really knows the chronology
> of the composition of Thinking and Speech will not find this controversial;
> the facts are well known, and only serve to throw the coherence and power
> of the work into greater relief (and also, incidentally, to undermine the
> popular idea--which Yasnitsky and Van der Veer DO subscribe to--that there
> are three very different Vygotskies believing three very different
> foundational ideas at work in the years 1926-1934).
>
> So of course this is not really revisionist and revolutionary enough for
> Yasnitsky and Van der Veer. Beyond this, they try to claim that the works
> that Vygotsky thought were important are NOT the works that we read today,
> and the works we read today are NOT the works that Vygotsky held dear. They
> found their argument on Vygotsky's own lists, compiled at three times
> during his life, of his own works. The problem is that two of these lists
> are part of job applications, and anybody who has ever done a job
> application knows very well that you list things that your potential
> employer will find impressive, and these are usually quite far from being
> the works that you yourself value. Sure enough, by this standard,
> Vygotsky's most important work is his first one: "Educational Psychology",
> which is surely his most uneven and least visionary, closely followed by
> "Imagination and Creativity", which was, as the authors quite correctly
> point out, a work of popular science (and includes references to textbook
> writers and agony aunts who wrote for the Soviet papers).
>
> Weakest of all are Yasnitsky's claims about the History of the Development
> of the Higher Mental Functions and Tool and Sign, to wit, that the former
> was a fabrication by the Soviet editors cobbled together from two unrelated
> texts and the Russian version of the latter the result of a benign forgery
> by Luria and the popular medical writer Elkhonon Goldberg.
>
> First of all, there is strong evidence INSIDE the text of HDHMF that it was
> conceived and written as a single work: there is a conclusion which goes
> back to the beginning, which remarks on the order in which it was conceived
> and how it differs from the order it was written, and how the chapters fit
> together. More importantly, the first part DOES lay out the problem, the
> approach and the research method followed in the "special studies" of the
> second part, just as Thinking and Speech was to do years later. is is
> really weak stuff: they
>
> Secondly, as Yasnitsky himself admits, the wonderful story of benign
> forgery (actually back translation, not a rare occurence in recovering
> historic manuscripts) does not actually explain what it is supposed to
> explain, which is the recurrence of several paragraphs, not word for word,
> but very nearly so. Yasnitsky explains this by adding a kind of Ptolemaic
> epicycle: there were TWO translators, and the editor didn't bother to read
> what he was editing, so there was some redundancy. The only authority for
> this story, which seems so much less probable than the alternative
> explanation that this is simply another instance of Vygotsky's tendency t
> repeat himself more or less verbatim in places, is Elkhonon Goldberg ("The
> Wisdom Paradox: How Aging Actually Benefits Your Brain", and other must
> readings in psychoneurology for aging jet-setters), and an anonymous
> blogger (neither source seems very well disposed to their erstwhile
> professor, Luria). Of course, the mere fact that a story is highly
> improbable and that the sources are somewhat jaundiced do not mean that it
> is not true; but in a work devoted to mythbusting, it should mean that it
> is...well, possibly mythical.
>
> 4. Vygotsky died with an unfinished book on consciousness clearly in mind.
> This much too should be have been already very clear to any careful reader
> of Thinking and Speech. But this is in fact the most exciting part of the
> book, and the only part of the book which really does offer completely new
> evidence (it is also the only part of the book which was not written by
> Yasnitsky or by Van der Veer). You may disagree with a lot of what
> Zavershneva has to say about Vygotsky's supposed Nietszcheanism and his
> rejection of "word meaning" as a unit of consciousness in favor of "sense"
> (which is, after all, a type of word meaning). You may question, as I did,
> whether "perizhevianie" is really intended as a substitute, and if so up to
> what point it is a substitute for word meaning. Above all, you may wonder
> what the relationship between THIS unwritten work and the other unfinished
> works that Vygotsky left us might be ("Teaching on the Emotions" is
> mentioned, but there is hardly any mention at all of "Child Development").
> But this is the part of the book where you are most likely to learn
> something. It's also the part of the book where we see the most Vygotsky
> inedit--unpublished Vygotsky.
>
> 5. Vygotsky has been poorly translated, and he didn't write either of the
> English language books for which he is famous. The facts are depressingly
> clear: the 1962 version of "Thought and Language" is something like half of
> the original, with all the Marx and Lenin (and also the "redundancies",
> which for Yasnitsky are the proof of the inauthenticity of Tool and Sign)
> cut away by editors. "Mind in Society" was not a book that Vygotsky ever
> wrote but instead (like much of Aristotle, like all of the New Testament,
> like the Quran and like de Saussure's "Cours", a compilation put together
> by students and students of students (e.g. Mike). I think what the
> revolutionary revisionists ignore is the dialectic of that process: "Mind
> in Society" was designed to, and did in fact, overcome the significant
> omissions of Hanfmann and Vakar's translation: they saw that they could
> bring back some of Vygotsky's Marxist roots, and that is exactly what they
> did. Yasnitsky and Van der Veer acknowledge that this book, whether by
> Vygotsky or not, was the book that started the Vygotsky "boom"; the real
> question we have to ask is--what can we actually accomplish with the energy
> that "Mind and Society" unlocked? What happens when the rubble of the boom
> stops bouncing? Previously, our "revolutionary revisionists" suggested
> archival work,authoritative editions, and so on, and of course that is
> certainly very much to be desired. But it also ignores the exoteric nature
> of the boom and does nothing to overcome the gap between theory and
> practice noted in point 1) above.
>
> 6. The results of Luria's Central Asian expeditions were suppressed in
> order not to inflame resentment among the USSR's national minorities. This
> too is extremely well known to people who read Luria's own preface, as well
> as those who followed the horrible story of the quasi-official denunciation
> of Vygotsky and Luria (see point 7 below). And it turns out to be...well,
> more or less true, although Laman and Yasnitsky manage to cloak the truth
> in anachronistic phrases like "affirmative action" and "political
> correctness" which only show how very little they understand the concrete
> realities that Luria and Vygotsky actually faced. The really objectionable
> part of this section of the book, though, is the accusation that Vygotsky
> is a vulgar Marxist who believed that the change in the relations of
> production, without any education, was enough to create concepts in the
> minds of Uzbeks. There is no evidence for this in any of Vygotsky's or
> Luria's texts, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. (Luria repeatedly
> refers to the effect of schooling). Note that Lamdan and Yasnitsky do not
> raise a number of key issues:
>
> a) Vygotsky at one point in HDHMF, Chapter Two, criticizes those who take
> experiments out of the laboratory and do anthropological fieldwork with
> them and calls this method absolutely unjustified. Does this explain why he
> did not personally take part?
>
> b) In fact, Luria's experiments were quite similar to what people like
> Rivers had done in New Guinea--they were not at all unprecedented; they
> were in fact part of a recognized and continuing tradition in
> cross-cultural psychology (c.f. Glick and Cole, and also recent work on
> chimps and children in Africa). This ethnographic tradition WAS politically
> suspect, and for good reason. Is this why Luria refers to it sparingly, and
> why Koffka is rather unsympathetic to Luria's (largely foregone)
> conclusions?
>
> 7. Vygotsky's work was never officially denounced by Stalin himself, but
> instead was subject to an informal ban, which did not prevent him from
> being favorably cited in the twenty years between his death and the first
> publications in Russia. Well, this isn't exactly myth-busting. Stalin was
> not particularly well-read; his most critical comment on Vygotsky would
> have been something along the lines of "Who?" But this really is both
> sensationalistic and naive: it is sensationalistic (and anachronistic) to
> imagine that Vygotsky's work was famous enough at his death to deserve the
> kind of explicit suppression that, say, Trotsky, Bukharin, Radek, or even
> Vavilov suffered. It is naive to imagine that the two almost fact-free
> articles published against Vygotsky in the years after his death were
> somehow not part of an orchestrated campaign against his work (which began
> WELL before he died--why is there no discussion of the 1931 decree on
> pedology in Leningrad, something that Vygotsky himself mentions in Thinking
> and Speech Chapter Six?)
>
> As Kozulin remarks in a remarkably well-tempered preface, this is a
> dangerous book--not so much to the reader, but to the writers. The danger
> is that that Yasnitsky and Van der Veer run the risk of busting a gut
> rather than busting myths, making revolutionary revisionism out of their
> firm grasp of the obvious embroidered with material that is anything but
> obvious. When that happens, we get something that is neither a gorgon nor a
> minotaur but more like Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest":
> something like a monster without being a myth.
>
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
>
>
>
> , and even (in designed to undo some of those cuts.  Like Aristotle, Jesus
> Christ, and Muhammad, Vygotsky didn't write or at least didn't edit the
> books that made him famous. The problem of course is that Vygotsky didn't
> know that he was Vygotsky; he thought he was just "me". and de Saussure,
> Vygotsky did not
>
>
>
>     So you thought you knew L.S. Vygotsky! Well
>