[Xmca-l] Re: Happy New Year and Perezhivanie!

Sun Jan 15 17:28:58 PST 2017

Marc, I must distance myself from your characterisation of 
my ontological position. I loathe structuralism and 
functionalism, but I define my position in opposition to 
both structuralism and functionalism on the one hand and 
hermeneutic and psychologicstic approaches to human life on 
the other. See for example my appropriation and critique of 
Anthony Giddens here: 
https://www.academia.edu/21493136/Anthony_Giddens_on_Structuration 
and my appreciation of Vasilyuk here: 
https://www.academia.edu/15198661/Fedor_Vasilyuk_s_Psychology_of_Life-projects 
and if you are a real sucker for punishment: 
https://www.academia.edu/29582222/An_ontology_of_social_life .

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://home.mira.net/~andy
http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making 

On 16/01/2017 3:27 AM, Marc Clarà wrote:
>
> Hi, all,
>
> I have the impression that part of this thread of the 
> discussion echoes the old (and eternal) discussion between 
> functionalism and structuralism. In our case, perhaps 
> these two broad positions would seem to take the form of 
> what could be called an “activity approach” and a 
> “semiotic approach” respectively. Or in other terms, 
> “perezhivanie is activity-function” vs. “perezhivanie is 
> structure-counciousness-mind”.
>
> In my understanding, within the “activity approach”, 
> Alfredo's position seems to be more radical than Antti's. 
> I see Alfredo's position somewhat closer, in some aspects, 
> to “participation” approaches (e.g. Rogoff's). If I 
> understand him well, he seems to assume that in reality 
> there is not anything but social interaction; that is, 
> that not only there is a UNITY but also an IDENTITY 
> between activity, social interaction, and meaning, and 
> that therefore all is reducible to social interaction. 
> Thus, in his article with Roth, they write: “In the case 
> of Sylvia’s categorizing her mystery object, we already 
> see her as part of the social relation that is 
> mathematical practice, a (social) practice that exists in 
> the linking of an act of classification to its account. 
> That practice is social in and as of the link; in the life 
> of Sylvia, it first was a social relation. Thus, there is 
> not something happening in the relation that then is 
> transferred to the inside of the girl.” (p.321). 
> Accordingly, Alfredo, in this conversation, says that “a 
> changing activity IS changing “meaning” (where “to be” is 
> to be heard as an “unity/identity” in the dialectical 
> sense)”, and also that a “SIGN is not a thing, but a 
> relation between two persons. But the sign then is not 
> something between things, or even between persons; it 
> really and concretely is a relation between people that 
> has to be accounted for empirically”. He adds that 
> mediation is a “particular class of activities in which 
> sign relations are produced”. Reading Antti's questions 
> and comments, I have the impression that his position 
> assumes the UNITY, but not the IDENTITY, between activity, 
> meaning and social interaction. But before going ahead, I 
> have to stress that, as I have already mentioned in a 
> previous e-mail, Alfredo's use of the concepts of SIGN and 
> CULTURAL MEDIATION seems to me very different from the way 
> I use these concepts, which I tried to make explicit in a 
> previous e-mail. It would seem that this could be because, 
> from Alfredo's view, the things and phenomena I call signs 
> and cultural mediation don't really exist, so he uses 
> these concepts to refer to phenomena that, in his view, do 
> really exist (this also echoes Vytosky's “historical 
> meaning of the crisis in psychology”).
>
> I have the impression that others in this discussion 
> (e.g., David, Andy, me), which take a more semiotic 
> approach, departs from the assumption that these phenomena 
> and things that, in my understanding, Vygotsky calls 
> cultural mediation and signs, do exist, and that are the 
> key to study mind-consciousness. It seems to me that Antti 
> also would assume the existence of signs and cultural 
> mediation (in Vygotsky's terms) but that he is concerned 
> on whether we have to study a structure (that is, 
> consciousness-mind, and therefore use as a unit the 
> sign-meaning -a microcosm of consciousness) or we have to 
> study a function (that is, activity).
>
> One of the many contributions I find interesting in 
> Vygotsky is precisely that, in my understanding, he tries 
> to conciliate these two positions -functionalism and 
> structuralism. In my view, he departs from the idea that 
> how the things are is strongly related to how the things 
> function (Vygotsky's law of the unity of the structure and 
> function in thinking). Vygotsky writes: “It is becoming 
> clear that functions depend on the structure of that which 
> is thought. Any act of thought must somehow establish a 
> connection between the various aspects of reality which 
> are represented in consciousness. The way that this 
> reality is represented in consciousness cannot be without 
> some significance in determining the operations of 
> thinking that will be possible. In other words, the 
> various functions of thinking are inevitably dependent on 
> that which functions, is moved, and is the foundation of 
> this process. Stated yet more simply, the functions of 
> thinking depend on the structure of thought itself.” 
> (Vygotsky, collected works, v.1, p.237).
>
> I think that this can enable an approach which overcome 
> what is often presented as a dichotomy between structure 
> and function, without eliminating neither structure nor 
> function. That is, the object of study can be 
> mind-consciousness, and therefore the unit can be the 
> sign-meaning; but the mind-consciousness must always be 
> studied at work, that is, how the mind-consciousness works 
> in psychological functions, i.e. within activity.
>
> In my view, this means studying how sign-meaning mediates 
> in specific psychological functions. More specifically, in 
> the study mentioned in my paper of MCA, it means studying 
> how certain semiotic structures mediate in activities of 
> experiencing-as-struggle. For example, from this study, it 
> seems that certain semiotic structures, which I call modal 
> contradictions (e.g., duty vs. incapability), in 
> m-perezhivanie may be important in 
> experiencing-as-struggle activities: their semiotic 
> transformation seems to imply an emotional transformation, 
> and seems to realize the psychological function of 
> experiencing-as-struggle.
>
> Of course, I introduce my empirical study here just to 
> exemplify my point and the general epistemological 
> approach I am assuming; I don't claim that my 
> methodological approach is unproblematic; in fact, I am 
> struggling to deal with the many methodological problems 
> that arise. Just to cite two of these many problems: 
> first, the study is incomplete, in the sense that, as 
> Antti mentions, the social relations which are also a 
> crucial aspect of the activity of experiencing-as-struggle 
> are beyond the scope of this study (I hope finding ways to 
> being able to analyze this aspect in the future); second, 
> although the study intents to be microgenetic, this is 
> done retrospectively from one narrative, what is certainly 
> problematic (the opposite problem is how to identify 
> processes of experiencing-as-struggle in advance, in order 
> to undertake a longitudinal study -this would also permit 
> studying better all aspects of activity). But all this is 
> at a methodological plane, which perhaps would deserve a 
> new thread; I think that the discussion in this thread is 
> more on the epistemological (and at times ontological) plane.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Marc.
>
>
> 2017-01-15 5:21 GMT+01:00 Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net 
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>:
>
>     /Perezhivanie/ is a type of activity, according
>     Vasilyuk, as Alex Kozulin remarked some years ago, a
>     "life-project."
>
>     Andy
>
>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>     Andy Blunden
>     http://home.mira.net/~andy <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy>
>     http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making
>     <http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making>
>
>     On 15/01/2017 10:22 AM, Antti Rajala wrote:
>
>         ...
>
>         Andy also uses Vasilyuk in informing his
>         definition of perezhivanie. I
>         wondered that for Andy, in what way perezhivenie
>         would be different as a
>         unit of analysis as compared to activity  (Andy -
>         I have read your critique
>         of Leontiev, so please feel free to substitute
>         e.g., collaborative project
>         for activity). I like in Andy's paper the idea
>         that through perezhivanie
>         not only the actor is changed but sometimes also
>         the social circumstances
>         (also the reference to Bildungsroman). Why only
>         focus on ontogenesis and
>         not also sociogenesis? In my own work, I am
>         interested to study the
>         relation between perezhivanie and agency.
>
>
>
>