[Xmca-l] Re: The final chapter of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech: A reader's guide

[David Kellogg]

I have a lot of questions about it, Alfredo.

a) The authors speculate that Vygotsky was preparing this as a quick and
dirty PhD. But we have a letter from Kornilov (in the Puzyrei collection)
which clearly says that "Psychology of Art" was the thesis accepted as
LSV's qualification and that it was accepted without a public defense
because Vygotsky was in hospital). So somehow Vygotsky's previous
qualification was rejected? How could that have happened?

b) Vygotsky had a lot of other actual publications (Educational Psychology,
Foundations of Pedology, Pedology of the Adolescent in two volumes, etc.).
These were already finished and out. Why didn't he submit those?

c) In many ways, what we see in Chapter Seven is more like a manuscript
that needs cutting. Compare, for example, the conclusion of Tool and Sign
("Word and Thought") which is in many ways similar (and cites many of the
same sources, like Grunbaum). Why isn't this reflected in the discussion of
the composition?

d) The precise function of Chapter Seven is clearly mentioned in the
author's preface and the introduction, and subsequent work--not to be done
by the author--is also mentioned in the final paragraphs. (Zavarshneva
herself has speculated that this was the prolegomena of a much longer work
on consciousness....)

e) Yes, Chapter Seven has a lot of quotations without quotation marks, and
a lot of these are "near quotations" and not word for word. In some cases
(e.g. Paulhan) he gets the quotations quite wrong (Vygotsky misquotes
Thorndike in the pedology a lot). Very few people, for example, will
recognize that when Vygotsky speaks of unpacking mysteries of which not
even sages can dream, he is quoting "There are more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy" from Hamlet.  But this is true
not just of Vygotsky but of many writers of his time (e.g. Bakhtin,
Voloshinov, and others).

I think the real question is WHY these quotations HERE, and this isn't
really answered in the article. But...

a) I think the idea that Vygotsky was being decertified and was about to be
fired is pure speculation. If true, it was the least of his worries. More,
Thinking and Speech would not have saved him (Kolbanovsky's preface is
pretty critical!). Chapter Seven would have made things worse for him in
almost every way.I think that Vygotsky's other publications were much
better candidates for Kandidat status, if that really was necessary (and I
don't think it was).

b) Vygotsky mentions finishing up a work on thinking and speech in 1932. So
to some extent the composition wasn't so much hurried as belated.

c) Vygotsky always had a lot of irons in the fire. He also got a lot of
rejections. So works tended to get reworked a lot, put aside under the
pressure of other work, etc. Thinking and Speech is a masterpiece, but it's
not an exception when we set it alongside his other works in progress.

d) Vygotsky at some point must have met Volosinov (probably when he was
teaching at the Herzen Institute in Leningrad). Zavershneva herself notes
that Vygotsky referenced Voloshinov in his notes. That is the source of the
Jakubinsky refs.  When was the last time you said "I'll just fill in these
refs later..."

e) Vygotsky had about one month between his throat haemmorhage on or about
May 3rd and this death on June 11th. Doesn't this suggest deathbed
dictation, or at most an unfinished manuscript? It's not really the moment
for a smart career move, is it?

The structure of the book that Vygotsky had in mind--as a whole--is pretty
clearly laid out in the author's preface: Intro (1), Critical Studies
(Chapters 2-3), Theoretical Background (4), Experimental Studies (5-6),
Conclusion (7). If we view it "synoptically" (as Mescheryakov suggests in
his work on the terminology), it was a matter of establishing the separate
planes of external speech, inner speech, thinking, affective-volitional
impulse. These are laid more or less in that logical order in the book,
because that is the worder in which Vygotsky saw them developing in the
child (exernal before internal, innner speech before thinking, and thinking
before free will), and that is the order they are put together in in
Chapter Seven too. The material that Vygotsky quotes, however, is largely
literature, describing thought in action, and here the elements are in the
reverse order, because when we describe a verbal act we think of the
motivation as background and lay out the thought against that, and the
words against that.

Vygotsky needs to explain all this, but he simply doesn't have time. That's
our job, I guess.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full


On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 12:16 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
wrote:

> I would be very glad if people take it up for discussion, Mike.
>
> Alfredo Jornet
> ________________________________
> New article in *Design Studies* "Imagining Design: Transitive and
> intransitive dimensions"
> Free print available: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1WhHg_,KmyN6Dr
>
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu>
> Sent: 27 March 2018 17:05
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The final chapter of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech:
> A reader's guide
>
> Thanks Peter
>
> For discussion?
>
> Mike
>
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 3:17 AM Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>
> > The final chapter of Vygotsky's
> > Thinking and Speech: A reader's guide
> > René van der Veer1,2 Ekaterina Zavershneva3
> > 1Department of Education, Leiden University,
> > Leiden, 2311, The Netherlands
> > 2School of Psychology, University of Magallanes,
> > Punta Arenas, 01855, Chile
> > 3Department of Psychology, Moscow University
> > of Medicine and Dentistry,Moscow, 127473,
> > Russia
> > Correspondence
> > René van derVeer,Department of Education,
> > Leiden University, 2311 Leiden, The Netherlands.
> > Email:VEER@FSW.leidenuniv.nl
> > Abstract
> > The seventh and last chapter of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech
> > (1934) is generally considered as his final word in psychology. It
> > is a long chapter with a complex argumentative structure in which
> > Vygotsky gives his view on the relationship between thinking and
> > speech. Vygotsky's biographers have stated that the chapter was
> > dictated in the final months of Vygotsky's life when his health was
> > rapidly deteriorating. Although the chapter is famous, its structure
> > has never been analyzed in any detail. In the present article we reveal
> > its rhetorical structure and show how Vygotsky drew on many hitherto
> > unrevealed sources to convince the reader of his viewpoint.
> > KEYWORDS
> > authorship, egocentric speech, inner speech, linguistics, Vygotsky
> >
> >
> >
> >
>