[Xmca-l] Re: Volume One of Pedology of the Adolescent Published in Korean

[David Kellogg]

Andy--You remember that Chapter Five of T&S was taken from "Pedology of the
Adolescent". The note which Van der Veer and Valsiner append to the full,
"Pedology of the Adolescent" version on p. 262 of the Vygotsky Reader is a
little misleading: they say that "Pedology of the Adolescent" is lopsided
and that other chapters "totalled" a meagre 15 pages.This makes it sound
like the bulk of Pedology of the Adolescent is Chapter Five. In fact the
other Chapters---there are sixteen of them--are almost all of the same
length, so in fact Chapter Five is only a small part of the work.

What Francine says about the Pedology of the Adolescent in Volume Five of
the Collected Works has to be read with that great length in mind--as she
says, there is a small part of it translated in Volume Five. We also
translated the chapter on imagination and creativity in the adolescent as
an addendum to the book we did on Imagination and Creativity in Childhood,
for which Francine wrote us a very nice jacket blurb. Volume Five has only
extracts from  five of the sixteen chapters; concepts are
disproportionately represented, and there isn't a word about sexual
maturation and love, to which Vygotsky actually devotes two whole chapters
in the massive, two volume version he published as a correspondence course
when he was working at Moscow Second State University. It is this full
length version,w hich is not at all lopsided, that we are publishing, and
we estimate there will be another two volumes in addition to this one. We
also added material from the"Lectures on Pedology" pertaining to the Crisis
at Thirteen. This is the material I circulated earlier on this list. Most
of work is, however, not translated into English. Nikolai Veresov and I are
working to bring out a version in English for Springer, but it won't be out
for a few years.

In the Chapter on the Crisis at Seven and the Crisis at Thirteen in
"Lectures on Pedology" Vygotsky refers to the central neoformation of the
Crisis at Three as "semanticized perception" and compares it to the central
neoformation of the Crisis at Seven, "semanticized perezhivanie". The
neoformation of Early Childhood, that is, the stable outcome of the Crisis
at One in which "autonomous" speech is constructed and then adult language
is construed, is "systemic and semantically structure of consciousness"
(смыслового и системного строения сознания). To me this is the solution of
the question Vygotsky asks at the end of Chapter Two in HDHMF, where he
rejects the use of the term "psychological tools". A tool is used to act on
objects, not on a subject. The things you name--algebraic symbols,
blueprints, writing--are all forms of language when they act on subjects,
and they are only tools when they transform the environment (e.g. a blue
print is only a tool when it is turned into a building, and writing is only
a tool when it is etched into the side of a monument). Voloshinov makes the
same point: when we look at the handle of an axe, we sometimes see that it
is decorated with patterns and sometimes not: this in itself tells us that
the axe is essentially a tool and only accidentally a vehicle for signs.
The problem with the phrase "psychological tools" is the reverse one: it
takes artifacts like algebraic symbols, blueprints and writing which are
essentially signs and only accidentally tools and declares them all to be
essentially tools.

dk

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Book with the Seoul Vygotsky Community

Volume 1 of "Pedology of the Adolescent", 분열과 사랑 (in the Korean language)

http://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=148240197


On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 10:36 AM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> Couple of questions, David.
>
> Which chapter of T&S are you referring to with "the chapter on concept
> formation in adolescence"?
>
> Are you saying that LSV uses the term "semanticization" to mean things
> like "algebraic symbolism, works of art, writing, schemes, diagrams,
> maps, blueprints ..."?
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 29/05/2018 10:56 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
>
> The Seoul Vygotsky Community is proud to announce the publication of the
> first volume of  Vygotsky's "Pedology of the Adolescent" in Korean (see
> link below). Some of this material has been circulated on our list, but it
> has never actually been published in any language except Russian.
>
> Like the upcoming publication of Vygotsky's pedological work in French
> (and, eventually, in English), I think the material speaks for its own
> importance in theory and in methodology. But I also think it addresses (at
> least) three practical questions which keep coming up on this list.
>
> a) How can a Zoped be measured in years? The Binet tasks are utterly
> inadequate for this purpose, as Thorndike, Vygotsky, and even Binet said at
> the time. So we need neoformations that are observable in the data of
> everyday life, e.g. language. The first chapter of this volume, never
> published in Engliish, gives these for the Crisis at Thirteen.
>
> b) What does the child think with before the child is thinking with
> concepts? In Thinking and Speech, the chapter on concept formation in
> adolescence is actually placed BEFORE the chapter on preconcept formation
> in elementary school. The chapters in this volume on the role of emotion as
> a "sputnik" of development not only explain how the adolescent is thinking
> during concept formation but also why.
>
> c) What is the status of the phrase "psychological tools"? Vygotsky
> himself uses it at one point. Then he criticizes it and says that people
> who use this are simply handwaving. This material was written at exactly
> the point in his thinking he made that criticism, and...he does not use it.
> Instead, he uses the idea of "semanticization" in order to describe the
> "intro-volution" of structures.
>
> This volume has important things to add on all of these issues, but it's
> actually little more than the kind of preamble we find in the first five
> chapters of HDHMF or the first four chapters we find in T&S. In the next
> volume, which we are working on right now, Vygotsky says that the last
> great critical period of childhood is the product of the "non-coincidence"
> of general anatomical growth, sexual maturation, and socio-cultural
> maturity. Growth goes on a bit later (thanks to diet), puberty happens
> earlier and earlier (ditto), but the child's ability to reproduce his or
> her own labor and that of a family seems to be endlessly put off by our
> culture.
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Book with the Seoul Vygotsky Community
>
> Volume 1 of "Pedology of the Adolescent", 분열과 사랑 (in the Korean language)
>
> http://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=148240197
>
>
>
>
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