Re: Unit, activity, experience...

nate (schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu)
Tue, 23 Mar 1999 19:45:09 -0600

Elena,

First, thankyou for the clarification. A few comments/questions.

> Also I disagree with discrimination of activity into leading
activities
> and goal-directed activities (Nate's quotation of Kosulin,1990). I
suppose
> that all types of activity are goal-directed by definition. If activity
> is not goal-directed, it is not activity at all.

I couldn't agree more. I will recheck Kozulin but I do beileve he used
those two definitions. It was a focus on directions of activity theory
after Vygotsky's death. One being the direction of Zaporzhets and the
other being El'konin. By goal I believe Kozulin was referring to activities
such as perception, memory, reading etc. Kozulin does question the use of
such a differentiation, but does acknowledge this differentiation ocurred
following Vygotsky's death via the activity approach of Leontiev. Some of
the theoretical manuscripts I have been reading Zaporzhets, Venger,
El'konin etc seem to point to this differentiation. My interpreatation of
Kozulin was there was a break in focus with Activity Theory in Russia as in
Zaporozhets-Venger and El'konin-Davydov in age related and goal directed. I
am also aware that this differentiation was not a strict individual split
in that Zaporozhets focused on age related aspects and El'konin on sensory
standards in respect to reading instruction. I guess I would ask if it is
untrue that this differentiation ocurred?

> One more disagreement. Veresov mentions (again from Nate's message)
> that Russia has two words for Activity: one coming from German
> (Leont'ev) and Vygotsky's use of activity which was more Pavlovian in
> origin. I believe that Soviet psychology has the only one definition of
> activity which is strongly connected with Marx's philosophy.

Veresov's comments:

"I will illustrate this by two examples. The first of these examples is a
terminological one; I mean the term activity. In his works A. N. Leont'ev
stressed that the term activity (deyatelnost) is the central concept of
activity-oriented approach. According to A. N. Leont'ev activity is the
goal directed and object-oriented system of actions of the individual. A.
N. Leont'ev stressed also that the meaning of the term activity is very
close to the concept Tdtigkeit (practical, labour activity of the
individual) as it was presented in German classical philosophy in contrast
to the term Aktivitdt as traditional in psychology at that times (Leont'ev,
1974-1975, 6-9).

The point of my criticism here is that we must distinguish at least two
meanings of the Russian term deyatelnost (activity). The first meaning of
this word is connected with the physiological glossary, in particular, with
I. Pavlov's higher nervous activity (vysshaya nervnaya deyatelnost) that
had, of course, nothing common with Tdtigkeit. I must say, and the
elementary textual analysis of Vygotsky's works in Russian shows this quite
clearly, that Vygotsky used the term deyatelnost only in this strict sense
with this meaning before 1928 (see Chapter III)."

My comment was in reference to Dorthy's quote which I assumed was from the
historical crisis which was written in 1927. I was unable to find the
actual quote, but was being cautious of how the term "activity" was
defined.

" The unity of analysis, then, must be the psychological activity in all
its complexity, not in isolation"

Nate