Re: [xmca] The belated reflections on Anna's and Peter's article

I found myself taking a close look at Sasha’s Dec 28 post, and wound
up writing a summary of many his points, including quotes. My
comments follow. Apologies for the length, please feel free to skim.

1. Sasha suggests that Anna and Peter take a cavalier and eclectic
methodological approach toward sociology.

Combining CHAT with “one or various types of sociology, based on
absolutely different philosophical backgrounds … demonstrates,” in
Sasha’s opinion, “some methodological unconcern.”

2. Sasha’s main concern in this post/commentary is not over CHAT and
sociology, however. It is over the relationship of Vygotsky and
Leontiev, and the errors they made. He sees Peter and Anna’s
“eclecticism” toward various trends in sociology as being akin to what
he sees as an eclecticism toward CHAT theory itself, which arbitrarily
and incorrectly combines Vygotsky and Leontiev.

Sasha remarks that “eclecticism blossoms in the discussed text much
earlier than [when] the authors try to act as matchmakers between
psychology and sociology.”

“The very notion of so called Cultural Historical Activity Theory, or
CHAT,” according to Sasha, amounts to little more than “several
arbitrarily taken out of context separate ideas of Vygotsky and
Leont'ev.”

“Even more naïve,” he comments further, is the “attempt to put forward
the distinction between "the first", "the second" and the "third"
generations” of what he sees as a “nonexistent theory.”

He acknowledges that “we use the term CHAT” as a way “to designate”
the tradition “rooted in Vygotsky and Leont'ev tradition,” but Sasha
emphasizes that “I'm afraid that it looks rather naïve to take it
literally as THEORY.”

3. Sasha asks “we have to put before ourselves the real question:
what, if anything, unifies psychological ideas of Leont’ev and
Vygotsky?”

Sasha says with emphasis: “***Near to nothing.***”

4. Sasha acknowledges that both LSV and ANL were Marxists, but
dismisses Marxism as being a point in common between Vygotsky and
Leontiev **as psychologists.**

He explains: “One can find a lot of common motives, common ideas and
even the same words in both LSV and ANL. These common motives and
words are nothing but their common Marxist background, their Marxist
theoretic culture. And we will be the last who will deny or
underestimate this common cultural-historical root of both thinkers.
But the question was about their similarity as psychologists, not as
private persons with similar political and philosophical
weltanschauung [sg - world view].”

5. Sasha emphasizes they were Marxists, and furthermore, did not make
concessions to what some would call Stalinism.

“Did [these] two researchers, or even one of them, part from their
common Marxist general philosophical and social position?
“Surely not!

“Both remain sincere and passionate Marxists and communists.

“Did one of them accept or slightly move closer to Soviet official
quasi Marxist ideology?

“Surely not, as well!”

6. However, Sasha emphasizes, one cannot agree with both Vygotsky and
Leontiev.

“… if one of them was right, the other inevitably was wrong.”

7. Sasha summarizes their basic theoretical positions on sign
mediation and object-oriented activity in this way:

“As we know the basic theoretic idea of LSV was the idea of sign
mediation. He really believed that “cultural” (arbitrary) sign can
bridge the gap between two Cartesian substances.”

On the other hand, “ANL didn’t believe that [the] arbitrary sign can
help to solve [the] old psycho physical problem, and shift[ed] his
attention as a researcher from “cultural” sign to object oriented
activity.”

As Sasha sees it, “Here, just in this point the ways of Vygotsky and
Leont’ev as psychologists divaricated. Leont’ev focused his attention
on activity as a means which can mediate a subject and his object,
while Vygotsky stayed on his old semiotic position.”

8. Sasha raises objections to points Peter and Anna raise about
“transformative change” being a theme in first but not second
generation CHAT. He uses this as a touchstone to a major point he
stresses - Vygotsky’s theory of sign mediation cannot play a role in
the emancipation (transformative change) of the wage worker.

Sasha says he “can hardly imagine how a sign can change anything both
in the real world and in the individual consciousness at least from
Marxist perspective.”

9. Sasha analyzes the plight of the wage worker to illustrate this.

“When a worker is self-employed say in subsistence production or in
creative work he acts as living object oriented and consequently
spontaneous creature. On the contrary, when a human sells his labor
power he alienates first of all his/her spontaneity.”

“ … as wage hand he needs to be specially stimulated to make any
movement.”

“ … the wage worker turns into Cartesian dead, mechanical SèR machine
in the very capitalist reality.”

“… a worker is totally enslaved and the task of communist revolution
is to destroy this relation which turns an alive human into dead SèR
machine.

10. Sasha describes the alienation of the worker both in capitalism
and in the Soviet Union.

“ … the method of double stimulation (the notorious triangle) was the
basic method of "emancipation" of alienated labour in the Soviet Union
…”

“… the basis of relation of wage labour lies naked S=>R relation …”

11. Sasha emphasizes that “signs” cannot liberate the worker, only
the elimination of wage labor itself can do this.

“… to mask this unattractive picture [wage slavery] capitalists
decorate the chain with paper flowers of every sort and kind of
"cultural" signs. The premise of this practice is an idea that
totally alienated wage worker will forget about his slave status and
imagine that he is free looking at false ideological quasi communist
or equally false ideological religious or liberal signs or slogans
hanging on the walls of his workshop or transmitting via mass media.

“… the way to the realm of freedom has nothing to do with so called
“sign mediation”.

“The fact is that we don't need false even highly "cultural"
decorations of the chain, we need to destroy the chains of wage labour
as it is.”

12. Better suited to this task is the theory of object oriented
activity than semiotic mediation.

“And the theory of object oriented (not alienated) activity in its
more developed variant as theory of dialectical psychology is more
suitable instrument for this task than all kinds of semiotic
conceptions with all kind of false artificial signs.”

13. The suggestion that Leontiev’s theorizing was connected to
Stalinism is unfounded.

“Surely Leont’ev (and Il’enkov) lived in more hard times than
Vygotsky, but that circumstance doesn’t give us a right to insult them
with unfounded inferences that his theoretic position has something to
do with the Soviet totalitarianism.”

14. At the same time, while LSV’s theory of semiotic mediation was
objectively reactionary, Sasha emphasizes that he is not accusing him
of being a political reactionary.

“To prevent any misunderstanding we want emphasize that criticizing
semiotic approach as objectively reactionary one we are far from
accusing Lev Semionovich in any political sins.”

“That is not his fault that the first outline of Marxist psychology
wasn’t entirely successful.“

“Even less we imply that Soviet authorities were in the list [in the
past? sg] guided by Vygotsky’s semiotic ideas, because similar more or
less articulated ideas were and still remain in the air.”

15. As an aside, Sasha discusses the way Anna translates a passage
from Vygotsky in a 2004 article. I will skip over that.

16. Sasha then moves on to describe the crux of his critique of
Leontiev. He points out that Leontiev's theory of perception is
indicative of what is wrong with his theory in general.

“ … Leont’ev knew and insisted on social character of human activity,
but he failed in substantial psychological realization of this
principle.”

“ … activity in Leont’ev’s theory is an activity of isolated person or
animal, a variant of Robinsonade. That comes home if we take for
example his and Zaporojets’ conception of perceptive activity.”

“ … both researchers analyzed the movement of eyes or hands of
isolated person in total abstraction from any social relation and from
any tangible tool, taking it in terms of Francis Bacon “with bare hand”.

17. Understanding the role of the human-created tool is crucial,
something Leontiev did not understand.

“In fact the omission of tool in the schema of human object oriented
activity is equal to omission of social context of this activity
because the attributive characteristic of human activity is that it
has to be armed with a tool given to him by another human.”

“Many of animals can make and utilize various tools. Only humans make
tools not for themselves, but for others, only humans don’t throw out
their tools after utilizing them, only humans teach their kids to use
this tools, only humans collect tools as tangible part of their
culture, only humans acquire an ability to deal with ideal meanings
embodies in those tools.”

18. Leontiev’s lack of understanding on the question of the human-
made tool means he cannot be credited with solving this crucial
problem in object oriented activity theory.

“Evidently that the shift of interest from “bare hand” (in Leont’ev
and Zaporojetz doctrine of perceptive activity) to hand armed with
cultural tool in object oriented activity belongs more to Alexander
Meshcheriakov and Il’enkov than to Leont’ev.”

19. Continuing his critique of Leontiev, Sasha explains that ANL’s
failure to understand the psychological nature of the cultural tool
paralleled Leontiev’s failure to theorize the psyche. Sasha refers to
sharp though friendly-in-form criticisms Leontiev made of Vygotsky
semiotic approach, but points out that Leontiev did not himself
surmount that “vulgar and evidently non-Marxist” semiotic approach
himself.

“In the same time he [Leontiev] totally failed in his attempt to give
a theoretic deduction of psyche.“

“In fact defining a psyche as an ability which emerges in the
situation when a (magically arise from nowhere) “subject” starts to
react on abiotic stimuli which acquires a meaning of sign which
indicates the presence of some biotic stimuli Leont’ev unintentionally
returned to the same vulgar and evidently non Marxist semiotic
approach which he sharply (though friendly in form) criticized in
Vygotsky.”

20. Nevertheless, Sasha argues that Leontiev did make a fundamental
contribution, despite these other failures.

“What Alexei Nikolaevitch really did was the discovery of the essence
of life as it is (which in fact is nothing but an object oriented
activity) … though Leont’ev himself didn’t guess what was the real
subject of his really great discovery.

21. The final part of Sasha’s commentary is a table comparing the
three trends of psychological theorizing represented by Vygotsky,
Leontiev, and Ilyenkov/A. Meshchariakov.

He lists:
1) the authors and
2) the names of the three theoretical trends,

and compares them along three criteria:

3) their units of analysis,
4) whether they solved the “essence of life” question, and
5) whether they solved what might be called the “human tool sharing in
culture and history” problem.

Vygotsky’s theory, “Cultural-Historical theory,” using the Vygotskian
triangle of sign mediation as its unit of analysis, did not solve
either problem.

Leontiev’s theory, “Theory of Activity,” using the subject and object,
or vital relation, as its unit of analysis, solved the essence of life
problem (activity is object-oriented), but not the human tool sharing
in culture and history problem (human psychology is based on the use
of shared tools in human activity).

Ilyenkov/Meshchariakov’s theory, “Dialectical Psychology,” or what
Sasha says can be called simply CHAT, uses as its unit of analysis
“collaborative object oriented activity of minimum two persons
mediated by cultural tool (not mere sign!)” and successfully solves
both problems.

22. As part of his presentation of this table, Sasha comments on
Vygotsky. He is critical of Vygotsky’s S=>R schema, his triangle of
mediation, as being mechanical. He rejects the idea that culture and
history can be found in this scheme with arbitrary [conventional]
signs. He also suggests that culture and history cannot be found in
the “artificial concepts” theorized in the Sakharov-Vygotsky experiment.

Vygotsky “tried to deal with stimulus reactive creatures as a starting
point of his theorizing (e.g. in the basis of his triangle of
mediation), while the S=>R schema is totally mechanical principle
which has nothing to do even with alive subjects not to speak of
subjects of psyche or human consciousness …”

“Culture is something that is growing and crystallizing and passing
from one alive hands to another one for ages and that has little to do
with taken by agreement arbitrary signs.”

“ … in the scheme of mediation with arbitrary signs we can find no
more “culture and history” than in Sakharov-Vygotsky experiment with
so called “artificial concepts”.”

23. At the same time, before he closes, Sasha feels strongly obliged
to point out Vygotsky’s vital contributions.
“I feel that I can’t put a dot without appreciating Vygotsky’s
contribution to CHAT …”

There is no question, says Sasha, that “Vygotsky’s role in foundation
of CHAT as a researching school can’t be underestimated.”

“It was Vygotsky who clearly formulated the criteria of scientific
character of our discipline: “Donauchn. t.zr. —
vzaimodeistv.” (prescientific point of view – interaction <of soul and
body – A.S.>).”

“It was Vygotsky who said: “Centr. problema vsei psihologii –
svoboda.” (The core problem of entire psychology is freedom)”

“… and this: “Grandioznaya kartina razvitiya lichnosti: put' k
svobode. Ojivit' spinozizm v Marks. psihol.” (The grandiose picture of
personality development: the way to freedom. Revive Spinozism in
Marxist psychology.)

“We can continue the list of such brilliant insights.”

24. Sasha finishes off also with a big nod to the contributions of
Leontiev and others.

“But probably his [Vygotsky’s] biggest scientific result was inducing
the field of greatest voltage around himself as a researcher, the
field that attracted and inspired such brilliant thinkers as Luria and
Zaporojets, as Elkonin and Leont’ev and many many others.

And among these, “ … first of all Alexei Leont’ev, who not only
continue[d the] Vygotsky’s project, but make [made] fundamentally new
step[s] in the development of CHAT psychology.”

25. And a final comment by Sasha to return to the general discussion
thread:

“To summarize my feelings from Anna’s and Peter’s article I can repeat
that it touches essentially actual problems and just therefore it must
be appreciated as a starting point of big discussion concerning social
dimensions of CHAT psychology.”

COMMENTS by Steve:

I appreciate Sasha’s contribution and criticisms. He raises important
issues for CHAT about how to understand Vygotsky, Leontiev and
Ilyenkov’s theories, and use them as a basis to move forward. I find
myself having a few critical remarks on Sasha's commentary in that
spirit, which I respectfully share.

I can’t agree that Vygotsky and Leontiev had “near to nothing” in
common in their psychological theorizing, and I am especially
unwilling to have to choose between their two lines of theorizing. I
believe the two can be highly integrated, even more so than has been
done (at least in English so far). (Obviously, this belief needs to
be put into practice!)

Generally speaking, I am not willing to choose between any of the
greater lights in CHAT theory - Marx, Engels, Vygotsky, Leontiev,
Luria, Ilyenkov, etc. All shared and advanced numerous fundamental
principles for forming a new, systematic general psychology, as well
as having made historic contributions to numerous sub-disciplines in
the study of human psychology and consciousness, such as semiosis and
activity analysis.

These researchers are (were) major architects and builders in a
project already almost a century old that will still be in its
foundation stage for more decades, and perhaps many more. They had
much more in common than they had differences. They each pioneered
new ideas, made new discoveries, ran up against limitations, made
errors. It is critical to examine these errors, but I believe it must
be done by starting with their common philosophical and social-
theoretical basis, which they each very explicitly and consciously
used in all their theorizing about psychology and related philosophy.
To lose sight of this theoretical basis is to see perhaps their words
but not grasp the content of their psychological theorizing. Even in
their errors they held many concepts in common.

I applaud Sasha’s call for emancipation from wage labor and alienated
work conditions, but I do not believe Vygotsky was talking about
political signs adulating capitalist industrial practices when he
talked about psychological signs, as Sasha seems to interpreting
Vygotsky's theory of sign mediation to be at least partially about.
Perhaps I am misreading Sasha's comments. Generally speaking, I do
not recognize Vygotsky’s actual "theory of sign mediation" in Sasha's
commentary. To understand his critique, I would need to see what
specific writings and theorizing Sasha is referring to, and how he
reads them to draw his conclusions.

On his analysis of wage labor, I question the one-sided way it seems
that Sasha suggests that at “the basis of relation[s] of wage labour
lies naked S=>R relations.”

It is certainly true that social relations and physical conditions can
deteriorate to terrible lows in capitalist industry, but humans,
except in the most extreme conditions, are rarely fully divested of
their upper mental functions and reduced to just limbic, animal
reactions, that is, naked S=>R relations. When this happens, of
course, humans can’t work. Not that one doesn't feel like that at the
end of the work day sometimes!

Such a situation could indeed happen in a concentration camp,
conditions of prison torture, etc., where people can truly “lose their
minds” for the moment, maybe for a while. But it is precisely the
(contradictory) meditational aspects of human psychology and social
reality that makes it possible for workers and anyone to be human –
not to mention stand up for and fight for their humanity - isn’t it?
It is that mediational element between the Stimulus and the Response
that gives us the power to be human, and even the power just to do
hard, monotonous, backbreaking, "nonspontaneous" menial work.

The capitalists indeed impose a mode of production that ultimately and
unmercifully seeks to completely ignore this mediational element - but
they do so at their peril. In reality, compromises are worked out on
shop floors and all workplaces day by day, minute by minute. Workers
can get treated like semi-animals (with language and skills!), but
they don't become animals. Over time, in fact, it is just the
opposite. In the course of struggle, workers invent new forms and
levels of human solidarity for themselves, such as unionism. This, of
course, is not what is normally publicly portrayed regarding real-time
struggles, and especially, is not the perspective of the capitalists
when they are in conflict with labor. Capitalists and people thinking
in terms of that class find such a thing impossible to even imagine,
much less observe. Workers themselves sometimes need to rediscover
it, or even learn it for the first time.

When Marx talked about the task of the emancipation of workers being
the task of the workers themselves, I think he was talking about
taking our humanity (despite the capitalist's exploitation and
distortion of it) on the job and generalizing that toward creating a
new kind of society - a process borne from the process of struggling
on the job as well as struggling with society via the workplace, using
the power workers are imbued with by being extensions of capital.

The first step is to see and understand the humanity and solidarity
that in actuality does exist in the work process, embryonic as that
may be. Sasha's description seems to lose sight of this first step.

I believe that Ilyenkov’s theory of the ideal solves important
problems with the instrumental level of analysis Vygotsky was using to
distinguish tools and signs and understand and describe the
fundamentally meditational character of human higher mental
functions. The theory of the ideal in my opinion is still only
tentatively being integrated into CHAT. I believe it is still only
beginning to rise to its potential.

Similarly, Leontiev’s theory of object-oriented activity solves some
very important limitations that first generation CHAT was facing when
trying to analyze the complex subject-object relations that psychology
must address.

I see activity theory as a framework from which to explore the laws
and categories of a new kind of psychology while maintaining roots in
a materialist view of society and the individual, culture and history,
material conditions and society, the ideal and the material.

Without these materialist roots, psychological theorizing quickly
loses its footing. It easily gets lost trying to theorize the complex
subject-object relations at the intersubjective and subjective levels
of human existence. Moreover, without a combined materialist and
rigorous dialectical approach, troublesome one-sidedness can reign.
Without a materialist-based dialectical methodology, one side or the
other of the subject/object relation in the realm of psychological
processes tends to become favored as dominant. When the subjective or
objective become seen as dominant in human psychology, this
ideological one-sidedness serves to collapse the existing, concrete,
intricate convergences of multiple levels of biological, social and
psychological reality existing in any human situation, into something
abstract. When taken to extremes, this complex of converging levels
either gets conceptually oversimplified (reduced to a lower level of
complexity; objectivised) or unanalyzable (compressed into a totality
of jumbled, complex processes; subjectivised). In other words,
without a dialectical approach grounded on a materialist perspective,
psychological theorizing tends to become subordinated to objectivist
and/or subjectivist accounts of human behavior.

 From what I have been able to study so far, (and I by no means am
close to being in a place where I can be anything like "conclusive," -
still learning!) Leontiev's **object-oriented** activity theory
appears to be a grounding tool toward finding materialist and
dialectical solutions to **object/subject** problems at the **subject-
oriented** psychological levels, where the subjective, by nature,
momentarily (and is perceived in bourgeois society by nature,
permanently) predominates at key psychological junctures.

Looked at this way, object-oriented activity theory is an anchor for
the theorist to be able to track the **objective** social conditions
and dynamics underlying and shaping the **subjective** social and
psychological processes humans undergo. At the same time, these
subjective processes follow their own laws of development, and are by
no means reducible to the laws of activity or social development.
This was one of Vygotsky's great discoveries.

I am happy to see that Sasha strongly acknowledges object-oriented
activity theory as a major contribution to CHAT. He emphasizes the
zoo-psychological aspect of activity theory (the essence of life, as
he calls it), that the activity of all animal life forms and whatever
level of psychic or pre-psychic activity they engage in can be framed
within object-oriented activity theory, which is also able to reveal
the fundamental transformations that take place when human activity
emerges.

As far as I can see, Leontiev's ideas are only tentatively and
partially understood, accepted and integrated into mainstream 'CHAT'
theorizing, especially outside Russian-speaking centers. Some
question whether an "object-oriented" theory of activity actually
belongs in CHAT. What is most accepted about Leontiev's work tends to
be his basic Activity/Motive, Action/Goal, Operation/Condition
paradigm, (which Peter and Anna did not even correctly reproduce in
their chart relating various theories of social conduct to these three
"poles" - or more importantly, explain why they modified it - an
indication of the odd place Leontiev's theory actually holds in CHAT.)

Little or none of Leontiev's work is in print in English in publicly
available books, translations of his books are sometimes inadequate,
internet versions of his work have errors, very little if any Leontiev
is taught in English-speaking colleges. Leontiev's own academic
career in the Stalinist USSR, his relationship to Vygotsky's work, and
other issues around him stir controversy and confusion. Much work
remains in regard to understanding and critiquing his work. Special
attention should be given to researchers like Sasha who have been
around and closely studied many issues regarding Leontiev, as well as
many other Russians in an around CHAT, and has done so for many decades.

As for the history of CHAT, rather than draw a picture focused on
reactionary errors and complete failures, as Sasha seems to lean
toward (and others sometimes do, too), I prefer viewing these
theoretical developments a little less dramatically and more
cerebrally, in terms of lines of development, obstacles, false starts,
new leaps. On the other hand, the very difficult conditions within
which CHAT has historically developed - total censorship, Stalinism,
Soviet totalitarianism, WWII, the Cold War, Western anti-communism,
Western academic repression and ostracism of Marxist-influenced ideas,
language and distance problems, etc. - need vigorous and passionate
attention. What is needed in my opinion is more focus on concrete
social and ideological history and less on individual problems.

Sasha takes pains to emphasize the good intentions of both Vygotsky
and Leontiev. I see no reason not to maintain this spirit in our
historical analyses of both their accomplishments and their
shortcomings, and those of others in the CHAT tradition. Even in
errors are important seeds of progress. Phraseology like
“reactionary” and “totally failed” tend to create a one-sided view of
serious work that can obscure one's vision of actual developments,
rounded histories, and the processes of negation and transformation
that all dynamic ideas undergo as they interpenetrate one another over
time. An effective dialectical critical analysis needs above all to
show where things have been **and where they are going**, not just
where, when and how they have stalled and who is to blame for it. If
Vygotsky and Leontiev have been lights on the CHAT road, their
specific errors can be analyzed in that light. Yes?

Sasha’s criticism of Leontiev as viewing activity and perception only
in terms of the “bare-handed individual" is interesting. For me,
specific passages where Leontiev does this are needed for me to
understand this criticism and use it in my own study of Leontiev.

As for the ideas about the shared cultural tool Sasha attributes to
Ilyenkov and A. Meshcheriakov, these ideas are certainly worth
explaining and elaborating, having appropriate writings referred to,
etc. It wouldn't surprise me if this line of reasoning could shed new
light on what Vygotsky was trying to accomplish with his theorizing
about sign mediation. These two lines of thinking about tools and
signs could be seen as two sides of the same coin, the same essential
process, which may be better understood now that we have the theory of
ideality/materiality to work with, (which, as I mentioned, I believe
is an advance over the older "sign/tool" framework Vygotsky
employed). The discovery by Ilyenkov that all cultural artifacts,
including internal psychological processes, "contain" (metaphorically
speaking) both ideality and materiality offers new ways to assess
earlier efforts to describe and explain mediation.

Finally, Sasha’s table (see item 21 in the summary) offers an
interesting look at how he sees CHAT as developing. Despite his sharp
rhetoric and negative assessments about Vygotsky and Leontiev, when
all is said and done, I don’t see Sasha's sense of the overall
direction of CHAT as radically different from that of most others in
the CHAT community', at least judging from this commentary and other
things I have seen him share at ISCAR and on xmca.

In some ways, my criticisms here boil down to encouraging the
recognition of the many, many "ands" and "pluses" that connect CHAT
thinkers, and discouraging overly emphasizing only the "buts," "ors"
and "minuses" of their work, which of course must always also be
carefully critiqued, worked through, and built upon.

We must never forget the value of errors and mistakes, and the many
accomplishments that precede errors, and upon which mistakes are
made. Errors are not trash to dismiss, they are gems to learn from.
When one remember these time-worn pieces of wisdom when they critique
the Vygotsky's and Leontiev's of the world, they not infrequently
discover that a "gross" error was only a half-error, a "total" failure
was only half-failure, that half the work toward the new solution was
already done by the error-makers ... and that the new solution may not
only be a new advance, but may eventually become another half-error
itself!

I see a lot of work still laying ahead of all of us in the CHAT world
just grasping and evaluating what Vygotsky, Leontiev and Ilyenkov
said, let alone putting their work together into an integrated theory
of psychology – or rather, part of the basis for such a theory. These
three writers of course are only the top of a pyramid of researchers,
philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, thinkers, theorists etc.
that need to be understood, critiqued and integrated. Underlying all
this effort is the desire and hope for a new kind of psychology –
which is what Vygotsky called for, and I think in one way or another,
unites us ... as different as we may be in terms of where we are
coming from and where we may be going.

I hope Sasha continues to share his thoughts and work. If he has a
chance to elaborate on some of his specific readings of Vygotsky,
Leontiev, Ilyenkov and others, all the better.

- Steve

On Dec 28, 2008, at 7:06 PM, Alexander Surmava wrote:

>
> Dear XMCA'ers,
> Because the text with my reflections contains a table and some other
> difficult for reproduction in "plain text" formatting I attach the
> MSWord
> file to this post.
> Cheers,
> Sasha
> <About Anna's and Peter's
> article.doc>_______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

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Received on Wed Dec 31 05:17:50 2008