History and AT

From: Bruce Robinson (bruce.rob@btinternet.com)
Date: Tue Nov 14 2000 - 04:52:18 PST


Paul asks:
>What is history from the perspective of activity theory?
>

I'm way behind both on the reading and have only followed bits of the
discussion, but I couldn't resist saying something on this topic. A good
starting point is this passage from Vygotsky's 'Crisis of Psychology' where
he discusses history as a graphic example of the impossibility of
empiricism rising to the level of scientific thought:

"...it is a gross mistake to suppose that science can only study what is
given in immediate experience. How does the psychologist study the
unconscious; the historian and geologist, the past; the physicist-optician
invisible beams and the philologist - ancient languages? The study of
 traces, influences, the method of interpretation and reconstruction, the
method of critique and the finding of meaning have been no less fruitful
than the method of direct 'empirical' observation... Scientific knowledge
and immediate perception do not coincide at all... It is just a matter of
how to interpret these traces, by what method... It is therefore a question
of finding the right interpretation and not refraining from any
interpretation."

"How do the sciences proceed in the study of what is not immediately given
[in perception]? Generally speaking they reconstruct it, they re-create the
subject of study through the method of interpreting its traces i.e.
indirectly. Thus the historian interprets traces - documents, memoirs,
newspapers etc - and nevertheless history is a science about the past,
reconstructed by its traces, and not a science about the traces of the
past, it is about the revolution and not about documents of the revolution.
The same is true of child psychology... It is just a question of how to
interpret these traces, by what method... It is therefore a question of
finding the right interpretation, not of refraining from any
interpretation. After all, historians too are familiar with more than one
erroneous construct based upon genuine documents that were falsely
interpreted. What conclusion follows from this? Is it that history is a
'paradise forever lost'?... And if the historian, the geologist, the
physicist were to argue like the reflexologist, they would say that as we
cannot immediately experience the past of mankind and the earth... history
and geology are subjective, impossible. The only thing possible is a
history of the present..." (p271-2)

LSV argues that the form of mediation through 'traces' (which is a
preferable term to 'historic texts' as it can include traces of recent
history in the form of the memories of the living) applies to all sciences,
but that history is a particularly good example because access to the past
- at least outside one person's life span - cannot be through direct
experience. It must of necessity be indirect and depends both on the traces
left and the interpretation (internalisation?) of them. So here is an
extreme example of the necessity of semiotic mediation as a foundation for
scientific knowledge, which flows from the nature and subject matter of
history as a discipline.

The second point he makes is that the indirectness of this process does not
make it impossible to reconstruct the past, assuming that enough relevant
traces have been left. We do not just take the traces at face value as they
appear to us in the present, but as evidence of the past that has an
objectivity, one respect of which is its residues in our ideas and the
structures we face in our own activity (though this may clearly be very
indirect). However the process of reconstruction is a human, social
activity and therefore one that has its own history (hence, historiography,
writing the history of historical writing) and is the product of both the
individual histories of its writers and the social / historical context in
which they operated, including the state of historical evidence available
to them.

The nature of historical research as a specific form of activity - which
requires us to decide how the traces are to be collected and interpreted,
what counts as reliable evidence, what deductions from the traces are valid
scientifically, and how the past can be reconstructed - gives rise to the
necessity for a specifically historical methodology. For example, when oral
history (based on interviews made up of direct oral testimony of
participants / contemporaries) began on a large scale in the 60s, there
were discussions precisely of the validity of anecedotal evidence, the
fallibility of human memory and the need for corroboration from other
sources. It would be interesting to discuss what such a methodology might
be if based more directly on CH psychology.

If I have time, I'll try and write something about how this all should
affect a reading of Leontiev, but I think it's also worth discussing in its
own right.

Bruce Robinson



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