Anna,
I confess that I have not been paying much attention to this thread but now
that you have so appropriately linked it with the reading of LBE, I see that
it is important to do so. Its interesting to me that you quoted the same
paragraph that provoked my comment on the horizontal/vertical metaphor. You
speak eloquently of progress and liberation and I am struggling to see how
we characterize progress, progress from what to what? Lower to higher?
Simple to complex? Specific to general? Narrow to broader? I take your point
that we should all make a conscious commitment to whatever conception of
progress that we prefer. But how does this avoid an endless relativism? Who
is the "we" that YE mentions as making value judgments? Multiple voices are
wonderful, harmony is even more appealing. Maybe, as David Russell suggests,
this will have to wait until we talk more about the notion of community.
I apologize for stepping so far out of the role of moderator but this is
something I have really been wrestling with........djc
P.S. I always though history was a discipline focused on "historically
interesting things" ; that is, people and events that historians thought
were interesting. No?
-----Original Message-----
From: Stetsenko, Anna [mailto:AStetsenko@gc.cuny.edu]
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:48 PM
To: 'xmca@weber.ucsd.edu'
Subject: RE: Re(3): history-text relations
One point has been left insufficiently explicated in the discussion that
started with a pretty dichotomous juxtaposition of the Russian Vygotskian
school versus the American one. By the way, setting a clear preference of
the latter OVER the former, and claiming that the cultural-historical view
should be COMPLETELY abandoned in favor of the sociocultural view isn't
perhaps a best way to pursue diversity and dialogue?
What has been left implicit in this discussion is that, in Marxist, and
relatedly, Vygotskian position, there are indeed claims of Truth and
Progress, Theory and Explanation. However, this Truth is not claimed as
eternally and historically absolute and not as the one that is spoken from
nowhere, that is, from a neutral position that claims no ownership. In
Marxism, Truth is always historically relative and positionally biased,
namely, relative and biased with regard to the standpoint from which it is
envisioned (although never achieved in absolute terms), constructed, and
told. There is no secret what the Marxist truth was about and whose truth it
was. In other words, there is no secret as to the position from which their
truth was spelled out. It was spelled out from the position of a marxist
commitment to a just society with some pretty well defined contours of such
a society - as one that eliminates exploitation of human beings by other
human beings, and hence, that eliminates alienation and other evils of an
unjust society. Marxism also has a pretty well spelled out conception of
what the ways and the means of achieving such society are -elimination of
private property and establishing instead a communal property on the major
means of production. Note that I am not trying to neither vindicate nor
condemn this position at this point, all I want to do is to indicate that it
is impossible to ignore this position when evaluating the truth that Marxism
was claiming, because this position belongs right there, in the 'internal
making' and contents of this truth. There are plenty of indications that
Vygotsky had his own strong position and commitment from which he was
speaking. Well, the crux of the matter then is that even in discussions of
rather abstract academic matters, one needs to take a political stand (this
stand, incidentally, is also historically relative, that is, necessitated in
its particulars by a given cultural-historical and sociopolitical context)
which also necessarily entails a moral stand on the issues of oppression
versus liberation, regress versus progress and so on. Unless such a stand is
taken, there is indeed not much more than a 'flow' of positions that are
neither right nor wrong unless one just sounds better than the other to
somebody's ear or looks better on a paper.
I suspect that when Davydov 'scandalized himself' by insisting that there
was a preferable (=better) way of guiding/organizing development and
education, he was speaking from HIS position, that is, from a position of
his commitment to a certain ideal of education that he happened to believe
in. There is no secret as to what his ideal was - that of a theoretical
thinking which for him, roughly speaking, equaled critical, independent,
generative, creative thinking with an infinite potential for development in
the process of a life-long learning. I suspect what happened when Davydov
scandalized himself, is that his words have been taken out of context of a
bigger picture of his standpoint, commitment and vision for the future of
education.
Lastly, let me bring in a rather lengthy quote that I happen to like very
much and that, I believe, essentially speaks to the same matter and even
takes it farther relating it to the context of social practices.
"It is surely appropriate to avoid imposing rigid, one-dimensional sequences
on social reality. But especially among Anglo-Saxon researchers adhering to
the ideas of Vygotsky, the standard alternative seems to be to avoid history
altogether. Differences in cognition across cultures, social groups, and
domains of practice are thus commonly explained without seriously analyzing
the historical development that has led to those differences. The underlying
relativistic notion is that we should not make value judgments concerning
whose cognition is better or more advanced - that all kinds of thinking and
practice are equally valuable. Although this liberal stance may be a
comfortable basis for academic discourse, it ignores the reality that in all
domains of societal practice value judgments and decisions have to be made
every day. People have to decide where they want to go, which way is up. If
behavioral and social sciences want to avoid that issue, they will be unable
to work out useful yet theoretically ambitious intellectual tools for
practitioners making those crucial decisions."
Guess where this quote comes from? From Yrjo Engestroem's work that,
incidentally, happens to be neither a Russian nor an American version of
Vygotsky, and that clearly cannot be easily positioned at one or the other
pole of this superficial and oversimplifying dichotomy.
Anna Stetsenko
-----Original Message-----
From: Diane Hodges [mailto:dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu]
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:37 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re(3): history-text relations
thanks to those who kept the idea alive - nate, martin, and others;
i think there are probably at least one hundred and one different ways of
asserting the relations between what we all might imagine "history" to
mean, and how we all might differently imagine "text" to re-present
whatever we might mean by history,
meaning, there is hardly a definitive relation between history and text,
since there aren't any substantial stabilities for grounding either
"history" or "text" -
so if i can contextualize my remarks, once again,
as academics - and i do know how much more seductive it is to forget that
this is what most of us do with our time - but as academics, we are,
mostly, involved with TEXT, and however we conduct ourselves in activity,
we express our activities in relations with texts- and here, especially,
in the contexts of readings, we are conducting ourselves in contexts of
text,
writing our particular perspectives.
history is irretrievably textualized, re-presented in different forms and
genres, culturally-reckoned in a concert with whatever history is at
stake, with who might benefit from a particular history, or perspective of
a particular history...
this is not to suggest no one experiences events, but that our experiences
are expressed in different narrative-contexts, as stories we tell,
memories we refer to, books we write, papers, what we read, what we choose
to read, films, music, however we choose to indulge in the affirmation of
a particular historical relation,
we are, invariably, relying on kinds of symbolisms that - in Western
dominant genres - are textually dependent.
i don't see this as a universal generalization - i understand this as a
facet of Western culture.
i think Angel Lin and Eugene have very nicely expressed the problems with
such dominance,
and SOOOOO, a critical-historical perspective might be able to highlight
both the dominance of the text, as history, as well as the problems
inherent in that assumption as a universal generalization: text is
expressed in yet-untold manifestations, just as assumptions about culture
have yet to be elaborated in particular historical contexts that can be
understood, interpreted, expressed, shared, listened to, and so on.
so it seems to me, through critical-historical / cultural-historical
analysis, it can become possible to reckon with the underlying privilege
and powers that dictate assumptions about culture, or history, or text.
diane
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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