RE: Leont'ev-Vygotsky controversy

I think Voloshinov (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) is a key figure here too (and not a pen name for Bakhtin).  Consider these examples:

"Consciousness becomes consciousness only once it has been filed with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently only in the process of social interaction." (p. 11)

"One other property belongs to the word that is of the highest order of importance and is what makes the word the primary medium of the individual consciousness.  Although the reality of the word, as is true of any sign, resides between individuals, a word, at the same time, is produced by the individual organism's own means without recourse to any equipment or any other kind of extracorporeal material.  This has determined the role of word as the semiotic material of inner life--of consciousness  (inner speech).  (p.14)

Woloshinov, however, always points back to the social activity (labor, schooling, commmunity life) as the source of semiotic means (language and other signs).  He does mention labor (and forms of labor quite specifically) as Leont'ev does and also talks of not only speech genres (which Bakhtin describes later) but of behavioral genres (which range from highly regulated and crystallized to fluid, fleeting, and vague).

His work, though limited to a few key texts, feels much closer to Vygotksy's, much more oriented to psychology and semiotics than Bakhtin's.  It has a strong semiotic orientation, but also emphasized the sociohistorically produced conditions of signs and he focused on affect and motives.  (I always had the sense that critical to Leont'ev's activity theory was his extension of Vygotsky's comment at the end of Thinking and Speech that he had yet to tackle the most fundamental problem of the affective and motivational dimensions of consciousess, which Leont'ev worked to develop through the motive/activity, action/goal, operation/conditions scheme.)

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Paul Prior
Associate Professor, Department of English
Associate Director, Center for Writing Studies
pprior who-is-at uiuc.edu
homepage:  https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/pprior/Prior/home.html
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign