Re: [xmca] Historical Development

Hi David Kel-- The weekend has arrived and with it a little time to catch
up. The list of unanswered messages is long
enough so I am proceeding backwards, so I hope I do not repeat something
unnecessarily.

I have been reflecting along the same lines concerning LSV's writings,
David. But the thoughts, as often happen, have led both to some of the same
conclusions and to some different ones.

The overarching thought/perplexity is that we all focus on different texts
at different times in our own lives and when talking about
LSV et sequelia we evoke the texts we are currently reading as if they were
"What Vyogtsky said.thought.wrote" and by some
trick of metonymy allow our at-least doubly partial readings stand for the
whole of HIS thought, not a messy hybrid from which
we must struggle to regularize and make consistent.

Crisis was writting in 25-26?? Roughly? A special moment in the history of
the USSR, Soviet social sciences and humanities.
The Psychology of Art a little earlier?
Thinking and speech aka Thought and Language 8 years (more than half a
working lifetime later).

His audience in each case was somewhat different. So, in Crisis he as
nailing all psychologies with spilling out of their appropriate
and restricted domains to become Generals. In psychology of Art, a
collection of essays, he moves between Plekhanov and formalism
addressing, it seems to me, several different audiences. In thought and
language he was also doing lots of things from lots of periods
of his work, writing some of it down, having some of it written down by
students, having those same students change what they claim
to have written down at different times, being translated in an incredible
variety of ways. (Did anyone wonder what a modern rendition
of the term translated as "irritant" might be in an earlier discussion? I
think its probably of some importance to figuring out if he came
up with a single unified psychology that managed to kill off the other half.

A unit of analysis: The smallest chunk/unit/phenomenon which contains in
recognizable form all of the properties of the phenomenon
you wish to study. LSV consistently uses the H20 example, early and late. So
did the Gestalists.

Not THE unit of analysis, as if there was some magic something from which
all regularities (aka laws?) in all domains of human life
take their basic structure and processes of change.

So, I am not surprised when he knocks gestalt psychology, or psychoanalysis,
or whatever in one place and adopts ideas from that
source in another. I do get pretty confused about how to create my own way
of understanding him and myself though!

Would LSV be unhappy if activity were made so general that it was said to
explain taste aversion in rats, perceptual illusions, work
place dynamics, classroom practices, etc etc?? Seems to me that he most
certainly would. But maybe that's just an old
conditioned reflex I picket up along the path.

There is a reverse question which has been asked a lot and is still being
discussed on xmca and elsewhere. Would LSV have even
countenanced the use of the concept of activity AT ALL? Is so, when and for
what purposes? My own conclusion to the latter question
is yes with respect to the general (at all) part of the question and "gee,
need to check out each case" for the latter part.

Back to checking around
mike

Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 9:23 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
wrote:

> In the San Diego-Helsinki Seminar, Mike makes the point that LSV's view of
> "central" and "peripheral" lines of development (and also his view of an
> all-encompassing "social situation of development") suggests a "very strong
> influence of Gestalt" psychology.
>
> Of course, that's right. But it's a LITTLE hard to square with the bit of
> LSV we're talking about just now, namely "The Crisis in Psychology". Right
> there in Volume Three, we've got something of a Jeremiad against Koffka. And
> in the heart of the Crisis, on p. 245, when he starts talking about the frog
> that blew itself to be the size of an ox and exploded, we've got this:
>
> "Gestalt psychology also originally arose in the concrete psychological
> investigation of the processes of form perception. There it received its
> practical christening; it passed the truth test. But, as it was born at the
> same time as psychoanalysis and reflexology, it covered the same path with
> amazing uniformity. It conquered animal psychology, and it turned out that
> the thinking of apes is also a Gestalt process. It conquered the psychology
> of art and ethnic psychology, and it turned out that the primitive
> conception of the world and the creation of art are Gestalten as well. It
> conquered child psychology and psychopathology and both child development
> and mental disease were covered by the Gestalt. Finally, having turned into
> a world view, Gestalt psychology discovered the Gestalt in physics and
> chemistry, in physiology and biology, and the Gestalt, withered to a logical
> formula, appeared to be the basis of the world. When God created the world
> he said: let there be
> Gestalt – and there was Gestalt everywhere (Kofflka, 1925; Kohler, 1917,
> 1920; Wertheimer, 1925)."
>
> And then LSV does to Gestalt psychology exactly what he does to Pavolvian
> and Freudian and Sternian psychologies. As Heidi says, it is retired from
> the department and is given the (purely ceremonial) rank of General.
>
> Doesn't it seem to you that if LSV were alive today, he might be saying
> exactly the same thing about "activity"?
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
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Received on Sat Mar 1 09:16 PST 2008