Without the time (or skill to switch to cyrrilic!) I have been thinking
about Kolya's questions, ,David.
For those who forget in the stream of xcma chatting, Nikolai asks:
where Vygotsky posits word meaning as
unit of analysis of human consciousness?
In which text and on what page? From what Vygotsky's work it is taken?
Could
I ask you to make a quotation from Vygotsky?
Thank you in advance
Nikolai
I was thinking how nice it would be to know how to search the vygotsky
corpus online in Russian, which I do not know how to do.
And remembering fragments of why I thought David's comments resonated
strongly
with my own intuitions, formed in part, by LSV.
such as (no quotations or page numbers, just failing memory here):
meaning is the most stable form of sense-- every totally stable? really?
word meaning changes in development
the closing of *Speech and Thought *that David points to, the drop of
water,
perhaps,
being in my eye.
The citation of the fragment from Doestoevsky where a bunch of guys are
standing
around saying, it seems, the word "product of defecation" (oh poo!) and
every one
is using the same word and every one is both saying the same thing and
saying something different.
Don't all of these and many other examples (Paula, are the Sakharov -LSV
blocks of any help here?) point to the general conclusion that David was
asserting?
Might our Russian friends join Nikolai and help us to understand the core
of
the issue
David raised? Is he incorrect? Can you search the corpus and help us to
understand
if we are misleading each other?
mike
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:26 PM, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:
Dear Professor Veresov:
Let me begin by saying how much we enjoy your work here in Korea. Our
group
has been discussing your 2005 "Outlines" article "Marxist and non-Marxist
aspects of the cultural historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky" since we
read it last year, and I found your 2006 article "Leading activity in
developmental psychology" very useful in figuring out why I don't accept
the
whole construct of "leading activity".
I think that BOTH works are really quite central to the periodization
problem under discussion, but I also think that BOTH works refer mainly
and
centrally (and thus for me somewhat misleadingly) to a period of
Vygotsky's
oeuvre that is quite different from the one I have in mind.
The 2005 article places a good deal of stress on early Vygotsky, a
Vygotsky
who is almost non-Vygotskyan, or at least non-psychological, Vygotsky in
his
early twenties, a student of the humanities with a very strong sense that
nothing human is alien to them.
The 2006 article in contrast seems to me to place a great deal of stress
on
the post-Vygotsky period, and I was very surprised and pleased to read
that
the work on "leading activity" is really not as far as I had thought from
the fragments LSV left behind in his unfinished "Child Development".
Elkonin, at any rate, seems to have been fully aware that the "leading
activity" is in no way typical or characteristic of a particular period
(though Leontiev and lately Karpov have said exactly the opposite). The
problem remains that I do not see any place for the crisis in this work,
and
there is no question but that MY Vygotsky, LATE Vygotsky, the Vygotsky of
Thinking and Speech gives the crisis an absolutely central (one might even
say a critical) role.
Of course, when I said that word meaning is a unit of analysis for human
consciousness I am not simply repeating what others have said (e.g.
Werstch
1985). On the contrary, I mean what for me is the most mature and
therefore
in some ways least characteristic moment of Vygotsky's own work; I might
even call it the "leading activity" of his thinking.
I meant, especially, the very last three paragraphs of Thinking and
Speech.
I have always found this to be a little like the last page of "Origin of
Species", rather more than a conclusion, but a whole revolutionary
program,
complete with a clarion call in the very last six words:
Осмысленное слово есть микрокосм человеческого сознания.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education.
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