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[xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 62



David wrote:
It is found on p. 347 of the Labirint═edition (2005), which is═a reprint of the 1934 edition that Vygotsky actually supervised.═In English, it means that the meaning-laden word is a microcosm of human consciousness. I think that the word "microcosm" means, here,═an irreducible, but fully complete, unit.═

Dear David. "Microcosm" is not just a word. It is an old philosophical concept having long history. "Unit of analysis" is another concept with a long history and content. They are not the same, unfortunately. They belong to different philosophical traditions. Without going into deep philosophical considerations I just want to note that "macrocosm" cannot be devided to any kinds of "microcosms", whereas unit of analysis presupposes the division by definition.
I believe Lev Vygotsky understood the difference.

Sorry, I did not want to be impolite, I respect your country and traditions, hope to visit South Korea (eventially to your seminar?) Thank you, now I know how to speak with people and what to dress.
Nikolai


----- Original Message ----- From: <xmca-request@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 10:32 AM
Subject: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 62


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Today's Topics:

  1. Re: Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 53 (David Kellogg)
  2. Re: Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 53 (Carol Macdonald)
  3. Re: Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 56 (ulvi icil)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:06:18 -0800 (PST)
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 53
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID: <194074.31465.qm@web110307.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-5

Dear Professor Veresov:
═
My country, South Korea, is a rather strange place. Professors tend to dress like businessmen here═(in blue suits, sometimes grey, with pinstriped shirts and expensive neckties, gold watches are not unheard of).
But we don't actually write business letters;═even the class═timetables I get from the dean generally begin with polite remarks about my health, cautionary═words about═the weather, or reminiscences about the last dinner we had together.
These═preambles are not pointless, and they are not simply polite. They are a way of establishing who is saying what to whom; a recognition that everything has to be interpersonally═contextualized to have any meaning at all.
My point was that I knew your work, and that I knew you had a great deal to contribute to the debate on periodization, but that I also knew that you were chiefly concerned with periods OTHER than the period from 1932-1934.
This is═the═main period where Vygotsky═talks about a "unit of analysis" and analysis into units. And sure enough, as Mike═points out, it is═a period of intense preoccupation with word meaning,═particularly with the "tearing away" of word meaning from the═"phasal" properties of language, by which Vygotsky means the phonological properties, the part which Andy calls "material"═(Thinking and Speech, 1987: 223).
Thinking and Speech was called a monograph═by Luria (on p. 359), despite the double title and despite the fact that its composition spans over half of Vygotsky's whole career. I think Luria is right; it IS a monograph; the topic of Vygotsky's monograph is neither "thinking" nor "speech" but rather the conjunction "and" that links them. For Vygotsky, that "and" is consciousness, and the "microcosm" of that consciousness is the meaning-laden word.═
I think the process of differentiating the purely sensory aspects of words from their ideality is═why self-directed speech is so important═(Chapter Two),═that is why the creation of interfunctional relations is actually more important than the independent development of the functions themselves═(Chapter Three), that is why the═merging of preverbal thinking and pre-intellectual speaking can present a model for the development of every higher mental function═(Chapter Four), that is why the═replacement of "visual-concrete images" by "abstract relations" is the foundation of conceptual thinking (Chapter═Five); that is why foreign language learning and concept formation are the archetypes that Vygotsky has in mind for the═zone of proximal development (Chapter Six) and it is why═thinking is only realized in the word═(Chapter Seven).
As you can see, I think that the idea that word meaning is the irreducible unit of consciousness═permeates every single chapter of the book which was, intellectually, Vygotsky's last will and testament, even though (for that very reason) it cannot be considered "typical" or "characteristic" of his work (merely its═culmination).
You asked me for a text, and like Mike I felt rather overwhelmed, because so many references seemed to cry out. How to choose? Where to begin?═And what to cut?
What I did was to cite the last THREE paragraphs of Thinking and Speech. Of course, like a Korean academic letter, these paragraphs have to be contextualized; we have to know who is saying what to whom.
The last three paragraphs═have to be read as the culimination of a book, and even of a life, and the last six words have to ═In the same way, the last six words have to be read as the culmination of those paragraphs; we═cannot simply cut them into═an epigraph═without making them═epigrammatic and consequently banal.
But (and this was the point of my pointless preamble)═you are in a better position to recontextualize the text═than almost anyone else. I assumed (from your name, and also from your remarkable erudition) that you read Russian. So I felt═reasonably confident that you could place this: "╬АэКАшущщчу Ашчрч уАБЛ эьзЮчзчАэ ГушчруГуАзчсч АчвщпщьО."
It is found on p. 347 of the Labirint═edition (2005), which is═a reprint of the 1934 edition that Vygotsky actually supervised.═In English, it means that the meaning-laden word is a microcosm of human consciousness. I think that the word "microcosm" means, here,═an irreducible, but fully complete, unit.═

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
(Associate Professor)
═





------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:24:43 +0200
From: Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 53
To: vaughndogblack@yahoo.com, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID:
<20f7d5360902190024l365a7409ha883d5cfda0e6c0c@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=KOI8-R

David
Re your last paragraph, does it then mean that the "word" is a germ cell
model, or am I confusing two concepts from different origins?

Perhaps people would be interested in reading the explanation about "word"
you gave me in a private conversation.

Carol

2009/2/19 David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>

Dear Professor Veresov:

My country, South Korea, is a rather strange place. Professors tend to
dress like businessmen here (in blue suits, sometimes grey, with pinstriped
shirts and expensive neckties, gold watches are not unheard of).

But we don't actually write business letters; even the class timetables I
get from the dean generally begin with polite remarks about my health,
cautionary words about the weather, or reminiscences about the last dinner
we had together.

These preambles are not pointless, and they are not simply polite. They are
a way of establishing who is saying what to whom; a recognition that
everything has to be interpersonally contextualized to have any meaning at
all.

My point was that I knew your work, and that I knew you had a great deal to
contribute to the debate on periodization, but that I also knew that you
were chiefly concerned with periods OTHER than the period from 1932-1934.

This is the main period where Vygotsky talks about a "unit of analysis" and analysis into units. And sure enough, as Mike points out, it is a period of
intense preoccupation with word meaning, particularly with the "tearing
away" of word meaning from the "phasal" properties of language, by which
Vygotsky means the phonological properties, the part which Andy calls
"material" (Thinking and Speech, 1987: 223).

Thinking and Speech was called a monograph by Luria (on p. 359), despite
the double title and despite the fact that its composition spans over half of Vygotsky's whole career. I think Luria is right; it IS a monograph; the topic of Vygotsky's monograph is neither "thinking" nor "speech" but rather
the conjunction "and" that links them. For Vygotsky, that "and" is
consciousness, and the "microcosm" of that consciousness is the
meaning-laden word.

I think the process of differentiating the purely sensory aspects of words
from their ideality is why self-directed speech is so important (Chapter
Two), that is why the creation of interfunctional relations is actually more
important than the independent development of the functions
themselves (Chapter Three), that is why the merging of preverbal thinking
and pre-intellectual speaking can present a model for the development of
every higher mental function (Chapter Four), that is why the replacement of
"visual-concrete images" by "abstract relations" is the foundation of
conceptual thinking (Chapter Five); that is why foreign language learning
and concept formation are the archetypes that Vygotsky has in mind for
the zone of proximal development (Chapter Six) and it is why thinking is
only realized in the word (Chapter Seven).

As you can see, I think that the idea that word meaning is the irreducible unit of consciousness permeates every single chapter of the book which was,
intellectually, Vygotsky's last will and testament, even though (for that
very reason) it cannot be considered "typical" or "characteristic" of his
work (merely its culmination).

You asked me for a text, and like Mike I felt rather overwhelmed, because
so many references seemed to cry out. How to choose? Where to begin? And
what to cut?

What I did was to cite the last THREE paragraphs of Thinking and Speech. Of
course, like a Korean academic letter, these paragraphs have to be
contextualized; we have to know who is saying what to whom.

The last three paragraphs have to be read as the culimination of a book,
and even of a life, and the last six words have to  In the same way, the
last six words have to be read as the culmination of those paragraphs;
we cannot simply cut them into an epigraph without making them epigrammatic
and consequently banal.

But (and this was the point of my pointless preamble) you are in a better
position to recontextualize the text than almost anyone else. I assumed
(from your name, and also from your remarkable erudition) that you read
Russian. So I felt reasonably confident that you could place this:
"Осмысленное слово есть микрокосм человеческого сознания."

It is found on p. 347 of the Labirint edition (2005), which is a reprint of
the 1934 edition that Vygotsky actually supervised. In English, it means
that the meaning-laden word is a microcosm of human consciousness. I think that the word "microcosm" means, here, an irreducible, but fully complete,
unit.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
(Associate Professor)





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xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca




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Visiting Researcher,
Wits School of Education
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Johannesburg 2092
011 673 9265  082 562 1050


------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:31:01 +0200
From: ulvi icil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 56
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID:
<5729a0520902190031k9218929y6cbe1acb2b113a03@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=KOI8-R

Kiitos Kolya ( This does not mean that I know Finnish and Russian. None of
them ! )

Only I lived one year in Helsinki and I admire Russian literature ,
especially 19th century (in fact, who does  not I suggest)


On 19/02/2009, Nikolai Veresov <nikolai.veressov@oulu.fi> wrote:

Sure, Ulvi
You can find it here
http://nveresov.narod.ru/links.html
Nikolai

Hello,

Is it possible to reach this article "Marxist and non-Marxist
aspects of the
cultural historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky" via email please?

Thank you.

Ulvi




On 18/02/2009, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:


Perhaps I could risk throwing in my thoughts Mike, because David
and I have
discussed this in the past too.

My understanding has been that LSV brought forward the concept of
word
meaning as a foundation for solving the problem of intelligent
speech. I am
not sure how wide that territory was for Vygotsky; self-evidently I
think it
is wider that simply "intelligent speech", but there are two
reasons I would
not go so far as to say that it was meant as a "unit of analysis of
human
consciousness".

(1) Words are probably the most important of artefacts, but they
are just
one kind of artefact. My work with "teaching spaces" when I first
started to
use Vygotsky was to do with how building forms succeeded in
transmitting
theories of learning to future generations, despite books and papers
claiming the opposite of what was set in concrete.

(2) Apart from artefacts, is also activity. Doubtbless activity is
implicit
in meaning in some way, but it is unclear to me. I think it is a
mistake to
make the foundation of consciousness just words, rather than
practice.

Andy

Mike Cole wrote:

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:

п·я│п╪я▀я│п╩п╣п╫п╫п╬п╣ я│п╩п╬п╡п╬ п╣я│я┌я▄ п╪п╦п╨я─п╬п╨п╬я│п╪
я┤п╣п╩п╬п╡п╣я┤п╣я│п╨п╬пЁп╬ я│п╬п╥п╫п╟п╫п╦я▐.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education.





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xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

_______________________________________________

xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca


--
---
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 Skype
andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm

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------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:15:20 -0800
From: "Monica Hansen" <monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 47
To: "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP874EA415B1EF023A4ACD32C5B50@phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="KOI8-R"

Is anything in Vygotsky counter to discourse and pragmatics? My take is
that
Vygotsky suggested word meaning as the unit of analysis in the concrete
sense(a specific example) of a more general concept for approaching the
study of development. I'm still studying...

Monica R. Hansen
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Curriculum and Instruction
College of Education
University of Idaho
1000 W. Hubbard
Suite 242
Coeur d'Alene, ID 83814
Phone: 208-667-2588, ext. 123
Email:  monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Joe
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 1:02 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Cc: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu; eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 47

I've always been bothered by word meaning as the basic unit. It is
more "cognitive" than I think was intended. Broadening the concept to
discourse a la wertsch/bakhtin opens the ideas to inter to intra and
to dialogic space, adressivity, audience, external/internal speech and
seems to link to many more Vygotskian concepts than does word meaning
alone.

On Feb 18, 2009, at 2:47 AM, ulvi icil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

Is it possible to reach this article "Marxist and non-Marxist
aspects of the
cultural historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky" via email please?

Thank you.

Ulvi




On 18/02/2009, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:


Perhaps I could risk throwing in my thoughts Mike, because David
and I have
discussed this in the past too.

My understanding has been that LSV brought forward the concept of
word
meaning as a foundation for solving the problem of intelligent
speech. I am
not sure how wide that territory was for Vygotsky; self-evidently I
think it
is wider that simply "intelligent speech", but there are two
reasons I would
not go so far as to say that it was meant as a "unit of analysis of
human
consciousness".

(1) Words are probably the most important of artefacts, but they
are just
one kind of artefact. My work with "teaching spaces" when I first
started to
use Vygotsky was to do with how building forms succeeded in
transmitting
theories of learning to future generations, despite books and papers
claiming the opposite of what was set in concrete.

(2) Apart from artefacts, is also activity. Doubtbless activity is
implicit
in meaning in some way, but it is unclear to me. I think it is a
mistake to
make the foundation of consciousness just words, rather than
practice.

Andy

Mike Cole wrote:

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.





_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

_______________________________________________

xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca


--
---
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 Skype
andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

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http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca



------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:28:14 -0500
From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 47
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
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But Andy, if we're following Ilyenkov's lead, don't words have an ideal
character that activity lacks?

Martin


On 2/17/09 9:11 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:


(2) Apart from artefacts, is also activity. Doubtbless
activity is implicit in meaning in some way, but it is
unclear to me. I think it is a mistake to make the
foundation of consciousness just words, rather than practice.

Andy

Mike Cole wrote:

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:

нЯЛШЯКЕММНЕ ЯКНБН ЕЯРЭ ЛХЙПНЙНЯЛ ВЕКНБЕВЕЯЙНЦН ЯНГМЮМХЪ.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education.





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