One issue I'd like to pick up on, and that's the conundrum of /what it is in the environment/, that is, the entire universe outside what is immediately given in the consciousness of the individual, which should be taken into account. Is there some /boundary/ with which things are important but beyond which can be ignored? Surely no. When posed this way, as you point out in talking about Bronfenbrenner, the problem becomes insoluble. It remains one of adding to the individual an utterly arbitrary selection of other features selected by the observer from the universe outside the subject's consciousness. One has to form a concept which is not about interaction or relations between pre-selected entities. I think Vygotsky largely cracked this one.
It is interesting to me that quite independently of all this, Critical Theory (the Frankfurt School) is wrestling today with the same consundrum in its discourse about ethics, trying to figure out who is affected by an individual's action, and is therefore a "stakeholder" (so to speak, to pluck terminology from yet another discourse). Also Activity Theorists invovled in Town Planning issues wrestle with this same issue from the ethical side.
Vygotsky's main insight came, I believe, in his study of development. A stone that hits you though you didn't see it coming cannot be a source of development (though maybe later recovery the injuries received may be) even though it affects you. But it's not to do with perception. Fundamentally it is about needs and goals.
Andy Martin Packer wrote:
Quite where and when it will be published is unclear, so 'unpublished' would be best. Martin On Sep 21, 2010, at 6:17 PM, Jonna Kangasoja wrote:Martin, Thank you so much for this interesting paper! Would it be ok to cite it already as forthcoming? best, Jonna 2010/9/21 Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>:I think that Andy is quite right here. Vygotsky was, it seems to me, trying to avoid the error of considering the social situation in entirely objective terms, and although it would seem that it must be the case that the situation should then be considered as subjective, he was keen to avoid that approach too. I am attaching a paper I finished recently on this topic. I'm not very happy with it, so I would welcome any recommendations for its improvement. Martin On Sep 19, 2010, at 11:25 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:I think the way Vygotsky makes and illustrates his point is open to misinterpretation, and in my opinion, Lydia Bozhovich misinterprets it actually! In relation to what you say, I think it would be a mistake to conclude from Vygotsky's refusal to theorise a situation as objective, that we ought to theorize the subjective as well. The difficult point he is trying to make is that the situation is subjective/objective and there is no sense in talk of objective on one hand and subjective on the other. This is a problem of philosophy which goes back, in my view, to Fichte, who introduced the notion of activity specifically to overcome this problem._______________________________________________ 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_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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