[Xmca-l] Re: Neoformation and developmental change: Issue 4 article for discussion

[David Kellogg]

We're just finishing up our ninth volume of Vygotsky's works in Korean (the
fourth of his lessons in pedology). It's a volume that contains a
"bridging" chapter on the Crisis at Thirteen written in 1933 and then a set
of correspondence course lessons written in 1929, so although it follows
the order of child development, it doesn't follow the order in which it was
written at all. The jump cut is not quite as large as the one that
Wolff-Michael is suggesting (his quote about the consciousness being the
perezhivanie of perezhivanie harkens back to the first paper Vygotsky ever
did, when he was not yet thirty and trying to break free of behaviorism
without writing himself out of academia altogether--his quote about the
water molecule is even more elemental: it goes back at least as far as John
Stuart Mill and this is one reason why it has been translated iinto English
as its exact opposite and yet nobody ever objects...). Nevertheless, there
is a notable difference between the 1929 work and the 1933 work: the
"neoformations", the "social situation of development", and the "lines of
development", which are central to the 1933 Vygotsky, are entirely absent
from the 1929 work.

But I don't think the chapters are by two entirely different Vygotskies
(and in fact I think that even Wolff-Michael's quote is by the same
Vygotsky, but it dates from before Vygotsky decided that consciousness
begins at birth). I think that the 1929 work lays the ground for the 1933
work in two important ways.

First, Vygotsky is trying to create a "science of a natural whole" along
the lines of history, and his first step in doing this is to distinguish
pedology (where he will later develop the concept of neoformation, social
situation of development and lines of development) from embryology on the
one hand and psychotechnics (adult development) on the other. The embryo
grows but doesn't learn; the adult learns but doesn't grow. The object of
pedology is a complex unity of growing and learning (biological and
cultural history) that Vygotsky calls development.

Second, Vygotsky is trying to avoid a "vinaigrette". This is the
deprecatory term used by Blonsky to mean a kind of emulsion of two
essentially incompatible substances, viz. a biology of the child and a
cultural history of the child, the kind of thing that Groos, Buhler, and
Nazi psychologists (Kretschmer, Spranger, Kroh, Ach, and eventually Jung)
were putting together. What Vygotsky says is that you can shake your
biology and your cultural history together, but if you can't discover some
internal link between growth on the one hand and learning on the
other, they will just separate out again, like oil floating on vinegar.
When Sasha says that Vygotsky failed to create a Marxist psychology and
left that task (through Leontiev) to us, I see this as a kind of "inverted
world". It seems to me that the truth is more like the very opposite:
Vygotsky DID create a Marxist psychology, not within psychology but within
pedology. But WE have created a vinaigrette, and one sign of this is that
even on this revered list, we often find that discussions separate out into
the oil of philosophy and the vinegar of pedagogy.

Let me try to shake the two things together again, at least until we can
get some salad lovers back into the discussion.

First, take a look at the attached picture. It's a Bogdanov-Belsky (all our
book covers are), and it's called "inspiration". The young woman's an
adolescent, of course, and she's reading some kind of book with pictures
and conversations. But she's not concentrating very hard, and we can easily
imagine her mind straying to something even more concrete. The title of our
new book, which combines the neoformation for age 13 with a central new
psychological formation of adolescence, is 분별과 사랑 ("Bunbyeolgwa Sarang", or
"Dissociation and Love")

Second, let me tell you about a problem we have been having with the
vinegar of pedagogy and the oil of philosophy here in Korea. Anxious
parents and whimsical professors like to treat curricula as hand-me-downs.
We've had eight different national curriculum reforms since 1950 (far more
than any other ASEAN country) and the net effect has always been to teach
the NEXT zone of development--that is, to teach the adolescents to be
adults, the thirteenagers to be teenagers, the primary schoolers to be
thirteen, and the preschoolers to be primary schoolers. The net effect is
very bad; it is like making beansprouts grow by pulling them up by the
roots.  Our teachers resist: they want to have the children play and teach
the zone of actual development, and they make the argument on entirely
non-phlosophical, pedagogical grounds. But if the good professors ever
decided to read our books, they might easily try to justify it by--the zone
of proximal development! (Fortunately, they are far too busy studying
Thorndike and the Singaporean system to bother with us...).

David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 6:17 AM, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Michael,
>
> First, thanks for the references to both Holzkamp and Marx & Engels use of
> "leading activity".
>
> Regarding the espoused emphasis of the paper, neoformation, the focus seems
> to drift between a focus upon changes in qualitative behaviour that do not
> necessitate developmental change and towards those that do. By development
> I mean the formation of organised behaviours that were not previously
> accessible that also implicate a larger object of activity.
>
> Personally, I do not find the phrase "quantity into quality" useful beyond
> a priming for the relevant ingredients. The 'naive' description of one
> thing turning into another is a change of quality, i.e. one quality (not a
> quantity) turning into another quality. I suppose the original expression
> is concerned with a taken-for-granted quality that turns into a new quality
> ostensibly through the instrumentation of a change in quantity (to project
> a cause-effect model).
>
> Regarding a study of the empirical content within the appropriate
> dimensions, I would say that the account of the teacher changing his/her
> practices is indicative but not sufficient to identify this as a
> developmental change (in the sense I use it). Also without identifying the
> holistic character of the change(s) -- both macro and micro -- I think
> there is more scope for attributing the changes to things other than what
> you have identified, or to bring these into question. A way to show this
> would be in terms of the teacher's broadening of his/her object of
> activity/unit of analysis (which need not be larger materialistically, but
> in fidelity). In this vein it would be interesting to consider how this can
> be advanced upon fragmentally, i.e. from initial exposure to certain
> practices that achieve things that the teacher's present methods do not
> achieve progressing to a deeper considerations for how to achieve this
> holistically along with the newly encroaching limitations. Also within the
> teacher example, there is the implication that the previous methods were
> the teacher's own -- as we know this is not necessarily the case, they may
> be the methods unquestionably adopted under the assumption that
> institutional society knows what it is doing, hence without knowing more
> this could also be an awakening to the naive assumptions of a teaching
> institution.
>
> There is also potential confusion here between the internal of affect and
> the internal of thought-based action. The pointing to an assumed external
> source as a stimulus for development is, from my perspective, not
> necessarily the case either, whereby an internal dialogue may be maintained
> to realise something new (perhaps more attributable to an adult).  Either
> way, I would say the developee is sharing in this larger unit from the
> outset of their 'readiness', even if they are unable to articulate it --
> they know enough to afford their volitional heightened concentration to
> take them into (for them) unexplored territory (I can provide anecdotal
> examples if you want them).
>
> >From a cybernetic perspective the "subject-environment unit" can be
> misleading. Cybernetics would argue that it is all in the self-perpetuating
> processes of the agent (the complex organism), through which the
> environment manifests, i.e. the environment is only 'real' to agent to the
> extent that it is reflected in the agent's own individuality. I take
> Sasha's paper to be much supportive of this view, with perhaps some
> trailing legacies (from Ilyenkov's reinvigoration), such as imputing
> "material existence" to be of the same complexity (concreteness) of that
> which is achieved by the advanced technology of dialectics... it is, I
> believe, a fairly harmless transition to recognise that this concretely
> complex material existences is merely an unknown and hypothetically assumed
> to be that of the most sophisticated thought of the time.
>
> Also I appreciate that this can be quite exhausting work and that perhaps
> the way you are approaching it by imputing development to observations is
> an energetically stimulating manner of working into the subject and its
> problems. I also note that you have pulled in references from various
> sources (neoformation, leading activity, crisis, environment-subject,
> internal, moment) and it is quite easy for me to assume that your ideas
> here overlap with mine. Perhaps an equally important test is whether the
> paper is coherent for someone who doesn't have this background.
>
> Thanks for the opportunity to read and discuss the paper.
>
> Best,
> Huw
>
>
>
>
>
> On 16 December 2017 at 08:55, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
> wrote:
>
> > Thanks, Andy,
> > Alfredo
> > ________________________________________
> > From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> > on behalf of Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> > Sent: 16 December 2017 08:43
> > To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Neoformation and developmental change: Issue 4
> > article for discussion
> >
> > attached, Bill
> >
> > a
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > Andy Blunden
> > http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> > On 16/12/2017 6:38 PM, Bill Kerr wrote:
> > > hi Alfredo,
> > > I downloaded Michael's first article and David's response. Is Michael's
> > > response to David (Looking back to the Future) still available as a
> free
> > > download? When I go to the site I get an invitation to login or
> purchase.
> > >
> > > Interested in this discussion.
> > > Thanks,
> > > Bill Kerr
> > >
> > >
> > > On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 4:03 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <
> a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > >> Steemed xmca'ers,
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> the year is close to its end and we have yet to discuss a selected
> > article
> > >> from Issue 4. The choice this time is an article written by
> > Wolff-Michael
> > >> Roth: "Neoformation: A Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change?".
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> The article, which is attached and will be made open access for a
> brief
> > >> time soon, brings up the concept of "neoformation", a Vygotskian
> notion
> > >> that has appeared more than once in xmca but which is not so common in
> > the
> > >> literature, despite having quite a methodological import in Vygotsky's
> > >> writings.
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> I believe the topic is timely given parallel discussions and critiques
> > to
> > >> Vygotsky in xmca and in recent literature. Moreover, the article
> brings
> > >> with it a companion, David's Kellogg commentary (which is open access
> > right
> > >> now), and a response by Michael. So its a 3 for 1 treat!
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> The whole issue is published here:
> > >>
> > >> http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/current?nav=tocList
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Michael has kindly agreed to join the conversation in the coming days,
> > and
> > >> I encourage you all to have a look at the paper and not to be shy
> > bringing
> > >> in comments and questions. I think this is a unique opportunity we
> have
> > for
> > >> digging into the different ways in which Vygotsky's legacy may live on
> > in
> > >> current and future CHAT and CHAT-related research/literature.
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Alfredo
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
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