[Xmca-l] Re: The last chapter of Thinking and Speech reconstructed

[Andy Blunden]

Thank you for sharing this, Mike. And all credit to Van der 
Veer and Zavershneva for their masterful excavation of 
Vygotsky's sources in the final chapter. Perhaps they are 
correct, that the citations were speedily put together with 
a view to getting a doctorate while requirements were 
temporarily relaxed, and after he died with the work 
incomplete, the editors, being human, did a sloppier job 
than the authors of this article would could have done so 
many years later. This is possible. But I tend to favour an 
alternative explanation.

Firstly, I confess that I am not familiar with the history 
of the discipline of academic scientific writing. Others on 
this list may be, and I'd be interested to know what the 
norms were in 1934 and in the Soviet Union in particular. I 
have only gradually learnt academic scientific writing, 
thanks to my association with MCA and the tireless 
assistance of the editors there. But prior to about 2007 I 
wrote as a Trotskyist and my experience with writing was 
very different. Before I got my first article published in 
MCA in 2007, I had written two books: Beyond Betrayal (1991) 
was  written without a shred of consciousness of being 
original; although I signed my name to it, I took as the 
expression of the view of the small Trotskyist group I 
belonged to; all I was doing was setting it on paper. For 
Ethical Politics (2003) was written again without any claim 
to originality, and one whole chapter was made up of 
material I picked from the brain of a comrade who knew much 
more about Ethics than I did. The idea of quoting sources 
and focusing on providing an original contribution to the 
existing body of science was novel to me.

If Vygotsky was mobilising the discoveries of contemporary 
psychology towards an important insight, are we sure that it 
was improper for him to cite these co-thinkers without 
sourcing the quotes?

Van der Veer and Zavershneva had done a marvellous job in 
tracking down the quotes. When I set about finding the 
source of everything Vygotsky said about Hegel, I was able 
to do this because I had read all the same books about Marx 
and Hegel that Vygotsky had read. They are all part of the 
canon of a certain type of Marxism. All bar one statement 
Vygotsky made about Vygotsky was lifted from one of half a 
dozen books which are part of this canon and with which I 
was very familiar, except for one extended passage which 
seemed to be Vygotsky's own synopsis of a part of Hegel's 
Psychology in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Anyone 
could have done the same kind of job, as I did for 
Vygotsky-on-Hegel, on my two books mentioned above. And yet, 
for all that, I was saying something original.

Combined with this, isn't is a fact that Vygotsky knew he 
did not have long to live in 1934, and he was in a hurry to 
complete this work - and thank God he did hurry to complete 
it! - this work which is to this day the most widely known 
and cited of his entire legacy. So even if he was not as 
blasé about citing sources etc., as Andy-before-2007 was, 
knowing he had little time left was reason enough o cut 
corners. That his editors could not do what van der Veer and 
Zavershneva did, but decided just to omit the quote marks, 
is believable. Also, maybe it was not politically correct in 
the USSR in the shadow of the Moscow Trials to quote 
approvingly so many "bourgeois psychologists"?

Personally, I find this a more likely explanation than the 
one favoured by the authors.

Andy

PS. the fact that I completed a PhD in Engineering does not 
contradict the fact that I was unacquainted with academic 
writing, and likewise the several articles I published years 
ago on diverse topics. It's a long story.

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 25/11/2018 3:29 pm, mike cole wrote:
> This recently published paper has been distributed through 
> Academia, so I assume it’s ok to forward.
> The authors track down an amazing amount of information 
> about LSV’s sources and provide a (to me) compelling case 
> that this chapter is a summary of his past work..... 
> bringing us to the threshold of the re-turn to perezhivanie.
>
> Mike
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