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

[Huw Lloyd]

I think more care needs to be made with statements like "The most
fundamental cultural means is language (speech in Vygotsky's terminology),

which makes it possible to transcend the here and now and to solve problems
on a theoretical plane". This summary plays into linguistic biases and
simplifications.


Similarly, I do not know the veracity of the second part of this statement
"Vygotsky gave two examples from the development of

children's speech: first, child speech goes from one-word sentences to more
complex, differentiated sentences; second, these first one-word sentences
mean many things and only gradually acquire a specific meaning." The second
part clearly does not necessarily follow. To whom do these one word
sentences mean many things and at what juncture of utterance?


Overall I barely recognised my readings of the chapter in this essay. The
ideational content about the potential differences between inner speech and
egocentric speech seemed to present something new for me, but I am not so
sure that this is simply a linguists' goal of identifying "inner speech" as
a category of linguistics and thought.


I have no issue with the "excavation" itself, which is interesting for
anyone who studied Vygotsky at some length. Although, again, one needs to
be careful with this kind of analysis work which is used to pidgeon-hole
the researcher and (in all likelihood) misrepresent them. Similarly one
should not confuse the manner of communication (paraphrasing etc) with the
ideational content (which is largely omitted) and how these ideas are
brought together in relation to the given problems. The conjunction of the
role of this kind of analysis with its emphasis upon a view largely reduced
to a linguistic interpretation seems to me to be something to be quite
alarmed about, particularly as it omits what, for me, makes the work great,
which is the ideas at play.


My reading of this paper came directly after looking through section's of
Rene's "Vygotsky Reader", which I have found myself returning to on
occasion.


Best,

Huw




On Thu, 29 Nov 2018 at 13:27, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> 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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