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

Thu Nov 29 11:08:07 PST 2018

Truth evidently does not have *two* authors!  :)

Martin

> On Nov 29, 2018, at 12:33 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> Gee, you folks are off and running and I havn't even had time to read Andy's note which I only skimmed,and
> the Anne-Nelly, and the great quotations from Foucault that Anna just contributed.
> 
> I don't feel prepared to take on the question of "what is truth," Ana, but Anna's quotations put me strongly in mind
> of the problem of audience. At the moment I am struggling with this problem in a paper I am writing with Martin.
> We appreciate working with each other because we have different, but complementary backgrounds and we enjoy
> the process of "joint self education," but this gets us into trouble with each other. At times I, at times Martin, writes
> something that is, for me, a complex knot of uncertainties. He is addressing experts in his subfields, the very ones
> I am familiar with primarily through secondary sources. And I often evoke the same reaction in him. Then we talk, or
> write sketches of how to communicate clearly to those NOT already "in the know." Then we return to the task at hand.
> 
> Personally, I appreciated the article for opening up to me the tiny slivers of information that Vygotsky doled out in the written
> texts by referring to sets of ideas by the names of their authors and a brief description of how they fit his (then-current) intellectual
> concerns. There are very few scholars who could manage that kind of multi-lingual recuperation. As a result, our understanding of the tangle of
> scholarly. ideas that Vygotsky and his colleague's wrestled with is enriched. 
> 
> Which to develop and which to abandon, of course, remains an open question.
> 
> mike
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 8:58 AM Ana Marjanovic-Shane <anamshane@gmail.com <mailto:anamshane@gmail.com>> wrote:
> “Truth does not have an author” – the moto of Positivism.
> 
>  
> 
> What do you think?
> 
>  
> 
> -- 
> 
> Ana Marjanovic-Shane
> 
> Phone: 267-334-2905
> 
> Email: anamshane@gmail.com <mailto:anamshane@gmail.com>
>  
> 
>  
> 
> From: "xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>" <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of "Stetsenko, Anna" <AStetsenko@gc.cuny.edu <mailto:AStetsenko@gc.cuny.edu>>
> Reply-To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
> Date: Thursday, November 29, 2018 at 11:24 AM
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The last chapter of Thinking and Speech reconstructed
> 
>  
> 
> Here is a sound and healthy attitude, smile:
> 
>  
> 
> "Sometimes I quote someone without using quotation marks or a footnote to give the name of the source. It seems like I’m just supposed to prove I’ve read this famous scholar, and I say why should I have to put quotes around it if you can’t even recognize who it comes from?"
> 
>  
> 
> "I often quote concepts, texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reveres Marx, and will be suitably honoured in the so-called Marxist journals. But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognising Marx’s texts I am thought to be someone who doesn’t quote Marx. When a physicist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote Newton and Einstein? He uses them, but he doesn’t need the quotation marks, the footnote and the eulogistic comment to prove how completely he is being faithful to the master’s thought. (p. 52)
> 
>  
> 
> Foucault, Michel. (1980). Prison talk. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 (pp. 37–54). Brighton: Harvester
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Anna Stetsenko, PhD
> 
> Professor
> 
> Ph.D. Programs in Psychology/Human Development and in Urban Education
> The Graduate Center of The City University of New York
> 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016
> 
> http://annastetsenko.ws.gc.cuny.edu/ <http://annastetsenko.ws.gc.cuny.edu/>
> visit www.academia.edu <http://www.academia.edu/> for my recent publications
> 
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of PERRET-CLERMONT Anne-Nelly <Anne-Nelly.Perret-Clermont@unine.ch <mailto:Anne-Nelly.Perret-Clermont@unine.ch>>
> Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2018 10:09 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The last chapter of Thinking and Speech reconstructed
> 
>  
> 
> Yes, Andy, you are certainly right that the norms of scientific writing were quite different in those days. 
> 
> It would very interesting to read Piaget's writings of the same period ('30's) in the same way as Van der Veer and Zavershneva read Vygotsky i.e. looking for the quotes that are not mentioned as such. I expect that many would be found in spite of the fact that Piaget was not under the pressure of finishing writing before dying. As students, listening to Piaget's lectures in the sixties,  we were  aware that we were expected to have  read many "classics" (even if they were not part of the study plan); we were expected to be aware of the on-going debates even if we were not explicitly informed about them. We were expected to recognise the quotes just as we were expected to already know certain facts. (As a consequence the exams that we had to take were organised in a quite different format).
> 
> Hence I suppose that Piaget and Vygotsky expected that their readers  and students would have  ( or would soon have) a strong background in philosophy, psychology etc. and hence they wouldn't "spell out" everything. This would be one more reason, beyond all those spelled out by Andy and by Van der Veer and Zavershneva, for the absence of explicit quotations and exhaustive reference lists.
> 
> Anne-Nelly 
> 
>  
> 
> Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont
> 
> University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland)
> 
> 
> Le 29 nov. 2018 à 14:26, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> a écrit :
> 
> 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 [ethicalpolitics.org] <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.ethicalpolitics.org_ablunden_index.htm&d=DwMGaQ&c=8v77JlHZOYsReeOxyYXDU39VUUzHxyfBUh7fw_ZfBDA&r=2kfPn11YFbh2hkICurgZ1_xSyFEpUsNf13uxtVwxkSg&m=EgwEIjQvm6tjIPfe0wx_3cO6hX8vewpp0T4Uwm1d9Ew&s=aPcclSjXbobP76ZxtiKzMrdF0y-A6-KBOabtqDlGpWk&e=>
> 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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