[Xmca-l] Re: Where is Marx in the work and thought of Vygotsky? by Lucien Seve

[David Kellogg]

Andy--

The translation was a commercial one; Lucien Seve wanted to have it
translated so that Anton Yasnitsky and Carl Ratner would respond to it, but
neither one mentioned it. When I asked Anton after his talk he said that he
found the first page so error-ridden he gave up. I have (with Lucien Seve's
permission) retranslated it; it should come out in MCA later this year.

I think that part of Seve's point in this paper is that Vygotsky the
psychologist is Vygotsky misconceived: de-socialized, de-culturized, and
de-Marxified. But Vygotsky the pedologist makes perfect sense, so long as
we understand that pedology is not "child psychology"--it's not a branch of
some larger purer science called psychology; on the contrary, for Vygotsky,
psychology was a specialized tool in the pedologist's kit, and pedology
itself is part of much larger science of human development, inevitably
linked to sociogenetic ideas of the nature of human progress.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663



On Sun, Jun 30, 2019 at 8:13 PM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> Just a couple of remarks on this very interesting paper:
>
> (1) When I read "Thought & Language" (the 1962 translation) - my first
> Vygotsky, I instantly recognised as a work of Marxism, and one informed by
> Hegel to boot. Which verifies Seve's obvious point that cutting out the
> explicit references to Marx does not remove the Marxist character of the
> work.
>
> (2) Seve (in my view) completely misunderstands Hegel's idea of "concept",
> attributing to Hegel the analytical view which Vygotsky also used up until
> 1931, at which point he came in contact with Hegelians. Marx made numerous
> "corrections" to Hegel, but the form of the concept was not one of those.
>
> (3) The meaning of Taetigkeit, Handlung, Aktivitaet, Praxis, etc., the
> various words in German, English and Russian, for "activity" is not cut and
> dry - different writers use different words differently. But despite the
> importance of the "productivist" interpretation of "Praxis" in anthropology
> and historiography, it has always seemed to me that the more general
> meaning of "purposive (social, artefact mediated) activity" is more
> appropriate for Psychology, and the meaning Vygotsky had in mind. It seems
> that Leontyev perversely agrees with this because of his spiteful attack on
> Vygotsky's supposed "idealism" (See JREEP v. 43, 2005) for not
> understanding "Praxis" in this productivist way.
>
> Still, very welcome article. Pity some of us Anglophones, like me, are so
> ignorant of the French language.
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 30/06/2019 11:08 am, Andy Blunden wrote:
>
> Attachment may be of interest to people on this list.
>
> Andy
> --
> ------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>
>
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