Re: dialectics today
vera p john-steiner (vygotsky who-is-at unm.edu)
Sat, 11 May 1996 21:10:19 -0600 (MDT)
Dear Arne and Jay,
After receiving Arne's message concerning the Engels' quote
I thought that it would be a good idea to think about some of his
analyses. I had also hoped that others would join the discussion. Jay's
message is the kind of comment that I was thinking about.
First, why did we use the particular quote, (and I no longer
remember whose choice it was). It was because of the section in Mind in
Society on methodology in which Vygotsky urges the adoption of a process
rather than an object orientation. Why did we emphasize in our postscript
dialectics without going into a deeper analysis of its many political and
philosophical uses? Because we were deeply interested in a non-Platonist,
non-Behaviorist psychology. And as most of you know, the process of
developing a developmental, process-oriented, dialectical approach is
hard. Our collegues from South America(see Anthropology and Education
Quarterly, Dec. 1995) rightly suggest that we have reduced some of
Vygotsky's works in the English translations --they kindly focus on
Thought and Language-- but Mind in Society is also open to similar
criticism. They recall Luria's role in this. We worked with Luria
but we also made some judgements of our own. My objective was to
participate in an effort to construct an interactionist-dialectical
approach, although my primary interest was and is in the relationship
between language and thought. It is because of his analysis of that
relationship that Vygotsky became my "distant teacher." I am not a
philosopher, nor am I a Marxist scholar, I did not experience first-hand
the many ways in which dialectics was used and distorted politically.
But I do think that Vygotsky's use of unification of "nature and culture"
of "learning and development" is a dialectical approach on which we have
all built some aspects of our own analyses.
I agree with both Arne and Jay that the 19th century belief in
scientific progress, the male bias towards mastery and destruction,
a reflection theory of thought are behind us, and rightly so. I have done
too much research in Native communities to accept a High and Low
concept of societies.As far as process and complex systems are concerned,
I think Jay's analysis is excellent, it has some family resemblance to
the notions of functional systems used by Luria and Newman,Griffin and Cole,
and to the theories of complexity, some of which are fashioned at the Santa
Fe Institute.
We share, we challenge and we appropriate from a complex legacy
and by our very passions for ideas we help each other, I believe,
to survive the many horrors of this century.
Vera
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Vera P. John-Steiner
Department of Linguistics
Humanities Bldg. 526
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
(505) 277-6353 or 277-4324
Internet: vygotsky who-is-at triton.unm.edu
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