Mike writes
>I really have a warped view of what the stereotypical views of the ALL
>goru
>(group) are, Anna, and as my earlier comment to Dot indicated, I am very
>leery of taking sides on matters of personal conflicts from the 1930's
>and 1940's when the only thing I am pretty sure of is that I have
>virtually
>NO idea of what went on.
- i would echo Dot, Phillip, Bill, Anna and others who have made efforts
to account for the
historical contexts of Leontiev's writings, and Vygotsky, Luria, and other
Gods of cultural-historical psychology.
there is no way, of course, to truly know what went on in the minds of
these writers when they were writing - we can understand some of the
historical events, however these, too, are based on textual transcriptions
- pro-Stalinists will construct very different meanings from pro-Marxists,
and so on. There is no stable translation, nor stable interpretation to be
gained from these -
instead,
and as Phillip and Dot rightly point out,
we are, ourselves, reflections of our own textual sites in history and as
such, are no more likely to produce stable
languages of interpretation than the writers who form the foundation of
"meanings" central to
CHAT theories.
(and forgive me if that was not their intention, but it was what i read,
aha! the instability of reading and interpretation eh?) -
we all take what we need and want from what we read. this is the tradition
of theory in the academy.
a more politically-responsible gesture is towards recognizing the politics
as
they emerge in symbolic acts of writing - as Phillip suggested with
Leontiev's assessment of "personality" - it is irresponsible, really, to
disregard the "stuff" we don't like and keep the stuff we do like from
within the same text, as though these are distinctions that can be plucked
or
nipped with semantic tweezers - all of the text is an effect of an
historical site of production and reproduction. that is, to me, what
potentially SAVES Activity Theory - the cultural-historical
aspects of our own engagements with reading and writing -
To quote Jameson here:
"Our presupposition, in the analyses that follow, will be that only a
genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and
radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the
solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures,
experiences, and struggles, with those of present day." (18)
As a method for reading in the contexts of a political structure, where
the text itself is a structure, as much as the unconscious engagement with
ideological assumptions of any historical moment is structured into the
writing as an effect of political structures:
"...[W]e will suggest that ...semantic enrichment and enlargement of the
inert givens and materials of a particular text must take place with three
concentric frameworks, which mark a widening out of the sense of the
social ground of a text through the notions, first, of a political
history, in the narrow sense of punctual event and a chroniclelike
sequence of happenings in time; then of society, in the now already less
diachronic and time-bound sense of a constitutive tension and struggle
between social classes; and, ultimately, of history now conceived in its
vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the succession
and destiny of the various human social formations, from prehistoric life
to whatever far future history has in store for us." (75)
This is not a simple HOW-TO kind of reading, but is a gesture towards more
political-critical
reading, that, for instance, psychology itself belongs to a dubious
history of assumptions, and so the theories written towards elaborating
psychology need to be tempered with the recognition that psychology is no
more innocent than the elaborations or reformulations effected during the
1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and so on, up to today and likely into
tomorrow.
while i think AT has the limits of observation built into its method, and
so provides a helpful methodological framework for thinking about what we
are doing when we suppose to be "studying" a phenomenon, or "intervening"
with a problem,
the cultural-historical limitations strike me as sites of greater
queasiness, squeamishness, and
as my sister does, when she doesn't want to listen, causes some to plug
their fingers in their ears and sing loudly, "LA LALA LA LA LA LA LA LA I
CAN'T HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA...." -
i'm sure you get the picture.
anyhow, i don't think this takes away anything from the readings done thus
far, but elevates it all to reading to at a necessary level of political
responsibility, de-romanticizing the foundations of CHAT
and innovating more appropriate passages into contemporary practice.
there ya go - my $0.02, or maybe it was a nickel's worth, either way,
it's in CDN funds, so worth little in its exchange value. ha ha
diane
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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