Quoted below was my favorite of the contributions on LSV and contextualism.
The problem here really seems to be our notions about what contextualism
is. If it is a simple opposition to universalism, then I think the issue is
what aspects of development are of interest to us: those that are
relatively more species-specific or those that are relatively more
variable. I incline more to the latter. LSV, I think, was looking for a
balance between these aspects. But in a dialectical tradition,
contextualism does not mean either anti-universalism, or simple dependence
on pre-given contexts. It means the interaction of agentive activity and
the social milieu. The Umwelt notion, and Gibsonian views are also
interactionist in this sense. The social milieu is not a fixed and given
reality, but more a resource and a dialogue partner, whether viewed as
tools, traditions, ways of making meaning, or patterns of social interaction.
I think LSV must be counted a contextualist in the dialectical sense: it is
interaction, agentive co-social activity, which is the motor of all
development, even the species-specific aspects, but which becomes
particularly relevant when we ask about differential development in
different social milieux (as with Luria), making different meanings and
different selves with different social resources, differently disposed
social partners, different available patterns of meaningful co-social activity.
But it probably trivializes the dialectical-interactionist aspect of LSV to
count him as a contextualist in the degenerate, intellectually impoverished
framework of outmoded universalism debates or fixed-objective-reality views
of context.
Read the originals. And some philosophy. Burn the textbooks.
JAY.
At 01:03 PM 6/12/2003 +0200, you wrote:
>Don,
>"Man is born free but everywhere in chains," Yep, you can use words any way
>you like, but don't be surprised if the discourse loses all semblence to
>your intentions.
>
>You've pretty much touched the central issue here with your discussion of
>the relationships or lack of them between context umwelt, and objectivity.
>One of the least digestible parts of the Hegelian/Marxist contribution to
>social theory, at least for those of us raised in the European philosophical
>tradition (tradition as used in Peruvian archaeology), is the unification of
>theory and practice, body and soul etc. etc. Even when we are sure that
>we've firmly integrated the unification of theory and practice into our
>worldview, the distinction often comes creeping back in some other subtle
>form. For example, even fairly sophisticated Marxist theoreticians
>(especially of the old school) used the term, objective, in a fashion more
>akin to that of medieval scholarship, "the world as experienced," than in
>the Hegelian sense. This is not really the place to go into the reasons for
>this, though I suspect that it has much to do with a lingering sense of the
>special elevated role of theoretical thinking that still characterizes the
>intellectual culture of our educational institutions and related social and
>cultural bodies.
>
>So, while it is not surprising that the issue of whether or not LSV was or
>was not a contextualist can become a subject of concern for we thinkers, it
>is probably not really relevant to the main body of Vygotskean research and
>theory. After all, Vygotsky was not only a Marxist but also a forerunner of
>the Dialectical faction that so criticized the positivist and pragmatist
>tenedencies of the official ideologues of the CPSU in the 1960's and '70s.
>Vygotsky and Ilyenkov (the best known and, probably the most advanced member
>of the Dialectical faction of the '60's and '70's) both made it very clear
>that while there could be no doubt that the only kind of information
>available to the thinking organism was his subjective apperception of the
>material world, the selection and formation of that information could only
>be a product of learning, i.e. his social milieu. If context is thought to
>be some sort of characteristic of the subjective sensing of the material
>world, than it is formless and meaningless and therefore not a subject for
>discourse. On the other hand, i f context is to be understood to have form
>and meanining, then it is an integral part of cultural life and
>indistinguishable from the performance of the thinking organism.
>
>It seems to me that "context" may have some relevance to this way of
>thinking in the very limited sense of the contrast between culturally
>mediated, subjective experience of temporal world states and the
>generalization of world conditions esconced in the tools (speech, gestures,
>graphic and plastic representations and so on) that mediate those
>experiences. It may be argued that the mediated subjective experience is
>relatively more rooted in the "context" than are, say, the generalizations
>that serve to give subjective experience form and meaning. At some point or
>other I played with the idea of regarding the means whereby subjective
>experience acquires form and meaning as decontextualized experience, but
>eventually rejected it as borderline idealism and as not very helpful for
>understanding social processes.
>
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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