Hi Andy,
I think you are incorrect with saying that ANL has a functionalist
theory, at least, /Activity, Consciousness, Personality/ is not at all
functionalist but emphasizes the individual subject of activity, its
consciousness, and how individual consciousness is a concretization of
collective consciousness.
That this is the case you can see in the work of Klaus Holzkamp, who
developed "Subjectwissenschaft", science of the subject, which focuses
on the problem of activity through the consciousness of the subject
where the objective sympractical activity is reflected.
This understanding of ANL is the result of a mechanical application of
triangles in Western scholarship---or so I think. And this
structural-functionalist approach has nothing to do with what I take to
be the true concerns of ANL.
Again, the English translation does in many ways not reflect the Russian
or German translation, and in science education, the conflation of terms
that the English translation makes would be termed "misconceptions". You
run into trouble when deyatel'nost' and aktivnost', two very different
concepts, come to be translated as activity; same with societal
(gesellschaftlich, obshchestvennoĭ [общественной]) from those that are
social (sozial, sozial’n [социальн]), but the English version renders
both as “social.” In English, we find the word “meaning” that translates
znachenie (значение)/ Bedeutung even though the Russian / German
equivalents refer to an objective phenomenon at the cultural-historical
level rather than the personal sense (Sinn, smisl [смысл]) students make
(“construct”) as part of lessons.
Cheers,
Michael
On 2010-03-12, at 9:34 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
As far as I can see, David, I agree with your observations, unless
except for your quotation of me. :) I said (8 March):
"A N Leontyev was right in determining that Vygotsky had a problem in
that he omitted from his unit of analysis the motivation for action. It
remained "over the horizon" for Vygotsky. ANL was right in determining
that an Activity Theory, and a concept of "an activity" (singular) was
needed, but failed in extending LSV's methodology to solve this problem.
So ANL left us a functionalist solution to the shortfalls in Vygotsky's
theory."
Andy
David Kellogg wrote:
Andy remarks, in a recent post, that Vygotsky did not sufficiently
take into account the OBJECT orientedness of activity. I’m not exactly
sure what he means by that. Vygotsky certainly did take “goal
orientation” into account (just as Ach and Uznadze and Rimat did).
Goal orientation was the central innovation of his whole experiment in
Chapter Five of Thinking and Speech. But Vygotsky went further than
goals and aims in his analysis of the activity in Chapter Five; as he
says, one cannot explain the trajectory of a cannon shell simply by
referring to the aim of the gunner.
Andy himself has criticized Vygotsky’s epigones for an OBJECTIVIST
distortion of Vygotsky’s teachings. I can really think of no better
example of this than Leontiev’s claim that without an object there is
no activity at all. What about play? Play cannot be reduced to
object-oriented activity without doing extreme violence to the whole
concept of an object. The “object” of play is an imaginary situation
or an abstract rule, but this object cannot exist independently of the
activity of play itself (when it does, e.g. in stamp collecting, we
quite properly cease to refer to the activity as play). So
“explaining” play by reference to its “object” is tautological: play
exists by virtue of its tendency to bring play into being.
Leontiev got around this problem by arguing that play exists by virtue
of its tendency to bring adult forms of labor into being. So the child
who plays at being a pickpocket is merely practicing for a lucrative
career in petty larceny, and the child who plays the policeman who
apprehends him is working out his frustration at being for the moment
too young to actually break arms and bash heads. The adultomorphism
of this position was obvious to Gunilla Lindqvist. But there is plenty
of empirical evidence against it too. Eugene Subbotsky points out that
five year olds will also play at being three year olds, but will in
fact refuse to drink a “magic potion” which (they are told) will make
them refer to being at three year old. Let’s suppose that play takes
into account object oriented activity, but goes further; the key role
of e-motion that Larry and Rod have remarked upon is the generosity
and open-handedness of the child’s creativity, and not its parsimony
and object-orientation.
Let’s suppose that play stands head and shoulders above the
satisfaction of needs. Let us suppose that the very precondition of
play is a surfeit of sufficiency, and THAT is why it is a source of
both heightened emotions and higher ones than might attend the
satisfaction of actual needs. At the beginning of Chapter Two of her
remarkable book “Beyond Modularity”, Annette Karmiloff-Smith has the
following epigraph from a four year old:
CHILD: What’s that?
MOTHER: It’s a typewriter.
CHILD: No, you’re the typewriter. That’s a type-write.
Karmiloff-Smith points out that what is remarkable about this example
is not the neologism itself: that’s understandable enough on the basis
of the statistical regularities found in words that would be common
enough in a four-year-old vocabulary: “teacher”, “worker”, and even
“mother”, “father”, “sister”, and “brother”. What is remarkable is
the lack of economy in the child’s contribution, the desire to go WELL
beyond naming to acquire the very principle of the nominative
function. To put this in less linguistic and more politically charged
terms, what is remarkable is the contested asymmetry of the exchange,
the child’s desire to move from a fairly successful question-answer
exchange to master the naming system itself. Karmiloff-Smith says
“What is special about humans is that they spontaneously go beyond
successful behavior” (p. 32). What is special about toddlers is not
that they try to imitate adults by walking instead of crawling, but
rather that they willingly give up a perfectly successful strategy for
one that is initially far less so. I suppose the Leontiev view is that
they do this because they aspire to being adult bipeds rather than
quadrupeds. A less philistine, and more likely, view is that walking
for toddlers is an extreme sport, i.e. a form of play. What
Wolff-Michael calls the “positive emotional valence” of play is
certainly an initializing factor. But one of the first things that
Vygotsky insists upon in his “play” lecture at the Herzen Pedagogical
Institute in 1932 (which is in Chapter Seven of Mind in Society) is
that it is wrong to see play as the satisfaction of needs, and one of
the last things he insists upon in this lecture is that children will
go on playing even when the emotional valence of the activity is
extremely negative.
To say that child development is driven not by lack but by surfeit is
not so very different from what we must say, as Marxists, when we
consider economic development objectively and historically. We all
know that what REALLY drives capitalist development (including crises)
is not scarcity at all, and in fact capitalism viewed from the optic
of scarcity has been an all around failure. What drives capitalist
development is overproduction. So it seems to me that there is every
reason to see not only play but also speech and even thinking as
superfluous (that is, “overflowing”) in terms of their needs and thus
in terms of their objectives and even their objects.
O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest things superfluous
Allow not nature more than nature needs
And man’s life is cheap as beast’s.
(King Lear, Act II, Scene IV)
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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