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Re: [xmca] crisis at age 17
I guess I don't think that LSV was being modest, Andy.
I completely agree with David Kirshner that we need to try to unify the various "moments" of Vygotsky's development (if only as a test of his OWN theory of development as a unitary process). More, I agree that we do not really achieve that unification by reducing the various moments to one. Still more, I agree that one of the major weaknesses of activity theory (and Wertsch in particular) has been to take these moments apart and to see the oeuvre as a whole as being radically unfinished as a result.
The documents you are trying to put together were written at different moments. The materials from the beginning of Volume Five, for example, belong to Vygotsky's "Pedology of the Adolescent". Vygotsky really is heavily influenced by the ideas of activity, the labor school, and complexes.
But the chapters of "Child Development" Vygotsky really ARE uncompleted, precisely because they come from the LAST, incomplete period of Vygotsky's life. Vygotsky has now broken with Leontiev over the question of activity and has begun to construct a much more semiotic, SEMANTIC account of consciousness.
When we look at the two chapters of this manuscript that Vygotsky did complete (the Problem of Age, and the chapter on Birth and Infancy) we find that it's very hard to reduce either one to a "leading activity" or a "central project".
It's true: Vygotsky does start with a unitary "social situation of development", and I think your insight that this is really a "sticky situation" and can even be phrased as a single predicament is absolutely correct. For example, in birth the "sticky situation" consists of the fact that the child is physiologically (mechanically) independent but biologically utterly dependent. In infancy, it is that the child has resolved this predicament through overleaping biological dependence with SOCIAL dependence, but lacks the main means by which we socially manipulate others, namely speech. With the Crisis at one, the child resolves this predicament through creating a speech, but it is not a social speech.
But I think that the OTHER aspects of Vygotsky's theory strongly resist this kind of sound bite summary. There doesn't seem to be a SINGLE "line of development" or even a single CENTRAL line of development at birth: feeding, grasping, crying, passive responsiveness are all mentioned. The same thing is true in infancy: reciprocal interest and active responsiveness are both mentioned. Even the Crisis at One mentions stumbling, babbling, temper tantrums, and none of these seem to me reducible to a single "activity".
That goes double for Vygotsky's remarks on the neoformation, which is really by definition not an activity and not a project but a new structure of MENTAL life. And it goes triple for the materials covered in the lectures, where Vygotsky is clearly looking for an account of development and an account of mental life that is NOT reducible to "leading activity" and its mental counterpart.
As for the unwritten and unspoken chapters (including the Crisis at Seventeen) I think we are on even more tenuous grounds. I like the Tibetan idea of considering humans at all times and in all places through three eyes (what Halliday likes to call trinocular vision). Every single moment of life, Tibetans say, can be seen as activity, but it can also be seen as thought, and as word, which is somewhere between the two yet not reducible to either.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Mon, 5/23/11, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Subject: Re: [xmca] crisis at age 17
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, May 23, 2011, 9:59 PM
In the passage to which David Kel kindly drew my attention, Vygotsky basically says that he has not yet figured out the nature of the Crisis at 17, or more precisely really, the crisis which marks the End of the "transitional period" and the passage to adulthood. But reading on, I think he is being too modest.
We all know from T&S that thinking in concepts is not attained until adolescence. Well, the first half of Volume 5 of the LSV CW has a collection of articles on the development of the Mental Functions in adolescence which make his point much clearer. It is not just that thinking in concepts does not arrive until adolescence, but **thinking in concepts is the leading neoformation of adolesence**. That is, conceptual thinking reorganises and restructures the emotions, attention, self-consciousness, will - everything. The psyche of the youth becomes a concrete concept.
At the conclusion of the chapter on "Development of the Higher Mental Functions during the Transitional Age," Vygotsky caps it all off with a 3-page discourse on Hegel's /Science of Logic/ as a metaphor for the development of the human personality. He does this of course, not directly, but by means of quotations recycled from Deborin, Lenin and Engels, all of which highlights those passages of Hegel where Hegel talks of the personality as a concept, and the arrival of adulthood and entry into social life as corresponding to the Concept (the 3rd book of the Logic). Pity Vygotsky died so young.
All the writers, including those whose work xmca has just been discussing under the heading of moral development, seem to agree that the crisis which marks the end of adolesence is the very act of taking up a place in adult society, choosing a vocation, or as I would say, adopting a project(s).
In the excellent and very helpful chapter of Mike Cole's book on Child Development, chapter 16, which deals with this period, we find descriptions of the struggle of the youth to establish an identity. This happens, according to Vygotsky, simultaneously with them forming a concept of the world, shaped and instantiated by their activity as part of some social class. In just one passage, Mike refers to this as "self-concept." Usually, in this period of individualism, we call it "identity," but self-concept is a far superior conception of oneself-in-the-world, I believe.
So it seems to me that the crowning concept of Vygotsky's theory development of the human being is the development of the person as a concept, aka and identity or self-concept, inseparably from an ideological view of the world instantiated by participation in a project, be that a profession, a family or a political or religious movement (including divergent selves in different domains, different projects). It is the way this enormous step, from childhood dependency to active responsibility for procreation both biological and phylogenetic, which hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the youth, at just a time when their entire physiology, interests and psyche is being totally disorganised by the arrival of sexuality. These are the facts that make adolesence such a stormy and troublesome time.
Any thoughts?
Andy
ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org wrote:
> With regard to its form, the logical has three sides: (a) the side of abstraction or of the understanding, (ß) the dialectical or negatively rational side, [and] (?) the speculative or positively rational one. (EL § 79)
>
> I pulled this off of this website: http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/paulhegel.htm
>
> I dare say that this is the 17 year old's crisis and consequently becomes an individual's synthesis of life, meaning and all that. As Bob Dylan wrote, "I was so much older than, I'm younger than that now." At 17 a person has been provided the world's potential without any consequences (for the most part, of course there are exceptions) and has yet to embark upon their practical life. Consider the soldier as poet, the scientist as mechanic, the engineer as lumberjack and perhaps this is a bit of insight into the 17 year old's crisis.
>
> comparing apples to oranges?
>
> eric
>
>
>
> From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> To: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> Cc: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: 05/19/2011 01:10 AM
> Subject: Re: [xmca] crisis at age 17
> Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> Mmm, I think that is c. p. 154 LSV CW v. 5.
> I'm getting to that shortly,
> thanks David
>
> Andy
>
> David Kellogg wrote:
> > Andy:
> > > I think if you look at "Imagination and Creativity in the Child",
> > where Vygotsky comments on the work of Ribot, you will find something
> > apposite.
> > >
> > Vygotsky, L.S. (2004). Imagination and Creativity in Childhood/.
> > Journal of Russian and East European Psychology. /42 (1) 7-97.
> >
> > > Ribot, who wrote that if man truly honored its great originators,
> > there would a statue of a child in every Hotel de Ville in France,
> > believes that at roughly age seventeen, every youth sacrifies
> > imagination to realism, and this is the condition for entry into the
> > work force.
> > > Vygotsky strongly contests this idea, both because he sees no
> > contradiction between imagination and productive labor and because he
> > believes that it is both preferable and more possible for art to
> > saturate life than vice versa.
> > > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> > --- On *Wed, 5/18/11, Andy Blunden /<ablunden@mira.net>/* wrote:
> >
> >
> > From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> > Subject: [xmca] crisis at age 17
> > To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Date: Wednesday, May 18, 2011, 5:46 AM
> >
> > On page 196 of vol. 5 of LSCV's CW, Vygotsky refers to a crisis at
> > age 17. I don't know of anything more he said about this crisis.
> > Can anyone help me?
> >
> > Andy
> > --
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> >
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> -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
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Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
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