Re: [xmca] crisis at age 17

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Mike: 
  
Yes, that passage REALLY threw me for a loop back in 2007 when Yongho and I first studied Volume Five (about the time of your San Diego-Helsinki video conference on development). I could scarcely believe my eyes: first, he says “internal”, “internal”, “internal”, as if he were teaching yoga, and then he talks this gobbledygook about the unity of personality and environment and how each step determines the next one, as if he were teaching ballroom dancing. 
  
Now, I think a little differently. I guess I think it’s useful to think of Vygotsky’s oeuvre as undergoing two different kinds of development. The first one I want to call “macrogenetic”, by which I mean the “periodization” problem, the thing that he refers to at the end of Chapter One (of T&S) when he says that several times during the course of his ten year work on the problem of thinking and speech he has had to give up on avenues of inquiry once thought promising and start over again.  
  
I suppose Malinowski might call this “context of culture”, because it’s very much related to the huge sea change in the culture of Soviet education that I was trying to draw attention to in my rejected article.  But it’s not DIRECTLY related to that, because, as Valsiner and van der Veer say, Vygotsky became politically fearless as he became medically hopeless; he never just says “Da, tovarich”. 
  
The second kind is the main kind of development I see in the passage that disturbs you, which I want to call “microgenetic”. I mean the way in which Vygotsky is responding to two kinds of what Malinowski might call the “context of the situation”: on the one hand the direction in which people like Leontiev and Zalkind and Kolbanovsky are trying to pull Soviet psychology and on the other the arguments that Vygotsky is having in his own head, both with himself and with his increasingly vociferous opponents. 
  
The way I interpret that last page is this. Macrogenetically speaking, Vygotsky is late in the third great period of his life: he has abandoned his early ideas about fiddling with the S-R unit (inserting mediation into it, changing “stimulus” to “subject” and response to “object”, pretending that the relationship is somehow a reversible one, like “production” and “consumption”. He has also abandoned the idea that the only thing that develops is structure, interfunctional relations, and he has embraced the idea that structural differentiation is linked to and closely follows functional differentiation (I am stealing all these ideas from Norris Minick and Alex Kozulin, but what follows is my own “microgenetic” interpretation). 
  
The “Child Development” manuscript is an attempt to show how functional differentiation in turn follows a genetic progression of stages that are not linked logically (because there really isn’t any way that you can get, say, walking out of crawling logically, and there isn’t any way that just thinking about pointing will give you the idea of naming).  But they are linked in life, and the links involve something that to the non-dialectical eye appears the very opposite of a link, namely a crisis (I talk to my dad a lot about this; he is devoting the twilight years of his career to a problem I think is somehow similar, namely calculating how shock wave discontinuities can be worked into equations that describe continuous variations in speed and pressure). 
  
Microgenetically speaking, I think Vygotsky is responding to a really CRUDE form of environmental determinism, whereby the crisis is a product of bourgeois parenting, and has no counterpart amongst proletarian and social youth (something that Leontiev believed and Karpov still argues, which is why I am very suspicious of the idea that that the crisis is only a response to job prospects). But he has reasons of his own, as well: he has just written or is in the process of writing Chapter Six of T&S, where he argues that the psychological operations of the child depend in a very direct way on BOTH the “structure of generalization” in the child’s thinking (e.g. heaps, complexes, preconcepts) AND the relations of generalization he finds in his environment (e.g. pointing at things, naming stuff, and liking stuff, that is, signifying). 
  
He is writing this for his students, and he needs a way of conveying, in the vernacular, this double dependence on functional relations (which are always a little more inter-mental and forward looking) on the one hand and structural relations (which are always a little more intra-mental and backward looking) on the other. So, cuckoo-like, he borrows the idiom of Gesell about an interaction between environment and personality. I think that if we see that both of these are really, in the long run, one hundred percent social, but only in the long run, there is really no dualism or mechanism involved, just good old Spinozan monism and dialectics. 
  
I think it also fits very much with the Zeitgeist (should I say the Zeit-Gestalt?). The other night my wife and I went to a production of Donizetti’s comic opera “L’elisir d’amore”. It was written in 1832, i.e. when Humboldt is busying spreading the idea that language has both an “outer form” that adapts to the environment and an “inner form” that is mysteriously immanent and stable (later picked up by Potebnia, applied to words, and thence dragged downward to Vygotsky’s signification and sense).   
  
In the first act, the peasant Nemorino falls in love with the rich landlady Adina, and he is too modest to dare to hope for her love but too honest to hide his feelings. Adina warns him that she never felt a desire which did not die as soon as it is awakened. He asks why, and she answers. (I must translate this so that it rhymes, and in return you must imagine the musical accompaniment): 
  
Why? Oh, go ask the zephyrs that flutter 
First to the lily and then to the rose 
Why they must flitter and clatter and clutter 
Where the brook babbles and where the grass grows 
  
They will just tell you that it’s in their nature 
Witty and wheezy, to restlessly range 
Why, it’s inherent in their nomenclature. 
Brilliant and breezy, to constantly change 
  
Nemorino replies that he will live go to live quietly and die somewhere near her, and she asks why. 
  
Why? Oh, go ask the rivers that fountain 
Forth from the hard hills with a soft sigh 
Why they run grieving through vale and mountain 
Down to the sea where they know they must die 
  
They will reply that, woebetide them, 
They are pulled downwards to that dread plain. 
They feel a force from outside and beside them. 
They feel a power they cannot explain. 
  
It is, of course, an exoteric and not an esoteric explanation of how personality and environment form a unity and even how freedom and fate depend upon each other. But the music is exquisite! 
  
David Kellogg 
Seoul National University of Education 
  
PS: Ah! I found it! No need to imagine…have a listen: 
  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npb7OQK3nf0&feature=related 
  
  
 

--- On Wed, 5/25/11, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] crisis at age 17
To: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Cc: "Culture ActivityeXtended Mind" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2011, 9:02 PM


Hi David-- There are too many issues here to comment on in one note. I have no further comment on the reviewing issues. But even with respect to LSV and crisis at age 7 (funny how little difference a decade can make in discussions at the right level of abstraction!) you touch on several important issues. I want to ask about the following because it seems overstated to me, or maybe just wrong.

But I think that internal development always occurs in such a way that there is a unity of personality and environmental factors, that is, every new step in development is directly determined by the preceding step.

Even allowing for your nuanced notion of internal as "the internalized" it is unclear how "unity of personality and environmental factors" implies, let alone is synonymous with "every new step in development is directly determined by the previous step."

I am brought back to the previous discussion initiated in a note of Larry's about loosely coupled systems. On the surface at least this looks way too mechanical to me, not to mention uncertainty about what the steps are and what the teleology is that allows one to talk of steps as if new and previous meant higher and lower.

Interesting about campiness and "acting as if" but part of a related, but different discussion.
mike









On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 8:15 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:






This is almost the very last thing that Vygotsky wrote in the book on Child Development. It's the Crisis at Seven, not seventeen, and it's the last page of Volume Five, 296:
 
"It is my impression that the crises actually have an internal source and consist in changes of an internal nature. There is no precise correspondence here between external and internal changes. The child enters the crisis. What has changed abruptly outward? Nothing. Why has the child changed so abruptly in such a short time?"
 
Of course, Andy could STILL be right--that is, the crisis at seventeen might be caused not by the external circumstances of looking for work but only by the shiver of anticipation that the future produces. But Vygotsky makes it clear that's not what he has in mind.
 
"Our idea is that we must object not to the bourgeois theories of the critical age levels, or the idea that the crisis is a very profound process interwoven into the course of the child's development, but we must object to the understanding of the internal nature itself of the process of development."
 
Vygotsky then points out that the bourgeois theories he refers to mean, quite literally, raging hormones. That is what "internal" means to them.
 
"But I think that internal development always occurs in such a way that there is a unity of personality and environmental factors, that is, every new step in development is directly determined by the preceding step. This means that development must be understood as a process where all subsequent change is connected with what went before and with the present in which the features of personality that have developed previously are now manifested and now act." 
 
Vygotsky concludes that if we understand "internal" as referring to the internalization of experience, there can really be nothing wrong with the idea of an "internally" caused crisis. 
 
Now, to me this suggests that the idea of a crisis rooted in the child's anticipation of entering the labor market is seriously flawed. It just doesn't take into account the PREVIOUS history of the child.
 
Now, that previous history, where is it? Alas, Vygotsky did not live to write it. But in a sense, THIS is it: this is the chapter on the Crisis at SEVEN, after all, not the chapter on the Crisis at Seventeen. 
 
So what does Vygotsky say about the Crisis at Seven? Well, he says that children develop a sense of CAMP, that is, acting "as if" rather than acting directly as themselves. The child walks "as if" walking instead of just walking. The child draws attention to the squeaky quality of his own voice when talking "as if" talking. Vygotsky notes that Charlie Chaplin's comedy works largely because it is devoid of camp; he acts with childlike naivete and directness which is quite inappropriate to any adult role; he simply acts instead of acting "as if".
 
Let me return, but only briefly, to the unpleasant topic of my rejections and the emotions they stirred up. I think the focus on my work is a little misdirected: I should have approached this as an MCA reviewer MYSELF, and pointed out how unconstructive it is IN GENERAL to dish out "do not resubmit" reviews with ad hominem comments that cast aspersions on the author's committment to scientific seriousness and base this on nothing but "tone". 
 
I should have pointed out as an MCA reviewer MYSELF (that is, one of those Andy and others are thanking) that it is in my interests that the editors uphold the principle of blind review, the principle of RARE outright rejection and the GENEROUS use of "resubmit", the principle of multiple reviewers, and last but not least, the principle of the "no a-hole rule": that is, no drama, no ad hominem, and total civility, particularly where rejections are concerned.
 
My comments on papering the bathroom walls with my rejection notes and also my free admission that I am, basically, a dysfunctional writer weakened this. But they were also meant to improve the tone of the discussion (and perhaps even the quality of the journal). I admit; I do think there are very few emotionally fraught discussions and even serious scholarly ones that cannot be improved by the introduction of humor. 
 
True, campiness had the unfortuate effect of strengthening the accusations of flippancy and unseriousness (which I don't take very seriously) and, alas, directing more attention towards myself (which I do). But there are two great advantages to campiness that every seven year old becomes acutely aware of and which even the seventeen year old does not outgrow. 
 
First of all, the campiness of "as if" is a real protection against the kind of suicidal feelings that Andy describes. But secondly, and more importantly, when we get "hot under the collar" and we say things that are extreme,  which is, as Mike points out, an inevitable concommittant of any deep discussion about deeply held beliefs, then there is an important EXCEPTION to the general xmca rule of total civility and complete intolerance of intolerance. 
 
Incivility, even in its most extreme forms (e.g. jokes that denigrate Jews, which as a Jew I make free with or the use of "queer" by gays and racial epithets by black people) is acceptable as long as it is self-directed. I think the child at seven discovers this, and it is a very important discovery indeed. It is, in fact, a central and difficult concept in the child's MORAL development.

 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 

--- On Wed, 5/25/11, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:



From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] crisis at age 17
To: ablunden@mira.net, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2011, 3:25 PM 





Andy--

I guess I am simply having trouble interpreting texts on xmca at the moment
in general! Sorry

The issue of the "back end" of the transition to adulthood is not passe, of
course! Quite the opposite, it is a new academic industry and a major life
issue of millions of people around the globe in ways that were unanticipated
by our forbearers. And it certainly is fraught! Both for participants and
analysts. Ask any 35 year old unemployed BA living at home with parents or
the parents or Ethiopian high school leaver who cannot find work!!

Does LSV use the term, institutionalized age-levels? The institutions part
of this process ordinarily goes under-theorized by psychologists and I seem
to have missed that.
mike

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I did not mean to impute a framing of the question in those terms to you
> Mike, but I can't quite see why you describe the idea of what Vygotsky calls
> the "transitional period" ending in the "beginning of adulthood" as
> something passe and fraught. Is there a country in the industrialised world
> which does not have an age (or ages) at which the person qualifies to vote,
> drive cars, give informed consent, join the army, run for election, serve on
> juries - all those rights which characterise adult citizenship in a country?
> Vygotsky says these instituionalised age-levels "depend on enormous
> practical experience" (LSV CW 5p187) so it seems a fair conclusion to draw
> that there is some reality behind a hear-universally institutionalised idea,
> some basis in patterns of child development in the given society.
> Mind you, he also says "We do not include youth (i.e. the period between
> adolesence and adulthood) in the scheme of age periods of childhood for the
> reason that theoretical and empirical studies equally compel opposition to
> stretching child development excessively and including in it the first
> twenty-five years of human life. In the general sense and according to basic
> patterns, the age eighteen to twenty-five years more likely makes up the
> initial link in the chain of mature age than the concluding link in the
> chain of periods of child development." (LSV CW 5p196) But that is really
> not my concern. I am not writing a book on child development! :) It's those
> youth I am most interested in. The development which proceeds on the basis
> of a person's thinking and acting in concepts is a different kind of
> development than that which he or she goes through during childhood, and
> does not exhibit the same laws.
>
> Andy
>
>
> mike cole wrote:
>
>> We also did not write about the transition to adulthood at what used to be
>> called the beginning of adulthood, a frought notion indeed. There is not a
>> large literature on that topic which is only pre-figured in the first
>> edition of our textbook when we were allowed to include a life-span
>> treatment of development.
>> mike
>>
>> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net<mailto:
>> ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>>
>>    Apologies Gregory. I slipped a note about Vygotsky in the middle
>>    of my commentary on Cole, whereas in fact, Mike did not refer to
>>    Vygotsky in this chapter.
>>    Culpa mia.
>>    Andy
>>
>>
>>    Gregory Allan Thompson wrote:
>>
>>        Ivo and Andy,
>>        Also in the adolescence section of Mike's textbook is
>>        reference to William Damon. He has a wonderful 3-D graphic of
>>        the development of self-concept from infancy through adolescence.
>>        His writings on moral development are quite good too. The
>>        major point that I always appreciate is that moral development
>>        should not be considered separately from development of
>>        self-concept (Andy, you might appreciate the way in which
>>        development of self-understanding and development of social
>>        understanding are caught up with each other - the development
>>        of an I that is We?).
>>        Although I don't recall any explicit reference to Vygotsky, he
>>        draws on an Vygotsky's kin (according to some), the American
>>        pragmatists James Mark Baldwin and William James.
>>        Damon and Hart 1992. Self-understanding and its role in social
>>        and moral development. In Lamb, M. and Bornstein, M. (Eds.)
>>        Developmental Psychology: An advanced textbook. pp. 421-464.
>>
>>        Graphic is on p. 433.
>>        I'm happy to share a copy directly but prefer not to
>>        distribute widely.
>>        -greg
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>>
>>
>>    --
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>    *Andy Blunden*
>>    Joint Editor MCA:
>>    http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
>>    <http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=g932564744>
>>    Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
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>>    <http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857>
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