RE: RE: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution

[Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>]

David, many thanks. Much to learn on this end. I hope that others can contribute to my ongoing education as well.
A hopeful and restful season to all, regardless of your calendar, affiliations, and source of wisdom. p

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of kellogg
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 7:10 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: RE: RE: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution


Peter:



I think you are absolutely right to emphasize that the Russian Revolution wasn't a single nationwide event; it was concentrated in only two large cities. However, the Civil War which followed immediatly upon the insurrection was indeed nationwide, and of course the great economic transformation which changed Russia from "The Sick Man of Europe" to a global power that not only laid the foundations for space exploration but also created the rudiments of the world's first truly scientific psychology was the work of a whole nation.



I think that the way that this minor splash was able to create such large ripples is actually related to those rudiments, because one of Vygotsky's key contributions (so it seems to me) is directly related to the concept of uneven and combined development, which was the theoretical justification put forward by Trotsky for Lenin's seizure of power ahead of the rise of a capitalist class to be overthrown.



Lenin himself planned on a period of capitalist rule by the working class and peasant parties. The idea he put forward right up to April 1917 was the "bourgeois democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry". The workers parties and the social-revolutionaries (representing the peasants) would give land to the peasants, make peace with the Germans, and carry out simple democratic reforms until the working class was numerically the most powerful force in the country and would rule in its own name and according to its own interests.



Trotsky pointed out that this assumed a national, rather than a global, economy. In important ways, Russia not only had a capitalist class, it had concentrations of capital that were not possible even in Germany precisely because development (often foreign investment) was so heavily concentrated in a few centres. (Paradoxically, the Germans built bigger factories in Russia than they did at home; you can see the same sort of thing in China if you just look out the window of the train that connects Hongkong and Guangzhou).



For Trotsky, uneven and combined development, that is, the juxtaposition of the most backward and the most advanced, was the rule and not just the exception. Combined development occurs precisely because of uneven development; the reason WHY Russia absorbs the most advanced forms of capital is that it is only these advanced forms of capital that get exported. That was why Russia and China had far more compact, organizable, and militant working classes than other countries, and why, politically, capitalism snapped at what was, economically, at once the weakest and the strongest link of the chain.



Vygotsky believes this too. Uneven and combined development is the rule and not the exception for psychological functions. Cognitive development happens precisely because development occurs unequally in a society (factory workers more than farmers or forest dwellers, parents more than children). And combined development happens precisely because of uneven development; the reason why children learn signs before they even learn the use of tools is that it is precisely these advanced forms of mediating activity that get exported. The reason why my mother in law read Gorky and Gogol to her illiterate mother is much the same reason why my neice has to teach me how to use a cell phone.



Here's an example that will interest you as a literacy person (I still remember reading your early work as a graduate student in 1991--my professor Keith Johnson was much influenced by it). It might also greatly shock Andy (but not surprise Martin). Vygotsky is talking about the child's very first drawings, and he notes that they are not depictions of objects but rather attempts at rendering speech.



"When the child, drawing, displays the new treasures of his memory, this is done by way of speech, as if by way of narration. The main trait of this method: a certain degree of abstraction which all verbal description necessarily and naturally must compel. We see, therefore, that drawing is a graphic speech arising on the basis of verbal speech. Schemata which characterize the first drawings of the child resemble verbal concepts, which convey only the essential and constant features of objects." (p. 138 of Vol. 4 of the Collected Works, bottom of the page, but this is my translation).



Weirdly, Vygotsky then goes on to describe how this form of "written speech" is really, from a psychological point of view, the depiction of objects and not the depiction of meanings at all. So we have an almost pure case of uneven and combined development, an abstract verbal concept in the way in which the symbols are arranged on paper (as a cartoon, sometimes even with speech bubbles and marks for motion) and a mere array of things in the child's mind. It's not too hard to see how Vygotsky and Sakharov could have developed from this their idea of a pseudoconcept; something conceptually developed on the outside but complexive and underdeveloped within.



What was true in space was doubly true of time: the revolution was by no means a single sharp shock that totally transformed a whole country. It would surprise me only a little if Vygotsky wrote anti-Bolshevik articles in 1917. On the one hand, it would be deeply ungrateful and uncharacteristically ungenerous, given that the Bolsheviks at a stroke wiped away discrimination against Jews in public life, something that Vygotsky had, up to that time, largely avoided only by incredible luck (such as winning the lottery for admission to Moscow University). On the other, it would be evidence that he was deeply influenced by people like Shpet at Shanyavsky University, where he was studyiing part time.



But what really DID surprise me was THIS picture, which was taken about the time that Leontiev and Luria were setting up a separate school in Kharkov.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GolodomorKharkiv.jpg



(A couple of years ago there was a CNN clip widely shown here in South Korea showing similar scenes allegedly shot in North Korea, but on closer inspection the "bodies" on the street proved to be quite well fed and were probably drunks, and I noticed street signs that were in Chinese!)



But there are too many pictures like this from Kharkov to discount. This was in a town of 417,000, about the size of the Minneapolis where I grew up; the Pyatorka must have seen this sort of thing on the street on their way to work fairly often. (We know that Vygotsky, in replicating the "chicken" experiments would use acorns that he gathered in the woods as prizes for the starving children, and they must have found these more than usually motivating.)



Of course, as in North Korea (and in China) there is a simple explanation that the regime could offer the people for the failure of the country to develop evently more than a decade and a half AFTER ther revolution--others are developing, and the developers are strangling us. The explanation had the advantage of being true--no aid was offered to North Korea, or to China in 1959, or to the Soviet Ukraine. So this too is uneven and combined development, seen on a world scale.



Many people have remarked how Vygotsky's conception of development is tragic without being Rousseauian and romantic. Yes, and no wonder.



David Kellogg

Hankuk University of Foreign Studies


--------- 원본 메일 ---------
보낸사람: Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu<mailto:smago@uga.edu>>
받는사람 : "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>>
날짜: 2012년 12월 26일 수요일, 05시 33분 17초 +0900
제목: RE: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution
According to the review: "Etkind is unambiguous in his assertion that the master architect of this Faustian bargain for Russian Freudians was Leon Trotsky. The political link between the latter and Russian psychoanalysis has, in Etkind's view, been consistently underestimated in Western literature on the history of psychoanalysis. He thus strives to set right this lack of appreciation--devoting over forty pages to Trotsky, a dozen of which specifically deal with his intellectual enthusiasm and continued political support for both psychoanalysis and its educational offshoot, pedology. The latter, a unique Soviet approach stressing the transformation of human nature through childhood, was founded by people who had gone through relatively serious training in psychoanalysis (p. 5)."

Figes makes a similar point about Soviet communism regarding its belief that a Marxist society (one also influenced by Darwin) could, through the establishment of an appropriate environment, evolve a new kind of person (or more to the point, new kind of people). That belief was new to me, but I see it reflected in Vygotsky's work on mediated human consciousness. Under Stalin that evolution included killing off and exiling those who didn't fit his vision--thinning the herd, in the Darwinian sense, through repression.

Complicated stuff. Figes argues that Soviet communism skipped a step that Marx considered necessary for the evolution of socialist societies, which was the rise of a capitalist class to be overthrown. I am not an economist or much of a philosopher, so can't assert a position here. Perhaps others can help, if this topic is of interest.

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu> [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu>] On Behalf Of Peter Smagorinsky
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2012 3:22 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: RE: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution

Reviewed at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3386

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu> [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu>] On Behalf Of Leif Strandberg
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2012 1:55 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution

Yes, and now I found the English title: Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia


Leif

25 dec 2012 kl. 12.02 skrev Peter Smagorinsky:

> http://www.project-syndicate.org/contributor/alexander-etkind
> I assume that this is the same Etkind?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu> [mailto:xmca-
> bounces@weber.ucsd.edu<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=bounces@weber.ucsd.edu>] On Behalf Of Leif Strandberg
> Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2012 5:21 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] vygotsky and the revolution
>
> Hi,
>
> I learned a lot of the intellectual context in USSR, 1920-1936 when
> reading Nadezjda Mandelsjtam's Stalins Miracle (where she mentions
> Vygotskij!), and Aleksandr Etkind's An Impossible Passion (I don not
> know the correct English title), where you can read how the
> Pedalogy- Movement was interrelated to the political life (e.g.
> Krupskaja, Kalinin, Vysinskij)... very interesting (and scary).
> Boris Pasternak's (a friend of LSV) Doctor Zjivago also provides a
> feeling of the context and the situation for the intellectuals during
> those years.
>
> Yes, USSR/Russia was/is an Ocean... and what happens in Moscow can be
> very different from what takes place in Samarkand (and that was
> problematic in Luria's Uzbeki-journey)
>
> Leif
> Sweden
> 24 dec 2012 kl. 20.05 skrev Peter Smagorinsky:
>
>> Well, it took me about 6 months, but I finally finished reading
>> Figes'
>> 824-page tour de force, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution
>> 1991-1924 (ending with Lenin's death and Stalin's ascendance). I am
>> glad I read it, even though I was actively discouraged from doing so
>> by some xmca subscribers, both on and off list. I would say that his
>> general perspective does not favor the Bolsheviks, which may account
>> for the efforts to dissuade my reading. I hope that I do have some
>> powers of discernment that enable me to identify and read through a
>> historian's perspective, however. (n.b. I am also aware that the US
>> has its own history that is amenable to multiple perspectives, many
>> of them unfavorable, so I hope I do not appear chauvinistic in
>> finding the USSR
>> problematic.) (full disclosure: my Jewish grandparents and two of my
>> uncles fled Gomel in 1913 and 1916 to escape pogroms, leaving from
>> Finland and landing in New York.)
>>
>> Figes does provide, in at times numbing detail, the complexities of
>> the transition from Tsar to USSR, which took place more or less
>> between 1905 and the early 1920s after the two Russian revolutions
>> (1905, 1917) brought down the Tsar; and after the civil war that
>> followed and produced an internecine military battle for control of
>> the Russian territories in the power vacuum. I must say that the
>> whole affair is far more complex than I'd ever imagined, which no
>> doubt speaks to my ignorance about most everything that's happened on
>> this earth, in spite of my ongoing efforts to learn it. I imagine
>> that there are many and contradictory points of view on the period
>> and its winners and losers; and I've read but one, at least in
>> detail. It's a history worth learning about, I'd say.
>>
>> My purpose here is not to debate the merits of Lenin, Stalin, and
>> Trotsky, or Marx and Engels, or any of the many lesser-known figures
>> from the revolutions (and there were several). I partly undertook
>> this reading to get a better understanding of the context of
>> Vygotsky's life and how his experiences mediated his construction of
>> a theory of human development. I've read a lot of brief summaries of
>> his life, but now must wonder how the incredible period of death and
>> destruction that surrounded his life contributed to his beliefs about
>> cultural difference and mediation (a major issue in his writing about
>> defectology). He was born in
>> 1896 in the Pale of Settlement, the Byelorussian territory to which
>> Tsarist Russia restricted Jews, leaving them subject to death via
>> pogroms. In 1905, with LSV at age 9, Russia lost a war to Japan,
>> bringing about the first revolution, which was quelled. Then in
>> 1914 World War 1 broke out, although hardly in a vacuum; it embodied
>> many extant conflicts. At about this time Vygotsky began the work
>> that resulted in The Psychology of Art, which he wrote mostly from a
>> sickbed during a lengthy bout with tuberculosis over a period of
>> about
>> 6 years, a time that encompassed the whole of WWI and then in 1917
>> the Russian Revolution that brought down the Tsar- according to
>> Figes, the Tsar's haughty lifestyle in conjunction with the people's
>> dissatisfaction with Russia's involvement with the war (particularly
>> their struggles against Germany) served as the tipping point in their
>> willingness to live as his subjects.
>>
>> It's quite striking that as the world raged and burned around him,
>> LSV focused intensely on trying to figure out the role of art,
>> particularly drama and literature, in the development of human
>> consciousness; and in the version I read (MIT Press translation),
>> there's no mention of revolution or politics. By the time he was done
>> the Tsar was overthrown but the civil war between Reds and White (an
>> affiliation of various anti-Bolsheviks, often loyal to the Tsar) was
>> in full stride, with the two sides contending to replace him and
>> thousands being killed in the process. Yet LSV biographies have him
>> teaching during this time, and ultimately landing in Moscow as a
>> psychologist, as if there were no disturbances in the environment.
>> His
>> career in Moscow is often described as beginning in about 1924, the
>> year of Lenin's death and Stalin's rise, and according to documents
>> recently unearthed, LSV was a devoted communist, even as Jews
>> continued to be suppressed in the new regime (as testified to by no
>> less a Bolshevik than Trotsky). So, Vygotsky's career as a Moscow
>> psychologist took place in the 10 years between Stalin's ascendance
>> to power and Hitler's rise in Germany-two extraordinary rulerships of
>> modern history, both highly repressive, parochial, nationalistic,
>> violent, and anti- Semitic-that get elided in accounts of his career,
>> at least those I've read.
>>
>> One thing I learned from Figes is that Stalin's crackdowns included
>> repression of the arts; and Vygotsky never returned to his early
>> considerations of the theater with nearly the focus that produced The
>> Psychology of Art. I imagine that the repressive environment had
>> something to do with that, but I'm only guessing from my historical
>> vantage point. I have to believe that LSV was not doing psychology in
>> a vacuum. So how did the tumult surrounding his career contribute to
>> his thinking? If mediation is central to development, it seems to me
>> that it has to matter.
>>
>> One thing about the revolutions that I have yet to figure out is how
>> extensive they were. Most of the action seems centered in the east,
>> where Moscow and St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/ Stalingrad are
>> located, and thus the locus of power and resources.
>> But Russia spans 13 time zones, stretches to the Pacific and Bering
>> Straits, and includes 17,075,200 sq km (6,592,800 sq mi), giving it
>> more than one-ninth of the world's land area. Luria's Uzbekistan
>> study suggests that the revolutions barely touched remote areas, even
>> in the western region. So I can't figure out how the whole of the
>> nation was affected by the revolutions, except perhaps for Siberia's
>> service as place of exile.
>>
>> Well, too much perhaps, but those are some thoughts following my
>> reading of this interesting history. Any help with contextualizing
>> LSV's career in light of these events is greatly appreciated. Thx,p
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