[xmca] Inside Outside

This morning it occurred to me that we are really missing something rather important about the difference between the way in which Marx was relevant to Vygotsky and the way in which both Vygotsky and Marx are relevant to us today. It's not really a matter of history at all; it's more a matter of the present and the future.
   
  In Obama's speech last week he found himself "distancing" himself from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright not on matters of history; anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that Reverend Wright was simply telling the truth about black people have experienced their history (and not that much of the truth, either!).
   
  Obama's argument (as far as I could work it out) was that Wright's comments, however accurate about history and however truthful about the black emotional response to it, were wrong because they ignored the promise of the future. (And even this was too much for white America!)
   
  I think there's no question but that the idea of history in Marx was relevant to Vygotsky. But as Martin points out, Syvia Scribner HAS discussed this before. And what appears to me to be missing from BOTH Scribner and Packer's account (to me) is that Marx was relevant to Vygotsky not simply in terms of history but in terms of the present and the future, the way that "hope" is relevant to Obama and not relevant to Wright.
   
  In chapter three of Leontiev's "Activity, Consciousness and Personality", ANL has this to say:
   
  The principal difficulties in psychology posed by the binomial plan of analysis and by the "postulate of directness" which hides behind it, gave rise to persistent attempts to overcome it. One of the lines along which these attempts were made stressed the fact that the effects of external action depend on their interpretation by the subject, on those psychological "intervening variables" (Tolman et al.) that characterize his internal state. In his time S. L. Rubinshtein expressed this in the formula that says that "external motives act through internal conditions." This formula, of course, seems to be incontrovertible. If, however, we understand as internal conditions the ongoing condition of the subject exposed to the effect, then it will contribute nothing essentially new to the formula S + R. Even nonliving objects, when their condition is changed, reveal themselves in various ways in interaction with other objects. On damp, softened soil, tracks will be sharply
 imprinted, but on dry, hardened soil they will not. Even more clearly is this apparent in animals and in man: The reaction of a hungry animal to a food stimulus will be different from that of a well- fed animal, and information about a football match will evoke an entirely different reaction in a man who is interested in football than in a man who is completely indifferent to it."
   
  In other words, the problem is not so much the division between inside and outside that the SR formula suggests. That is real enough, but rather trivial. The real problem is directness; the idea that external conditions DIRECTLY impact child development the way that footprints impact muddy soil.
   
  I think that for LSV and ANL the idea that outside conditions act through internal forces would have meant something very different in the 1920s. The USSR had been invaded by fourteen different outside forces during the Civil War. Nevertheless, for most Russians, this was a civil war. Every single one of the imperialist powers that landed expeditionary forces on Soviet soil chose to work through one or another of the White armies, forces that represented RUSSIAN historical classes such as the RUSSIAN aristocracy, the RUSSIAN liberal bourgeoisie, and the RUSSIAN peasantry.
   
  So I think that Vygotsky's reference to the "internal" nature of the crises of child dvelopment probably had this notion of inside-outside in mind. He explicitly says that when he refers tot he internal causation of crises he is NOT referring to the action of hormones or endocrine glands; that is why he does not consider dentition or puberty to be crises. Instead, he believes that the central and peripheral lines of development we see (first feeling and speech, then speech and thought, and then thought and speech again) represent social formations that have achieved some form of psychogical representation. Their relationship with the social forces that created them cannot be direct, and their struggle for ascendancy must necessarily, for that reason, be a civil war.
   
  I also think that the idea of POTENTIAL is even more real for LSV than it is for Obama. Ultimately, the child's own self, in the sense of the child's volition, comes to the child from the outside, because the child learns to control himself through the experience of being controlled by others. Of course, as long as the child is being controlled by others, volition is merely potential. Paradoxically, it is precisely for that reason that it is not only socially but also psychologically real. Power, in the hands of others, is graspable, nay, seizable. (But of course it has to be actually and not merely rhetorically seized!)
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education
   

       
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Received on Sun Mar 23 17:43 PDT 2008