Re: [xmca] Inside Outside

Hi,
I would hope that this inside/outside, internal/external dichotomy
would go away. Here is what I have down in a developing chapter....

It is not useful to drive a wedge between the internal and external:
they are two sides of the same process (Zinchenko, 2004).

In a materialist dialectical approach (Bakhtine/Volochinov, A. N.
Leont’ev, Mikhailov) all mental activity needs to be seen understood
as issuing from the same material, because there is no mental
activity that does not involve the word and other material signs. As
a consequence, the principle of a qualitative distinction between
internal content and external expression “must be
abandoned” (Bakhtine/Volochinov, 1977, p. 122); for any cultural-
historical (Vygotskian) psychology worth its name, there only is “the
dynamic identity of intersubjectivity and
intrasubjectivity” (Mikhailov, 2006b, p. 6, emphasis added). It is
not the mental activity that shapes the expression but the expression
that shapes the mental activity. The most immediate social situation,
the concrete context in which a particular activity such as schooling
or farming is realized, conditions the expression. Bakhtine/
Volochinov note that the nerve center of any utterance and any
expression is external rather than internal to the individual: this
center is situated in the social milieu that surrounds the
individual. Everything we need for a social psychology, therefore, is
external, on the surface, available in exchanges, and especially in
verbal material. This material, however, is a function of society,
its socio-political/hierarchical structures, and it therefore is
societally mediated

I think we should follow people like Bakhtine/Volochinov and
Mikhailov and get rid of the dichotomizing and do real cultural-
historical research.

Cheers,

Michael

On 23-Mar-08, at 5:41 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

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 18:46 PDT 2008