Re: [xmca] Inside Outside

Michael,
 I just wanted to say that I appreciate your call to move away from the
focus on the inside/outside dichotomy. I'm certainly a novice in this field,
and I'm reading Bakhtin/Volosinov, Vygotsky and others as a first-timer
right now. As such, I am a bit hesitant to jump into this discussion.
However, your message clarified some issues I have been struggling with in
the "Verbal Interaction" chapter of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
(Volosinov- Matejka & Titunik Trans., 1986) .

Page 95 of this chapter points out that "Language acquires life and
historically evolves precisely here, in concrete verbal communication, and
not in the abstract linguistic system of language forms nor in the
individual psyche of speakers." Reading your message and reading this quote
from the chapter clarified the importance of transcending the
indside/outside dichotomy. It is becoming clear to me that a study of
language through the lens of social interaction is key.

Thanks for providing some clarity for me.
Trevor

On 3/23/08 9:41 PM, "Wolff-Michael Roth" <mroth@uvic.ca> wrote:

> 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.
> Leont¹ev, 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 ³must be
> abandoned² (Bakhtine/Volochinov, 1977, p. 122); for any cultural-
> historical (Vygotskian) psychology worth its name, there only is ³the
> dynamic identity of intersubjectivity and
> intrasubjectivity² (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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Trevor Thomas Stewart
Graduate Assistant
Department of Language and Literacy Education
University of Georgia
301J Aderhold Hall
Athens, GA 30602
828-508-2654

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to
live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in
common hours.
Henry David Thoreau

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Received on Sun Mar 23 19:55 PDT 2008