In response not to Martin's ultimate point here, but in the preliminary
comments on the uses being made/not made of sources:
When I want to critically comment on what someone's _discourse_ SAYS in a
discursive context without making attributions as to what they might
personally THINK or BELIEVE, I find it useful to refer to what I'm calling
"form fields," as discursive fields that shape meaning (analogours to
"force fields" shaping physical time-space).
See http://curricublog.org/2008/02/24/form-fields/
This is not exactly what Martin's dealing with, but the notion of
"form-fields" might have similar utility here.
On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, Martin Packer wrote:
> Andy,
>
> I can only agree with your comments. This paper is just a draft, and one
> sign of this is the use of clumsy expressions about the relationships among
> writers. I too want to avoid claims about what Marx or Vygotsky "really
> thought," or what Vygotsky "ignored." Put a bit more clearly (perhaps; I
> hope) what I am interested in attempting is an interpretation of Vygotsky's
> texts for their relevance to our situation here and now. I'm not trying to
> figure out his original intentions, or even place his work in its original
> context (which I'll never know enough about). The point about class is that
> we ought to pay attention to it, and in my view Vygostky's psychology shows
> us a way to do so, even if he himself didn't, at least directly.
>
> As for your point about returning to Hegel rather than turning to Bourdieu,
> what I started to do in the paper, but haven't yet finished, was suggest
> that rather than *adding* something to Vygotsky's analysis (whether that
> something is Bernstein, Bahktin or Bourdieu) we should instead explore in
> the direction that Vygotsky himself seems to have been moving at the end of
> his life: towards a concrete psychology of specific kinds of persons in
> specific situations. Would Hegel help in such an exploration? I think very
> much so.
>
> Martin
>
>
> On 3/12/08 11:14 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
>> Martin,
>> I at last found time to read
>> <http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/Pubs/Packer 06 problems.pdf>
>>
>> Again, great work! Fundamentally, I completely agree with you, and your
>> paper has given me a number of ideas that will help me in my future
>> work. Thank you again.
>>
>> I hate getting into arguments about how much Marx can be blamed for how he
>> is read and "what Marx really thought". I think we share an affection for
>> Marx (and Hegel in my case) that dissuades us from explaining history in
>> terms of theoretical errors by great people in the past. So I will simply
>> not enter into that discussion.
>>
>> --------------------------------------
>>
>> But surely in criticising theorists (and it is Vygotsky's psychology we are
>> concerned with) we turn principally to the social and cultural conditions
>> in which they worked (the conditions of the USSR, its ruling culture and so
>> on) and mediately the theoretical resources they had available through the
>> reception of earlier writers in those social conditions? So the issue is
>> the cultural environment which produced a certain kind of Marx and a
>> certain kind of Hegel and at the same time a certain kind of Vygotsky, so
>> to speak.
>>
>> Conversely, for us reading Vygotsky in the US or Australia, in the
>> post-USSR era, we read a certain kind of Marx ( See http://marxmyths.org ),
>> a certain kind of Hegel and as you point out, we see Vygotsky in a new
>> light and we also see the issue of cultural difference and class
>> differently. Our social and cultural conditions have produced this critical
>> perspective. How? That is the question. Not just what "blinded" Vygotsky,
>> where did our insight come from?
>>
>> So I heartily agree that it was conditions in the USSR in the wake of the
>> October Revolution and the ruling conceptions of those years that
>> conditions the view of the world through a lens in which cultural and class
>> difference was seen as historical progress alone, and therefore basically
>> ignored. I don't think you can say it 'came from Marx' any more than the
>> "workers state" or "classless society" 'came from Marx'. These conceptions
>> had their roots in the entirety of culture and were reflected in a specific
>> way in Marx as well as Plekhanov, etc.
>>
>> So I think the standpoint for weighing this problem is primarily conditions
>> in the USSR as well as the history of the development of Marxism in Russia
>> up to then, on one side, and ...
>>
>> On the other side, the social movements that swept through the US, and the
>> rest of the capitalist world in the 1950s, 60s and 70s completely changed
>> the psychology of us in the west. The insights we have into
>> cultural-blindness is the very specific product of these social movement.
>> These movements did not happen in the USSR, for all intents and purposes.
>>
>> (Relevant to that I am very interested in the huge fight of Eleanor Marx,
>> Dora Montefiore and others against Belfort Bax and others over the woman
>> question amongst Marxists in Britain around the turn of the century. There
>> were also fights over whether imperialism was a good thing for the
>> colonies. In the decades of the 2nd International, Marxists were the
>> leaders of the women's movement, and were up to the Suffragettes. The
>> parting of ways, so far as I can see, comes after the Soviets became
>> leaders of the world Communist Movement. Though I stand to be corrected
>> here, as I have not really researched the question.)
>>
>> --------------------------------------
>>
>> A separate question.
>>
>> I think that because there has been no serious Hegel scholarship by people
>> with a knowledge of Vygotskyan psychology, Hegel's concept of Subjective
>> Spirit as opposed to Objective Spirit is usually interpreted in the spirit
>> of Cartesian dualism, as if what was being referred to was an inner world
>> of mental states, which was of course, the very thing that Hegel was
>> working against. If on the contrary we see Subjective Spirit in contrast to
>> Objective Spirit in terms of those relations in which an individual
>> participates on a person-to-person basis, mediated by bodies, children,
>> words, material labour processes, family relations, natural division of
>> labour and so on (note that language itself is part of Subjective Spirit),
>> as opposed to the domain of Right, mediated by law, science, politics,
>> literature, art, religion, philosophy, then we have a very adequate
>> approach to the psychology of class, cultural difference, gender politics
>> and so on. I like Bourdieu, and I interpret his notion of habitus in the
>> same way, but Hegel's original idea is worth looking at because of its
>> place in our intellectual history.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK DE 19716
twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________
"those who fail to reread
are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
-- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Sun Mar 16 11:20 PDT 2008
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Wed Apr 09 2008 - 08:03:11 PDT