Re: [xmca] New Book: Zones of Proletarian Development

Fascinating juxtaposition of Vygotsky and Leontiev on crises, David.
From Leninism to Stalinism?
mike

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Wayne Au <wau@exchange.fullerton.edu>
wrote:

> Yes David, thankfully, I did avoid seeking a causal connection between
> Lenin
> and Vygotsky!
>
> I just wanted to let folks know that I am lurking on this board, but
> haven't
> posted before due to some technical issues - hopefully Bruce and I have
> worked out the problem.
>
> At any rate I am greatly flattered (and also intimidated) by the discussion
> here about my paper (special thanks to Shirley for saying such nice things
> in her last post and to Steve for bringing it up earlier in the year), and
> am happy to continue the discussion "in person" now that I can post to the
> list.
>
> Some of us have also got a panel at ISCAR on Marxism and Vygotsky, so
> hopefully we can talk more then as well.
>
> Wayne
>
> [Side Note: At the time I also wanted to post regarding peer review - since
> I am an editor for Rethinking Schools. Our board operates as a collective,
> and no submission is "blind", but as many of us are present at meetings
> offer comments and discuss every submission (including our own). So what
> happens is we end up with a very critical collective review process - all
> of
> us have been teachers and expect the articles to be useful and readable for
> teachers - and I think we have one of the most rigorous review processes
> I've ever seen. Yet, we are a very low status journal because we aren't so
> much interested in academic research, but in writing that classroom
> teachers
> feel like they can engage with. My publications in Rethinking Schools
> certainly barely help me get tenure, and if I were at an R-1 institution,
> they would just laugh at the prospect of taking Rethinking Schools
> seriously.]
>
> Wayne Au
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Secondary Education
> CSU Fullerton
> P.O. Box 6868
> Fullerton, CA 92834
> Office: 714.278.5481
> Editorial Board Member: Rethinking Schools (www.rethinkingschools.org)
> http://ed.fullerton.edu/SecEd/Faculty/Full_Time_Faculty/Au.html
>
> On 7/22/08 9:48 AM, "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > My world history professor at University of Chicago was a guy called
> MacNeill
> > who wrote something called "The Rise of the West". That's all you really
> need
> > to know about world history, according to MacNeill (and all you really
> need to
> > know about MacNeill according to me).
> >
> > Anyway, one of the games he used to play to while away the long hours
> before
> > our final exam and his retirement was based on finding far flung
> parallels
> > between cultures and then explaining them. He had a few tropes for doing
> this,
> > but they were all unmediated; cultures learned things from other
> cultures,
> > usually via direct diffusion (and yet when I suggested that all the books
> he
> > had ever written and printed on paper were invented in China he scowled).
> >
> > I think that Au, thankfully, avoids this; he pretty much leaves open the
> > question of whether the undoubted influences of Lenin's work on
> Vygotsky's was
> > direct or mediated. This is a wise move; they were doubtless both.
> >
> > But it also leaves open the question of what the mediated sources of
> influence
> > were, and whether there was any reciprocally mediated influence by
> Vygotsky or
> > Vygotsky-like thinkers on Lenin or other state leaders.
> >
> > An important means by which Lenin's work influenced Vygotsky was highly
> > indirect: the Russian formalists and the futurists and the whole literary
> > critical reaction to the romantic subjectivist view of language and
> meaning.
> > By the late nineteenth century, there were already two important currents
> > arguing that, contrary to romantic ideas of inspiration and philological
> lines
> > of study that located meaning in texts, meaning really comes to language
> from
> > outside the self. Not all of these were particularly "progressive"; T.S.
> > Eliot, for example, argued that literary "inspiration" is a matter of
> building
> > in almost imperceptible ways on a tradition that exists almost entirely
> > outside the writer. Formalism and futurism took this to an extreme:
> meaning
> > comes ENTIRELY from outside the self, and Lenin's and
> Trotsky's relationship
> > to formalism and futurism (one of critical distance) is noticeably
> similar to
> > LSV's own in Psychology of Art.
> >
> > How did child psychology become important enough for the government to
> issue a
> > decree banning pedology, intelligence testing, and LSV's work? A couple
> of
> > months ago I read Bukharin's "Philosophical Arabesques", one of four
> books he
> > wrote while awaiting execution. There is a great deal on how children
> learn
> > language, some of it clearly directed towards creating the idea of a
> child who
> > is almost entirely socio-culturally determined, a kind of human
> counterpart to
> > the wheat that Lysenko was creating at that time.
> >
> > Bukharin doesn't touch on one of the most obvious philosophical problems
> > raised by Vygotsky's theory of child development, that is, the crisis.
> Crises
> > are, of course, and inevitable feature of cultural historical change
> according
> > to Lenin and they are equally unavoidable in child development according
> to
> > Vygotsky:
> >
> > "Facts show that in other conditions of rearing, the crisis occurs
> > differently. In children who go from nursery school to kindergarten, the
> > crisis occurs differently than it does in chidren who go into
> kindergarten
> > from the family. However, the crisis occurs in all normally proceeding
> child
> > development; the age of three and the age of seven will always be turning
> > points in devleopment: there will always be a state of things where the
> > internal course of the child±s development will conclude a cycle and the
> > transition to the next cycle will necessarily be a turning point. One age
> > level is reconstructed in some way in order to allow a new stage of
> > development to begin." Volume Five, 1998: 295.
> >
> >
> > But not according to Leontiev:
> >
> > "In fact crises are not at all inevitable accompaniments of psychic
> > devleopment it is not the crises that are inevitable but the turning
> points or
> > breaks the qualitative shifts in development. The crisis on the contrary
> is
> > evidence that a turning point or shift has not been made in time. There
> need
> > by no crises at all if the child's psychic devlopment does not take shape
> > spontaneously but is a rationally controlled process, controlled
> upbringing."
> > (Leontiev, A.N. (1981) Problems of the Development of the Mind. Moscow:
> > Progress. 398-399)
> >
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> >
> > PS:
> >
> > Andy:
> >
> > Still thinking about that post you wrote on video games and changes in
> modern
> > warfare. I was thinking that one of the main themes in the history plays
> of
> > Shakespeare is the replacement of direct kingly combat (in which the king
> was
> > an epic hero representing the nation) with war by proxy. Then I saw this:
> >
> > http://www.slate.com/id/2195751/
> >
> > Read and shudder!
> >
> >
> >
> > --- On Mon, 7/21/08, Achilles Delari Junior <achilles_delari@hotmail.com
> >
> > wrote:
> >
> > From: Achilles Delari Junior <achilles_delari@hotmail.com>
> > Subject: RE: [xmca] New Book: Zones of Proletarian Development
> > To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Date: Monday, July 21, 2008, 10:44 AM
> >
> > Thank you.
> > Achilles.
> >
> >> From: s.franklin@dsl.pipex.com
> >> Subject: Re: [xmca] New Book: Zones of Proletarian Development
> >> Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:17:26 +0100
> >> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >>
> >> Here is the Au paper.
> >> Its great - very interesting application of Vygotsky's perspective on
> >
> >> learning academic and everyday concepts with Lenin's on the
> >> imptorance of leading /teaching/instructing the revolutionary
> >> development of the proletariat.
> >> Shirley
> >>
> >> On 21 Jul 2008, at 18:07, Mike Cole wrote:
> >>
> >>> I agree. This looks like a REALLY relevant text to examine. Do not
> >>> know the
> >>> Vygotsky and
> >
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Received on Tue Jul 22 14:04 PDT 2008