Re: [xmca] Vygotsky's Plural Discourse!!

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Thanks for kicking me under the table on this, Jonna. I printed out Jussi's paper a few days ago and read it but it's the (new) Year of the Cow over here and I haven't been able to get into my office for a few days. 
 
The paper itself is a terrific read. You know, there's this long preamble in Problem of Age (Collected LSV vol. 5) where LSV says that ALL the basic periods of periodization for child growth, no matter how WRONG HEADED they all are (dentition, endocrine secretion, schooling, etc.), appear to roughly coincide, and this ought to tell us something.
 
The same can be said about all the different periodizations of LSV's opus. Langford's account, in particular, has to be one of the most obtuse things I've ever read on the subject (Professor Langford, why do you WANT to write a full length book about a man you clearly loathe and whose work you neither respect or understand? It must have been a VERY boring sabbatical!) Minick's, on the other hand, is one of the most acute. And they do overlap to a remarkable degree.
 
This suggests, as Hegel says, not so much a set of misunderstandings that need to be cleared up but a set of partial understandings that need to be synthesized, or moments that need to be sequenced. 
 
But the reason I needed a kickstart, Jonna, was I had trouble getting past Althusser and Foucault. It seems to me that Althusser and Foucault, between them, BOTH manage to BOTH overstate and understate the epistemological break problem. 
 
They overstate it because they really remove the development of a new science from a new practice; practice is of course itself a source of epistemology, but its breaks are not purely epistemological ones. To take my profession as an example, there was a turn away from structuralism in the 1970s which really had almost nothing to do with the way language was theorized and everything to do with the way it was taught and learned. 
 
The difference between the Soviet emphasis on DEVELOPMENT in Vygotsky's theory and the western emphasis on LEARNING probably has as much to do with differing practices than differing epistemology. (Steve has said that Stalinism is a practice rather than a theory, and the same could certainly be said about capitalism, pardon me, "freedom and democracy").
 
Althusser and Foucault understate the break because they both (for different reasons) locate the break within the new science rather than between the old and the new. I think they also unwittingly understate the break by phrasing it as a matter of old and new science. There are forms of "science" which are merely disguised prejudices; here again, methodology has to be key.
 
So, yes, Vygotsky started out as a social behaviorist. But even in his most credulous moments, when he tried to theorize the behavior of humans as dogs who can ring their own bells, it was a little bit of good old Spinozan parsimoniousness: since we don't really KNOW what mediation can do, who says it CANNOT account for consciousness?
 
Well, Vygotsky does, but he doesn't really say it loud and clear until 1930 or so. Now why DID he say it loud and clear? That's what we need to know. To me, the argument that he suddenly came on the idea of mediation doesn't ring a bell. He had the concept of mediation already; it's right there in Engels. So is the idea of object-oriented activity. If that is all there is to Vygotsky, the new science started fifty years earlier.
 
Minick argues that from 1930-1932 Vygotsky was really at sea. There are certainly some interesting CONTRADICTIONS in his writings at this time. For example, he says at the beginning of Chapter Five of Thinking and Speech that there is really nothing new in the psychological functions of the child at adolescence, it's just the way they are organized. At the very END of that chapter he says that their reorganization completely transforms them.
 
Similarly, at the beginning of Chapter Five he gives us three categories of "heap". The last two are rather bizarrely linked: the child first forms heaps, and then selects a representative of each heap and forms a new heap of heap-exemplars. But in Chapter Six he criticizes Chapter Five for assuming that the child starts all over with each new attempt to form a concept rather than generalizes the generalizations of the previous stage.
 
I think Minick's right: Vygotsky has ABANDONED the safe harbour of behaviorism, reactology, reflexology, with its clear explanans (roughly, SR units, or SMR units) and its even clearer explanandum (behavior). He doesn't know what will go in its place. He's toying with the idea of lines of development, of mental functions that are joined somehow to create psychological systems...but how?
 
Here too, I think Minick's right: Vygotsky III, the Vygotsky of 1932-1934, explains cosnciousness (and not just psychological systems) by using the twin notions of functional differentiation (because LSV concludes that contrary to what he said the functions really DO change when they are linked to each other) and the unit of analysis (because LSV concludes that consciousness is right there in the act of generalization that gives us word meaning). 
 
But the question that Jussi asks in his paper is not so much HOW but WHY? Why did Vygotsky give up the safe harbour of social-behaviorism and flounder at sea for two years (knowing that he could die at any moment) and then why did he choose THOSE two particular solutions (functional differentiation and word meanings which develop in a zoped)?
 
It seems to me that Vygotsky must have noticed that what made the very various theories of periodization roughly coincide was the CRISIS. And the CRISIS is exactly what Thorndikean incrementalism or any other theory based on atomistic units (including "activity") could not explain. It was the crisis which brought about Vygotsky's own crisis, that is, his double epistemological break.
 
(Happy Moo Year, everybody!)
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education  
 
 


      
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