Sorry that I only occasionally get to catch up these days with the
stacks of email in my xmca folder.
I was interested to read the paper by Jussi and many of the comments on
it. I had not realized, having never read LSV in chronological order,
the nature of the development of his ideas over time.
As to whether these represent 'epistemological breaks', or just a more
usual to-and-fro of the very sort of dialectical development LSV was
trying to characterize, I can't quite say. But I do think that
Foucault's view of such things, and perhaps Althusser's, can be useful
if we remember that F at least is not talking about changes in how
someone thinks about or writes about a topic, but rather in the
emergence in the community of new possibilities and forms of discourse:
new topics, new questions, new forms of argumentation, new grounds for
evidencing, new limitations and taboos, etc. One might compare this with
the perhaps more familiar 'paradigm shift' notion of Kuhn. And it would
seem to apply to anyone who thinks LSV, or Marx, or Freud, were
intellectual revolutionaries in this broad sense. So what Jussi seems to
me to be saying is that LSV participated in the beginnings of such a
shift as he altered or expanded the possibilities for talking about the
development of higher mental functions beyond the discourse of
behaviorism, indeed beyond all possible such discourses, to not just his
own theory (or Leontiev's, etc.) but to a whole new class of possible
theories in which development was central, development was dialectical
in a practical and material-activtiy sense, and in which sign mediation
and the role of social meaning had an articulated and critical role.
Perhaps not the best summary (cf. the two obituaries Jussi cites), but
at about the right level of abstraction to make the point about what
'new' or 'revolutionary' means.
Correspondingly, as for Foucault, and maybe Althusser, one does not
expect the individual theorist or writer to necessarily be aware of the
larger-scale, longer-term nature of the 'break' or introduction of new
possibilities for discourse. LSV was of course very conscious of the
theoretical and philosophical traditions and historical context of
psychology in his day, but it's still likely quite difficult to see
these shifts at the time as a historian looking backward from decades or
a century after LSV would see them. I think today it's widely recognized
that Darwin introduced new possibilities of discourse about the natural
world, and indeed new modes of explanation, well beyond his own specific
theories. But I don't think that was evident at the time, either. So for
LSV it probably felt like two steps forward, one step back. And small or
medium sized steps at that. While for Jussi or for us, we can see it as
building up steam for a big jump.
I was also interested that Jussi identified, and claims that in late
lectures LSV also identified the biggest shift as that towards semantic
analysis, semiotics, and meaning. Of course we all find it familiar
today to see the end of behaviorism in the rise of an emphasis on
meaning, a historical and cultural change that in some ways feels very
recent, perhaps not even completely finished yet. And Jussi may be
influenced by this familiar narrative of our times. But it also seems
likely that he is right, and that LSV was right if he did say this,
because of the very natural fit that we seem to have found in the last
couple decades between CHAT and other semiotically-based forms of
discourse, such as Bakhtin's dialogism, or socioculturally informed
methods of discourse and semiotic analysis. And I wonder if Jussi isn't
rather subtly suggesting that LSV's final agenda, left unfinished, is
still somewhat unfinished. Because integrating the necessary emphasis on
practical material activity as the context and generator of
developmental change (or expansion) with the key role of social meaning
systems and the individual's participation in them, does seem to me to
remain incomplete. Especially across the wide range of timescales from
episodes of activity to historical changes in the possibilities for
social meaning-making.
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
On Jan 29, 2009, at 9:57 AM, kangasoj@mappi.helsinki.fi wrote:
Dear all,
I'd like to start the discussion on Jussi's paper by a couple of words
on the heuristic Jussi uses, namely Althusser's idea of
'epistemological breaks' in making a new science. Jussi is using the
idea as Foucault used it in Arhaeology of Knowledge - by tracing the
epistemic contradictions and transformations in the development of
science.
'New scinece starts with concepts borrowed from the old theories, and
because of this the demarcation line between the old and the new
science is within the new theory'.
Jussi asks firstly: how does the transition to a non-classical or
'organic psychology' really occur in Vygostky's thinking. As far as I
understand, this type of developmental analysis has only been possible
for a relatively short time for the non-russian speakers after the
collected works appeared in English.
Jussi identifies three phases: A socio behaviourist phase of young
Vygotsky, the founding phase of cultural historical psychology and the
late Vygotsky's work. I think one of the key contributions of the
paper is how Jussi relates these phases to the 'current disputes about
the continuity or discontinuity between key figures in the Vygotsky
school.'
In this note I will not go further into Jussi's actual argument on how
the contradictions and transformations occurred in Vygotsky's thinking
- I hope others will soon pick up the thread regarding those - but
rather I'd like to connect to a personal experience from last week: I
went to listed to Uffe Juul Jensen speak at the Unversity of Helsinki
on 'Do we need a new philosophy of medicine?'. Uffe started out with a
self reflective account on how where he grew up and studied, and the
shifting intellectual currents around him formed who he was and is as
a person, and how this is connected with how his thinking has evolved.
This account reminded me very much of Jean Lave's wonderful
autobiographical/intellectual history speech at ISCAR (in Seth's
session where Jean, Uffe and Ray McDermott all gave a talk).
As I read Jussi's paper I realized that the heuristic discontinuous
change he is using is somehow related to this particular type of
scholarly (self) reflexivity that is very powerful and liberating. I
don't really know yet what to make of it, but I recognize it as
something of vital importance.
best, Jonna
Quoting "Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com>:
Go to http://www.lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/index.html
and read all about it! Jussi's new paper proposed for
discussion is now posted.
mike
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