I take a stab at some of these issues in the attached paper. p
Peter Smagorinsky
The University of Georgia
125 Aderhold Hall
Athens, GA 30602
smago@uga.edu/phone:706-542-4507
http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 9:11 PM
To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 47
Perhaps I could risk throwing in my thoughts Mike, because
David and I have discussed this in the past too.
My understanding has been that LSV brought forward the
concept of word meaning as a foundation for solving the
problem of intelligent speech. I am not sure how wide that
territory was for Vygotsky; self-evidently I think it is
wider that simply "intelligent speech", but there are two
reasons I would not go so far as to say that it was meant as
a "unit of analysis of human consciousness".
(1) Words are probably the most important of artefacts, but
they are just one kind of artefact. My work with "teaching
spaces" when I first started to use Vygotsky was to do with
how building forms succeeded in transmitting theories of
learning to future generations, despite books and papers
claiming the opposite of what was set in concrete.
(2) Apart from artefacts, is also activity. Doubtbless
activity is implicit in meaning in some way, but it is
unclear to me. I think it is a mistake to make the
foundation of consciousness just words, rather than practice.
Andy
Mike Cole wrote:
> Without the time (or skill to switch to cyrrilic!) I have been thinking
> about Kolya's questions, ,David.
>
> For those who forget in the stream of xcma chatting, Nikolai asks:
> where Vygotsky posits word meaning as
> unit of analysis of human consciousness?
> In which text and on what page? From what Vygotsky's work it is taken?
Could
>
> I ask you to make a quotation from Vygotsky?
> Thank you in advance
> Nikolai
>
> I was thinking how nice it would be to know how to search the vygotsky
> corpus online in Russian, which I do not know how to do.
>
> And remembering fragments of why I thought David's comments resonated
> strongly
> with my own intuitions, formed in part, by LSV.
>
> such as (no quotations or page numbers, just failing memory here):
>
> meaning is the most stable form of sense-- every totally stable?
> really?
> word meaning changes in development
> the closing of *Speech and Thought *that David points to, the drop of
water,
> perhaps,
> being in my eye.
> The citation of the fragment from Doestoevsky where a bunch of guys are
> standing
> around saying, it seems, the word "product of defecation" (oh poo!) and
> every one
> is using the same word and every one is both saying the same thing and
> saying something different.
>
> Don't all of these and many other examples (Paula, are the
> Sakharov -LSV
> blocks of any help here?) point to the general conclusion that David
> was
> asserting?
>
> Might our Russian friends join Nikolai and help us to understand the
> core
of
> the issue
> David raised? Is he incorrect? Can you search the corpus and help us to
> understand
> if we are misleading each other?
> mike
>
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:26 PM, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:
>
>> Dear Professor Veresov:
>>
>> Let me begin by saying how much we enjoy your work here in Korea. Our
group
>> has been discussing your 2005 "Outlines" article "Marxist and
non-Marxist
>> aspects of the cultural historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky" since
>> we
>> read it last year, and I found your 2006 article "Leading activity in
>> developmental psychology" very useful in figuring out why I don't
>> accept
the
>> whole construct of "leading activity".
>>
>> I think that BOTH works are really quite central to the periodization
>> problem under discussion, but I also think that BOTH works refer
>> mainly
and
>> centrally (and thus for me somewhat misleadingly) to a period of
Vygotsky's
>> oeuvre that is quite different from the one I have in mind.
>>
>> The 2005 article places a good deal of stress on early Vygotsky, a
Vygotsky
>> who is almost non-Vygotskyan, or at least non-psychological, Vygotsky
>> in
his
>> early twenties, a student of the humanities with a very strong sense
that
>> nothing human is alien to them.
>>
>> The 2006 article in contrast seems to me to place a great deal of
>> stress
on
>> the post-Vygotsky period, and I was very surprised and pleased to read
that
>> the work on "leading activity" is really not as far as I had thought
from
>> the fragments LSV left behind in his unfinished "Child Development".
>>
>> Elkonin, at any rate, seems to have been fully aware that the "leading
>> activity" is in no way typical or characteristic of a particular
>> period
>> (though Leontiev and lately Karpov have said exactly the opposite).
>> The
>> problem remains that I do not see any place for the crisis in this
>> work,
and
>> there is no question but that MY Vygotsky, LATE Vygotsky, the Vygotsky
of
>> Thinking and Speech gives the crisis an absolutely central (one might
even
>> say a critical) role.
>>
>> Of course, when I said that word meaning is a unit of analysis for
>> human
>> consciousness I am not simply repeating what others have said (e.g.
Werstch
>> 1985). On the contrary, I mean what for me is the most mature and
therefore
>> in some ways least characteristic moment of Vygotsky's own work; I
>> might
>> even call it the "leading activity" of his thinking.
>>
>> I meant, especially, the very last three paragraphs of Thinking and
Speech.
>> I have always found this to be a little like the last page of "Origin
>> of
>> Species", rather more than a conclusion, but a whole revolutionary
program,
>> complete with a clarion call in the very last six words:
>>
>> Осмысленное слово есть микрокосм человеческого сознания.
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435
Skype andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm
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