Thank you David for your valuable remarks and apologizes from all but
especially from Nikolai Veresov also if I used xmca in a wrong way.
Ulvi
On 22/02/2009, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
Dear Ulvi:
Thanks for your long and very considered reply. I think that the
relationship between Vygotsky's psychology and larger philosophical
issues
(including Marxism) is a topic that will not go away, whether you and I
continue it or not.
Very often, I think, we make the mistake of choosing articles for
discussion that emphasize these philosophical issues; the reasoning is
that
the more abstractly we approach the problems, the more the solutions will
be
applicable to everybody. We are a VERY diverse group, which is another
way
of saying we are a highly inclusive one!
It seems to me, however, that the way to solve these questions is really
through PRAXIS, and through discussing articles where the larger
philosophical issues (e.g. Marxism) have immediate relevance for data and
for the conclusions we draw from data.
So for example in Mariane Hedegaard's article (which I hope will soon be
chosen and made freely available for discussion) I think an absolutely
KEY
question is whether or not her formulation of "the crisis" is compatible
with Vygotsky's Is the "crisis" of Jens in kindergarten (where he refuses
to
settle down and listen to a fairy story and will not accept that a
picture
of a baby whale shows a "baby") a good example of a REVOLUTIONARY
restructuring of the relationship between psychological functions and
the
precocious (adventurist) SEIZURE of POWER by the child's psychological
neoformations? In what sense does Halime's failure to attend camp
represent
the emergence of a new form of mental life (a neoformation)? .
I certainly did NOT mean to imply that Vygotsky rejected Marxism. There
is
no evidence that this is the case. All the evidence in mature Vygotsky
suggests that his methodology was getting more and more Marxist (e.g. his
emphasis on word meaning as a unit of analysis comparable to the
commodity).
Like you, I believe that Vygotsky refusal to call his psychology
"Marxist"
was partly a matter of hygiene. Yes, Vygotsky felt some disdain for the
noisy "Marxists" who were clearly using the word to get ahead and
discarding
the methodology.
I think I understand this very well. In China, "Marxism" (which meant
that
you supported a very gruesome set of 19th Century Marketist "reforms")
was a
meal ticket. I never called myself a Marxist there. In Syria, a country
very
close to your own, "Marxism" was a ticket to prison; the Marxists I met
there were of considerably better quality.
I think that Vygotsky probably despised "Marxist" psychologists like
Zalkind, who tried to show how social circumstances were rather
mechanically
mirrored in psychology, and in fact for any approach that saw the crises
as
being EXTERNALLY determined. For Vygotsky the sources of the crisis, like
the neoformation itself, lies within the child. (Whether Martin likes it
or
not, that is what he says!)
To be a Marxist, as opposed to noisily calling yourself one, means to
understand that Marxism is a science, and a science simply cannot be
applied
in a mechanical way to every realm of human understanding, the way a
child
with a hammer sees every problem as a nail. Marxism is a very specific
form
of historical understanding developed in response to a particular problem
set.
I don't think these problems include sex and death, or spelling in
kindergarten and learning that the word "baby" is also applied to whales.
In
fact, I think that Marxism applied to phylogenetic evolution, ontogenetic
growth and even to microgenesis in the classroom is Marxism misapplied.
As
Vygotsky liked to say, it is a bullfrog puffed up until it is the size of
a
cow, a theory that has compromised its explanatory power through a
process
of intellectual inflation and disciplinary imperialism.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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