[xmca] Vygotsky vs. Bakhtin (or, The Interpersonal Is Not the Sociocultural Redux)

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

I've often puzzled over the paradox that the ostensible believer Bakhtin appears to deny the very possibility of the abstract absolute, while the ostensibly unbelieving Vygotsky clearly affirms it in his "measure of generality" and his work on concept formation, and above all in his "Psychology of Art" and on creativity. 
 
Bakhtin appears to think that existence is an endless but ultimately godless carnival, with the low and high constantly changing places. If God exists, it is largely thanks to the devil, to whom he must be very closely related, if not on intimate terms. On the other hand, the genuinely godless Jew Vygotsky thinks that Jacob's ladder was a great spiral staircase, and man is always headed for the Crown of Glory (that is, the concept) no matter how often he seems to turn in circles.
 
It's almost as if Bakhtin believes that the mere impossiblity of God does nothing to lessen his reality in the Son of Man, while Vygotsky believes that the mere possibility of God in the mind of man suggests that he must be overthrown, abolished, and supplanted by the sons of men.
 
See if you can figure out who this is:
 
"The life situation of a suffering human being that is really experienced from within may prompt me to perform an ethical action, such as providing assistance, consolation or cognitive reflection. But in any event my projection of myself into him must be followed by a return into myself, a return to my own place outside the suffering person, for only form this place can the material derived from my projecting myself into the other be rendered meaningful ethically, cognitively, or esthetically. If this return into myself did not actually take place, the pathological phenomenon of experiencing another's suffering as one's own would result--an infection with another's suffering, and nothing more."
 
And this?
 
“Art would have a dull and ungrateful task if its only purpose were to infect one or many persons with feelings. If this were so, its significance would be very small, because there would be only a quantitative expansion and no qualitative expansion beyond an individual’s feeling The miracle of art would then by like the break miracle of the Gospel, when five barley loaves and two small fishes fed thousands of people, all of whom ate and were satisfied, and a dozen baskets were filled with the remaining food. This miracle is only quantitative: thousands were fed and were satisfied, but each of them ate only fish and bread. But was this not their daily diet at home, without any miracles? (…) The miracle of art reminds us much more of another miracle in the Gospel, the transformation of water into wine. Indeed, art’s true nature is that of transubstantiation, something that transcends ordinary feelings; for the fear, pain, or excitement caused by
 art includes something above and beyond its normal, conventional content.” 
 
Both are attacking the Tolstoyan idea that art is a kind of disease, spreading emotion like a one of the plagues that Moses and Aaron visited upon the Pharoah. Both believe, as Brecht did, that art requires an objectifying move; that the tennis ball in play can never understand the laws of motion, and man in the grip of passion cannot really make sense of emotion either. (This, for me, was Spinoza's really great contribution, Andy!)
 
But for one the going out and the coming back is quite enough; God goes out to man in the form of Christ and returns to himself in order to bestow perfect forgiveness. For the other, on the other hand, the whole thing must be turned on its head: instead of the sociocultural emerging from the sum total of the interpersonal, the interpersonal may only truly be made sense of as a microcosm of the sociocultural.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 



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