Re: [xmca] The Problem of the environment

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Andy
reading Vygotsky's article on he environment focused on the
cultural-historical environment as being the "model" that mediates the
individuals emerging subjectivity.  When Vygotsky describes 3 siblings as
developing in unique ways because each child was at a different subjective
level of development meant that each child was going through a unique
environment even though they were in the same social situation.
My question was attempting to explore or bracket the unique subjective
aspects of each child and how cultural-historical theory explores or
brackets the specific developmental level of each child.  As I read Vygotsky
on the environment the centrality of subjectivity and emotion of each
child's unique developmental level seemed central interacting with
environment.

My question was how these subjective levels are theorized in CHAT and the
place of "subjective" motivation in the theory.  Vygotsky, in this article
 explained each child's position as unique from the other siblings because
of each child's level of development.

The question is how to understand subjective development as central to CHAT

Larry

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 7:14 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I don't know if I entirely understand you, Larry. I have benefited recently
> from reading this article, and reading this and a Lydia Bozhovich article
> from JREEP, together with Marilyn Fleer and her wonderful group of
> researchers at Monash Uni. (some of whom have attended the Golden Keys
> School courses in Russia over the past 2 years) and watching Peter
> Smaogorinsky's talk about Vygotsky's Psychology of Art, into which he trew
> some insights about /perezhivanija/ culled from conversations with Dot
> Robbins. All this has leant bucket loads of nuances to the word
> /perezhivanie/ for me.
>
> At the moment, I think we have to take a /perezhivanie/ to be an
> emotion-laden experience, something which could be called a trauma or
> catharsis, though I am not sure that the strong and transformative
> associations of these words in English is essential, *and* "social situation
> of development." SSD, to us non-Russian speakers at least, has a strongly
> objectivist connotation. But it is not really necessarily so, is it? A
> situation is only a situation for you insofar as it impinges on your vital
> needs, within the horizons of your consciousness of those needs (a genetic
> diseaase you are unaware of may kill you but it cannot drive your
> psychological development until you learn of it). So a social situation is
> both subjective and objective. I believe the same is true of /perezhivanie/,
> normally translated as "lived experience" or "emotional experience." We
> non-Russian speakers tend to take this concept as subjective. "Experience"
> is subjective; it has almost always been taken that way in the history of
> philosophy. But when you think about it, it is not a different concept from
> "social situation." So I take /perezhivanie/ as meaning both: it is a social
> situation insofar as it exists within the horizon of your perception and
> impinges on your needs (it's not a situation if it has no significance for
> you).
>
> So this is a discrete event, not something continuous, as is implied in the
> words /catharsis /and /trauma/,
>
> So it functions as a unit of analysis ... and this is important ... for
> *consciousness as a whole*. That is, for the entirety of a person's relation
> to their environment, if we take, as we must, that we mean "consciousness"
> in the Marxist sense, as "all inclusive." The notion of social situation
> "connects up" with the experience with the larger social context, from which
> it is quite inseparable.
>
> So I just don't see the place for ideal models here. The concepts above do
> not idealise in that sense.
>
> Does this go to your question, Larry?
>
> Andy
>
> Larry Purss wrote:
>
>> Andy
>> Thanks for posting Vygotsky's article The Problem of the Environment"
>> first
>> published in "Foundations of Paedlogy" (1935)
>> I want to bracket on e paragraph for further reflection.
>>
>> ".... the ESSENTIALfactors which explain the influence of environment on
>> the
>> psychological development of children, and on the development of their
>> conscious PERSONALITIES, are made up of their emotional experiences
>> [petrezhivanija].  The emotional experience [perezhivane] ARISING from any
>> situation or from any aspect of this environment, DETERMINES what KIND of
>> influence this situation or this environment will have on the child.
>> Therefore, it is not any of the factors IN THEMSELVES (if taken without
>> reference to the child) which determines how they will influence the
>>
>> future course of his development, but the SAME FACTORS REFRACTED through
>> the
>> PRISM OF THE CHILD"S EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE [perezhivanie]...."
>>
>> I recognize that perezhivanie and "ideal models" in the environment cannot
>> be analyzed separately as "units of analysis" BUT for heuristic reasons
>> can
>> perezhivanie be braceted to elaborate the motivational "systems" that
>> dynamically interact with the ideal models??
>> The question that I'm asking is if it is appropriate to analyze the basic
>> primary emotions that interact with the ideal forms?  A new book is
>> elaborating a "motivational systems theory" based on dynamic systems
>> theory
>> and the article just mentioned has me thinking.
>>
>> Larry
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>>
>>
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
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