[xmca] Redundancy in Tool and Symbol

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Anton, Andy, Mike:
 
I liked the answer van der Veer and Yasnitsky gave to their own eponymous question in  "Vygotsky in English: What Still Needs to be Done" (Integrative Psychological Behavior). They want to have an authoritative, annotated version of Vygotsky's key texts. They define this as a text where editorial changes are all REVERSIBLE by the reader, so that the original text is RECOVERABLE at every point.
 
That's what we are trying to do with Tool and Symbol here in Korea. But of course this does immediately raise three difficult problems, which Anton refers to. Which is the original text? The Russian or the English? Who wrote it? Vygotsky alone or Vygotsky and Luria? And finally, when was it written? In 1930 or in 1932? Finally--and I think this is really related to the previous questions and also to the problem of what we make of it in terms of modern "neo-Vygotskyan" psychological discourse--did Vygotsky change his mind?
 
First of all, the English text, although good, reads in places like a translation (e.g. use of "researches" as plural). Secondly, the redundancies with slight variations that I referred to would probably not occur with someone writing in a second language; we tend to have a much smaller repertoire in a foreign language and slight variations like that are much more typical of native language use. 
 
But most importantly the Russian manuscript seems UNFINISHED to me--the chapters of very unequal length and degree of polish, the redundancies, and even the issue of authorship fluctuates from chapter to chapter. (This is also true of the English manuscript, of course, but the cutting of redundant sections suggests a little more polishing and thus a later version.)
 
The next question is authorship. The first chapter, which is the most finished, clearly contains Luria's ideas as well as Vygotsky's. But Chapter Three refers to "I and my colleagues" and "my laboratory" in a context that clearly refers to Vygotsky. 
 
We know that the co-authored study "Ape, primitive, child" was written with separate authors for separate chapters (see "Letters to Students and Colleagues" in the JREEP 45 [2] p. 26). It seems probable that they might have done this the same way.
 
Finally, when was it written? Almost all of the (many) studies that "Tool and Symbol" uses are published in 1930 (including a book by Leontiev that he has listed as published in 1930 but which actually wasn't published until 1931). This suggests to me that he's writing in 1930. 
 
Then there is the exegesis. It seems to me that it's really HERE more than anywhere else that we need Mike's opinion. Mike has written about Vygotsky's ambivalent relationship to Gestaltism, and if this manuscript really was written in 1930, that would place it right at the moment when Vygotsky is turning from using Gestaltism as a weapon against the atomistic approach of reflexology to criticizing Gestaltism as fundamentally incapable of distinguishing between the higher and lower psychological functions (as he does in Thinking and Speech).
 
Here's an example. Vygotsky and Luria write: 
 
Высшие психические функции не надстраиваются, как второй этаж, над элементарными процессами, но предсавляют собой новые психологические системы, включающие в себя сложное сплетение элементарных функций, которые, будучи включены в новую систему, сами начинают действовать по новым законам; каждая высшая психическая функция представляет, таким образом, единство высшего порядка, определяемое в основном своеобразным сочетанием ряда более элементарных функций в новом целом. 
 
The Vygotsky Reader has this as: "The higher psychological functions are not superimposed as a second storey over the elementary processes, but represent new psychological systems which include a complex knot of elementary functions that, upon being included in the new system, begin to act according to new laws. Each higher psychological function thus presents a unity of a higher order, determined mainly by the particular combination of a series of more elementary functions into a new whole." 
 
There’s a certain contradiction here which suggests that Vygotsky’s views are not fully formed (and this may also account for the insistence with which he repeats himself too!)
On the one hand, the higher psychological functions are not a second story or a superstructure; they are not the result of incremental building on top of the elementary functions. On the other, the higher psychological functions are created by synthesizing pre-existing functions and they are wholly determined by their component functions.
 
There’s a contradiction here: on the one hand, a higher psychological function does not develop by adding functions or by adding links between functions. But on the other, it is entirely reducible to its component functions and to the links between functions.  
 
We can see here why Minick associates the view of “interfunctional links” with MIDDLE Vygotsky rather than LATE Vygotsky (that is, Vygotsky II rather than Vygotsky III). In LATE Vygotsky (e.g. the “Child Development” book in Volume Five) Vygotsky insists that the structure determines the various parts (rather than the parts determining the whole).
 
But here Vygotsky and Luria insist that higher mental functions are determined by their constituent parts. They also seem to think that they are mainly the product of synthesizing elementary functions rather than exapting cultural ones. 
 
At the end of the chapter, for example, they argue that aphasics simply refert to natural functioning, which seems to me to follow Janet like reasoning (Janet argued that mental functions develop and degrade according to the simple principle of "last hired first fired" and this seems to have impressed Vygotsky for a time). It's not consistent with the idea of the complete restructuring of elementary functions by higher functions (and it's also not consistent with the information we have about bilinguals who suffer from Alzheimer's or strokes). 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
 

--- On Sat, 7/9/11, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:


From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Redundancy in "Tool and Sign" (teh beginning of the "Second Vygotskian Revolution")
To: "Anton Yasnitsky" <the_yasya@yahoo.com>, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Saturday, July 9, 2011, 6:53 PM


Anton, could I use a parallel of the translation of Marx's manuscripts? I think it fair to say that Marx's legacy had in many ways better conditions, but nonetheless, controversy has raged down the decades over what Marx really said. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, there was a big effort to transcribe his work, and rescue his legacy from the Second International, and since the 1990s especially there has been a wave of "back to the real Marx" aimed at rescuing the "real Marx" from the Third International and other currents.

My observation is that this is a complex process in which translation, editing and exegesis are a subordinate part. Every generation has re-interpreted Marx in the light of current conditions (a point you make yourself). So the process of reconstructing the theory and rediscovering the founder's own words are two processes which work side-by-side, mutually aiding one another.

My only concern is that while we all work at reinventing a Cultural Psychology (or Nonclassical Psychology or Activty Theory or whatever you want to label it) we continue to work on excavating the real Vygotsky, but that one task is never an obstracle to the other, that doubts about the legacy never act as a blockage to interpretation of the legacy in our new circumstances.

Andy

Anton Yasnitsky wrote:
> ... Furthermore, as an aside, I am now torn apart between apparently contradicting desire to retranslate the whole of Vygotsky exactly as the stuff was published or ever existed in manuscripts, AND, on the other hand, inclination NOT to retranslate BUT rather reinterpret the theory in terms of contemporary psychological discourse. 
>   


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