I agree, Andy, with your point about everyday life and institutional life
being unnecessarily dichotomized. You end that section of your comments with
"The two can only be understood through the mutual transformation of one
into the other." Can you explain more about what you mean with that?
Transformation might imply that one turns into the other, but when you add
"mutual" you are saying they are interrelated and cannot be two different
things?
You also make the point that philosophy is not the same thing as science and
that Wittgenstein didn't have the same considerations Vygotsky in trying to
develop psychology as a science. This is why Shotter, brings them together,
isn't it? I would say this is really one of the main foci for the different
threads of these discussions: How human activity, both practice and
thinking, are shaped by the field/discipline/method of approach or inquiry
and what are understood to be the requirements and obligations of that line
of inquiry in regard to method. What Vygotsky was trying to do with his line
of argument was to remedy the crisis as he saw it in working towards a
better, more inclusive science? And philosophers, they are what,
rationalizing and using words? Is this the chiasm, where one point of view
has to be brought to bear upon the other?
Monica
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 10:23 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] John Shotter in 1995 discussing the link between
Wittgenstein and Vygotsky
Thank you Larry for providing the Shotter article on Vygotsky and
Wittgenstein. I just want to share a few observations on it. I must
qualify these comments by noting that I am never sure how much I am
talking about Wittgenstein and how much about Shotter.
Firstly, the article makes it very clear that the subject matter of
Wittgenstein's work is speech taken very much as a part of activity,
both in the sense of extended projects (the metaphor about a city and
its districts) and in the sense of actions, directed and constituted by
speech; that for Wittgenstein, texts unconnected with activity would
indeed be meaningless, and activity without talk inconceivable. This is
very helpful for me, because generally, those I have come across in the
past who use Wittgenstein, use him in a universe of texts, divorced from
activity, but it seems that this does not come from Wittgenstein himself.
Secondly, in the remarks about the need to be attentive to what is going
on in and around speech, and the "unnoticed features of our own conduct"
it seems to me that the kind of work that Wittgenstein has done does
function to sensitise us to these "background" and unnoticed actions and
contexts which are in fact giving meaning to what is said. Goethe, with
his "delicate empiricism" would approve. How else would one write so as
to sensitise people to this unnoticed conduct? Shotter has drawn our
attention to the value of this work. And also, there are a lot of points
of synergy between Wittgenstein and Vygotsky, that is clear.
That said, a couple of points on the other side. When Shotter says:
"For, if /'every sign by itself seems dead... [and only] in use [is it]
alive... '/ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.432), then it is no use us searching
(as we have done in structural linguistics) for a word's meaning in
terms of its function or role within a closed system of formal and
decontextualized sign type-to-sign type relationships." Then the words
jump out at me "as */we/* have done in structural linguistics." So
Shotter identifies himself as a structural linguist, or maybe a reformed
structural linguist, addressing other structural linguists, and
basically telling about this radical stuff he has discovered in Vygotsky
and Wittgenstein. Shotter writes well and he does justice to these
writers but this is the occasion of the article - a structural linguist
telling others about what Vygotsky and Wittgenstein have to offer. All
well and good of course.
But this leads to some shortcomings. A little way in, Shotter mentions
"context" and points to the importance of context, presumably because
structural linguists have neglected context. But coming from Cultural
Psychology, this begs the question! People have spent lifetimes not just
discovering context, but trying to figure out how to theorise context in
psychology. Likewise with "joint action." No cultural psychologist needs
to be told about the importance of joint action, but what constitutes
"joint" and what kind of "jointness"? If I work for my boss, is that
"joint action"? Am I doing "joint action" with my audience when I write?
If so, are the audience and my boss in the same relationship to me? What
I am saying is that it is not enough to make gestures to jointness and
context but we have to work out how to theorise these relations. That is
the whole point.
Another point I want to make. I am not sure if this is Shotter or
Wittgenstein, but I think the dichotomy between institutional life and
everyday life is a false dichotomy. There may be many reasons for
rejecting this dichotomy, but in particular there seems to be an
assumption that while the life of one institution is different from that
of another, everyday life is everywhere and always the same. If only!
Cultural psychology deals with the obvious fact that everyday life is
highly differentiated, heterogeneous and dynamic. And what is the source
of everyday life? In the main yesterday's institutional life. And what
is the source and foundation of institutional life? Everyday life. The
two can only be understood through the mutual tranformation onf one into
the other.
Another observation: what marks Vygotsky off from Wittgenstein or
Bakhtin so far as I know, is that Vygotsky was building a scientific
psychology, his observations were supported by experiment and he
exhaustively studied child development and pathology, and through this
constructive work, developed a nuanced understanding of thinking and
speaking which I personally think is inaccessible to any philosophy,
Bakhtin and Wittgenstein included. Wittgenstein is useful for critical
purposes, but I cannot see how one could go from Wittgenstein to build a
psychology, except by wrapping him up with someone else.
Enough said for the moment, I think.
Andy
Larry Purss wrote:
I have not yet read the article I'm attaching but when I googled [Shotter
XMCA] this article was located. I looked at the bibliography and did not
see Merleau-Ponty referenced. His engagement with M-P's ideas must have
come after 1995 [when he wrote the article I'm attaching.] For others
interested in this line of inquiry I thought the article may be
interesting.
In the more recent article I was discussing John says he has moved from
using the term "joint activity" to the term "dialogue" and most recently
to
using the term "chiasmic intertwining". I'm wondering what others think
about John's journey of exploration and how it links up to CHAT?
Larry
Larry
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