On his return to activity, the group began to work their way through all the theories of psychology which were contesting the field on the world stage: Freud, Piaget, James, ... critiquing them and appropriating the insights each had to offer. The group worked collaboratively, discussing the problems in a group while one of them took notes. To this day it is not possible to be certain about the authorship of much of what the group produced in this period. Even graduate students were invited to experiment on their own initiative and sometimes made key breakthroughs.
In a 1929 manuscript known as ‘The Crisis in Psychology’ (1997a) they critically appropriated the insights of many contending schools of psychology, just as Marx had laboriously worked his way through everything that had been written about political economy. Vygotsky developed the idea of the ‘unit of analysis’ for a science. As Marx points out in the preface to the first edition of Capital, the commodity relation is the germ or cell of economics. All the phenomena of capitalism can be unfolded from this simplest and most primitive of relations, the exchange of commodities, just like the cell of biology and the molecule of chemistry. This idea originated with Goethe and is a key methodological principle for both Hegel and Marx. Finding that the relation between thinking and speaking was the central problem for psychology, he concluded that resolving this problem was a microcosm of the whole problem of human consciousness. He went on to conclude that word meaning was the unit of analysis for the study of intelligent speech (1987), and more generally, that the basic unit of psychology is joint, artefact-mediated action, with word meaning a special case. To make a beginning in their investigations, the group developed a novel approach to psychological experimentation. Vygotsky pointed out that the usual approach which emphasized ‘scientific objectivity’ and observed the behaviour of individual subjects, isolated from interaction with other people, especially the experimenter, was incapable of capturing psychological functions in the process of development, but was limited to the observation of finished process. Treating subjects like laboratory rats in this way, it was impossible to understand psychological processes, which are not innate, but originate from the collaborative use of cultural products. The team developed what they called the ‘functional method of double stimulation’ (Vygotsky 1987): the subject was given a task to perform; then they were offered some artefact which they could use to complete the task. By assisting the subject to use an artefact, such as an aide mémoire, to complete a task, the researchers could actually foster the development of a new psychological function, such as ability to memorize. The use of a ‘psychological tool’ allows the subject to modify their own psyche. The fact is that a universal characteristic of human psychology is the disposition of human beings to use cultural products to control their own behaviour. By collaborating in this, the researcher can unlock the developmental processes of the psyche. The cultural psychologists were making a name for themselves and earning respect, but at no point were they able to challenge behaviourism as the dominant current in Soviet ‘psychology’. Behaviorism is the science of prediction and control of other people’s behaviour, based on the S?R (Stimulus-Response) model, and this was the kind of science which met the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy. And political conditions were changing. When Leontyev published a book in 1929, the publisher inserted a preface denouncing his ‘errors’, and in 1930 he was forced to leave his post at the Krupskaya Academy of Communist Education. With Lydia Bozhovich and others, Leontyev set up a center in Kharkov where they might be able to work more freely, this later becoming the Neurosurgical Institute. In the meantime, Vygotsky worked prodigiously, as if in a hurry, and in the early 1930s gave lectures (transcribed by his students) and wrote the manuscripts in which his scientific legacy, the foundations of cultural psychology, were set down, focusing mainly on questions of methodology, the areas of child development, emotions and learning and ‘defectology’. The Institute for Defectology in Gomel provided a refuge for Vygotsky’s students to continue their work as the political pressure continued to mount. In 1931, with Vygotsky’s help, Luria carried out an expedition to Uzbekistan to investigate the changes taking place in the thinking of people who were being drawn directly from a feudal lifestyle into a modern planned economy, a unique opportunity to observe cultural psychology in motion. They found that even limited schooling or experience with collective farming brought about dramatic changes in people’s thinking. There were some flaws in Luria’s methodology and his interpretation of the results, but officialdom missed the point entirely. The data was interpreted as in itself insulting to Soviet nationalities and Luria came under severe political fire as a result. The affair made cross cultural research in the Soviet Union politically impossible and cultural differences in learning and cognition could not be even discussed thereafter. Vygotsky was overtaken by another bout of tuberculosis and died in 1934, but his friends were able to publish “Thinking and Speech” (1987) which remained in print for just 12 months before being banned, and then did not see the light of day for 30 years. Central to “Thinking and Speech” was a critique of the eminent Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, in which, rather than advocating that instruction trail along behind development, realizing capacities as they matured according to a nature-given program, Vygotsky claimed that instruction leads development. Teachers need to recognise not what a child can do unaided, but rather what they cannot do alone, but can do with assistance. Focusing on those psychological functions which entailed structural development of the child’s psyche, educational activity could be directed to facilitate the child’s healthy development. Further, Vygotsky criticized Piaget’s interpretation of infants’ egocentric speech. Piaget thought that the child ‘talking to herself’ was a kind of autism which eventually died away. But as Vygotsky saw it: first the child used speech to gain the help of adults, and then to control their own actions, and then vocalization gradually faded away as the vital function of controlling their own behavior through speech turned inwards. Vygotsky demonstrated that there is speech before intelligence and intelligence before speech, but it is only when the trajectories of these two functions intersect, creating intelligent speech, that the characteristic human psychology is formed. Written speech then entails a qualitatively new psychological function, as the person must make an object of their own thought, i.e., an unvoiced word, and then implement a series of visual motor operations under the control of their thought. So written speech in turn becomes a new tool for the control of one’s own thinking and behaviour. At every point, the motor control and sense perceptions of the entire body, interacting with real artefacts and internalized reflections of these artefacts, are involved in thought. Both developmentally and ontologically therefore thought is tied up with material objects (tools, symbols or other people) and the practical activities through which people use them and give meaning to them. Vygotsky demonstrated Marx’s aphorism: “The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object - an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.” (Marx 1975) The human organism is born with a range of functions each resting on distinct biological structures. In the course of development these basic functions which we share with animals are subsumed into higher psychological functions, developed through the social use of cultural products. As a result, new, specifically human, psychological functions successively differentiate themselves, each of which mobilize the entire range of biological formations in a new Gestalt. This allows to human beings voluntary use of different functions, such as memory, speech, visual perception and so on, which is unavailable to animals. This also explains the contradictory results of investigations in brain localisation of psychological functions: every human psychological function utilises a multiplicity of regions of the brain, as well as the whole body. At the time of his death, Vygotsky was working on a theory of child development in which he traced development through a series of distinct stages. Each stage corresponds to a specific set of relationships between the child and those around them, in which the child is cast in a certain role and her needs met in a certain way, with one or another psychological function playing the leading role in her development. This mode of activity forms a Gestalt in which a way of thinking and a mode of activity and a system of immediate social relationships form a single whole. As certain psychological functions mature, this mode of activity actually becomes a barrier to the child who must, if she is to develop, rebel against the very system by which her needs are met and by an act of will, emancipate herself from this relationship and establish a new identity, entering a new stage in personal development and role in their immediate social environment. These studies emphasise that Vygotsky’s psychology was concerned not with the technology of social control, but with the means of human self-emancipation. Political conditions rapidly deteriorated as the Moscow Trials got under way, during which almost the entire leadership of the Soviet state, the Army and the Party were denounced as saboteurs and shot (Sedov 1980; Khrushchev 1956). Terror penetrated every workplace, every family. First was the Pedology affair, in which Vygotsky’s work on the education of disabled children was denounced, and his works banned. Thereafter, there would be no psychological testing of children in Soviet schools and with a misconceived egalitarianism, all students were to be treated ‘equally’ in the Soviet education system, with no special measures, regardless of intellectual or sensory disability or cultural difference. In 1936, S. G. Levit, Director of the Institute in Kharkov, was denounced and shot. Luria was lucky to slip away and departed the field of psychology, adopting medicine for his own health. Life was hardly risk-free as a Jewish doctor in Stalin’s USSR, but Luria concentrated his attention on the treatment of brain damage, and very soon, the Nazi invasion brought plenty of opportunity to contribute to the war effort while doing important research for which he would become world famous, even whilst remaining almost unknown in his own country. Luria can be counted as the founder of modern neuropsychology, and it is hard to estimate the damage that was done to science by this world-famous Soviet neuroscientist being forced to conform his public comments on psychology to reflexological absurdities in which, for example, speech was the “speech reflex” as if language use could be understood in terms of stimulus and response. In fact, the idea of cultural psychology could be summed up by saying that they replaced the S ? R (Stimulus ? Response) model of behaviorism with a model: S ? X ? R, with a mediating element introduced between the stimulus and the organism’s response. S ? X and X ? R are both stimulus-response reactions, but X is a ‘psychological tool’, introduced into the neurological system through participation in social practices. Thus, like any artefact, the organism obeys all the laws of physics and chemistry, but is at the same time a product of human activity, constructed so as to meet human ends. Luria had an abiding interest in what he called ‘romantic science’, in reference to the ideas of people like Goethe, Freud and Marx who pursued ‘the romantic aim of preserving the manifold richness of the subject’ (Luria 1979), rather than dissecting the subject and reassembling it out of bits, in the manner of positivist science. Connected to this idea was his use of the idiographic rather than nomothetic method in medicine. This meant following a single individual or group through their life, studying the entire personality and its development, rather than generalizing superficial observations of a large numbers of observations to formulate general principles, as is done in nomothetic science. Luria’s study of an eidetic individual, S, reported in “Mind of a Mnemonist,” (1987) demonstrated that the cognitive functions were comprehensible only as part of an integrated Gestalt. But while Luria’s work became known internationally (although he is never given the credit he is due), and A. N. Leontyev was able to continue work in psychology, Vygotsky’s work and even his name was suppressed. By end of the war, Vygotsky’s legacy had been virtually eradicated. Ironically, in a ‘socialist’ country, scientific knowledge has been passed down along family lines and the children and grandchildren of the founding troika had been a key vehicle for the preservation of their original ideas (for example, Lena Kravtsova, Vygotsky’s grand-daughter and Dmitry Leontyev, A. N. Leontyev’s grandson). The Institute of Defectology which Vygotsky founded in Gomel, provided a sanctuary where his students were able to continue his work. But in the social and political conditions created by the purges, these researchers no longer discussed and promoted Vygotsky’s writings, although because they took his works as their founding documents, even though they criticized them, this did not prevent them from constituting a current of Vygotsky’s ideas. A brief thaw after World War Two which saw Luria made a full professor at Moscow University did not last long. Pavlovian pseudo-psychology was enforced as the compulsory norm along with Lysenkoite pseudo-genetics and there were widespread purges of scientists. Luria was dismissed from his position in an anti-Semitic campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’. After Stalin’s death, things did loosen up somewhat. After an interval of 20 years of non-existence, Psychology got its own learned journal. In 1957, Luria was allowed to travel and Leontyev’s work began to receive some appreciation. Both Leontyev and Luria credited Vygotsky as their teacher. But Vygotsky’s name remained unknown outside a small circle, and Cultural Psychology existed only in the memory of a few. Leontyev made a name for himself with ‘Activity Theory’, an extension of Vygotsky’s work which has its own following across the world today. The task of Activity Theory is to connect up the subject matter of psychology with the subject matter of sociology to lay the basis for an integrated human science. Leontyev defined Activity in terms of a three-level conceptual structure. An Activity is a collective system of actions, driven by a socially determined object and motive. An activity is realized through individual actions which are oriented to goals. The individual’s goals are not the same as the social motives of the Activity, and the formation of a goal is necessarily a complex function of the social system, if individuals are to be mobilized in the reproduction of the society. Actions are in turn are realized by means of routinized operations, dependent on the conditions of the action. An individual is not normally conscious of their operations, unless something goes awry, and it is via actions which pass into operations the pursuit of social goals constructs an individual’s personality. For walking is generally an operation carried out without thought, until some obstacle causes you to bring your limbs under conscious control. Your action of walking to point A is driven by some goal, such as completing your part in a team task and being paid, which makes sense only in terms of the overarching activity, such as delivering the mail. Leontyev carried out an extensive experimental program which traced the development of the mind from the most primitive organisms up to primates and human beings, supplementing further experimental work on the development of human individuals. He was able to construct a comprehensive theory of mind based on the idea that Marx outlined, in essence, in his 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach” (1975a). But in the meantime, a new generation had appeared. Alexander Meshcheryakov, a student of Luria’s, took over the work of Professor Ivan Sokolyansky, a pioneer in the education of deaf and blind children. Meshcheryakov developed methods of education of deaf-blind children and opened a school for the deaf-blind in Zagorsk in 1962. He did ground-breaking work, superior to anything to be found in the West in this field. The education of children born without sight or hearing involved the practical construction of human consciousness where it did not previously exist. The paradigmatic lesson for such a child is learning to eat from a spoon, at first with a teacher operating the spoon, and little by little the child taking initiative. Behind the spoon is the entire history of society, and the human way of eating, and learning to use the spoon is the first step to becoming human, being part of a human community, towards consciousness. Many of Meshcheryakov’s students completed higher degrees in mainstream universities and most went on to productive careers in the general community. Meshcheryakov’s work created a basis for a renewal of Vygotsky’s legacy. Crucial to making this connection was a group of philosophers who recognized the significance of Meshcheryakov’s work. First among them Evald Ilyenkov, taking up Vygotsky’s ideas at an new level, based on a comprehensive critique of European philosophy and an original analysis of the writings of Karl Marx. continued _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
