[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology: Dialects and dialectics

2009-12-09 Thread c b
'Is you is or is you ain't my baby is in the Negro American English
dialect from the 1940's or so.

I've always been curious as to whether or what might be the non-joke
pun significance of dialect and dialectics.

In the context of discussion of the relationship between language and
thought, and dialectician Blunden, I wonder is there is a dialectic of
dialects.

CB

___
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


[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-07 Thread c b
CB: On another list some said:

:All human activity, from the moment we wake until we sleep, is the
domain of inquiry ( of political economy)

^
CB: This is a somewhat interesting  if side point ,no ? Political
economy is not concerned with the major fraction of human life which
is sleeping. To sleep , perchance to dream.

Political economy is a very social realm. The natural individual realm
is sleep, independent from the social, society, which indeed is the
domain of inquiry of poltical economy

A natural domain of inquiry ( unit of analysis ? smile) of
psychology is sleeping humans, dreams, specifically, thinking while
asleep.

___
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


[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-07 Thread c b
In American psychology I recall social psychology. It would seem tp
correspond to some extent to prioritizing the social in human
individual thought, but don't count on it in the bourgeois academy.


Also,  national character studies in anthropology are a type of
cultural psychology.

CB
National character: a psycho-social perspective By Alex Inkeles,
Daniel J. Levinson

http://books.google.com/books?id=ln9i8WGFS0YCdq=national+characterprintsec=frontcoversource=bllots=wBAQ12ab49sig=vd__KVXMxOQvp-AWVsU86PMkPQwhl=enei=lFYdS5zAG4ri8AbOguzXAwsa=Xoi=book_resultct=resultresnum=11ved=0CDwQ6AEwCg#v=onepageq=f=false



National character studies

National character studies is a defunct anthropological focus that
made broad and often flawed generalizations when studying cultural
behavior as a means of justifying the concept of modal personality
traits. That is, recognizing and applying behavioral patterns
unanimously to citizens within a culture as a result of those citizens
being born and or raised there. In short, stereotyping.

A good example of the logical fallacies this method produces is found
in Ruth Benedict's book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, where she
had studied Japanese culture during wartime. She characterized the
Empire of Japan as having a preoccupation with aesthetics and
militarism.

This book was a good example of Boasian anthropology founded by Franz
Boas (of whom Benedict was a student). While it was the first to
introduce a scientific method to anthropology, it had not yet
developed adequate and recurrently verifiable data collection methods.

[edit] See also
Nationalism
Margaret Mead
Cultural determinism
[edit] References
Homayun Sidky (2004). Perspectives on culture: a critical introduction
to theory in cultural anthropology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson
Prentice Hall. pp. 174–8. ISBN 0-13-093134-9.
[edit] External links
Terracciano A, Abdel-Khalek AM, Adám N, et al. (Oct 2005). National
character does not reflect mean personality trait levels in 49
cultures. Science 310 (5745): 96–100. doi:10.1126/science.1117199.
PMID 16210536.



 This article relating to anthropology is a stub. You can help
Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e




http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/11/10-piercing-insights-into-human-nature.php


http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/oneworld-char.html



SUBSECTIONS: National Character - Technology  Social Change
Margaret Mead As a Cultural Commentator
Learning to Live in One World



National Character
When Mead and Bateson returned to the United States in 1939, she was
pregnant with their daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who was born
that December. In this period, the couple prepared their Balinese
materials for publication and began using their professional skills to
assist the Allied war effort in the U.S. They contributed their
expertise as social scientists to groups that applied the behavioral
sciences to such issues as problems of morale in wartime. Early in
1942, Mead went to Washington, D.C., to head the National Research
Council's Committee on Food Habits. This committee applied
anthropological methods to problems of food distribution and
preparation in war-affected countries. Also as part of the war effort,
in 1942 Mead published And Keep Your Powder Dry, a book on American
national character.

During World War II, anthropologists used the techniques they had
developed in small-scale societies to analyze the national character
of so-called complex societies. By gathering information from
immigrants to the United States, as well as from published sources and
films, they studied culture at a distance. Such research was used to
guide government and military policy, to further cooperation among
wartime allies, and to plan for a postwar world. Similar studies
continued after the war with the Research in Contemporary Cultures
project, which was led by Mead after Ruth Benedict's death in 1948.




Schedule for Margaret Mead's
December 10-13, 1942,
visit to the Menninger Clinic.
Typescript with handwritten notes
by Dr. Karl Menninger.
Manuscript Division (221b)
 Menninger Schedule, December 1942
In 1942, Mead began a professional association with the Menninger
Clinic--an innovative mental health facility in Topeka, Kansas--which
lasted the rest of her career. This schedule shows the topics she was
to address during her first visit: Balinese culture; character
structure and international cooperation; and wartime food problems.
Arranging her trip, Mead wrote:

In planning a schedule for me please realise that the only thing I
will resent is not being used. I want to fill the time as full as
possible.
Demanding a full schedule was characteristic of Mead, who planned
trips to include a maximum number of events, including not only
lectures, seminars, and interviews, but also visits with family and
friends.

Lineage
During World War II, Mead also began consciously articulating
influences on her intellectual development. In this appendix for the
never-completed Learning to 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-03 Thread CeJ
All of which brings to mind something I saw at MR--which I do not
subscribe to, but do read the MRZINE occasionally.



http://monthlyreview.org/nfte091201.php

In this issue we are reprinting C. Wright Mills’s “Psychology and
Social Science” from the October 1958 issue of Monthly Review. The
argument of this piece was subsequently incorporated in Mills’s
Sociological Imagination, which appeared fifty years ago this year,
and constituted a powerful indictment of mainstream social science.
Both “Psychology and Social Science” and the larger Sociological
Imagination were strongly influenced by “the principle of historical
specificity” as described in Karl Korsch’s Karl Marx. Mills used this
to construct a radical challenge to the prevailing notion of a
permanent “human nature,” applicable to all societies and social
situations. He later referred to The Sociological Imagination — in a
letter to an imaginary Soviet correspondent (part of a work he was
writing, to be called Letter to a Russian Intellectual) — as “a kind
of ‘Anti-Duhring,’” constituting his radical break with ahistorical
social science.

Mills — author of White Collar (1951), The Power Elite (1956), and
other iconoclastic works — was both a resolutely independent left
thinker and what Todd Gitlin (in his afterword to the fortieth
anniversary edition of The Sociological Imagination) has called “the
most inspiring sociologist of the second half of the twentieth
century.” In his last few years, he emerged as the single most
important figure in the launching of the intellectual New Left, with
the publication of “Letter to the New Left” in the New Left Review in
September-October 1960.

The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 widened the split within
Marxism, with official Soviet ideologues more and more separated from
independent Marxists, particularly in the West. Mills increasingly
identified with the latter, labeling himself in his final book, The
Marxists (1962),as a “plain Marxist,” which he defined as someone who
views Marxism not as a dogma but as a critical tool, to be employed in
historically specific terms. He associated this perspective with such
diverse names among his contemporaries (in what generally came to be
known as “Western Marxism”) as G.D.H. Cole, Georg Lukàcs, Isaac
Deutscher, Joan Robinson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Thompson, William
Appleman Williams, Paul Sweezy, and Erich Fromm — authors who, with
the exceptions of Lukàcs and Fromm, were all Monthly Review and
Monthly Review Press writers.

In a November 1956 letter to his close friend Harvey Swados (also an
MR author), Mills wrote: “Let’s not forget that there’s more [that’s]
still useful in even the Sweezy kind of Marxism than in all the
routineers of J.S. Mill [i.e., modern liberal ideology] put together.”
Mills was struck by Sweezy’s critical assessment of The Power Elite in
theSeptember 1956 issue of Monthly Review, which Mills saw as somewhat
“doctrinaire,” but “no less so than all the liberal stuff,” and “much
more generous as well.” Sweezy was later to be acknowledged by Mills
as one of the individuals to whom he was beholden for helpful
criticisms of the earlier manuscript version of The Sociological
Imagination. In May 1958, Mills chaired Monthly Review’s ninth
birthday gathering in New York, with G.D.H. Cole as the main speaker,
attracting a crowd of 1,100. At the time of his death at age
forty-five in 1962, he was planning a lunch at his home in West Nyack,
New York, which was to include his close friend Ralph Miliband, soon
to become cofounder of The Socialist Register, together with Monthly
Review editors, Leo Huberman and Sweezy.

The central event in the last three years of Mills’s life (and for
Monthly Review at the time) was the Cuban Revolution and the Bay of
Pigs invasion. Mills visited Cuba and strongly defended its socialist
path in his powerful polemic Listen Yankee! (1960), written in six
weeks of frantic, around-the-clock effort. Mills was slated to engage
in a debate on Cuba with a major liberal figure, A.A. Berle, on NBC
television December 10, 1960, but was struck by his first heart attack
the night before. As Miliband wrote in his tribute to Mills in Monthly
Review (September 1962), the Bay of Pigs invasion filled Mills with
“bitter, helpless shame. In fact, it broke his heart….It was
altogether fitting that, when Mills died fifteen months later, Fidel
Castro should have sent a wreath to the funeral. For Mills was a
casualty of the Cuban Revolution, and of the revolution of our times.”

Among Mills’s most lasting legacies was his critique of what he called
“liberal practicality,” which he believed was a major hindrance to the
development of meaningful left action. This was a central theme of The
Sociological Imagination and continued to occupy him in all his
subsequent works. Those who wish to continue along his path would do
well to start there. (See John Bellamy Foster, “Liberal Practicality
and the U.S. Left,” Socialist Register, 1990. For an 

[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-03 Thread c b
I believe Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit is a sort of psychology.
 After some of Blunden's discussion, I've been thinking that Spirit
in Hegel is roughly culture in the modern anthropological sense -
custom, tradition, a certain People or nation's history.  So, the
title below might be better _The Spirit of European Phenomenology or
Personality type_


The Phenomenology of Spirit


The title page of the original 1807 publication
Part of a series on
G. W. F. Hegel

Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) is one of G.W.F. Hegel's most
important philosophical works. It is translated as The Phenomenology
of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind due to the dual meaning in the
German word Geist. The book's working title, which also appeared in
the first edition, was Science of the Experience of Consciousness. On
its initial publication (see cover image on right), it was identified
as Part One of a projected System of Science, of which the Science
of Logic was the second part. A smaller work, also titled
Phenomenology of Spirit, appears in Hegel's Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, and recounts in briefer and somewhat altered
form the major themes of the original Phenomenology.

It formed the basis of Hegel's later philosophy and marked a
significant development in German idealism after Kant. Focusing on
topics in metaphysics, epistemology, physics, ethics, theory of
knowledge, history, religion, perception, consciousness, and political
philosophy, The Phenomenology is where Hegel develops his concepts of
dialectic (including the Master-slave dialectic), absolute idealism,
ethical life, and aufhebung. The book had a profound effect in Western
philosophy, and has been praised and blamed for the development of
existentialism, communism, fascism, death of God theology, and
historicist nihilism.[1]

Contents [hide]
1 Structure
1.1 The Preface
1.2 Introduction
1.3 Consciousness
1.4 Self-Consciousness
1.5 Reason
1.6 Spirit
1.7 Religion
2 Criticism
3 Hegelian dialectic
4 References
5 English translations of The Phenomenology of Spirit
6 Secondary literature
7 External links


[edit] Structure
The book consists of a Preface (written after the rest was completed),
an Introduction, and six major divisions (of greatly varying size):
Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, and
Absolute Knowledge. Most of these have further hierarchical
subdivisions, and some versions of the book's table of contents also
group the last four together as a single section on a level with the
first two.

Due to its obscure nature and the many works by Hegel that followed
its publication, even the structure or core theme of the book itself
remains contested. First, Hegel wrote the book under close time
constraints with little chance for revision (individual chapters were
sent to the publisher before others were written). Furthermore,
according to some readers, Hegel may have changed his conception of
the project over the course of the writing. Secondly, the book abounds
with both highly technical argument in philosophical language, and
concrete examples, either imaginary or historical, of developments by
people through different states of consciousness. The relationship
between these is disputed: whether Hegel meant to prove claims about
the development of world history, or simply used it for illustration;
whether or not the more conventionally philosophical passages are
meant to address specific historical and philosophical positions; and
so forth.

Jean Hyppolite famously interpreted the work as a bildungsroman that
follows the progression of its protagonist, Spirit, through the
history of consciousness[2], a characterization that remains prevalent
among literary theorists. However, others contest this literary
interpretation and instead read the work as a self-conscious
reflective account[3] that a society must give of itself in order to
understand itself and therefore become reflective. Martin Heidegger
saw it as the foundation of a larger System of Science that Hegel
sought to develop[4], while Alexandre Kojève saw it as akin to a
Platonic Dialogue ... between the great Systems of history.[5] It
has even been called a philosophical rollercoaster ... with no more
rhyme or reason for any particular transition than that it struck
Hegel that such a transition might be fun or illuminating.[6]

[edit] The Preface
The Preface to the Phenomenology, all by itself, is considered one of
Hegel's major works and a major text in the history of philosophy,
because in it he sets out the core of his philosophical method and
what distinguishes it from that of any previous philosophy, especially
that of his German Idealist predecessors (Kant, Fichte, and
Schelling).

Hegel's approach, referred to as the Hegelian method, consists of
actually examining consciousness' experience of both itself and of its
objects and eliciting the contradictions and dynamic movement that
come to light in looking at this experience. Hegel uses the phrase

[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-03 Thread c b
[edit] Consciousness
Consciousness is divided into three chapters: Sense-Certainty,
Perception, and Force and the Understanding.

[edit] Self-Consciousness
Self-Consciousness contains a preliminary discussion of Life and
Desire, followed by two subsections: Independent and Dependent
Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage and Freedom of
Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy
Consciousness. Notable is the presence of the discussion of the
dialectic of the lord and bondsman.

[edit] Reason
Reason is divided into three chapters: Observing Reason,
Actualization of Self-Consciousness, and Individuality Real In and
For Itself.

[edit] Spirit
Spirit is divided into three chapters: The Ethical Order, Culture,
and Morality.

[edit] Religion
Religion is divided into three chapters: Natural Religion, Religion
in the Form of Art, and The Revealed Religion.

[edit] Criticism
Arthur Schopenhauer has criticized Phenomenology of Spirit as being
characteristic of the vacuous verbiage he attributed to Hegel[7].

[edit] Hegelian dialectic
The famous dialectical process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis has been
controversially attributed to Hegel.

Whoever looks for the stereotype of the allegedly Hegelian dialectic
in Hegel's Phenomenology will not find it. What one does find on
looking at the table of contents is a very decided preference for
triadic arrangements. ... But these many triads are not presented or
deduced by Hegel as so many theses, antitheses, and syntheses. It is
not by means of any dialectic of that sort that his thought moves up
the ladder to absolute knowledge.

– Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation, § 37, Anchor Books, 1966

However, that does not mean that Hegel rejected a triadic process.
Despite the popular misrepresentation of Hegel's triadic method which
denies that Hegel used triads in his writings, Professor Howard Kainz
(1996) affirms that there are thousands of triads in Hegel's
writings.

However, instead of using the famous terminology that originated with
Kant and was elaborated by J. G. Fichte, Hegel used an entirely
different and more accurate terminology for dialectical (or as Hegel
called them, 'speculative') triads.

Hegel used two different sets of terms for his triads, namely,
abstract-negative-concrete (especially in his Phenomenology of 1807),
as well as, immediate-mediate-concrete (especially in his Science of
Logic of 1812), depending on the scope of his argumentation.

When one looks for these terms in his writings, one finds so many
occurrences that it may become clear that Hegel employed the Kantian
using a different terminology.

Hegel explained his change of terminology. The triad terms,
'abstract-negative-concrete' contain an implicit explanation for the
flaws in Kant's terms. The first term, 'thesis,' deserves its
anti-thesis simply because it is too abstract. The third term,
'synthesis,' has completed the triad, making it concrete and no longer
abstract, by absorbing the negative.

Sometimes Hegel used the terms, immediate-mediate-concrete, to
describe his triads. The most abstract concepts are those that present
themselves to our consciousness immediately. For example, the notion
of Pure Being for Hegel was the most abstract concept of all. The
negative of this infinite abstraction would require an entire
Encyclopedia, building category by category, dialectically, until it
culminated in the category of Absolute Mind or Spirit (since the
German word, 'Geist', can mean either 'Mind' or 'Spirit').

[edit] References
^ Pinkard, Terry. Hegel's Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 2
^ Hyppolite, Jean; John Heckman (1979). Genesis and Structure of
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Samuel Cherniak (trans.). Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press. pp. 609. ISBN 0-8101-0594-2.
, 11-12
^ Pinkard, Terry. Hegel's Phenomenology, 9
^ Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
^ Alexander Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ch 1.
^ Pinkard, Terry. Hegel's Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 2
^ If, therefore, one is provided with sufficient audacity and is
encouraged by the pitiable spirit of the times, one will hold forth
somewhat as follows: 'It is not difficult to see that the manner of
stating a proposition, of adducing grounds or reasons for it, and
likewise of refuting its opposite through grounds or reasons, is not
the form in which truth can appear. Truth is the movement of itself
within itself', and so on. (Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of the
Mind, p. lvii, in the complete edition, p.36 [§ 48]) I do not think
that it is difficult to see that whoever puts forward anything like
this is a shameless charlatan who wants to fool simpletons and
observes that he has found his people in the Germans of the nineteenth
century. (Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 1, Sketch
of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real, 

[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-03 Thread c b
CB:I believe Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit is a sort of psychology.
 After some of Blunden's discussion, I've been thinking that Spirit
in Hegel is roughly culture in the modern anthropological sense -
custom, tradition, a certain People or nation's history.  So, the
title below might be better _The Spirit of European Phenomenology or
Personality type_


 Or  Culture of European Personality Types,  Semiotics of European
Personality Types   or European Cultural Psychology.

___
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


Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-02 Thread c b
So, phenomenology is psychology.  Sounds like quintessential
positivism- starting with the individual and trying to derive a
fundamental of humans.  I see why Husserl is first cousin to the
existentialists like Heidegger. They all fall into the bourgeois error
of primacy of the individual.

Semiotics is fundamentally social because symbols and language are
inherently social. Nobody thinks that individuals are born with their
own symbol system or language, only the capacity to symbolize or learn
languages.

CB

On 12/1/09, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote:
 While Pavlov might have denied his status as 'pscyhologist', Vygotsky
 was considered an outsider to the psychological establishment of his
 nation. He seems in terms of his reading (who he cites anyway) and
 understandings rooted in the phenomenological traditions (Brentano and
 after) which gave the world  versions of empirical psychology
 (Brentano, Stumpf), but also gestalt psychology, and the philosophical
 phenomenology of and after Husserl. In terms of concerns and
 approaches, the strongest parallels I can find are Merleau-Ponty. In
 terms of mainstream academia today, his biggest impact has been in
 American education (they always cite Dewey, Vygotsky and Freire--while
 Americans dutifully avoid any Marx or Marxism in Vygotsky or Freire)
 and perhaps, although unknown to most who read them now, 'social
 semiotics' people, such as functionalist (not Eastern Bloc
 functionalism) linguistic M. Halladay.

 ___
 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


___
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


Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-02 Thread CeJ
Soviet Cultural Psychology

CB: So, phenomenology is psychology.  Sounds like quintessential
positivism- starting with the individual and trying to derive a
fundamental of humans.  I see why Husserl is first cousin to the
existentialists like Heidegger. They all fall into the bourgeois error
of primacy of the individual.


You may well be on to something. I think this is why Merleau-Ponty is
the greatest heir to Husserl--because M-P could successfully integrate
Marxist thinking into phenomenology (or not, depending on your
evaluation of M-P, I guess). At least he tried--as did Sartre and de
Beauvoir. Husserl is, intellectually thinking, Heidegger's 'FATHER',
and Heidegger his wayward son, so to speak.

However, I must also point out that Husserl's phenomenology critiqued
and rejected the empiro-positivism of his time but also critiqued and
rejected types of 'historicism'. Still, Husserl is often quoted as
saying something like We [phenomenologists] are the true
positivists.

A couple more points. My point about phenomenology and psychology is
that, starting with Brentano and a handful of figures associated with
him, we get both branches of psychology and branches of philosophy.
Husserl goes decidedly in the direction of philosophy, away from
psychology, although he was interested in the so-called 'crisis'. As
did the relatively but criminally obscure Meinong.

However, that doesn't mean he moved away from being interested in
'science', since he wanted to give philosophy a scientific basis (a
concern of the positivists and Wittgenstein, as well, and not merely a
coincidence).

Also I would point out here--because it occurs to me--that much of the
modern/post-modern 'science' of linguistics is actually
phenomenological in its nature. As is emergent concerns around
'cognition' and 'cognitive science'. And the postmos are falling into
the same old traps of the crisis when they want to rely on
neuroscience to explain all. At any rate, getting back to
phenomenology, it seems to indicate that Husserl's project was
decidedly a 'rationalist' one, despite the reputation it gets through
the distorting post-modern and post-structuralist filters. In research
around 'second language acquisition', however, the projectors have
never got past naive positivism and behaviourism.

CJ

See:



http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/6/6/5/6/p66560_index.html


Abstract:

Theoretical approaches to modernity (A.D. 1815 onwards) seem to
suffer a twofold fate: (a) partial reconstructions of a European
past presented as total reconstitutions of the Global present; and,
(b) the belief that pre-modernity was dominated by a monolithic,
intellectually hegemonic philosophy. While positivism characterizes
much of the work of 19th century philosophers such as Kant, Comte,
Hume, and Saint-Simon, it is generally accepted that Comte first used
the word positivism in the place that the history of philosophy has
ascribed to it, however, Kant appears to be more precise about
philosophy's method, and therefore is used here to illustrate how
modernity reaches backwards into Kantian deontological space: a
transcendental space that arises out of a reliance on the human senses
(as it leaves impresses in the human mind, Vorstellungen). Kant and
Husserl, like Plato before them, assumed truth and value were
discoverable within human beings. They were interested in the process
and method of uncovering such truth and value, and how these equally
modern qualities continue to be vigorously present in the positivist
and phenomenological traditions. Briefly, positivism describes the
nature of the scientific arrangements that were needed to discover
knowledge; human beings became the center of the universe, and
replaced religion as the focus of cosmological activity. At the center
of Comte's arguments (that ran parallel to Kantian notions of time and
space) was the search for proof and evidence: the primary logic for
the excavation of knowledge. Phenomenology on the other hand did not
view knowledge as a process of discovery as the positivists generally
claimed. Rather, phenomenology emphasizes the creation of knowledge
phenomena per se at historical points in time rather than a process of
discovering knowledge as fixed and immutable assets.


http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/455564/Phenomenology/68551/Contrasts-with-related-movements#

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13008675/Phenomenology-and-Positivism

http://books.google.com/books?id=_JsOQAAJdq=husserl+social+worldsource=gbs_navlinks_s

___
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


Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-12-01 Thread CeJ
While Pavlov might have denied his status as 'pscyhologist', Vygotsky
was considered an outsider to the psychological establishment of his
nation. He seems in terms of his reading (who he cites anyway) and
understandings rooted in the phenomenological traditions (Brentano and
after) which gave the world  versions of empirical psychology
(Brentano, Stumpf), but also gestalt psychology, and the philosophical
phenomenology of and after Husserl. In terms of concerns and
approaches, the strongest parallels I can find are Merleau-Ponty. In
terms of mainstream academia today, his biggest impact has been in
American education (they always cite Dewey, Vygotsky and Freire--while
Americans dutifully avoid any Marx or Marxism in Vygotsky or Freire)
and perhaps, although unknown to most who read them now, 'social
semiotics' people, such as functionalist (not Eastern Bloc
functionalism) linguistic M. Halladay.

___
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


[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology.

2009-11-30 Thread c b
Vygotsky was invited to Moscow to take up a position at the Institute
and soon formed a research group (the ‘troika’) with two of Kornilov’s
young assistants, Alexander Luria, at the time an advocate of
psychoanalysis, and Alexei Leontyev.

-clip-
For all the problems, the old society had been shattered. The Soviet
Union in the 1920s was a cauldron of creativity. Physical and
intellectual conditions were desperately inadequate. The entire
resources of the country which had not been destroyed were mobilized
in an ideological atmosphere which was highly charged. But nothing was
impossible or out of bounds. History was being made everywhere. These
three young men could never have met but for the Revolution, let alone
find themselves charged with the task of revolutionizing the entire
science of psychology.

^
CB: Of course , the entire science of psychology had only been in
existence for a few years at this time ( smile).




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.

^
CB: I'm trying to think what the unit of analysis is in ethnology (smile).

Interesting that Vygotsky settles on the relation between thinking and
speaking as the central problem of psychology.  The issue of the
relationship between thought and language is taken up by the
contemporary analytical philosophy wasn't it ?

^^^
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


CB: To me, this is the fundamentally important aspect of Vygotsky's
and associates' approach: Giving primacy of attention to the
relationship between the social/cultural and the individual in trying
to understand the development of the individual.  Psychology is the
study of _individual_ humans, but for humans the social and cultural
is especially important in the development of individuals. Thus, the
name _Cultural_ Psychology indicates the revolution in psychology in
itself.

More later

___
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


Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-11-28 Thread CeJ
http://www.marxists.org/subject/psychology/works/levitin/not-born-personality.pdf

This work gives a lot of information on many of the other Soviet
'psychologists' as well as Vygotsky. It's the best profile of Elkonen
I've ever found, albeit very short.

CJ

http://www.marxists.org/subject/psychology/works/levitin/not-born-personality.pdf

Interesting excerpt:

In the 1920s, Soviet psychologists quickly destroyed the traditional, 
subjective-empirical psychology which prevailed in Russian science before the 
Revolution. And the same years saw impatient attempts to replace it with a 
new Marxist, materialist and objective psychology. Moreover, psychologists 
were strongly influenced by Pavlov’s physiology of higher neural activity, 
which was seen as a model of scientific objectivity and materialism. Its 
successes were enough to impress any scientist in the early 1920s. Soviet 
psychologists in those years were also greatly influenced by the idea of 
explaining psychological processes in straightforward sociological terms. 
Considering that the Soviet humanities had not yet interpreted and 
assimilated Marxist philosophy with sufficient depth, these ideas were often 
regarded as authentically “Marxist.” Finally, of the psychological schools 
proper, the greatest influence on Soviet psychology was exerted by 
behaviourism, which was attractive because it was seen as an objective, 
materialistic trend.
The influence of these and a series of other circumstances produced a
very complex picture in psychology. Some defined psychology as “the
science of behaviour” (Borovsky, Blonsky), others as “the science of
reflexes” (Bekhterev), others thought that psychology was “the science
of reactions” (Kornilov), and still others described it as a science
“of the systems of social reflexes” (Raisner). Despite the differences
in these formulations their general thrust was undoubtedly directed
against the notion of psychology as “the science of the soul.” Making
psychology objective was the goal of all the trends. To achieve this
aim, psychologists were prepared to forego the study of any subjective
elements in the human psyche. The psyche was reduced either to a
system of behavioural reactions or to a combination of conditional
reflexes or a set of what a modern scholar would describe as “social
positions” or “social roles.”
LEV VYGOTSKY. THE MOZART OF PSYCHOLOGY 37
What did that mean in relation to the problems of consciousness? Many
prominent Soviet psychologists (Blonsky and Borovsky) practically
ignored this problem. They believed it was beyond the scope of
scientific psychology, as it was incapable of being studied by
objective methods. Another group of psychologists headed by Kornilov,
on the contrary, considered consciousness to be the key object of
psychology. And some few psychologists led by Chelpanov still adhered
to the traditional psychology of consciousness.
It would seem that the above three positions exhaust every possible
attitude to the problem of consciousness, but Vygotsky challenged all
of them at once. He broke through the presuppositions to which the
Soviet psychologists of those years had confined themselves without
being aware of it. This arose from a premise which was tacitly and
unconsciously accepted by all: consciousness can only be studied as it
was studied by subjective empirical psychology. Vygotsky managed to
escape this trap because he approached the problem of consciousness
not from a psychological but from a methodological angle. To get a
genuine opportunity to study the essence – genesis, structure,
determinants – of consciousness, he argued, one must adopt a
methodological position whereby consciousness becomes the object of
study per se. That, in turn, makes it necessary to work out a more
general principle of explanation. One must look for a layer of reality
of which consciousness is itself the function. If consciousness could
serve as a principle of explanation – and that was precisely the case
in traditional psychology, which described consciousness as “the
common master of psychic functions,” “the stage on which the psyche
unfolds” – any study of its essence would be automatically impossible,
and only a description of the individual phenomena pertaining to it
would be possible.
To give consciousness a different methodological status (I am
deliberately using the terms of the 1960s and 1970s because this
modernisation helps express Vygotsky’s idea for which there was no
adequate terminology in his time) one had to identify the layer of
reality that determined it. And Vygotsky accomplished that by
representing consciousness as an element in the structure of man’s
labour activity.
The idea that consciousness is determined by labour activity led
Vygotsky to the idea of the “psychological tools” created artificially
by mankind which represented an element of culture. Initially they
were directed “outward,” toward the partner, but then they turned
“inward upon oneself” to become the 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-11-28 Thread CeJ
And more on the physiologists--Vvedensky, Bekhterev and Pavlov,
including excerpts from Vygotsky's take on them (which brings me to
the conclusion that Vygotsky actually agrees some with Husserl on the
'crisis'). I think Pavlov had the largest impact on American
behaviourists (and remember it was the Americans who helped to get the
Russians going on behaviourism in the first place) probably because of
a couple very good translations and the 'generalizability' of his
methods to experimentation in the US. Bekhterev appears to be the more
expansive thinker. I don't know much about Vvedensky at all.

V, B and P were all physiologists first, but Vygotsky was a 'semiotician'.

CJ

Bekhterev

http://books.google.com/books?id=IqVeqasmsSACdq=reflexology+soviet+unionsource=gbs_navlinks_s

http://books.google.com/books?id=IqVeqasmsSACprintsec=frontcoversource=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepageq=f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=IqVeqasmsSACpg=PA45dq=reflexology+soviet+unionsource=gbs_toc_rcad=8#v=onepageq=reflexology%20soviet%20unionf=false

http://www.amazon.com/Collective-Reflexology-Complete-V-M-Bekhterev/dp/0765800098

Product Description
Vladimir Mikhailovitch Bekhterev was a pioneering Russian neurologist,
psychiatrist, and psychologist. A highly esteemed rival of Ivan
Pavlov, his achievements in the areas of personality, clinical
psychology, and political and social psychology were recognized and
acclaimed throughout the world. Publication of the complete text of
Collective Reflexology brings to the English-speaking world this
brilliant scientist's final theoretical statements on how
reflexological principles, which he had been developing over a quarter
century, can be extended far beyond analysis of the individual
personality.

Bekhterev's work grows out of his interest in group psychology and
suggestion. This concept of the reflex is much broader than Pavlov's.
It is applicable to every variety of life. Bekhterev compared his own
analyses to those of other European thinkers such as Comte, LeBon, and
Sorokin. Such analyses strained against the official Marxist-Leninist
doctrines of the era. Bekhterev died in 1927, allegedly of poisoning
by Stalin's henchman. As with many scientists during the Soviet era,
his legacy was suppressed. In the normal course of events his name
would have been as well known as that of Freud, Pavlov or, more
lately, B.F. Skinner. This first publication of Bekhterev's great work
in English fills a void in the fields of psychology, sociology, and
the history of science.


About the Author
V.M. Bekhterev was director of the Military Medical Academy in St.
Petersburg and founded there its Psychoneurological Institute. Among
his many books are Suggestion: Its Role in Social Life (available from
Transaction) and The Subject Matter and Goals of Social Psychology.
Lloyd H. Strickland is professor of psychology at Carleton University.
He is the author of numerous journal articles and editor of Directions
in Soviet Social Psychology and Soviet and Western Perspectives in
Social Psychology.

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/crisis/6_dir/6_s4.htm


It is this feeling of a system, the sense of a [common] style, the understanding
that each particular statement is linked with and dependent upon the
central idea
of the whole system of which it forms a part, which is absent in the essentially
eclectic attempts at combining the parts of two or more systems that are hetero-
geneous and diverse in scientific origin and composition. Such are,
for instance,
the synthesis of behaviorism and Freudian theory in the American
literature; Freu-
dian theory without Freud in the systems of Adler and Jung; the
reflexological Freu-
dian theory of Bekhterev and Zalkind; finally, the attempts to combine Freudian
theory and Marxism (Luria, 1925; Fridman, 1925). So many examples from the area
of the problem of the subconscious alone! In all these attempts the tail of one
system is taken and placed against the head of another and the space between
them is filled with the trunk of a third. It isn’t that they are
incorrect, these mon-
strous combinations, they are correct to the last decimal point, but
the question
they wish to answer is stated incorrectly. We can multiply the number
of citizens
of Paraguay with the number of kilometers from the earth to the sun and divide
the product by the average life span of the elephant and carry out the whole op-
eration irreproachably, without a mistake in any number, and
nevertheless the final
outcome might mislead someone who is interested in the national income of this
country. What the eclectics do, is to reply to a question raised by
Marxist philosophy
with an answer prompted by Freudian metapsychology.
In order to show the methodological illegitimacy of such attempts, we will first
dwell upon three types of combining incompatible questions and answers, without
2 thinking for one moment that these three types exhaust the variety
of such attempts.
The first way in which any school 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-11-28 Thread CeJ
If you will recall--I think JF was referring to previous threads as
well--that we were discussing some of this under the 'Vienna Circle'
threads (which I cite in this post -- scroll down). All this puts me
to mind of Wittgenstein's interest in psychology, which was not simply
a late development in his thinking. First, he was exposed to much this
as part of an educational reform movement in Austria between the wars.
Also he had an expressed but critical interest in Gestalt psychology
(which you could put simplistically as a psychological spin-off the
same lines of inquiry and research that led to the 'Husserlian turn'
in philosophy).

Now I really must learn more about Stumpf's output in phonetics. I
hadn't known about this until this week, which does go to show that
although we seem to go around and around here on M-T, going around and
around can led to a different direction out.

CJ

http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/69

Phenomenological factors in Vygotsky’s mature psychology
Paul S. Macdonald

Murdoch University, Western Australia, pmcdo...@central.murdoch.edu.au

This article examines some of the phenomenological features in Lev
Vygotsky’s mature psychological theory, especially in Thinking and
Speech and The Current Crisis in Psychology. It traces the complex
literary and philosophical influences in 1920s Moscow on Vygotsky’s
thought, through Gustav Shpet’s seminars on Husserl and the inner form
of the word, Chelpanov’s seminars on phenomenology, Bakhtin’s theory
of the production of inner speech, and the theoretical insights of the
early Gestalt psychologists. It begins with an exposition of two
central Husserlian schemas: part-whole theory and the thesis of the
naïve standpoint, both of which Vygotsky was clearly familiar with.
This is followed by an account of the reception of phenomenology in
early Soviet Russia. The article’s central sections are concerned with
a careful unpacking and critique of Vygotsky’s employment of
Husserlian method and analysis in his later doctrine of the ‘inner
plane of speech’, his use of part-whole theory, and his identification
of Husserl’s position with an untenable version of idealism. The
article closes with the contention that Vygotsky misrepresents the
phenomenological analysis of meaning formation and appropriates basic
Husserlian conceptual terms in his elaboration of the ‘inner form of
the word’; but Vygotsky does so in such a way that he enriches our
descriptive access to the individual development of humans’ dynamic
use of language.

Key Words: cognitive meaning • Edmund Husserl • part-whole theory •
phenomenology

http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu/msg04571.html

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl2.htm
(by the way, I have the book, but am citing an online source for list
participants)

small excerpt �61. Psychology in the tension between the
(objectivistic-philosophical) idea of science and empirical procedure:
the incompatibility of the two directions of psychological inquiry
(the psychophysical and that of psychology based on inner
experience).

ALL SCIENTIFIC empirical inquiry has its original legitimacy and also
its dignity. But considered by itself, not all such inquiry is science
in that most original and indispensable sense whose first name was
philosophy, and thus also in the sense of the new establishment of a
philosophy or science since the Renaissance. Not all scientific
empirical inquiry grew up as a partial function within such a science.
Yet only when it does justice to this sense can it truly be called
scientific. But we can speak of science as such only where, within the
indestructible whole of universal philosophy, a branch of the
universal task causes a particular science, unitary in itself, to grow
up, in whose particular task, as a branch, the universal task works
itself out in an originally vital grounding of the system. Not every
empirical inquiry that can be pursued freely by itself is in this
sense already a science, no matter how much practical utility it may
have, no matter how much confirmed, methodical technique may reign in
it. Now this applies to psychology insofar as, historically, in the
constant drive to fulfil its determination as a philosophical, i.e., a
genuine, science, it remains entangled in obscurities about its
legitimate sense, finally succumbs to temptations to develop a
rigorously methodical psychophysical - or better, a psychophysicist's
empirical inquiry, and then thinks that it has fulfilled its sense as
a science because of the confirmed reliability of its methods. By
contrast to the specialists' psychology of the present, our concern -
the philosopher's concern - is to move this sense as a science to
the central point of interest - especially in relation to psychology
as the place of decisions for a proper development of a philosophy
in general - and to clarify its whole motivation and scope. In this
direction of the original aim 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-11-27 Thread CeJ
JF:This, in part at least,
was a consequence of Stalin's
regime opting to support the
'reflexology' of Ivan Pavlov
and Vladimir Bekhterev.
While we in the West tend
to think of Pavlov as having
been a psychologist, he
did not view himself as
such.  He was trained
as a physiologist and
he always saw himself as
a physiologist.  He described
his famous work on conditioned
reflexes as part of the physiology
of the higher nervous system.
He was generally dismissive
of psychology which he
tended to view as a kind
of pseudo-science.

But the agendas behind 'reflexology' weren't just physiology, were
they? Not when you turn to the shared concerns that emerge from
medicine, social sciences, logics and math, and philosophy.

Perhaps Pavlov was skeptical that the various concerns that converged
under the label 'psychology' would ever come together in some unified
approach to research.

It's also informative to see what two of his more important
contemporaries outside the Soviet Union thought about such
matters--such as Stumpf and Wundt. In retrospect we can see that
psychology never did come together as a unified science, and
contradictory approaches and philosophies don't so much compete as
they do co-exist (often quite ignorant of each other). Finally, it's
interesting to note how Vygotsky points out that the crisis is
actually a 'bottom up' one, and not simply the concern of
theoreticians.

See:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stumpf/#PsyMin

1. Biographical Sketch

Stumpf's intellectual biography is rich and complex due to his long
university career that lasted more than 50 years, his academic
achievements, and his philosophical work. To complete this
biographical sketch, the reader is invited to consult Stumpf's
autobiography (published in 1924) and Sprung's biography, published in
German under the title Carl Stumpf – Eine Biografie (2006).
1848Carl Friedrich Stumpf was born on April 21, 1848 in Wiesentheid
in Franconia, Germany.
1859-1863   Attended the Gymnasium in Bamberg; studied music and
composed several pieces.
1864-1865   Attended the Gymnasium in Aschaffenburg where he studied
Plato with Hocheder.
1865Entered the University of Würzburg; during his first year, he
studied aesthetics and law.
1866Met Franz Brentano on July 14, during the disputatio for his
habilitation and then decided to study philosophy with Brentano.
During the period from 1867 to 1870 he attended Brentano's lectures on
the history of philosophy, metaphysics, Comte and the positivists, and
logic.
1867-1868   Because Brentano had not been habilitated to supervise
dissertations, he recommended that Stumpf study with Hermann Lotze in
Göttingen; Stumpf attended Lotze's lectures on psychology, history of
philosophy since Kant, philosophy of nature, and practical philosophy;
he also took courses from the physiologist G. Meissner and the
physician W. Weber.
1868Graduated on August 13, 1868 with a dissertation on Plato and
then returned to Würzburg in order to study with Brentano.
1869-1870   Entered the ecclesiastical seminary in Würzburg and due to
the influence of Brentano and Lotze, he resigned in July 1870.
1870Returned to Göttingen to prepare his habilitation on
mathematical axioms under the supervision of Lotze and successfully
defended it in October 1870.
1870-1873   Lectured at the University of Göttingen where he founded
the Eskimo society along with mathematician Felix Klein; he also met
Fechner and probably Frege, who studied in Göttingen during this
period.
1873Published an important treatise on the origin of space
perception, and dedicated it to Lotze.
1873-1879   Appointed to his first professorship at the University of
Würzburg at the age of 25 to replace Brentano, who moved to Vienna in
1874.
1878Married Hermine Biedermann (1849-1930).
1879-1884   Moved to Prague and in 1880 his friend Anton Marty arrived
there; Marty was a professor there until the end of his career; Stumpf
developed professional contacts with Mach and maintained a close
relationship with Ewald Hering.
1882Visited by William James in Prague, and this encounter marked
the beginning of a lasting friendship between both philosophers.
1883Published the first volume of Tonpsychologie.
1884-1889   Replaced Ulrici at the University of Halle and became a
colleague of Georg Cantor and J. E. Erdmann.
1887Husserl published his habilitation thesis on the origin of the
concept of number, which was supervised by Stumpf.
1889-1894   Arrived in Munich in 1889 as successor to Prantl.
1890Published the second volume of Tonpsychologie; he also worked
with H. Ebbinghaus, H. von Helmholtz, and G. E. Müller, among others,
on the prestigious journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie
der Sinnesorgane, of which Stumpf was one of the founding editors.
1891Involved in a controversy with Wundt and his students on
experiments and on Fechner's law.
1894Joined the philosophy faculty in 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-11-26 Thread Jim Farmelant

On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:40:14 -0500 c b cb31...@gmail.com writes:
 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.
 
 

Back in Janauary, I wrote a little a bit about the 
crisis in psychology as seen by Soviet psychologists 
back in the 1920s and 1930s. See:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2009-January/023554.h
tml

As I pointed the Soviet psychologists drew upon both
American behaviorism, as represented by John B. Watson
and the Gestalt school.  Watson was seen as offering
a materialist psychology, which suffered from the
defect of being mechanistic and undialectical.
The Gestalt school offered a dialectical psychology,
but which was idealist.  The Soviet psychologists
were attempting to develop a psychology that
was both materialist and dialectical.

As Andy Blunden piece notes, the
psychology of Lev Vygotsky was
suppressed by Stalin's regime.  In
fact psychology as an independent
discipline was suppressed in the
Soviet Union for at least a couple
of decades.  This, in part at least,
was a consequence of Stalin's
regime opting to support the
'reflexology' of Ivan Pavlov
and Vladimir Bekhterev.
While we in the West tend
to think of Pavlov as having
been a psychologist, he
did not view himself as
such.  He was trained
as a physiologist and
he always saw himself as
a physiologist.  He described
his famous work on conditioned
reflexes as part of the physiology
of the higher nervous system.
He was generally dismissive
of psychology which he
tended to view as a kind
of pseudo-science.

Jim Farmelant

Top Psychology Degrees
Find schools offering psychology programs online. 3 easy steps!
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/c?cp=hH8quBryO3AsEJpOxV1lpgAAJ1AP8ttsZd_TbiVxkZxsC3mBAAQFADiYjT4AAAMlAAZmkwA=
___
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


[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-11-25 Thread c b
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 

[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-11-25 Thread c b
Ilyenkov’s most widely noted contribution was his study of the ideal,
of how ideals come into being as perfectly material cultural products,
the archetype of which is money. His study of Capital, “The Abstract
and Concrete in Marx’s Capital” is a masterpiece. Ilyenkov gained a
formidable reputation as an interpreter of Hegel even outside of the
ranks of Marxism. Ilyenkov was a communist, and the frustration of
life in Brezhnev’s USSR became more and more unbearable for him.

Another great philosopher of this generation was Feliks Mikhailov who
tackled the seemingly insurmountable philosophical problems that arise
as soon as the orthodox Marxist begins to look beyond the simple
slogans of philosophical materialism.

During the late 1970s, Leontyev’s work began to come under some
criticism, criticism generally basing itself on the work Vygotsky, of
which Leontyev himself had been seen as the foremost authority,
signaling the development of a new generation of critical Marxist
thinking. But in the late 1970s, an entire generation of Soviet
psychologists died: Luria and Meshcheryakov died in 1977, Leontyev and
Ilyenkov in 1979, Ilyenkov by his own hand.

Creating a Marxist cultural psychology in the post-Stalin USSR faced
an almost insurmountable difficulty: Marx had plenty say about the
social and psychological problems arising from bourgeois society, but
the Soviet Union was supposed to be free of all such ‘contradictions’.
Even those who were wise enough to know that this was nonsense had no
opportunity to theorise the pathology of Soviet life, being quite
unable to talk or write about such things with other people. Science
cannot be built without discussion. This meant that there was a firm
line beyond which Soviet psychology could not go without descending
into hypocrisy. Even a brilliant Soviet psychologist like Vasily
Davydov presaged his analysis of child development on ‘really existing
socialism’ being a norm, against which the pathologies of other
societies were measured (Kozulin 1990). Perhaps Ilyenkov’s solution
was the only way out?

But in those precious two decades between a thaw in the suppression of
scientific enquiry and the death of the Vygotsky’s continuers, contact
was made with the West.

In 1962, a young psychology graduate on a student exchange from
Indiana University, Mike Cole, arrived in Moscow for a year of
research into ‘reflexes’ under Luria (APA 2006). Cole frankly admitted
that the significance of Vygotsky’s work which Luria was urging on him
utterly escaped his understanding. Nonetheless, Cole took on the task
of translating and publishing Luria and Vygotsky’s work in the US.

Through Cole’s collaboration with Soviet academics, his own research
and teaching, and the steady flow of English translations, a current
of Cultural Psychology grew up in the US. Other Americans, such as
James Wertsch also visited Russia and contributed to the work of
interpreting, translating and exporting this conquest of the Soviet
Union. Many, many others like Jaan Valsiner, R. van der Veer, Dot
Robbins also played an important role. Finland has always enjoyed a
close relationship with Russia, and Yjrö Engeström’s group in Helsinki
is probably the main vehicle for the transmission of Activity Theory
to the West. There has also been an outflow to the West of Russian
academics, schooled in “Cultural Historical Activity Theory” (CHAT).
After decades of isolation behind an ‘iron curtain’, in reconnecting
with the West, the impact of the social movements (feminism, civil
rights, etc.) began to contribute to the development of what is
fundamentally an emancipatory theory.

There is a great irony here. A Marxist theory of the mind was born in
the cauldron of the Russian Revolution, but was repressed precisely
because of its revolutionary Marxist character, despite the fact that
Marxism was the official state doctrine. After 30 years in hiding, it
escaped to take root in the U.S., the bastion of capitalism and
anti-communism, where in order to survive it had to keep its Marxism
under wraps. But in a double irony, the crisis which befell Marxism in
the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union left CHAT largely
unscathed, because of the non-political shape it had adopted for the
purposes of survival in the past.

So CHAT is now a worldwide current in the human sciences, largely
overlooked by anyone going in search of Marxism, because it is located
in the professional lives of teachers and social workers, linguists
and psychologists, almost all of them politically on the Left, but no
kind of Party. In the opinion of many, it is the most important
intellectual gain of the whole period of the Russian Revolution and
its aftermath in the USSR.

References



American Psychological Association, (2006) Citation for Michael Cole:
Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement
of Psychology, American Psychologist, 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology

2009-11-25 Thread farmela...@juno.com

In an old Marxmail post, I drew a connection
between the debates that took place in
the 1920s between the Soviet Mechanists
and Deborinists and the later debates
in Soviet philosophy and psychology,
as exemplified in the work of Ilyenkov.

See:
http://tinyurl.com/djbre

Jim Farmelant

-- Original Message --
From: c b cb31...@gmail.com
To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and the 
thinkers he inspired marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:41:44 -0500

Ilyenkov’s most widely noted contribution was his study of the ideal,
of how ideals come into being as perfectly material cultural products,
the archetype of which is money. His study of Capital, “The Abstract
and Concrete in Marx’s Capital” is a masterpiece. Ilyenkov gained a
formidable reputation as an interpreter of Hegel even outside of the
ranks of Marxism. Ilyenkov was a communist, and the frustration of
life in Brezhnev’s USSR became more and more unbearable for him.




Wholesale Hardwood Floors
Never pay retail again. Wholesale prices on all hardwood flooring!
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/c?cp=7RmWH8NHEFrfVfzyFF2vXwAAJ1AP8ttsZd_TbiVxkZxsC3mBAAQFAFwF6j4AAAMlAANlcwA=

___
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