[Marxism-Thaxis] Soviet Cultural Psychology: Dialects and dialectics
'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
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
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
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
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
[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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Ilyenkovs 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 Marxs 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 Brezhnevs 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