Is Vygotsky Relevant? Vygotsky's Marxist Psychology

This article explores the connections between Vygotsky's psychology and Marxism, arguing that his was a “Marxist psychology” in its “historical foundation”: a specific conception of history. This conception of history is evident in Vygotsky's analysis and diagnosis of the crisis in psychology. The creation of a Marxist, general psychology was the historical task that was defined by this crisis, and his developmental psychology was the historical project of such a psychology. In his practice of the methodology of this general psychology, Vygotsky recounted “child history”: the history of the genesis of mind. The conception of history evident in Crisis throws new light on Vygotsky's texts on child development: They tell a history of the objective tendencies of consciousness, of the dialectical processes of sublation, and of self-mastery. As Vygotsky interpreted the higher mental functions, they are manifestations of the child's ability to master himself or herself as a consequence of the “social moment” of consciousness. In fostering these functions, one shaped a human consciousness capable of free and deliberate choice.     

Vygotsky's Stage Theory: The Psychology of Art and the Actor under the Direction of Perezhivanie

This article reviews Vygotsky's writings on arts (particularly logocentric art including the theater) and emotions, drawing on his initial exploration in The Psychology of Art and his final considerations set forth in a set of essays, treatises, and lectures produced in the last years of his life. The review of The Psychology of Art includes attention to the limits of his analysis, the mixed Marxist legacy that is evident in the book, the cultural blinders that affect his vision of the relative value of different artistic productions, the content of what he elsewhere refers to his “tedious investigations” into extant views, and the gist of what he considers to be the essence of art. Attention to his late work falls into two areas: Emotion in formal drama and emotion in everyday drama, each of which involves perezhivanie, roughly but incompletely characterized as emotional experience. The article concludes with an effort to situate Vygotsky's writing on art and emotion both within his broader effort to articulate a comprehensive developmental psychology of socially, culturally, and historically grounded individuals and social groups, and within scholarship that has extended and questioned his work as his influence has expanded beyond the clinics of Soviet Moscow.     

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Abstract

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.     

Ilyenkov on Aesthetics: Realism,Imagination, and the End of Art

It is sometimes claimed that Evald Ilyenkov's writings, particularly those on the problem of the ideal, best express the philosophical framework of Russian cultural-historical psychology and activity theory. In this article I consider a neglected part of Ilyenkov's legacy: his work on aesthetics. Ilyenkov's writings on art cast significant light on his views of culture and mind and on the humanistic vision at the center of his philosophy. In 1964, on a rare trip to the West, Ilyenkov visited an exhibition of pop art in Vienna. He was disgusted by what he saw and wrote a scathing critique entitled "Chto tam, v Zazerkal'e?" ("What's there, through the looking glass?"). Does Ilyenkov's antipathy to pop-and, indeed, to so-called modern art in general-show him to be enamored of a narrow, reactionary form of socialist realism? If so, how can this be squared with his reputation as a creative, critical voice within Soviet Marxism? I examine Ilyenkov's other writings on aesthetics in search of a nuanced interpretation of his reaction to pop. I consider his idea that art should serve to cultivate higher forms of perception and his attendant concepts of aesthetic sensibility and imagination, and I explore how these notions contribute to his view of the unity of the cognitive virtues, his hostility to the division of labor, and his ideal of genuine human activity, guided by reason. Such themes are vital constituents of Ilyenkov's humanism, which celebrates free, creative activity as a life principle that must assert itself against the mortifying forces of mechanization and standardization. Although these ideas may not entirely redeem Ilyenkov's hostility to modern art, they reveal his stance to be far more sophisticated than appears at first sight.     

Vygotsky,Consciousness, and the German Psycholinguistic Tradition

This article argues that Vygotsky's choice of word meaning as the basic unit of analysis for cultural psychology connects him to a German psycholinguistic tradition—exemplified in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and J. G. Herder—distinct from the Marxist tradition. While later commentators criticize Vygotsky's reliance on word meaning, arguing that it cannot explain the formation of consciousness, this German psycholinguistic tradition provides intellectual resources for rethinking the relationship between language and consciousness. Consciousness, through this model, arises from linguistic interactions, and is therefore not separable from language. Thus, word meaning encapsulates consciousness itself, not just its mediation in the world.     

George Herbert Mead and the “Division Of Labor”: Macrosociological Implications Of Mead'S Social Psychology*

By presenting some results of an extensive reconstruction of George Herbert Mead's work published as yet only in German it is argued that Mead's work as a whole and particularly his social psychology contain an implicit conception of social order. This can be characterized as the idea that it is not normative integration as such, but communicative coordination that makes possible human society and social order. This is shown by findings on the early development of Mead's ideas (Hegelianism, Definition of the Psychical), on German influences in Mead, and on the meaning of democracy as self-government in Mead's political biography. Some hints to a comparison of Mead with other concepts of social order (Durkheim; negotiated order approach) are given.     

Vygotsky’s Anomalous Spinozism

Abstract

This article exposes sources and influences of Spinoza in some of Vygotsky’s works, keeping in mind its meaning for the creation of a “new man” in Soviet Socialism. We try to understand the features of Vygotsky´s reading of Spinoza in an active dialogue with contemporary studies of 17th-century philosophy and its consequences for a materialist psychology. In this direction, we discuss references to Spinoza done by Vygotsky in the context of the latter’s argumentative style as well as studies of Engels, Plekhanov and Deborin as possible sources in Vygotsky´s approach to Spinoza. Paraphrasing Negri´s take on Spinoza as the “wild anomaly” of the 17th-century, we argue that Vygotsky performed an anomalous reading of Spinoza. In spite of the similarities with Deborin´s view of the modern philosopher, Vygotsky had plans that were more ambitious for Spinozist materialism and determinism. We trace the anomalous way in that the latter´s materialism reveals itself as one of randomness and contingency, against a rigidly structured projection of state, society, or model of human beings. We cannot figure out exactly which “model of man“ Vygotsky had in mind in his take on Spinoza, but we are able to recognize some core aspects in his reasoning. Roughly, these include the unity between mind and body, which can take the most diverse forms in the common body of multitude; the bases of consciousness in the affection; the integration, in the psychological systems, of affect, will, and desire; and the Spinozan ethics as a reference to life.     

The interdependence between forms of mutuality and the development of theoretical interest in the classroom

The present Vygotskian community is divided by a common language, 1 argue. By closer inspection there appears to be 2 quotation communities. The reasons for this are many, but the main reason seems to be the different reception histories of Vygosky's work in Russia and in the U. S., respectively. Concurrently, on the continent there also exist 2 different quotation communities. In one community Vygotsky's work initially was introduced through his Russian disciples; in the other community through his American adherents. This article focuses on a Vygotsky‐inspired curriculum rationale that is not yet widely known abroad. It is authored by El ‘konin and Davydov. In Russian parlance this approach is called Developmental Education. By closer inspection it turns out that there is a remarkable family resemblance between this approach and the American approach known as the Schools‐for‐Thought movement. Here both approaches are juxtaposed and critically valued.     

Solidarity and Responsibility,Ontologically (Categorically)

Vygotsky proposed that schools have an essential role to play in the socialization of scientific or academic concepts. The aim of this article is to expand and revise Vygotsky's proposal using Grice's work on the informal logic underlying everyday conversations. We argue that both academic and everyday conversations rely on Grice's Cooperative Principle and his maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. These two types of conversations do differ, however, in terms of the degree and type of accountability to which the participants are subjected. For example, even among familiar interlocutors, mathematics explanations must exhibit informativeness, logical coherence, veridicality, relevance, and clarity. One teacher's requesting and revoicing strategies (types of conversational metamessages) are examined to illustrate the contributions of a Gricean perspective to our understanding of the socialization of the mathematics register.     

Social Control and Emotions

This is the first article in Symbolic Interaction's symposium in tribute to Tamotsu (Tom) Shibutani (1920–2004). The author, a student in Shibutani's graduate course on social control, discusses his teacher's ideas and their evolution into his own. The article provides ample basis for the author's observation: a scholar's contribution can be measured not only by the cumulative corpus of his or her published work, but also by the influence that this individual has had on the work of others.     

The Work Sites of an American Interactionist: Anselm L. Strauss, 1917–1996

This article offers a situated overview of the work of Anselm Strauss. Beginning from its intellectual genesis at the University of Chicago with Blumer and Hughes, Strauss's creation of a sociology of action through concepts of routine and nonroutine action, negotiated order, social worlds, arenas, properties and kinds of work, and trajectory are examined. Strauss's ideas about medicine and chronic illness, psychiatric institutions, death and dying, awareness contexts, biography and trajectory are discussed. His profoundly innovative contributions to research methods, including grounded theory and the integration of structural elements through his conditional matrix, are also detailed. In conclusion, the ways in which Strauss himself framed the critical space of an interactionist sociologist are laid out through new interview materials.     

INTRODUCTION: The Lay of the Land and the Currents of the River

Abstract

This editorial is a critique of Lewis Menand's article which appeared in the march issue of the new Yorker of 2010. Unfortunately, his article misleads the public into believing that psychiatry and psychology are ill equipped to go into the human mind and heart. It also takes the position that psychology and psychiatry are not qualified to be considered a science, but it does this in such a way so as to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth.     

On Diversity,Empathy, and Community: The Relevance of Johann Gottfried Herder

Abstract The writings of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) foreshadowed several of the dominant theories of sociology, social psychology, aesthetics, linguistics and literary theory. His ideas impacted generations of thinkers, but today he is uncelebrated, mostly unknown. His writings on populism, expressionism, and pluralism are relevant to contemporary sociology, especially community sociology. Here we consider his views on the nature and meaning of community, and his methods of studying and interpreting communities. These include an emphasis on the essential particularity of human communities and their connection to wider systems and networks. Herder urges special attention to the elements of context (place, time, language, culture) within which communities are situated. Herder's is an embedded particularism, a focus on individuality and diversity within larger unities. He also sensitizes us to the multivalence and multiplicity of social phenomena. As the proper stance for community research he counsels involvement and empathy rather than objectivity and emotional distance, and he urges researchers to be sensitive to data from all of their senses, not merely sight. Drawing upon Herder's writings, we conclude with several important methodological principles relevant to improving current work on the nature and conceptualization of communities.     

Analyzing Children's Learning and Development in Everyday Settings from a Cultural-Historical Wholeness Approach

The main point in this article is to conceptualise how demands connected to children's life conditions influence both children and caregivers. To pursue this aim I advocate an extension of Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory of children's learning and development. Vygotsky pursued a wholeness approach to children's development with his concept of “the child's social situation of development” as the child's dialectic experiential and motivational relation with his or her surrounding. This conception I extend with the concepts of institutional practice and activity setting. The conditions for children's activities are the institutional practice and its activity settings. But a child's activities in these settings also has to be seen from the child's perspective, that is, his or her motive orientation. To focus on the child's motive within an activity setting—requires the researcher to focus on the child's social situation of development to discern how the dialectic between the child's orientation within an activity setting and the demands from the setting and other persons influence the child's activities within the child's zone of proximal development.     

Botswana Expansive School Transformation Project (BeST): A Response to Serpell’s Commentary

Those who are acquainted with Vygotsky's theory probably know that his publications were blacklisted in the Soviet Union from 1936 until 1956. Regrettably though, only a few adherents of Vygotsky in the West are informed about the great pains taken by the Russian Vygotskians to get hold of a firm position in the local psychological landscape between 1956 and the origin of the perestroika at the end of the 1990s. With this in mind, we here present Vasilii Davydov's vivid account of an endeavor to organize an open conference on Vygotsky's theory at the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1981. Ultimately, the Communist Party officials prohibited this conference. The story involved is actually an excerpt from an unedited audiotaped interview I had with Davydov in my residence on June 13, 1994. Davydov spoke in a flawless, sparkling Russian. Therefore, it was a great challenge to translate his narrative adequately. Elina Lampert-Shepel and I have done our best to render the subtleties that reverberate in Davydov's account of the event concerned.     

Lessons from the interpretation/misinterpretation of John Ogbu’s scholarship

In November 2003, the Council on Anthropology and Education honored John Ogbu with the George and Louise Spindler Award, for exemplary and long‐term contributions to educational anthropology. But in March 2003, a noted economist condemned Ogbu’s work as serving an ‘oppressive function’. In this paper, such contradictory instances are cited as the author recounts his encounters with Ogbu’s scholarship. Disparate assessments of Ogbu’s ideas and legacy raise important questions. What responsibility do educational anthropologists have for how their research is understood? Which aspects of Ogbu’s legacy should we hold onto as his work is interpreted in politicized and polarized ways?     

Skuka and the Absurd in Gogol'’s Tale of the ‘Two Ivans’

The present article is devoted to an analysis of Gogol'’s last story from his Ukrainian cycle, “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”; it makes use of canonical as well as innovative approaches to Gogol'’s tale in order to explore the significance of the epilogue to an interpretation of the story as a whole. The examination will encompass ideas on the temporal aspects of the narration, the philosophical concept of ennui/skuka, and the possible significance of the camera obscura as the setting for one of the key moments in the story. Whereas the camera obscura is the setting of the quarrel between the two main characters, the story ends with a manifestation of skuka from the narrator: how do these two elements relate to each other, and what do they suggest in terms of the possibility of reaching an all-encompassing interpretation of the ‘Two Ivans’?     

Simmel's Legacy for Contemporary Value Theory: A Critical Assessment

In this essay I critically assess Georg Simmel's legacy for contemporary value theory and provide the rudiments of an alternative approach. My central thesis is that Simmel fails to satisfactorily conceptualize the nature and origin of value because of his devotion to an asocial, Cartesian–Kantian conception of mind, human freedom, and agency. In contrast, I incorporate recent data from neuroscience, social self theory, developmental psychology, and elements of Marx's theory of the commodity form to provide the terms of a postmetaphysical, intersubjective alternative.