Re: [xmca] Was Stalin RIGHT About Vygotsky?

Martin--

The position summarized in

For example, he insists that primitive
man ³exhibits, objectively speaking, logical thinking in all those
circumstances where activity is oriented toward direct adaptation to nature.
Invention and use of tools, hunting, cattle-raising and farming, and waging
war all demand from him real, not just apparent, thought² (87)

is precisely the position promulgated by Levy-Bruhl. L-B has been
interepreted in
a variety of ways over the years so that one's interpretation of L-B and LSV
tend
to oscillate in some sort of relation to each other.
mike

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> David,
>
> I think you're raising some important points here. Certainly in Thought
> and
> Language Vygotsky makes it clear that thinking in complexes hasn't
> disappeared. And in Ape, Primitive Man, and Child he describes "primitive"
> thinking in a way that emphasizes what has been both gained and lost in
> the
> transition to more abstract thought. For example, he insists that
> primitive
> man ³exhibits, objectively speaking, logical thinking in all those
> circumstances where activity is oriented toward direct adaptation to
> nature.
> Invention and use of tools, hunting, cattle-raising and farming, and
> waging
> war all demand from him real, not just apparent, thought² (87). He points
> out that while some have seen primitive life as backward, others have
> glorified it, and that this is a contradiction that needs to be resolved.
>
> In that book it is the chapter by Luria that describes the Uzbekistan
> research. What texts do we have by Vygotsky himself on that project?
>
> Martin
>
>
> On 4/11/08 6:58 PM, "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I just read, on Andy's recommendation, Eugene's very stimulating article
> on
> > the difference between the "ontological project" of South African
> "cultural
> > historical" thinking (national unity) and the "ontological supertask" of
> > Western Vygotskyans (opposing differential forms of institutional
> failure).
> > This is in Culture and Psychology, 14 (1) 5-35.
> >
> > I LIKE the idea that "ontology" orients itself to practical tasks. I
> also
> > think that by posing the question in this way, Eugene makes possible a
> > solution: the way in which we use the tool that LSV bequeathed us
> depends on
> > the way we recontextualize it, and that in turn depends in thoroughly
> > understanding the way in which it was contextualized in the first place
> as
> > well as a painstaking analysis of the new context. But for exactly that
> > reason, I am much more sympathetic to a "fundamentalist" reading of
> Vygotsky
> > than he is. And as a result I have a question. Does anybody seriously
> think
> > that Stalin was RIGHT about Vygotsky's attitude towards Uzbek peasants?.
> >
> > It seems highly implausible. Stalin was uniformly wrong about
> everything,
> > but particularly about the scientific questions in which he and his
> minions
> > occasionally dabbled. His criticisms of Ya Marr's position on language
> as
> > superstructure are laughable, his support for Lysenko's war against
> genetics
> > was contemptible, and his ham-handed grasp of Marxism as a method nearly
> > crushed the life out of it for many generations to come. In general,
> anything
> > that required concentration, careful reading and scientific
> consideration
> > independent of short-term political aims was beyond him, and so he
> delegated
> > the task to someone who was even less interested in critical thinking.
> >
> > So why is it that so many people assume that the criticisms that were
> made
> > of the Luria and Vygotsky studies (that they were ethnocentric and
> arrogant,
> > that they denigrated non-European people, and that they assumed a
> single,
> > monotonic line of human development) were made in bad faith but were
> > fundamentally correct? Isn't it MUCH more likely that they were made in
> bad
> > faith and as a result based on a complete misrepresentation?
> >
> > The attitude of real Marxists towards Western rationalism was a highly
> > critical one: they did not assume that the "formal logical" principles
> that it
> > had uncovered were disinterested or objective. The attitude of real
> Marxists
> > towards ALL oppressed groups was highly partisan: groups like the Jews
> (and
> > blacks, and gays in our own time) were blessed/cursed with mutiple
> ontogenies;
> > while the dominant castes understood their own culture exclusively,
> oppressed
> > castes were in a position to understand the dominant culture critically
> and to
> > also understand that alternatives were possible.
> >
> > The early Bolsheviks believed that the structure of society was such
> that
> > the strata of society with the most power had the flabbiest ontologies
> and the
> > least real knowledge, and that this was one of the things that made
> possible
> > their overthrow. They believed that their real task was not to raise the
> > oppressed to the level of a bourgeois philistine, but rather to raise
> them far
> > above it, by casting down the oppressor classes, appropriating their
> culture,
> > and transforming it with their own.
> >
> > It's true, LSV does assume that there is something "complexive" rather
> than
> > "conceptual" about pre-modern thinking (a suggestion that Volosinov
> decisively
> > rejects). But LSV does not fail to point out how pervasive complexive
> thinking
> > is in so-called "modern" ideas as well.
> >
> > It's also true that LSV was hard up for good sources. Inevitably, LSV
> cites
> > lots of fairy tales from Levy-Bruhl, including the one about "Hottentot"
> > morality of "Kaffirs" (in the chapter on ethics in "Educational
> Psychology"),
> > and sometimes these citations appear uncritical to our eyes. But this
> same
> > fairy tale about the "Hottentot" moralist was used by Bolsheviks to show
> that
> > moral thinking by "worker Hottentots" had the same formal logical basis
> as
> > bourgeois thinking, and an interest in going far beyond it. (See, for
> example,
> > Trotsky, "Their Morals and Ours", with its withering critique of
> Levy-Bruhl).
> >
> > I think LSV (and also Cole and Scribner, and Cole, Gay, Glick and
> Sharp) do
> > not believe that one set of instruments are in any monotonic sense
> superior to
> > another; if anything LSV is more interested in generality than
> efficiency in
> > his discussion of psychological tools, and that is why he is more
> interested
> > in semiosis than in, say, Fordism.
> >
> > I think he must have seen that semiotic tools can be easily
> expropriated,
> > seized from their original misusers and set to an entirely different
> > historical purpose. There is absolutely no reason to think that having
> done
> > this, the oppressed will simply go about reproducing the culture of the
> > oppressor.
> >
> > On the contrary, Levi-Strauss's observation that the non-modern man is
> a
> > Jack-of-All-Trades who wants multifunctional tools rather than an
> engineer who
> > requires precision made and task-dedicated instruments augurs well for
> the
> > oppressed. Of course, this preference for jerry-built solutions to a
> wide
> > range of problems is not unique to them: it is the intrinsic world view
> of
> > any competent language user. It is no accident that the culture of the
> > oppressed tends to be made of words rather than, say, celluloid and
> > computerized SFX.
> >
> > Eugene is absolutely right to point out that the Hutchins work on
> > Micronesian navigation is as much about the "fly by night" basis of
> so-called
> > "Western" navigational practices as it was the about the consistency and
> > principled quality of the Micronesian practices! My father spent part of
> his
> > postgraduate years in Micronesia, not studying the local people but
> rather
> > vaporizing their islands with hydrogen bombs.
> >
> > My dad came back imbued with wonder at the culture he had just helped
> to
> > exterminate (and an abiding regret that he had not acquired more of
> their
> > ingenious star maps made of tapa cloth strings and knots). Part of this
> wonder
> > was the realization that the Micronesians had mastered our cultural
> practices
> > as well as their own; they could not only build their own canoes, but
> given a
> > set of plans from a California boat builder, could turn out wooden
> versions of
> > the popular "Lightning" sailboats for American military officers as well
> (he
> > recently tried to locate some of these boats, which are apparently still
> being
> > sailed).
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> >
> >
> >
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Received on Sat Apr 12 10:15 PDT 2008