VIDEO:Vygotsky’s Critique of Psychological Science.

Melbourne based Marxist philosopher , Andy Blunden, has written and published on line an essay introducing the work of Marxist psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

Blunden's essay is rather dense but it ticks all the Vygotskian boxes and while it may not be the easiest introduction to Vygotsky, it nonetheless captures the rigor and scope of the perspective he advocated.

Here are a few quotes that Blunden lifts from Vygotsky's works which give you a taste of his contribution to psychology:

“When our Marxists explain the Hegelian principle in Marxist methodology they rightly claim that each thing can be examined as a microcosm, as a universal measure in which the whole big world is reflected. On this basis they say that to study one single thing, one subject, one phenomenon until the end, exhaustively, means to know the world in all its connections. In this sense it can be said that each person is to some degree a measure of the society, or rather class, to which he belongs, for the whole totality of social relationships is reflected in him.” (Vygotsky 1997b)

[Blunden:This could be taken as an argument for the idiographic approach, but he goes on in what is the final paragraph of his most famous work:]

“The consciousness of sensation and thinking are characterised by different modes of reflecting reality. They are different types of consciousness. Therefore, thinking and speech are the key to understanding the nature of human consciousness. If language is as ancient as consciousness itself, if language is consciousness that exists in practice for other people and therefore for myself, then it is not only the development of thought but the development of consciousness as a whole that is connected with the development of the word. Studies consistently demonstrate that the word plays a central role in the isolated functions but the whole of consciousness. In consciousness, the word is what – in Feuerbach’s words (Feuerbach 1972) – is absolutely impossible for one person but possible for two. The word is the most direct manifestation of the historical nature of human consciousness.

“Consciousness is reflected in the word like the sun is reflected in a droplet of water. The word is a microcosm of consciousness, related to consciousness like a living cell is related to an organism, like an atom is related to the cosmos. The meaningful word is a microcosm of human consciousness.” (Vygotsky 1987: 285)

VYGOTSKY IN PRACTICE: Lois Holzman interview for Lev Vygotsky: One Man's Legacy Through his Life and Theory


Piaget & Vygotsky in 90 seconds
A key point is made. You cannot miss it.Tis is the great divide -- a divide to which Noam Chomsky's linguistic work has contributed ... on Piaget's side.

VIDEO Origins of CHAT - German Philosophy -- Andy Blunden

Talk given at the Monash University Monash Education Research Community, by Andy Blunden . The talk is the first of a two-part seminar for the International Course on Cultural Historical Activity Theory. It covers the contributions to this current of thought derived from Descartes, J G Herder, Goethe and Hegel. Part Two, to follow, deals with Marx.

Origins of CHAT - German Philosophy from Andy Blunden on Vimeo.

Cultural-historical psychology (also called the school of Vygotsky, sociocultural psychology, socio-historical psychology, activity theory, cultural psychology, cultural historical activity theory, and social development theory) is a theory of psychology founded by Lev Vygotsky at the end of the 1920s and developed by his students and followers in Eastern Europe and worldwide.

VIDEO: the brave new world of social media -- that has such sharing in 't.

I 'm sure I'm thought u of within my circle as an obsessive. Here I am always talking up new media like its the best thing since when. I confess that I sometimes have my doubts and think that I'm merely on a manic surge of sorts and the phase will soon enough pass.

But the tune keeps coming back into my head like a compulsive sentence and every time I interface and experiment with Web 2.0 social media stuff I am always mightily impressed with what's there.

I've been up in the clouds for several years now and with one platform or another I'm always thinking, there is going to be a peak and then the whole thing will settle down to a sort of Darwinian survival balance of sorts as one web start-up beats the competition to more dollars than it is polite to snaffle.

But that hasn't happened. Instead the dynamic of online media -- the social platforms -- has quickened as though the virtual world run by digits is only just beginning to form a very brave new one.

I'm thinking of Shakespeare not Aldous Huxley,:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The Tempest (V, i)

I shared some comments from Brendan Cooney here -- robots vs luddites -- in regard to how the digital informational universe impacted on the traditional analysis of surplus value. In effect we possess the technology of socialism but lack the political means. to make it come about -- at least for now.

Indeed, the economics of this frontier are very challenging and not only for Marxists -- the capitalists are having one helluva time growing a dollar in the computer clouds.A ttempts to anchor this world wide webbery with some formatted theory -- such as the book Wikinomics, reviewed sharply here -- Wikinomics and hyperbole -- don't scrub up to much at all.

This frontier is moving so fast and has such massive demographics driving it that its direction is in no one hands but 'ours' -- all of us, everyday. Its' not even in Google's paw.

In regard to this option, I was having an exchange with Andy Blunden who runs the Vygotsky Marxist archive on the web -- and I'm a Vygotsky groupie I'm afraid (much like more than a few primary school teachers) -- and he suggested that our political challenge was grab these new social media tools with their massive collective potential and run with them as a primary modus operandi of radical politics. These were the sort of mediations that the Soviet psychologist was talking about. This is real time dialectical matter and motion being created in real time faster than any tool was ever formed by human hand before .

But this is where my credibility gets questioned -- as though I'm living in tangential universe , contained by a certain geekiness and driven by an arrogant hutzpah.

If that's the case, consider this video -- which is alive with statistics that drive home a few points that can only make me smirk. the video may try to present a capitalism -approved version of social media but it cannot help but get caught up in the wonder of it.

I told you so....O brave new world

Leggoland and the far left

Now and then I seek intellectual entertainments and will ferret around for a profound thought. And what could be more profound than a thought about thought.Take it away , Lev:

Thought is born through words. . . Consciousness is reflected in a word as the sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness." Lev Vygotsky (from Thought and Language)

In part this penchant we humans have to deploy words as tools to think with may explain some of the inability of the far lefts to relate to one another.

Perhaps you are thinking that surely all the far lefts speak the same language -- the language of Marxism?

Yes...and no.

In my experience each  left tendency has its own cant and its own patented world view that is sustained by using language as a sort  of Leggo. Before you can build the next floor, the next level of the thinking construction (often referred to as "the program"), you have to presume that another rests below it and that for all intents and purposes we are all speaking the same language sitting on the shoulders of the "words" -- especially buzz words -- that have gone before.

The complication being that inasmuch as you are isolated from the main business of society you tend to enclose and turn inwards as much with your outlook as your language.In part this explains some of the inability to win an argument on the far left because to concede one point here and there may bring down the whole house of cards.Rather than allow that to happen , many groups will establish shibboleths in order to defend their conceptual identity from all comers. These act as struts to hold the Leggoland in place being so sacred that they become identifiers akin to architectural styles. I guess you could call them 'kit' homes.

This may all seem a bit of a wank. And I guess I have to plead guilty .

But a recent post on Splintered Sunrise -- and Ireland based blog -- tackles this habit -- I guess it's  a habit -- with a telling critique of language deployed by the British Socialist Workers Party. Currently experiencing a bit of an internal faction fight, the SWP disputation is so rhetorically strong  that Splintered Sunrise has a field day  pulling out the threads and unraveling them.

It may all seem a bit esoteric as you may not have one iota of interest in a barney in a party at some distance to your self, over matters you have no familiarity with. Granted that that is a drawback. Nonetheless what Splintered Sunrise does is approach the challenge posed by the dispute with such a sharp eye for contradictory use of language and the mismanagement of fact  that I think we can all learn from the approach.

I find reading SWP Pre-Conference Bulletins something of an enervating experience, requiring you to work yourself up into that willing suspension of disbelief that dramatists aim for. There used to be an awful lot of ringing declarations of the party’s infallibility; statements so sweeping you would hope (usually in vain) that the more bumptious element wouldn’t take them literally; and libertyvalanced versions of events that you were sure didn’t happen like that. The factional situation this time round at least means there are two sides doing the libertyvalancing, and the claims of infallibility has been replaced by an acknowledgement that yes, some minor mistakes were made, but it was all the other lot’s fault. If you remember the polemics between Taaffeites and Grantites when Militant split, it’s a bit like that. There are also some good (and one or two quite strange) contributions from further down the hierarchy, which unfortunately will probably get lost in the mix.

Essentially what Splintered Sunrise is seeking is a return to materialism. This is why SS prefaces his comments with, what seems,a digression on György Lukács.

 That may seem tenuous except that I think SS has a strong point: to make  that this left which insists  that  it is loyal to the materialism of Karl Marx is infected  limb and branch with a gratuitous idealism. and  it is blithely unaware of how much its assessments of   and its   interventions in everyday reality are ruled and formatted by a the aspirations embedded in  ideas rather than the  actual occurrences. It's a  sort of doublethink.  Templated first in a mindset and imposed on reality via so many schemata that it is now so very difficult to grasp the living real world because there is so much cant in the way.

The Brain:the power of plasticity

Part 1 of 2: The Power of Plasticity
From ABC National's All in the Mind.

The dogma used to be that the adult brain was a rigid, unchangeable organ, but that pessimistic perspective is now being radically revised. Psychiatrist Dr Norman Doidge journeyed into the labs and lives of the `neuroplasticians´ -- once scientific mavericks, they're challenging the old neurological nihilism. Professor Jeffrey Schwartz is one. They both join Natasha Mitchell in discussion to reveal how the human brain has underestimated itself! Next week, plasticity on the couch...

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Original audio source

This audio program explores the nature of brain plasticity in some exciting detail. It suggests that the brain rather than being a organ sentenced to permanent habitual ways of functioning can be remade and renovated throughout the life cycle. Such a perspective, to me, seems in sync with the work on neurology begun by the Soviet Marxist scientists -- Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria.

Towards the end of the program there's the beginnings of a discussion about culture and brain function inasmuch as it impacts on perception.

In an age where we are being asked to bow down before the ideology of DNA it is worthwhile being reminded that humans, and maybe other animals, can adapt to and even often transcend whatever challenge we may have to deal with and that we are not so many components mechanically separated from other functionalities in our nervous system.

It is worthwhile noting what neuropasticity means: Neuroplasticity (variously referred to as brain plasticity, cortical plasticity or cortical re-mapping) refers to the changes that occur in the organization of the brain as a result of experience.

• See example: Brain Building -- Norman Doidge

Language and nationhood

by Dave Riley

Elsewhere in my political universe there's been an attempt to argue that West Papua didn't qualify to be included under the slogan of 'national self determination' leading to nationhood. These are some of my comments from a thread on the GLW eList. The discussion raised 'the problem'(!) that West Papua did not have a national linga franca

Here's a note below on the very many languages of Bougainville -- a island whose history is rich in the struggle for independence.

So because Bougainville cannot get its polyglot shit together are we then to assume that any pretense to independence and national self determination has to wait until the Bougainvillians -- some 175,160 people -- get the kosher nod from the registered nationhood specialists among us?

The irony is that Bougainville is one of the most linguistically various regions on earth. So no speaker da same -- no right to go it alone?

You'll also find mixed language groups in many regions that have been a tad keen on independence such as....Timor Leste.

[At least sixteen distinct languages are indigenous to East Timor, some of them closely related, others completely unrelated to each other. These can be divided into more than 30 groups of "dialects"].

So should it then follow that until such time as the Scots or the Irish can get all their tongues twisted around Gaelic they are mistaken in their long held desire for independence?

"There are several indigenous languages in Bougainville. These include both Austronesian and Papuan languages.

The most widely spoken Austronesian language is Halia and its dialects, spoken in the island of Buka and the Selau peninsula of Northern Bougainville. Other Austronesian languages include Petats, Solos, Saposa/Taiof, Hahon and Tinputz, all spoken in the northern quarter of Bougainville, Buka and surrounding islands. These languages are closely related. Banoni and Arawa are Austronesian languages not closely related to the former, which are spoken in the coastal areas of central and south Bougainville. All these languages are part of the Melanesian sub group of Austronesian languages.

In the nearby atolls of Mortlock Islands, an Austronesian language of the Polynesian sub group is spoken

The Papuan languages are all confined to the main island of Bougainville. These include Rotokas, a language with a very small inventory of phonemes, Eivo, Buin, Keriaka, Nasioi, Motuna, Usiai and several others. These languages are part of the East Papuan language family.

None of these languages is spoken by more than 20% of the entire population of Bougainville, and the largest languages such as Nasioi, Motuna, Buin and Halia are split into dialects that are not always mutually understandable. For general communication most Bougainvilleans use Tok Pisin as a lingua franca, and at least in the coastal areas Pisin is often learned by children in a bilingual environment. English and Tok Pisin are the languages of official business and government.

Basically, the technical definitions don't tell us everything we need to know.

You bet they don't! I've often thought that the Lenin definition was rather rigid and formalistic.

But it is a complex and important issue.The work that Lev Vygotsky did on language is interesting in this regard. He argues --as a 'historical psychologist' -- that language is a core mediator that both empowered and shaped the human brain such that 'culture' and 'identity' (as a human) was rooted in the acquisition and exercising of language skills.

That seems fine as language is the primary mediator which is utilized to define and name your environment socially. So having one language as distinct from another must therefore be a primary source of one's identity.

Fair enough it seems.

But, of course, it can never be that simple. Dogs have one "language" and a dog from China can communicate seemlessly with another from Botswana or Chile. So groups of dogs, if we were in Animal Farm mode, are very unlikely to get into national self determination despite the fact that greyhounds are separate breed from fox terriers.

My dogs don't care whose butt they sniff. They even think I'm canine.

But the language/identity/'nationality' issue really comes to the fore I think in regard to those among us who are hearing impaired.If you have ever been exposed to Deaf Culture you'll know that communicating with sign rather than with voice is something that sharply defines their language -- of "seeing voices' -- from the language of non signers and hearers. This issue is very politically charged and Oliver Sacks book on the topic (Seeing Voices)is well worth reading in regard to identity, culture and language.

My point is that Sacks -- a dedicated Vygotskian -- embraces signing as a standalone and separate culture and language in the same way that Lenin (& Stalin) would have argued in regard to nationality. And I'd think the Deaf Culture community would agree with that aspect of separation or difference.

The primary languages of those who identify themselves as Deaf are signed. Deaf communities also often possess social and cultural norms that are distinct from those of surrounding hearing communities. So why can't it be said that these Deaf communities have a greater 'right' to self determination than a group of Bougainvillians or West Papuans who speak many different languages but not so much one together that they can call their own?

They share the same language don't they? They are often cross generational too. So on a pecking order who has more 'right'?

So the argument over language becomes a bit schematic does it not? While its evident that localised deaf communities do have their own often enclosed and self contained culture driven by language (and such communities do actually exist where hearers and non hearers all sign)it no way follows that they could share a "national" identity. They have a very strong language identity and cultural one but that's it-- thats' as far as language can take them (despite the oftentimes radical separatism that occurs in the Deaf Culture community).

Nonetheless, in Quebec, where the population is predominantly French-speaking language goes a long way to determining both identity and your right to self determination and separation. (And the traditional Marxist view has been to support Quebec separatism)

That may seem OK in the Marxist sense that has been argued here.

But as I understand it there exists a law that if your mother tongue is French -- regardless of where you live in the world -- you can migrate to Quebec. This is akin to the Zionist credo that if you're Jewish -- Israel is your homeland regardless of where you may live.

Israel does not insist on migrants knowing Hebrew. I'm not suggesting that being Jewish gives a a group automatic right to 'national self determination'(as the Zionists argue) or to kick out Palestinians -- but I point out that there are many horses for courses; and even in the formal instance to rest your argument on the attainment of a national language is to project a very narrow reading of what constitutes the dynamics of nationhood.

No one for instance seems to ask the question that if the East Timorese were so keen to foster national self determination what about those Timorese in the West of the island?

No: nationhood, identity, and the desire for self determination is rooted in the ongoing dynamic of the historical experience of oppression which can in (as it turns out) most instances bring people, from different cultures and languages together.I think thats' so self evident that it hardly warrants being referenced in regard to West Papua or anywhere else.

Marx and ecology:Frederick Engels got it wrong a lot of the time but got it right where it counted

by Dave Riley

There's a thoughtful interview with John Bellamy Foster -- On “Marx’s ecology” - materialism and nature which is worth a squiz. Foster explores the oversight in Marxism in way of recognising and embracing the rich ecological tradition that underpins a lot of Marx and Engels thinking and work.

He says:

The irony is that thinkers like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins and Steven Rose did carry on a Marxists tradition in science that was very dialectical. Gould, Levins and Lewontin (and they weren’t alone - think of Haldane) became major figures in evolutionary theory, but the rest of the Marxist tradition ignored them.

I don't think that's quite true in my experience of Marxism these last forty years. It may be true of the Western Marxists in academia who Foster polemicises against -- but there has been a strong 'dialectical biology' thread in Marxism particularly as it related to debates on genetics, evolution and personalty. And these were debates Marxists in the real world of activism and change could not avoid...and these thinkers were not ignored.

Fortunately not all Marxist were 'westernized'...

The handicap has been that Marxists haven't been able to integrate this ecological/biological science with their everyday work. There's been a separation as Marx was harnessed primarily as a political and historical tool. No one was actually rushing to sign on with Marx's view that dialectical materialism was the "one science " -- because, unlike Engels, no registered Marxist was planning to update The Dialectics of Nature for the 20th, let alone the 21st century (as Lenin tried to do in the lead up to the 1917 Russian Revolution in the wake of discoveries in quantum physics).

Except for the crew Foster dips his lid to...and that tradition in biology (but there were others like Lev Vygotsky who were similarly engaged with dialectics but in field of psychology).

As Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin reminded us in their dedication for the 1985 edition of The Dialectical Biologist:

'To Frederick Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time but who got it right where it counted''

Part of the problem over the past 20 years has been that a lot of green theory has been sourced in anarchist tradition and in a few instances relied on the perspectives advocated by libertarians such as Prince Peter Kropotkin whose Mutual Aid: a factor in evolution was as much employed as a political treatise as it was a study in ecology. Green theory has also been held hostage to what Rudolf Bahro called "the last hesitation to socialism"-- a registered third way that was thought to be piloted without Marxian baggage.

Allied to this, as any keen reader of Stephen Jay Gould will tell you, is that comprehending ecology and the interactivity between organism and the environment had to weather the stormy debates that accompanied Darwinism, read as crude genetics. Then sociobiology , the quintessential biologic ideology of conservatism, asserted itself as a harsh determinism for almost everything about us as a species you care to question.

You know the mantra:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

So while the touchy feely edge of the green movement was moving into holistic mode -in health and pseudo science -- under the aegis of the I Ching and related metaphysical concepts-- this new spirituality which accompanied that drift was not matched or counteracted by a keener commitment to the philosophy of Marxism -- as the practice of it had fallen into a sort of neglect, and treated with disdain in some quarters under the influence of these same Western Marxists, Foster targets.

For those who can recall any of it, part of the drum was that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was thought to be a bit of a bad influence on Marx and the Marxists. But is was from Hegel that Marx got a lot of his radical philosophical bent. It was similarly argued that Frederick Engel was an unfortunate and too much a freehand editor of Marx...and soforth.

In my view, we missed an opportunity presented by the publication of Lovelock's and Margulis' Gaia Hypothesis back in 1979 to re-orientate.Not a Dialectical Materialist work as such, but holistic and inter relational.

I can blame the packaging: Greek goddesses are not kosher icons among dedicated materialists. And this "Gaia" concept -- offered to Lovelock by the novelist William Golding [The Lord of the Flies author]-- thereafter served to help seed the environment movement with a spiritual substrate rather than a rigorous and hard hat science. This approach was encouraged by the fact that Lovelock and Marguilis' hypothesis was canned by main stream science and Lovelock persisted for some time with the liberal use of deifying metaphors.

I think a bias crept in which was later shorn up by a preference in green debates to default to anarchy speak and defer to a crude concept of ecological "balance" -- balance being almost anathema in Marxism.

Today, the scientific work throughout the eighties and nineties which sort to steer investigation away from reductionism has facilitated this new promise and comprehension we are all -- Marxist and non Marxist; left and green alike --harnessing today.

There is, nonetheless, a core aspect of Marxism that needs to be asserted quite strongly I believe: that rather than 'having' an ecology, Marxism is ecology. It is study of the relationship between things: classes, celestial bodies, atoms, molecules,species, plants, ideas...any and everything in the way that any and anything relates to any and everything else.

So while the local forest may be a relationship between many living and inanimate things; capitalism is also a relationship between many living and inanimate things.

• Also see: Diamat makes a comeback (GLW 1993)
• and this review: Who said Marx wasn't a greenie?
  

Romantic Science

I have been writing a touch on the topic of ecosocialism and going on about how little I cared for the term.

The irony is that I am very enamored with the notion of dialectical biology as I see that as a very descriptive term that I like to use. Since I'm no scientist please excuse my ready name drop of a science I'm not so very good at in specialist detail.

The concept of dialectical biology is explored in an important 1986 book by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin which predates the more recent review of the same topic by John Bellamy Foster with his Marx’s Ecology,

So there is a body of work that embraces a sort of holistic take of life on earth that is not held hostage to a reductionism that is so much the mode in so many of the biological sciences. And when you approach the Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock y(and it is Lovelocks' holistic science that begins to explain the consequences and causes of runaway carbon emissions) you can really green yourself up by expunging Gaia's mythic investment to settle on a dialectical materialist view of the planet and its living things.

It's like a rewrite (but with much better science) of Frederick Engels Dialectics of Nature where everything is meshed together and synergistic.

My point is that the methodology of Marxism -- dialectical materialism -- is a great way to comprehend the current carbonation of the planet and the part played in that by the capitalist mode of production.

That's my greening, you see. The issue is broader than ecosocialism and bigger than King Kong.

However I want to throw a little something extra into the pot: Alexander Luria. (pictured)

Luria was a Soviet neuropsychologist of some significant standing. He was for instance a mentor to Oliver Sacks and partnered the groundbreaking work of Lev Vygotsky on the nature of thought, language, culture and development.

[Excuse this route I'm pursuing but I want to give the man some context.]

Luria wrote an autobiography The making of mind which included an important chapter on "Romantic Science".

The web kindly offers us that chapter here for our perusal..I suggest you go and read it with the planet's ecological ill health in mind, because Luria talks about the one science -- the science of Dialectical Materialism. (Nickname: DiaMat)

If you are wondering how we got from ecosocialism to something romantic , you can blame Goethe who wrote for Luria's inspiration this line in Faust:

"Grey is every theory, ever green the tree of life."

Marxists aren't usually thought of as exponents of much romance at all. But the way Luria calls it(with some help from Goethe), it is so very easy to become passionate about the science of Marxism and still come up so very green as green can be.

LURIA:I have always admired Lenin's observation that a glass, as an object of science, can be understood only when it is viewed from many perspectives. With respect to the material of which it is made, it becomes an object of physics; with respect to its value, an object of economics; and with respect to its form, an object of aesthetics. The more we single out important relations during our description, the closer we come to the essence of the object, to an understanding of its qualities and the rules of its existence. And the more we preserve the whole wealth of its qualities, the closer we come to the inner laws that determine its existence. It was this perspective which led Karl Marx to describe the process of scientific description with the strange-sounding expression, “ascending to the concrete.”