Lev Vygotsky:Revoltn Scientist

Fred Newman, Lois Holzman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134922079
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First Published in 1993. Vygotsky railed against the 'aboutness' that permeated both the form and content of the Western scientific, social-scientific and philosophical traditions they both inherited. This book was written as an introduction of Vygotsky life and works to college and university students.

Chapter 1

Vygotsky and psychology

A debate within a debate

By all accounts, Lev Vygotsky was a brilliant and charismatic thinker, speaker, mentor and builder. He is credited by some with breaking through the stalemate in the debates within Russian and European academic circles about what was the proper object of psychological study, thus influencing the historical course of psychology as a human science from the 1920s up to the present and, in the process, giving birth to what can be properly identified as a Soviet psychology.¹

Born in 1896 (the same year as Jean Piaget), as an adolescent Vygotsky was passionately interested in philosophy, literature and culture. He was a brilliant student who, as a Jew in anti-Semitic czarist Russia, was limited in the fields of study and professions open to him. Nevertheless, he managed to complete a law degree, write a dissertation on the psychology of art, teach and publish literary works before turning his attention and creativity to fundamental questions of human development and learning.

Although he contracted tuberculosis at the age of 24 and was sickly throughout his short life of thirty-seven years, Vygotsky became the leading Marxist theoretician among the post-revolutionary Soviet psychologists. He formulated one of his primary concerns in this way: ‘What new forms of activity were responsible for establishing labor as the fundamental means of relating humans to nature and what are the psychological consequences of these forms of activity?’ (1978, p. 19). Even passing familiarity with traditional developmental psychology texts is enough for this question to strike the reader as radical: Vygotsky is talking about activity, not behavior or personality or traits; he claims that human activity (as yet unspecified) produced a specific human activity, namely labor, as the fundamental organization of the relationship between human beings and nature, and that there are psychological consequences of these forms of activity. This question and the premises underlying it are steeped in the Marxian world view, dialectical historical materialism.²

Vygotsky’s accomplishments are impressive: he played a key role in the restructuring of the Psychological Institute of Moscow; he set up research laboratories in the major cities of the Soviet Union and founded what we call special education. He authored some one hundred and eighty papers, many of which are just now being published. Vygotsky’s practical goal during his lifetime was to reformulate psychology according to Marxist methodology in order to develop concrete ways to deal with the massive tasks facing the Soviet Union—a society attempting to move rapidly from feudalism to socialism. He was the acknowledged leader, in the 1920s and ‘30s, of a group of Soviet scholars who passionately pursued the building of a new psychology in the service of what it was hoped would be a new kind of society. As a contemporary Vygotskian scholar has described it:

This period, especially after the Civil War in 1922, was one of upheaval, enthusiasm, and energy unimaginable by today’s standards. People such as Vygotsky and his followers devoted every hour of their lives to making certain that the new socialist state, the first grand experiment based on Marxist-Leninist principles, would succeed.

(Wertsch, 1985, p. 10)

Tragically, Stalin would all too soon put an end to this brief period of creativity and experimentation during which attempts were made to transform every area of human life—not only politics and economics, but also art and culture, science, the family, education and labor.

The empirical work of Vygotsky and his followers focused on education and remediation, and dealt with illiteracy, cultural differences among the hundreds of ethnic groups that formed the new nation, and the absence of services for those unable to participate fully in the new society. Further, Vygotsky never abandoned his love for art and literature nor his fascination with the clues to subjectivity he believed they held. Although his later works dealt less often with poetry and drama than the earlier ones, his methodological and psychological writings are clearly those of an intensely poetic author. Familiar with the work of the radical and avant-garde filmmakers, dramatists, graphic artists and painters of the immediate post-revolutionary period, he knew some of them personally as well (e.g. the poet Mayakovsky, the filmmaker Eisenstein and the stage director Stanislavsky).

Though they never met face to face, during the 1920s Vygotsky and Piaget were engaged in an intellectual debate about the relationship between language and thought in early child development. For the next thirty years, little was known about Vygotsky’s work either in his own country (where it was suppressed under Stalin) or in the rest of the world, and the post-World War II West slowly began to embrace Piagetian theory and research. Then, in 1962, the first English translation of a significant portion of his writings was published (Thought and Language). While a few psychologists and linguists read the book with enthusiasm, Thought and Language did not have any significant impact on these fields. It was not until sixteen years later, in 1978, when the second English-language volume of Vygotsky’s writings, Mind in Society (edited by Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner and Ellen Souberman), was published that Vygotsky’s presence began to be taken seriously.

The vast changes in the world created the conditions for a more receptive audience among Western scholars for the materialist, social-cultural perspective on human development in general and the development of thought and speech in particular.³ The practicality of Vygotsky’s insights and experiments concerning instruction and pedagogy in the elementary school years and for the developmentally delayed and/or disabled was of greater interest.

The fields of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics had flowered in the late 1960s and early ’70s, in large part due to the ‘linguistic revolution’ precipitated by Chomsky’s scientific discoveries about language and grammar in the 1950s. With these new disciplines came a keen interest in the early years of childhood, in the origins and acquisition of language, thought and communication. The philosophy of language, especially the seminal writings on meaning, predication, explanation and speech acts by Wittgenstein and his followers, Austin, Searle and others, began to have an influence on linguistics; their work led to intense research interest in the ‘pragmatics of communication,’ and, again, a search for the origins of such social skills. Not just words in themselves but ‘how to do things with words’ became a major focus (Austin, 1962). Side by side with the emergence of cognitive science approaches—which tended to look ‘inside the head’ for explanations of the remarkable intelligence and achievements of infants and very young children—were attempts to develop alternative paradigms, or models, to capture and express the essential socialness of language and communication. The more socially oriented scientists went beyond offering critiques of the reductionistic, positivistic paradigm which dominated developmental research and tried to develop new models. Many returned to studying the rich historical tradition of models and paradigms outside of and, in some cases, oppositional to the mainstream of psychology, with its focus on the individual as the proper unit of analysis; they found much that was useful in these older works, and applied their insights to contemporary social and scientific issues.⁴ Within this rich intellectual environment, Vygotsky’s work was a gold mine.

What also made Vygotsky more appealing in the 1970s and ’80s than in the early ’60s were the socio-political changes occurring in the institution of human science research. In the United States, for example, no longer were ‘applied’ areas of the social sciences (e.g. child development, learning and instruction, reading and literacy) regarded so plainly as of lower status than the ‘pure’ areas. With the failure of President Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty,’ the federal government was making severe cutbacks in research funds and insisting on a more pragmatic justification for the money it did allocate for research. Many of the once ‘pure’ social scientists in psychology, anthropology, sociology and linguistics were forced to turn their attention to applied areas in order to continue their careers. Many were also truly concerned about the severe social problems of the day, especially the impact of poverty and racism on educational failure and the role of communication in cognitive and social development and underdevelopment. There was a quiet optimism among some scholars that a more socially based and socially relevant psychology could contribute to alleviating, if not eliminating, social ills and injustice.⁵

The decade 1978–88 was a period of intense research activity. The group of psychologists, linguists, anthropologists and educators working and training others in the Vygotskian tradition grew and became international, to the point where in the late 1980s the existence of a Vygotsky ‘revival’ was noted (Holzman, 1989; Kozulin, 1986a). In the Soviet Union and many other countries, there was an upsurge in the publication of Vygotsky’s writings (suppressed in the Soviet Union for fifty years) and works about Vygotsky and Vygotskian research—in 1988–91 alone, no fewer than seven new books appeared.⁶ Increasingly, we find references to Vygotsky’s relevance to practitioners in early childhood, special education and adult literacy in newsletters and publications of associations for professionals and paraprofessionals in these fields, such as the American Montessori Society and the American Federation of Teachers.⁷ Textbooks in developmental psychology that formerly had devoted a couple of sentences (at most) to Vygotsky now treat him as a ‘school’ nearly on a par with Piaget, Freud, Skinner and social learning theorists, and the recently established US National Teacher Examination includes questions on Vygotsky.⁸ To all intents and purposes Lev Vygotsky, the radical Marxist psychologist, has entered the mainstream of psychology.

THE DEBATE ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY

To the naive mind, revolution and history seem incompatible. It believes that historical development continues as long as it follows a straight line. When a change comes, a break in the historical fabric, a leap—then this naive mind sees only catastrophe, a fall, a rupture; for the naive mind history ends until back again straight and narrow. The scientific mind, on the contrary, views revolution as the locomotive of history forging ahead at full speed; it regards the revolutionary epoch as a tangible, living embodiment of history. A revolution solves only those tasks which have been raised by history: this proposition holds true equally for revolution in general and for aspects of social and cultural life.

(Vygotsky, quoted in Levitan, 1982, inside front cover)

The sheer weight of years of hard, creative work by committed Vygotskian scholars, coupled with the astonishing events that took place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in late 1989—and which continue as we write this—have transformed what was a revival of interest and research activity into a full-fledged psychological, philosophical and political debate. What is the relevance of Vygotsky’s work to psychology today? With the demise of communism, why should we be interested in the works of a Marxist? Which of his contributions can help us deal with contemporary social issues? Was he primarily a psychologist, a methodologist, a literary critic? Was he really a Marxist: did he merely pay lip service to Marxian conceptions; was Marxism just one of several intellectual traditions that Vygotsky—according to some, a classical eclectic—incorporated into his very original thinking; or did the new world view that was Marxism permeate his entire life’s work? Was he a hard-line Stalinist? What debt did he owe to Lenin? Why was his work suppressed in the Soviet Union for half a century—because he refused to censor Western (bourgeois) thinkers from his writings; or because his work, particularly what he accomplished in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was too radical for the bureaucratic and totalitarian Stalin? What are we to make of the recent flurry of interest in Vygotsky? Stripped of his Marxism, is he distorted to ‘fit in’ with Western psychological theory, as really a Piagetian or Deweyian or Meadian, or even an information processing psychologist, after all? How are we to understand his passion for poetry, theater, film? As the ‘real’ Vygotsky? As the idealism and spiritualism of a Russian Jewish intellectual youth? Or as a critical component of his contributions to a new theory and practice of human development? These questions and others contribute to the current (relatively) healthy intellectual-political climate in which fundamental issues about the relationships between psychology and politics, social science and social change, and reform and revolution are not only being raised, but increasingly appear in some manner, shape or form in the mass media.⁹

While we will touch upon all these topics to varying degrees, our main focus will be the role of Vygotsky and his followers in the contemporary debate about the very nature of psychology as a scientific enterprise. Of course, this is not a new debate. In its short history, psychology has had ongoing lively and heated discussion on such questions as: What is its proper subject matter? How does one engage in studying it? What paradigm, or model, will dominate—an existing one, such as the natural science paradigm, or something entirely new?¹⁰ Does a dominant and agreed upon psychological paradigm exist or is the psychological community still in the process of developing it? Some of the more radical voices in this century-long debate include the phenomenological psychologists, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, and adherents of humanistic psychology, hermeneutics, the anti-psychiatry and anti-psychology movements, and dialectical psychology and fem inist psychology.¹¹ The Vygotskians bring still another dimension (and debates about it) to this broader debate.

PSYCHOLOGIST AND/OR METHODOLOGIST

Vygotsky as psychologist and/or Vygotsky as methodologist is a useful shorthand for characterizing the role of Vygotsky in the debate within the debate. The two descriptions raise the question of the vantage point from which one sees psychology in general and Vygotsky’s contributions in particular. Perhaps even more importantly, the connective ‘and/or’ suggests Vygotsky’s radical unwillingness to make a sharp distinction between the substantive content of psychology—what it is about—and its more formalistic (for some, meta-psychological) method—how it is done.

Treating Vygotsky as primarily a psychologist assumes that psychology’s nature is relatively clear, its subject matter and paradigm established. On this account, Vygotsky has made major contributions to the development of psychology and, while he has perhaps made some important methodological contributions, his work fits comfortably inside the dominant paradigm and can advance, deepen and reform psychological practice as it currently exists. Further, according to this view, his scientific significance will ultimately be a function of the ability of contemporary researchers to apply his specific findings about human development to contemporary social issues. Many modern Vygotskian researchers understand Vygotsky in just this way. (We will discuss their work in subsequent chapters.)

An alternative view (which we share with a number of philosophers, historians and psychologists)—taking Vygotsky as a methodologist who did psychological research in the interest of discovering what psychology is—characteristically begins from the vantage point that a psychological paradigm has not yet evolved and that there is still an active debate concerning the very nature and activity of psychology itself. From this point of view, Vygotsky’s work was and remains foundational: he was engaged in investigating the nature of paradigms in general and psychological paradigms in particular as an essential part of developing a qualitatively new science. As Bakhurst put it, ‘For Vygotsky, the identity of psychology as a science depended on the degree to which it could contribute to the transformation of the object it investigates. Its tasks were not simply to mirror reality but to harness reality’ (1986, pp. 122–3).

Certainly Vygotsky made contributions to our understanding of human development, in particular the nature of learning and the relationship of language to thought. But on this view (which is also ours) he remained true to the scientific task of investigating the very nature of psychological science even as he made a host of practical-critical discoveries within the science of psychology.

Significantly, Vygotsky was a Marxist methodologist. Neither he nor Marx ultimately succeeded in creating a full-blown paradigm (or, if you prefer, an anti-paradigm)¹² for psychology, economics or history, but both advanced the ongoing debate regarding the very nature of paradigms in the specific context of their efforts to discover/create a genuine comprehension of human progress and human science.

What was Marx’s methodology? The textbook version presented in the philosophy, political science and even some psychology literat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Vygotsky and psychology: a debate within a debate
• 2 The laboratory as methodology
• 3 Practice: Vygotsky’s tool-and-result methodology and psychology
• 4 The zone of proximal development: a psychological unit or a revolutionary unity?
• 5 Playing in/with the ZPD
• 6 Reform and revolution in the study of thinking and speech
• 7 Completing the historical Vygotsky
• 8 Logic and psychotherapy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index