Reading :: The Soul of a New Machine

The Soul of a New Machine

By Tracy Kidder

Just a quick acknowledgement that I finally read this book, which is frequently used to illustrate Latour’s points in Science in Action. Since Latour used it, I was expecting an ethnography, but instead it’s an engaging, fast-paced account of how a team of engineers at Data General designed a superminicomputer (the Eclipse MV/8000) and brought it to market in a remarkably short amount of time. 

This 1981 book is a terrific read, introducing us to different people and different phases of the project, helping us to understand what drives them and how their organization has been set up, and also showing how Data General exploited the spirit and curiosity of these young engineers (mostly early 20s). At one point, an salaried engineer working 80 hours a week discovers the pay stub of a contractor in the wastebasket — and realizes that this hourly contractor, working overtime, is making twice as much as the engineer. After some thought, the engineer and his manager decide to burn the pay stub so that the other engineers won’t see it.

Kidder plays up the Machiavellian machinations of the group’s manager, and I can see how this figure caught Latour’s imagination at that point in his career. But I was also intrigued by the accounts of debugging, which brought back my memories as a computer science student in 1988-1991 (a few years after the events in the book). Although I didn’t work on hardware, I certainly spent many late night sessions, or all nighters, poring over code, tracking down bugs, and figuring out how to do things that (I imagined) no one else had done in quite the same way. So I identified with the engineers and their motivations, even as I wanted to tell them to hold out for better compensation and to work fewer hours. 

The book is definitely a product of its time, and some of the reported statements that seemed colorful or interesting to Kidder ring as blatantly racist and sexist today. For instance, at one point, an engineer walks through a computer expo with Kidder, pointing out how the IBM booth had “just the right number” of women and Blacks. (In contrast, the Data General team had just one woman, and although Kidder doesn’t mention race, he is quick to mention which engineers are Jewish.) So sometimes the book makes uneasy reading. But still fascinating reading. If you want to get a sense of what drove the incredible leaps in computer technology in the late 1970s and early 1980s, definitely pick up this gripping book. 

Reading :: Perezhivanie, Emotions, and Subjectivity

Perezhivanie, Emotions, and Subjectivity: Advancing Vygotsky’s Legacy

Ed. by Marilyn Fleer, Fernando Gozalez Rey, and Nikolai Veresov

Lev Vygotsky has been incredibly influential in educational psychology and beyond, primarily through the works of his instrumentalist period (e.g., Mind in Society) and those that at least gesture toward the thoughts of his holistic period (e.g., Thought and Language). Both deal primarily with cognition. But Vygotsky was also interested in the question of personality. His works on personality were much thinner, but he saw it as a critical part of an overall psychology. In this context, he used the terms perezhivanie (singular) and perezhivaniya (plural) to refer to units of the formation of personality. Vygotsky either used the term of referred to it in writings as early as “Concrete Human Psychology” (1929) and as late as a 1935 lecture on pedology. In these instances, perezhivanie relates to how individuals’ personalities develop as they process emotions about experiences they undergo. But as Peter Smagorinsky argues elsewhere, perezhivanie “remains more of a tantalizing notion than a concept with a clear meaning” (2011).

In this collection, Fleer, Gonzalez Rey, and Veresov aim to clarify and develop the concept. The book starts with a lengthy introduction by the editors, followed by four parts: Perezhivanie (focusing on the concept), Emotions, Subjectivity, and New Challenges and Perspectives. 

Of these, I found the opening chapter and the first part the most useful, since they develop the concept more fully. 

The introduction, “Perezhivanie, Emotions, and Subjectivity: Setting the Stage” (Fleer, Gonzalez Rey, and Veresov) reviews past use of the term, then theorizes it: “Rather than examining emotions, perezhivanie and subjectivity as the result of internalised operations, this chapter puts forth the view that these concepts must be understood as a generative system inseparable from the individual. … It is through understanding the human psyche as the unity of social, personal, and environmental characteristics, that it becomes possible to advance on the essence of the three concepts that are the focus of this book, and thus to generate new understandings of what might constitute a contemporary reading of perezhivanie, emotions and subjectivity” (p.1). Later in the chapter, they state that “perezhivanie is a tool (concept) for analysing the influence of the sociocultural environment, not on the individual per se, but on the process of development of the individual” (p.10). Whereas social determinism might assume that the environment directly determines the child, this approach understands the environment as influencing the individual’s development — a dialectical process in which the individual becomes a unique subject. The authors link this process to Vygotsky’s discussion of the social situation of development (p.10). “Perezhivanie is a unit of analysis of a social situation of development,” they argue, a unity that cannot be divided into social and individual parts (p.11). They also use the analogy of the individual as a prism that refracts (not reflects) the environment (p.11). (Recall that Vygotsky’s late work was attacked by Stalinists in part because it did not hew closely enough to Lenin’s reflection theory.) 

In Part I, chapters review perezhivanie from various angles. Mok overviews interpretations of perezhivanie, including from activity theory. Veresov distinguishes between perezhivanie as an empirical phenomenon and a concept, in the process digging deeply into the works of Vygotsky. Hammer extends this theoretical perspective to the domain of early childhood educational settings. 

In Part II, “Emotions,” authors get into actual studies that mobilize the concept of perezhivanie. Fleer examines “how everyday interactions in a preschool environment can contribute to the emotional development of young preschool children,” specifically “when engaged in self-directed activities where teachers and other children spontaneously respond to the dramatic moments found in everyday play practices” (p.85). March and Fleer theorize emotional regulation as “the dynamic interplay of interpsychological and intrapsychological functioning during moments of emotional expression” and draw from “the findings of a close study of the conditions for supporting one child’s emotional regulation” (p.105). Chen also examines emotional regulation, this time in “everyday family life” (p.129). Fleer and Gonzalez Rey examine “two case examples, where a medical model is used to explain children’s behaviours, resulting in a deficit view of the children” and provide an alternate reading grounded in perezhivanie (p.145).

In Part III, “Subjectivity,” authors provide a mix of theory pieces and studies. Gonzalez Rey “outlines a general picture of the phenomenon of subjectivity in Soviet psychology” by examining an eclectic set of writings, then proposes understanding “subjectivity as a system that permits to understand how the historical experiences and the simultaneous contexts of the individual current’s [sic] life experiences appear together in new units of subjectivity, defined by the author as the intertwined movements between subjective configurations and subjective senses” (p.173). He contrasts this understanding with that of dialogical psychologists such as Matusov (p.186-on). Gonzalez Rey and Martinez discuss the epistemological and methodological challenges posed by perezhivanie and sense, challenges that were not met when these concepts were “not in focus during Soviet times,” and proposes “the Qualitative Epistemology on which the basis of a constructive interpretive methodology is developed as a path for the study of subjectivity from a cultural-historical standpoint,” using a case study to illustrate (p.195). Gonzalez Rey, Martinez, Rossato, and Goulart use two case studies to explore understanding processes and subjective units as “new qualitative subjective productions” rather than reflections (p.217). 

In Part IV, “New Challenges and Perspectives,” the authors think about the future development of perezhivanie. Fleer, Gonzalez-Rey, and Veresov write the sole chapter of this part (the final chapter). Here, they “theorise the relations between the concepts introduced, building new theoretical insights, but also explicitly introducing methodological challenges yet to be faced by the cultural-historical community as they engage in research which draws upon these concepts” (p.247).

In all, the collection has more coherence and consistency than most collections I’ve read. That’s probably due to the fact that the editors have a hand in nearly all of the chapters. At the same time, that coherence means that the book is more narrowly focused than it might have been otherwise. For instance, as someone who uses activity theory and Vygotskian concepts to investigate groups and organizations, I wanted to see how perezhivanie might be used to understand group experiences of adults within these systems —- but in their case studies and illustrations, the authors focus almost exclusively on the development of individual children ass they go through social experiences. 

Still, this collection was critical to my understanding of the concept of perezhivanie. I’m not convinced that Vygotsky left us enough to reconstruct his theory of perezhivanie per se, and I’m also not convinced that he even had an articulated theory, but the authors have provided a coherent, credible picture of what a reasonable Vygotskian theory of perezhivanie would look like. If you want to understand this concept, if you would like a solid platform on which to build your own thoughts or studies of perezhivanie, this book is a must-have.