Reading :: Learning by Expanding, 2ed

Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research (Second Edition)
By Yrjo Engestrom

Yrjo Engestrom's 1987 book Learning by Expanding is a hugely influential book. Published the same year that he earned his PhD, LBE lucidly described activity theory, applied it to adult education, and expanded it to address a more globalized, networked world. The book was picked up fairly quickly in human-computer interaction research, but also in my field of writing studies, and for the same reason: we were searching for a contextualized, developmental account of cognition that was more socioculturally oriented than information-processing cognitive science, but more structured and cognitively oriented than anthropology.

LBE has been available for some time on the UCSD website, both in HTML and PDF. I inadequately reviewed that version back in 2003. But in late December 2014, Cambridge University Press put out the second edition, making it far easier for scholars to obtain and cite this influential book.

Although this book is the second edition, as Engestrom explains in the Preface, the original text is only lightly revised for style. The major addition is a new introductory chapter that discusses how the theory of expansive learning has been taken up since its publication.

So let's spend some time with that introduction: "Learning by Expanding: Origins, Applications, and Challenges." Here, Engestrom recalls three reasons for writing the book.

The first reason was "in order to formulate a strong alternative to the dominant Cartesian views of cognition and learning that depicted the human mind as if it were a computer, isolated from the cultural context." It was part of the same "groundswell" as everyday cognition, situated action, and cognition in practice (p.xiii). (And that is what made it especially attractive to those of us in writing studies in the early 1990s.)

The second reason, he says, was methodological. Engestrom had "grown up as an activist of the radical student movement [and] was convinced that research needs to be actively involved in making the world better" (p.xiii). So, rather than developing an observational methodology, he wanted to develop an interventionist one. Activity theory, he says, was developed in the USSR in interventionist terms, so it was a strong fit.

The third reason was that AT was a

potent framework for understanding and changing the world. In the Soviet Union, activity theory had a sixty-year history of original insights, groundbreaking research, and severe oppression. In the West, Vygotsky's work was found and promoted from the 1960s on in escalating steps by well-known North American scholars, such as Jerome Bruner (1962) and Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner (1978). Activity theory, the most important heir and extension of Vygotsky's legacy, was primarily discovered by radical European scholars and students in the 1970s and 1980s mainly through the works of Leont'ev (1978). In the late 1970s the works of Vassily Davydov (1977, 1990) made a strong impression on me, and I was fortunate enough to persuade him to visit Finland in the early 1980s. The first international conference on activity theory was organized in West Berlin in 1986. Learning by Expanding is a fruit of that movement. (p.xiv). 

I've quoted the above at length because it's part of the AT origin story that Engestrom set forth in the original LBE.  He recapitulates that origin story in the next section. According to Engestrom, AT has gone through three generations, which I'll designate as 1GAT, 2GAT, and 3GAT:

1GAT: Centered around Vygotsky's insight into mediation, illustrated in Vygotsky's triangular model of subject, object, and mediating artifact. Inserting a cultural artifact into the subject-object relationship "was revolutionary in that the basic unit of analysis now overcame the split between the Cartesian individual and the untouchable societal structure. ... Objects became cultural entities and the object orientedness of action became the key to understanding human psyche" (p.xiv). Yet the focus was limited to the individual.

2GAT: That limitation was "overcome by the second generation, led and inspired by Leont'ev's work" (p.xiv). Leont'ev "showed how historically evolving division of labor had brought about the crucial differentiation between an individual action and a collective activity" (pp.xiv-xv). Yet, Engestrom says, "the relationship between object-oriented production and communicative exchange beween people remained somewhat unclear in Leont'ev's work" and Vygotsky's triangle diagram was never graphically expanded in this work (p.xv). Beyond that, in the Soviet Union, activity theorists mostly restricted their studies to "play and learning among children" and "Contradictions of activity remained an extremely touchy issue" (p.xv). In the 1970s, he recounts, radical researchers in the West picked up the concept and applied it to other domains, including work, and Ilyenkov's writings on contradictions became incorporated. Yet 2GAT was insensitive to cultural diversity, as Cole pointed out (p.xv).

3GAT: Here, Engestrom drops the human actors in his sentences; you can mentally insert "Engestrom" as the actor in these sentences, since he defined this agenda in LBE.

The third generation of activity theory is developing conceptual tools to understand networks of interacting activity systems, dialogue, and multiple perspectives and voices. In this mode of research, the basic model is expanded to include minimally two interacting activity systems. This move toward networks of activities, while still in an embryonic form, was anticipated in the original text of Learning by Expanding" (p.xv)

He adds that in 3GAT, intersecting activity systems have "partially shared and often fragmented objects" (p.xv) and studying them involves studying subjectivity, embodiment, emotion, and identity (pp.xv-xvi). And

there is a risk that activity theory is split into the study of activity systems, organizations, and history, on the one hand, and subjects, actions, and situations, on the other hand. This is exactly the kind of split the founders of activity theory set out to overcome. To bridge and integrate the two directions, serious theoretical and empirical efforts are needed. (p.xvi)

He sets out such efforts, seeing developmental work research as an agenda of application. Here's his summary of LBE's themes:

The central ideas of this book may be condensed into the following five claims: (1) The object-oriented and artifact-mediated collective activity system is the prime unit of analysis in cultural-historical studies of human conduct; (2) historically evolving inner contradictions are the chief sources of movement, change, and development in activity systems; (3) expansive learning is a historically new type of learning, which emerges as practitioners struggle through developmental transformations in their activity systems, moving across collective zones of proximal development; (4) the dialectical method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete is the key for mastering cycles of expansive learning; and (5) an interventionist research methodology that aims at pushing forward, mediating, recording, and analyzing cycles of expansive learning in activity systems is needed. (p.xvi)

Here, Engestrom discusses how each of these claims has been explored in the time since LBE was published (primarily citing his work and the work of his students). I won't treat these as exhaustively as the above, but I'll pick out some things that are interesting for my own current line of inquiry.

One is that "The theory of expansive learning is a process or phase theory of learning. In other words, it proposes an ideal-typical sequence of learning actions that together make an expansive learning cycle"—but, Engestrom adds, this sequence is not universal or strongly prescriptive (p.xviii).

Another is that "The theory of expansive learning is based on the dialectics of ascending from the abstract to the concrete" (p.xx; cf. Ilyenkov). In the expansive cycle, individual subjects begin by questioning an accepted practice. Through a cycle or spiral of learning, they expand into a "collective movement or institution." This learning spiral involves constructing and resolving "successively evolving contradictions in the activity system" (p.xx). Engestrom cites Davydov's ideal-typical sequence of learning in the classroom:

According to Davydov (2008), an ideal-typical sequence of learning activity consists of the following six learning actions: (1) transforming the conditions of the task in order to reveal the universal relationship of the object under study; (2) modeling the identified relationship in a material, graphic, or literal form; (3) transforming the model of the relationship in order to study its properties in their "pure guise"; (4) constructing a system of particular tasks that are resolved by a general mode; (5) monitoring the performance of the preceding actions; and (6) evaluating the assimilation of the general mode that results from resolving the given learning task. (p.xx-xxi)

Engestrom describes what he sees as a parallel expansive learning cycle:

1. Questioning
2. Analyzing
3. Modeling
4. Examining the model
5. Implementing the model
6. Reflecting on the process and "consolidating its outcomes into a new stable form of practice" (p.xxi)

Large-scale cycles, he says, may contain smaller-scale ones (p.xxii). (I of course thought of Boyd's OODA loop here, although it is not learning so much as adjusting tactically and strategically.)

Under "The Vertical and the Horizontal in Learning and Development," Engestrom discusses the fact that (3G)AT's activity systems are "multi-voiced" and the "horizontal" aspect of the activity is thus dialogical, involving a "discursive search for shared meanings" (p.xxiv). Engestrom cites Bakhtin via Wertsch here. Citing Ritva Engestrom's 1995 argument that Bakhtin's ideas on language parallel Leont'ev's levels of activity, he adds, "One might say that activity theory, and developmental work research as its application, incorporated dialogue and discourse into their foundational repertoires in the 1990s" (p.xxiv). Certainly that's about the time that we in writing studies started putting together AT-genre syntheses. And most likely it could not have been done earlier, in the Soviet Union. 

Engestrom addresses some common critiques of 3GAT. For instance, he acknowledges Bakhurst's critique that AT's triangular models have minimal predictive power and seem developed to address only certain kinds of (well structured) activities; he says that the counterexamples that Bakhurst proffers are not "relatively durable collective activities" (p.xxviii). Bakhurst also critiques the 3GAT understanding of contradictions and says that Ilyenkov would be "dismayed" by this application; but Engestrom argues that Bakhurst doesn't really understand what Ilyenkov means by contradictions (p.xxiv; contra Engestrom, Bakhurst does understand what Ilyenkov is trying to say, he just doesn't find it to be plausible).

Finally, at the end of the introductory chapter, Engestrom addresses the future of the theory. 3GAT faces challenges. For instance, "Activity systems are increasingly interconnected and the combinations of activities keep changing rapidly"; thus Engestrom and collaborators have developed the concept of negotiated knotworking, "involving new tools and rules for rapidly pulsing renegotiation of the object" (p.xxxvi). Another is "runaway objects" or "hyperobjects," "objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change or pandemics" (p.xxxvi; see also Engestrom 2008). A third concept is "'wildfire activities' and mycorrhizaelike forms of organizing" (p.xxxvi), which are "hybrid and poorly bounded" (p.xxxvii). A fourth is that of polycentric social movements (p.xxxvii). Engestrom suggests that all of these must be investigated next.

So—the above is a summary of just the new introduction to the book. Now we get to the book itself.

In Chapter 1, "The Futility of Learning," Engestrom critiques influential books on learning that are situated within cognitive psychology. Such books focused on helping learners to "cope with the tasks given to them"—and focused on quantitative improvements such as speed and scale (p.2, his emphasis). Instead, Engestrom argues, we should explore expansive learning, "which transcends the context given" (p.4). He argues:

true expansion is always both internal and external, both mental and material. More specifically, I shall argue (a) that expansive processes can indeed be analyzed and modelled; (b) that the gateway to understanding expansion is neither the concept of collective unconscious nor that of perspective but the concept of activity;  (c) that expansive processes are becoming integrated into processes of learning, i.e., that a historically new advanced type of learning - learning by expanding - is currently emerging in various fields of societal practice. (p.7, his emphasis)

This argument is theoretical, but based on data:

1. "theories and theoretical propositions pertaining to human learning and expansion." (p.11)
1. "an identification and characterization of the most advanced state of theorizing within the currently dominant paradigm." (p.11)
2. "I examine and employ certain classical theories which put the problem of the chapter in question into a more penetrating light." (p.12)
3. "I take up and analyze the ideas of the cultural-historical theory of activity in its modern form." (p.12)
2. "general historical accounts of the development of human learning and expansion." (p.13)
3. "accounts of specific historical cases in the development of human learning and expansion" (p.14), including 
1. literary cases and 
2. cases from the history of science

Engestrom sets his intention to draw from many different perspectives, respecting the heteroglossia (p.20) while striving to develop a unified theory.

In Chapter 2, "The Emergence of Learning Activity as a Historical Form of Human Learning," Engestrom uses Carl Bereiter's "learning paradox" to illustrate the difference between cognitivism and the cultural-historical approach to psychology. How can a structure generate another structure more complex than itself? How can one learn complexity without an existing structure that embodies that complexity? (pp.25-26). Bereiter briefly considers Vygotsky's answer, in which complexity is situated within the culture rather than the child, but dismisses it because Vygotsky doesn't solve the concept of "internalization" to his satisfaction (p.26). But, Engestrom argues, Bereiter is looking for an explanation of how complex structures are (re)created within the head of the individual; learning is reduced to internalization (p.27). "Is the evolution of learning essentially a story of progressively enlarged capacity for internal individual processing of information?" (p.28). Drawing on Zinchenko, Engestrom argues that to understand learning, we must be able to conceive it within "concrete historical activities with specifiable subjects, objects, and instruments, within specifiable contexts" (p.30).

This argument leads him to discuss 19th-century breakthroughs in philosophy (Hegel), biology (Darwin), and social sciences (Marx):

Two fundamental features are evident in these breakthroughs. First, they meant that organism and environment, man and society, were no more seen as separate entities but as integral systems within which retroactive causality and internal dynamic transitions prevail. Second, these breakthroughs meant that organism and environment, man and society, could no more be understood as stable, unchanging entities but only as something characterized by qualitative transformations requiring a historical perspective. (p.31)

Along these lines, Engestrom set his intention to develop

a viable root model of human activity with the following initial delimitations. First, activity must be pictured  in its simplest, genetically original structural form, as the smallest unit that still preserves the essential unity and quality behind any complex activity. 

Second,  activity must be analyzable in its dynamics and transformations, in its evolution and historical change. No static or eternal models will do. 

Third, activity must be analyzable as a contextual or ecological phenomenon. The models will have to concentrate on systemic relations between the individual and the outside world. 

Fourth, specifically human activity must be analyzable as culturally mediated phenomenon. No dyadic organism-environment models will suffice. This requirement stems already from Hegel's insistence on the culturally mediated, triadic  or triangular structure of human activity. (pp.32-33)

He finds prerequisites in three traditions, all of which put mediation at the forefront: the study of signs (Pierce); intersubjectivity (Mead); and CHAT (Vygotsky) (p.33). Rather than get bogged down in this lengthy discussion, let's fast forward to CHAT, where Engestrom has this interesting critique of Vygotsky:

For me, Wartofsky's secondary artifacts and Vygotsky's psychological tools are essentially the same thing. Vygotsky's intellectualist bias (see Leontiev & Luria 1968, 354-355) led to a somewhat one-sided emphasis on signs and word meanings. The broader category of psychological tools, as well as the exciting relations between technical and psychological tools were not elaborated concretely by Vygotsky. Ironically, the activity-oriented approach in Soviet psychology after Vygotsky tried to get rid of Vygotsky's intellectualism by neglecting the problem of signs and psychological tools in general: "if the polemic with concrete works of Vygotsky on the problem of the sign was necessary and natural, the removal of this problematic - in principle - led only to a substantial 'narrowing' of the theory of activity" (Davydov & Radzikhovskii 1985, 60). In the recent revival of Vygotskian studies, signs may again be treated too much 'on their own', separated from the spectrum of psychological tools and their relations with primary tools. This danger seems to lure even in outstanding analysis, such as that of Wertsch's (1985b) on Vygotsky's concept of semiotic mediation. (p.50)

Engestrom is here referencing the split between Vygotsky and Leontiev when the latter left for Kharkov, the one that Kozulin alleges created later theoretical and methodological problems for 2GAT. According to both of these linked references, the problem was not that Vygotsky emphasized signs too much and Leontiev emphasized them too little; the problem was that they disagreed on what root a Marxist psychology should have. Do we start with signs, as Vygotsky did, focusing on the semiotic characteristics that distinguish us from apes? Or do we start with labor, as Leontiev did, hewing closely to the Engelsian account in which labor made man? Leontiev made the politically smart choice, and won the Lenin Prize. Vygotsky made what he would consider the methodologically smart choice, and faded into obscurity as his books and articles failed to be reprinted. (Later his reputation was revived by Leontiev and Luria.)


The Leontievan account of labor emphasizes tool use, and as Engestrom describes the levels of activity, he bluntly states that "Tools are crystallized operations" (p.54). In fact, tools are one of three categories of mediators in human activity—the others are rules and division of labor—that are missing for animals (pp.59-61). For animal activity, an individual member of the species interacts with others in the population within the natural environment; this configuration is represented by a flat-topped triangle (p.60). For animals evolving into humans, these points are mediated by emerging tool making; emerging collective traditions, rituals, and rules; and emerging division of labor; the population is now a community; and the environment is now not only natural but also artificial (p.61). (This evolutionary account isn't sourced to Leontiev in this text, but it's essentially his account, which is in turn based on Engels'.) After this transitional phase, we get the familiar triangular diagram of activity, with area labels for production, exchange, distribution, and consumption; Engestrom sources these area labels to Marx's Grundisse (p.63).

In fact, it's striking how Engestrom has not only illustrated Leontiev's structure of activity but also developed it using other Marxist components. In addition to drawing the area labels from Grundisse, he draws from Marx and Ilyenkov to supplement the account of contradictions:

The basic internal contradiction of human activity is its dual existence  as the total societal production and  as one specific production among many. This means that any specific production must at the same be independent of and subordinated  to  the total societal production (see Damerow, Furth, Heidtmann & Lefèvre 1980, 240-241). Within the structure of any specific productive activity, the contradiction is renewed as the clash between individual actions and the total activity system. This fundamental contradiction acquires a different historical form in each socio-economic formation. 

The fundamental contradiction arises out of the division of labor. (p.66)

He argues that  "In pre-capitalist socio-economic formations, the basic contradiction, the subordination of individual producers to the total system of production, took the form of immediately visible personal suppression by force,  be it exercised by slave-owners or feudal lords"; but "In capitalism, the contradiction acquires the general form of commodity.  Commodity is an object that possesses value  (i.e., exchange value),  not only and not primarily use value. The value of the commodity is basically determined by the average necessary amount of social labour needed for its production" (p.67). "In capitalism, all things, activities and relations become saturated by the dual nature of commodity - they become commodified. The relation between individual actions and collective activity, between specific productions and the total production, is transformed accordingly" (p.68). And thus "The essential contradiction is the mutual exclusion and simultaneous mutual dependency of use value and exchange value in each commodity. This double nature and inner unrest is characteristic to all the corners of the triangular structure of activity. It penetrates the subject and community corners because labour force itself is a special kind of commodity" (p.69). He cites Leontiev here—Leontiev was of course safe in pointing out the contradictions in capitalism!



Engestrom goes on to discuss four levels of contradictions:

The primary contradiction of activities in capitalist socio-economic formations lives as the inner conflict between exchange value and use value within each corner of the triangle of activity. 

The secondary contradictions are those appearing between the corners. The stiff hierarchical division of labor lagging behind and preventing the possibilities opened by advanced instruments is a typical example. 

The tertiary contradiction appears when representatives of culture (e.g., teachers) introduce the object and motive of a culturally more advanced form of the central activity into the dominant form of the central activity. For example, the primary school pupil goes to school in order to play with his mates (the dominant motive), but the parents and the teacher try to make him study seriously (the culturally more advanced motive). The culturally more advanced object and motive may also be actively sought by the subjects of the central activity themselves. 

The quaternary contradictions require that we take into consideration the essential 'neighbour activities' linked with the central activity which is the original object of our study. (pp.70-71).

Some pages later, Engestrom illustrates the primary contradiction of modern work activity—in capitalism—which, as stated above, is the conflict between use-value and exchange-value at every corner of the activity system (p.90). And he adds:

The increasingly societal nature of work processes, their internal complexity and interconnectedness as well as their massive volumes in capital and capacity, are making it evident that, at least in periods of acute disturbance or intensive change, no one actually quite masters the work activity  as a whole, though the control and planning of the whole is formally in the hands of the management. This creates something that might be called 'grey zones' (Projekt Automation und Qualifikation 1981), areas of vacuum or 'no man's land', where initiative and determined action from practically any level of the corporate hierarchy may have unexpected effects. (p.90)

Later, he argues:

The object of learning activity is the societal productive practice, or the social life-world, in its full diversity and complexity. The productive practice, or the central activity, exists in its presently dominant form as well as in its historically more advanced and earlier, already surpassed forms. Learning activity makes the interaction of these forms, i.e., the historical development of activity systems, its object. 

This object appears to the subject first in the form of discrete tasks, problems and actions. As Michael Cole (1983, 51) notes, "discovery of the goals is essential to true activity". Learning activity (a) analyzes and connects these discrete elements with their systemic activity contexts, (b) transforms  them into contradictions demanding creative solution., and (c) expands and generalizes them into a qualitatively new activity structure within societal productive practice. (p.99)

This brings us to Chapter 3, "The Zone of Proximal Development as the Basic Category of Expansive Research." Here, Engestrom discusses Bateson's double bind (p.113), reinterpreting it within 3GAT:

The distinctive feature of human activity is that it is continuous creation of new instruments that in turn complicate and change qualitatively the very structure of the activity itself.  It is essential that human activity cannot be reduced to the upper sub-triangle of Figure 2.6 alone. Human activity is not only individual production. It is simultaneously and inseparably also social exchange and societal distribution. In other words, human activity always takes place within a community governed by a certain division of labor and by certain rules. (p.114)

 After reviewing work by Leontiev, Harre, Bateson, Raiethel, Wartofsky, and Judin, Engestrom develops an elaborate table describing the hierarchical structure of activity in terms of the points of the 3GAT triangle (p.122). And he returns to the question of the double bind:

A double bind may now be reformulated as a social, societally essential dilemma which cannot be resolved through separate individual actions alone  - but in which joint co-operative actions can push a historically new form of activity  into emergence. (p.131)

He describes Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (pp.134-139), then illustrates it with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (pp.139-153) and Seven Brothers (pp.153-167). I found these illustrations less satisfying than the actual cases he uses elsewhere.

In Chapter 4, "The Instruments of Expansion," Engestrom argues that "a new type of 'learning by expanding' is emerging in the current phase of human history. This implies that the transitions mentioned above are becoming potential objects of conscious or intuitive mastery" (p.169). We'll skip past his account of dichotomies in the literature and look at how he characterizes instruments:

In the realm of secondary artifacts, similar types may be tentatively distinguished. Firstly, the continuously changing flow of information, consisting of  specific opinions, news, descriptions, advertisements, etc. may be identified as the rapidly renewed  objects of consumption on the secondary level. 

Secondly, the relatively stable and general representations with which we filter and modulate our daily information flow may be identified as the slowly renewed objects of consumption on the secondary level. 

Thirdly, both above-mentioned types may be turned into objects or raw materials of production, to be molded and transformed into something new. 

Fourthly, sign systems such as gestures, spoken and written language, or mathematical and musical notation may be identified as typical, continuously available instruments of production on the secondary level. (p.185)

and

Expansive thinking requires that relatively stable objects  of consumption and production are transformed into instruments  of production. Cycles of expansion, or zones of proximal development, activate the "complementarity of representational and instrumental aspects" (Otte 1980, 64) of such conceptual objects. The representational concept, as a static and uncritically accepted frame, must be transformed into an instrumental concept, critically reflected, molded and applied, and back to a new representational frame. (p.185)

Engestrom draws on Ilyenkov's account of dialogical logic, filtered through Davydov (pp.190-191). In dialectical logic, the concrete is the interconnected whole, while internal contradictions are at the core of the interconnections (p.193). Again relying on Davydov's interpretation of the source material, Engestrom recounts the method of ascending from the abstract germ cell to the concrete generalization (p.195).

After discussing models, Engestrom argues that there are "four historical types of activity": craft activity, rational activity, humanized activity, and a newly emergent "collectively and expansively mastered activity" (p.224). That is, he provides a brief historical account of transitions between activity types. But how do we understand these transitions? Engestrom nominates dialectics, arguing that

The dialectical method is a method of grasping the essence of the object by reproducing theoretically the logic of its development, of its historical 'becoming'. The dialectical method is thus a historical method. But it is also a unity of the historical and the logical.  The history of the object is purified of its arbitrary details, it is elevated to the level of logical succession from which the details in their full richness may again be derived, now 'with the meaning they have thereby acquired'.
...
 In my analysis, dialectics is the logic of expansion. And expansion is essentially a social and practical process, having to do with collectives of people reconstructing their material practice. (p.242)

But (and?) for understanding sociality, he turns to Bakhtin's dialogism:

The new sociality envisioned here is one of heteroglossia and polyphony, orchestrated and organized around a common object. Borrowing from cognitive science, one could perhaps speak of parallel distributed processing systems. An evolving activity system socially based on such parallel distributed modules could be conceived of as a local or global paradigmatic network  of groups and individuals sharing a common object/motive and common instruments. 

But how would such a social structure differ from the classical idea of a community of scholars, or from an invisible college of related research groups? We get advice from Bakhtin: "the novel must represent all the social and ideological voices of its era, that is, all the era's languages that have any claim of being significant; the novel must be a microcosm of heteroglossia" (Bakhtin 1982, 411). Applied in expansive learning and research, this means that all the conflicting and complementary voices of the various groups and strata in the activity system under scrutiny shall be involved and utilized.  As Bakhtin shows, this definitely includes the voices and non-academic genres of the common people. Thus, instead of the classical argumentation within the single academic speech type, we get clashing fireworks of different speech types and languages. (p.247)

Engestrom doesn't go into how these "clashing fireworks" resolve with the developmentally oriented, Marxist dialectics in the previous section.

In Ch.5, "Toward an Expansive Methodology," Engestrom discusses his cycle of expansive transition.

It traces the generation of socio-culturally new activity systems by collectives of concrete human beings. Here, individually manifested doubt, hesitation and disturbance is the starting point. The direction is from the individual to the societal.  However, the individual point of departure is itself understandable only as a cultural-historical product. (p.252)

Engestrom says that one must delineate the activity system by first gaining preliminary phenomenological insight (p.253): "expansive research is not dealing with activities 'in general' but with real activities realised by identifiable persons in identifiable locations. Delineation is this very act of identifying the personal and geographical locus and limits of the activity. The reason for putting delineation after phenomenology is obvious. Often the locus and limits of activity can be properly defined only after a relatively extensive  'dwelling' in it" (p.254).

Once that is done, the second step is to rigorously analyze the activity system through " (a) the object-historical analysis, (b) the theory-historical analysis, and (c) the actual-empirical analysis" (p.254).

The third steps is to encourage the activity's participants to formulate "qualitatively new models as  genuine keys for resolving the double bind" (p.256). Then

The new instruments can only be implemented in selected strategic tasks. Such tasks represent the points of probable breakthroughs into the qualitatively more advanced form of practice. In carrying out these tasks with the help of the new instruments, the participants of the activity system face intense conflicts between the old and the given new ways of doing and thinking - the tertiary contradiction. (p.261)

Finally, one reports the results.

Engestrom ends the chapter by recentering us on the mission of expansive developmental research:

Expansive developmental research aims at making cycles of expansive transition  collectively mastered  journeys through zones of proximal development. In other words, it aims at furnishing people with tertiary and secondary instruments necessary for the mastery of qualitative transformations of their activity systems. (p.263)

That's it—a book with just five chapters, each of which is lengthy and dense. If you are interested in activity theory, particularly Engestromian activity theory—if you are working in HCI, CSCW, writing studies, or other areas that use activity theory—if you read articles in which people present triangles and call them "activities"—obviously you should (still) read this book.

Reading :: Lenin

Lenin: A Biography
By Robert Service

I read this thick (494pp. without notes) biography as part of my quest to better understand the Russian milieu in which activity theory developed. Service has also written biographies of Stalin and Trotsky; the latter was pilloried for multiple errors. The Amazon reviews for the Lenin book are generally positive, but some complain that the book is too full of trivia, speculates too much, and doesn't do enough context-setting to understand Lenin's decisions well; it reduces him to a megalomaniac.

My reading was not so harsh. The book certainly has flaws, but I found a lot to like in it. Some of the details were amusing—for instance, as a baby, young Vladimir "as a baby had short, weak legs and a large head. He kept falling over, apparently because he was top heavy" (p.32). At 10, his favorite book was Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery classic Uncle Tom's Cabin (p.43), which deeply impressed him (although later in life, he apparently could not see the parallel to the forced labor camps the Cheka would later set up). As a teen, he became infatuated with Chernyshevski's socialist novel What is to be Done? (p.65), which later furnished the title for one of his own books.

Service notes that Lenin's brother Alexander Ulyanov, as a university student in St. Petersburg, became involved in a plot against the czar and was hanged. This event was a turning point for the family: their climb into the nobility was reversed, their place in society was worsened, and the children had trouble finding their own places at universities. Lenin himself only made it through part of a semester at the University of Kazan before being implicated in demonstrations and expelled. (He later stood for exams after self-study and passed with high marks.)

Through the biography, we follow Lenin as he joins the socialists, gets arrested, is sent to exile in Siberia, marries an activist (in what Service implies is a marriage of convenience), leaves the country, and begins publishing his works.

Through Marx and Engels he 'knew' that the future would bring about a final and wonderful stage in world history. His life had purpose. Lenin clung to a rock of attitudes and assumptions, and on it he was able to construct almost any notions about politics and economics he wanted. Overtly he claimed that Marxism had a readily identifiable logic that permitted development of one single policy for any given situation. But this was pretence. What he really assumed by this was that his own version of Marxism was the sole authentic one. (p.237)

As Service tells it, Lenin was sure not that he was on the right side of history, but that history was on his side. Both in exile and after the Revolution, he was an inveterate splitter, inciting schisms within the Party; when people across the aisle disagreed with him on minor matters, he vilified them as being no better than capitalists and imperialists.

He was also indefatigable. For instance, when things went bad for the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution, he had to flee to the countryside and live with Zinoviev in a wooden hut in a hayfield. There, he resumed his work on Marxist political theory, The State and Revolution, which would eventually be published after the October Revolution.

One continual theme in Lenin's books and speeches was that the world was on the brink of a socialist revolution, and indeed one would have to happen if the Soviet experiment were to survive (cf. pp.315-316, 396). But this belief was not shared by others in the Bolshevik leadership, such as Kamanev and Zinoviev (p.304).

The way Service tells it, Lenin was inconsistent in his philosophy and arguments, an inveterate splitter, an absolutist, someone who was animated by hatred of the aristocracy even though he was accustomed to the benefits of being near it. Lenin lived out the end of his life, Service says, being shut out of Party leadership; the Party even considered printing up dummy issues of the party newspaper with Lenin's contributions so he wouldn't know that these contributions were not accepted (p.472). But the cult of Lenin was strong enough that, once he passed away, Stalin swiftly positioned himself as its high priest.

Should you read this book? I found it helpful, but I agree with the Amazon commenters who complain about its sometimes narrow focus. Still, if you're looking for an introductory biography, check it out.

Reading :: Dialectical Logic (second reading)

Dialectical Logic
By Evald Ilyenkov

The last time I reviewed this book, in 2005, a new copy was only available on marxists.org. But now the print version (Creative Commons license, of course) is available from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (you have to buy it via PayPal) as well as through Amazon. Insert ironic commentary here. I am not a fan of the amateurish page layout and typography, but the book is readable, sturdy enough, and more convenient than reading the text in pieces on marxists.org.

Reading the book ten years later, I have a better background for understanding it. I've read Marx and Engels more extensively, I've read Lenin, and I've read Bakhurst's survey of Ilyenkov and his Soviet philosophical milieu. And I am more aware of the author's constraints as a philosopher in a country in which philosophy was largely reduced to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, a country that had just recently emerged from Stalinism. Let's see if these new experiences get us somewhere different in terms of this second review.

From the first page, Ilyenkov seeks cover for his project from Lenin, from whom he also borrows his polemics:

The task, bequeathed to us by Lenin, of creating a Logic (with a capital ‘L’), i.e. of a systematically developed exposition of dialectics understood as the logic and theory of knowledge of modern materialism, has become particularly acute today. The clearly marked dialectical character of the problems arising in every sphere of social life and scientific knowledge is making it more and more clear that only Marxist-Leninist dialectics has the capacity to be the method of scientific understanding and practical activity, and of actively helping scientists in their theoretical comprehension of experimental and factual data and in solving the problems they meet in the course of research. (p.1)

Dialectical logic, he says, paraphrasing Engels, is the science of development of all things, material and spiritual (pp.2-3). In the first part of the book, he sets off to trace the development of dialectical logic through Spinoza (Ch.2), Kant (Ch.3), Fichte (Ch.4), Schelling (Ch.5), Hegel (Ch.6), and Feuerbach (Ch.7).

From Spinoza, he advances the propositions that (a) nature itself thinks through man (p.18) and "thinking is not the product of an action but the action itself" (p.19).

From Fichte, he lifts the insight that "either the principle of contradiction was absolute (but then no synthesis was possible in general, not uniting of different determinations) or there was development and a synthesis of the determinations of concepts (and they did not conform to the absolute requirements of the principle of contradiction)" (p.75)—that is, we can understand contradiction as possible because of development.

From Schelling, he continues this line of thought: activity is always open-ended; fixed, it ceases to be activity (p.78). He also endorses Schelling's idea that in two phases of a dynamic process, the two "objects" appear mutually contradictory even though they are actually the same, one developed more than the other (p.89). This argument becomes key later in the book. Alas, he says, "Schelling confirmed dialectics as the genuine theory of scientific knowledge, but then broke all its links with logic" (p.94).

In the second half of the book, Ilyenkov discusses problems of Marxist dialectics. One such problem is that of the ideal, which is more or less recapitulated from The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital:

The ideal existed immediately only as the form (mode, image) of the activity of social man (i.e. of a quite objective, material being), directed to the external world. When, therefore, we spoke of the material system, of which the ideal was the function and mode of existence, that system was only social man in unity with the objective world through which he exercised his specifically human life activity. The ideal thus did not boil down to the state of matter found in the cranium of the individual, i.e. the brain. It was the special function of man as the subject of social labour activity, accomplished in forms created by preceding development. (p.152)

Notice the familiar Marx-Engels origin story of man as self-made through social labor. This story is developed further in this book:

The ideal is therefore nothing else than the form of things, but existing outside things, namely in man, in the form of his active practice, i.e. it is the socially determined form of the human being’s activity. In nature itself, including the nature of man as a biological creature, the ideal does not exist. As regards the natural, material organisation of the human body it has the same external character as it does in regard to the material in which it is realised and objectified in the form of a sensuously perceived thing. Thus the form of a jar growing under the hands of a potter does not form part either of the piece of clay or of the inborn, anatomical, physiological organisation of the body of the individual functioning as potter. Only insofar as man trains and exercises the organs of his body on objects created by man for man does he become the bearer of the active forms of social man’s activity that create the corresponding objects. 

It is clear that the ideal, i.e. the active form of social man’s activity, is immediately embodied, or as it is now fashionable to say, is ‘coded’, in the form of the neuro-cerebral structures of the cortex of the brain, i.e. quite materially. But the material being of the ideal is not itself ideal but only the form of its expression in the organic body of the individual. In itself the ideal is the socially determined form of man’s life activity corresponding to the form of its object and product. To try and explain the ideal from the anatomical and physiological properties of the body of the brain is the same unfruitful whim as to try and explain the money form of the product of labour by the physico-chemical features of gold. Materialism in this case does not consist at all in identifying the ideal with the material processes taking place in the head. Materialism is expressed here in understanding that the ideal, as a socially determined form of the activity of man creating an object in one form or another, is engendered and exists not in the head but with the help of the head in the real objective activity (activity on things) of man as the active agent of social production. (pp.154-155)

Here we get an argument that is familiar to, or at least amenable to, activity theorists. In activity theory, the activity is the unit of analysis because it is the smallest meaningful unit. Here, Ilyenkov similarly argues that the ideal exists only in a unit of activity. Even traits that are encoded in the cortex—for instance, the speech center of the brain—emerge from and make sense only within human social activity. Indeed, "determination of the ideal is especially dialectical" (p.156): it exists only in the cyclic movement from thing to deed to word to deed to thing (p.157). As Ilyenkov says later in the chapter:

the ideal as a form of human activity exists only in that activity, and not in its results, because the activity is a constant, continuing negation of the existing, sensuously perceived forms of things, is their change and sublation into new forms, taking place in accordance with general patterns expressed in ideal forms. When an object has been created society’s need for it is satisfied; the activity has petered out in its product, and the ideal itself has died. (pp.162-163, his emphasis)

In Ch.10, Ilyenkov affirms with all Marxists that contradiction is the real nucleus of dialectics (p.189). "Dialectics as logic is the means of resolving these contradictions" (p.190).

Readers, I confess that I am often bored by philosophical discussions, so I found this book to be a tough read in the sense of keeping interested in the discussion. But I also found it to be a tough read for other reasons. First, the polemic tone wore on me; I think Ilyenkov was imitating Lenin here, and perhaps the style worked better for the Soviet milieu than it does for me. Second, the argument seemed stretched at points. Bakhurst does a good job of discussing the leaps involved, particularly the claim that logical contradictions simply don't take account of development. But I'm less interested in the question of whether the claim makes sense and more interested in what Ilyenkov thought it did for logic, which was to differentiate dialectical logic as a superior account to that of formal logic due to its commitment to materialism and its attention to development.

Beyond that, I was interested in how Ilyenkov's account laid some of the foundations for Engestrom's later work. I intend to review the 20th anniversary version of Learning by Expanding soon, so this review was useful. If you have also been influenced by Engestrom's work, definitely check this book out.

Reading :: The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital (second reading)

The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital
By Evald Ilyenkov

This is my second review of Ilyenkov's 1960 book. My first review was 10 years ago, written as I was doing research for Network, but for my current project on the history of activity theory, I wanted to reread Ilyenkov's major books in context. Of course, you can never get eough context. I reread this book about six months ago, and have been trying to catch up with some of its influences (such as Lenin) and history since then, as well as commentary on Ilyenkov's works. So this review is influenced by those readings and specifically interested in how Ilyenkov was trying to solve problems that also cropped up in relation to activity theory's development.

Ilyenkov is interested in the abstract and the concrete. Why are abstract concepts considered different from concrete ones (p.13)? He reviews the history of the separation, from "logical treatises of medieval scholarship" (p.13) through Berkeley and Hume, Locke, Hobbes, Helvetius (p.16), Spinoza (p.17), Kant (p.24), Hegel (p.25), Mill (p.28), to Marx (p.32 et passim):

Marx defines the concrete as ‘the unity of diverse aspects. This definition may appear paradoxical from the standpoint of traditional formal logic: the reduction of the sensually given diversity to unity appears at first sight to be the task of abstract knowledge of things rather than of concrete one. From the point of view of this logic, to realise unity in the sensually perceived diversity of phenomena means to reveal the abstractly general, identical elements that all of these phenomena possess. This abstract unity, recorded in consciousness by means of a general term, appears at first sight to be that very ‘unity’ which is the only thing to be treated in logic. (p.32)

Ilyenkov explains that this definition makes sense dialectically:

When Marx defines the concrete as unity of diverse aspects, he assumes a dialectical interpretation of unity, diversity, and of their relationship. In dialectics, unity is interpreted first and foremost as connection, as interconnection and interaction of different phenomena within a certain system or agglomeration, and not as abstract likeness of these phenomena. Marx’s definition assumes exactly this dialectical meaning of the term ‘unity’. 

If one unfolds somewhat Marx’s aphoristically laconic formula, his definition of the concrete means literally the following: the concrete, concreteness, are first of all synonyms of the real links between phenomena, of concatenation and interaction of all aspects and moments of the object given to man in a notion. The concrete is thereby interpreted as an internally divided totality of various forms of existence of the object, a unique combination of which is characteristic of the given object only. Unity thus conceived is realised not through similarity of phenomena to each other but, on the contrary, through their difference and opposition. (pp.32-33)

That is, concreteness is defined through relations: the links rather than the node. Unity emerges from difference and opposition, which yield a unique combination (p.33). And this unity is not subjective:

The most important aspect of Marx’s definition of the concrete is that the concrete is treated first of all as an objective characteristic of a thing considered quite independently from any evolutions that may take place in the cognising subject. The object is concrete by and in itself, independent from its being conceived by thought or perceived by sense organs. Concreteness is not created in the process of reflection of the object by the subject either at the sensual stage of reflection or at the rational-logical one. (p.33)

Similarly, the abstract in Marx is not purely ideal, it's an objective characteristic. For instance, Marx calls gold the "material being of abstract wealth"; that doesn't make gold ideal, it simply describes gold's function within the capitalist formation (p.34). Ilyenkov argues:

‘The abstract’ in this kind of context, very frequent in Marx, assumes the meaning of the ‘simple’, undeveloped, one-sided, fragmentary, ‘pure’ (i.e., uncomplicated) by any deforming influences). It goes without saying that ‘the abstract’ in this sense can be an objective characteristic of real phenomena, and not only of phenomena of consciousness. (p.34).

Thus, Ilyenkov quotes Marx as saying, the abstract is a category of dialectics (p.35). It's not (necessarily) idealist, but rather something one can study materially. In fact, Ilyenkov suggests, we must: the concrete in thinking is a synthesis of numerous definitions, and it is realized in thinking through the abstract (p.37).

Indeed, he continues in the next chapter, for Marx and Engels,

definitions of concepts are nothing but definitions of different elements of the actual concreteness, that is, of the law-governed organisation of a system of relations of man to man and of man to things. Scientific study of this concrete reality must yield ‘abstract’ definitions of concepts expressing its structure, its organisation. Each abstract definition of the concept must express a discrete element that is actually (objectively) singled out in the concrete reality. The solution is very simple at first sight, yet it cuts it a stroke the Gordian knot of problems that idealist philosophy has so far been unable to unravel. (p.55)

 The idealist, mystical reading of the abstract is incorrect:

Marx uncovered this mystification by showing the reality of ‘the concrete’ as a whole system of interacting things, developing and resulting from development, as a whole divided in accordance with some law, rather than as an individual isolated thing. Given this interpretation, any shade of mystification disappears. 

The concrete (and not the abstract) – as reality taken as a whole in its development, in its law-governed division – is always something primary with respect to the abstract (whether this abstract should be construed as a separate relatively isolated moment of reality or its mental verbally recorded reflection). At the same time any concreteness exists only through its own discrete elements (things, relations) as their specific combination, synthesis, unity. (p.58)

Using this distinction, Ilyenkov later attempts a Marxist definition of man, grounded in Marxism's founding myth of mankind:

Nature as such creates absolutely nothing ‘human’. Man with all his specifically human features is from beginning to end the result and product of his own labour. Even walking straight, which appears at first sight man’s natural, anatomically innate trait, is in actual fact a result of educating the child within an established society: a child isolated from society à la Mowgli (and such cases are numerous) prefers to run on all fours, and it takes a lot of effort to break him of the habit. 

In other words, only those features, properties, and peculiarities of the individual that are ultimately products of social labour, are specifically human. Of course, it is mother nature that provides the anatonomic and physiological prerequisites. However, the specifically human form which they ultimately assume is the product of labour, and it can only be comprehended or deduced from labour. Conversely, all those properties of man that are not a product of labour, do not belong to the features expressing man’s essence (e.g., soft lobes of the ear, although they are a ‘specific feature’ of man and not of any other living being). (pp.71-72, my emphasis)

As I've noted elsewhere, this founding myth valorizes labor as what makes us human. Solzhenitsyn noted one of the moral problems with this account. But in this passage Ilyenkov even notes distinguishing physiological characteristics of humans and disallows them as markers of humanity, since they do not express the human essence as products of social labor. Now think through the implications for class (do the upper bourgeoise labor?) and contribution (do the severely disabled labor?).

In any case, Ilyenkov goes on to argue that

In other words, all those features the sum of which makes up the much talked-of essence of man, are results and products (ultimate ones, of course) of socio-human labour activity. Man does not owe them to nature as such, still less to a supernatural force, whether it be called God or by some other name (e.g., the Idea). He owes them only to himself and the labour of previous generations. This is even more true of the more complex forms of human activity, both sensual and objective (material) and spiritual, than of straight walking. 

Mankind’s culture accumulated throughout history appears to a modern individual as something primary, determining his individual human activity. From the scientific (materialist) point of view the individual, the human personality should therefore be regarded as a unitary embodiment of universal human culture, both material and spiritual. This culture is naturally realised in the individual in a more or less one-sided and incomplete manner. The extent to which an individual can make the riches of culture into his property does not depend on him alone; to a much greater degree it depends on society and on the mode of division of labour characteristic of society. 

Actual assimilation of some area of culture or other, some form of human activity or other, means assimilating it to such an extent as to be able to develop it further in an independent, individual, and creative manner. Nothing can be assimilated through passive contemplation – that is like building castles in the air. Assimilation without active practice yields no results. That is why the form of assimilating universal human culture by the individual is determined by the form of the division of labour. Of course, there is one-sidedness and one-sidedness. The principal achievement of Marx and Engels in the solution of this problem was their careful and concrete study of the contradictions of the bourgeois division of labour. (pp.72-73)

That is, the essence of man is the product of sociohuman labor activity and thus owed to past generations (not God). The human personality is the unitary embodiment of universal human culture. The assimilation of a specific culture or activity happens not through contemplation but through the division of labor. Contra Feuerbach:

According to the logic of Marx and Engels, a concrete theoretical conception of man, a concrete expression of the essence of man could only be formed in the diametrically opposite way, through considering exactly those differences and oppositions (class, professional, and individual) which Feuerbach ignores. The essence of man is real only as a well-developed and articulated system of abilities, as a complex system of the division of labour which, in accordance with its needs, moulds the individuals – mathematicians, philosophers, entrepreneurs, bankers, servants, etc. 

In other words, a theoretical definition of the essence of man can only consist in revealing the necessity which gives rise to and develops all the multiform manifestations and modes of socio-human activity. (pp.73-74)

 Ilyenkov immediately appeals to Engels' account of how humans arose from animals:

 Man, as is well-known, becomes separated from the animal world when he begins to work using implements of labour which he himself created. Production of labour implements is exactly the first and in time, logically and historically) form of human life-activity, of human existence.  

Thus the real universal basis of everything that is human in man is production of instruments of production. It is from this basis that other diverse qualities of the human being developed, including consciousness and will, speech and thinking, erect walk and all the rest of it. 

If one were to attempt a universal definition of man in general, a short definition of the concept, it would sound like this: ‘man is a being producing implements of labour’. That will be a characteristic example of a concrete universal definition of a concept.

The production of labor implements is the "simplest, elementary form of man's human being," realized in individual acts (p.75). Yet "the social act of the production of labor implements" has internal contradictions, resulting in "speech, will, thought, artistic feeling, and further, class division of the collective, emergence of law, politics, art, philosophy, state, etc." (p.75). Here, the universal is not opposed to the particular and individual; the unity of universal, particular, and individual are opposed to other unities in the same concrete, historically developed system. That is, the object has internal relations in its aspects (p.75).

Let's skip a bit. In Ch.2, Ilyenkov discusses the "spiral-like character of development of reality and its theoretical reflection" (p.114). Quoting Marx, he argues that the circular nature of interaction is a universal law of dialectics: a "spiral-like" development of systems of interacting phenomena (p.116), a system of mutually conditioning aspects (p.117). Ilyenkov's discussion of this point leads to Ch.3, "Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete," in which he argues with Marx that one should begin with abstract definitions, then reproduce the concrete by way of thinking (p.135). In this approach, analysis and synthesis are interwoven (p.141). Concreteness, he says later, is linked with dialectical development: "self-development through contradictions" (p.155); longtime readers of this blog will recognize a theme that third-generation activity theorists in particular make a central tenet.

Later in the chapter, Ilyenkov quotes Engels in Dialectics of Nature to demonstrate the movement from the abstract to the concrete in Carnot; see my previous review for more on this aspect of Ilyenkov.

In Ch.4, "Logical Development and Concrete Historicism," Ilyeknov describes logical development as an expression of concrete historicism in investigation: "a historically posterior result arising from the entire preceding development does not remain merely a passive result, merely a consequence. Each newly arisen (higher) form of interaction becomes a now universal principle dominating all historically preceding forms, transforming them into secondary external forms of its specific development, into ‘organs of its body’, as Marx put it in connection with one instance of this kind. They begin to move according to laws characteristic of the new system of interaction in which they now function" (p.209). That is, the system is a developmental spiral in which one level of development becomes the new normal, setting the stage for the next:

In this case, too, development takes the spiral-like form which we analysed in the first part of the work as a most characteristic feature of internal interaction, of concreteness in the genuine sense of the concept. 

The necessarily assumed condition of historical emergence of the object becomes in this case the necessarily posited consequence of its specific development. 

In this form, the historically necessary conditions of the emergence of the object are preserved in its structure throughout its development, its specific movement. All those moments which, though present at the birth of the new form of development, were not absolutely necessary conditions of this birth, are not, in the final analysis, preserved or reproduced. These forms are not observed at the higher stages of development of the object – they disappear in the course of its historical maturing, becoming lost in the darkness of the past. 

For this reason, a logical consideration of the higher stage of development of an object, of an already developed system of interaction, reveals a picture in which all the really necessary conditions of its emergence and evolution are retained and all the more or less accidental, purely historical conditions of its emergence are absent. (p.210, his emphasis)

One can see why he asserts in the next section that "A concrete understanding of reality cannot be attained without a historical approach to it. The reverse is also true – historicism devoid of concreteness is pure fiction, pseudohistoricism" (p.212). The latter leads to attempting to trace every preceding condition, which he terms "bad infinity" (p.213). (I just want to go on record as suggesting "Bad Infinity" as a great book title.)

On to the next and last chapter, "The Method of Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete in Marx’s Capital." Here, he discusses the dialectical understanding of contradiction as opposed to the logical understanding, a topic that he undertakes in more detail in his later book Dialectical Logic. (Bakhurst argues that Ilyenkov's argument is weak here, if memory serves, although that part of the book didn't make it into my review.) Here, Ilyenkov argues that while logical contradictions are disallowed,

Dialectics proceeds from a diametrically opposite view. Its solution of the problem is based first of all on the assumption that the objective world itself, the objective reality is a living system unfolding through emergence and resolutions of its internal contradictions. The dialectical method, dialectical logic demand that, far from fearing contradictions in the theoretical definition of the object, one must search for these contradictions in a goal-directed manner and record them precisely – to find their rational resolution, of course, not to pile up mountains of antimonies and paradoxes in theoretical definitions of things. 

The only way of attaining a rational resolution of contradictions in theoretical definition is through tracing the mode in which they are resolved in the movement of the objective reality, the movement and development of the world of things ‘in themselves’. (p.244, his emphasis)

So, rather than being disallowed, in dialectics we can see "Contradiction as a Principle of Development of Theory" (which is the title of the last section in this chapter). He argues:

Dialectics consists exactly in the ability to discern the inner contradiction of a thing, the stimulus of its self-development, where, the metaphysician sees only an external contradiction resulting from a more or less accidental collision of two internally non-contradictory things. 

Dialectics requires in this case that external contradiction of two things be interpreted as a mutually necessary manifestation of the inner contradiction of each of them. The external contradiction emerges as an inner identity of mutually exclusive moments mediated through a relation to something else and reflected through something else, as an internally contradictory relation of a thing to itself, that is, as a contradiction in one relation and at one and the same moment in time. Marx proceeds from an external manifestation of a contradiction to establishing the inner basis of this contradiction, from the appearance to the essence of this contradiction, whereas the metaphysician always tries to act in a precisely reverse manner, refuting the theoretical expression of the essence of a thing from the standpoint of external appearance, which he believes to be the only reality. (p.266)

For Ilyenkov, inner contradictions are crucial for understanding development. Interestingly, he argues that "external contradiction of two things be interpreted as a mutually necessary manifestation of the inner contradiction of each of them"—that is, external contradictions are important for development primarily because they exacerbate inner ones. Although Ilyenkov became crucial to Engestrom's third-generation understanding of activity theory, 3GAT focuses on interactions between activity systems and provides a fourfold typology of contradictions, including those between activity systems. It's a bit startling to read that external contradictions spark development primarily by exacerbating internal ones, and I'm not sure that I want to follow Ilyenkov here.

In any case, this book was even more thought-provoking the second time around. I'm glad I read it, and I'm also glad I took the time to read some of the other background around it. If you're interested in activity theory, contradictions, or Soviet philosophy, check it out.

Reading :: Language and Cognition

Language and Cognition
By A.R. Luria

Here's another book that I won't be able to review adequately. The material is thick and draws across many disciplines (Luria began in psychology, then studied neurology, then drew from linguistics and a number of other areas). But I'll hit what I think are the highlights for my current project.

First, the introduction, which James Wertsch wrote for this 1981 English edition. Wertsch asserts that "one can identify the origins of almost every aspect of Luria's approach in Vygotsky's writings of the 1920s and 1930s. However, that does not mean that Luria simply added a few minor details to a complete theoretical framework. His development of Vygotsky in light of modern linguistic and neurophysiological research constitutes a major accomplishment" (p.2). Wertsch notes that Luria acknowledged his debt to Vygotsky (p.2) and identifies three themes that characterize their research:

(1) the use of genetic (or developmental) explanation, (2) the search for the social origins of human psychological functioning, and (3) an emphasis on the role of sign systems in mediating social and individual processes. These three themes provided the cornerstones of Vygotsky's attempt to reformulate psychology on Marxist foundations. They have guided the research of Luria as well as the research of Vygotsky's other followers (e.g., D.B. El'konin, P.Ya. Gal'perin, A.N. Leont'ev, and A.V. Zaprozhets). (p.3)

Note that this claim papers over the differences between Vygotsky and the others, specifically in point (3). It's not inaccurate, but it does portray the relationship in the same way that Leont'ev chose to portray it after winning the Lenin Prize in 1963 and as Luria later portrayed it in his autobiography. Wertsch follows this line in describing Vygotsky, Leontiev, and Luria as the "troika," with the latter two developing the ideas of the first. Luria "developed Vygotsky's ideas in the areas of neurophysiology, neuropsychology, developmental psychology, neurolinguistics, and cross-cultural studies" and Leontiev "developed the philosophical foundations of a general Marxist psychology" (p.8). And Wertsch notes that Luria was deeply influenced by Leontiev's work, using terms such as "activity," "action," and "operation" the same way that activity theorists do (p.8).

Now to the book itself. The sixteen chapters cover a range of material: the problem of language in consciousness (Ch.1), words and word meanings (Ch.2-3), concept development and semantic fields (Ch.4-5), speech, inner speech, and thought (Ch.6-7), sentences, complex utterances, and speech utterances (Ch.8-11), comprehension, language, and discursive thinking (Ch.12-16).

The book's debt—or perhaps careful obesiance—to Marxism-Leninism is evident from the first page of the first chapter, in which Luria approvingly quotes Lenin: "Lenin pointed out repeatedly that the study of cognition, and hence of science, is not so much a study of things in and of themselves, as the interrelationship among them" (p.17). Lenin said a lot of things, and many of them contradicted each other, but Luria expertly uses this quote to frame the problem of cognition in Vygotksy's terms:

What was Vygotsky's proposal? His basic position sounds paradoxical. It is as follows: In order to explain the highly complex forms of human consciousness one must go beyond the human organism. One must seek the origins of conscious activity and "categorical" behavior not in the recesses of the human brain or in the depths of the spirit, but in the external conditions of life. Above all, this means that one must seek these origins in the external processes of social life, in the social and historical forms of human existence. (p.25, his emphasis)

Luria asserts that

humans differ from other animals because, with the transition to sociohistorical existence, to labor, and to the forms of social life associated with it, all basic categories of man's behavior undergo a radical change. Human activity is founded on social labor and the division of social labor. These aspects of human life give rise to new forms of behavior that are independent of biological motives. Direct, instinctive behavior yields to complex, indirect behavior. (p.26)

He goes on to cite Leontiev on the structure of activity. Notice that although the origin of man is consonant with both Vygotsky's and Leontiev's accounts (which are both drawn from Engels), the interpretation is Leontiev's: labor, not sign systems, is taken to be the crucial foundation. But Luria also gives language its due, again drawing from the Engels origin story:

As Engels correctly pointed out, it was in the process of social labor that the need arose for people to say something to each other, to specify the situation in which they are participating, and to convey the information which emerges as a result of the division of labor. ... The birth of language led to the appearance of a whole system of codes signifying objects and actions. ... (pp.26-27)

That system of codes came to assume a decisive importance for the further development of human conscious activity. ... (p.27)

Language, in the course of social history, became the decisive instrument which helped humans transcend the boundaries of sensory experience, to assign symbols, and to formulate certain generalizations or categories. That is, if humans had not possessed the capacity for labor and had not had language, they would not have developed abstract, "categorical" thinking. (p.27)

No language, no labor, no abstract thought or categorical behavior. So, Luria counsels us, seek their origins "in the social forms of human historical existence"; this is "the basic position of a Marxist psychology" (p.27).

Throughout the rest of the book, Luria repeatedly credits Vygotsky with advances: understanding that "word meaning" and thus the structure of consciousness "develops even after the object reference of the word is stabilized" (p.53); formulating the zone of proximal development (pp.64-65); understanding voluntary acts when superficial Pavlovians and behaviorists couldn't (p.89); truly understanding inner speech when the Piagetans couldn't (p.104); and understanding a thought as completed in, not simply embodied by, speech (p.150). He sometimes explains Vygotsky's observations from Luria's own vantage point as a neurologist (ex: p.108).

Luria contrasts monologic and dialogic speech in Ch.11, but not in a Bakhtinian sense. He argues (implausibly to my mind) that written speech is always monologic, clarifying, and without an addressee (p.166)—"written speech... always remains speech in the absence of an interlocutor" (p.167).

Overall, the book constitutes such a broad sweep, and Luria delves into fields that are unfamiliar enough to me, that I had a hard time getting my arms around this book. I think I'll return to it. And of course I recommend it to those of you who are interested in activity theory.

Reading :: The Wide Lens

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss
By Ron Adner

Let's take a short break from all of the Soviet-era readings I've been doing lately and instead look at a contemporary book on innovation ecosystems.

This short book, frankly, could have been even shorter. The author has a worthwhile idea—helping people to understand and map the innovation ecosystems that can make their innovations a success. But, in the style of many business books, it overexplains the concept and provides so many examples that the book feels less substantial than it really is.

In short, the author argues the following. In an interdependent world, "the success of a value proposition depends on creating an alignment of partners who must work together in order to transform an idea to a market success" (p.4). That means making sure that those partners can also innovate so that your own innovation can matter, and that others have to adopt the innovation before the customer can assess the value proposition (p.7). An easy example is the success of the iPod, which depended on iTunes, which had to strike partnerships with music labels to sell singles online; without the partnerships, the iPod's value proposition was much diminished (Ch.6).

So far, so familiar. But the author articulates the challenges involved by producing a set of terms, concepts, and heuristics to help innovators achieve aligned innovation ecosystems. For instance, the author advocates going beyond value propositions to "value blueprints," maps of the actors (suppliers, intermediaries, complementors, end customers) and links that make up the innovation ecosystems, as well as the risks involved. Colors indicate each actor's level of adoption within the system: green=in place, yellow=a plan to be in place, red=not in place, no clear plan (pp.85-87). For ecosystems that aren't well configured, the author suggests five levers for reconfiguring them: relocate, separate, add, subtract, and combine (p.178). And, borrowing the term "minimum viable product," the author argues that we should think in terms of "minimum viable ecosystems" (p.198) that allow you to "build collaboration and achieve scaled deployment" (p.202, footnote).

In all, it's an engaging and clearly written book with helpful heuristics. If you have an innovation that requires an ecosystem, take a look.

Reading :: Understanding Vygotsky

Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis
By Rene van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner

As part of my ongoing series on the roots of activity theory, I picked up this biography of Lev Vygotsky. It's a thick, intimidating book (400pp. excluding references), and it's both useful and fascinating. In fact, I won't be able to provide a detailed summary and review here, and I encourage you to pick it up yourself if you are interested in learning more about the great psychologist. (This is an intellectual biography, though: chapters are internally chronological, but treat different aspects of Vygotsky's thought, so you'll find the same date ranges being referenced across the chapters. That organization makes an overall chronology difficult to extract.)

My more specific interest at this point is in better understanding how Vygotsky drew his inspiration from Marxist thought and how he navigated through the ideological strictures that came about after the Revolution. And in this aspect, the authors deliver well. They have read Vygotsky's unpublished papers and correspondence as well as those of his contemporaries, and they have contextualized the moments of his life and thought alongside the events surrounding him.

Forgive me a brief detour into how I took notes on this book. As usual, I placed small sticky notes on the right and left edges of the book to mark key passages and thoughts. But with a book this substantial, that meant scores of sticky notes:

When this happens, I also use sticky notes on the bottom to (a) mark especially important passages for my current project or (b) summarize a range of notes. For this review, I'll focus on those bottom notes—which, in this context, generally make connections with Marxist thought.

Take the one in the picture, for instance. Here, the authors are describing how Vygotsky began thinking through his critique of reflexology in his 1926 book Pedagogical Psychology and other contemporary publications. (To give you an idea of how prolific a writer Vygotsky was, consider that the authors, using APA style, refer to this book as (1926i). They list Vygotsky's 16 publications and manuscripts for 1926 alone.) Here's the passage on the lower right side of the picture:

According to Vygotsky animal behavior could be entirely explained by reference to (1) innate reactions; and (2) conditional reflexes (which were themselves combinations of innate reactions and personal experience) (Vygotsky, 1926i, p.40). But human beings—and here Vygotsky relied heavily on Marxist thought—differed in fundamental ways from animals: they have a collective social history and do not adapt passively to nature. Moreover, they actively change their nature according to their design. This transformation of nature is reached by making use of tools in the process of labor. Through this reasoning—which was to reappear (and in more elaborate form) to underpin his writings time and again (see chapter 9)—Vygotsky developed the following explanation of human behavior; human behavior can be fully explained only by taking into account (1) innate reactions; (2) conditional reflexes; (3) historical experience; (4) social experience; and (5) "doubled" (udvoennyj) experience. [The authors explain that (5) is based on Marx's famous passage contrasting the labor of spiders and bees with that of humans, who foresee the results of their labor. The concept of udvoennyj experience] implied that the organism reacted twice: the first time to external events, and the second to internal events. The (internal) plan of building a house would be a stimulus to the actual process of building, whereas the plan itself arose as the result of some reaction to an external event. In this way, conscious activities are (1) really reactions to internal stimuli that (2) arose as reactions to external stimuli. They, therefore, have a "double" nature and may be termed "doubled experience." (pp.51-52)

We see here that Vygotsky was already firmly grounding his Marxist psychology in the works of Marx and Engels. (Engels' book Dialectics of Nature was published in Russian in 1925, the year before Pedagogical Psychology was published. Although Vygotsky read it immediately, I'm unclear whether its insights made it into Pedagogical Psychology, but they proved to be important in Vygotsky's subsequent work.) We also see how udvoennyj suggests Vygotsky's later technique of double stimulation, a technique that also drew from Gestalt psychology (p.161), and specifically Kohler (p.167).

Yet Vygotsky made some unforeseeable missteps in this publication, specifically citing Trotsky and Nietzsche. These citations helped to prevent his book from being reprinted in the Soviet Union (p.56). To Western eyes, however, this text seems extremely Soviet in ideology: it praises the "fully articulated Soviet dictatorship," looks forward to the new classless society, characterizes the child's development as a dialectic struggle between man and world, performs the doctrinaire Soviet atheism, and describes the new Soviet (super) man that would result from the Soviet liberation (pp.54-56).

(Later still, Vygotsky's works would fall out of favor because they cited bourgeois scholars such as James (p.42), Durkheim (p.206), the Gestaltists (Ch.8), and Kohler (p.167). He also never let go of the utopianism that led him to imagine the ideal Soviet man; see p.161, 191, )

Around 1928, Vygotsky's defectological writings changed: he shifted toward the cultural-historical approach (p.69; for context, Stalin was consolidating power at around this time; the Bakhtin Circle published four books in 1927-1929; the Gulag was officially established in 1930; and Luria's research trip to Uzbekistan happened in 1931-32.) Vygotsky distinguished between natural and cultural development (p.71), characterizing children who did not go through normal cultural development as "child-primitives" (p.71), a notion that he borrowed from Petrova—whose syllogism-based approach (applied to children) would later be used by Luria (applied to Uzbek peasants; p.72). The shift to the new approach was fortuitous especially for Luria, since Freudianism became non grata in 1930 (p.78) and his ten-year involvement in psychoanalysis had to come to an end (or, the authors suggest, had to be hidden under Marxist terminology; see p.88). Vygotsky had already critiqued Freudianism as early as 1926 (p.97). Psychology had to be rebuilt within a Marxist framework.

In fact, Vygotsky was claiming in 1926 that a Marxist psychology did not yet exist (p.139). Freudianism didn't fit the bill, but neither did the reactology that Luria's mentor Kornilov offered, despite Kornilov's attempt to retrofit it with the dialectical triad (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) or to characterize contradictions as the engine of development (p.121). Vygotsky instead turned to Engels' Dialectics of Nature for its dialectical materialist account of concepts and to both Marx and Engels for the concept of the germ-cell (p.146-148). He criticized others for doing what Kornilov had done: cherry-picking quotes from Marx and Engels rather than drawing out a methodology that could be applied to psychological questions. After all, Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov were not psychologists and could not supply ready-made answers; but they could supply the principles for a Marxist method (p.153).

Vygotsky was not alone, of course: he had students. And a troika—although, as the authors argue, at first there was no troika (p.183): it took 4-5 years for Vygotsky and Luria to begin cooperating, while Leontiev's later role was less visible; he never coauthored pieces with Vygotsky and was barely on the radar as a practitioner of the cultural-historical approach (p.184). "As we will see, the myth of the troika served the function of obscuring the very real differences of opinion and personal conflicts that would develop between Vygotsky and Leontiev (and, to some extent, Luria) at a later stage" (p.184).

Indeed, "When the Psychological Laboratory of the Academy of Communist Education closed down in 1932 Vygotsky and his collaborators lost an important meeting place," so "the foundation of the Ukranian Psychoneurological Academy in Kharkov in 1930 was a most welcome event" (p.185). Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev, Zaprozhets, and Bozhovic were invited to join, but lodging was difficult so Vygotsky decided to stay in Moscow while Luria and Leontiev split their time, 20 days a month in Kharkov, 10 in Moscow. Unfortunately, "It was in Kharkov that the cultural-historical school started to disintegrate." First, Vygotsky's expansive synthetic understanding of paedology conflicted Galperin's view of specialization. Second, "Leont'ev started gradually developing his activity approach that was in fundamental contradiction with several of Vygotsky's most cherished ideas" (p.185). More on this in a bit.

In Ch.9, the authors address the cultural-historical theory. They characterize Vygotsky's view: "To understand any complex human phenomenon we have to reconstruct its most primitive and simple forms, and to follow its development until its present state—that is, to study its history." This view was taken from Durkheim, but was in the air at the turn of the century and was inspired by Lamarck, Spencer, and Darwin (p.189). Vygotsky drew from a number of sources (including non-Marxist ones), but did not simply amalgamate them; he

essentially presented a theory of man, his origin and coming into being, his present state amidst the other species, and a blueprint for his future. The image of man that derives from this theory is that of man as a rational being taking control of his own destiny and emancipating himself from nature's restrictive bounds. It is an image of man that is partially based on Marxist thinking and partially on the ideas of various philosophers such as Bacon and Spinoza. But above all, of course, this was an image of man Vygotsky believed in, a belief that was very common among the people of his time and in the country he lived. (p.191)

"Vygotsky—following Marxist thought—distinguished two periods in human's phylogeny": biological evolution (Darwin) and human history (Marx and Engels) (p.191). He parted with Darwin in that, whereas Darwin thought human mental faculties only differed from those of animals in degree, Vygotsky believed they differed in kind due to human culture (p.193; consider the dialectical principle of quantity and quality here). Culture emancipates man from nature (p.193). This insight led him to distinguish biological evolution and human history along the lines that Engels described in Dialectics of Nature in "The part played by labor in the transition from ape to man" (p.197). Engels' argument was key, and the authors comment that "Engels' account of the origin of Homo sapiens was rather crude but not implausible in view of the available evidence" (p.197). According to this account, descending from trees left the hands free, allowing man's ancestors to develop hands, sense organs, and brains; next, the primates began cooperating in labor (specifically, making stone tools), necessitating a way to communicate, leading to speech. Thus labor made man; it defined human beings. And that labor involved not just using nature, but "the planned, deliberate transformation of nature" (p.197). That is, the Marxist origin story of humanity starts not with the Word, but with labor; we developed through and define ourselves by the act of transforming nature. This was an origin story Vygotsky could get behind.

In fact, it was unclear to what extent Vygotsky could have dissented from this account in the 1920s (p.198). He did disregard some of Engels' obviously incorrect statements (p.198), but kept what he liked (that is, he cherry-picked, sort of like the superficial Marxist psychologists that he had criticized elsewhere). The authors note that Engels' distinction between tool-use and labor is vague and that his account of the origin of speech seems rather Lamarckian (of course it does, this is par for the course for Engels) (p.198). But the account gave Vygotsky a firm distinction between biological evolution and human history, something that he would use extensively in his theory. Vygotsky had to avoid or finesse some of the hard questions that went along with such an account: Don't animals use tools as well? Can we reconstruct the history of Homo sapiens—and can we assume that "current non-Western people were somehow identical or similar to historical primitive man"? Are biological and cultural evolution distinct or overlapping periods? (p.199)

Vygotsky and Luria ended up claiming that in animals, tool use never developed into labor, and thus animals did not develop speech or culture (p.204). "Human beings' history was for Vygotsky the history of artifacts, of artificial organs. These artifacts allowed humans to master nature as the technical tool of speech allowed them to master their own mental processes" (p.204). The solution rests on "the dialectical law that says many quantitative changes may result in a qualitative leap"—a proof that the authors acknowledge may be less convincing to some readers than it was to Vygotsky's contemporaries (p.204).

Vygotsky also had the tendency, common at the time, to "compare different cultures on a linear scale"—specifically, in terms of the Uzbekistan study on which he sent Luria (p.214).

The authors conclude this chapter by discussing "the fundamental problem for Vygotsky and other Marxists [, which] was to reconcile the Darwinian account of human evolution with the image of man as the self-conscious creator of his own destiny and the new society of prosperity and eternal bliss" (p.221). That was a tough problem, all right.

Speaking of, Chapter 10 covers the expeditions to central Asia. As the authors note, Luria's account of these expeditions acknowledges the fact that from 1929-1932, the Soviets were collectivizing agriculture; however, it does not discuss the elimination of kulaks (relatively prosperous farmers) as a class (p.243). Collectivization and dekulakization led to the deaths of millions of people as well as 1/3 of the horses, 1/2 the cattle, and 2/3 of the sheep and goats in Central Asia (p.245). Luria stuck to the party line in his study, of course, portraying collectivization as an untrammeled good (p.245). Of course, the authors note, Luria also tested his lie detector on students at Moscow University during the purge, and later kept a friend's brain in a jar (p.246).

Koffka was invited to join the expedition, and he separately confirmed what I had long suspected: some of the variations seemed to be attributable to the attitudes of the research subjects toward the testers (p.249).

But despite Luria's careful praise of collectivization, his study was not well received: Luria had not adequately described the region's enormous progress and the creation of the new Soviet man (!) and his protocols seemed to characterize politically astute answers as inferior (p.254).

In Part III, we return to the disintegration of Vygotsky's research collective with Leontiev and Luria's move to Kharkov. Leontiev "developed his own view of cognitive development in response to ideological criticism" and distanced himself from Vygotsky in the latter's obituary (!), in which "he emphasized that mediation processes are rooted in material and social, or rather societal, activity and renamed the cultural-historical theory 'social-historical theory'" (p.289). Here, he advocated replacing Vygotsky's emphasis on signs with labor (p.290). Labor, not speech.

But these assertions did not originate in the obituary. Vygotsky understood the change (p.290). According to Vygotsky's daughter, Leontiev wrote Luria, claimed that Vygotsky's ideas belonged in the past, and invited Luria to collaborate with Leontiev directly; Luria was initially receptive, but then had a change of heart and showed Vygotsky the letter, initiating a decisive break between Vygotsky and Leontiev (pp.291-292).

Part of the pressure was political, of course. Vygotsky had developed paedology as an interdisciplinary field and had become closely identified with it during the last seven years of his life, but paedology was banned by decree in 1936 (p.293). Vygotsky's works would not be reprinted until de-Stalinization, and as noted elsewhere, at that point Leontiev managed to rehabilitate Vygotsky within a story that flattered himself more.

Well, this review turned out much longer than I thought it would. But it's not as long as it could be. If you have any interest in Vygotsky or activity theory, of course you should read this book.

Reading :: Thought and Language, 2ed

Thought and Language - Revised Edition
By Lev Vygotsky

I've reviewed this classic book before, of course. But that review was of the 1962 edition. In that review, I say that I'll have to "soon" go to the library and pick up the revised (1986) edition. Now, ten years later, I finally have. The irony is that I just discovered that there's a 2012 edition of Thought and Language, which I'm sure I'll get to by 2025.

The 1962 edition, published in the US at the height of the Cold War, cut out some of the Marxist bits of Vygotsky's work. They're back in this edition, along with an excellent introduction by editor Alex Kozulin. In fact, I'll spend the first half of my review discussing it.

Kozulin provides context for Vygotsky's work, ideology, and ideological constraints, and recounts the history of this book in particular. I was particularly interested in the early 1930s, when Stalin was tightening control and "Soviet psychologists were expected to derive psychological categories directly from the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin." Although Vygotsky genuinely wanted to found a Soviet psychology on Marxist principles, he also drew on European and American research, and that research was now labeled bourgeois and anti-Marxist. Similarly, Luria's cross-cultural research was severely criticized, and he had to renounce psychoanalysis; these constraints are probably what led him to pivot to neuropsychology (p.xliii). Leontiev had to resign from the Academy of Communist Education, although his official biography does not elaborate why (p.xliv).

Also in the 1930s, a group of Vygotsky's students (including Leontiev, Zaporozhets, and Bozhovich) established a program in developmental psychology in Kharkov, Ukraine. Their proposed solution to the relation between consciousness and activity was: "'The development of the consciousness of a child occurs as a result of the development of the system of psychological operations, which, in their turn, are determined by the actual relations between the child and reality'" (p.xliv). The obvious weak point is "actual relations with reality," which became a major point of disagreement between the Kharkovites and Vygotsky (p.xlv). The Kharkovites played down the role of signs as chief mediators. As Kolulin adds, "This is an attack not on a peripheral, but on a central notion of the cultural-historical theory [of Vygotsky]" (p.xlvi). As Zinchenko argued, "'social development cannot be reduced to the history of the development of culture.'" But here we find a flaw in activity theory:

While in Vygotsky's theory, activity as a general explanatory principle finds its concretization in the specific, culturally bound types of semiotic mediation, in the doctrine of the Kharkovites, activity assumes a double role: as a general principle and as a concrete mechanism of mediation. However, in order to be socially meaningful, the concrete actions have to be connected in some way with human social and economic relations with reality. The task of elaborating this overall structure of activity was taken up by Leontiev. (p.xlviii, my emphasis)

Leontiev elaborated the structure of activity, but when discussing human activity in general, he used categories of Marxist social philosophy that

apply to the social-historical subject, rather than to the psychological individual. At the same time, 'actual relations with reality' were sought by Leontiev in the concrete practical actions and operations of the individual. The intermediate link between these two facets of activity—which Vygotsky identified as culture in general and the semiotic system in particular—had been lost because of the rejection of Vygotsky's position. (p.l)

"Rejecting semiotic mediation, and insisting on the dominant role of practical actions, the Kharkovites had obliged themselves to elaborate the connection between the philosophical categories of production and objectification and the psychological category of action" (p.l) Leontiev eventually substituted "meaning and sense" for internalized operations, "unwittingly" acknowledging Vygotsky's approach (p.l), but critics caught his inconsistency (p.li).

In the late 1950s, Vygotsky was rehabilitated during de-Stalinization. He was reprinted and read. Former Kharkovites had gained solid positions. In 1963, Leontiev's Problems of the Development of Mind won the Lenin Prize, and Leontiev took on the mantle of Vygotsky's chief interpreter (pp.li-lii). Vygotsky began to be seen as the predecessor of Leontiev, whose research program was portrayed as the "authentic realization" of Vygotsky's work (p.li).

But in the late 1970s, Leontiev's theory came under scrutiny on the grounds that Vygotsky had critiqued it: "using the notion of activity at one and the same time as an explanatory principle and as a subject of concrete psychological study. By 'explaining' the phenomena of activity by means of the principle of activity, a vicious circle was created" (p.lii). Kozulin paraphrases Yudin: "structural elements of activity (activity-action-operation and motive-goal-condition) once suggested as the elaboration of the explanatory principle, were later used in the context of the subject of study" (p.liii).

So there's Kozulin's fascinating introduction. Now to the book itself. Since this is a revised edition, rather than thoroughly covering the entire book, I'll note some things that caught me on this reading.

One is the impact of Marx and Engels. I think many of these references were cut out of the 1962 edition, but they are frequent in this one. As in the essays of the Vygotsky Reader, these essays read human and prehuman history through Engels in particular (e.g., p.90). Similarly, Vygotsky explicitly grounds his methods in Engelsian dialectics (e.g., pp.124-125).

More broadly, the impact of Soviet ideology is clearly seen. For instance, in Ch.6, Vygotsky uses examples of students "correctly" finishing sentences in social science subjects, sentences that are ideologically charged (and, to my mind, dubious) such as "Planned economy is possible in the U.S.S.R. because there is no private property—all land, factories, and plants belong to the workers and peasants" (p.191). Examples such as these, at the time when the Soviet Union was becoming inexorably more unfree, are jolting reminders that Vygotsky had to work within a sharply limited set of ideological parameters.

Do I need to say it? The book is still a classic, and Kozulin's introduction adds much to my understanding of it. Definitely pick it up.

Reading :: The Vygotsky Reader

The Vygotsky Reader
Edited by Rene van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner

Lev Vygotsky was virtually unknown in the West until 1962, when a heavily abridged version of Thought and Language was published by MIT Press. Today, the English-speaking world largely knows Vygotsky through Thought and Language and Mind in Society. But Vygotsky wrote far more scholarship. In this edited collection, van der Veer and Valsiner pull together a sample of his many writings (as well as some from others in his circle), and in so doing, give us a better understanding of Vygotsky's worldview, influences, and development.

The editors provide a solid introduction that contextualizes the work. Particularly interesting to me was their account of how A.R. Luria doggedly promoted Vygotsky's work in the late 1920s, then went silent during the Stalin years, only to pick up the thread in the 1970s by promoting Vygotsky's work to Michael Cole and other international scholars. That promotional work yielded 1962's Thought and Language and 1978's "cocktail mixing" Mind in Society (p.4). By the early 1980s, international audiences were interested in Vygotsky, partly as they became interested in activity theory (p.5).

Yet, the editors, argue, "a number of blind spots can be detected in contemporary uses of Vygotsky's ideas." First, Vygotsky's ideas were interdependent with his US and European counterparts. Second, Vygotsky was more focused on individual development than is commonly understood. Third, current applications tend to represent the facilitator of education (parent, teacher) as always helpful; Vygotsky "instead focused more upon culture as providing tools for thinking" (p.6).

Let's get to the writings themselves. As I read this collection, I was specifically interested in how Marxist ideology influenced Vygotsky and his circle. So let's skip to Chapter 4, Luria's "The problem of the cultural behaviour of the child." The very first sentence sets the tone: "Man differs from animals in that he can make and use tools" (p.46)—an enthusiastic echo of Engels' account of human development in Dialectics of Nature. (It's also incorrect.) Luria goes on to argue: "the tools used by man not only radically change his condition of existence, they even react on him in that they effect a change in him and in his psychic condition. ... his hand and brain assume definite shapes, a series of complicated methods and conduct are being evolved, with the aid of which man adapts himself more perfectly to the surrounding world" (p.46). He applies this insight to children, describing various experiments that suggest two different types of memory: natural and mediated.

In Chapter 5, "The problem of the cultural development of the child," Vygotsky picks up this thread. "In the process of development the child not only masters the items of cultural experience but the habits and forms of cultural behavior, the cultural methods of reasoning. We must, therefore, distinguish the main lines in the development of the child's behavior": natural development and cultural improvement (p.57). He argues that children's memory has two bases: organic (mneme) and cultural (method) (p.57). Like the apes that Kohler studied, "the child solves an inner problem by means of exterior objects" (p.60). Vygotsky provides a triangle diagram to illustrate mediation, the same one that shows up in his books (p.61).

Vygotsky then critiques others' conceptualizations of the relationship between thinking and speaking: (a) speech as the outer clothing of reasoning and (b) reasoning as speech minus words (p.68). In contrast, he says, the development of speech and reasoning have different roots and developmental paths; at a certain moment, these paths cross (p.68). He describes the method of double stimulation, in which the child is given two stimulations with distinct functional importances, as a way to connect the "complicated internal activity" with external activity—a bit like hooking a fish, he says (pp.69-70).

Vygotsky and Luria coauthored Ch.7, "Tool and Symbol in Child Development," which contrasts practical intelligence in children and apes—again drawing on Kohler, and again examining the transformational role of speech. "Our research leads us ... to the positive conclusion that the great genetic moment of all intellectual development, from which grew the purely human forms of practical and gnostic intellect, is realized in these two previously completely independent lines of development [of thought and speech]" (p.108, their emphasis). Speech allows the child to master the situation by mastering his own behavior; the more complex the action and the less direct the solution, the greater the importance of speech (p.109). Indeed, early in development, speech accompanies the child's activity; later in development, speech precedes actions (p.120).

Based on these insights, Vygotsky and Luria make three propositions: (1) Higher psychological function comprises a specific new form. (2) Higher psychological functions are not simply superimposed over elementary processes; they are new psychological systems. (3) In cases of disintegration, "the first link to be destroyed is that between the symbolic and natural functions"; natural processes begin functioning at primitive levels unmediated by psychological structures. (pp.138-141).

The authors then—this is a very long chapter—discuss the structure of sign operations, beginning with aides-memoire such as notched sticks that go beyond natural limits to provide cultural organization of behavior (p.143). Sign operations are the result of a complex process of development (p.151), and that development process is in "a spiral, passing through one and the same point at each new revolution to a higher level" (p.153). At this higher level, we get "a social method of behavior applied by itself to itself" (p.153, their emphasis). Outward sign operations yield a new intra-psychological layer (p.155).

Near the end of the chapter, the authors quote Engels approvingly: "'labour created man himself,' i.e. created the higher psychological functions which distinguish man as man. Primitive man, using his stick, by means of outer sign masters the processes of his own behaviour and subordinates his activity to the aim which he forces external objects to serve: tool, soil, rice" (p.165).

Especially interesting to me was Vygotsky's "The Socialist Alteration of Man" (Ch.8), in which he argues that "the struggle for existence and natural selection, the two driving forces of biological evolution within the animal world, lose their decisive importance as soon as we pass on to the historical development of man. New laws, which regulate the course of human history and which cover the entire process of the material and mental development of human society, now take their place" (p.175). Vygotsky draws heavily on Engels throughout this chapter as he develops his argument, which is rather determinist. He argues that even in primitive societies, "the entire psychological makeup of individuals can be seen to depend directly on the development of technology, the degree of development of the production forces and on the structure of the social group to which the individual belongs" (p.176). He references Marx's writings "on the subject of the corruption of the human personality which is brought about by the growth of capitalist industrial society" (p.176) and cites Engels in arguing that, with the division of labor, man himself became subdivided (p.177). Capitalism brought "the constantly growing distorted development of the human potential" (p.178). Every new level in the development of production yields "ever deeper degradation of the human personality and its growth potential" (p.179). Yet, Vygotsky argues along with Marx, labor "contains within itself endless possibilities for the development of the human personality" (p.179, his emphasis). Manufacturing labor plus education could yield "all-round developed people" (p.179), "flexible" people "who would be capable of changing the forms of work, and of organizing the production process and controlling it" (p.180; cf. Castells). In fact, Vygotsky declares that "the growth of large-scale industry contains within itself hidden potential for the development of human personality and ... it is only the capitalist form of organization of the industrial process which is responsible for the fact that all these forces exert a one-sided and crippling influence, which retards personal development" (p.180).

This passage is key, I think. Engels argued that tools made man; our origin is in labor. Vygotsky quotes Marx as arguing that labor can perfect man. (The Marxist reverence for labor parallels that of the Protestant work ethic that Weber had described 25 years earlier and which he claimed made capitalism run.) But not all labor was good: some had been corrupted by capitalism.

Vygotsky declares that in the transition to socialism, "a change in the human personality and an alteration of man itself must inevitably take place" (p.181, his emphasis). He argues that the "withering away" of capitalism will yield new forms of social and spiritual life, liberating man; people will begin working for their own sake; and social relations will change for the better. Education, he says, should play a central role. "New generations and new forms of their education represent the main route which history will follow whilst creating the new type of man" (p.181, his emphasis).

Keeping with the theme of labor, let's draw one quote from Leontiev's "Voluntary Attention in the Child" claims that it is "well known that the transition to regular labor is usually achieved with its division": first, women and slaves were assigned systemic work as punishment, and later stimuli built up around work; these stimuli let us organize our own attention (pp.295-6). Again, I'm interested in how the Engels account seems to provide assumptions about both the development and the sanctity of labor.

Chapter 13, "Fascism in Psychoneurology," was part of a 1934 brochure written by Jewish scientists in Moscow, and it essentially condemns attempts to reconcile fascism and psychology. That is, it was written during the early years of the Great Terror, and the editors of this collection acknowledge that some of the accusations were rather like the pot calling the kettle black. They claim, without proof, that some of the parallels may not have escaped Vygotsky's attention.

In sum, this collection is fascinating. It certainly gave me a broader understanding of Vygotsky, his arguments and assumptions, his insights and blind spots. If you're interested in Vygotsky, Soviet psychology in general, or activity theory in particular, check it out.

Reading :: The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky

The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky
Edited by Harry Daniels, Michael Cole, and James V. Wertsch

In my ongoing quest to revisit the roots of activity theory, I picked up this thick collection to gain insight into the psychologist who is commonly seen as the origin point of AT.

As Rene van der Veer reminds us in the first chapter, "Vygotsky in Context," Vygotsky was very nearly forgotten (p.39). Van der Veer nicely contextualizes Vygotsky in this chapter, describing how the great scholar was influenced by Marxist thought and how he sometimes had to navigate around Soviet orthodoxy; see Van der Veer and Valsiner's Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis for a more in-depth exploration of these influences.

David Bakhurst's chapter, "Vygotsky's Demons," examines Vygotsky's philosophical influences and legacy. Bakhurst provides an overview of Vygotsky's tenets in dialogue with philosophy, and intriguingly argues that "the growing appreciation of the significance of the semiotic that marks Vygotsky's later work should have led him to dialogism, for if consciousness is a semiotic phenomenon, and if meaning is a cultural product, then the very content of consciousness is fixed in social space (just as the meaning of an author's words is not determined by her say-so)" (p.63). Bakhurst reasons that "A psychology that grasps this insight will attend more to the negotation of meaning in public contexts and focus less on events in individual minds"; yet Vygotsky "could never shake free of the idea that the individual is the primary unit of psychological analysis" (p.63).

Bakhurst also notes that

unlike doctrinaire Marxists, he did not think that progress was guaranteed by the laws of history; but he believed in it nonetheless. Because he saw enculturation as the source of mind, he naturally held that an individual's potential is constrained by the level of sophistication of the mediational means offered by his or her culture. This prompted him to draw parallels between the child's elementary mental functioning and the forms of representation and reasoning typical of so-called primitive societies. (p.71)

Perhaps contra Bakhurst, Holland and Lachicotte argue in their chapter that Vygotsky and Luria developed a dialogic understanding of self: "one's behaviors elicit reactions from others, so that, over time, on develops an inner sense of the collective meanings and social judgments that may meet one's behavior" (p.106).

In James Wertsch's chapter, "Mediation," he argues that Vygotsky used the term in two different ways. In explicit mediation, an individual "overtly and intentionally introduce[s] a 'stimulus means' into an ongoing stream of activity," and the stimulus means "tends to be obvious and nontransitory" (p.180). Implicit mediation, in contrast, "is part of an already ongoing communicative stream that is brought into contact with other forms of action" (pp.180-181); these signs are not deliberately introduced, nor do they originally emerge to organize the activity (p.181). Implicit mediation includes inner speech; it is ephemeral and ongoing (p.183).

Cole and Gajdamaschko's chapter "Vygotsky and Culture" explores his ideas of culture—a somewhat difficult task, since he used the term in at least three different ways. But the authors argue that his "orientation to culture as a historical phenomenon is central to the comparative aspect of Vygotsky's theory" (p.199). He also believed that "there was an intimate link between culture and mind" (p.199). Indeed, Vygotsky and Luria argued that "what is crucial in human development, and distinct from the development of other creatures is not the existence of tool use or communication considered in isolation, but their fusion such that what are ordinarily considered separately as tools, signs, and symbols are unified" (p.200). Vygotsky and his contemporaries mistakenly believed that tool use was uniquely human (p.203; I personally blame Engels).

Cole and Gajdamaschko note Leontiev's break with Vygotsky in which he shifted the unit of analysis to activity rather than mediation. This shift was seen as a repudiation of Vygotsky, but the authors argue that it was "an effort to place mediation in its cultural context" (p.206).

Skipping a bit, we get to Yrjo Engestrom's chapter, "Putting Vygotsky to Work: The Change Laboratory as an Application of Double Stimulation." Engestrom is characteristically interested in application that is firmly grounded in Vygotskian theory, so he emphasizes his Change Laboratory approach as using double stimulation, which is "aimed at eliciting new, expansive forms of agency in subjects. In other words, double stimulation is focused on making subjects masters of their own lives" (p.363). In double stimulation, the experimental situation cannot be rigidly controlled; double stimulation can trigger, but not produce the individual's construction of new psychological phenomena (p.365). Vygotsky goes on to tease out the implications of double stimulation as a learning tool.

Overall, this collection provided a solid overview of Vygotsky's thought from a variety of vantage points. Paired with Vygotsky's original works and some other commentary, this collection provides valuable insights. If you're interested in Vygotsky or the elements of activity theory, check it out.