Reading :: Wardley Maps

Wardley Maps By Simon Wardley

First of all, thanks for Frederik Matheson for introducing me to Wardley’s work. I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces, but finally was able to devote some time to read this linked PDF -- which is not a published book, but rather a compilation of Wardley’s Medium posts under a CC license. Still, it hangs together decently well as a book.

Wardley describes an issue he ran into years ago while serving as a CEO in the tech space: he had no way to envision strategy. He assumed that other CEOs did and that he just had to figure out how they were doing it. Eventually it dawned on him that they were as lost as he was. Like him, others leapt directly from purpose to leadership. Reading Sun Tzu, he realized that other factors had to be taken into account: landscape, climate, and doctrine. And he had no way of accounting for these.

This realization began a spate of eclectic reading as well as analogizing from other domains. Wardley drew from his experience playing games (chess, World of Warcraft), from warfare (especially map making, but also OODA), from Simon’s theory of hierarchy, from business and management sources (the Red Queen’s race, Boisot’s I-space, Moore’s Crossing the Chasm), and other sources in order to develop visualizations that could help him better understand strategy and make strategic decisions in the technology space. 

The resulting system is eclectic and complex -- and I mean that as a compliment. Wardley emphasizes (here and on his Twitter feed) that it’s more of a direction than a guaranteed product -- a way to map strategy that we can experiment with and improve. By folding in insights from different domains, Wardley builds in different perspectives and pushes us to think through strategy in ways that go beyond storytelling. 

How reliable are these maps, and do they serve to provide certainty or to generate potential relationships to explore in other ways? Gee, I don’t know. To me, they seem like they provide a visual vocabulary for identifying and categorizing potential change rather than a precision predictive tool. But (full disclosure) I skipped the exercises, which largely focused on business strategy for established companies. Still, I can see Wardley Maps as a heuristic that does for business strategy what the Business Model Canvas does for identifying core business components -- that is, it gives you the rules of the game, helps you to apply and understand things you already know, and identifies things you need to either discover or invent. 

I’m not a member of that target audience, since I’m not running a company, but I can see how the principles can apply to individual work and academic units. And this brings me to what I think is the broader lesson. When you feel lost or confused about what you’re trying to do, one way to address it is to change how you’re representing your work to yourself. That’s why we use calendars and to-do lists, Kanban boards and SWOT, flowcharts and business model canvases (and in qualitative research: flow, network, and matrix models). Wardley Maps zoom out beyond the scope of all of these, representing broader strategic issues in a way that emphasizes specific principles and considerations, and providing a way to explore new connections and relationships before you have to experience them. Reading this book didn’t make me want to draw Wardley Maps, per se, but it made me want to lift some of these techniques to address the ways in which I have been feeling overwhelmed in my own work. If you’re similarly struggling to pull back and see “the big picture,” definitely give this book a read. 

Reading :: Mind as Action (supplemental notes)

Mind As Action
By James V. Wertsch

I reviewed this book a long time ago (2003!), but a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. So I'll make some supplemental notes focusing on mediation.

In Chapter 2, Wertsch makes several claims about mediated action:

1. Tension between agency and mediational means. Wertsch again takes up the question of signs and tools, giving the examples of pole vaulting and multiplication, which are both impossible without mediators and that require an analytic strategy to apply mediators to the action at hand (p.30). 
2. The materiality of mediational means. He reminds us that even signs are material: "materiality is a property of any mediational means," including spoken signs (p.31). 
3. Multiple goals of action. Furthermore, mediation is associated with multiple goals, often in conflict (p.32). 
4. Developmental paths. "Mediated action is situated on one or more developmental paths" (p.34).
5. Constraint and affordances. Mediators "constrain or limit the forms of action we undertake," partially because "even if a new cultural tool frees us from some earlier limitation of perspective, it introduces new ones of its own" (p.39). 
6. Transformations of mediated action. "The introduction of novel cultural tools transforms the action" (p.42).
7. Internalization as mastery. An agent masters a cultural tool by using it, developing specialized skills through that use (p.46). 
8. Internalization as appropriation. Beyond mastering a cultural tool, the agent appropriates it, i.e., makes it her or his own (and here Wertsch draws on Bakhtin, p.53). 
9. Spin-off. Cultural tools do not simply result from needs, but are "spun off" from current tools being used for new purposes. Here Wertsch uses the example of fiberglass being developed for military purposes and then being applied to pole vaulting poles (p.59). "Such accidents and unanticipated spin-offs may be the norm rather than the exception when it comes to cultural tools  used in mediated action," implying that "most of the cultural tools we employ were not designed for the purposes to which they are being put" (p.59). Among other examples, he cites David Olson's terrific book on writing systems (p.62). 
10. Power and authority. Mediational means are not "neutral cognitive and communicative instruments" (p.64), and we can examine them not just in terms of the individual agent but also in terms of institutional and societal interests (p.65). Again, Wertsch invokes Bakhtin to explore these angles. 

There's much more to this book, and perhaps I will get into further insights in future supplemental notes! But I'll stop here for now. If you haven't picked up this book, I encourage you to do so!

Reading :: Voices of the Mind

Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action
By James V. Wertsch

I was surprised to discover that I apparently haven't reviewed this classic from 1991. Drawing on Vygotsky and Bakhtin, Wertsch seeks to explain and develop the notion of mediation. Longtime readers of this blog will already understand the basics of mediation. See Vygotsky's economical introduction for some background—including the background for a distinction I'll foreground in this review: physical vs. psychological tools.

As Wertsch argues:

The third general theme that runs throughout Vygotsky's formulation of a sociocultural approach is the claim that higher mental functioning and human action in general are mediated by tools (or "technical tools") and signs (or "psychological tools"). Here again the influence of Marx and Engels is evident, especially in Vygotsky's discussion of the use of tools in the emergence of labor activity. But Vygotsky's main contribution resulted from his focus on psychological as opposed to technical tools. His lifelong interest in the complex processes of human semiotic action allowed him to bring great sophistication to the task of outlining the role of sign systems, such as human language, in intermental and intramental functioning. (pp.28-29)

Vygotsky was, as Wertsch points out, quite focused on speech in its relationship to thinking. This "ethnocentric bias" "is not so much one that invalidates the research as it is one that limits the applicability of constructs to certain groups and settings. It reflects a pattern of privileging that distinguishes the performance of people functioning in various cultural, historical, and institutional settings" (pp.31-32). Yet one lasting contribution is the insight that "the inclusion of signs in action fundamentally transforms the action. The incorporation of mediational means does not simply facilitate action that could have occurred without them; instead, as Vygotsky (1981a) noted, 'by being included in the process of behavior, the psychological tool alters the entire flow and structure of mental functions...'" (p.32). Signs change the flow of behavior. 

The focus on speech was one limitation of Vygotsky's thinking; another was his focus on "small group interaction, especially the interaction of the adult-child dyad" (p.46). For that reason, Vygotsky largely treated concept development as an individual process—but around 1934, Vygotsky began considering concept development "from the perspective of how it emerges in institutionally situated activity" (p.47). Wertsch thinks that if Vygotsky had survived past 1934, he would have extended his ideas further into the intermental realm, something that Wertsch advocates: "extending Vygotsky's ideas to bring the sociocultural situatedness of mediated action on the intermental plane to the fore" (p.48). Here, Wertsch believes that Bakhtin's ideas are relevant, since Bakhtin examines the relationship of utterances, meanings, and social languages, and thus the relationship between individual (intramental) and group (intermental) meanings.

After covering the basics of Bakhtin, Wertsch returns to Vygotsky's analogy between tools and semiotic mediation (Ch.5). Vygotsky had noted the limitations of this analogy, but Wertsch boldly states that in his view, "he did not push this analogy far enough": we should think of these diverse semiotic mediators as a "tool kit" (p.93). Thinking along these lines will push us to ask why someone uses one tool and not another in a given situation (p.94). Wertch again brings in Bakhtin here, noting how different semiotic mediators may come from different social languages.

Later, Wertsch criticizes Leontiev for losing sight of semiotic mediation: "In contrast, looking at action in isolation, without concern for the mediational means employed, loses sight of one of my most fundamental points and what is perhaps the most central contribution Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and many of their colleagues made to the study of mind: mediated action is an irreducible unit of analysis, and the person(s)-acting-with-mediational-means is the irreducible agent involved. ... Shchedrovitskii (1981) has argued that A.N. Leontiev's account of activity and action is flawed by the fact that Leontiev lost sight of some of Vygotsky's insights about semiotic mediation" (p.120). 

And I'll leave it there, although the book has much more to recommend it. If you're interested in mediation, Vygotsky, and/or Bakhtin, definitely pick up this highly readable classic.

Reading :: Facing Gaia

Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
By Bruno Latour

Last summer I reviewed Latour's Down to Earth, one of the two books he published in English in 2018. This one, Facing Gaia, is the other. Both are oriented to the same problem, which is how to deal with climate change. But whereas Down to Earth was oriented to casual readers, this one is more academic.

Here, Latour argues that the "anthropology of the Moderns" that he has studied throughout his career resonates with the "New Climate Regime": "the physical framework that the Moderns have taken for granted, the ground on which their history has always been played out, has become unstable" (p.3). The result is an ecocrisis in which we should detect "a profound mutation in our relation with the world" (p.8, his emphasis), but we don't: "we receive all this news with astonishing calm," not acting (p.8). The question of why we haven't acted is at the center of the book.

Latour argues that the division between nature and culture is untenable (pp.15-16). Using the figure of Gaia from James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, Latour portrays this figure as a "muddle" that results from a distribution of final causes (p.100), Latour encourages us to follow the actors, the overlapping waves of action that "are the real brush strokes with which [Lovelock] seeks to depict Gaia's face" (p.101).  Gaia is not a whole or superorganism (p.104), and thus we must abandon the distinction between individual and system. This point is critical later in the argument:

When they [social scientists] talk about "society as a whole," "the social context," "globalization," they are drawing a figure with their hands that has never been bigger than an ordinary pumpkin! But the fact is that the problem is the same whether we are talking about Nature, Earth, the Global, Capitalism, or God. Each time, we are presupposing the existence of a superorganism. The passage between connections is immediately replaced by a relation between parts and the Whole, and the latter is said—without much thought—to be necessarily superior to the sum of its parts—whereas it is always necessarily inferior to its parts. Superior does not mean more encompassing; it means more connected. One is never as provincial as when one claims to have a "global view." (p.135, his emphasis)

To interpret this passage, it may help to know that Latour has said that when people talk about "context," they typically make a circle with their hands that starts at the collarbone and ends at the sternum, leading him to think that context is the size and shape of a pumpkin. He also adds a footnote to the end of the paragraph: "There is a confusion between the cartographic globe, which is a way to register as many differences as possible through the simple device of Cartesian coordinates, and the globe of so-called globalization, which is the extension everywhere of as small a set of standard formats as possible" (p.135, footnote 68). That is, Latour is objecting to systematization as a way of simplifying relationships by reducing them to a single manageable frame. He adds in the next paragraph:

Scale is not obtained by successive embeddings of spheres of different sizes—as in the case of Russian dolls—but by the capacity to establish more or less numerous relationships, and especially reciprocal ones. The hard lesson of actor-network theory, according to which there is no reason to confuse a well-connected locality with the utopia of the Globe, holds true for all associations of living beings. (p.136)

This discussion leads Latour (again, as is his wont) to contrast science and religion, which he does through tables: one contrasting two approaches to science and two approaches to religion (p.178) and another that rearranges these columns under the heading of "Natural religions" and "Terrestrialization" (with a science column and a nature column under each) (p.181). (One might suggest that in systematizing science and religion, these tables simplify their relationships by reducing them to a single manageable frame.)

The next lecture is on the end of times. Latour argues here that the certainty of truths from on high is "the exercise of terror" (p.198) and that (quoting Vogelin) the West was the apocalypse for other civilizations (p.205). In trying to determine the date of the Anthropocene, Latour (p.218, footnote 84) embraces a starting date of 1945, not just because that is when we laid down the first radioactive layer from the atom bomb, but also because "it frames exactly the existence of the Baby Boomers." (Latour was born in 1947, and to my knowledge, this is the most Boomer thing he has written.)

And I'm going to wrap things up here. If you've read Latour, especially more recent Latour, I don't think you will encounter many surprises in the second half of the book. He identifies and sharpens differences, then flips and betrays them (as he did with the science-vs-religion tables earlier). He criticizes science and religion in the same terms. He argues that we must carry religion along with us to a new understanding of the world. We must question the distinction between organism and environment and we must emancipate ourselves from the infinite. 

Do you need to pick up this book? No—if you have a casual interest in Latour, I would suggest some of his earlier books, and if you want to understand how Latourean thought can be applied to ecological questions, I would recommend Escobar first. But is it still readable and entertaining? Sure. 

Readings :: Pragmatism

Pragmatism
By William James

The link goes to the free Kindle edition, but my copy is a 1986 print copy from Hackett Publishing Company that I picked up in a secondhand bookstore a while back. The original was published in 1907, based on a series of lectures that James gave in 1906.

As I mentioned, my copy is secondhand, with at least two intemperate readers making marginal comments such as "What the fuck are you talking about?" and "No! Live without illusions, you wuss!" as well as this summative comment at the end of Section II: "Idiot."

Going out on a limb here, I think that William James was not an idiot. Rather, the unnamed critic was having trouble allowing James' argument to unfold. This argument is that philosophy has an ongoing dilemma and that pragmatism can address it.

The ongoing dilemma, James argues in Ch.1, is between the rationalist and the empiricist (or the "tender-minded" and the "tough-minded"; see p.10). James summarizes these views in two columns, with contrasts such as "intellectualistic" vs. "sensationalistic," "idealistic" vs. "materialistic," etc. He asks us to postpone the question of whether these contrasting columns are "internally consistent or self-consistent" and instead think through some examples that we know (p.10), allowing that most of us identify with characteristics on both sides (p.11). Then he asks: "Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need?" (p.12)—a question that provokes an outraged "WHAT!?" scrawled in blue ballpoint in the margins.  James answers his own question a little later: "You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity," but what we find instead is "empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows" (p.13). 

After a few pages fleshing out this divide, James positions pragmatism "as a philosophy that can satisfy both types of demand," bridging rationalists and empiricists (p.18; n.b., I can see what Vygotsky would like about this idea). 

So what is pragmatism? In Ch.2, James explains the pragmatic method via the illustration of a squirrel shifting its position so as not to be visible to an observer walking around a tree. "Does the man go round the squirrel or not?" (p.25). The pragmatic method is "to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences": if the consequences are the same, the dispute is not meaningful; if they are different, one can make a judgment (p.26). (Notice that he is talking about small-t truth here, i.e., drawing distinctions on which one can build knowledge.) Here he quotes Peirce as saying that beliefs are rules for action. James characterizes pragmatism as empiricist, but in both a more radical and a less objectionable sense than in standard empiricism (p.28). "No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts" (p.29, his emphasis). 

James contrasts pragmatism with instrumentalism, in which "ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience" (p.30). 

Later, he adds that "If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged" (p.36, his emphasis). That is, truths are interdependent, and "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons" (p.37, his emphasis). This line of argument whips our unnamed annotator into a frenzy, perhaps understandably. James' approach is to make a strong and apparently radical statement like this one, then hedge it a bit to make it more acceptable. (The anonymous annotations heighten this pattern for me as I watch the annotator fall into the trap over and over again.)

Let's skip a bit. In Lecture V, James discusses common sense:

My thesis now is this, that that our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's development, the stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it. (p.79, his emphasis)

A couple of things here: (1) James illuminates the pragmatic relationship here with which our anonymous annotators have been struggling, recognizing that the great Truths and basic divisions on which we base our thinking were once invented or discovered themselves; in recognizing this state of affairs, pragmatism focuses on how such divisions are constructed. (2) James also establishes a relationship among philosophy, psychology, and culture, understanding the basic, currently unquestioned foundations of our thought as products of our cultural forebears. That is, our ways of thinking are a cultural heritage. The implications for genre in particular are obvious, of course. 

He carries this line of thought over to Lecture VI, on the notion of truth:

The moment pragmatism asks this question [the question of what consequences there are to accepting an idea as true], it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as. (p.92, his emphasis)

This definition fits pretty well as scientific or empirical truth. But it also plausibly works with religious truth, as William James' namesake argued (James 2:17). William James goes on to argue that for pragmatism, "The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation. (p.92, his emphasis). He goes on to discuss verification and validation in pragmatic terms. 

In Lecture VII, regarding pragmatism and humanism, he acknowledges that audiences do not like the view of truth he sketched out in Lecture VI. They want and expect "the Truth"—and "All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from the oracular role," offering the Truth (p.109, his emphasis). But James says that speaking about the Truth is like speaking about the Latin Language or the Law: "an abstraction from the facts of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase" (p.109). Instead, he says, when we add knowledge, "we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition. ... Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the human use of it" (p.114). He goes on to emphasize that even our distinctions of things from their environment is arbitrary: depending on our purpose, we might discuss an audience, a collection of individuals, organs, cells, or molecules and atoms. "We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions" (p.114).

There's much more to this book, but that's where we'll stop. James is really trying to think through how we make distinctions and what that implies for how we understand truth in the world. If you're interested in pragmatism—or ontology, or truth, or cultural psychology—definitely take a look. 

(Activity theory summer school -- now with flyer)

If you're interested in the Activity Theory Summer School, here's the flyer explaining dates, application process, cost (FREE), and instructors. Join us this summer!

(Presentation: Perpendicular Realities and Communities after COVID)

Last month I was honored to present a keynote at the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces 5th RGCS Symposium, which focused on collaborative practices, workplaces and communities during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Most of the audience knew me from my coworking research, but I wanted to provide a broader picture of the work and collaboration trends over the past half-century and how they contributed to the unique tensions we see during the present crisis. That meant drawing on various strands of research to identify four changes in work—and how those changes have created winners and losers during COVID.

Perpendicular Realities and Communities after COVID

(Presentation: How do people work in teams?)

Soon I'll be speaking to one of our undergraduate HDO classes about how people work in teams, based on research I've conducted over the last 20+ years—specifically the typology of activities I discuss in All Edge and the basics of activity systems I discuss in Topsight 2.0. 

Here's the presentation I'll be giving: 

How do people work in teams? A typology of work configurations

(Presentation: Managing Commitments and Expectations)

I've been making several presentations over the past year aimed at working professionals. This one is on how to manage your time while being kind to yourself:

Managing Commitments and Expectations: What to do when There's Not Enough Hours in the Day

(Presentation: What's wrong with my emails?)

I've been making several presentations over the past year aimed at working professionals. This one is on how to improve your email game:

What's wrong with my emails? Communicating Effectively via Email and Other Digital Platforms 

(Activity theory summer school 2021)

After a year's hiatus due to a little pandemic you may have heard about, we are bringing back the Activity Theory Summer School at University West, Trollhättan in Sweden. This year we'll be going virtual, so you (and I) will not even have to take a flight!

So if you're (a) really interested in Activity Theory and (b) working on a PhD, consider joining us. ATSS is structured as a 7.5-hour course at University West, Trollhättan in Sweden. It runs during the summer (obviously), and the live portion is June 7-11. 

Instructors include Yrjo Engestrom, Anna Sannino, David Allen, Stan Karanasios, and myself. We'll each put on a workshop, discussing theory and history, methodology, analysis, concepts, and case studies. We'll also discuss publishing and (of course) the future of activity theory. We'll also provide students with feedback as they develop their own studies.

It's a really exciting opportunity, and I hope you'll consider joining us!

Reading :: A History of Marxist Psychology

A History of Marxist Psychology: The Golden Age of Soviet Science
Edited by Anton Yasnitsky

Anton Yasnitsky has edited yet another collection on Soviet-era psychology. Unlike his previous offerings, this one is not specifically Vygotsky-centered, nor is it as aggressively revisionist—although you'll still find challenges to received wisdom. Instead, these chapters tend to wander more widely, examining the  works by Leontiev and Rubinsten, the history of Soviet psychiatry and pedology, Luria's powerbroking, and the uptake of Soviet psychology in contemporary Brazil. 

Let's start with Radzikhovskii's "Reminiscence about Future Marxist Psychology," in which the author tells the story of how he cam to ghostwrite A.N. Leontiev's introduction to Vygotsky's Collected Works. According to the author, he was working under Davydov at the time, was asked to write the introduction, and was mildly surprised when the introduction was published under Leontiev's name in 1982 (pp.26-27). The explanation he got was that only Leontiev, the most devout student of Vygotsky, could have written this introductory chapter, but he was not feeling well. "I would like to emphatically state here that—as strange as might appear today—at the time it never crossed my mind to blame anyone for anything ... as the whole situation was perceived as absolutely normal by all sides involved, and totally fitting the dominant scientific ethos in Soviet scientific practice at the time" (p.27). In fact, "I was really glad and proud to have received such a flattering and honorable assignment as a junior researcher, whose work turned out good enough to be signed by the name of a Great Man such as Aleksei N. Leontiev" (p.27). Yet he later learned from Zinchenko's retrospective writings that Leontiev had consistently delayed the project, with one roadblock being that the collection could not go out without his introductory chapter, a chapter he consistently delayed writing (p.28)! 

Radzikhovskii offers this anecdote partly to explain the way psychology worked in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and how it developed in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union (p.28). Remarkably, he says, Marxist sources were de rigeur in 1980s psychology and then disappeared almost completely in the 1990s (p.29). This phenomenon, he says, is easily explained: "in the USSR of the 1980s it was plain obvious that psychology was diseased with the same sickness as the rest of Soviet social sciences. The main problem was that social sciences hardly reflected the actual life problems of contemporary social reality and, instead, dealt with abstract schemes and abstract images of idealized people as they 'should be' as opposed to the real people in the concrete settings of the their [sic] socialist social environment in the Soviet Union" (p.29). Thus, during perestroika, the main goal became to make psychology "accountable for and capable of solving the problems of the real individuals ... in their effort to solve their mundane problems" (p.29). However, one one hand, "all Soviet grand psychological theories and lesser-scale projects were invariably referred to as 'Marxist' ones," and on the other, revising these fundamental theories would be understood as subversive, and "thus, the revision of the Marxist fundamentals was not apparently an option. It was way easier—and way more pleasant and self-satisfying to the Soviet scholars in the times of the rapidly disintegrating state and official ideology—to denounce any Marxism altogether. This was triumphantly accomplished roughly by the end of the decade of the 1980s" (p.30). 

Radzikhovskii turns to Leontiev's troubled relationship to Vygotsky's legacy, noting that Leontiev's notion of psychological activity is based on the Marxist socioeconomic notion of labor (p.48). "From this standpoint, a description of psychological processes as those involved in activity means, therefore, to deprive psychology of its genuinely psychological meaning and to establish a very different field of knowledge that might be referred to as 'praxeology' or the 'science of activity'. When I first expressed this idea in Russian more than 30 years ago (Radzikhovskii, 1988) I could have hardly anticipated how true it would eventually turn out at the end of the second decade of the 21st century" —and here, he cites my own chapter reviewing activity theory's march from psychology to de facto sociology (p.48). 

Reviewing Bozhovich's criticism of Leontiev, he affirms that "First, Leontiev's writings abound with quasi-Marxist abstract speculations, 'the arguments of istmat [historical materialism]', instead of systematic psychological theoretical work," and second, "Leontiev's excessive istmat speculations, in her [Bozhovich's] view, reflected the fundamental deficiency of well-developed distinct methodology of scientific research and the studies of 'psychological activity' conducted on its basis" (p.49). 

In the second chapter, "Sergei Rubinstein as the Founder of Soviet Marxist Psychology," Anton Yasnitsky strongly argues that "Sergei Rubsinstein (1889-1960) was definitely and undeniably the founder of Soviet Marxist psychology" (p.58). That is, "the unified project of the Soviet Marxist psychology emerged in Rubinstein's works and was forever strongly associated with his name and contribution"—yet "this gigantic figure and the creator of Soviet psychological Marxism is virtually unknown in the West to this very day," with few of his works translated into English and a few more into German (p.59). Yasnitsky begins to rectify this situation with this chapter, which overviews Rubinstein's life and scholarly works.

Gregory Dufaud's chapter overviews the overlooked history of psychiatry in the USSR, while Andy Byford does the same with the occupation of pedology. In the latter chapter, Byford discusses how the entirety of pedology's leadership was accused of deviation, halting the mobilization of pedological research and making it an occupation rather than a science from 1931-on (p.117). By 1935, a number of politically sensitive incidents led to commissions, leading to the infamous 1936 decree—in which the role of pedology was demonized, but the individuals themselves were simply reassigned (p.123). 

Gisele Toassa and coauthors address the history of psychology and Marxism in 1970s Brazil, discussing how liberation theology led to Freire's contributions, which in turn led to liberation psychology (p.134). By 1975, copies of Vygotsky's works made their way from Italy, followed closely by Bakhtin's (p.135). 

In the chapter "Alexander Luria: Marxist Psychologist and Transnational Scientific Broker," Alexandre Metraux provides a personal account of how he interacted with Luria and saw Luria interacting with other scientific elite—and in doing so, I think, answers Yasnitsky's question of why the Vygotsky school is so much more well known than Rubinstein. Among other things, Metraux traces the origins of Luria's autobiography and notes some of the details that Luria fudged. He also discusses how Luria aggressively promoted Vygotsky's work, partly because he genuinely wanted to honor Vygotsky, but also "in order to consolidate his own approach (and that of those of his colleagues who referred to Vygotsky without being among the very close followers) against other, competing approaches of Soviet psychologists" (p.171). That is, "Luria also used the 'posthumous Vygotsky' as a significant instrument in his own interest," just as (in Luria's telling) Vygotsky used his circle as instruments (p.171). In one example, Luria translated his and Leontiev's preface to Vygotsky's book in German so that East German readers—who generally could not read Russian, yet felt the strong impact of Soviet approaches to psychology—would see Vygotsky as "the most significant and still highly relevant figure of Soviet psychology or even as the leading Marxist psychologist of the USSR" (p.172). Through such efforts of Vygotsky promotion in the West, Luria and Leontiev could advocate for their own research agenda as well as a way to defend against Pavlovians at home (p.173). 

Sometimes this elevation of Vygotsky "looks like having bordered on obsession," as when Luria agreed to write an autobiographical chapter, then tried to include a biography of Vygotsky in it (p.174). Interestingly, Luria's autobiography The Making of Mind was composed in English, growing from an interview he gave to a director of scientific films (p.176). Mike Cole wrote the epilogue to that autobiography, which noted the difficulties Luria faced in the 1930s-1950s. Obviously the Soviet copyright agency did not approve of the epilogue, although it approved of the core manuscript, and it asked Zinchenko to intercede (p.184). 

There are other chapters, well worth reading as well, but I'll stop here. This volume does a nice job of selecting many authors who actually lived these events and are able to draw on deep experience to discuss them. If you're interested in Soviet psychology, activity theory, Vygotsky, Luria, or just how ideas are picked up and travel, definitely take a look.

Reading :: Designs for the Pluriverse

Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds
By Arturo Escobar

I saw this book cited in Huatong Sun's Global Social Media Design earlier this year and decided to pick it up. According to the back cover, the book "presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth"; it promises an "autonomous design" that is oriented to "collaborative and place-making approaches" rather than the demands of capitalism.

The book, as Escobar claims on p.1, seeks to contribute to the redefinition of design from a politico-ontological standpoint. It offers: 

1. "an outline for a cultural studies approach to design" (p.3)
2. "an ontological reading of the cultural background from which design emerges" (p.3)
3. a deep exploration of these propositions, examining "cultural and ecological transition narratives and discourses" (p.4) and concluding with potential frameworks for "an ontological reframing of design" (p.5)

Escobar begins with a Zapatista slogan, which translates as "We want a world where many worlds fit" (p.16)—i.e., a pluriverse. He argues that 

1. "The contemporary crisis is the result of deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing, and doing," so we must understand design historically and culturally (p.19);
2. "Today the most appropriate mode of access to the question concerning design is ontological," so we must understand the dualist ontology of capitalism (pp.19-20);
3. We're seeing "ecological and social devastation," so we must think about "significant cultural transitions" (p.20); and
4. This book specifically seeks to make "a Latin American contribution to the transnational conversation of design," one that "stems from contemporary Latin American epistemic and political experiences and struggles" (p.20).

Yet, he adds, the book belongs "to a long set of conversations in both Western philosophy and sociopolitical spaces in the West and beyond" (p.20)—an important qualification, as we'll see below.

In Part I, Escobar discusses an ontological approach to design. He argues that modern design has contributed to unsustainability and the elimination of futures, but perhaps non-dualist design practices could yield futuring strategies (p.52). To investigate, he draws from design anthropology, ethnography-as-design, and the anthropology of design—and he proposes a fourth alternative, that of "reorienting design on the basis of anthropological concerns" (p.54). To explore the latter, he turns to political ecology, discussing the ontological turn, which is defined by "a host of factors that deeply shape what we come to know as reality but that social theory has rarely tackled—factors like objects and things, nonhumans, matter and materiality ... emotions, spirituality, feelings, and so forth," factors that represent "the attempt to break away from the normative divides, central to the modern regime of truth, between subject and object, mind and body, reason and emotion, living and inanimate, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, and so forth" (p.63). He calls these perspectives "postdualism," and argues that in them we see "the return of the repressed side of the dualisms—the forceful emergence of the subordinated and often feminized and racialized side of all of the above binaries" (p.64). 

"The most important targets of a postdualist PE [political ecology] re the divide between nature and culture, on the one hand, and the idea that there is a single nature (or world) to which there correspond many cultures, on the other," he argues, citing scholars such as Ingold, Haraway, Law, and Latour (p.64). He goes on to explore the literature of feminist political ecology and political ontology. Specifically, he discusses the sociology of absences, in which "what doesn't exist is actively produced as nonexistent or as a noncredible alternative to what exists" (p.68). Thus, he says, we must step away from the limits inherent in the "mono-ontological or intra-European origin of such theories" (p.68), instead understanding the world in terms of "relational ontologies" with "complex weavings" based in a "rhizome-like logic" that "reveals an altogether different way of being and becoming in territory and place" (p.70). To be honest, I became a bit frustrated at this point in the book, since the discussion is based primarily in European and American authors (Ingold, Haraway, Law, Latour), the logic is described with the familiar term rhizome (cf. Deleuze and Guattari), and the author turns to handwaving phrases ("complex weavings") rather than more concrete argument. Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life was published in 1979; Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus was published in 1980; Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto was published in 1985. Why aren't we farther along here? Perhaps Escobar is attempting to describe these insights to a design audience that hasn't heard of them, but if so, I would like to see more precise phrases than "complex weavings" and a better transition from these Western authors to non-Western and specifically South American insights. However, to his credit, he does soon get to South American insights, specifically via Maturana and Vela, who discuss cognition as enaction (p.82). 

Later, Escobar argues that the problem isn't that dualities exist—it is that coloniality features the categorization and hierarchical classification of differences (p.94). He argues that "there is no modernity anywhere without this coloniality" (p.94). 

With this foundation in place, Escobar turns to the question of what a new design should look like, drawing on Winograd and Flores (pp.109-110). Long story short, it is ontologically oriented and aimed at sustainability. Sustainable design "requires fundamental changes in values and novel socioeconomic and institutional arrangements"; it "highlights interconnectedness and envisions the decoupling of well-being from growth or consumption, and the cultivation of new values (e.g., solidarity, ethics, community, meaning)" (p.142). Later in the book, he lays out the presumptions of autonomous design, which read like participatory design:

1. "Every community practices the design of itself"
2. "Every design activity must start with the strong presupposition that people are practitioners of their own knowledge"
3. "What the community designs, in the first instance, is an inquiring or learning system about itself"
4. "Every design process involves a statement of problems and possibilities that enables the designer and the group to generate agreements about objectives and to decide among alternate courses of action"
5. "This exercise can take the form of building a model of the system that generates the problem of communal concern" (pp.184-185)

He lists more features of autonomous design on pp.188-189, summarized in Figure 6.2 as related to Earth, Territories, Ancestrality, Un/Sustainability/Sustainment, Futurality, and Autonomy (p.189). Realizing this vision means "that all transition thinking needs to develop this attunement to the Earth. In the end, it seems to me that a plural sense of civilizational transitions that contemplates—each vision in its own way—the Liberation of Mother Earth as a fundamental transition design principle is the most viable historical project that humanity can undertake at present" (p.204). Earlier, Escobar described the idea that we live in a single underlying world as "imperialistic" (p.86), but when rallying the entire globe to undertake a project, it's useful to have a single underlying principle ("the Liberation of Mother Earth," a notion in which Escobar has packed a lot of ideas about an underlying shared reality). 

As you can tell, I'm not convinced by this argument, which seems to me to be seeking to replace one fundamental understanding with another, largely on the backs of 40-year-old ideas developed by Western philosophers. Sure, we could change the world as long as most of us decide to believe and act differently—to replace a shared set of assumptions about a shared world with a different set of assumptions about the same world. (That's what Lenin thought would happen in 1917.) But there's no roadmap from A to B. There's not even a roadmap to addressing the obvious scaling issues in the numbered list above, the list that looks so similar to the principles of participatory design, which itself has been around for 35 years and which has also not scaled due to the labor-intensiveness of achieving sustained buy-in from community members. I'd be more interested if Escobar, like participatory designers, had applied principles in a concrete way to specific cases in order to illustrate how at least part of the world could change with this new vision. That is, Escobar needs a UTOPIA project in which to prove these ideas—and it would help if he read beyond Winograd and Flores to the broader CSCW and PD literature. 

I've been a little hard on this book because I think it overpromises. However, it's still a useful book for thinking about how different ontologies might contribute to design. In particular, it functions well as a set of literature reviews that bridge design with object-oriented ontology (OOO) concerns. For that reason, I still recommend the book (with caution) to people who are interested in pluralist design approaches. 

Reading :: The Wretched of the Earth

The Wretched of the Earth
By Frantz Fanon

This 1961 classic of decolonialist literature has a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre -- which we'll skip.

On the first page, Fanon tells us: "decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.  ... decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain 'species' of men by another 'species' of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution" (p.35). He argues that decolonization is "a historical process," "the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies" (p.36). In this situation, it is "the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence" (p.36). He adds: "In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem" (p.40) -- that is, the Marxist claim that everything comes back to economics is inadequate, since colonialism sets the terms for economics. This is more than a slight stretching! And thus "Everything up to and including the very nature of pre-capitalist society, so well explained by Marx, must here be thought out again" (p.40).

He argues that decolonization is ascendant for various reasons. The colonial powers want to avoid the violence of revolution (p.70) and the infiltration of Communists (p.74), and decolonialization allows the US to escape the bad press and Soviet propaganda about colonialism (p.79). The West has tried to slow and manage decolonization, but it cannot stop it. 

Furthermore, "colonialism, as we have seen, is in fact the organization of a Manichean world, a world divided up into compartments" (p.84). And he argues that former colonies should not be swept up in the Manichean Great Power competition between the US and USSR: "The underdeveloped countries, which have used the fierce competition which exists between the two systems in order to assure the triumph of their struggle for national liberation, should however refuse to become a factor in that competition" (pp.98-99). Rather, "The country finds itself in the hands of new managers; but the fact is that everything needs to be reformed and everything thought out anew" (p.100).

Like Cesaire, he argues, "what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country?" (p.90). And "Not long ago Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony. The governments of the various European nations called for reparations and demanded the restitution in kind and money of the wealth which had been stolen from them: cultural treasures, pictures, sculptures, and stained glass have been given back to their owners" (p.101). Thus: "In the same way we may say that the imperialist states would make a great mistake and commit an unspeakable injustice if they contented themselves with withdrawing from our soil the military cohorts, and the administrative and managerial services whose function it was to discover the wealth of the country, to extract it and to send it off to the mother countries" (p.102). He calls for "a double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that it is their due, and the realization by the capitalist powers that in fact they must pay. For if, through lack of intelligence (we won't speak of lack of gratitude) the capitalist countries refuse to pay, then the relentless dialectic of their own system will smother them" (p.103). That is, without reparations, capital can't find a safe outlet and is blocked and frozen in Europe, leading to catastrophe in the long run (p.104). The former colonies will no longer buy things from Europe, and thus the capitalists will struggle against their own governments and monopolies will eventually realize they must give aid (p.105). He urges the West to stop the Cold War and give aid to underdeveloped regions, for the fate of the world depends on it (p.105).

(Here, as in Freire, the author invokes dialectic as an analogue for justice.)

Fanon turns to the question of the relationship between a nationalist party and the masses. He first notes that the idea of political party has been developed for highly industrialized societies, then imported into colonized areas (p.108), and that the analogue does not work so well: "in the colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonized population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime" (p.108) -- i.e., the proletariat are the bourgeoisie (p.109). He goes on to discuss the difficulties in developing a revolution in a colonized area, then looks forward to the future decolonized society:

In a veritable collective ecstasy, families which have always been traditional enemies decide to rub out old scores and to forgive and forget. There are numerous reconciliations. Long-buried but unforgettable hatreds are brought to light once more, so that they may more surely be rooted out. The taking on of nationhood involves a growth of awareness. The national unity is first the unity of a group, the disappearance of old quarrels and the final liquidation of unspoken grievances. (p.132)

and 

The settler is not simply the man who must be killed. Many members of the mass of colonialists reveal themselves to be much, much nearer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation. The barriers of blood and race-prejudice are broken down on both sides. (p.146)

This is optimism on the level of the Leninist notion of the withering away of the state! 

We see the continuing influence of Marxism-Leninism in the rest of the dialogue. For instance, the rich are predators -- and subhuman:

The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests, and in knowing who their enemies are. The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh-eating animals, jackals, and vultures which wallow in the people's blood. (p.191)

And labor (as opposed to slavery) gives us dignity: 

the idea of work is not as simple as all that, that slavery is opposed to work, and that work presupposes liberty, responsibility, and consciousness. (p.191)

In a later chapter, Fanon turns to actual cases of mental disorders to discuss how colonialism affects the colonized. 

He concludes by calling the former colonies to make their own way independent of their former colonizers:

So, my brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that same Europe?

That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind. (p.312)

And "It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man" (p.315).

All in all, the book reminds me of Lenin. The analysis is unrelenting and unflinching. But that analysis gives way to a vision of the future that is overoptimistic and perhaps oversimplified. Just as Lenin saw the state withering away once the oppressions of capitalism had ceased, Fanon saw the decolonized coming together in a common purpose once the oppressions of colonialism had ceased. But perhaps that optimistic, clearly delineated vision is what one needs in order to move confidently into an uncertain future. In any case, it's well worth a read, both for the analysis and for the proposed vision. 

Reading :: Discourse on Colonialism

Discourse on Colonialism
By Aime Cesaire

This book was first published in 1950. According to Robin D.G. Kelley, who wrote the introduction, it was part of a wave of postwar anticolonial literature (p.8). Cesaire was born in Martinique in 1913, went to study in Paris in 1931, and began his awakening there. He and his wife returned to Fort-de-France in 1939, shortly before France fell and Vichy rule began. Thousands of French sailors arrived on the island, shattering his illusion of colorblind French brotherhood and radicalizing Cesaire. Cesaire went on to develop his anticolonialist views, including his view that fascism is just colonialism turned on Westerners (p.19). Kelley notes that Cesaire closes his 1950 book with the "shocking" assertion that the Soviet Union was a template for a better society (p.23); Cesaire would go on to reject Stalinism in 1956 (p.25), and even in the 1950 book he advocated for an "unmaterialist" (p.24) set of new spiritual values (p.25). 

Kelley emphasizes that in this book, Cesaire argues that "colonial domination required a whole way of thinking, a discourse in which everything that is advanced, good, and civilized is defined and measured in European terms" (p.27). And Kelley adds that "In the end, Discourse was never intended to be a road map or a blueprint for revolution. It is poetry and therefore revolt. It is an act of insurrection, drawn from Cesaire's own miraculous weapons" (p.28).

Now to the book itself. Cesaire indicts Europe on the first page:

The fact is that the so-called European civilization -- "Western" civilization -- as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of "reason" or before the bar of "conscience"; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive. (p.31)

and

the chief culprit in this domain is Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity = civilization, paganism savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences. (p.33)

Cesaire allows that "is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds" (p.33) -- but colonization has not done this (pp.33-34). Instead, colonization places an infinite gap between civilizations (p.34), and in doing so, decivilizes the colonizer (p.35), making Europe savage (p.36) and leading to Hitler: Hitler demonstrates that capitalist society can't establish the concept of rights of all men or individual ethics (p.37). In fact,

that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization -- and therefore force -- is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment. (p.39)

Indeed, in treating others like an animal, the colonizer transforms himself into one -- the boomerang effect of colonization (p.41). He adds: "colonization = "thingification" (p.42). And he vaunts the old societies that colonization replaced: "They were communal societies, never societies of the many for the few" and "They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist" (p.44). 

Europe is not the only problem: "the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed -- far surpassed, it is true -- by the barbarism of the United States" (p.47). For better models, we have to look elsewhere:

It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.

For some examples showing that this is possible, we can look to the Soviet Union. (p.52)

In the next chapter, he discusses the issue of personal vs. systemic oppression:

And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally -- that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul -- they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism. (p.55)

He concludes that Europe, if it is not careful, will perish from the void it has created around itself (p.75). And 

the salvation of Europe is not a matter of a revolution in methods. It is a matter of the Revolution -- the one which, until such time as there is a classless society, will substitute for the narrow tyranny of a dehumanized bourgeoisie the preponderance of the only class that still has a universal mission, because it suffers in its flesh from all the wrongs of history, from all the universal wrongs: the proletariat. (p.78)

That is, he returns to Marxism-Leninism as a possible template for a post-colonialist Europe that can deliver on its promises. 

As Kelley mentions in the Introduction, Cesaire had been a leader in the Communist party of Martinique since 1945, so by 1950 he was fairly committed. Furthermore, with fascism defeated, the world had become bipolar, with the US leading the a coalition of capitalist democracies and the USSR leading a coalition of communist and socialist republics. Which path would history take? But by 1956 it had become clear that Stalinism could not deliver on all of its promises: Stalin died of a brain hemorrhage in 1953, and Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" was delivered in 1956, but more broadly, it became clear that the US and USSR were fighting proxy battles on others' soil (e.g., the Korean War of 1950-1953). The USSR could not deliver on the promises that had made it so attractive to audiences such as Cesaire (although those promises continued to inspire people through the 1980s). 

Nevertheless, as Kelley argues, Cesaire's remarks about the USSR are not central to his discourse -- without them, the piece still stands as an indictment against European colonialism. For that reason, this short book is definitely worth a read.  

Reading :: Genre Studies around the Globe

Genre Studies around the Globe: Beyond the Three Traditions
Edited by Natasha Artemeva and Aviva Freedman

This edited collection, as promised, draws from scholars across the globe to examine multiple traditions of genre theory and research. North American genre scholars will recognize authors such as Swales, Bhatia, Martin, Bazerman, Miller, Bawarshi, Giltrow, Rose, Tardy, Johns, Devitt, and Freadman, but we also see plenty of others across the 18 chapters. 

Since the collection largely features senior scholars, we see a lot of summing up in these chapters. For instance, Bazerman's chapter features a retrospective in which he discusses his journey to understanding and developing genre theory, while Miller's critically examines a metaphor (evolution) that has guided some genre theory. We also see a lot of overviews and histories of genre approaches. I think these contributions are important and could position the book well for, say, a class on genre theory. On the other hand, the strength is also a weakness: like most collections, this one had a hard time pulling together a unified theme and the overview-ishness of most chapters means that they sum up rather than offering new developments. Still, a worthwhile volume. If you're interested in genre theory, certainly pick it up.

Reading :: The Origin of Language

The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue
By Merritt Ruhlen

I found this 1994 book fascinating, but not entirely for its subject matter. Merritt Ruhlen studied with the late Joseph Greenberg, who advanced the controversial idea that all extant languages can be traced to a single language. Ruhlen took up that standard, but by his account, "these proposals do not enjoy wide acceptance within the linguistic establishment, where, in fact, they are almost universally condemned as 'futile,' 'subversive,' or worse" (p.125). Aggrieved, Ruhlen concludes that the linguistic establishment is wrong and their reasoning faulty, and he brings his case to us, the public. 

To make the case, he provides us with carefully curated tables that allow us to compare words in different languages. Through this approach, he walks us first through comparing European languages (Ch.1) while providing the basics on how languages change; then through language families, specifically in Asia and (native) Americas (Ch.2); then the idea of families of families of languages (Ch.3), noting that linguists do not believe that families of languages are related to each other—and congratulating us on seeing through "one of the great hoaxes of twentieth-century science" (p.66). In Ch.4, he examines Native American language families, concluding that these belong to different families-of-families common with the rest of the world, and in Ch.5, he argues that the evidence suggests "a single origin for all extant human languages" (p.104). Ch.6 reviews the conflict he and Greenberg have with the linguistic establishment, which contends that languages change too much for comparison to be useful past about 6000 years (cf. p.76). He points to relatively new evidence that the three North American language families correspond to genetics and to teeth (p.166), arguing that all three lines of evidence point to three distinct waves of immigration that made up what we call Native Americans. 

So what do we, the public, think of this line of argument? Despite Ruhlen's attempt to teach me the basics of linguistic comparisons, I am not confident in my newfound ability to compare languages and language families. This controversy is relatively easy to explain, but I — and, I think, most of the rest of the public — are not equipped to judge it on its merits or on the evidence that Ruhlen provides. I'm also not convinced by Ruhlen's explanation for why the linguistic establishment is unpersuaded—my suspicion is that if I were to talk to members of this establishment in 1994, they would have plenty of other reasons that Ruhlen did not discuss. A quick scan of his Wikipedia page suggests that this intuition is correct.

All this doesn't mean that I am taking sides! I am just intrigued by the idea of bringing a bitter disagreement from your specialty to the court of public opinion, a court that has neither the training nor the investment to make a ruling. It's a proposition that is doomed to fail, but maybe that's why I enjoyed reading it.

Reading :: Awful Archives

Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence
By Jenny Edbauer

What could be more timely than a book on how conspiracy theorists argue? In this highly readable book, Jenny Edbauer recounts her time in the archives of conspiracy theorists as well as her interviews with them, examining how they make claims, cite evidence, and respond to others' arguments. In examining conspiracy theories about ESP experiments, the hollow Earth, the Stargate project, the Holocaust, 9/11, the Apollo moon landing, President Obama's birthplace, and Pizzagate, Edbauer examines evidence not as a foundational material on which to build arguments, but in terms of acts, processes, and registers. 

Based on these investigations, she urges us to think of evidence as "composed of actions that build and move in many different registers, both material and affective. They are structures in motion" (Kindle loc 3635). Evidentiary structures and processes, she argues, are "embedded within larger public scenes" (ibid.). In her final chapter, she suggests that the method of debunking conspiracy theories offered by "debate culture" -- that of providing evidence and demonstrating its solidity -- is not effective, since debate culture always loses to theater in the eyes of conspiracy theorists (loc. 3635). For an example, she points to Lenny Pozner, whose son was murdered at Sandy Hook. When conspiracy theorists portrayed him as a crisis actor and claimed that his son was either still alive or nonexistent, Pozner initially responded by posting his son's birth certificate and providing other evidence. After years of such attempts, he switched tactics: whenever he saw his son's photo on a conspiracy posting, he reported it as a copyright violation. This tactic -- responding to the structures and processes of social media platforms rather than to a neutral, dispassionate audience that didn't exist -- worked. 

For those of us who are still hopeful about the role of evidence, this book is dispiriting. More to the point, although it helps us to understand this current moment -- in which conspiracy theories are going mainstream, amplified by the President, destroying faith in free and fair elections. Unfortunately, these conspiracy theories have gone so mainstream that the Pozner approach might not be viable: can the structures and processes of social media platforms be gamed when this many people have turned their backs on evidence? 

Should you pick up this book? Definitely.

Reading :: Don't Knock the Hustle

Don't Knock the Hustle: Young Creatives, Tech Ingenuity, and the Making of a New Innovation Economy
By S. Craig Watkins

A fast review today for a fast read. I picked up this book after attending an IC2 meeting with Watkins -- he's currently conducting research on coworking spaces in rural areas. In this book, he lays out his recent research (including research on coworking, but other side hustles) for a general audience. The book is highly readable and takes us on a tour of side gigs and hustles: not just coworking spaces, but also bootstrapping game development, pop music production, schooling, web series, indie movie development, and activism. 

Whereas many research studies focus specifically on the gig economy and its precarity, Watkins' studies connect that economy deeply and appropriately to generation (millennials) and diversity. The book is a fast read, overviewing stories from many different sectors and drawing them together to provide broad insights about the hustle. If you're interested in how the innovation economy is being lived out, definitely pick up this book. Personally, I'm planning to pick up the research articles on which the book was based. 

(I'm still reading)

 I haven't reviewed a book here since October. That doesn't mean I stopped reading -- I've just been cannibalizing my blogging time in order to write on my many projects. But with winter break here, I'll try to catch up on the books I've read recently -- at least 13! 

Reading :: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of the Oppressed
By Paulo Freire

The link goes to a version of this famous book on Amazon, but (full disclosure) I downloaded a PDF of it recently. I read it late this summer, just before Matusov's Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy, which (you may recall) excoriated Freire for his later work in supporting totalitarian regimes. 

This isn't the first time I've read this book, of course. In fact, I read it as a PhD student in the mid 1990s in a class on radical pedagogy. Back then, I didn't approve of the book, but had a hard time articulating it. A quarter century later, I can articulate my problems with it, although I can also see past those problems to understand its contributions.

So let's talk about those contributions first. Freire is best known for two specific contributions to education theory. First is his critique of the "banking model of education," mainly in Chapter 2. In this model, 

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into 'containers,' into 'receptacles' to be 'filled' by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education ... (pp.71-72) 

Freire roundly criticizes this model, which is both enslaving and incorrect. Learning just does not happen in this way, as any educational psychologist can tell you. But the banking model, he says, mirrors oppressive society as a whole -- implying a monopoly on truth, reinforcing an understanding of active leadership and passive followers (p.73). That is, the banking model becomes a model of citizenship; "the 'humanism' of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human" (p.74). In dicohotomizing everything (p.80), he argues, the banking model removes the students' (and citizens') ability to know.

Second is his argument that education should be a dialogue. As he says early in the book, "The correct method [of education] lies in dialogue. The conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their own conscientizacao" (p.67). This dialogue should not be a manipulation by teachers (revolutionary leadership) of the students—it must express the consciousness of the students themselves (p.69); in Bakhtin's sense, it can't be authoritative discourse, it must be internally persuasive. In dialogic education, in contrast to the banking model, "no one teachers another, nor is anyone self-taught (p.80). 

Now, let's talk about the issues I have with Freire. Freire was a central figure in inspiring liberation theology, a synthesis of Christian theology and socioeconomic analyses. Specifically, Freire (like many in the mid-20th century) based his socioeconomic analysis on the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin (MELS) analysis that posed the most direct challenge to capitalism in the mid-20th century. The fingerprints of both MELS and Christianity are all over the place in this book. The problem, of course, is that neither really coexists with dialogue in the sense that Freire tries to encourage—both identify an absolute truth and a teleology in which all will eventually know the truth as the come to a day of reckoning (and here I am specifically referring to the Stalinist viewpoint). Both subscribe to a Manichean view in which good and evil (or oppressed and oppressors) exist and struggle until a day in which good wins and evil is abolished. 

So how do you square dialogic pedagogy with an absolute truth? Simple: You argue that if people are allowed to conduct dialogue, they will eventually come to the Truth. And this is essentially what Freire argues. The oppressed themselves, he says, will liberate both themselves and (eventually) their oppressors (p.44) from this dialectical contradiction between opposing social forces (p.46). As they discover that they are oppressed, the students discover the dialectical relationship they have with the oppressor, without which the oppressor cannot exist (p.49). This concrete contradiction is objectively verifiable and must be transformed to liberate both parties from the contradiction (p.50). This liberatory pedagogy cannot be developed or practiced by the oppressors themselves—it must spring from the oppressed, leading to a "process of permanent liberation" for all (p.54); "As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression" (p.56). This dialectic yields "the appearance of the new man: neither oppressor nor oppressed, but man in the process of liberation" (p.56, my emphasis; notice that the Soviets and the New Testament both refer to the idea of a new man: see Ephesians 4:17-24). 

Shuttling between a Christian and a MELS vocabulary, Freire continues: "Conversion of the people requires a profound rebirth. ... Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the structure of domination" (p.61). Diverse social ills are laid at the feet of the oppressor-oppressed dialectic: When the oppressed man beats his children or drinks too much, it's because of the oppressor (p.65). "It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves" (p.65). And that realization cannot be bestowed, it cannot be propagandized, it can only be realized through dialogue (p.67), which must express the consciousness of the students themselves (p.69). 

Later, Freire argues that this dialogue leads to unity: "This affirmation [that oppressors and oppressed transform each other] might appear to imply division, dichotomy, rupture of the revolutionary forces; in fact, it signifies exactly the opposite: their communion" (p.129). And a few pages later: "Unity and organization can enable [the oppressed] to change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can re-create the world and make it more human" (p.145). These terms—communion, unity, organization—suggest what Freire has explicitly told us elsewhere: When he says dialogue, he's talking about dialectic, leading to a more densely woven unity. Give people the room to talk and they will listen to something similar to what evangelicals characterize as the "still small voice"—they will come to the same truth.

We can see why Matusov was initially enchanted by this idea, but we can also see how Freire eventually became involved in developing propagandic programs for totalitarian regimes. If Truth exists and you expect people to find it, what happens if they don't? You have to give them hints. And if they don't take your hints—if their dialogue doesn't lead to your conclusions? Clearly they have not listened to the "still small voice" or they have consciously decided to side with the oppressor. Evangelicals understand this willful disobedience as taking sides against God, leading to Hell; Stalin characterized it as counterrevolutionary activity, leading to the Gulag. Freire, for his part, doesn't even seem to entertain the possibility that dialogue would lead to somewhere other than his conclusions! 

I've been a bit harsh in this review, and I expect my view is colored by my recent research in Soviet history as well as my evangelical upbringing. Certainly you should read this classic text as well and draw your own conclusions. In Bakhtin's terms, I invite you to enter this dialogue and see if it is internally persuasive for you. 

Reading :: Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy

Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy

By Eugene Matusov

For research purposes, I'm not especially interested in pedagogy. But I am interested in dialogism, and Matusov has been considering dialogism from the cultural-historical perspective for a long time—specifically its relationship with Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. So I picked up this book and was not disappointed. Although it is rough around the edges in places (it could have used a bit more editing), the book considers dialogism from a really useful angle. 

The resulting review will be a bit self-serving, focusing more on my concerns than Matusov's. If your concerns are closer to his (that is, if you're focused on pedagogy), I encourage you to pick up the book yourself. It should be well worth it! But given my more selfish aims, I'll mainly focus on the relationship between dialogicality and monologicality, terms that are based in Bakhtin.

Matusov gets at this relationship in Ch.2, where he reviews Socratic dialogic pedagogy. He notes that many commentators have focused on the dialectical aspects of these dialogues, and agrees that "Socratic dialogic pedagogy involves a focus on questioning contradictions" in others' thinking — but this is dialectic in the Socratic sense, not in the Hegelian or Marxist sense, which "involves analysis of mutually constituting oppositions" (p.19). Rather, "Socratic dialogic pedagogy is based on internally persuasive discourse and involves transformation of the student's subjectivity or the student's 'ideological becoming'" (p.19; the internal quotes refer to Bakhtin). He argues that Socrates was pedagogically a "radical constructivist," although epistemologically he was a "radical anti-constructivist" (p.21). Matusov conducts a content analysis of the Meno to demonstrate.

In Ch.4, Matusov turns to Paulo Freire's dialogic pedagogy—a pedagogy with which Matusov was initially infatuated, but later connected with totalitarianism. Matusov really lets Freire have it: He charges that "Freire personally participated in two totalitarian communist regimes in Africa: in Guinea-Bissau and in Sao Tome and Principe in the mid 1970s ... For some strange reason, neither he nor his dialogic critical pedagogy for liberation registered the totalitarian oppression happening in those African countries as recorded by human rights organizations at that time that Freire worked there. ... Freire's own texts about his work ... suggest ... that he and his dialogic critical pedagogy willingly and, arguably, uncritically, participated in the political propaganda campaigns of these totalitarian communist regimes" (p.74). Matusov has the receipts and displays them throughout the chapter.

I've heard that a cynic is a disappointed idealist, and Matusov appears to be a cynic when it comes to Freire: he was initially taken by Freire's dialogic pedagogy, but realized that "Freire did not develop a pedagogical argument for the need of dialogue in education" (p.79). "According to Freire, the regime of dialogue requires love and the equality of free people searching for truth. Truth emerges as a consensus among free participants in a dialogue, 'dialogical people,' that is tested by their actions. Dialogical people cannot impose truth on each other neither by epistemological authority ... nor by force ... but only through critical dialogue tested by the participants' actions" (p.81). So, for Freire, "Dialogue as a meaning making process is also a process of humanizing the world and, thus, themselves" (p.81). 

Matusov takes issue with this characterization: "Like many scholars rooted in Hegel and Marx, Freire seemed to prioritize consensus over disagreement in a dialogue. ... In dialogue, people become complete. It is 'bigger' than its participants are. ... One can speak monologically on behalf of the Dialogue" (p.82). Matusov points to a footnote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (p.74) in which Freire approvingly quotes Chairman Mao as saying "we must teach the masses clearly what we have received from them confusedly"; Matusov comments: "This totalitarian circular reasoning claims a communist monopoly on truth" and adds, "Freire did not recognize this monologic trick but instead enthusiastically but, uncritically, accepted Mao Tse-Tung's propaganda statement" (p.82). 

Matusov later argues that "Freire's version of dialogic pedagogy can be characterized as cultural-dialogical because he believed that knowledge emerged dialogically but exists in culture (e.g., artifacts and historically established consensuses). Thus, Freire's approach can be characterized still as instrumental, Freire's own insistence to the contrary" (p.92). 

This brings us back to Matusov's case against Freire in Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome. Ruthlessly, Matusov argues that the texts that Freire prepared for teachers in these countries were "classical totalitarian texts" (p.98, his emphasis), all bearing "the same birthmarks of totalitarianism," "including cult of personality" (p.98), "authoritarian argumentation," "propaganda of the official Party line," "full loyalty and conformity to the regime," "lack or suppression of critical stand toward the regime" (p.99), "disregard to human suffering from the hands of 'liberators,'" "circular reasoning of self-righteousness," and "totalitarian ideology" (p.100; he supplies examples for all of these claims). Matusov notes that Freire wrote all of these texts from outside the regimes, so they cannot be explained by fear or material gain; "Freire's production of totalitarian texts was obviously intrinsic" (p.100). After examining one text closely, he adds: "Notice please that all statements in Freire's curriculum texts are given in a form of commands" (p.102—so much for internally persuasive dialogue). Matusov closes the chapter with an unequivocal condemnation of "totalitarian socialist regimes" and "a high majority of the radical left [which] has remained silent" rather than criticizing such regimes (p.105). (Matusov is not positioning himself as a member of the right here; he espouses social justice as well as conventional left positions, both here and throughout the book.) Ultimately, he concludes, Freire's liberation pedagogy was "too monologic" both in concept and in practice, prioritizing Freire's idea of social justice over "searching for truth" (p.109).

In Ch.5, Matusov returns to more pleasant topics, specifically Bakhtin on polysemy, dialogue, and monologue. He argues that there are three "vistas" on dialogue and monologue in Bakhtin: oppositional, complementary, and excesses. 

• Oppositional relations between the two are best known to educators, but focusing just on oppositional relations inevitably leads to monologue! (p.112)
• Complementary relations lead us to the concept of "voice," which Matusov argues is an alternative to Western "identity." "Any voice is characterized by a certain degree and quality of dialogicality and monologicality reflecting both centrifugal and centripetal forces of human consciousness and human community" (p.112).
• Excesses in both monologism and dialogism are "associated with stable breakdowns in a community that are often politically grounded in social classes" (p.112).

Examining a classroom incident, Matusov argues that "meaning is never generated but emerges on boundaries" (p.120). Furthermore, "In excessive dialogism, a unified, solidified, respected, pacified world is impossible because there is no a [sic] community that backs up the individual" (p.133). Matusov notes that one of Bakhtin's examples of excessive monologism is schooling (p.139), and he adds that "excessive monologism accepts only one consciousness — the consciousness of an authority or a tradition" (p.140). In dialogism, "truth is not the product of this dialogic process, but it is the process itself" (p.141). 

Skipping way ahead, in Ch.12, Matusov considers dialogue and activity—specifically activity as articulated in activity theory. He argues that "there seems to be some kind of tension between the notions of learning and dialogue, on the one hand, and the notion of activity, on the other." He argues that "activity is responsible for the monologicity aspect of discourse" because "joint collective activity is about accomplishing something" and 

the subject of such an activity is a unified, shared, common understanding — one consciousness, as Bakhtin would say. A joint activity becomes problematic when shared understanding is not achieved, partially achieved, or achieved about wrong things. Although heteroglossia can be viewed as a productive force in the activity at its initial and intermediary stages, at the final phase, it has to be eliminated. From this point of view, activity is essentially anti-dialogue (anti-heteroglossic). However, as Bakhtin showed, this unifying, centripetal force is an important aspect of any discourse defining one's voice, the recognized unity of consciousness. The problem starts when the other complementary and necessary aspect of discourse—namely dialogicity—is either ignored or attempted to actively exclude from the analysis (and design) or eliminate from the discourse, when a voice becomes the voice. In the latter case, there becomes a tendency to establish a regime of excessive monologism. (p.383)

Matusov outlines three principles of the activity approach:

1. Activity is defined by mediation;
2. Human social and psychological phenomena is [sic] shaped by the humans' participation in the activities, practices, and institutions; and 
3. Activities transform and develop through dialectical contradictions. (p.383)

Getting personal, Matusov discusses studying psychology in the 1970s and 1980s from Davydov and colleagues and being attracted by the activity approach (p.384). But this attraction was disrupted as he read Bakhtin and realized that "Bakhtin saw Hegelian dialectics as some kind of deception" (p.385). Recalling a seminar that he arranged as a young scholar, Matusov quotes Soviet philosopher Anatoly Arsen'ev as saying that "Bakhtin realized on the ethical grounds that Hegel and the activity approach in its logical conclusion lead [sic] to totalitarianism and genocide of any dissent" (p.385). Matusov was shocked, but "Later, I realized that the activity approach focuses on the monologicality aspect of discourse and indeed if it is pushed too far leads to excessive monologism as it happened with Marxism" (p.385). Yet

Monologicity has to be appreciated and recognized as an important and necessary aspect of discourse. For example, although Bakhtin criticized dialectics in many of his writings, he also acknowledged that dialectics can produce "a higher level dialogue," "dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue at a much higher level (a dialogue of personalities) (Bakhtin et al., 1986, p.162). Activity approach has to be complemented by focus on dialogicity (Engestrom et al., 1999). (p.385)

He argues:

The activity approach has rarely considered these types of byproduct-oriented activity processes. I propose, at risk of being severely criticized by my colleagues, that activity approach mostly focus [sic] on re-productive activities, in which the issue of "how" (to achieve something known) is more important to participants than "why" and "what" (they try to do what they do). In contrast, creatively productive activities develop a new product. (p.386)

Later, he states: "Dialogic opposition involves an irresolvable confrontation of person-ideas" (p.403)—and it is this irresolvability that distinguishes it from dialectic (my observation, not Matusov's). He concludes the chapter by approving of Engestrom's (1999) "call for focusing Activity Theory on dialogic aspects of activity" and arguing for viewing teaching as a special activity (p.414).

There is more, much more, to this 428-page book. But I'll leave it there. Overall, I found this book to be very helpful, especially as I consider the relationship between dialectics and dialogics in activity theory. If you're interested in that—or if you're interested in the actual subject of the book, dialogical pedagogy (!)— check it out.