(Reading Roundup: Thomas, Wilde on Marx and Engels)

Originally posted: Thu, 05 May 2005 19:03:29

Following up on my examination of some of the roots of activity theory, I recently read selections from The Cambridge Companion to Marx. In particular, I was interested in the relations among Marx, Engels, dialectic, and contradiction. Just a few notes on these:

Thomas, Paul. "Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now"

Thomas argues that much of what we ascribe to Marx is actually the work of Marx's sometime collaborator and posthumous popularizer, Engels. "In considerable measure Engels invented what has come down to us as Marxism," Thomas charges (p.36), particularly the understanding of Marxist thought as "a coherent system of materialist metaphysics" or a universal system that extended into the natural as well as the social world (p.36). "Augmented by his Dialectics of Nature, Engels' works were given a new lease on life by the Russian Revolution"; they, not Marx's works, underpinned dialectical and historical materialism (p.40). "Engels' doctrines owed little or nothing to Marx, the man he called his mentor, yet this went along with the assertion of a joint identity: Engels referred self-consciously to 'our doctrine'" (p.41). Engels' version of Marxism, Thomas says, "had an improperly scientistic aspect that is at variance with what we can now identify as Marx's approach, method, and subject matter" (p.41; he cites Carver 1981 here). Thomas credits this variance not to "mandacity and perfidy" but rather to Engels' misunderstanding; Engels was "the last of the true believers" (p.42). (Latour would say that Engels translated Marx's work.)

Wilde, Lawrence. "Logic: Dialectic and Contradiction"

Wilde also has uncomplimentary things to say about Engels. In his chapter on dialectic, Wilde describes how Marx adapted Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist method, particularly examining how Hegel and Marx handled the notion of contradiction in opposition to formal logic (p.277). He examines Marx's work sympathetically. Engels not so much. "In writings published after Marx's death in 1883, Engels extended the dialectical method to encompass nature and in doing so transformed dialectic into a set of three 'laws.' This work had nothing to do with Marx's own dialectic, which, as we have seen, was quintessentially a social scientific method. Nevertheless, Engels claimed that Marx had approved his work before he died" -- I wonder how that transpired -- "and the dialectic came to be associated with the confident certainty of positive science" (p.291, and again the author credits Carver 1983). Marx didn't explicitly articulate dialectic, so Engels' Dialectics of Nature fit the bill, presenting a simplified, universalized dialectic that was easy to follow (p.291).

Some Soviets did reread Marx and raise questions about Engels: "it was not until 1923 that the first suggestions came from the Marxist movement that the dialectical methods of Marx and Engels were incompatible" (p.292). But "there was an almost hysterical reaction to these works in the official international Communist movement" and the scholars Lukacs and Korsch were not terribly popular around the Marxist water cooler by the end of the 1920s. (Notice that Lukacs raised his objections about the time that Vygotsky's writings were being assembled for publication. Vygotsky's books, as I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, have Engels' fingerprints all over them.)

These two readings emphasize the difficulty of critiquing Marx -- but also how easy it is to critique Engels! The problem is that Marx is hard to read and Engels is easy, so we are tempted to either read Marx through Engels (leading to misguided critiques) or scapegoat Engels (leading to a pass for Marx).

>

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Reading :: Hegel

Hegel

By Frederick Beiser

I’m continuing to avoid reading Hegel by reading Hegel commentaries. Next up is this 12-chapter overview of Hegel’s thought by Frederick Beiser. 

Beiser includes, among other things, a short chronology of Hegel’s life from birth to death (p.xix) and a discussion of relevance. He clarifies that he treats Hegel in historical context rather than as a contemporary philosopher -- that is, Beiser explores Hegel’s thought as it related to his time rather than mobilizing it in current debates (a choice that seems appropriately Hegelian) (p.5). 

The book includes the obligatory biography, then covers 5 parts:

• Early ideals and context

• Metaphysics

• Epistemological foundations

• Social and political philosophy

• Philosophy of culture

Rather than thoroughly reviewing these, I’ll just note some things that caught my attention.

In discussing Hegel’s grounding in Plato and Aristotle, Beiser notes:

Third, Plato and Aristotle understood nature in organic terms, as ‘a single visible living being’. In all these respects Plato and Aristotle presented the sharpest contrast with the modern worldview, whose self is divided into soul and body, whose state is a contract between self-interested parties, and whose concept of nature is mechanical. It was the great achievement of Hegel and the romantic generation to have reaffirmed the classical ideal of unity against the modern worldview. (p.38)

That ideal of unity, of course, is at the root of Hegel’s dialectic. Related (at least in my estimation):

It is indeed noteworthy that Hegel, along with Hölderlin and Schleiermacher, explicitly denied personal immortality and excoriated the entire ethic of salvation based on it. From his early Berne manuscripts to his 1831 lectures on the philosophy of religion Hegel attacked the ethic of salvation for its self-centered concern for the fate of the soul.

True to his immanent ideal of the highest good, Hegel believed that the meaning of life could and should be achieved in the community alone. We find satisfaction and purpose in our lives, he argued, when, like the ancient Roman and Greek, we contribute to the common good and help to create its laws. The ancient Greeks found immortality and meaning in their lives by living for the polis, which was a whole greater than themselves, and which they knew would survive them; they had no concern for their individual salvation, for the fate of their soul after death. In Hegel’s view, the Christian ethic of personal salvation was only a cry of desperation, a feeble Ersatz, after the loss of community. (p.43)

In terms of unity, Hegel (and Schelling) sought grounding in Spinoza:

Schelling and Hegel greatly admired Spinoza for his monism, for showing how to overcome dualism when Kant, Fichte and Jacobi had only reinstated it. True to Spinoza, their principle of subject–object identity essentially means that the subjective and the objective, the intellectual and the empirical, the ideal and the real –however one formulates the opposition – are not distinct substances but simply different aspects, properties or attributes of one and the same substance. (p.64)

But, Beiser points out, unity creates a problem:

In the end, the problem of contingency presents Hegel with a dilemma. The realm of contingency must be inside or outside the system. If it is inside the system, then contingency has only a subjective status, so that there is no explanation of real contingency. If, however, it is outside the system, it has an objective status; but it then limits the absolute and introduces a dualism between form and content. (p.79)

Hegel addressed this question via organicism, in which

The goal of subject–object identity contrasted sharply with the reality of a dualism between subject and object in ordinary experience. These dualisms can be overcome, Hegel maintains, only if we accept an organic concept of nature according to which the subjective and the objective are only different degrees of organization and development of a single living force. (p.105)

Recall that Hegel was a big influence on Vygotsky (which is why I’m reading about Hegel). Beiser describes Hegel’s use of the familiar terms of internalization and externalization:

In some striking passages from The Spirit of Christianity Hegel calls what both produces and results from love, the whole process of self-surrender and self-discovery, of externalization and internalization, spirit (Geist). He first uses the term in a religious context, in writing about how the spirit of Jesus was present at the Last Supper. He wrote that the spirit of Jesus is the spirit of love, which first makes itself objective, externalizing itself in the bread and wine, and then makes itself subjective, internalizing the bread and wine through the act of eating. Hegel likens the process to that of understanding meaning from a written word; the thought is first objectified in the sign, and it is then resubjectified when the sign is read as having a specific meaning. (p.115)

And 

The opposing movements involved in the experience of love – its externalization and internalization, self-surrender and self-discovery – Hegel will later call ‘dialectic’. Hegel will later use the term in this sense to describe the process of spiritual development. It is important, however, to distinguish at least two meanings of this concept: the ontological, whereby it defines something happening in reality; and the methodological or epistemological, whereby it signifies a method of doing philosophy. (p.115)

Dialectic, of course, is one of Hegel’s primary contributions (and the contribution that most interests me). Beiser explains it further:

Hegel’s term for his own anti-methodology is ‘the concept’ (der Begriff), which designates the inherent form of an object, its inner purpose. It is the purpose of enquiry to grasp this inner form, Hegel argues, and it is for this reason that he demands suspending all preconceptions. If the philosopher simply applies his a priori ideas to the subject matter, he has no guarantee that he grasps its inner form or the object as it is in itself; for all he knows, he sees the object only as it is for him. When Hegel uses the term ‘dialectic’ it usually designates the ‘self-organization’ of the subject matter, its ‘inner necessity’ and ‘inherent movement’. The dialectic is what follows from the concept of the thing. It is flatly contrary to Hegel’s intention, therefore, to assume that the dialectic is an a priori methodology, or indeed a kind of logic, that one can apply to any subject matter. The dialectic is the very opposite: it is the inner movement of the subject matter, what evolves from it rather than what the philosopher applies to it. (p.160)

Like everyone else who writes about Hegel, Beiser cautions us that Hegel did not use the schema thesis-antithesis-synthesis (p.161). He also argues that dialectic is not some sort of alternative logic (p.161). Rather, it’s about the unity of the subject matter: “Indeed, the point of the dialectic will be to remove contradictions by showing how contradictory predicates that seem true of the same thing are really only true of different parts or aspects of the same thing” (p.162). Regarding contradictions, Beiser adds:

The dialectic arises from an inevitable contradiction in the procedures of the understanding. The understanding contradicts itself because it both separates things, as if they were completely independent of one another, and connects them, as if neither could exist apart from the other. It separates things when it analyzes them into their parts, each of which is given a self-sufficient status; and it connects them according to the principle of sufficient reason, showing how each event has a cause, or how each part inheres in a still smaller part, and so on ad infinitum. Hence the understanding ascribes both independence and dependence to things. The only way to resolve the contradiction, it turns out, is to reinterpret the independent or self-sufficient term as the whole of which all connected or dependent terms are only parts. (p.164)

Beiser adds:

Hegel states that there are three stages to the dialectic: the moment of abstraction or the understanding; the dialectical or negatively rational moment; and the speculative or positively rational moment. (p.167)

Beiser covers many other aspects of Hegel’s thought as well, but let’s stop there. I found this discussion to be helpful for understanding Vygotsky, but also Marx. If you’re trying to understand Hegel but, like me, are trying to either work up to or avoid reading the original, Beiser has written a clear summary that you should check out.

Reading :: Dance of the Dialectic

Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method
By Bertell Ollman

This spring, I was Zooming with several colleagues. One of them mentioned this book, and another recommended it as well. “It’s so good,” Colleague 1 remarked. “Soooo good,” Colleague 2 affirmed.

I ordered the book immediately, because I really needed an explainer on dialectics. I mean, yes, I have read a lot about dialectics, and I’ve recently tried my hand at differentiating among different applications of dialectics, but the term’s used in at least two senses, with considerable slippage among them.  

On one hand, dialectic is sometimes understood as the now common-sensical notion that:

• Things change over time and relative to each other; change is the only constant.

• Elements in a given system mutually adjust. In a relatively stable system, elements are held in tension and constantly work out these tensions. The result might be a new equilibrium, but not a permanently stable system, as new tensions develop.

• Systems sometimes reach tipping points, points at which small differences add up and precipitate larger systemic change.

• Dialectic is thus a description of how elements, and more importantly the relations among elements, change in a system.

This understanding of dialectic yields an open field of possibilities. Here, systemic constraints are hard to predict, confounding the older and simpler idea of stability and clear monocausal relations. To provide one example, evolutionary theory challenged the older understanding of fixed species reproducing, instead arguing that species evolve to address changes in the environment, and in evolving, they change the environment for other species around them. Evolution isn’t a fixed linear path (contra how it is often depicted in science fiction) but rather a dispersion of various mutations, some of which might succeed in the changed environment. 

On the other hand, dialectic is sometimes – especially in Engels, Lenin, and Stalin – understood in a much more closed way:

• The essential logic of nature, one that underlies all processes, and ultimately teleological (Engels).

• Since it’s teleological, dialectic is a process that inevitably leads to specific outcomes, especially communism (Stalin).

• Dialectic is thus a prescription or prediction, telling us how a system – specifically an economic system – will change as it resolves its tensions.

This understanding of dialectic yields a closed field of possibilities. It lays out imperatives. For Stalin, it justified extending the dictatorship of the proletariat from a short transitional period to an “entire historical era.” 

There’s (ahem) a tension between these two senses. Marxists have emphasized the former, but have tried legitimizing the latter. This is true of Marx, but especially Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.

How does this relate to Ollmann’s book? On page 1, he argues that “Marxism … offers us a tale of two cities: one that claims to have freedom but doesn’t, and another that possesses bountiful freedom for all, but few know where it is or how to get it. The first city is called ‘capitalism’ … The other city is called ‘communism.’” (p.1).

For those who might object that communist regimes have so far not really been associated with freedom for all, Olmann hastily adds:

This city [communism] can’t be found on a map, because until now it only exists in the shadows of the first city. … The capitalists have managed to keep communism a well-guarded secret by using their power over the mike [microphone] … to ensure that no one learns that communism is really about freedom, while endlessly repeating the cannard [sic] that something called ‘communism’ was already tried in a few underdeveloped countries and that it didn’t work. (p.1; cf. p.155 for an explicit denial of “what happened in the Soviet Union and China”)

In other words: if you say that communism hasn’t worked, Olmann says that’s because it has never actually been tried. Just as Christ’s Second Coming us always on the horizon, or Dippin’ Dots is always characterized as the ice cream of the future, communism hasn’t come into its own yet, but it is an inevitability – according to this line of thought.

Olmann adds that Marx’s focus isn’t capitalism or communism, but rather their internal relations, and “how communism evolves as a still-unrealized potential within capitalism and the history of this evolution, stretching from earliest times to a future that is still far in front of us” (pp.1-2). That is, Marx’s focus is dialectic, which, when he applied it to capitalism, allowed him to contemplate how this capitalist system could (would) eventually evolve into communism.

Here on p.2, I had an epiphany due to my recent readings. 

The first is Latour’s Aramis, which I grow to appreciate more each time I read it. In Aramis, Latour investigates the failure of a cutting-edge autonomous train system in France, and he discovers that the system failed in part because its stakeholders each had a different, ideal notion of the train system. None of them were willing to compromise on this system, and their desires were incompatible, so the system could not come into being. They all loved the idea of Aramis, but only if it fit their ideal versions – and thus they loved it to death. 

The second is Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. I’ll just quote from my review of that book:

Boltanski and Chiapello agree with Weber's basic thesis but argue that capitalism continues to reinvent itself. They argue that the "spirit of capitalism" is the "ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism" (p.8) and that this ideology has periodically had to change in order to address and incorporate critiques (p.19). In fact, the authors identify three "spirits" of capitalism at different periods—familial, bureaucratic, and globalized—each of which were in tune with their time periods (p.19). The third spirit, which is what we are living through today (or at least were in 1999), must restore meaning to the accumulation process, combined with social justice (p.19).

More broadly, they say, critiques function as a motor for capitalism, which must align with other values to survive. Capitalism relies on its enemies' critiques to identify moral supports, which it then incorporates (p.27). (For a quick example, think in terms of social entrepreneurship.) In rhetorical terms, capitalism concedes critiques and adjusts its argument to address them. Paradoxically, this means that capitalism is the most fragile when it is triumphant (p.27)—when it doesn't have a critique to incorporate.

To put it back into Latourean terms, capitalists generally haven’t loved capitalism to death: they haven’t insisted on it being pure, perfect, or ideal. They have kept evolving it, reinventing it, by incorporating critiques. You might be able to find some capitalist idealists who will conclude that real capitalism hasn’t been tried yet, but they are considered marginal. People criticize systems as not being purely capitalist (ex: welfare! Social security!) but no one makes excuses by saying capitalism has never been tried. 

Putting these two texts together gives us a new insight into Ollman’s two cities. Perhaps, as Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, capitalism succeeds because it incorporates critiques. And perhaps communism remains understood as some future accomplishment because the previous attempts at communism have not incorporated critiques; instead, they are dismissed as not really communism because they do not meet the ideal that communists have in mind. 

But without trying versions and incorporating critiques, how could communism emerge? So here we are, 175 years after the Communist Manifesto was published, with a string of communist efforts that real people fought and died over, all of which have been denied because they turned out not to be perfect. Real communism has never been tried! But the price of success is a string of previous failures, and denying those failures makes success impossible. Communism is meant to somehow spring inevitably from the failures of capitalism, rather than emerging from trial and error, adaptation and maladaptation – that is, from dialectic in the first sense (description). The only way to get to this inevitable, ideal version of capitalism is dialectic in the second sense (prescription, prediction). 

As we get into Ch.2, Olmann adds (?) that dialectics is not “a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history,” but “Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world” (p.12). That is, he specifies the first meaning of dialectics above (description). He says,

Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common-sense notion of “thing” (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of “process” (which contains its history and possible futures) and “relation” (which contains a part of its ties with other relations). … it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes units (the dialectical term is ‘abstracts’) in which to think about the world. (p.14)

Olmann says that dialectical relations include

• identity/difference

• interpenetration of opposites

• quantity/quality

• contradiction (p.15)

Of these, contradiction is the most important, since it focuses on the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation (p.17). Here, Olmann swerves back to the second meaning of dialectics above (prediction): “Capitalism’s fate, in other words, is sealed by its own problems, problems that are internal manifestations of what it is and how it works and are often parts of the very achievements of capitalism, worsening as the achievements grow and spread” (p.18). In contrast to (unnamed) nondialectical thinkers, who only think in terms of serial causality, dialecticians can (like Marx) understand how mutual dependence among elements will unfold: “for Marx … tracing how capitalist connections unfold is also a way of discovering the main causes of coming disruption and coming conflict” (p.18).  

(Olmann continues to dance across this line – for instance, later he claims that capitalism “was not only a possible development out of class society, but it was made likely by the character of the latter, by the very dynamics inherent in the division of labor once it got underway” (p.98, in which I would characterize as the first meaning of dialectics). And later still, he claims that Marx’s historical examinations aren’t teleological – Marx simply looks at today’s conditions and then asks: what past conditions led here (p.118)? Yet Marx looks at the capitalism of his day and concludes that “capitalism cannot go on much longer” (p.123)). 

Olmann makes a few concessions here:

1. Dialectical thinkers may play down details in the process of generalizing.

2. Dialectical thinkers sometimes move too quickly “to push the germ of an idea to its finished form.”

3. Dialectical thinkers sometimes “overestimate the speed of change.” (p.19)

Moving on. In Chapter 3, Olmann turns to social relations. Rather than examining “facets” of a single thing, dialectics focus on relations or interdependencies (p.25). In Chapter 4, he turns to internal relations, where he argues that in discussing interrelations, we are describing the system in which things exist (p.41). And in Chapter 5, he discusses abstraction, which Marx uses in four distinct ways:

1. The mental act of subdividing the world (p.61)

2. The result of this process (parts) (p.62)

3. “A suborder of particularly ill-fitting mental constructs” (p.62)

4. “A particular organization of elements in the real world – having to do with the functioning of capitalism – that provides the objective underpinnings for most of the ideological abstractions mentioned above” (p.62)

Olmann sounds a theme here that shows up elsewhere in the book – the theme that critics just haven’t put the time into really understanding Marx (see also p.109). He acknowledges that Marx uses terms with considerable slippage (like “abstraction”) and switches between levels of analysis without much signaling, and consequently non-Marxists have trouble reading Marx properly (p.94). Similarly, he explains Engels’ reductive presentation of dialectics in his Dialectics of Nature by claiming that Engels is writing about dialectics at a broad level, Marx at a human level (p.97). 

Moving on, we get to Chapter 9, “Why Dialectics? Why Now?” And here we return to the theme of impending communism that was begun in Chapter 1. Olmann acknowledges the collapse of the USSR, but warns (like Marx) that capitalism can’t go on much longer (pp.158-159) and assures us that communism still lays concealed inside capitalism (p.159). Capitalism is “becoming impossible,” creating the conditions for communism (p.159). And here we begin to see the real differences between this dialectics, the second sense of dialectics, and Latour’s Aramis and Boltanski & Chiapello. For dialectics, the conditions create an inevitable progression: the principle of quantitative change yielding qualitative change means that the system will collapse into a new equilibrium rather than being negotiated and evolving in unpredictable ways. Every knee will bend, every tongue will confess.  

Having stepped into the second meaning of dialectics, Ohlmann must end by hopping back into the first meaning, conceding that “the projections of the future obtained through the use of the method outlined here are only highly probable” and noting that Marx himself conceded that an unlikely alternative outcome would be “barbarism” (p.168). (Surely many, many other possibilities exist in a highly complex system, but most of that complexity can be waved away through Abstraction.) Olmann finally provides us with a figure of dance steps that he terms the “dance of the dialectic”: 

1. Analyze

2. Historicize

3. Visionize

4. And organize! (p.169)

But as implied in this review, the dance of the dialectic seems to also include two other steps interspersed throughout the dance: first a leap to Describe, then gathering strength for the powerful leap to Predict, followed by a hasty conciliatory hop back to Describe, and repeat as opportune.

I’ll stop here. The remaining chapters are useful, but not (in my judgment) core to the book, and this review is long enough.

So what did I think of the book? Although I think readers can recognize my frustration with dialectics, this book was indeed “soooo good,” as my colleague promised, because it helped me to think through dialectics as a method, and specifically this duality between description and prescription – admittedly, probably too simple a characterization, but it was enough to help me understand what has always put me off about dialectics. If you’re similarly struggling with what is meant by this method, or how to apply it, or how to better understand the works of Soviet psychologists (as I am), definitely pick it up.

Reading :: The Formal Method of Literary Scholarship (supplemental notes on dialectics)

Originally posted: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:59:52

The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics

by M.M. Bakhtin, P.N. Medvedev

I reviewed this book earlier, but I've returned to it to more closely examine how Medvedev understands dialectic. I just did something similar with Voloshinov's 1929 book -- see that review for a little more context. Here, I'll cut to the chase.

Medvedev does seem to be looking for a system in which to place dialogue. He frames the book in terms of ideology, just as Voloshinov does, and within that frame he extensively discusses what he terms social evaluation (p.119 on). Social evaluation, in Medvedev's view, is connected to economic class. In terms of social evaluation, different levels of analytical scope are dialectically connected to each other (p.121) (a point that I made in an article a couple of years ago, although I wasn't using dialectic in particular). Medvedev's interest in system leads him to look on familiar Marxist territory: base and superstructure, laws of development, and of course ideology (pp. 3-4). He allows that a "will to system" gives way to a desire to understand organic unity in the world (p.6), but it seems that this organic unity is understood along Marxist lines and contrasts with Bakhtin's buzzing, chattering disunity.

Dialectic pairs seem to abound in this book as they did in Voloshinov's. The levels of scope I've already mentioned (p.121). Others include the dialectic between philosophy and world (p.6), extrinsic and intrinsic (p.67, 158) (a pair that dialectically yields an ideological horizon (pp.153-154)), and the dialectical conception of the individuality and interaction of ideological phenomena (p.30). Interestingly, Medvedev uses the same example of the water molecule that Vygotsky cribbed from Engels, but in reverse -- likening literary criticism to pulling the oxygen out of the molecule (p.22).

Like Voloshinov, Medvedev agrees with Bakhtin on key points about dialogue, but strays on others. Like Bakhtin, Medvedev sees each utterance as a social act (pp. 120-121) and understands expressive intonation as historically unique (p.122). Medvedev also sees genre as having a double orientation not described as dialectic (p.131; cf. p.135, where he discusses the reality of genre vs. the reality accessible to it). He understands genre as a way to conceptualize reality, just as Bakhtin does (p.133), and even thinks that inner speech, in utterances, constitutes inner genres (p.134). Like Bakhtin and Voloshinov, he doesn't understand inner speech as a stream of words (p.133). On the other hand, like Voloshinov but unlike Bakhtin, Medvedev understands utterances as agreeing with or negating (p.91; 165). This is key, I think, because (as I argued in the Voloshinov review linked above) it betrays an ultimate allegiance to dialectic as a philosophical method in which theses and antitheses must meet to develop new syntheses and new truths. Bakhtin is looking for personal truths; Marxists, and I think Medvedev as well, are looking for more broadly based ones. >

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Reading :: Dialectical Logic

Originally posted: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 21:00:45

Dialectical Logic: Essays on its History and Theory

by E.V. Ilyenkov

I've provided a link to the electronic version of this book at marxists.org since Amazon doesn't list the version I read and doesn't have much on the book at all. Ilyenkov is credited by Yrjo Engestrom as the thinker that brought the issue of contradictions back to the forefront of dialectical thought; Engestrom and others applied the work to activity theory, making possible the development of the third generation of AT. For those of us who came late to activity theory, it's hard to imagine AT without contradictions as the central explanation for developmental change.

In this book, Ilyenkov does develop the idea of contradictions as the driving force of change and development in human activity. But the book mainly deals with the history of dialectical logic. Ilyenkov traces the prehistory and history of Marxist dialectic, touching briefly on Aristotle before jumping to Descartes, Locke, Bacon, Liebniz, and a series of other philosophers. Ilyenkov reserves extended discussion for Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Lenin. Those who are familiar with Soviet publications from this era will not be surprised that Marx and Lenin are treated as infallible while the others are treated as men who couldn't quite escape their preconceptions. In vintage Soviet form, Ilyenkov casts Hegel's contributions in this way:

Marx, Engels, and Lenin showed both the historical contribution of Hegel and the historically conditioned limitations of his scientific advances, the clearly drawn boundary across which the Hegelian dialectic could not step, and the illusions, whose power it was incapable of overcoming despite all the strength of its creator?s mind. Hegel?s greatness, like his limitations, was due on the whole to his having exhausted the possibilities of developing dialectics on the basis of idealism, within the limits of the premises that idealism imposed on scientific thinking. (p.227).

Although Ilyenkov is a careful thinker, he sounds downright Engelsian in his claims for dialectic. "Dialectical Logic is therefore not only a universal scheme of subjective activity creatively transforming nature," he declares, "but is also at the same time a universal scheme of the changing of any natural or socio-historical material in which this activity is fulfilled and with the objective requirements of which it is always connected" (p.8). So is dialectic a logic -- a sociohistorical phenomenon -- or is it a universal law that applies equally to all types of change, as Engels would have it? My reading suggests the latter: Ilyenkov later approvingly quotes Engels' assertion that natural dialectic inevitably will produce thinking minds (p.55) and Lenin's assertion that thought is the highest form of development of the universal property of sensation (p.56). Later, Ilyenkov hails Schelling's contribution of the "truly universal" law of bifurcation, derived from various examples (magnetic polarity; acids and alkalis; positive and negative electricity). Again, this sounds much like Engels, and supports Deleuze and Guattari's charge that dialectic is arborescent. Finally, Ilyenkov insists that dialectical schemas revealed by Hegel were universal forms and laws of the natural world reflected in man's collective consciousness (p.251; cf. 290; 312). Haraway's critique of dialectics seems more and more relevant here.

Let's return to the question of contradictions, because this is where Ilyenkov makes his real contribution. Ilyenkov boldly asserts that "Contradiction as the concrete unity of mutually exclusive opposites is the real nucleus of dialectics, its central category. On that score the cannot be two views among Marxists" (p.320). Contradictions, he says, are the principle of self-movement in a "concrete, developing system" (let's say an "activity system" here) and are "the form in which the development is cast" (p.330). They provide the impetus for development; dialectics "is the means of resolving these contradictions" (p.322). In fact, studying contradictions is all about studying human activity geneticallly (i.e., historically-developmentally). How did this system develop? What contradictions have arisen and how will they be resolved?

We can see how the third generation of activity theory has taken on Ilyenkov's specific approach to studying development, while moderating or suppressing what appears to be a strongly teleological, universalist understanding of the principle. I'm becoming more and more convinced that activity theory is treading a difficult path at this point, attempting to hold onto the modernist understanding of dialectics and contradictions while simultaneously trying to integrate postmodernist, amodernist, and poststructuralist ideas (multiplicity, dialogism).

Is it worth reading this book? If you're interested in a history of dialectics, or if you're interested in how activity theory's notion of contradiction was developed, you should. I'm interested in both. But be prepared for -- how should I put this? -- some remarkably Soviet prose. >

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Reading :: The Rebirth of Dialogue

Originally posted: Sat, 06 Nov 2004 07:51:59

The Rebirth of Dialogue: Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical Tradition

by James P. Zappen

I'm going to be talking about Bakhtin and dialogue soon, and it's been worrying me. My upcoming project involves comparing dialogue and dialectic in the works of the Bakhtin Circle and in Vygotsky's works. I'm curious whether the difference between the two -- a difference that Bakhtin seems to think is quite fundamental -- is damaging to the many Bakhtin-Vygotsky syntheses being used in cultural-historical studies. Of course, I have been trying to limit my inquiry to what those two circles meant by the terms dialogue and dialectic -- I didn't want to get bogged down in more general, more ancient uses of the terms. That is, I wanted to limit myself to how Vygotsky conceived of dialectic, not how Socrates did. The more extended spadework, I thought, could be done by someone else.

Fortunately someone else already has. In The Rebirth of Dialogue, Jim Zappen does a very good job of reexamining dialogue and dialectic in the Socratic dialogues, taking as his starting point Bakhtin's discussion of these dialogues from Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Bakhtin's argument (overstated but still in the ballpark, Zappen suggests) is that the earlier Socratic dialogues are closer to the actual, unfinalized dialogues that Socrates had with his interlocutors; the later ones more closely reflect the finalized dialectic scripted by Plato. The former involved testing the interlocutors in their own terms, drawing ideas from them, working together on developing a common stance, but not completely committing to it or holding it up as an absolute answer. The latter involved a teleological progression to the final(ized) absolute answer. As Zappen puts it,

From the perspective of the more mature dialectic and rhetoric of Plato or Aristotle, Socrates may seem to be, at best, a canny rationalist and, at worst, a devious manipulator. But the Socrates who emerges in studies of the early dialogues (including Mikhail M. Bakhtin's) was less concerned with establishing positive knowledge and persuading others to accept that knowledge, by whatever means, than he was concerned with improving his own and other people's lives by examining, together, their most fundamental beliefs. ... This art of dialogue disappears as it is transformed into Plato's dialectical rhetoric and Aristotle's dialect and rhetoric but reappears in the nineteenth century in opposition to the unified truths of philosophy and science and the persuasive purposes of traditional rhetoric.

Echoing Bakhtin, Zappen argues that we can read past Plato's almost certainly distorted portrayal of Socrates' many interlocutors to reconstruct their actual arguments. (Latour does something similar in Pandora's Hope; I think a lot of folks do.) Through sensitive and painstaking examinations of the dialogues, Zappen manages to mine a lot of gold.

Near the end, Zappen addresses Socrates' complaint about writing in the Phaedrus, reading it as a complaint about a medium that cannot engage in dialogue -- one in which the words are finalized and cannot entertain others' utterances or answer back. He links this point to digital media and discusses some of the many projects in which he has engaged, from online courses taught in MOOs to his more recent Connected Kids project. I was glad to see this connection between classical rhetoric and modern computers-and-writing topics. But I'm not entirely convinced that these electronic texts would satisfy Socrates.

In any case, The Rebirth of Dialogue was really fascinating and proved very helpful for working out some of the thoughts I've been having about dialogue. It also made me want to go back and read some of those dialogues over again; it's been a while. Maybe I'll tackle them again soon.

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Reading :: Thought and Language

Originally posted: Tue, 04 Jan 2005 01:30:26
Thought and Language (First Edition)
by Lev S. Vygotsky
I was stunned to realize that I hadn't yet written a review of this classic book by Lev Vygotsky, the giant of developmental psychology whose cultural-historical approach became the basis for activity theory. This first edition of Thought and Language was published by MIT Press in 1962 with a foreword by Jerome Bruner. I understand that the second edition (1986) includes more text that was not originally translated and included in this version, so I'll have to go to UT's library soon and pick it up.
Even without those materials, though, the first edition is still a valuable piece of work. Based on the Russian book published posthumously in 1934, Thought and Language is a criticism of then-current scholarship regarding language acquisition and a description of an alternate thesis. Vygotsky based his theoretical and methodological insights on dialectical materialism and supported them with considerable work with small children -- though that work was not always terribly careful. (In the foreword to Mind in Society, Mike Cole explains that Vygotsky was suffering from tuberculosis and knew he didn't have much time to experimentally develop all of his work.)
Although Vygotsky's empirical work was primarily with children, his goal was larger than that; it was an attempt to develop a theory of general language use. Here, I think his reach exceeded his grasp. Although Vygotsky developed some valuable and important concepts, his focus on development and his allegiance to dialectic tend to get in the way of a general theory of language. That is to say, language acquisition is not necessarily the same as language use, and the latter question is neither as well explored nor as well thought out as the former in this book. In contrast to Bakhtin, who was developing his own philosophy of language at about this time, Vygotsky seems simultaneously more knowledgeable and grounded (in terms of language development) and more naive (in terms of how language is used in everyday adult life).
Before developing this idea, let's get a sense of Vygotsky's general direction. Vygotsky, as I said, worked primarily with children and was interested in language acquisition. He complains in Chapter 1 that many language researchers try to take an "elemental" approach in breaking language down into elements such as sound and meaning, and famously uses the illustration of water. You can break down water into its elements -- hydrogen and oxygen -- but you can't learn much about water that way. Hydrogen and oxygen are flammable, but water isn't. To understand water, you need to study the essential unit of analysis, the water molecule (pp.3-4). Similarly, to study language, you have to look for the essential unit of analysis, which he identifies as word meaning (p.5). Readers might recognize the "germ cell" notion that Engestrom uses so much and that has its roots in Marx. "Since word meaning is both thought and speech, we find in it the unit of verbal thought we are looking for" (p.5) --- it embodies a dialectical relationship between thought and speech. "Every idea," Vygotsky says later in the chapter, "contains a transmuted affective attitude toward the bit of reality to which it refers. It further permits us to trace the path from a person's needs and impulses to the specific direction taken by his thoughts, and the reverse path from his thoughts to his behavior and activity" (p.8). That is, Vygotsky wants to develop a historical-genetic account of language acquisition and thought, an interactionist-dialectic account that allows us to retrace the developmental steps.
The interactive-dialectical relationship is used quite a bit in this book: thought-speech (p.5, 33, 125), adaptation-need (p.21), invented-given (p.33), concepts-complexes (p.74), learning-development (most of Ch.6). The concepts-complexes relationship in particular is viewed as a "ceaseless struggle" (p.74), while the thought-speech relationship is seen as "growth curves" that "cross and recross" (p.33; cf Mind in Society p.46). In each case, the pair has an interactive relationship in which both sides develop in concert, qualitatively and teleologically. It's understandable that this sort of relationship be used to characterize language acquisition, which certainly follows a particular, predictable path -- and as I think Vygotsky shows, it's a more satisfactory account of language acquisition than Piaget's or Stern's. But it's also very interesting to me that this relationship is characterized not only as interactive but as dialectical, not only as developmental but as genetic (in the educational sense, not the human genome sense). The emphasis on these particular characterizations, I think, comes from the fact that Vygotsky was basing his work on Marx's work. Although this translation barely uses the term "dialectic," I sense that it's deeply embedded in the work, such as in these theses on the thought-speech relationship:

In brief, we must conclude that:
1. In their ontogenetic development, thought and speech have different roots;
2. In the speech development of the child, we can with certainty establish a preintellectual stage, and in his thought development, a prelinguistic stage;
3. Up to a certain point in time, the two follow lines independently of each other;
4. At a certain point these lines meet, whereupon thought becomes verbal and speech rational. (p.44)

Thought and speech are different -- thought is not just internalized speech, speech is not just expressed thought -- but they don't meet their potential until they enter a predictable, developmental interactional-dialectic relationship. At that point they meet and they irrevocably change each others' character, though they never entirely merge. Indeed, "all the higher psychic functions are mediated processes, and signs are the basic means used to master and direct them" (p.56); thought only becomes higher thought by becoming verbal, by being mediated with signs.
This insight is incredibly valuable and carries us quite a ways, helping us to examine language acquisition and use in more complex ways than before. But at the same time, dialectic spells trouble when we get to general language philosophy and use. If dialectic is the ruling principle for language use, then non-dialectical interaction -- for instance, a dialogue in which nothing gets resolved, or a relationship that is indeterminate or multivalent -- can only be seen as abnormal or defective. I think that's the problem behind Vygotsky's discussion of complexes vs. concepts in Ch.5.
Here, Vygotsky explains that concept formation happens in three stages. The first is when the child solves problems by placing items in unorganized heaps. "At this stage, word meaning denotes nothing more to the child than a vague syncretic conglomeration of individual objects that have somehow or other coalesced into an image in his mind. Because of its syncretic origin, that image is highly unstable" (pp.59-60).
The second stage is what they call "thinking in complexes." "In a complex, individual objects are united in the child's mind not only by his subjective impressions but also by bonds actually existing between those objects. This is a new achievement, an ascent to a much higher level" (p.61). "In a complex, the bonds between its opponents are concrete and factual rather than abstract and logical" (p.61). Vygotsky and his colleagues identify five types of complexes:
- associative: Based on a common trait, similarity, contrast, or proximity (p.62).
- collections "on the basis of some one trait in which they differ and consequently complement one another" (p.63).
- chains: "a dynamic, consecutive joining of individual links into a single chain, with meaning carried over from one to the next" -- although that meaning might change from one end of the chain to the other (p.64).
- diffuse: "marked by the fluidity of the very attribute that unites its single elements"; that attribute may be based on "a dim impression that they have something in common" (p.65).
- pseudo-concept: it looks like conceptual thinking, but it's still a complex. For instance, when a child is asked to pick out all the triangles, he can do it, but on the basis of visible likeness (associative) rather than on the basis of concepts. The pseudo-concept is the bridge to concepts (p.66). It is "a complex already carrying the germinating seed of a concept" (p.69).
Yes, a germinating seed. One can see how the Marxist narrative of development guides this discussion of language development. And it leads to the third stage, the concept, which is a unifying theme (p.69) that allows the language user to transcend complexes and transcend the given language to form her own understandings and groups (p.67). This is where the discussion goes off the tracks, I think, because we go from language acquisition to language philosophy. Complexes, Vygotsky says, characterize not only children's thought but also the thought of primitive peoples: "Primitive people also think in complexes, and consequently the word in their languages does not function as the carrier of a concept but as a 'family name' for groups of concrete objects belonging together, not logically, but factually" (p.72). And not only primitives, but us, in the etymologies of our common words (p.73)! And this brings us to the "ceaseless struggle within the developing language between conceptual thought and the heritage of primitive thinking in complexes" -- a struggle that is not so ceaseless after all in terms of individual words, since the concept usually wins (p.74).
That's a troublesome conclusion to draw, since the implication is that modern (as opposed to primitive) societies converge on single abstract meanings of words and leave behind the childish associational meanings. Compare to Bakhtin's decidedly different understanding, in which the word is half someone else's and words can recall interactive but nonconvergent dialogues. It's easy to see now what Deleuze and Guattari meant when they said that multiplicity had killed off dialectic: once you accept that words always have these multiple meanings and, yes, associations, Vygotsky's notion of concept formation becomes untenable -- at least as I understand it here. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that complexes, as Vygotsky calls them, are still quite plentiful in fully developed adult speech and concepts -- though perhaps developmentally "higher" or later -- cannot supplant them.
Perhaps this notion of dialectic development is what makes the final chapter, on general language use, seem flat. Vygotsky uses examples from literature, including Dostoevsky's story of the drunks carrying on a conversation composed of a single unprintable word, but he sees dialogue as a "chain of reactions" (p.144) -- something that sounds rather similar to the chain complex -- rather than something in which viewpoints are exchanged without necessary agreement. There's something very linear about Vygotsky's depiction of dialogues and of development. Again, compare with Bakhtin.
Still, this is a fascinating book. I'm going to have to pick up the second edition, but I also need to review Morson and Emerson's compare-and-contrast between Bakhtin and Vygotsky.
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