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Vygotsky, Marxism and Pavlovs Reflexology

Peter E Jones Historical Materialism 2013

Department of Humanities Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield S1 1WB UK P.E.Jones@shu.ac.uk

In this paper I briefly summarize some of the conclusions from my forthcoming book on Vygotsky, (Language and Human Potential in Vygotskys Tradition, Cambridge University Press) focusing here on the relationship between the Marxist tradition and the key theoretical principles of Vygotskys psychology in the light of the latter's dependence on the reflex-based approach of Ivan Pavlov.

I stress that this paper is not an attempt at a detailed critical evaluation of the whole of Vygotsky's work or of its application in current educational theory and practice, but aims to clarify the theoretical presuppositions of Vygotsky's appeal to semiological and linguistic processes. See Jones (2007, 2009) for further discussion of Vygotskys conception of language and communication.

Vygotsky and Marx

The brilliant Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, who died in his late 30s in 1934, was explicit about his own commitment to Marxism and his ambition to develop a psychological theory consistent with Marxist principles. But he was also modest about his actual progress on that score, understanding in refreshing contrast with many others - that it was impossible to create a psychology, or indeed any science, by spinning out quotations from the Marxist classics.

A young man of 21 when the October Revolution took place, he was one of a new generation who embraced the aims of the Revolution as well as its formidable challenges. His work undoubtedly represents an original attempt to identify and develop the psychological implications of Marxian thought while helping to solve the formidable practical tasks of education and rehabilitation thrown up by war and revolutionary upheaval.

What might one expect to draw from Marx about the human mind and how to study it?

Firstly, that human mental powers are neither innately given, nor are they identical in all individuals: they are historical in nature, developing and varying in time and circumstance with the lives of those people whose powers they are.

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Secondly, human beings are naturally social creatures whose mental capacities arise as forms and means of living their lives in cooperation and association with others.

Thirdly, social life is first and foremost practical, an ever-renewed process of creation and transformation of the life world in the production of the material and spiritual means of life (labour) and, at the same time, a making and re-making of people themselves in that process. Understanding how people see the world and themselves, how they think and reason, how they communicate with one another, means, therefore, understanding how they live, how they act, how they make things, how they produce, how they organize their lives and social relations since their powers of perception, cognition and communication are just the powers of these individuals consciously living these lives.

For Vygotsky, developing his new cultural-historical psychology, then, human mental processes were neither determined by our biology nor the expression of some other-worldly spiritual powers. Our mental faculties, rather, are created by us: they are a purely human accomplishment, forged in a historical process of self-development or self-mastery. More specifically, these powers are formed in the relationship between people and the instruments beyond their bodies which they have fashioned and incorporated into their vital activities. Human mental functioning, then, included these extra-bodily instruments, instruments which were themselves subject to historical change and re-design. Amongst these various instruments of human action, Vygotsky singled out the role of signs, including language, for their special significance in the development of distinctively human thought and action. Signs and words were, on this view, psychological tools due to the influence that they conveyed on the thoughts and behaviour of others. These psychological tools, both the product and the vehicle of historically developing culture, now properly became part of the study of the human mind itself which was, accordingly, now also a historical study of essentially cultural psychological functions.

This was Vygotskys original vision and the heart of his contribution as a psychologist.

However, while the Marxian inspiration for such a view may appear obvious, Vygotskys position, as set out above, actually reflects more keenly the influence of other ideas and assumptions of a quite un-Marxian character in philosophy, philology, sociology and the natural sciences, which were nevertheless fashionable amongst the leading Marxists of the time in Soviet Russia.

Soviet Marxism and Reflexology

Its significant that the Marxist work most cited by Vygotsky in his early writing on the psychology of art is Nikolai Bukharins book Historical Materialism: a System of Sociology first published in 1921 and going through several editions. The book is instructive for what it tells us about what one powerful strain of Marxism had turned out like in the Russian revolutionary movement under the influence of Plekhanov and Lenin. Bukharin articulates a number of then-current 'Marxist' ideas whose influence

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is evident in psychological theorizing, including that of Vygotsky, in the immediate post-Revolutionary years.

First of all there is Bukharins reading of materialism:

A zero cannot think; nor can a doughnut or the hole in it think; nor can mind think without matter. Mans brain, a part of mans organism, thinks. And mans organism is matter organized in a highly intricate form (1926: 54).

Then a crude social determinism:

if we examine each individual in his development, we shall find that at bottom he is filled with the influences of his environment, as the skin of a sausage is filled with sausage-meat (1926: 98).

He expands on this theme:

Like a sponge he constantly absorbs new impressions. And thus he is formed as an individual. Each individual at bottom is filled with a social content. The individual himself is a collection of concentrated social influences, united in a small unit (1926: 98).

Bukharin also explains how his version of Marxism deals with the thorny philosophical problem of free will and determinism, i.e. by doing away with it altogether:

under all conditions, both usual and unusual, both normal and abnormal, the will, the feeling, the actions, of the individual man always have a definite cause; they are always conditioned (determined), defined (1926: 37).

Then onto thought and language which Bukharin refers to as the most abstract ideological categories of the superstructure' (1926: 203). His basic position is a combination of an ancient logocentrism with the latest reflexological discourse:

Thought always operates with the aid of words, even when the latter are not spoken; thought is speech minus sound (1926: 204).

Turning his attention to the evolution of thought as an aspect of social evolution, he quotes approvingly from Lvy-Brhls book, published in 1910, entitled Les fonctions mentales dans les socits infrieures, a book which was a major influence on Vygotsky himself (see Van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991). As Buhkarin explains, Lvy-Brhl considered the mode of thought of savages as pre-logical (1926: 204):

In savage thought, details and specific things are often not distinguished from the general or even the whole; one thing is confused with another.

These quite absurd, formal and scholastic views on the thinking powers of savages which betray not even a faint echo of the credo and methodological imperatives of the German Ideology for instance sit side by side with an unrivalled enthusiasm for the causal-mechanistic orientation of Pavlovian reflexology. When Bukharin

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published his own response to Pavlovs 1924 diatribe against the Bolsheviks, he argued that whether Pavlov realized it or not, his [reflex] doctrine was a weapon from the iron arsenal of materialism (Joravsky, 1989: 213). Trotsky, too, another important source in Vygotskys early work, publicly praised Pavlovs work, albeit it on the basis of a rather vague acquaintance with psychology, as Joravsky argues (1989).

Reflexology or the whole tradition of physiological reductionism (Joravsky, 1989) - was rampant at the time and easily gained the ascendancy over other psychological paradigms, in Russia as well as everywhere else. It was accepted pretty much uncritically in educated Marxist circles that reflexology was the scientifically valid, materialist way forward in psychology. By the time Vygotsky began his own career as a professional psychologist, critical voices against reflexology were rare and increasingly marginalized in the rush for Marxist psychological gold.

Now it is true to say, as many have, that Vygotsky burst onto the psychological scene in 1924 with his own critique of reflexology. From the very beginning his focus on consciousness and will as essential human psychological attributes marked him out from your average reflexologist. Kozulin, for example, summarizes Vygotskys 1924 position as a challenge to almost all leading Soviet behavioral scientists, from Pavlovians to Bekhterev and Blonsky, who rejected the category of consciousness as an idealist superstition (1984: 103). But it would be misleading to paint Vygotsky as an opponent of reflexology. At that time, in relation to reflexology, he was more Catholic than the Pope, taking reflexes to provide the foundation for behavior though adding that we can learn nothing from them about the building that is constructed on this foundation (1984: 103, my emphasis).

In other words, it never crossed his mind to throw the Stimulus-Reaction model out. His intention, rather, was to restrict its domain of operation and build other principles on top. This was to be the basis of Vygotskys all important distinction between natural (lower) and cultural (higher) psychological functions, a distinction which he never retracted or repudiated and which was enshrined in the central Vygotskian concept of mediation.

The key principles of his new psychology, therefore, came with the reflex approach built in, as Nikolai Veresov argues:

one of the most famous ideas of the cultural-historical theory the idea of the mediated nature of every higher psychical function was rooted and established in the defectological works of Vygotsky, that were completely based on the behaviouristic-structural conception of human consciousness and due to that conception (1999: 203, my emphasis).

Mediation

Vygotsky (1981) introduces his conception of mediation as part of his account of the instrumental act, the cornerstone of his new theory and an innovative attempt to explain how material and symbolic tools (or signs) play different, though complementary, roles in the development of distinctively human forms of thinking and behaviour. His concept of instrumentality rests, firstly, on something that tools

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and signs have in common (the mediating function itself), and, secondly, on a distinction between them in relation to what they are directed at the real object (in the case of the tool), or the mind of another person (in the case of the sign). On those grounds the sign is distinguished as a psychological tool and one which is a cultural or artificial construct as opposed to a natural stimulus.

The role of the psychological tool (or sign) within the instrumental act is accounted for in reflexological terms. Indeed, as Vygotsky puts it: the whole composition of the instrumental act can, without exception, be reduced to a system of stimulus-response connections (1981: 140, my emphasis).

This works in the following way. The sign acts as a stimulus, thereby eliciting a reaction. So far so Pavlovian. But the key to understanding human ('higher') forms of behaviour is the idea that the sign stimulus is not some external environmental event acting on a passive organism but is itself deliberately created by the respondent as a way of eliciting the wanted reaction, what Vygotsky calls 'autostimulation' (1997: 54). As his succinct definition puts it:

We call artificial stimuli-devices introduced by man into a psychological situation where they fulfill the function of autostimulation signs (1997: 54/284).

Sign use, or auto-stimulation, involves bringing the natural psychological process (e.g., being reminded of something by an external stimulus) under the conscious control of the reacting person. If I want to remember to ring a friend I create a stimulus, e.g., a knot in my handkerchief, and feeling the knot at some point during the day will elicit phoning my friend (Van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991: 218).

Thus, mediation is defined in Vygotsky in relation to the S-R mechanism: it is the S-R relation itself which is mediated (by the cultural tool or sign). In that sense, Vygotskys cultural-historical theory was, and remained, reflexological to its foundation.

In this way, Vygotsky kept the natural psychology of the S-R schema but added another layer consisting of signs. The novelty of this layer was that it was located in society or history as a whole, and, for Vygotsky, it was precisely this socio-historical dimension that offered the key to a Marxist psychology, a dimension that Pavlov had neglected (at least initially). While Pavlov was preoccupied with animal reactions, Vygotsky thought he had found the source of human actions in a domain outside of, external to, the natural workings of the reflex mechanism namely society and the cultural forms of social organization. What was missing in Pavlovs naturalistic account was the power of society to make individual behaviour conform to the social norms embodied in the system of cultural signs or language. As Vygotsky put it:

social life creates the necessity of subordinating the behaviour of the individual to social requirements and with this creates complex signalizing systems means of connection directing and regulating the formation of conditional connections in the brain of each separate person These means of psychological connection are in

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their nature and function signs, that is artificially created stimuli whose purpose lies in influencing behaviour (cited in Leontev, 1967: 79).1

Reflexology, then, was not simply a part of a psychological or physiological model, but allowed the all-important hook up between individual psychology and sociology. Human behaviour, as opposed to animal behaviour, thus represented 'a new type of behavior', namely 'the social determination of behavior carried out with the aid of signs' (1997: 56).

The command and self-regulation

The basic principle of cultural-historical psychology is mediation, i.e., human self-regulation (or control of one's own reactions) by means of cultural signs (stimuli means). Furthermore, the self-regulation of behaviour by the individual is explained as a result of the internalization of external or interpersonal regulation. And it was the verbal command that Vygotsky considered to be the most important and characteristic means of external regulation.

Vygotsky took his picture of the communicative function of the command and its role in self-regulation pretty much lock stock and barrel from Pierre Janet (cf Van der Veer and Valsiner, 1988):

According to Janet, the word was initially a command for others According to Janet, the word is always a command and consequently it is the basic means of controlling behaviour (Vygotsky, 1997: 103).

Janets view was that the power of the word over mental functions is based on the real power of the superior over the subordinate (1997: 104). And this verbalized form of the boss-subordinate relationship becomes the means of individual self-control:

Regulating another's behavior by means of the word leads gradually to the development of verbalized behavior of the individual himself (1997: 104).

In other words, the view of language as a means of self-regulation is constructed on the same reflexological assumptions we have already examined.

Vygotsky in fact builds a mythology of social evolution and the development of labour around this particular hypothesis:

If we consider the initial forms of work activity, then we see that the function of fulfilling and the function of directing are separated there. An important step in the evolution of work is the following: what the supervisor does and what the underling does is united in one person. This, as we shall see below, is the basic mechanism of voluntary attention and work (1997: 104).

1 The quotation is from the 1960 Moscow edition of Vygotskys work of 1930, The Development of

Higher Psychological Functions. (My translation).

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Thus, Vygotsky's general position on the sociogenesis of mental functions is that 'all higher functions were formed not in biology, not in the history of pure phylogenesis, but that the mechanism itself that is the basis of higher mental functions is a copy from the social (1997: 106, my emphasis).

It is important, then, to understand this particular theoretical context when we are reading such statements as:

All higher psychological functions are the essence of internalized relations of a social order, a basis for the social structure of the individual (1997: 106).

In other words, the self-regulating role of speech, which has been uncritically accepted within the Vygotskian tradition, is understood as a process in which you internalize the commanding relationship, coming to give orders to yourself (first out loud then internally), on the reflexologically informed assumption that the commanding sign acts causally to make things happen in your mind.

Origins of the reflex conception

Pavlov himself notes that [o]ur starting point has been Descartes idea of the nervous reflex (Pavlov, 1927/1960: 7-8). He explains:

Starting from the assumption that animals behaved simply as machines, he regarded every activity of the organism as a necessary reaction to some external stimulus, the connection between the stimulus and the response being made through a definite nervous path (1927/60: 4)

Reflexology merely tried to make a science of what Descartes considered to be the basis of animal behaviour, namely mechanical reactivity to external influence, and the reflex principles Pavlov proposed were taken by many, including some of the leading Marxists of the time, as the foundation for an objective or materialist approach to human psychology.

The attraction, again, lay in the determinism that the reflex model afforded, as Yaroshevsky explains:

Thus, the appearance of the concept of reflex was the result of the penetration into psychophysiology of models which had been developing under the influence of the principles of optics and mechanics. The extension of physical categories to the activity of the organism permitted a deterministic understanding of this activity (1985: 127-128).

So the intellectual source of the cultural-historical conception of mediation is actually the distinction drawn by Descartes between the mechanical, animal reflexes and the higher intellectual powers of humans. This distinction is enshrined in cultural-historical theory in the Vygotskian two-stage formula for voluntary behaviour examined above. While it is true, then, that Vygotsky introduced important changes into his understanding of signs and the role of language in thinking, the point remains that the two-stage model based on reflexology, including the view of the sign as having a causal power rooted in reflex mechanisms, was a permanent feature of his

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thinking and the basis for his understanding of internalization and self-regulation, including his analysis of the derivation and role of egocentric and inner speech in his last work.

When Vygotsky placed the reflex hypothesis at the foundation of his new theoretical scheme he therefore brought the dualism of Descartes along with it.

If Vygotskys later work developed beyond his initial mediation conception it was nevertheless a development of that conception.

Concepts

Where does Vygotskys later work on concepts and conceptual development fit into this picture of a reflex-based psychology of mediation?

Very briefly, its the flip side. If the mediation view gives us a picture of people exploiting their own natural reactivity to outside stimulants, then the view of concepts tries to explain how they free us from the direct push and pull of immediate circumstances to plan actions according to universal or logical principles or laws. The conceptual abilities of educated western adults are here the model and are linked to the mastery of particular uses of language demonstrating scientific concepts along with syllogistic reasoning.

By contrast, when we turn to [t]hinking in connection with the development of language in primitive society (Vygotsky and Luria, 1993: 108), we discover that the language of primitive man turns out to be more meagre in means, cruder, and less developed than the language of a cultural man (1993: 108):

The wealth of vocabulary is directly dependent on the concrete and precise nature of primitive mans language. In the same way that he photographs and reproduces all his experience, he also recalls it, just as precisely. He does not know how to express himself abstractly and conditionally, as the cultural man does. (1993: 110).

In furtherance of Vygotskys programme, Lurias expeditions to Central Asian Republics within the USSR at the beginning of the 1930s, while collectivization crashed and burned, brought confirmation that the illiterate farming communities couldnt think according to the highest cultural standards of thinking and reasoning.

Here I merely quote Michael Coles succinct evaluation of this work:

'I can point to two features of Lurias cross-cultural research that fail to fulfil the methodological requirements of the sociohistorical school. First, as we have commented elsewhere [Cole and Griffin, 1980], Luria neither studied nor modelled in his experiments the practical activity systems of the Uzbeki and Kazaki people and the psychological processes associated with them; hence, his interpretations were not grounded in an analysis of culturally organized activities. Instead, for purposes of psychological diagnosis he introduced distinctly Western European activity systems in the form of psychological tests and interviews, which did not model local reality, but served instead as measurements of generalized psychological tendencies for

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which there was a developmental interpretation in Western European societies (Cole, 1999: 399).

The second problem: is Lurias failure to restrict his conclusions to particular domains, instead appearing to claim that in general there is a change in the complexity of mediational mechanisms of cognition in the socioeconomic change from agriculture to industrial modes of production. Too often he seems to be concluding that the results he reports are independent of problem content and activity context, e.g., generalized cognitive changes. This kind of conclusion simultaneously undermines the well-established principles of the dependence of psychological process on living activity systems and renders adults who display such behaviors child-like in inappropriate terms (1999: 400)

Cole then cites Vygotsky in support of the idea of the context specificity of psychological capacities, thereby glossing over Vygotskys own contribution to Lurias research and his endorsement of similar methods and results in his own work.

The mechanistic reflex model and the scholastic concept model are, therefore, two sides of the dualistic coin: a Frankensteins monster of a psychological theory.

Conclusions

The above arguments might lead one to conclude that Vygotsky's theory, in its broad lines at least, is distinctly un-Marxist, one might even say pre-Marxist, since, like many 18th century thinkers (including Condillac), Vygotsky saw the problem of explaining the human mind as one of showing how natural, pre-social and involuntary psychological functions and behaviours would be domesticated by the social environment and become means of voluntary individual self-control. Reflexology - as a sociology as much as a psychology was at the centre of that, and the official Marxism of the early Soviet period licensed and endorsed the vulgarization of Marxs work which such an approach presupposed. Not surprisingly, then, there are clear parallels between Vygotskys psychological theory and the ideology of the society in which he developed it; the idea of cultural signs penetrating natural processes from without, via the command, the idea of compliance with an external other as the basis for a mechanism of voluntary self control, the idea of the internalization of the boss-subordinate relationship as the road to freedom all fits very well with the 'socialist alteration of man' (the title of a 1930 article) going on all around him.

References

Bukharin, N. (1926) Historical Materialism: a System of Sociology. London: Allen & Unwin. Cole, M. (1999) 'Cross-cultural research in the sociohistorical tradition', in P. Llyod & C. Fernyhough (eds.) Lev Vygotsky: Critical Assessments. London: Routledge. Jones, P.E. (2007) Language as problem and problematic in the Vygotskian-

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Leontievan legacy, in R. Alanen & S. Pyhnen (eds.) Language in Action: Vygotsky and Leontievan Legacy Today, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Jones, P.E. (2009) From external speech to inner speech in Vygotsky: a critical appraisal and fresh perspectives. Language & Communication 29 (166-181). Joravsky, D. (1989) Russian Psychology. A Critical Analysis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kozulin, A. (1984) Psychology in Utopia. Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Leontev, A.A. (1967) Psycholinguistics. Leningrad: Nauka (in Russian). Pavlov, I.P. (1927/1960) Conditional Reflexes. New York: Dover. Van der Veer, R. & Valsiner, J. (1988) Lev Vygotsky and Pierre Janet. On the origin of the concept of sociogenesis. Developmental Review, 8, 52-65. Van der Veer, R. & Valsiner, J. (1991) Understanding Vygotsky. A Quest for Synthesis. Oxford: Blackwell. Veresov, N. (1999) Undiscovered Vygotsky. Etudes on the Pre-history of Cultural-Historical Psychology. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Vygotsky, L.S. (1981) The instrumental method in psychology, in Wertsch (ed.). Vygotsky, L.S. (1997) The Collected Works of L.S.Vygotsky. Volume 4 The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions. New York: Plenum. Wertsch, J.V. (ed.) (1981) The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology. New York: Sharpe. Yaroshevsky, M.G. (1985) The History of Psychology. Third edition. Moscow: Mysl (in Russian).