ABSTRACT

Vygotsky in Context: Sociocultural Theory and the History of Western Thought.

Vygotskian and Sociocultural Theory (SCT) have had in recent years a particularly strong influence in theories of second language acquisition and pedagogy; however, virtually no attempt has been made in the academy to criticize them.  This article begins to formulate such a critique, first by attempting to situate Vygotsky within the larger realm of Western thought, and then by suggesting that his theory of the development of human mental functioning does not adequately account for the role of human agency within that development.  It will be argued that while the popularity of Vygotsky and SCT should best be viewed as a “religious-type” reaction to the mechanistic view of human behavior and cognition favored by cognitive science, neither theory – cognitive or sociocultural –  deals properly with the question of how human will interacts with and influences cognition and behavior.  SCT, I assert, does no more than switch the determination of human cognition and behavior from biology to culture; it does not escape determination per se.

Vygotsky in Context: Sociocultural Theory and the History of Western Thought.

Louis Betty

Department of French and Italian

Vanderbilt University

VU Station B #356312

2301 Vanderbilt Place

Nashville, TN 37235-6312

Phone: 615-260-4390

louis.r.betty@vanderbilt.edu

Vygotsky in Context: Sociocultural Theory and the History of Western Thought.

            For anyone involved in the fields of applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and pedagogy, the name Lev Vygotsky is no doubt by now of some significance, if only by virtue of its association with Sociocultural Theory and such notions as the zone of proximal development, inner speech, and, erroneously it would seem, scaffolding.  Well known among researchers and theorists, Vygotsky’s ideas about the nature of the mind and how it comes to function in a human way are already being put to use, both in pedagogical  and research practices and in the interpretation of data.  In the field of second language acquisition in particular, the rise to prominence of Vygotsky and Sociocultural Theory (SCT) has been impressive.  Recent publications, such as James Lantolf’s article of 2006, Sociocultural Theory and L2: State of the Art, which summarizes the key aspects of SCT theory and presents recent research, and Marysia Johnson’s A Philosophy of Second Language Acquisition, a book-length work urging the implementation of pedagogical practices styled on Vygotskian-SCT theory, bespeak in part the degree of intellectual gravity that Vygotsky and SCT now carry, especially as they call into question and offer alternatives to cognitive notions of language acquisition and learning.  SCT, of course, has its history, which does not begin in America until the 1960’s, when Vygotsky’s work Thought and Language was translated into English after a long period of repression by the Soviet government.  In 1978 followed the translation and publication of perhaps the more significant Mind and Society.  In the realm of second language acquisition, Vygotskian theory has begun to emerge most prominently since the mid-1990’s, beginning specifically in 1994, a year which saw both the appearance of a special issue of the Modern Language Journal (vol. 78, issue 4) dedicated completely to SCT in SLA practice and research, and Lantolf and Appel’s edited work Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research.  Vygotskian approaches to SLA are therefore quite new in the field of second language acquisition; it is also the case that they have yet to meet with any serious challenges or probing critique.  That such challenges and critiques will eventually develop is inevitable; but the momentum that SCT has built up against the more traditional, cognitive notions of the mind and learning has given it carte blanche to pursue its ends without much hint of reproach.

            My intentions here are in some sense to offer a first outline of that critique, but more generally to attempt to place Vygotsky – as the genitor of SCT – within the history of ideas of the West.  Vygotsky’s debt to certain thinkers, such as Marx and Spinoza,[i] is already well attested; but what is of interest here is not to trace a genealogy of that intellectual debt, but rather to talk about ideas in general, and in particular what Vygotsky might have in common with other thinkers outside the realm of his personal inspiration.  It must be kept in mind that Vygotskian theory is fundamentally a theory of the mind and the nature of its content, and that it gives us, as a base of assumptions upon which practice can build, an image of how the mind comes to function in the normal, human way that we are all accustomed to.  Let us then review the basic components of that theory, before making comparisons with other thinkers.

            One must consider from the very beginning the milieu in which Vygotsky’s ideas emerged.  The 1920’s in Soviet Russia provided thinkers with much more intellectual liberty than one would perhaps expect, as Stalinism at this time had not yet taken hold.[ii]  Vygotsky set himself apart from other thinkers in psychology during this period by opposing the generally accepted and state-favored tenets of behaviorism, a fact which has led to the erroneous belief that he was not a Marxist.[iii]  Intellectual liberty, however, suffered at the onset of Stalinism, and in the hysteria of Marxist dogmatism that followed, Vygotsky’s work was misconstrued and eventually banned, though not for any of those theories that interest Western intellectuals today.  Since he was devoted to working in the vein of Marxism and historical materialism, which consider human behavior, nature, etc., as products of historical (especially economic) developments rather than products of evolution, Vygotsky was heavily interested in generating a theory of mind wherein the mind and its content could be explained in purely social and dynamic terms.  His theories about the origin of higher mental functions and the role of language in internalizing them are the product of that interest.  Vygotsky’s most famous dictum is that human higher mental functions – basically those functions that distinguish us from animals – are first generated in social interaction, and are only then internalized by the individual.  On the social plane, through the dynamic interactions of multiple persons, human behavior emerges; persons engaging in these activities internalize them as they take part in them.  Enriching Marx to some extent, Vygotsky contended that the means by which such behavior is internalized is linguistic in nature; that is, that we regulate our behavior through the use of a kind of inner speech, which penetrates us first from the outside, from the social world, but which we eventually redirect towards ourselves.  In other words, language first regulates from the outside, showing us the mind in its typically human functioning, and then through our own learning regulates from the inside.  The key in all of this is the mediating force of language: it stands between the human animal and the human being and makes the latter possible. 

            So, let us lay Vygotsky out: all definitively human mental functions are social in origin, and it is language that permits us to internalize them.  The debts here to a Marxist notion of human nature are obvious.  Consider Marx’s words in The German Ideology:

The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and every generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived of as the “substance” or “essence” of man (186).

We can think here of the essence of man as related to what he does and thinks – essentially his behavior.  The unity of essence, behavior, and content, is crucial here: what is in the mind informs the mind’s behavior, the behavior (thoughts and actions), as well as naked content (ideas), forming the essence.  If we can consider all of these as emerging in a process of social construction, then we will be able to make the critical links between Vygotsky and other thinkers, such as John Locke or the post-moderns. 

            Locke, whose famous “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” gave us the well-known sensualist dictum that “there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses,” shares a special affinity with Vygotsky, in that he attributes the content of the mind – ideas – solely to experience,   He writes in the Essay:

The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet: and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them.  Afterwards the mind proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names.  In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, that materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty; and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment, increase (22).

Locke here links ideas to behavior: the impression of ideas and language upon the mind allows it to carry out the behavior of reasoning.  Thus environmentally learned ideas are linked to behaviors, which is the realm Vygotsky is concerned with.  This linking allows us to make the comparison between Locke and Vygotsky – if, after all, ideas and behaviors were of wholly different origins, we might very well lose the integrity of the mind altogether.  There are of course vast differences between Locke and Vygotsky in the matter of details and historical particulars, but these differences are not differences in the essence of the two thinkers’ assumptions: both espouse a constructivist theory of mind, which credits environment rather than nature as the author of the human psyche.  It might even be appropriate to consider Vygotsky something of a twentieth century sensualist, if the term did not immediately invoke an aura of pre-Kantian philosophical primitiveness. 

            During the twentieth century, the insistence upon the primary role of language in human cognition and consciousness was a key aspect of much of postmodern thought.  Derrida, in particular, though he often denied the charge of semiological reductionism, that is, the reduction of all phenomena – mental in this instance – to linguistic reality, is seen by many as a proponent of this thinking.[iv]  Without delving into the particulars of this very difficult and rather arcane theory, we can at least point out that deconstruction insists on the limitation of consciousness to the endless play of displaced, differentiated, and non-present signifiers; that is to say, that the play of  language – social speech, the speech of the other – primordially invades consciousness at its deepest level and disrupts the presence of self-referential thought, capturing and defining the mind within the absence and alterity of language.[v]  Whatever this all actually means is debatable; but Derrida always vehemently rejected the charge of semiological reduction, saying that he maintained a constant openness to the “other of language”.[vi]  But, of course, in Derrida’s system, which is not supposed to be a system, the other never comes, so in a practical sense, imagining something outside the linguistically mediated mind amounts to mere inconsequential speculation.  Again, I don’t want it to seem as if I’m arguing that Derrida and Vygotsky share any particular affinity; I have yet to discover one.  What is important is that in both instances we are dealing with a generalized semiological, or linguistic, reductionsim, which limits the mind to the categories that language imposes on it.

            Whatever the affinities between Vygotskian theory, Marxist philosophy, and postmodernism might be, I leave to the reader.  But by recognizing the general similarities between theories such as deconstruction that are still popular in the academy today, or that at least, like those of Locke, represent a primitive formulation of the kind of social constructivism that enjoys so much favor in a world of political correctness and cultural relativism, one can begin to get an idea of why Vygotsky is so prized now as a thinker.  It is certainly not because he is saying something new; rather, he is saying what relativists and constructivists have always said since the age of Protagorus, and which in this particular historical cycle has become popular again: that man is the measure of all things, that the mind is the product of society and not of its own essence or nature.  Vygotsky’s thought, content aside, is merely a retroactive contribution to more recent relativist ideas that became popular later in the 20^th century and have remained entrenched in academic thinking ever since.  The future of Vygotsky is in this sense the future of relativism and constructivism in general. 

            Because it seems obvious enough that at our small moment in the history of ideas, opinion has slipped to the prejudice of Protagorus to view man as the measure of man, we can account quite easily for Vygotsky’s popularity so long after his death; his theory of the social origin of human mental functions makes of human beings the true creators of their own minds, the measures of themselves to every possible extent.  Of course, many of the greatest minds in the history of Western thought have argued quite convincingly that man is most certainly not the measure of all things, and have pressed us to believe, against our pretension to build the world and ourselves anew as we see fit, that the mind is endowed with  – and yes, blithely limited by – what is quite an impressive array of innate qualities, which, though activated and partially shaped by accidental experience, owe their ultimate existence to some different order of phenomena.

            Descartes, for instance, proposed the theory that the mind is endowed with certain innate ideas.  His argument for God’s existence, elaborated in the Discourse on Method, wherein he states that the idea of a perfect being could not possibly have come from experience, since we have no experience in this world of perfect beings, is the most celebrated example.  Kant, writing a century and a half later, showed in his Critique of Pure Reason most essentially that the world is not simply a thing given in and of itself, which the mind has only to open itself up to and be imprinted with.  The world of things in themselves, the noumenal world, in which language floats between isolated minds, is utterly foreign to us.  Thus, the mind requires certain innate ideas – fundamental intuitions of space and time, in Kant’s instance – in order to have any experience at all.  In other words, only a naïve realist would argue that language, or anything else coming into the senses, is organized temporally, spatially, in and of itself; rather, according to Kant, it is the mind that organizes this input, lest it fall into complete unintelligibility.  The most important continuer of these ideas in the 20^th century is most likely Chomsky, who, assuming perhaps implicitly the most basic ideas of Kant, gave us the vision of language as a phenomenon emerging from a deep structure and predisposition in the mind.  Without this structure, there would be nothing to make language intelligible in the first place.  Vygotsky, like all other constructivists, is guilty of the naïve realism that so many great minds in the history of thought have therefore warned us about, namely the fault of assuming an a priori intelligible world that an empty, formless mind has only to gaze upon in order to internalize.  

            If there is any foil to constructivism, it is death; for death is both ultimate nature and ultimate solitude.  Death is the great un-co-constructed object of our experience, bungling our communalist pretensions at that loneliest of moments, binding us with the fetters of final privacy.  To embrace death is to embrace essence, as much as it is to embrace life in its full sense.  In this theological vein, the popularity of SCT seems, at least to me, to have a significant amount to do with the perceived “soullessness” of cognitive, innatist, theories of mind, like those beholden to Descartes, Kant, or Chomsky, which have the understandable appearance, in our technologized world, of reducing all forms of mental life to deterministic and hereditary biological principles, essentially negating all possibility of human agency and free will.  Regardless of whether this is a fair evaluation of cognitive theories of mind – and I would argue that it most certainly is not – SCT, in light of such an evaluation, at least spares us the hated reduction to mechanistic determinism.  In other words, though SCT in a very important sense does no more than switch the determination of human behavior from inalterable physical determinism to the more malleable – if only in the context of historical development – determinations of culture, it at least, in refusing to deny human agency altogether, as hardcore biological determinism would, allows us to retain the semblance of a soul.  If anything, then, the emergence of SCT as a popular theory of mind can be viewed as a quasi-religious reaction to a certain evaluation of cognitive notions of mind, however misguided such an evaluation may ultimately turn out to be.  It remains to be demonstrated, of course, to what extent SCT itself really gives an adequate account of agency, that is, to what extent it allows for free will in the subject.  After all, whether determination is cultural or biological, determination it is nonetheless; what is missed in both cases is the always mysterious role of will in the ordering and functioning of the mind.  We will hope to see, then, whether this religious spirit of the post-cognitive age is aroused by anything more than the meretricious assurances of a machine with a human face.