Activity Theory: An Introduction

Alex Levant, Kyoko Murakami, Miriam McSweeney (Eds.)

Activity Theory An Introduction

Alex Levant, Kyoko Murakami, Miriam McSweeney (Eds.)

ACTIVITY THEORY An Introduction

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Cover picture: Victory Over the Sun, 10. New Man, 1923, El Lissitzky, Tate, Purchased 1976. Photo: Tate

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Table of Contents Forewords ............................................................................................... 7 Part I. Histories and Lineages Alex Levant A World of Activity: A ‘Special Reality’ with a ‘Peculiar Objectivity’ ........................................................................................... 15 David Bakhurst Ilyenkov, Activity Theory, and Moscow in the 1980s: An Interview with David Bakhurst ......................................................... 51 Seth Chaiklin The Theory of Activity— in a Psychological Perspective .............. 73 Vesa Oittinen Ilyenkov and the Shadow of Helvetius ............................................ 97 Part II. Current Trends: Applications/Interventions Katsuhiro Yamazumi The Application of Activity Theory to Research on Learning and Education in Japan: The Case of Practical Research into Community-Based Disaster Prevention Learning ....................... 115 Yrjö Engeström, Mikael Brunila, Juhana Rantavuori The Politics of Expansive Learning: A Study of Two Social Movements ......................................................................................... 137 Brecht De Smet Revolution as Learning: Tahrir in Terms of Activity and Instruction........................................................................................... 173 Bonnie Nardi Reduction Redux: Humanity as Code ........................................... 199 Cathrine Hasse Activity Theory, Socratic Ignorance and Posthumanism............. 219

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Miriam McSweeney, Kyoko Murakami Tracking the Object: A Case of a Small-scale Developmental Work Research-based Intervention ............................................................ 243 Juliano Camillo, André Machado Rodrigues, Cristiano Mattos Thinking with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: Examining Science Education Key Issues .......................................................... 275 Annalisa Sannino Foundations of Educational Studies of Agency: An ActivityTheoretical Critique........................................................................... 295 Part III. Pasts and Futures Michael Cole Encountering Cultural Historical Psychology and Activity Theory: An Interview with Michael Cole ...................................... 329 Andy Blunden Leontyev’s Activity Theory and Social Theory ............................. 345 Anna Stetsenko Reclaiming the Tools of the Past for Today’s Struggles: Radicalizing Vygotsky, via Marx, in Dialogue with Audre Lorde ................................................................................................... 369

Index .................................................................................................... 407 Contributors ....................................................................................... 413

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“The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included— is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice.” (Marx 1969 [1888])

Forewords My journey exploring this remarkable body of thought began through my research on the work of the philosopher Evald Ilyenkov. He developed an original materialist conception of “the ideal”—immaterial phenomena like mathematical truths, moral imperatives, concepts, rituals, and so on. In contrast to views of these phenomena as either mere social constructions based entirely on convention or eternal facts with truth-value independent of society, he saw them as products of human activity. For Ilyenkov, the ideal emerges from the ongoing practices of human beings, but it also acts as a blueprint that shapes future practice. Individuals encounter these ideal phenomena as having material force, even though they are human made. When detached from their grounding in human activity, they appear in reduced form, as either conventions or immutable facts. In contrast, Ilyenkov's perspective sees immaterial phenomena as neither arbitrary conventions nor eternal truths. Instead, they originate from collective human practice over time, while also guiding the activities of individuals in the present.

This “activity approach” provides an original way of analyzing the emergence and power of ideal phenomena in social life.

Despite its highly theoretical origins, this approach that prioritizes activity as a means of understanding the genesis and nature of knowledge, has proven to be remarkably effective in practical applications. I was aware of its break-through in disability education in relation to the achievements of the Zagorsk experiment with deaf-blind children in the 1970s. (Please see chapters 1, 2, and 4, for details.) However, at that time I did not yet know how these ideas had spread beyond the Soviet Union and how they were developed in very different directions and applied in different fields. My work 7

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on Ilyenkov brought me into contact with figures like Meshcheryakov, Vygotsky, and Leontiev (who coined the term “activity theory”), but at that time I was not yet aware of the contributions of Michael Cole and Yrjö Engeström, and the development of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). I became fascinated by its global proliferation and its application in such diverse fields as social movement theory, human-computer interaction, and even business management.

At the same time, I also noted some of the profound differences between how activity theory developed in the West and in Soviet philosophy and psychology. Reflecting on these differences, David Bakhurst writes: “While the latter saw the concept of activity as a fundamental category to address profound philosophical questions about the possibility of mind, activity theory in the West has principally become an empirical method for modeling activity systems” (2009, p. 197). Indeed, a reader familiar with activity theory through the work of Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, and other Soviet thinkers may find it surprising how their ideas have been retooled and applied in ways they could not have imagined. Nevertheless, regardless of their specific content, these real-world applications of activity theory highlight its power and remind us of its untapped potential.

Moreover, it is important to also recognize, as we do in this volume, that, despite its focus on modeling activity systems, CHAT has also been applied to research oriented on larger political issues. Overall, as I wrote in “Two, three, many strands of activity theory!”: “I see activity theory as a broad tent, a theoretical tradition in the making… and I agree with Engeström and Miettinen (1999, 8) who write: ‘Activity theory should not be regarded as a narrowly psychological theory but rather as a broad approach that takes a new perspective on and develops novel conceptual tools for tackling many of the theoretical and methodological questions that cut across the social sciences today’” (p. 107).

It is the vast potential of this approach that drew me to this work.

Today we find activity theory consisting of a loose-knit, eclectic body of theorists, working in various fields around the world. What

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binds them is a common tradition rooted in a particular approach that has considerable, virtually untapped, methodological value for understanding social phenomena. Activity theory has vast potential for tackling theoretical and methodological questions cutting across the social sciences today, as it illuminates a special reality with a peculiar objectivity, which otherwise remains obscured. My hope is that this collection will contribute to the expansion and selfclarification of this tradition, facilitating its transformation into a method that can stand alongside other established research methods typically used in the social sciences.

Alex Levant, August 2023

The current book has undergone many different stages of development. It is an understatement that it has been a long, taxing journey, but I believe it is a worthy one. I joined this book project, first as a chapter contributor, then as a co-editor in 2020 together with Miriam McSweeney. It has been a privilege to be part of the editorial team as it gave me an opportunity to deepen my understanding of Activity Theory and to explore its potential beyond the way it is used. Looking back on my intellectual journey so far, it was the dialectical research tradition, underpinning sociocultural theory/CHAT that appealed to me. The perspective informed by this tradition steered from the problematic of the individual and shifted to the focus of the social and collective and its interface with the individual. It felt like a serendipity at the time, but it was not by coincidence that Activity Theory came to me. I ‘bumped’ into colleagues, who were taking the journey according to CHAT whilst my academic career took me to the CSAT (Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory) at the University of Bath, and to Denmark, the research group named PPUK (Person, Praktise, Udvikling, Kultur).

I walked the CHAT road for however brief or long the shared paths lasted under our professional circumstances. In that juncture, Harry Daniels, Seth Chaiklin, Mariane Hedegaard and Katsu Yamazumi, amongst many others unnamed, were my dear ‘teachers’. Furthermore, I had the pleasure of learning from those

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pioneering scholars interviewed and chapter authors in the editorial process. They are the teachers of otherwise inaccessible thoughts, Soviet philosophy for someone like me, who does not have an obvious Soviet or Russian connection. Working with the editors and chapter authors of the book, it felt as if pieces of the puzzle were being put together in terms of the history of Activity Theory, its theoretical development and empirical application to various social science disciplines.

Again, perhaps out of serendipity, the joining of the editorial team marked a special turning point in my intellectual journey which destabilised my thinking. It was now time for me to evolve. I am grateful that I met Alex Levant, the book’s editor, in the seminar organised by Catharine Hasse, a contributing author, in 2015 in Copenhagen. As Alex says, CHAT research is prolific and global. One can become complacent with CHAT for what it is capable of and its powerful claims for transformation of practice and societies. Despite the ongoing critical debates about CHAT, the diffusion of CHAT research to other fields beyond psychology and education is astounding. Its practical application to understanding the process of how our practices in workplaces and classroom alike can be transformed for the better strikes a chord to many. One cannot keep being complacent with the legacy of CHAT and its popularity.

Whilst working with the contributing chapter authors in this edited book project, I was keenly reminded of my own knowledge gap in the vast and profound theoretical tradition that Activity Theory embraces. To put it humbly, I gained the deepest insight into Activity Theory—its origin, history, development and potential for future advancement, by working with the contributing authors, especially in the way the theory was read and debated by philosophers.

It is my earnest hope that this book will simulate, provoke and encourage debates and discussions by scholars, both emerging and experienced, together with research students, to sustain the activity theory approach and develop its potential in the widest possible way. For those educational and psychological researchers, no one theory solves the complex problems of humanity. Activity Theory is evolving, as shown by the chapter authors of the book, rooted in

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a rich history, widening its scope and presenting more questions for theoretical advancement and empirical application.

Kyoko Murakami, August 2023

It was a curiosity about the cultural context in which I work that brought me to Activity Theory. I came to higher education as a lecturer having worked in the information technology industry.

Working in a multi-campus environment I noticed there was a low and slow uptake of teaching and learning technologies among lecturers across different schools and campuses where I worked. I believed that the technologies themselves were not the problem but that something about the lecturers’ work context may have been contributing to the complex phenomenon I observed. In a bid to understand how the cultural context might have been impacting on human thinking and activity I undertook my PhD journey at the University of Bath under Harry Daniels and Kyoko at the Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory. It was Harry and Kyoko who introduced me to Activity Theory. I had come from a background in Business and Information Technology and so I had a lot to learn about Soviet psychologists. My PhD studies brought me to Helsinki where I met with Yrjö Engeström and Annalisa Sannino and continued learning about Developmental Work Research (DWR) and the practical application of Activity Theory in a diversity of fields.

I was more drawn to Activity Theory, particularly noting its potential as a framework from which a broad range of social contexts could be understood. Today, I can introduce my own students to Activity Theory as a conceptual framework in the fields of Business and Information Technology.

Kyoko introduced me to Alex and I was delighted when they invited me to join them in editing this book. It has given me a valuable opportunity to continue my journey with Activity Theory. The privilege of working with the contributing authors has been an insightful learning experience. The range of contributions signifies both the rich tradition and the vast potential that yet lies in Activity

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Theory. My hope is that those who come to Activity Theory like I did, from a place of curiosity about human activity, will find here a collection of thought-provoking contributions. For new and seasoned scholars alike I hope it will be a place where they can read about the historical roots, the many practical applications, along with thought provoking ideas for the future evolution of Activity Theory. If scholars are inspired to question and think more deeply about collective human activity then that is a just reward.

Miriam McSweeney, August 2023.

Part I Histories and Lineages

A World of Activity: A ‘Special Reality’ with a ‘Peculiar Objectivity’ Alex Levant In Dialectics of the Ideal (2009/2014) the philosopher E. V. Ilyenkov describes a “special reality” with a “peculiar objectivity”. He aims to illuminate an aspect of the world that typically remains out of sight—something as material as the objects we see around us, but which usually goes unnoticed. This special reality is the world of human activity, and its peculiar objectivity is the materiality of practice.

What makes this reality special is that it is not always perceptible, although it occupies the same space as the everyday observable world. As a metaphor, consider a still image from a film on pause. Looking at the screen, one could make observations about what one saw, but these observations would be limited by not having seen what had happened prior to everyone freezing into place.

Quite easily, a simple gesture, like a kiss for example, could come to mean something very different when seen in the context of the film unfolding.

The Kissing Sailor Consider the iconic image of The Kissing Sailor by the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. It continues to be celebrated and reproduced around the world. It is sold at universities across Canada at annual poster sales for students to buy and stick to their walls. The image appears to depict a couple kissing during a WWII victory celebration.

However, according to Greta Zimmer Friedman—the woman in the picture—this image is not at all as it appears. “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came over and grabbed!” She 15

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explained in an interview with Patricia Redmont for the Veterans History Project in 2005 where she described what took place in detail. “That man was very strong. I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me.” The man was George Mendonsa, a sailor who was engaged to another woman walking just behind him. He grabbed and kissed Greta and then continued with the celebration. The two of them did not know each other and did not meet again until 1980 when they were both contacted by LIFE magazine.

This example illustrates the difficulty of deriving meaning from an image. How could one have known that this was not a romantic kiss? The expressions of others in the picture appear to confirm this interpretation. Perhaps her left hand, which is closed in a fist, takes on a new significance now that we know the context; however, in the absence of that context, what appears in the image becomes open to other interpretations.

This context, however, is not in the still image. Only when the image is set in motion does the story appear. For instance, if this photo were a still from a film, and if we could rewind and see the story unfold, we would be able to observe what the people in the image were previously doing. The motion of the figures would become visible and seeing this would offer an entirely new understanding of the moment the picture was taken. We don’t have such a film, but Greta’s testimony serves as a substitute, and the Kissing Sailor acquires quite a different meaning when set in the context she provides. However, when looking at a separate still, in the absence of the film, the activity of all the characters slips out of sight, and—along with it—the story of what happened.

On the face of it, it would seem that the iconic status of this image endures because of a lack of context. After all, students who buy this poster likely have no idea who these people were or what they did moments before this photo was taken. But the question persists as to why Greta’s voice remains largely unheard. Why is it so difficult to see this image as she experienced it? Moreover, why did no one in the picture intervene when he grabbed her? Why did they continue to celebrate, as the photograph appears to suggest?

Perhaps it is not the absence of context that makes it difficult to recognize the reality of what took place, but the presence of

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another already-existing context that makes it so easy to interpret the image as a romantic kiss. In other words, the context one would have if one knew what George and Greta were doing prior to the kiss is replaced by another context. In an article called The Kissing Sailor, or “The Selective Blindness of Rape Culture”, Victor Vaughn directs our attention to rape culture—the societal attitudes about gender and sexuality that normalize sexual violence. In the context of rape culture, the passers-by appear oblivious to what in another context would appear as a sexual assault. The context here refers not only to what George and Greta and others in the image were doing moments prior to the picture being taken; rather, it includes the larger patterns of activity in society, the social practices that constitute rape culture.

Rolling the film further back could offer a view of these activity patterns; however, they vanish from view in freeze-frame. This is what makes their reality special and their objectivity peculiar.

Bodies remain in view when a film is paused, but their activity becomes largely invisible. Sometimes, we can make reasonable assumptions about what took place moments earlier and predictions about the immediate future, especially in an “action shot”, but that is quite different from the possibility of seeing larger patterns of activity that the addition of temporality affords. When these patterns are brought into view, they can become subject to analysis and intervention; however, when they remain out of sight, as in a still, it can become difficult to understand the source of various observable phenomena.

This situation can be further illustrated by looking at an old Star Trek episode from the original series where something analogous takes place. The Enterprise arrives at a planet where there appear to be no signs of life except for a buzzing sound from time to time. Upon arrival, strange, inexplicable events start to happen that continue back on the ship. It is subsequently revealed that the aliens from the planet—the Scalosians—are the cause of the events and that they remain unnoticed because they live at an accelerated rate of activity. Because they move so quickly, they are virtually invisible and things seem to appear out of nowhere, like magic. From the Scalosians’ perspective, everyone else is terribly slow, while they

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are too fast even to be noticed. They are detected only by the consequences of their activity, such as a cup vanishing into thin air.

The special reality that Ilyenkov illuminates is the world of human activity, which plays a similar role in explaining apparently disparate and often inexplicable phenomena. The world of activity is a special reality because it is not immediately perceptible. Despite its materiality, it vanishes when observed in freeze-frame. Similarly, patterns of activity elude us when we think in freeze-frame. Our challenge is to think in film.

To Think in Film The world of activity becomes visible only when we think in film because of its peculiar objectivity. What makes it peculiar is that it has a dual existence: it consists of both past and present activity— past activity that is objectified in the world around us, and the present activity that this objectified world motivates.

Societal norms have a materiality in human activity in the sense that people act on ideas. And the ideas on which we act, which motivate our actions, also have a materiality. They are codified in laws, written in books, enacted in performance, sculpted in stone, and so on. One can think of them as patterns of activity, schemas that guide practice, or ideas that are enacted and socially enforced.

In this sense, ideas do not exist “in our heads” as opposed to “in reality”; rather, they exist outside us and are in fact as material as the world they represent. In this sense, ideas are objective, and the ideal world is not the other of the real world but its constituent part.

Ilyenkov explains: This [ideal world] confronts the individual as the thought of preceding generations realised (“reified”, “objectified“, “alienated“) in sensuously perceptible “matter“—in language and in visually perceptible images, in books and statues, in wood and bronze, in the form of places of worship and instruments of labour, in the designs of machines and state buildings, in the patterns of scientific and moral systems, and so on. All these objects are in their existence, in their “indetermine being”, substantial, “material“, but in their essence and origin they are “ideal“ because they “embody“ the collective thinking of people, the “universal spirit“ of mankind. (Ilyenkov, 2014, p. 52)

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In addition to the material form of the idea (in words or images, for example), there is also the material force of the idea in the form of the human activity it motivates. The objectivity of a law, for instance, consists also of the practices it calls into action, the patterns of activity that it produces. Hence, it is objective both in the sense of the materiality of the language in which it is embodied, but also in the sense of the material consequences of acting on it (or not). In both senses, the materiality of the ideal world confronts us with a force no less palpable than that of the material world of objects, and in fact cannot be separated from it.

This ideal world is as real and objective as the material world, but its dual existence gives it a peculiar objectivity. It exists in the form of human activity as ideas in action, and it also exists in the form of the product of that activity as objectified ideas. Ilyenkov writes: “‘Ideality’ as such exists only in the constant transformation of these two forms of its ‘external incarnation’ and does not coincide with either of them taken separately” (p. 77). Taken together, however, the two forms of the ideal world (activity and object) appear as moments or phases of a single, indivisible process.

To think in film, then, is to approach observable phenomena as moments in process, rather than individual things. Ilyenkov describes it as: the process by which the material life-activity of social man [sic] begins to produce not only a material, but also an ideal product, begins to produce the act of idealization of reality (the process of transforming the “material” into the “ideal“), and then, having arisen, the “ideal“ becomes a critical component of the material life-activity of social man, and then begins the opposite process—the process of the materialization (objectification, reification, ‘incarnation’) of the ideal. (Ilyenkov, 2014, p. 36)

This process of idealization and materialization is an indivisible unit where each moment comes to appear as something other when seen in freeze-frame. Rather than moments in a process, observable phenomena become reified as things (Lukacs, 1971).

However, when seen in process, things take on new significance. As images come to be seen as stills in a film, their meaning changes. Patterns of activity come into view; stories emerge. The world becomes more complex, but also more intelligible, as the

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dimension of human activity brings into view previously unobserved connections, ways of understanding things that otherwise may appear with simplistic realism or may be incomprehensible altogether. Because of what it brings into view, thinking in film can be a powerful way of learning how to effectively intervene in realworld situations. For Ilyenkov, this “activity approach” holds the key to understanding much about our world.

By drawing on this approach, Ilyenkov articulated an original conception of “the ideal” (immaterial phenomena, such as mathematical truths, concepts, customs, moral imperatives, laws, and so on). Were these phenomena social constructions based entirely on convention or did they have truth-value independent of society? In an influential essay on the ideal published in 1962, he offers an answer that is quite distinct not only from those who understand the ideal as a matter of the brain but also from social constructionists who identify the ideal with the world of human social constructions. In contrast to the latter, the “substantive difference lay in the fact that, for Ilyenkov, ideal phenomena can exist only within the context of human activity” (Guseinov and Lektorsky, 2009, p. 15).

In other words, the ideal exists in the materiality of human practice rather than as a separate realm, such as Karl Popper’s World3, for instance (Ilyenkov, 2014).

By “thinking in film”, Ilyenkov was able to grasp ideal phenomena neither as social constructions nor as facts independent of society. In contrast, he claimed that “the ideal” appears as a moment in a process. He writes, “The ideal is the outward being of a thing in the phase of it’s becoming in the action of a subject in the form of his wants, needs and aims” (1962, p. 223). The unit of analysis here is the activity, which has both an ideal and a material moment, neither of which can be understood in isolation from that process.

In fact, he cautions against both forms of reductionism.

“Neopositivists, who identify thought (i.e., the ideal) with language, with a system of terms and expressions, therefore make the same mistake as scientists who identify the ideal with the structures and functions of brain tissue” (2014, p. 68). However, by

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turning to the special reality of human activity, Ilyenkov offers a different way of understanding the nature of the world of ideas.

He articulated his thoughts, in part, through debates with his contemporaries, many of whom understood the ideal as a property of the human brain (e.g., Dubrovsky). In contrast to these braincentered approaches, his findings in philosophy lead him to human activity as the key to understanding the world of ideas. For Ilyenkov, the ideal is not a mental projection onto the material world; rather, it is a moment in the activity of human beings. Consequently, the ideal representation of a material object always involves the activity into which that object is incorporated.

Since man [sic] is given the external thing in general only insofar as it is involved in the process of his activity, in the final product—in the idea—the image of the thing is always merged with the image of the activity in which this thing functions. That constitutes the epistemological basis of the identification of the thing with the idea, of the real with the ideal. (Ilyenkov, 1962, p. 225)

Ilyenkov illustrates this point with the example of how the stars are idealized as they are incorporated into human activity.

However, he is not referring only to parts of the material world that individuals directly transform, but to all matter that society comes “in contact” with. He writes: An ideal image, say of bread, may arise in the imagination of a hungry man or of a baker. In the head of a satiated man occupied with building a house, ideal bread does not arise. But if we take society as a whole, ideal bread, and ideal houses, are always in existence, and any ideal object with which humanity is concerned in the process of production and reproduction of its real, material life. This includes the ideal sky, as an object of astronomy, as a “natural calendar”, a clock, and compass. In consequence of that, all of nature is idealized in humanity and not just that part which it immediately produces or reproduces or consumes in a practical way. (Ilyenkov, 1962, p.

225)

From this perspective, all matter enters individual consciousness already transformed and idealized by previous activity, and this ideal informs the individual’s activity in the present. Consequently, Ilyenkov was interested in the relationship between human activity and human consciousness, and—unlike his contemporaries who

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sought the key to understanding uniquely human forms of consciousness in the human brain—he looked to uniquely human forms of activity.

Awakening to Consciousness We know today that much of what we had previously considered to be uniquely human cognitive capacities are in fact exhibited by other species as well. For instance, recent research demonstrates that some great apes make tools, communicate linguistically, have a culture (acquire behaviors socially), have friends, help others, and even demonstrate the capacity to evaluate each other’s social actions (Tomasello, 2019). Clearly, we are not as unique in terms of exhibiting these capacities as we had once thought. In fact, separately from this, contemporary social theory highlights that many forms of human behavior we typically associate with agency should be reconsidered in relation to networks of technology in which they are embedded (Latour, 2005), or that matter itself is “self-organizing or smart” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 57).

Demoting the human in these ways is perhaps warranted, given the legacy of approaches that place humanity as the subject at the center of a world of objects; however, it can also obscure uniquely human forms of consciousness that are nevertheless real.

This is particularly relevant now that human capacities have developed to the level of having planetary implications measured in geological time. As geologists have noted, we have entered the Anthropocene—a new epoch of geological time, characterized by the ascendance of humanity as a new primary force affecting the planet (Angus, 2016; Hasse, in this volume; Moore, 2016; Wark, 2015).

Given the reality of these new powers that humanity has acquired, there could not be a more urgent time to reflect on the nature of these uniquely human capacities, and Ilyenkov’s work and activity theory more broadly are uniquely positioned to offer insights into how to better address the challenges we currently face.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, who looked to the human brain and nervous system in their effort to understand uniquely

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human cognitive capacities, Ilyenkov believed that it was this special reality with its peculiar objectivity that held the key. He claimed that “an individual awakens to conscious life” only within the normative patterns of behavior of a culture.

These are the cultural norms, as well as the grammatical-syntactical linguistic norms on which he learned to speak, as well as the “laws of the state” in which he was born, as well as the rules of thinking about the things around him since the world of his childhood, and so on and so forth. He must internalize all of these normative patterns as a special “reality” that is clearly distinct from himself (and from his brain, of course). (Ilyenkov, 2014, p. 30)

Ilyenkov believed that individuals must internalize this special reality in the form of these norms to be able to behave according to its requirements, and that a uniquely human consciousness emerges through that experience.

He claimed that individuals awaken to consciousness not because of physiological developments but because of the experience of having to comport themselves according to normative patterns of behavior of their culture. He writes: Consciousness and will become necessary forms of mental activity only where the individual is compelled to control his own organic body in answer not to the organic (natural) demands of this body but to demands presented from outside, by the “rules” accepted by the society in which he was born.

It is only in these conditions that the individual is compelled to distinguish himself from his own organic body. These rules are not passed on to him by birth, through his “genes”, but are imposed upon him from outside, dictated by culture, and not by nature. (Ilyenkov, 2014, p. 71)

For Ilyenkov, human consciousness develops in response to the experience of having to control one’s body according to these rules.

Consciousness Forms in Slow Motion Ilyenkov found confirmation of his ideas in the extraordinary achievements of the Soviet psychologist Alexander Meshcheryakov, who developed effective pedagogical strategies in the context of the so-called Zagorsk experiment—his work with a group of pupils at the Zagorsk children’s home for the deaf-blind. One of his

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most heralded success stories was in assisting four deaf-blind children to acquire undergraduate degrees at Moscow State University in 1977—a level of achievement previously unattained (with singular exceptions, like Helen Keller). Meshcheryakov systematized Ivan Sokolyansky’s method of deaf-blind education to enable its application on a mass scale with remarkable real-world results. His book, Awakening to Consciousness (1974), chronicles this work in detail.

Proceeding from one of the fundamental propositions of the activity approach—that mental development always occurs intersubjectively or socially first and is subsequently internalized by individuals—he was able to grasp the significance of deaf-blindness as two-fold: children who are born deaf-blind cannot readily have access to both the physical world as well as the social world, i.e., to the social experience necessary for cognitive development. Meshcheryakov devised pedagogical strategies that had the effect of simulating typical social experiences that stimulated mental development, establishing a sense of self and others, as well as a capacity to navigate the social world, or—more accurately—a meaningful (idealized) material world.

David Bakhurst, whose work on Ilyenkov remains unparalleled in the English-speaking world, explains in “Ilyenkov, Activity Theory, and Moscow in the 1980s: An Interview with David Bakhurst”: [T]he pedagogue has deliberately to create the conditions in which their mental powers can be activated and cultivated. So the experience of working with blind-deaf children can teach us a lot about the preconditions of human psychological development. Central among them, it transpires, is the child’s initiation into the basic activities of everyday life: learning to eat with a spoon, learning to dress oneself, and so on. Ilyenkov sees this process of “initial humanization” (pervonachal’no ochelevechivanie—it sounds much better in Russian!), not just as a matter of training in basic routine behaviours, but as the child’s entrance into the realm of the ideal: learning to relate to the world as a site of significance and value and building communicative relations to other human beings, so that the child’s environment comes to life as a meaningful world and their activity within it is constantly mediated by ideal phenomena, including the activity of other minded beings. (this volume, p. 52)

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Meshcheryakov recognized that in addition to these considerable practical achievements, this research would enable an exploration of questions “that go beyond the narrow confines of deaf-blindness, such as the formation of… the human mind” (Meshcheryakov, 1974, p.6). Ilyenkov saw in Meshcheryakov’s work a window into how the mind forms in slow motion. Bakhurst explains: The sighted and hearing child is absorbed in so multivarious an environment, and open to so many interwoven influences, that these conditions are greatly obscured. In the case of the blind-deaf child, however, the very possibility of creating the child's mind depends upon deliberately determining and controlling the activities that precipitate internalization. Thus, as Leontiev put it, Meshcheryakov's work creates ‘the conditions in which the key events in the process of the formation of the person and the coming-intobeing (just think of it!) of human consciousness become visible - one wants to say, even touchable, and moreover drawn out in time as if in slow motion - conditions that, as it were, open a window upon the depths of consciousness's hidden nature. (Bakhurst, 1991, pp. 224-5)

This window into the formation of human consciousness confirmed for Ilyenkov that the human mind did not emerge spontaneously from the human brain. “The brain continues to develop according to the program encoded in the genes, in the DNA. However, there emerges not one neurodynamical connection securing mental activity”, he observed (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 69). He sparred with his proponents in his day of the view that the mind was essentially information encoded in the brain. These were predecessors of the contemporary view that human consciousness lies in the dynamic interactions between neurons that occur in a connectome—a map of all the possible connections between neurons across the nervous system. In contrast, Ilyenkov claimed that human consciousness was in its essence a social phenomenon, and he directed our attention to that special reality of human activity with its peculiar objectivity instead of neurodynamic activity inside our individual bodies.

Meshcheryakov demonstrated that deaf-blind children suffered from the absence of social interaction that other children typically experienced, and he established forms of social interaction that were appropriate to their circumstances, resulting in mental development that otherwise remained absent. Without social

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interaction, these children remained in what Ilyenkov observed as a vegetative state, passive and immobile.

The image he paints of children who did not have the benefit of Meshcheryakov’s program is disturbing.

The mind is not present at all, even in those elementary forms that any higher animal possesses almost from the moment of birth. This is a creature that, as a rule, is immobile and reminds one rather of a plant, of some kind of cactus or ficus, that lives only so long as it is in direct contact with food and water... and dies without uttering a sound if it is forgotten to feed, water, and protect it from the cold. It makes no attempt to reach for food, even if that food is half a meter away from its mouth. It utters not a squeak when it is hungry, will not cover itself from the draught with a warm blanket... It is a human plant in the full sense of the term, completely bereft of mind. It will grow—increase in size—but the mind will still not emerge. Not even the most elementary. (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 23)

However, Meshcheryakov showed that when deaf-blind children experienced social interaction drawing on their other senses, they would develop similarly to other children. The key was to produce a program that was appropriate to their needs to assist in bringing them out of their isolation from the social world, which he claimed was as indispensable for the mind as the physical structure of neurological connections in our bodies.

The claim here is perhaps more radical than it might appear at first glance. The notion that social experience shapes human perception is widely acknowledged in different ways across the social sciences; however, the claim here is that social experience does not only shape perception, but that human consciousness is social from the very beginning. Meshcheryakov’s work confirmed for Ilyenkov what he had argued on the terrain of philosophy, that human consciousness does not emerge spontaneously from the human body, but that individuals awaken to conscious life within a culture, through the experience of appropriating a set of shared practices that are meaningful.

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“Technological Breakthrough” Theory of Mind The activity approach stands in stark contrast to approaches that understand consciousness as information encoded in a neural network. According to such views, an artificial neural network could theoretically perform the same function as a biological one, and the information encoded in a biological network could then perhaps be transferred to an artificial one. This is the basis for a considerable number of stories in contemporary science-fiction popular culture, and even the basis for some real-world business ventures.

Ilyenkov would be skeptical of this view since he did not see the mind as reducible to information encoded in a neural network.

For him, the mind of an individual presupposes not just a body capable of complex neurological activity, but also a social body with a social consciousness. This social body is not located in an individual’s nervous system; rather, it has an objective existence outside the individual. He writes: [S]ocial consciousness is not simply the individual consciousness repeated many times, just as the social organism in general is not the individual human organism repeated many times, but is, in fact, a historically formed and historically developing system of “objective representations”, forms and patterns of [a] unique intellectual culture, all this being quite independent of the whims of the consciousness or will of individuals. This system comprises all the common moral norms regulating people’s daily life-activity, as well as the legal precepts, the forms of state-political organisation of life, the ritually legitimised patterns of activity in all spheres, the “rules” of life that must be obeyed by all, the strict regulation of the workplace, and so on and so forth, up to and including the grammatical and syntactical structures of speech and language and the logical norms of reasoning. (Ilyenkov, 2014, p.

47)

Individual consciousness, in this sense, presupposes a social consciousness that regulates the actions of individuals, bringing them into congruity with established norms of behaviour. The experience of acquiring this social consciousness, internalizing it, making cultural practices and norms one’s own, is synonymous with awakening to consciousness.

However, according to the “technological breakthrough” theory of mind, the assumption is that conscious machines would

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eventually emerge as technology advances to the point of artificially creating neural networks adequate to the task. This may be a long wait, however, as there is no indication that a powerful neural network would ever spontaneously awaken to consciousness. In fact, if Ilyenkov and Meshcheryakov are correct, then it appears that even a typical human brain is not capable of such a feat. Individuals do not appear to develop minds by virtue of developing a human brain. Engaging in social practices that cultivate mental growth appears indispensable.

From Social Speech to Inner Speech Perhaps one of the best illustrations of the social nature of consciousness in this tradition is L. S. Vygotsky’s reflections on the function of speech in children’s development. Vygotsky was of an earlier generation than Ilyenkov and Meshcheryakov. They were of the 60s generation (‘Shestidesyatniki’), while Vygotsky was active in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was a contemporary of stimulusresponse theorists, such as Pavlov, and the founders of Gestalt psychology, such as Wertheimer. He figured prominently in the debates over the direction of Soviet psychology in the early years of the revolution and today he is by far the best-known figure associated with this approach.

However, his ideas come to us by means of a precarious thread. In 1934 he died of tuberculosis at the young age of only 37.

His work was blacklisted in the Soviet Union for 20 years following the Central Committee’s 1936 resolution against pedology (the study of children’s behavior and development) (Bakhurst, 1991, p.

60), and by the end of the war his legacy was “virtually eradicated” (Blunden, 2010, p. 6). This may well have been the case had it not been for the persistence of his students and collaborators, A. N. Leontiev and A. R. Luria, who contributed to a resurgence of the activity approach in Soviet scholarship during the thaw of the late 1950s (Blunden, 2010). Both Aleksey Leontiev and Alexander Luria took Vygotsky’s ideas in new directions (more on that below), and in the 1960s and 70s Vygotsky became available for the first time in

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English translation, largely due to the efforts of the American psychologist Michael Cole, who went to Moscow on an exchange and studied with Luria in 1962. He became aware of Vygotsky’s work and recognized the need for its translation into English.

In 1978, Mind and Society was published, and it included an English translation of Vygotsky’s 1930 unpublished text “Tool and Symbol in Children’s Development”. In this book, Vygotsky sought to understand the “uniquely human aspects of behavior, and to offer hypotheses about the way these traits have been formed in the course of human history and the way they develop over an individual's lifetime.” The main findings of this research focus on the significance of the acquisition of speech as a qualitative leap in the development of the uniquely human aspects of behavior, or what he called “higher functions”.

He drew on research from problem-solving experiments that noted how children with speech demonstrated capacities that children without speech and apes lacked. Clearly, children without speech, as well as apes, exhibited mental capacities; however, the way they approached problem-solving exercises revealed that children with speech possessed unique forms of consciousness that the others lacked. For instance, children with speech were able to master their surroundings less impulsively, often drawing on stimuli outside of their immediate visual field. They also appeared to use their ability to speak as they problem-solved, and he noted that children in the early stages of speech would freeze-up when not permitted to babble when they problem-solved. In essence, children with speech displayed a qualitative leap in behaviour as they were able to draw on something unavailable to the apes and to the children without speech. Vygotsky explained: The system of signs restructures the whole psychological process and enables the child to master her movement. […] This development represents a fundamental break with the natural history of behaviour and initiates the transition from the primitive behaviour of animals to the higher intellectual activity of humans. (1978, p. 35)

The acquisition of speech signals the development of capacities that we typically associate with human consciousness.

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Speech, along with the mental development it implies, is understood to come from outside the individual, as opposed to developments in their body. It is literally acquired. Vygotsky called this process “internalization”, which he defined as the “internal reconstruction of an external operation” (p. 56). In acquiring speech through “the internalization of social speech”, children also acquire an internal dialogue, an inner speech. He used the example of pointing to illustrate this acquisition of speech as internalization.

The event consists of a child who is reaching for something too far away to grasp, and a helpful adult observes the child’s effort and brings the object to them. After the child experiences several times that their attempts to grasp the desired object result in the adult bringing the object to them, their attempt at grasping becomes half-hearted and increasingly intended as a gesture for the observing adult rather than a genuine attempt to grasp the object. Vygotsky observes: “At this juncture there occurs a change in that movement's function: from an object-oriented movement it becomes a movement aimed at another person, a means of establishing relations. The grasping movement changes to the act of pointing” (p.

56). The interaction between the grasping child and the moreknowledgeable adult results in a qualitative leap in mental growth as the child internalizes this external operation, extending the horizon of their mental world.

The example of pointing illustrates Vygotsky’s claim that higher mental functions emerge not from the brain or body of an individual but from the territory between individuals—social experiences that cultivate mental growth and that we cannot see using freeze-frame thinking. On the basis of these findings, Vygotsky drew his well-known conclusion: Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals. (p. 57)

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This is a radical proposition that stands in contrast to dominant approaches today, which typically associate the achievements of the human mind with the unique qualities of the human brain. Alternatively, Vygotsky claims that mental development occurs intersubjectively, and is subsequently internalized by individuals who are always embedded in normative patterns of activity that are indispensable for an individual to awaken to consciousness.

Vygotsky’s work brings into sharp relief the limits of the technological breakthrough theory of mind. In fact, considering his work from decades ago, it appears quite clear that expecting a robot to develop consciousness due to a technological breakthrough would be akin to expecting a child to spontaneously develop consciousness with age. It is a situation reminiscent of the old Star Trek episode discussed above, with one appearing much like Kirk and his crew before they become aware of the presence of the Scalosians in the same space they inhabit, whose activity is responsible for the strange events they see around them. In the absence of seeing the patterns of activity that the child appropriates, mental development appears to take place all by itself.

Illuminating the special reality of human activity, with its peculiar objectivity, can be empowering, as it can explain connections between observable phenomena that otherwise remain obscured.

The scope of possible research is vast. Vygotsky was aware of its potential. He wrote, “the internalization of socially rooted and historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology, the basis of the qualitative leap from animal to human psychology. As yet, the barest outline of this process is known” (p.

57). Today, almost 100 years later, the activity approach has developed in directions entirely unforeseen by Vygotsky.

Researching the World of Activity Some of this work became available in English for the first time in the 1960s and 70s, inspiring a new generation of theorists outside the Soviet Union in different contexts with different concerns to deploy and develop the activity approach in new directions. In 1962,

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a 24-year-old American psychology student named Michael Cole went to Moscow on a student exchange where he met and studied with Alexander Luria, Vygotsky’s student and collaborator. He was one of the first Americans to take on the task of translating this material into English. He went on to head the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) at the University of California in San Diego, the premier research center for activity theory in the US, and where the journal Mind, Culture and Activity is housed.

The following year, Cole went to Liberia to assist the local government with improving the performance of children in mathematics. Building on Luria’s earlier research in Uzbekistan, which focused on the importance of context in cross-cultural psychology, Cole was able to note something that had eluded other researchers.

The Kpelle children in Liberia were performing poorly not due to a lack of skill, but due to the way their performance was being measured. Specifically, when the children faced tasks that were found in their culture, even complicated ones, and if they were also able to use artifacts that were indigenous to their culture, they performed remarkably well—better than their American counterparts, who outperformed them in tests used for American children.

This research demonstrates some of the difficulties associated with measuring performance, even in a field apparently as clear-cut as mathematics. It also illustrates the power of the activity approach: by focusing on the special reality of their world of activity, the activity patterns they exhibited, such as complex financial exchanges in their markets, for example, Cole was able to recognize an intelligence among the Kpelle children that others had missed.

Building on this research, he developed approaches to education that proved to be effective in real-world situations, including an intervention in the education system in his state of California, beginning in the 1980s with the Fifth Dimension afterschool center. Cole’s work serves as a crucial bridge between activity theory in the Soviet Union and its development in the West, and it contributed to the development of a distinct current of thought within the broad tent of activity theory rooted in the legacy of Luria. (See the interview with Michael Cole: “Encountering Cultural Historical Psychology and Activity Theory” in this volume.)

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Additionally, Cole is a central proponent of what came to be known as Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CHAT is the most well-known expression of the activity approach outside of the former Soviet Union. Its usage begins in the 1990s (Blunden, 2010, p. 3); however, it traces its lineage to the Soviet founders of the activity approach, and it offers a particular way of reading that body of work. Yrjö Engeström’s ground-breaking book, Learning by Expanding (1987), is foundational in charting this direction. Working in Finland in the 1980s, Engeström made a theoretical intervention by recasting the main contributions of Vygotsky and Leontiev, as first- and second-generation versions of activity theory, and positing a third generation that offered a new method of researching the world of activity. This method has been widely used in multiple fields across the social sciences and has demonstrated some of the breadth of the potential of this tradition.

Engeström and his colleagues at the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE) at the University of Helsinki have placed CHAT on the map of world scholarship, in part due to its remarkable breadth of application in real-world situations. Through their work, activity theory has been retooled to analyze complex organizations and to make practical interventions to promote innovation and learning. Engeström’s method appears with considerable nuance and complexity in Learning by Expanding.

One of the most cited aspects is a way of visualizing patterns of activity in which individuals are situated using a diagram of triangles. These activities are mapped as systems of activity. Brecht De Smet (who has a chapter in this volume) succinctly defines an activity system as follows: “a coherent but often contradictory system comprising rules, relations, and divisions of labour which organize the subject’s actions and relations toward (a) their object, (b) co-participants in the activity, and (c) other agents who are engaged in separate and distinct activities that are oriented toward the same object” (De Smet, 2012, p. 140). This approach has resonated strongly with researchers who reject the individual as the primary unit of analysis, and who instead seek to understand individuals as inextricably embedded in their cultural context.

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What is particularly interesting here is that the unit of analysis is not simply broadened to include the larger community; rather, it grasps a moment in time. The basic unit is not the individual embedded in a community, but in an activity. For instance, recall the example of pointing that we examined above. Vygotsky maintained that the action of pointing signaled a qualitatively new type of behaviour. In the shift from grasping to pointing, the child demonstrated mental and behavioural complexity beyond simple stimulus-response, as when they sought to grasp the object prior to their acquisition of an understanding of pointing. The gesture of pointing serves as a mediating artifact that alters the child’s behaviour.

Once they acquire the capacity to point, they no longer continue to grasp the object. The response changes from grasping to pointing due to the mediation of this new artifact that the child now possesses. Vygotsky writes: Consequently, the simple stimulus-response process is replaced by a complex, mediated act, which we picture as:

Figure 1: Vygotsky’s auxiliary stimulus In this new process, the direct impulse to react is inhibited, and an auxiliary stimulus that facilitates the completion of the operation by indirect means is incorporated. Because this auxiliary stimulus possesses the specific function of reverse action, it transfers the psychological operation to higher and qualitatively new forms and permits humans, by the aid of extrinsic stimuli, to control their behavior from the outside. The use of signs leads humans to a specific structure of behavior that breaks away from biological development and creates new forms of a culturally-based psychological process. (1978, p. 40)

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For Engeström, this diagram represents the basis for the firstgeneration model of activity. He builds on this visual representation of an individual’s action by seeking to include the larger context in which it takes place. He draws on Leontiev’s work, which is cast as the second-generation of activity theory.

Leontiev was a student and collaborator of Vygotsky who went on to become a major figure in Soviet psychology in the postwar period. His book, Activity, Consciousness, and Personality (1978), articulates many of the key ideas that characterize second-generation activity theory. Leontiev sought to look beyond the actions of individuals and to examine the larger social activities in which he believed they were inextricably embedded. He argued that activities were an indivisible unit, what he called a “unit of life”. He writes, Activity is a non-additive unit of the corporeal, material life of the material subject. In the narrower sense, i.e., on the psychological plane, it is a unit of life, mediated by mental reflection, by an image, whose real function is to orient the subject in the objective world. (Leontiev, 1978, p. 3).

This unit of life held the key to understanding the actions of individuals that comprised the activity. For Leontiev, the purpose of an activity is the actual motivation behind the actions of individuals, which he grasped as elements in a larger division of labour. He calls this purpose the “object” of the activity and claims that all activity is object-oriented, and that the object is the “true motive” of the activity. “The basic ‘components’ of separate human activities are the actions that realize them”, he explains (1978, p. 6). Individuals who contribute to the activity through their actions may or may not be aware of the motive. In their minds, they may be motivated by something else altogether, unaware of the true motive force behind their actions (the activities in which their actions are situated and without which they would not exist).

Leontiev uses the example of a hunt, where the activity of hunting consists of two groups: a group whose goal is to chase the animal toward the second group whose goal is to wait until the animal is chased toward them and to kill the animal. The activity is motivated by the objective of acquiring food. However, each group

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has a narrower goal that contributes to the overall objective. The two groups are oriented on their specific goals and together they achieve their overall objective.

In a more complex division of labour, individuals might not even be aware of the overall objective or purpose of the activity to which they contribute through their actions. For example, someone working in a factory may be personally motivated to work by their pay; however, what is motivating the activity of which their action is a part is something else entirely. Somewhere, someone who owns or controls the factory decides to hire individuals to perform specific actions. If it is a profit-seeking enterprise, then the true motive (i.e., what brings the action into being) is profit. The profit motive of the buyer of labour stimulates an activity which is organized and divided into separate actions performed by individual workers at the factory. While the individual workers’ actions are driven by pay, the activity that calls them into action is driven by profit.

The division of activity into various performative roles can obscure what is actually motivating the activity that individuals participate in through their own actions. Just as our practices become fragmented, we also become fragmented subjectively. De Smet explains: “Persons who are able to freely dispose of their labor power, but who do not possess their own means of production, are forced into the activity system of modern wage labor. Through their participation in this activity, they acquire the subjectivity of “worker.”

(De Smet, 2012, p. 141).

Similarly, Leontiev explains through the concept of intermediate results: But the simplest technical division of labour that arises in this process necessarily leads to the emergence of intermediate, partial results, which are achieved by individual participation in the collective labour activity, but which in themselves cannot satisfy the need of each participant. This need is satisfied not by the “intermediate” results, but by the share of the product of the total activity that each receives thanks to the relationships between the participants arising in the process of labour, that is, the social relations. It will easily be understood that this “intermediate” result which forms the pattern of man’s labour processes must be identified by him subjectively as well, in the form of an idea. (1978, pp. 6-7)

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These “intermediate results” shape our subjectivities. Or put differently, we are the intermediate results.

Engeström modified Vygotsky’s triangle model by replacing stimulus-response with subject-object as a way of visualizing the subject’s orientation on an object whose action is mediated by artifacts. But he went much further by adding new categories to the model in the form of rules, community, and division of labour or roles, to capture more of the complexity of the context of activity.

In Learning by Expanding (2015, p. 63), he introduced the following diagram:

Figure 2: The structure of human activity This model has been adopted by researchers across a broad range of fields around the world. Today, in large part due to the effort of Engeström and his colleagues at CRADLE, activity theory is no longer the “well-kept secret” that he and Reijo Miettinen described in their collection, Perspectives on Activity Theory (1999, p. 3). On the contrary, it appears to be “attract[ing] more interest globally than ever before” (Sannino et al., 2009, p. 1) among researchers in disparate fields, such as disability education, cultural and communication theory, philosophy, cross-cultural psychology, organizational theory and workplace management, therapy and addiction, social movement theory, and human-computer interaction, among others. Activity theory “is today one of the most influential and

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progressive schools of thought in the domain of child development and elementary education, and is active in a wide range of other disciplines” (Blunden, 2010, p. 3).

The LCHC in San Diego and CRADLE in Helsinki are the two most important activity theory research centers in the world. However, they are not the only ones. There is an activity theory research center at the University of Oxford, as well as at Kansai University in Osaka, among others. Katsuhiro Yamazumi’s chapter in this volume, “The Application of Activity Theory and Expansive Learning Theory to Educational Research in Japan”, offers an account of the introduction and development of activity theory in Japan. Activity theory has also established roots in many countries around the world, as the diversity of contributions to this collection attest.

Separate from these developments in the US and Finland and elsewhere, the activity approach likewise developed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s in very different directions. Although neuroscientific conceptions of the mind continued to dominate Soviet scholarship, the activity approach played a pivotal role in the so-called “Marxian renaissance” of the 1960s, where a new generation of Soviet philosophers, led by Ilyenkov and others, openly challenged the verity of official Soviet Marxism (Oittinen, 2005).

Ilyenkov is regarded as having contributed to the philosophical foundation of activity theory in the 1970s (Bakhurst, 1991; Levant, 2012), and current Russian theorists continue to build on this work (Maidansky and Oittinen, 2016; Tolstykh, 2008; Mareev, 2008).

In addition to the spectacular uptake of CHAT across the social sciences, the activity approach is also breaking into the physical sciences, straddling this ancient divide in the academic world, and contributing to our understanding of the origins of human consciousness. After all, if consciousness did not arise strictly from the development of a uniquely human brain but also required unique social practices, patterns of activity that must be appropriated for consciousness to arise, then the question activity theory puts on the table is: What changes in activity patterns took place in our distant past for this to have happened?

Michael Tomasello’s current research offers a possible answer.

His recent book, Becoming Human (2019), is a “Neo-Vygotskian”

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theory of the origin of uniquely human forms of cognition, which situates “human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory” (Tomasello, 2019, p. 15). He takes a fresh approach that overcomes the binary between culture and nature by examining the cultural dimension of biological evolution— how human culture arises in response to specific adaptive changes.

Essentially, he claims that the greatest achievements of humanity have not only to do with our unique brains but also “the unique ways in which individuals are able to coordinate with one another cooperatively, both in the moment and over cultural historical time” (Tomasello, 2019). In other words, he attributes the development of our uniquely human consciousness to the development of our unique capacities for cooperation. He rolls back the film and takes us on a journey into the distant past to examine in detail how “human individuals come to the species-unique cognitive and social abilities necessary for participating in cultural coordination and transmission” (Tomasello, 2019). We learn how the genus Homo, with its larger brain, diverged from our last common ancestor about 2 million years ago, and how about 400,000 years ago they developed a new kind of subjectivity based on joint intentionality, which “created the pragmatic infrastructure” for cooperative communication and uniquely human forms of consciousness. The story he tells brings human activity into the analysis. It is an excellent example of thinking in film.

Despite these many separate achievements in multiple fields, activity theory has not formed a coherent tradition, but remains more of an umbrella term for a set of methodological approaches mostly in the social sciences that share a common history and a certain methodological vocabulary. This collection is partly oriented on facilitating its self-reflection and development.

Challenges Ahead Given the remarkable potential of examining this special reality, it is understandable why activity theory continues to attract interest.

As Langemeyer and Roth (2006) point out, a central reason for this

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recent proliferation of activity theory “lies in its potential to provide a non-reductionist approach to human development” (p. 20). By positing individuals as always embedded, along with their language, tools, and community, in systems of activity, it provides a powerful anti-reductionist theory of subjectivity. This is particularly timely, given Stetsenko’s observation that: [I]t is impossible not to notice a rising tide, indeed a tsunami, of starkly mechanistic views that reduce human development (more boldly now than at any other time in recent history) to processes in the brain rigidly constrained by genetic blueprints passed on to contemporary humans from the dawn of evolution. (2008, pp. 472-3)

The appeal of activity theory has produced a growing intellectual movement that seeks not only to apply its insights to real-world concerns, but also to critically reflect on this method and its intellectual history. Recognizing both the significant potential of activity theory, as well as multiple unresolved issues, several theorists have called for its renewal. Already in 2004, Stetsenko and Arievitch wrote, “Will it continue to be one of those projects ‘unique for its practical, political, and civic engagement’ committed ‘to ideals of social justice, equality, and social change’ as it was in the beginning?”

One of the issues has to do with unresolved ambiguities in the concept of activity. For example, Colley (2010) writes that activity theory misunderstands and dehistoricises Marx’s concept of activity and she directs us to the mode of production to differentiate between activity and alienated labour. Similarly, Jones writes, “In particular, Activity Theory has failed to distinguish between the labour process and the valorization process” (2006). Langemeyer also notes that the “notion of activity (and its triangular representation) proves rather indifferent about the broader societal relations that determine practice and by which human activities develop historically” (2006, p. 28). Similarly, Blunden’s book, An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity (2010), goes into some depth about problems with the concept of activity. He argues that CHAT “has abandoned the approach characterizing the tradition of science running from Goethe through Hegel and Marx to Vygotsky, in favour of an abstract-

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empirical approach” (2010, p. 231). Bakhurst makes a similar observation: “While the [Soviet founders of the tradition] saw the concept of activity as a fundamental category to address profound philosophical questions about the possibility of mind, activity theory in the West has principally become an empirical method for modeling activity systems.” (2009, p. 197). Recall that Vygotsky followed Marx’s methodology in Capital Volume 1, where the commodity appears as the unit of analysis, the “cell-form” of capital. Similarly, Vygotsky considered artifact-mediated action as a unit of analysis, and he sought to write a Capital for Psychology. Today, however, Marx and the Marxist tradition is no longer as central to CHAT. In a similar vein, Warmington (2008) interrogates the role of contradiction in the approach, noting how larger class relations play less of a role than local practices. Avis (2007) likewise notes that societal contradictions are rarely the focus. Instead, the focus appears entirely local, what Avis calls “radical localism” (p. 171).

He writes, “although the importance of history is stressed, it is that of the activity system and its participants. The concern with historicity is set at this localized level” (Avis, 2007, p. 167).

Further, Mojab and Gorman (2003) question who benefits from an activity theory analysis. Avis similarly argues that the transformations that activity theory analyses seek tend to be “adaptive”, i.e., they do not pose a challenge on a larger societal scale. He writes, “The point is that these transformations are adaptive in the sense that they neither challenge nor disrupt the wider social relations within which the activity is set” (Avis, 2007, p. 171). Warmington calls for a renewal “of activity theory’s theoretical and methodological framework” on the basis of Marx’s understanding of fundamental categories, like contradiction. The peril, as he explains, “is that, in current activity theory, Marxist notions of contradictions in the labour process become domesticated in the service of ‘soft’ system adaptation” (2008, p. 17). These are some of the many issues being considered by some figures working with these concepts today, and this volume is in part a contribution to this effort.

In addition to demonstrating this capacity for self-reflection, activity theory has also demonstrated notable practical applications

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and has earned international respect as a viable non-reductionist method of research that brings something new to the table. In terms of our discussion here, one could say that it is an example of thinking in film. However, if we take the sweeping claims made by Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and others about the nature of human consciousness in earnest, then the potential of activity theory appears quite vast and what has been achieved so far may just be the beginning. The power of activity theory is rooted in the fact that it looks for answers in that special reality that becomes occluded when we think in freeze-frame, and our study of that reality appears to be in its infancy.

Overview of the Book This volume is an invitation to examine the special reality of human activity in which we are embedded. It offers a partial window into that world through the research of some of the most important figures who work with these concepts today. It brings together scholarship across a broad range of fields from scholars around the world who share an approach that orients their research on patterns of human activity. It showcases their findings and offers reflections from some of its leading figures on its history, significance, and future.

The book is organized in three parts. Part I offers an orientation to activity theory. It includes an interview with David Bakhurst, and pieces by Seth Chaiklin, Vesa Oittinen, and Katsuhiro Yamazumi.

“Ilyenkov, Activity Theory, and Moscow in the 1980s: An Interview with David Bakhurst” provides a window into the intellectual life of Soviet philosophy in the 1980s, when Bakhurst first traveled to the Soviet Union, discovered E.V. Ilyenkov, and subsequently wrote the first English-language book on that extraordinary philosopher.

In “The Theory of Activity in A Psychological Perspective”, Seth Chaiklin introduces the core ideas of activity theory as developed primarily by A.N. Leontiev. It alerts the reader to some of the

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difficulties in terminology, as well as conceptual challenges that need to be addressed. It also provides an account of its reception in Western Europe and North America.

Vesa Oittinen’s piece, “Ilyenkov and the Shadow of Helvétius”, revisits the Zagorsk experiment (discussed above), noting Sokolyanski’s and Meshcheriakov’s significant breakthroughs in disability education. It also revisits a debate between Helvétius and Diderot on the impact of sense perception on the development of consciousness, and offers a critique of “the interiorization thesis, as defended by the psychologists and philosophers involved in the Zagorsk experiment,” arguing that it “cannot explain how cultural and social goods which as such are material (since they exist objectively outside the mind), can become ideal constituents of individual minds”.

As activity theory continues to proliferate around the world, Katsuhiro Yamazumi’s piece reflects on its development in Japan.

It also offers an illustration of its application to a concrete situation: earthquake disaster prevention in Japan. This case study is an example of one of the many practical applications of activity theory today, some of which are showcased in Part II—the centerpiece of the collection.

As we saw above, activity theory continues to attract interest among researchers across a broadening range of fields. Part II includes current applications in three specific fields: social movement studies, posthuman studies, and education.

Researchers who study social movements have been drawn to activity theory, in part, for its capacity to account for agency and to offer strategies for effective intervention. In fact, there is a substantial literature on working-class learning that draws on activity theory (Sawchuk, 2007; Krinsky, 2008). “The Politics of Expansive Learning: A Study of Two Social Movements”, by Engeström, Brunila, and Rantavuori, is an activity theory analysis of the sustainability of social movements. It examines La PAH, an organization in Barcelona aimed at stopping evictions and securing housing, and the Herttoniemi Food Cooperative in Helsinki in order to understand how “expansive learning [is] embedded in, or woven into, the activity system(s) of the given social movement”. This chapter

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illustrates the power of the expansive learning approach pioneered

by Yrjö Engeström and his collaborators.

In “Revolution as Learning: Tahrir in Terms of Activity and Instruction”, Brecht de Smet brings activity theory into conversation with Antonio Gramsci in the context of contemporary social struggles in Egypt. De Smet’s work signals a return to Marx for activity theory via Gramsci and offers a powerful method of understanding the ebbs and flows of social movements.

Unlike Social Movement Theory (SMT), where we see researchers increasingly drawing on activity theory, the more recent field of Posthuman Theory continues to be dominated by approaches oriented on decentering the human—rethinking the relationship between the human and the non-human where humanity appears at the center of a world of objects. These approaches include new materialism, actor-network theory, postphenomenology, among others. While motivated by an impulse to act as a corrective to human-centric perspectives characteristic of some Enlightenment thought, these approaches tend to obscure the genuinely central role that humanity plays in reality today, particularly in the Anthropocene Epoch.

In “Reduction Redux: Humanity as Code”, Bonnie Nardi critically engages with Rosi Braidotti’s work in some detail, arguing against a conceptual shift in agency from the human to the nonhuman and for the importance of activity theory as an alternative approach that brings human activity into the analysis. Nardi’s piece offers an important alternative approach to Braidotti’s “new materialism” that grasps the specificity of human activity without slipping into crude Enlightenment conceptions of the subject.

Similarly, in “Activity Theory, Socratic Ignorance and Posthumanism”, Cathrine Hasse offers a critical review of current research in posthuman theory and, in contrast to these, argues for placing human activity as the focal point of analysis. Hasse’s and Nardi’s work makes a distinctive contribution to a field that is dominated by approaches that seek to decenter the human. In contrast, they focus on the special reality of human activity.

Unlike with posthuman theory, activity theory has been quite influential in the field of Education. In their chapter, “Tracking the

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object: a case of a small-scale Developmental Work Research-based intervention”, Miriam McSweeney and Kyoko Murakami demonstrate the power of Developmental Work Research Intervention (DWR)—a method developed by Engeström and his collaborators that enables researchers to map patterns of activity in an organization to identify contradictions for the purpose of facilitating an effective intervention. Their research focuses on the problem of low uptake of MOODLE, a virtual learning environment, by lecturers in higher education in the Republic of Ireland. After tracking the lecturers’ activity patterns over a 12-month period and mapping their practices, they were able to identify tensions and contradictions, which revealed that this low uptake did not result from the lecturers’ difficulty in working the technology, but was due to the institutional context, which impeded their engagement. McSweeney and Murakami’s piece is an excellent illustration of the efficacy of the activity approach. By illuminating the larger world of activity in which the lecturers were embedded, they were able to identify the actual source of the problem they observed.

Camillo, Rodrigues, and Mattos’s chapter, “Thinking with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: Examining Science Education Key Issues”, examines certain problems in the field of Science Education today, particularly at a time of increasing distrust in science.

It critiques approaches to science education that disregard the historical nature of scientific knowledge, and in contrast it offers an activity approach to science education focused on students as active agents in the creation of scientific knowledge. The purpose of science education, they argue, should not be to deliver established knowledge to students, but to empower students to produce knowledge that is adequate to addressing their real-world challenges. In other words, the aim should be on cultivating agency, as opposed to passing on knowledge.

Similarly, Annalisa Sannino’s piece, “Foundations of educational studies of agency: An activity-theoretical critique”, confronts the issue of agency explicitly. She presents a critique of current conceptions of agency that are prevalent in educational studies, and she argues that these approaches are based on fixed and pure categories, reminiscent of what is described above as freeze-frame

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thinking. In contrast, she proposes activity theory with its focus on contradiction in systems of activity as an alternative approach to conceptualize agency.

Part III offers interpretations and reflections on activity theory from Andy Blunden and Anna Stetsenko, as well as an interview with Michael Cole on his role in the development of activity theory in the West.

Andy Blunden’s chapter is a critical engagement with Leontiev’s conception of activity. He argues that the “social theory which flows from Leontiev’s theory is functionalist”, noting that individual actions tend to be understood strictly in terms of their role as parts of a larger social organism. He draws on Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivaniya to supplement Leontiev’s understanding of personhood (or self). He also identifies ambiguities in what constitutes an activity in Leontiev’s work, and he advances a particular direction for activity theory with his conception of a “project” as a unit of activity.

Anna Stetsenko’s concluding piece approaches these issues with a sense of urgency. Like Hasse, she situates the discussion in the context of a world in crisis and she looks to the work of Vygotsky and Marx for assistance. More specifically, she offers a reading of Vygotsky in relation to Marx and calls for “making Vygotsky dangerous again". Her intervention invites us to consider activity theory in relation to urgent questions of social transformation.

These pieces offer a partial window into the power and the scope of activity theory, as there are many other examples of researchers around the world who work with these concepts. This collection is an invitation to engage with their research, and to take up these concepts in order to contribute to the exploration of the world of activity.

References Angus, I. (2016) Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Avis, J. (2007) Engeström’s Version of Activity Theory: A Conservative Praxis? Journal of Education and Work, 20(3), 161-177.

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Bakhurst, D. (1991) Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Cambridge University Press.

Bakhurst, D. (2009). Reflections on Activity Theory. Educational Review, 61(2), 197–210.

Blunden, A. (2010). An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity. Brill Academic Publishers.

Braidotti, Rosi (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cole, M. (1998) Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Harvard University Press.

Cole, M. and Engeström, Y. (1993). A Cultural-Historical Approach to Distributed Cognition. In: G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, (pp. 1-46). Cambridge University Press.

Colley, H. (2010) Communities of Practice: Reinscribing Globalized Labour in Workplace Learning. Paper presented to the Historical Materialism Conference, York University, Ontario, Canada, May 16, 2010.

De Smet, B. (2012). Egyptian Workers and “Their” Intellectuals: The Dialectical Pedagogy of the Mahalla Strike Movement. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 19(2), 139-155.

De Smet, B. (2016). A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt: Gramsci, Vygotsky, and the Egyptian Revolution. Brill Academic Publishers.

Eisenstaedt, A. (1945). The Kissing Sailor. The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock. https://cratesandribbons.com/2012/09/30/the-kissingsailor-or-the-selective-blindness-of-rape-culture-vj-day-time s-square/ Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach. Orienta-Konsultit.

Engeström, Y. (2015). Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139814744.

Engeström, Y. and R. Miettinen (Eds.) (1999). Perspectives on Activity Theory.

Cambridge University Press.

Guseinov, A. A. & Vladislav A. Lektorsky (2009). Philosophy in Russia: History and Present State. Diogenes 56(3).

Ihde, D. (2010). Interview with Don Ihde. Figure/Ground. figureground.org Ilyenkov, E.V. (1962). ‘Ideal’noe’, Filosofskaia entsiklopedia, 2, 219-27.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1974). Dialekticheskaja logika. Politizdat, Moscow.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1977). Stanovlenie lichnosti: k itogam nauchnogo eksperimenta [The Genesis of the Person: on the Results of a Scientific Experiment]. Kommunist [Communist], 2: 68-79.

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Ilyenkov, E.V. (2009). ‘Dialektika ideal’nogo [Dialectics of the Ideal]’, Logos, 69(1), 6-62.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (2014). Dialectics of the Ideal. In A. Levant and V. Oittinen (eds.), Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism.

Brill.

Krinsky, J. (2008) Changing Minds: Cognitive Systems and Strategic Change in Contention over Workfare in New York City. Social Movement Studies, 7(1), 1-29.

Langemeyer, I. & Roth, W-M. (2006). IIs Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Threatened to Fall Short of Its Own Principles and Possibilities As a Dialectical Social Science? Outlines: Critical Practice Studies, 8(2), 20-42.

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press.

Leontiev, A. N. (1978) Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Prentice Hall.

Leontiev, A.N. (1972) Activity and Consciousness. Voprosy filosofii, 12, 129140/ Philosophy in the USSR, Problems of Dialectical Materialism, 1977, pp. 180-202.

Levant, A. (2012). E. V. Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Theory: An Introduction to Dialectics of the Ideal. Historical Materialism, 20(2), 125-148.

Lukács, G. (1971) [1923]. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone, London: The Merlin Press.

Luria, A. R. (1979). The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology. (M. Cole & S. Cole, (Eds.) Introduction and Epilogue by Michael Cole). Harvard University Press, Maidansky, A. & V. Oittinen (Eds.) (2016). The Activity Approach in Soviet Philosophy. Brill.

Mareev, S. (2008). Iz Istorii Sovetskoi Filosofii: Lukach—Vygotskii—Il’enkov. Moscow: Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia.

Marx, K. (1969 [1888]). Theses on Feuerbach, translated by W. Lough, available at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/184 5/theses/theses.pdf>.

Marx, K. & F. Engels. (1991 [1846]). The German Ideology. International Publishers.

Marx, K. (1996 [1867]). Capital Volume 1. In Collected Works, Volume 35.

Progress Publishers.

Meshcheryakov, A. (1974). Deaf-Blind Children: The Development of the Mind in the Process of Forming Behaviour [Слепоглухие дети. Развитие психики в процессе формирования поведения]. Moscow: Pedagogy.

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Mikhailov, F. (1980 [1976]). The Riddle of the Self. Progress Publishers.

Mojab, S. and Gorman, R. (2003). Women and Consciousness in the “Learning Organization”: Emancipation or Exploitation? Adult Education Quarterly, 53(4), 228-241.

Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of capital. London: Verso.

Nardi, B. (ed) (1996). Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and HumanComputer Interaction. MIT Press.

Oittinen, V. (2005). Introduction. Studies in East European Thought, 57, 223– 31.

Redmond, P. (2005). Interview with Greta Zimmer Friedman. Veterans History Project. The Library of Congress.

Sannino, A., Daniels, H., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (Eds.). (2009). Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Stetsenko, A. (2005). Activity as Object-Related: Resolving the Dichotomy of Individual and Collective Planes of Activity. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 12(1), 70-88. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327884mca1201_6 Stetsenko, A. (2008). From Relational Ontology to Transformative Activist Stance on Development and Learning: Expanding Vygotsky’s (CHAT) project. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 3(2), 471-491. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-008-9111-3 Sawchuk, P. H. (2007). Understanding Diverse Outcomes for WorkingClass Learning: Conceptualising Class Consciousness as Knowledge Activity. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 17(2), 199–216.

Stetsenko, A. & Arievitch, I. M. (2004). The Vygotskian Collaborative Project of Social Transformation. History, Politics, and Practice in Knowledge Construction. Critical Psychology, 12, 58-80.

Tolstykh, V. I. (Ed.) (2008). Eval’d Vasil’evich Il’enkov. ROSSPEN, Moscow.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Harvard University Press.

Vaughn, V. (2012). The Kissing Sailor, or “The Selective Blindness of Rape Culture”. Crates and Ribbons: In Pursuit of Gender Equality. Blog.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Psychology of Higher Mental Functions. Harvard University Press.

Wark, M. (2015). Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso.

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Warmington, P. (2008). From “Activity” to “Labour”: Commodification, Labour-Power and Contradiction in Engeström’s Activity Theory, Outlines: Critical Practice Studies, 10(2), 4-19.

Ilyenkov, Activity Theory, and Moscow in the 1980s: An Interview with David Bakhurst David Bakhurst is a philosopher based at Queen’s University in Canada who has made substantial contributions to the field for more than three decades. His book Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (1991) remains the only English-language book on Evald Ilyenkov.

Like Michael Cole (see Chapter 13 below), Bakhurst also went to the Soviet Union as a young student and discovered what immediately struck him as something remarkable. Cole was among the first psychologists to participate in the Soviet-American exchange program in 1959 and discovered there the absent presence of Vygotsky through his students and colleagues—chiefly, Alexander Luria.

Similarly, in 1980, Bakhurst went to Moscow and discovered Ilyenkov through his colleagues who were deeply affected by the latter’s suicide just the year before.

In this interview, Bakhurst introduces us to many of Ilyenkov’s contemporaries, including figures like Felix Mikhailov, whose book The Riddle of the Self offers an account of individual personality from an activity theory perspective. Bakhurst brings these theorists to life, offering insights into what motivated their thinking and reflections on Ilyenkov’s main ideas.

The interview was conducted over several email exchanges in June-July 2022.

Alex Levant: Your book Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy was my introduction to Ilyenkov. I began reading it on a flight to Moscow in 1998 and it so inspired me that one of the first things I did when I arrived was to find Ilyenkov’s 1962 article on the ideal. Your book offers a window into a rich tradition of Soviet intellectual culture from the postwar period about which little was known in the West.

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Can you begin by telling us about the circumstances under which you came to write this book?

David Bakhurst: Well, to begin at the beginning, my interest in Soviet Philosophy goes right back to my undergraduate days at Keele University in Staffordshire, UK, where I studied Philosophy and Russian Studies. Naturally, I became curious about what was happening in philosophy in the USSR. I found it difficult to believe that in a country with such a rich philosophical heritage—exemplified in philosophically intense literary fiction and political writing— that philosophy could have been reduced to the dull form of doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism presented in Soviet textbooks and mirrored in the accounts of Soviet thought presented by Western commentators. Keele was a highly interdisciplinary university before such things were fashionable, and my tutors, particularly the intellectual historian Eugene (Genia) Lampert, who was Professor of Russian, encouraged me to pursue this interest. In 1980, the Russian department awarded me a small bursary so that I could travel to Moscow and try to make contact with philosophers there. This was during the Cold War, of course, so it was difficult to travel to Russia from the West unless one was part of some organized group. So, I signed up for a month-long language course and off I went.

One remarkable piece of good fortune was that Genia Lampert was there too, as one of the leaders of the very same language course. This was an extraordinary coincidence. Lampert was very kind to me, taking me to meet the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the famous writers’ colony in Peredelkino and Bella Akhmadulina at her apartment in Moscow.

AL: Did you manage to meet philosophers?

DB: Not until the very end of my stay, at which point I had more or less given up hope. To console myself, I made a visit to the Progress Publishers Bookshop on Prospect Mira, thinking that at least I could buy a few books. There I came across the newly published English translation of The Riddle of the Self, by a certain F.T. Mikhailov. After

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reading only a few pages, it was obvious that this was something special. The text was vibrant and engaging, and it addressed live issues about identity and the self, the nature of knowledge, and the scope and limits of philosophy itself. It was written in the author’s own distinctive voice, and he spoke directly to his reader, using a variety of literary devices (dialogues, accounts of dreams) to bring the discussion to life. This was utterly unlike the monolithic, dogmatic idiom of official Soviet philosophy. I was thrilled. Back at the hotel, I bumped into another one of the language group’s leaders, the artist Roxanne Permar. Seeing the book, she told me she knew the translator, Robert Daglish. I immediately asked if she could help set up a meeting, which she kindly did. Moreover, Daglish invited Mikhailov himself, who also lived in Moscow. So, on the evening of 11th September 1980, Daglish, Mikhailov, Lampert and I met in Daglish’s apartment. Mikhailov and I instantly hit it off. He spoke no English and my Russian was poor at that time, but Lampert was a wonderful interpreter (he had been one of Berdyaev’s translators).

Mikhailov was a delight to talk to and it quickly became obvious that there was a great deal going on in the world of Soviet philosophy that was invisible in the literature. Mikhailov offered to help me if I could get back to Moscow for an extended period of time, so after I finished my undergraduate studies in 1982, I got British Council funding to return to Russia for the 1982–83 academic year, as a visiting student at Moscow State University (MGU). Although I was based at MGU, my real supervisor was Mikhailov, who at that time worked in a “philosophical laboratory” at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology (aka “The Vygotsky Institute”).

Mikhailov looked after me, welcomed me into his family, and introduced me to many people who helped me get an insider’s perspective on Soviet philosophical culture, its history and its present reality. When the year was up, I returned to England and began my doctorate in Oxford, where I wrote the dissertation, E. V. Ilyenkov and Contemporary Soviet Philosophy, that eventually became Consciousness and Revolution. Without my experience in Moscow, it would have been impossible for me to write the book.

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AL: Can you say more about the research you conducted, the people you met and your impressions of your time in Russia?

DB: When I arrived in Moscow in the Autumn of 1982, my Russian wasn’t good enough to engage in philosophical discussion in any real depth, so I worked hard, very hard, to improve it. I focused on learning to write good philosophical prose, so that I could carefully formulate ideas for discussion. I then gave a number of seminar papers. I had with me a SONY Walkman that had a recording function, so after I had presented my ideas, I could tape the discussion so that I could reflect on it later if I found it difficult to follow. By far the most successful of such events was a talk I gave on personal identity at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology, responding to Ilyenkov’s essay “S chego nachinaetsa lichnost’?” (“Where does personhood begin?”). Mikhailov had invited a small group of sympathetic colleagues, including Vasili Davydov, who was then the Director of the Institute, Vladimir Bibler and Vladislav Lektorsky. They, and Mikhailov too of course, all gave substantive, and very illuminating, responses to my argument. It was a really exciting event, which ran over two days. I later transcribed and translated the recording and published it in Studies in East European Thought as “Social Being and the Human Essence”. The text shows the remarkable philosophical and oratorical skills of my interlocutors, and it also brings out their humanity, their wit, and their charm. It reveals how serious they were about philosophy, but also how much they enjoyed philosophizing in each other’s company.

It’s a very unusual record of a slice of Soviet philosophical culture and I’m very glad it’s in print (although I think it’s not well known).

Later, I did a similar session at the Institute, this time on the nature of mental phenomena, but if my memory serves me right it was broken up by the authorities (by this time Davydov had been unjustly ousted as Director) and we had to continue the next day at the Institute of Philosophy, where Lektorsky hosted us. Again, if I remember correctly, Mike and Sheila Cole were in Moscow and came to the first session, I think. This seminar was less successful than the first, not just because of the disruption, but because my paper was too long and less accessible than it might have been. But

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the discussion was fruitful, and I remember that Bibler later invited me to his apartment and we talked about the issues for some time.

That was great. He was wonderful.

In addition to these sessions, I spent a lot of time with Felix, who told me a great deal about Vygotsky, the Activity Approach, and especially, the philosophy of his friend Evald Ilyenkov. It’s important to remember that Ilyenkov had committed suicide in 1979, and his loss was very keenly felt among his erstwhile friends and colleagues. Many of those to whom Mikhailov introduced me had been close to Ilyenkov. Davydov and Ilyenkov had been students at MGU together after the war, Davydov in psychology and Ilyenkov in philosophy, though at the time the Psychology department was housed within the Faculty of Philosophy. Ilyenkov was a huge influence on Davydov, for instance on his ideas about concept development. Lektorsky—with whom I also became friends—had done graduate work under Ilyenkov’s supervision and later came to lead the Sector (Department) at the Institute of Philosophy where Ilyenkov worked. Mikhailov and Ilyenkov had been close. Mikhailov, for example, was much involved with furthering Meshcheryakov’s seminal work on the education of blind-deaf individuals, a project that mattered hugely to Ilyenkov. So, Ilyenkov and his legacy was very much on everyone’s mind. Mikhailov and Lektorsky introduced me to a lot of other people who were willing to speak to me about Soviet philosophy and Ilyenkov’s role within it—Vladimir Smirnov, Vladimir Schveryev, Igor Kon, Valentin Tolstykh, and Anatoly Aresen’ev, to name a few—and over the next few years, on subsequent visits to Moscow or in the West, I also met Nelli Motroshilova, Nina Ulina, Vadim Sadovsky, and Genrich Batishchev, among others. I even sought out Ilyenkov’s critics, Igor Narsky and David Dubrovsky, who agreed to speak with me even though they were nonplussed about why anyone who was trained in analytic philosophy (which they revered) should want to spend time on the philosophy of Ilyenkov (which they disdained). All these encounters gave me a sense of how Soviet philosophical culture felt from the inside. The conversations were often deep and poignant too— though they were also fun, especially because in true Russian style

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they usually took place in people’s kitchens, and there was plenty to eat and drink.

AL: Tell us more about Ilyenkov and what was his contribution to Soviet Philosophy.

DB: Ilyenkov was one of the most important figures—perhaps the most important figure—in the renewal of Soviet Philosophy after the Stalin era. Under Stalin, Marxist philosophy had been reduced to a simple set of principles that were presented as the supreme and incontrovertible truth. The classic expression of this is the famous fourth chapter of The Short Course on dialectical and historical materialism. This simple creed was set up in stark opposition to socalled bourgeois idealist philosophy, and Soviet philosophers were charged with fighting on its behalf in the class war in philosophy.

Any attempt to question, or even to refine, this view was seen as an affront to Party loyalty and so as heretical. Of course, it goes without saying that such an approach is antithetical to the very spirit of philosophical inquiry.

Ilyenkov was one of the generation whose education had been interrupted by the Great Patriotic War. At the tender age of 20, he commanded an artillery platoon in the Lvov-Sandamierz offensive and was later part of the force that liberated Berlin (there’s a striking photograph of Ilyenkov standing on the ruins of the Reichstag).

Returning from the horrors of a brutal war, Ilyenkov, like many of his contemporaries, sought a better future. What had he been fighting for? For a world in which the communist vision of an egalitarian society securing the flourishing of all could finally become real. He passionately believed such a world could be built only on the right philosophical foundations and this necessitated the rejuvenation of Soviet philosophy. So Ilyenkov made this his mission.

AL: What impression did Ilyenkov make on his contemporaries?

DB: From the outset Ilyenkov was viewed with the greatest suspicion by the Soviet philosophical establishment. In May 1954, as a junior lecturer at MGU, Ilyenkov, together with his friend and

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colleague Valentin Korovikov, presented a number of theses on the nature of Philosophy at an open meeting of the Philosophy Faculty.

The theses provoked considerable controversy because they challenged the established Soviet view of philosophy as the science of the most general laws of nature, society and thought; invited scepticism about the distinction between dialectical and historical materialism; and provoked discussion of what exactly Marxist philosophy is supposed to be. While the effect on many of the younger generation was inspirational, the old guard were appalled and Ilyenkov and Korovikov were subjected to severe criticism over many months, eventually losing their jobs at the University. Korovikov left academe and became a journalist. Ilyenkov fortunately also held a position at the Institute of Philosophy, which he managed to keep notwithstanding mounting pressure. Things calmed down only when, in 1956, the 20th Party Congress and Krushchev’s “Secret Speech” ushered in a new era of “de-Stalinization”.

AL: What alternative vision of philosophy did Ilyenkov advance?

DB: For Ilyenkov, philosophy is the science of thought (nauka o myshleniya). He formulated this view early, and championed it throughout his life. Of course, Ilyenkov does not mean that philosophy studies thought in the way the psychologist does. Philosophy is not an empirical discipline. Rather, philosophy studies the forms of our thinking—its fundamental categorial structure; the adequacy of thinking to being (its truth, its fidelity to reality); and the movement of thought—the ways in which thinking engages, or fails to engage, with its objects. The material on which the philosopher reflects is not empirical data, but the deliverances of self-consciousness: namely, what we are able to know about thought in virtue of the fact that we are ourselves thinking beings. Thus, for Ilyenkov, philosophy is “Logic” or, as he puts it, “Logic with a capital L” (to distinguish it from formal logic), which coincides with dialectics and the theory of knowledge (echoing the famous remark on the unity of logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks).

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AL: What were Ilyenkov’s most important early publications?

DB: Ilyenkov’s first book was a study on scientific method that grew out of his Candidate’s dissertation. It was entitled The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, and was published in 1960. The text was brutally cut before publication and was only published in full in 1997 as The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Scientific-Theoretical Thought.

Ilyenkov’s other major work was his 1962 article on “The Ideal” that my book inspired you to seek out. That was an entry in volume 2 of the pathbreaking Philosophical Encyclopedia. This essay is a masterpiece, one of Ilyenkov’s most brilliant creations (although he constantly played down its originality). It addresses the status of non-material (ideal) phenomena in the material world. Of course, this was a hot topic because Soviet Marxism defined itself in terms of the primacy of matter over spirit, materialism over idealism. Many of Ilyenkov’s contemporaries interpreted the primacy of matter to mean that anything non-material can be reduced to the mental, and the mental in turn can be reduced to the physical (ultimately to goings-on in the brain). Ilyenkov, in contrast, argued that ideal phenomena—the realm of thought—exists objectively as features of reality independent of individual human minds. So, for example, our forms of thinking have a reality that transcends any particular mind; they exist as part of “humanity’s spiritual culture”.

Moreover, individual human beings enter a world that is replete with objective meaning and significance, embodied not just in human language and meaningful human behaviour, but in artefacts that are, if you like, embodiments of human purpose. For Ilyenkov, our minds take shape as we become at home in this realm of the ideal, as we internalize the distinctively human environment with all its meaning and significance. As I like to put it, human individuals do have to find reality anew (as empiricist theories of concept acquisition suggest); we acquire a conception of the world, along with the powers to criticize and develop it, as we are initiated into humanity’s spiritual culture, into the domain of the ideal.

Ilyenkov’s essay on the ideal was absolutely transformative. It inspired many of the more creative philosophers of his generation,

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whether they agreed with it or not. Of course, it provoked a certain amount of criticism as heretical, but for whatever reason the criticism did not gain momentum, perhaps because this was the height of the period known as “the thaw”, and there was a greater tolerance of new perspectives.

AL: You note in many of your writings that activity (deyatel’nost’) is a key concept in the Soviet philosophical tradition. What role does that concept play in Ilyenkov’s thought?

DB: The concept of activity is absolutely central to Ilyenkov’s thinking. The basic idea is that to understand the relation between “subject” and “object”, mind and world, we have to recognize that thinking subjects are active beings and that the world on which they act is transformed into a possible object of thought through that activity. So, as we saw, in Ilyenkov’s writings on the ideal, he argues that to be a thinking thing is to inhabit the realm of the ideal, which exists objectively, independently of human individuals. This can sound like a form of platonism, but Ilyenkov argues that the ideal exists only in relation to our activity. The ideal does not have a brutely objective existence: its source lies in human activity.

Does that make Ilyenkov some kind of social constructionist?

I don’t think so. It’s true that in the case of some ideal phenomenon—economic value, for instance—we can tell a detailed story about how such phenomena emerge out of human activity (labour).

But this is not the case for many ideal properties (there’s not going to be a labour theory of beauty, for instance, or of universals). In any case, it was characteristic of social constructionism, at least in the form in which it flourished in the 1990s, to seek to undermine the objectivity of the phenomena it portrayed as constructed, and, indeed, to be sceptical of the very idea of an independent reality.

Ilyenkov does not think this way. He is concerned to stress the objectivity of the ideal and he has no doubt that we live in a natural world that is, for the most part, not of our making. So, I think Ilyenkov’s position is best understood like this: Human beings inhabit a world that is replete with meaning and significance, but that distinctively human environment cannot be understood except in

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relation to the life-activity of beings like us. If you want to understand a lion’s world, you have to understand what kind of life-form a lion is. And similarly for human beings: our life-world is the other-being of our life-form, if I can put it like that. And that’s something we have to countenance if we are to understand how we have developed powers of thought that enable us to see beyond things as they present themselves to us and characterize reality as it is independently of our modes of engagement with it.

For Ilyenkov, the power of thinking is an active power, and— moreover—one that is expressed in the bodily activity of the subject, in the form of her active engagement with the world. Ilyenkov likes to speak of “the thinking body”, and in this respect he anticipated the ideas of “embodied cognition” and “enactivism” now current in Western philosophy of mind. To think is not merely to entertain some ethereal mental representation hovering in “inner space”—thinking is essentially related to doing. To have a concept is to have the power to do certain things. To make a judgment is to be committed to acting in certain ways. Even perception is a mode of active appropriation of reality, not just passive apprehension. To become a thinking being is thus to develop the powers to engage in a certain form of life-activity.

In this context, it’s helpful to think about the reality of child development. Philosophers tend to be preoccupied with vision, and so it’s tempting to portray concepts as akin to visual representations; to see thought as a play of images or a string of words in the mind’s eye; and to portray reflection as contemplation. It’s true that young children in search of knowledge want to see, but they also want to hear, smell and touch, especially touch. It’s easy to underestimate the role of bodily activity in the origin, development, and refinement of our mental powers if we are entirely focused on the visual.

AL: Your emphasis on touch brings to mind Ilyenkov’s involvement in Meshcheryakov’s work on the education of blind-deaf children and young adults. Can you tell us about that?

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DB: Alexander Meshcheryakov was a tiflosurdopedagog—i.e., a specialist in the education of blind-deaf students. He had trained with Ivan Sokolyansky (1889–1960), who was the first notable Russian specialist in that area (Sokolyanky’s work is noted by Vygotsky). In the 1960s, Meshcheryakov was working at the Zagorsk home for children with severe sensory impairments. He had remarkable success with four students, who graduated from high school and then, in the 1970s, went on to do degrees at MGU. Ilyenkov first met Meshcheryakov in 1967, I think. His first reference to Meshcheryakov’s work is in a lecture given in January, 1968. At that time, Ilyenkov hadn’t yet met Meshcheryakov’s four protégées—that happened a few months later. Thereafter, he was much involved with Meshcheryakov’s work and he befriended and mentored the four students, especially Alexander Suvorov, with whom he became very close.

Ilyenkov thought Meshcheryakov’s “experiment”, as it came to be known, was of great philosophical and psychological significance. There is an interesting short paper co-written by Ilyenkov and Meshcheryakov, published only recently, in which they explain why the work is so important. They argue that because blinddeaf children are profoundly isolated by their sensory impairment—isolated from the world and, especially, from other people— they simply do not develop psychologically. Accordingly, the pedagogue has deliberately to create the conditions in which their mental powers can be activated and cultivated. So, the experience of working with blind-deaf children can teach us a lot about the preconditions of human psychological development. Central among them, it transpires, is the child’s initiation into the basic activities of everyday life: learning to eat with a spoon, learning to dress oneself, and so on. Ilyenkov sees this process of “initial humanization” (pervonachal’no ochelevechivanie—it sounds much better in Russian!), not just as a matter of training in basic routine behaviors, but as the child’s entrance into the realm of the ideal: learning to relate to the world as a site of significance and value and building communicative relations to other human beings, so that the child’s environment comes to life as a meaningful world and their activity within it is constantly mediated by ideal phenomena, including the activity

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of other minded beings. Of course, the situation of the blind-deaf child helps to orientate us away from the usual emphasis on highly visual models of experience and thought and to appreciate the importance of embodied engagement with reality through touch.

Ilyenkov was convinced that there was so much to learn from all this. But, of course, his attitude to the project was not one of a detached scholar. He was deeply moved by Meshcheryakov’s work, which he thought exemplified the egalitarian commitment to create social conditions in which all citizens can flourish, whatever disabilities they may have, a commitment that he thought central to the communist ideal. And he became very attached to Meshcheryakov’s students.

AL: How much did Ilyenkov write on this topic?

DB: Ilyenkov published several papers on Meshcheryakov’s work—many of which were quite popular in style and extolled the “experiment” as a triumph of Soviet educational theory and practice and a vindication of a broadly activity-theoretical conception of the social constitution of the human mind. These writings were designed to talk up the project in order to ensure that it received the resources necessary for its continuation. The work was of course very labour intensive. Hence Ilyenkov wasted no opportunity to celebrate Meshcheryakov’s achievements. This became all the more urgent after Meshcheryakov’s sudden death in 1974. Unfortunately, Ilyenkov was not particularly successful. There was a certain amount of scepticism about the wisdom of putting so many resources into the education of people with severe disabilities, and even more scepticism about Ilyenkov’s claims about the psychological interest of the project. Ilyenkov’s critics countered that we couldn’t infer anything about the normal conditions of psychological development from such very abnormal cases, and hence Meshcheryakov’s work had nothing to tell us about which psychological functions are innate, and the relation of the social to the biological in the development of our mental lives. This kind of criticism continued even after Ilyenkov’s death, culminating in the so-called “Battle for Truth in Tiflosurdopedagogika” in 1989, when some of

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Ilyenkov’s longstanding detractors attacked him for misrepresenting the experiment to vindicate his own theories. Carol Padden and I came to Ilyenkov’s defense in our 1990 article, “The Meshcheryakov Experiment”.

Ilyenkov had hoped that Meshcheryakov’s successes would prompt some serious research on psychological development, but that didn’t happen. However, work at the Zagorsk School continued in one way or another. When I was in Moscow in 1982–83, Meshcheryakov’s four famous students were living independently in an apartment in Moscow and they were attached to Mikhailov’s laboratory at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology.

So, I got to meet them on a number of occasions, especially Sasha Suvorov, who was writing interesting material at the interface of philosophy and psychology about perception and imagination at the interface of philosophy and psychology. Mikhailov was fluent in the dactological alphabet and could chat away merrily, but Sasha had to be very patient with me as I traced out Russian letters on his palm. But we got on very well.

AL: Let’s go back to Ilyenkov on activity for a moment. How original are his ideas on this topic?

DB: Well, as I mentioned, Ilyenkov played down the originality of his position. He felt he was just heeding Marx’s words in Theses on Feuerbach and drawing on a long tradition of thinking going back to Hegel, Fichte, and—ultimately—Kant. And Ilyenkov was hardly the only thinker in the Russian tradition to give pride of place to activity. As far back as the 1920s, the philosopher and psychologist Sergei Rubinshtein described the thinking subject as constituted by acts of “creative self-activity”, a position which might also be associated with Vygotsky, although Vygotsky doesn’t use the term “dejatel’nost’” in the way his successors, such as Leontiev, do. So, it’s not just that Ilyenkov draws heavily on Marx and German classical philosophy, the theme of activity runs through Soviet intellectual culture from the outset.

However, be that as it may, there is also a sense in which only Ilyenkov could have written that article on “The Ideal”. It is

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remarkably fresh and creative. It’s full of ideas. It’s beautifully written by a philosopher with a distinctive vision, and who is utterly in command of his subject. It’s testimony to Ilyenkov’s particular genius. It’s no surprise that it made a huge impression on many philosophers of the younger generation and set new standards for rigor and creativity in Soviet philosophy.

AL: You somewhere describe Ilyenkov as “the philosophical mentor of the Vygotsky School”. How much was Ilyenkov influenced

by Vygotsky? To what degree did his work on activity and ideality influence Soviet psychologists?

DB: Well, these days one has to be cautious about talking in too cavalier a fashion about the “Vygotsky School”, since there is a now impassioned debate about the way Vygotsky is remembered and how his legacy has been “managed” by his followers (I have in mind Anton Yasnitksy’s “Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies”). However, Ilyenkov was close to Alexei Leontiev, who was one of Vygotsky’s students. As I already mentioned, Ilyenkov was also close to Vasili Davydov, who did important work on learning and concept development. Davydov was a student of Petr Galperin and he was mentored, I believe, by Alexander Luria (Vygotsky’s other famous student). Davydov collaborated with Daniel Elkonin, and he became a prominent figure in the world of Soviet psychology and was close to many important thinkers in and around the activity approach—Vladimir Zinchenko, for example. These were the circles in which Ilyenkov moved and there must have been a good deal of mutual influence.

I’m sure Ilyenkov became familiar with Vygotsky’s thought through his discussions with these friends and colleagues. I’m not certain, however, how much Ilyenkov actually read Vygotsky. You have to remember that, after his death in 1934, Vygotsky was a persona non grata during the Stalin era and his works were not easily available until a one-volume collection of his writings appeared in 1956. It was not until the early 1980s, long after Ilyenkov’s death, that the six-volume Selected Works began to appear. There are no references to Vygotsky in Ilyenkov’s published writings, though he

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occasionally speaks of “internalization”, a concept congenial to his own approach to the formation of mind. It’s noteworthy that, in his “Psychological Studies”—which is a set of notes from 1970 not written for publication—Ilyenkov devotes a section to Vygotsky’s ideas, though it’s entitled: “Vygotsky’s Position as Retold by A. R. Luria”, so even here we have Ilyenkov’s version of Luria’s reconstruction of Vygotsky…

AL: You mentioned that Ilyenkov’s writings on Meshcheryakov’s legacy were more popular in style. Did he write other works intended for a wider audience?

DB: Yes, he did. Like many Soviet “men of the 60s” (shestidesyatniki), Ilyenkov’s work was infused with a broad humanistic vision.

He believed deeply in the Soviet project, and he pressed for the reforms that he, like many of his peers, believed would set the country on the path to a truly socialist future. This was not just a matter of countering the legacy of Stalinism. It also involved speaking out against current trends in Soviet society that were widely believed to be progressive but which Ilyenkov viewed with suspicion. For example, Ilyenkov was a rigorous critic of positivism and scientism, which he thought had infected not just Soviet philosophy, but Soviet culture as a whole. He disdained Soviet fascination with the “scientific-technological revolution” and argued that socialism was not going to be built by technological innovation alone. Indeed, no good could come of technology unless it was deployed in the service of true humanist values. So, in addition to his scholarly writings, Ilyenkov sought to get his ideas across to a wide audience and to advocate for a kind of “socialism with a human face”. Ilyenkov saw socialism as a collective project, but one that had to be ultimately focused on the flourishing of human individuals. Human beings cannot flourish, he thought, unless they can think for themselves. Ilyenkov therefore cared deeply about education’s role in enriching people’s lives and equipping them to think critically, creatively and independently. These themes come together in his 1968 book, Of Idols and Ideals, and in his various essays on education.

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AL: You mentioned that Ilyenkov’s career was fraught with controversy. Can you tell us more?

DB: Ilyenkov’s career was marked by dramatic highs and lows. On the one hand, he was much celebrated. He won the Cheryshevsky Prize in 1965; he published several essays in the party journal Kommunist, and his writings were translated into many languages. On the other hand, he was often subjected to ideological criticism and persecuted as a revisionist and idealist. The incident over the famous theses was only the first of a number of crises Ilyenkov had to endure. In the 1970s, for example, his conditions of work at the Institute of Philosophy were very bad. The Director, B.S. Ukrainstev, together with ex-KGB operative Elena Modrzhinsaya, who’d been put out to pasture at the Institute, took every opportunity to make Ilyenkov’s life a misery. Things came to a head when the Scientific Council would not approve for publication a collection of essays by the members of Lektorsky’s sector unless Ilyenkov’s contribution—his long essay “Dialectics of the Ideal”—was excised from it. The controversy went on a long time and really wore Ilyenkov down. The essay was only published after his suicide in 1979.

Of course, you know this essay very well, Alex, since we owe to you the definitive English translation of it, which appeared in 2014.

AL: After the dramatic controversies earlier in his career, where Ilyenkov must have feared that his livelihood, and perhaps even his freedom, were at stake, why do you think that the academic squabbles at the Institute, nasty though they must have been, had such a terrible effect on him?

DB: Well, it’s hard to speculate about such things, and perhaps inappropriate to do so, but I will say this. One factor is the symbolic significance of denying Ilyenkov the right to publish on the problem of the ideal—on the subject that he had made his own and on which he was unquestionably the leading Soviet authority. But perhaps the main factor lies elsewhere, back in the events of 1968. The idea of “socialism with a human face” is of course a concept coined, not by the Russian men of the sixties, but by the Czech reformers of

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the Prague Spring. Ilyenkov and many of his generation viewed that movement as a harbinger of reform, a new dawn. When it was unceremoniously shut down by the Soviet invasion, Ilyenkov and his like-minded peers were devastated. It suddenly became clear that reform was not inevitable and that the Soviet project, as they understood it, was not destined to succeed. I think this made it particularly difficult for Ilyenkov to endure the harassments he suffered in the 1970s. Before Prague, he believed that the fight for reforms would prevail and a just egalitarian society would emerge in the Soviet Union. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he lost hope, and I think that made him far less resilient.

AL: There seems to be a good deal of interest in Ilyenkov’s work today, both in Russia and the West. Are you surprised by this?

DB: I don’t know if I’m surprised, but I’m certainly heartened. Consciousness and Revolution was published just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so what began as a study of a living, yet poorly understood, philosophical tradition seemed suddenly to have become a work of merely historical interest. Who now, I asked myself, would be interested in the ideas of a Soviet Marxist, who styled himself a dialectical materialist and a Leninist? Yet Ilyenkov’s star did not fall. Indeed, interest in his work seems only to have intensified.

AL: What accounts for this?

DB: Well, throughout the world there is a lot of interest in Vygotsky and in activity theory, and people drawn to those approaches often have a flair for theory. What’s attractive about Vygotsky is the depth of his vision, the brilliance of his theoretical insights. And so it’s natural that people should turn to Ilyenkov to provide a kind of unifying philosophical background against which to read Vygotsky, Leontiev and so on. Of course, in Russia and the West, there are also those who admire Ilyenkov’s creative Marxism in its own right. And there are many who appreciate Ilyenkov’s significance in the history of Russian thought, and scholars who want to do

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justice to that and not just airbrush the whole Soviet period out of the history of Russian thought.

It’s also really important that those close to Ilyenkov, such as Vladislav Lektorsky and Ilyenkov’s daughter, Elena Illesh, together with younger scholars such as Andrey Maidansky, have recently published a great deal of fascinating material. Notable here are three volumes of archival materials that appeared between 2016 and 2018, which cast all kinds of new light on Ilyenkov’s life and work. This inspired me to write a couple of my recent papers on Ilyenkov, such as “Punks versus Zombies”, which is about the incident with the Theses. I knew about the theses from conversations with Mikhailov and Lektorsky, and I mentioned it in Consciousness and Revolution, but I had nothing to work with except hearsay. Even the theses themselves were lost. That all changed thanks to Illesh’s wonderful books. It would be fantastic if they were to be translated into English. Another recent paper is my chapter on Ilyenkov in The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought, “E. V. Ilyenkov: Philosophy as the Science of Thought”. I think this casts some new light on Ilyenkov’s legacy, thanks to the appearance of all this fascinating new material.

Another heartening thing is that many of Ilyenkov’s works have been republished in Russia and a Russian edition of Ilyenkov’s Collected Works is in progress. Five volumes have already appeared.

I think there will be ten in total. Andrey Maidansky is responsible for a lot of the work on this.

AL: Are you planning to write further papers on Ilyenkov and the Soviet tradition?

DB: Well, I have a book in press that brings together the best of my essays on Russian thought. It’s called The Heart of the Matter: Essays on Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and the Courage of Thought. It also includes a couple of previously unpublished papers—one on Ilyenkov’s philosophy of education and one on Vygotsky’s intriguing concept perezhivaniya. It will be out next year (2023). I also wrote something this year for a Special Issue of the Russian journal, Filosofiya nauki i tekhniki (Philosophy of Science and Technology), in honour of

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Lektorsky’s 90th birthday, and I expect I will continue to write further pieces as the spirit takes me. Of course, I am busy with many other things. I have been working on themes in 20th Century British philosophy—particularly on Gilbert Ryle and Iris Murdoch—and I am also now the editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. So, as always, I have a lot going on. But I really enjoyed revisiting my various essays on Ilyenkov and Vygotsky.

AL: How would you sum up what’s distinctive about your writing on Russian thought?

DB: One thing that makes my work on Soviet philosophy distinctive is that I was brought up in the analytic tradition. Of course, I had read Marx. But I was not steeped in Kant and Hegel, let alone Fichte, Schelling, and so on. Nor was I committed to any particular variant of Western Marxism. As a result, I came to Soviet philosophy with an open mind and I necessarily brought Ilyenkov’s ideas into dialogue with issues that were familiar to me. Of course, although, as I have frequently noted, the concept of activity is pretty much absent in the kind of philosophy I was schooled in—analytic philosophers preferring to focus on action—there were nonetheless many fruitful points of contact—with the later Wittgenstein, with pragmatism, with Aristotelian ideas, and so on. Moreover, I was interested not just in presenting Ilyenkov’s views, but in engaging with them. I didn’t want just to describe a philosophical tradition, I wanted to do philosophy—to open up new questions and new avenues of inquiry. My approach might sometimes have led me to some eccentric interpretations, although my intimate acquaintance with the Soviet context and the many hours in discussion with Felix and others, meant that I had a good feel for Ilyenkov’s way of thinking, even if I sometimes cast his ideas in a rather different idiom.

My Russian interlocutors also very much welcomed my approach, as is clear from their responses in “Social Being and the Human Essence”. I think they trusted me to get things right and, when I strayed off-track, they would let me know. In general, I believe it’s a good thing when a thinker’s ideas are recast and brought into dialogue with different perspectives (especially when the thinker

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himself was largely prevented from engaging constructively with other living styles of philosophy). That makes the ideas accessible to a much wider audience, at least if it’s done well. Recently, for example, I have been trying to illuminate the concept of activity by developing some ideas in Elizabeth Anscombe’s philosophy. I started reading Anscombe under the influence of Sebastian Rödl, Andrea Kern and Rachael Wiseman, and it struck me that there is much there relevant to the activity approach. Of course, there is a sense in which Anscombe, a deeply committed Catholic, is a million miles from Ilyenkov. But there are also some remarkable parallels.

I’ll be interested to see what people make of this—if anyone actually reads it!

References Bakhurst, D. and Carol Padden (1991). The Meshcheryakov Experiment: Soviet Work on the Education of Blind-Deaf Children. Learning and Instruction, 1, 201-215. https://doi.org/10.1016/0959-4752(91)90003-Q Bakhurst, D. (1991) Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Cambridge University Press.

Bakhurst, D. (1995). Social Being and the Human Essence: An Unresolved Issue in Soviet Philosophy. Studies in East European Thought, 47, 3-60.

(A dialogue with F.T. Mikhailov, V.S. Bibler, V.A. Lektorsky, and V.V. Davydov. Text translated from Russian.) https://doi.org/ 10.1007/BF01075140 Bakhurst, D. (2019). Punks versus Zombies: Evald Ilyenkov and the Battle for Soviet Philosophy. In V. Lektorsky and M. Bykova (Eds.), Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century: A Contemporary View from Russia and Abroad. Bloomsbury Academic, 53-78.

Bakhurst, D. (2021). E. V. Ilyenkov: Philosophy as the Science of Thought.

In M. Bykova, L. Steiner and M. Forster (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought, 359-381. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-62982-3_17 Bakhurst, D. (2022). Philosophy, Activity, Life Philosophy of Science and Technology/Filosofiya nauki i tekhniki, 27(12): 31–15.

Bakhurst, D. (2023). The Heart of the Matter: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and the Courage of Thought. Brill.

Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU (Eds.). History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course (1938).

Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1943.

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Ilyenkov, E.V. (1962). Ideal’noe. Filosofskaia entsiklopedia, 2, 219-227.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1968). Ob idolakh I idealakh. Politizdat.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1982/1960). The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s “Capital”. Progress Publishers.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1997). Dialektika abstraktnogo i konktretnogo v nauchno-teoreticheskom poznanii [The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Scientific-Theoretical Thought]. Rossiyskaya politicheskaya entsiklopedia.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1979). S chego nachinaetsa lichnost’? [Where Personhood Begins]. Moscow: Politizdat, 1st ed.: 183-237; 2nd ed. (1984): 319-58.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (2014). Dialectics of the Ideal. In A. Levant and V. Oittinen (Eds.), Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism.

Brill.

Lenin, V.I. (1976). “Philosophical Notebooks”. In Collected Works, Volume 38. Progress Publishers.

The Theory of Activity— in a Psychological Perspective Seth Chaiklin What conceptual ideas underlie a psychological approach to activity? The first part of this chapter clarifies core ideas in a psychological concept of activity, after providing a historical contextualization of the origins of these ideas. The last part of the chapter discusses methodological implications and consequences for working with these core ideas, thereby expressing concretely an implicit vision for characteristics of a scientific tradition that draws centrally on an activity concept. A short intermezzo between these two parts discusses some contemporary approaches that use the concept of activity as a central concept.

What is the Theory of Activity?

The main focus of the chapter is the psychological theory of activity, as developed in the Soviet Union. As Levant (this volume) notes in the introduction, there is a heterogeneous, multidisciplinary reception of the activity concept, also within the Soviet Union. One implication of the heterogeneity is that pronouncements about “activity theory” cannot be understood as applicable automatically to all who use this expression, so no claim is being made for the centrality or singularity of the interpretation presented here. The expression theory of activity is preferred when referring to theoretical perspectives organized around the activity concept; as explained later, the expression activity theory is viewed as a neologism, established probably in the early 1980s during its reception outside the Soviet Union.

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Three main reasons motivate a focus on the Soviet1 psychological theory of activity. It can be considered as an original and singular source of ideas about activity.2 It has been the main source of ideas for contemporary approaches that are self-described as activity theory. The conceptual substance of this theoretical perspective is still valuable, deserving to be clarified and its implications elaborated. These clarifications and elaborations are particularly important because it is still rare to see research that draws on ideas from the psychological theory of activity in a substantial way.

Setting the Stage Historically The conceptual core for a psychological theory of activity was formed through a confluence of interrelated interests that grew out of: (a) specific research problems in the 1920s and early 1930s about the development of human psychological capabilities, which were motivated by the theoretical interests and approach of researchers in immediate contact with Lev S. Vygotsky and each other (because they were working in the same organizational unit), (b) some conceptual ideas and perspectives from the 19th century that were viewed as relevant for those research problems (e.g., a materialist approach, with a focus on the origins and development of psychological phenomena), and (c) new ideas that were elaborated in the course of working with the previous two points (e.g., role of psychological tools in mediating thinking and speech).

1

2

The expression Soviet is used to refer to a particular geographical location and temporal period. No implication is intended to suggest that a specific substantive theory was associated with the political nation-state during this period.

I have not been able to find any scholar who disputes the idea that the intellectual origins of activity—as a social scientific tradition—are grounded in ideas from the Soviet Union (which were also drawing upon ideas from 19th century German sources). Nothing depends on the Soviet sources as being the unique or original source of ideas. In principle, researchers in other countries or other intellectual traditions could have developed ideas of Marx and Hegel into the kinds of analyses and perspectives that are known under the mantle of activity, but until other relevant traditions can be identified, these are the important sources to consider.

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There is no standard or common account of the origin of the theory of activity. A. N. Leontiev and S. L. Rubinshtein are often identified and recognized as important figures in the historical development of ideas about the concept of activity, but it is important to recognize that neither of these researchers has claimed to be the originator of the concept (Chaiklin, 2019a, p. 6). It seems more appropriate to understand the development of the theory of activity as a collective achievement, distributed temporally over several decades involving many researchers,3 who worked independently, with greater or little coordination.

A practical implication of this historical situation is a need to construct a conceptual understanding of the theory of activity, without being limited necessarily to a particular researcher or text, even if certain individuals, such as A. N. Leontiev and S. L. Rubinshtein, are important sources. This is the topic of the first part of the chapter: to put forward a way to conceptualize the activity concept in relation to psychological research—whether within the discipline of psychology itself, or among other disciplines that draw on psychological ideas or work with psychological phenomena. As part of developing that conceptual understanding, it is relevant to understand (a) the problems that motivated a psychological theory of activity, (b) ideas that seek to address those problems, and (c) implications for research grounded in the theoretical perspective that grow through those ideas.

Psychological Theory of Activity: A Historical Dialectic The aim of this section is to identify some significant highlights in the conceptual development of the psychological theory of activity.

For the sake of presentation, four periods or events are identified, 3

At a minimum, one might identify at least seven researchers who were particularly important in the initial elaboration of an activity concept (Sechenov, Vygotsky, Rubinshtein, A. N. Leontiev, Gal’perin, Zaporozhets, P. I. Zinchenko), but additional researchers (or time periods) could also be named, depending on how one wants to characterize a distributed process of idea development. For present purposes, the main point is that the development of the activity concept results from the contributions of many individuals.

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primarily to give a general impression of the diverse sources and events involved, as well as the temporal spread in the development of the activity concept (see Chaiklin, 2019a, for more details).

The original problem that leads to an activity perspective is how to conceptualize the relation between organism and material world. The central or core principle that initiates (and remains in) the activity perspective is the principle of the inseparable relation between organism and material world. Without this principle, the activity perspective would dissolve. Even to say “inseparable” might seem to imply that there exist two components: “person” and “environment.” While we can perceive a physical person, this visual appearance is misleading. The observable boundaries between person and surroundings are not a good guide to approaching the conceptual issues in a theoretical understanding of psychological action and development of psychological capabilities. This holistic image of a person-environment relation may be the most important in the conceptual development of activity as a psychological concept, because of the many consequences that arise for how to conceptualise human action and development. The adoption of this materialist assumption can be considered as the initial stage or event from which the activity conception developed, where the initial holistic image has been increasingly differentiated and specified over the years. Because this chapter’s narrative focuses on Soviet sources of ideas, it is appropriate to identify Sechenov (1865) as an important source of this materialist idea. While Sechenov is not from the Soviet time period, his ideas were well-known among psychologists in the early 20th century in Russia and the Soviet Union (Smith, 2019).

The second major period in the historical development of a psychological concept of activity was from roughly 1925 to 1940 when Vygotsky and his colleagues were striving to make a materialist psychology, culminating in a theoretical structure of activity formulated by Leontiev (1940/2005) around 1940. There was no question that it was necessary to study the interactions between person and environment, but there was also a need to have a more articulated theoretical structure for analysing these relations. In addition to experiments that focused on practical intelligence (e.g.,

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how children, through their own action, could solve problems), there may also have been some attention to texts from Marx (especially Theses on Feuerbach, German Ideology, and 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) and Engels (e.g., Dialectics of Nature).

While these texts are now often characterized as “classics” of Marxism—such as Leontiev did in the early 1970s—it is relevant to consider that these works were first becoming available to the world during the late 1920s or early 1930s (Leckey, 1995). Vygotsky knew the main editor (Riazanov), and it is possible that he had some form of prepublication access. These historical facts may explain some of the enthusiasm and interest at that time to explore the significance or insights that Marx’s texts might offer for developing a materialist psychological science. These facts also give a useful way to interpret the following statement by Leontiev (1975/1978): There was a process of gradual rethinking of the significance of the works of the classics of Marxism for psychological science. It became increasingly apparent that Marxism had produced a broad theory that revealed the nature and general laws of psyche and consciousness. (author’s translation)

The expressions “gradual rethinking” and “increasingly apparent” suggest a slow process by which these texts from Marx were digested and evaluated for their implications for psychological science, where there were not singular events in which particular passages or ideas were immediately recognized as applicable. This point is raised here partly to counter contemporary responses that unreflectively assume the necessity of drawing upon Marx for formulating a theory of activity—rather than recognizing—as Leontiev also indicates—that it was more likely a process of working with ideas in Marx’s texts concurrently with ongoing psychological research.

A third major period was the explicit introduction of the idea of personality into the theoretical structure (in the late 1960s and early 1970s). The idea of personality was present as a major concern during the second period, but the issue often remained in the background (e.g., noted at the beginning and end of Vygotsky’s major 1931 monograph on the development of psychological functions),

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but it was only in the early 1970s that Leontiev elaborated these ideas.

The fourth major period (in the 1980s) was the recognition of the need to analyse what was called collective activity and the relation between the individual and the collective, but without any good ideas about how to proceed with this problem.

This brief historical review illustrates that the concept of activity has been under development for decades, drawing on ideas from physiology, philosophy, political economy, and psychological research. There has not been a singular or key event that engendered the discovery or creation of the activity concept. Rather, the initial focus—person inseparable from material environment—has been explored, elaborated, and differentiated, providing useful theoretical conceptions, but also leaving many issues remaining to be examined more carefully (e.g., meaning and role of personality, how to theorize collective activity). Accordingly, if one is going to work with the activity concept, it is necessary to understand the conceptual issues underlying the activity concept (and not just a historical account).

Core Ideas of the Activity Concept The aim of this section is to present basic conceptual assumptions that would be found in all psychological theories of activity. It is difficult to capture adequately the conceptual structure and dynamics in the activity concept in a single formal definition. The approach taken here is to present core assumptions that express the activity concept. Although the assumptions are differentiated, activity should be conceived in an integrated way, rather than focusing solely on single assumptions in an atomized way. The enumeration is not considered exhaustive, but it does try to convey a reasonably comprehensive, integrated coherence for understanding the theoretical meaning of activity. The assumptions presented here underlie Leontiev’s differentiation of the structure of activity (in

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terms of operations, actions, activity), so the following discussion does not rehearse this well-known perspective.4

Basic Assumptions The category of activity, as a psychological phenomenon, emerges from the omnipresence of the relation designated here as: 1.

2.

4

5

Ontological assumption. Persons are always inseparably engaged and acting in relation to objects (both physical and spiritual), where these actions are aimed ultimately at satisfying needs.

The ontological assumption, which gives a reasonable a proximation to the meaning of activity, can be considered to be the basic kernel of the psychological concept of activity, because it is present in all psychological phenomena.5 Additional assumptions are needed to elaborate and clarify important qualities that are implicit in and interrelated to this kernel. Actions in relation to objects are always embedded in sociohistorical conditions and traditions, and involve the use of tools (i.e., not just internal psychological processes). Actions usually draw on or adapt historically existing traditions of action, but sometimes persons create new actions. These two assumptions are designated respectively as: Sociohistorical assumption. Actions on objects are aimed at purposefully transforming natural and social reality to make things that are culturally significant, where these actions reflect cultural traditions.

Operations, actions, activity are three different perspectives on the same object; they are not different levels of description. See Chaiklin (2007, pp. 183-185) for a critique of the “levels” characterization and a discussion of how to understand their relation.

For detailed discussion about the kernel, see Chaiklin (2019a, pp. 9-10).

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4.

5.

6.

Instrumental assumption. Tools, including psychological constructions, are always involved in actions on objects.

Activity emerges or is embodied in this always-present internal relation of person-acting in and on the objective world (environment), where the dynamic of this relation is a person’s intentional action aimed ultimately at satisfying needs. That is, a person formulates 6 and pursues goals, aimed at making transformations in material conditions in the course of producing needed objects. These dynamic qualities are highlighted and concretised in the following three assumptions: Social assumption. Actions are conducted either directly or indirectly in relation to other persons.

Motive assumption. Actions are directed toward and inseparable from motives.7 Need assumption. Motives are objects that satisfy needs, where need arises from a gap between a person’s intention and the current material state.8

These six assumptions, taken together, are the fundamental core of a psychological conception of activity. The basic kernel and its implications have been elaborated in the Soviet conception of activity (e.g., relations between operations, actions, and motives, consequences for self-development), but these elaborations do not transcend or eliminate this fundamental core.9

6

7

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9

Self-consciousness of this formulation is not required. It may be implicit, vague, or semi-verbalized in a given situation, but from an analytic or theoretical point of view, action is always understood in relation to a goal.

The motive concept is difficult to describe compactly, because the concept must be understood in a system of conceptual relations (see Chaiklin, 2012, p. 222, for one attempt). The main function of the concept is to identify the object toward which action is directed, which, as noted, provides the dynamic in activity.

The gap or interaction between intention and material condition is understood as animating action to overcome that gap. In other words, motive, as object, is not a material determinism in which the object itself creates need, while the intention to overcome the current lack of object highlights a material dimension, contra a pure subjective or ideal determinism.

For brief elaborations about these assumptions, see Chaiklin (2019a, pp. 12-14).

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From a psychological perspective, activity is manifest in an interaction of intention, perception and action, where action is oriented to a specific need. Development of new psychological capabilities is an important consequence of these interactions.

7. Origin of consciousness assumption. Psychological development (both functional and substantive) is a consequence of activity, reflecting the structure of action.

Research Implications From an activity perspective, basic research problems within psychology—as this discipline has been constituted historically— should involve understanding the structure and dynamics of relations between intention, perception, and action in concrete, meaningful situations, and their consequences for development of psychological functions. Explanations of psychological phenomena such as learning, development, and social interaction would be grounded in these assumptions. The origin of consciousness assumption can be understood as an implication of the six core assumptions. Other research implications that arise from an activity perspective are: 1.

Psychological development in activity implication. Two different meanings of development are present and intended here.

One meaning is that psychological qualities and capabilities develop as a consequence of activity. Research should be focused on understanding the processes by which activity becomes manifest in psychological functions. The second meaning of development involves considering the significance of the development of psychological capabilities in relation to the whole person’s life situation (i.e., psychological development). Psychological development, in a cultural-historical perspective, is not a simple increment of psychological capabilities, but is dependent on the processes (through activity) by which psychological capabilities develop.

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3.

Integral person implication. Implicit in the basic assumptions is the idea that integral persons are acting in the world. This implication is reflected in the ontological assumption, the need assumption, and the origin of consciousness assumption. The concept of personality has been used to express this idea. That is, a personality is making transformations, which in turn has consequences for personality development (A.N. Leontiev, 1975/1978, pp. 97-99).

Forms of activity implication. An important implication of this conception of activity, especially the sociohistorical assumption, is that forms of activity become more structured and precise in relation to specific kinds of historicallyformed practice. This implication has consequences for the first implication (about psychological development).

Reception of the Activity Concept and its Theory in Western Europe and North America In the late 1970s, translations of two major works by Leontiev provided a major opportunity for researchers in several countries in Western Europe and North America to access and encounter the activity perspective for the first time. In particular, Leontiev’s (1975) book on activity was translated into several languages, including English (1978), Spanish (1978), German (1979), and Danish (1983). An English translation of a collection of Leontiev’s articles (1959/1981) also contained several chapters that addressed the activity concept.10

10

Early translations were also made in German (Leontjew, 1959/1964), Danish (Lontjew, 1959/1977) and, probably not well-known, some selected chapters in English (Leont’ev, 1959/1964).

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“Activity Theory” or Research Approaches Using an Activity Concept?

In the Western reception, the theoretical perspective quickly acquired the designation activity theory, 11 even though Russian sources from this time, including the just-named Leontiev texts, did not use such an expression. As an informal way to illustrate this point, look at English translations of Russian texts from this same time period. In these translations, the expression psychological theory of activity appears, but not activity theory (e.g., Lomov, 1981/1982, p.

81, or Davydov 1979/1981, p. 4). Similarly, one of the early English language texts that discussed the concept of activity refers consistently to “theory of activity” (Wertsch, 1981), or a mention of “general theory of activity” (Engeström, Hakkarainen & Seppo, 1982, p.

39). But the expression activity theory also started to appear around this time as well—both from North America (Tolman, 1980)12 and Western Europe (e.g., Engeström, Hakkarainen & Hedegaard, 1984)13. By the mid-1980s, the expression activity theory was wellestablished in Western European and North American texts that referred to theory of activity. The reasons or explanation for the appearance of the expression activity theory are not important for the present discussion. There is no expectation that existing usage will change in the near or intermediate future. Of course, any researcher is free to adopt the expression activity theory to describe their

11 12

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Similarly in Danish (virksomhedsteori) and German (Tätigkeitsteorie).

Tolman’s article is cited to illustrate how it is possible to read Leontiev’s (1975/1978) book and choose to use the expression activity theory—even though this expression does not appear in the English translation. Tolman’s choice simply exemplifies what many others have done, more or less from the beginning. No suggestion is being made that Tolman’s review was the origin or source of this expression. As a speculation, it was a common practice within psychology in North America in the 1980s to refer to all kinds of ideas as theory.

At that time, one could see researchers (within social, cognitive or development psychology) discussing attribution theory, attachment theory, field theory, learning theory, prototype theory, social comparison theory, social learning theory, and so forth.

A transitional case: ‟theory of activity” (p. 153), ‟activity theory” (p. 155).

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work14, but it is relevant to consider possible consequences of using this label. One concern is that the expression activity theory invites a misleading interpretation that the theory is a general theoretical system that can be used to explain or influence human action. It is true, in some sense, that the theory of activity provides a general system of concepts that can be used for a variety of explanatory or interventive purposes—given that all human action can be understood in terms of activity—but the theory does not contain any advice or principles for how to concretise its concepts in particular cases, because the substance of the situation is not contained in the theory of activity. Using a phrase like theory of activity should make it more apparent that the theory is about activity (as a general concept), where this theory is being used as a conceptual background (ontological assumptions and elements) from which explanations are being constructed in relation to particular fields of practice or spheres of action. This distinction between activity theory and theory of activity is particularly relevant because Leontiev (1975) focused on a general theory of activity, while most psychological and practical research focuses on theories of child development, subjectmatter learning, development of capabilities at work, and so forth.

The current practice of using the label activity theory generically raises a second concern about whether different approaches that use this label are actually referring to the same analytic object, especially when some may be focused on developing a theory of activity, while others are focused on analysing particular practices or psychological consequences of participation in practices. A variety of methodological approaches have drawn centrally on the activity concept as part of research investigations and intervention studies within practical spheres of human life, especially adult work practices. Particularly well-developed approaches are found within human-computer interaction (e.g., Clemmensen, Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2016; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2012), ergonomics (e.g., Bedny, 2015; Bedny & Karwowski, 2011), workplace learning (e.g.,

14

Havighurst (1961) introduced the idea “the activity theory of aging”, which subsequently was simplified among disciplines that work with older adults as “activity theory” (e.g., DeLiema & Bengtson. 2017).

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Engeström, 2005), and to a lesser extent education (e.g., Plakitsi, 2013). Within developmental psychology there is less explicit focus on the theory of activity among researchers who draw on this tradition, though it often serves as an important orienting perspective (e.g., Hedegaard, Edwards, & Fleer, 2012).

Because researchers in these different practical areas are using or presenting activity theory, then one might expect plausibly that they start with the same assumptions and address the same issues.

The reception of the theoretical ideas, especially in Western Europe and North America, has been selective, not necessarily systematic.

There has not been a linear, expansive development of the activity tradition in its historical reception. These claims are not meant to be polemical (in the sense of dismissing or deprecating traditions that have developed with inspiration from Soviet sources), nor conservative (in the sense of trying to preserve or fossilize the conceptual schemes from the 1970s). Rather they are meant to highlight the importance of trying to understand the accomplishments (and limits) of the Soviet ideas, which have focused on the theory of activity, and to clarify the ways in which they have been adopted, modified, extended, or ignored in contemporary traditions. Similarly, research traditions that have developed or adopted Soviet ideas about activity should be understood in their own terms, where their relation to the original tradition about the theory of activity must be evaluated critically, rather than assuming that contemporary traditions are necessarily a continuation or elaboration of the original tradition. It is not a question of either working with a theory of activity alone or working with using a theory of activity in relation to a concrete field of investigation; the theory of activity must be developed through investigation of concrete situations and practices. For any particular investigation, it may be worthwhile to (a) indicate or signal when the research focus is on developing versus using the theory of activity, and (b) to recognize that the theory of activity is not explanatory by itself in relation to particular practices, but must be concretized in ways that require their own justifications.

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Activity and Mind A brief comment on the concept of mind in relation to theory of activity is necessary, because some researchers give a central role for this concept in the context of discussions about activity. For example, Bakhurst (2009) asserts: “The activity approach emerged in the discipline of psychology in an attempt to understand the nature of the human mind” (p. 96). Or Martin and Beim (2009) assert that “the kernel of what becomes activity theory” is “Vygotsky’s pedagogic focus” that “configures the development of mind as an inescapably social process with a strong emphasis on mediation and development” (p. 132). A critical question is whether a concept of mind is necessary or meaningful within a theory of activity.

The focus on “mind” seems to be particularly salient among researchers in the United Kingdom and North America, which in turn has influenced some researchers in other European and Latin American countries. The concept of mind may be more common in philosophical traditions that do not consider the inseparable relations between a person as a psychic being and the societally organized environment within which persons are acting. Soviet texts discuss development of consciousness or psychic development, instead of mind. It appears that that the concept of mind has been imported into activity discussions, without adequate explanation of the meaning of mind or justification for introducing this concept into the theory of activity.

This situation is a good illustration of a point to be developed in the next section: the value of and need for differentiating between a theory of activity (as a conceptual background) and the application of that theory to a particular substantive content area—in this case “an attempt to understand the nature of the human mind.”

This distinction makes clear that questions about “human mind” require a theory in its own right, where that theory might be constructed using assumptions in a theory of activity, but without equating that substantive objective (i.e., theory of mind) to a theory of activity, or making that objective a necessary part of the theory of activity.

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Methodological Implications The theory of psychological activity embodies a broad general theoretical perspective. In principle, the activity concept can be used in any investigation of a problem field15 that involves psychological phenomena, including humans acting in meaningful situations.

While a theory of activity may be used as part of specific studies, the theory only provides generic ideas (e.g., about the relation between action and motives). For example, Leontiev’s (1975/1978) analysis of activity is not directed toward special problems or issues within psychological research or particular spheres of human action, and Leontiev does not provide much advice about how to integrate these ideas into what he calls “separate branches” of psychology and “applied research” (p. 45).

The fundamental core of the activity concept has profound methodological consequences for how to conceptualize and investigate specific areas of human action and psychological development. Some of these consequences are indicated in this final part of the chapter. Implicit in this discussion is a belief that most contemporary research involving an activity concept has not engaged sufficiently with methodological consequences of an activity perspective.

Start with a Focus on Practice The first and possibly most challenging methodological point is that research problems must start from and be attentive to the specific practices involved in the research situation. Even if the specific research problem is focused on a limited phenomenon (e.g., social conflicts between schoolchildren; improving anatomy teaching for nursing students; designing control panels for a car), it is necessary to formulate the research approach in relation to the specific practices that are present in the situation being researched. At the same 15

Problem field refers generically and neutrally to a practice or situation from which a research object, issue or question for investigation comes, with no intention to imply that the field is necessarily problematic.

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time, it is essential to recognize that the activity perspective does not provide information about the content of conflicts among school children (though it might give a general idea that competing motives could be a source of conflicts). Similarly, the activity perspective will not be able to identify what nursing students should know about anatomy, but it might help to predict that if the teaching content is relevant to the professional motive of the students, then there is likely to be better conditions for mastering the relevant content. These two concrete examples illustrate more generally the need to work interactively between the problem field and the theory of activity.

Reasons for Starting with Practice and Distinguishing Activity from Practice Two different reasons motivate the need to start investigations in relation to practice, when using activity concepts. First, is a methodological principle about investigating meaningful wholes, reflecting Vygotsky’s argument for the need to make analysis of units, not analysis of elements (see Chaiklin, 2019b, pp. 268-272). Second is a conceptual issue about the need to differentiate a concept of practice from a concept of activity.

Historically, the theory of activity has been attractive to researchers because of the lack of social scientific perspectives for studying human collective action (cf. Chaiklin & Lave, 1993), but ambiguity or confusion arises in trying to distinguish or relate activity to collective activity. In labour processes, individual activity always has a collective relation (e.g., the often-cited example from Leontiev, 1947/1981, p. 210, about the beater in a group of hunters).

Some researchers use terms like collective activity, joint activity, or activity system to describe this collective aspect. Given the ontological, sociohistorical and social assumptions, all human actions

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(including family life, educational processes) can be understood theoretically as labour processes.16 A distinction between practice and activity provides a way to avoid collapsing all individual actions into collective systems (Chaiklin, 2011, pp. 228-229). The concept of practice focuses on the tradition of action for producing needed objects (instead of using a term like collective activity or activity system) (pp. 233-234). Activity remains an individual psychological concept which emphasizes the embedded nature of persons acting in a historically-constructed environment. Activity (as a psychological phenomenon) is always an interaction of subjective and objective aspects, as persons act in relation to their perception of the material environment, where this perception is formed in relation to goals and motives, which are understood in relation to the practice in which a person is acting. In other words, activity must be understood in relation to a practice, where the conceptual distinction between practice and activity provides a way to refer analytically to historically-formed, objective conditions (practice), and the subjective actions in relation to that historical tradition (activity).

Methodological Consequences The analytic distinction between practice and activity gives a way to understand that the abstract ideal of practice is embodied physically in the form of activity while activity always proceeds within and in relation to practice. This relation between practice and activity is always present—an ontological consequence of the theoretical perspective. This ontological characteristic highlights the need to study how individuals learn to act in relation to a practice, including becoming conscious of the demands or requirements in that practice. The methodological consequence is that the researcher 16

It is important to recognize that the word labour is being used in a specific theoretical sense of human transformation of material conditions to create new desired conditions (sociohistorical assumption). Unnecessary confusion arises about the applicability of the concept of labor to such processes as education and family life, if labor is interpreted with everyday meanings and stereotypical connotations.

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must have an understanding both of practice and of activity in the empirical field being investigated, seeking to concretize and evaluate an understanding of the dynamics between activity and practice in the situation. While the theory of psychological activity has been useful for giving researchers a way to think about human action in meaningful situations, the generality of the theory requires researchers to engage more directly in the substantive content of the specific field of human action being investigated.

In this perspective, the methodological starting point is not the theory of activity, but a societal practice (or practices) in which a person or persons are engaged (even if this practice was not necessarily the immediate focus or motivation of the researcher). This necessary attention to the situated nature of psychological phenomena (ontological assumption) arises from the activity perspective, where activity concepts give a way to interpret, elaborate or frame the practical situation, going beyond the immediate surface appearance. The activity perspective can be useful for directing the researcher’s attention, and for formulating hypotheses, where the challenge is to use activity concepts to identify critical, dynamic relations in the problem field that need to be investigated. These relations might be the focus of an exploratory investigation, or used to address a question or issue that motivates the research. For example, such interpretations or framing might focus especially on motives, because of their importance for identifying what persons are likely to notice, how persons will interpret what is noticed, and what actions they are seeking to perform or master.

In all cases, the activity concepts must necessarily be supplemented with substantive content from the field being investigated.

Because this process necessarily involves the consideration or analysis of the historically-developed content of practice(s), there will never be a simple, a priori procedure for deciding what concrete relationships should be analysed. For this reason, there is little point in using activity concepts primarily as a descriptive or classification system. Use of activity concepts requires their interpretation in relation to the concrete problem field.

The need for concrete interpretation of activity in relation to a practice often creates problems when communicating results of

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analysis in an activity perspective, as reviewers ask for an explanation of the “method” that was used. Sometimes it has been sufficient to give a brief indication of the idea of dialectical analysis from Hegel, but that response is mostly a temporary pragmatic solution.

This epistemological issue is likely to remain problematic (relative to methodological perspectives that are oriented to a representation ontology), because the purpose of the activity analysis is to focus on dynamic relations in the situation, rather than give a static description or classification of observable features.

Activity in psychological research The meaning of “psychological research” becomes transformed in an activity perspective. The theoretical perspective provides, in effect, a conceptual system and terminology for describing practical situations, and an orientation toward what kinds of relations in these situations need to be understood concretely, which has profound consequences for identifying what psychological phenomena need to be explained and what kinds of arguments or analyses might be used in making these explanations. For example, the activity concept dissolves a strict separation between “psychological processes” and meaningful human action in historically-organized social interactions. That is, meaningful action in historically-organized situations is part of a psychological process. Attempting to delimit or separate one part as “psychological” probably reflects a commitment to a dualism of psychic and material, which this theoretical perspective is avoiding. There is a shift from speaking about psychological processes as though they are meaningful by themselves to a focus on the origin, development, and transformation of psychological processes in relation to practical situations, and to understanding the consequences of action for developing new psychological capabilities. Research questions seek to engage with the dynamics of the development of psychological processes, rather than simply stopping with a description of (for example) performance characteristics. The dynamic is reflected in a person’s actions in relation to motives; not in a simple mechanistic relation between

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the objective environment and person. As noted before, the problem is how to use this conceptual structure as part of the investigation of specific questions (e.g., development of psychological capabilities, individual learning, participation in tasks), instead of simply describing problems and situations in an activity language.

Concluding Comment This chapter introduced the psychological theory of activity, highlighting that it is a general theoretical perspective, not tied to any one theorist. The first part enumerated some of the core assumptions that underlie this perspective, while this last part discussed profound methodological shifts that arise from a focus on activity and practice. It is possible to encounter other researchers who think in a way that is consistent with an activity perspective, even if they are not using activity terminology. In the long run, the important issue is to understand the role of practice in psychological processes, where the activity perspective provides some systematic concepts for expressing and communicating about these problems.

In addition to developing research approaches that use activity concepts, there is also a methodological challenge that arises in empirical studies that use activity concepts, because they do not satisfy common expectations about “reproducible methods.” Procedural solutions or analytic templates will not resolve these problems.

Epistemological standards will be grounded in criteria that involve practice (cf. Marx’s 2nd thesis on Feuerbach17, which is echoed in Vygotsky (1927/1997) who notes the consequences for a 17

“Die Frage, ob dem menschlichen Denken gegenständliche Wahrheit zukomme—ist keine Frage der Theorie, sondern eine praktische Frage. In der Praxis muß der Mensch die Wahrheit, i.e. Wirklichkeit und Macht, Diesseitigkeit seines Denkens beweisen. Der Streit über die Wirklichkeit oder Nichtwirklichkeit des Denkens—das von der Praxis isoliert ist—ist eine rein scholastische Frage.”

[The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. One must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the worldliness of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is purely a scholastic question.]

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psychology that must “confirm the truth of its thinking in practice” (p. 305)). Ideals and criteria remain to be formulated and established for preferred ways to confirm in practice.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Mariane Hedegaard for comments on previous drafts, which helped to clarify and sharpen the presentation.

References Bedny, G. Z. (2015). Application of Systemic-Structural Activity Theory to Design and Training. CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/b17976 Bedny, G. Z., & Karwowski, W. (Eds.). (2011). Human-Computer Interaction and Operators’ Performance: Optimizing Work Design with Activity Theory. CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781439836279 Chaiklin, S. (2007). Modular or Integrated?: An Activity Perspective for Designing and Evaluating Computer-Based Systems. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 22(1/2), 173-190. https://doi. org/10.1207/s15327590ijhc2201-02_9 Chaiklin, S. (2011). The Role of 'Practice' in Cultural-Historical Science. In M. Kontopodis, C. Wulf & B. Fichtner (Eds.), Children, Development and Education: Cultural, Historical, Anthropological Perspectives (pp.

227-246). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0243-1_14 Chaiklin, S. (2012). A Conceptual Perspective for Investigating Motive in Cultural-Historical Theory. In M. Hedegaard, A. Edwards & M. Fleer (Eds.), Motives in Children's Development: Cultural-Historical Approaches (pp. 209-224). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org /10.1017/CBO9781139049474.016 Chaiklin, S. (2019a). The Meaning and Origin of the Activity Concept in Soviet Psychology—with Primary focus on A. N. Leontiev’s Approach. Theory & Psychology, 29(1), 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0959354319828208 Chaiklin, S. (2019b). Units and Wholes in the Cultural-Historical Theory of Child Development. In A. Edwards, M. Fleer & L. Bøttcher (Eds.), Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning and Development (pp. 263-277). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-68264_17

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Chaiklin, S., & Lave, J. (Eds.). (1993). Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/cbo9780511625510 Clemmensen, T., Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi, B. (2016). Making HCI Theory Work: An Analysis of the Use of Activity Theory in HCI Research.

Behaviour & Information Technology, 35(8), 608-627. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/0144929x.2016.1175507 Davydov, V. V. (1981). The Category of Activity and Mental Reflection in the Theory of A. N. Leont'ev. Soviet Psychology, 19(4), 3-29. (Original work published 1979) https://doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-040519043 DeLiema, M., & Bengtson, V. L. (2017). Activity Theory, Disengagement Theory, and Successful Aging. In N. A. Pachana (Ed.), Encyclopedia of geropsychology (pp. 15-20). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978981-287-082-7_102 Engeström, Y. (2005). Developmental Work Research: Expanding Activity Theory in Practice. Lehmanns.

Engeström, Y., Hakkarainen, P., & Hedegaard, M. (1984). On the Methodological Basis of Research in Teaching and Learning. In M. Hedegaard, P. Hakkarainen & Y. Engeström (Eds.), Learning and Teaching on a Scientific Basis: Methodological and Epistemological Aspects of the Activity Theory of Learning and Teaching (pp. 119-189). Aarhus Universitet, Psykologisk Institut.

Engeström, Y., Hakkarainen, P., & Seppo, S. (1982). The Necessity of a New Approach in the Study of Instruction. In E. Komulainen (Ed.), Research on Teaching and the Theory and Practice in Teacher Training. Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki.

Havighurst, R. J. (1961). Successful Aging. The Gerontologist, 1(1), 8-13. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/1.1.8 Hedegaard, M., Edwards, A., & Fleer, M. (Eds.). (2012). Motives in Children's Development: Cultural-Historical Approaches. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139049474 Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi, B. (2012). Activity Theory in HCI: Fundamentals and Reflections. Morgan & Claypool. https://doi.org/10.2200/S00413ED 1V01Y201203HCI013 Leckey, C. (1995). David Riazanov and Russian Marxism. Russian History, 22, 127-153. https://doi.org/10.1163/187633195X00061 Leont’ev, A. N. (1964). Problems of Mental Development. U.S. Joint Publications Research Service. (Original work published 1959) Леонтьев, А. Н. (Leont'ev, A. N.). (1975). Деятельность. сознание. личность. Политической литературы.

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Leontʹev, A. N. (1978). Activity, Consciousness, and Personality (M. J. Hall, Trans.). Prentice-Hall. (Original work published 1975) Leontʹev, A. N. (1978). Actividad, conciencia, y personalidad. Ediciones Ciencias de Hombre.

Leontʹev, A. N. (1979). Tätigkeit, Bewußtsein, Persönlichkeit (K. Krüger, Trans.). Volk und Wissen. (Original work published 1975) Leontʹev, A. N. (1981). Problems of the Development of the Mind (M. Kopylova, Trans.). Progress. (Original work published 1959) Leontiev, A. N. (2005). The Genesis of Activity. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 43(4), 58–71. (Original work written 1940) https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2005.11059253 Leontjev, A. N. (1983). Virksomhed, bevidsthed, og personlighed (F. Schaumburg-Müller, Trans.). Sputnik. (Original work published 1975) Leontjew, A. N. (1964). Probleme der Entwicklung des psychischen (E. Däbritz, Trans.). Volk und Wissen. (Original work published 1959) Leontjew, A. N. (1977). Problemer i det psykiskes udvikling (C. Bendixen, N. Svendsen, J. Olsen & A. Holmgren, Trans.; Vol. 1-3). Rhodos. (Original work published 1959) Lomov, B. F. (1982). The Problem of Activity in Psychology. Soviet Psychology, 21(1), 55-91. (Original work published 1981) https://doi.org /10.2753/RPO1061-0405210155 Plakitsi, K. (Ed.). (2013). Activity Theory in Formal and Informal Science Education. Sense.

Smith, R. (2019). The Muscular Sense in Russia: I. M. Sechenov and Materialist Realism. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 55(1), 520. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.21943 Tolman, C. (1980). Activity, Consciousness, and Personality by A. N. Leont'ev [review]. Science & Society, 44(1), 92-94.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 4. The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions (R. W. Rieber, Ed.; M. J. Hall, Trans.). Plenum. (Original work published 1931) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5939-9 Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation (R. van der Veer, Trans.). In R. W. Rieber & J. Wollock (Eds.), The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky: Vol. 3: Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology (pp. 233-343). Plenum Press. (Original work written 1927) https://doi.org/10.10 07/978-1-4615-5893-4_17 Wertsch, J. V. (1981). The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology: An Introduction. In J. V. Wertsch (Ed.), The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology (pp. 3-36). M.E. Sharpe.

Ilyenkov and the Shadow of Helvetius Vesa Oittinen

Introduction One of the main achievements in Evald Ilyenkov’s career was his participation in the so-called Zagorsk experiment with deaf-blind children and his interpretation of their results. The experiment was carried out in the first half of the 1970s at the Zagorsk Children’s House in the Moscow region and supervised by the Department of Psychology at Moscow State University (for details, see Suvorov, 2016). Ilyenkov attempted to give a philosophical interpretation of the indeed astonishing results of the experiments, which managed to restore the cognitive abilities of the test persons. But he met with skeptical counterarguments, too. These charges, which started in the last decade of Ilyenkov’s life (Balhurst and Padden, 1991, p. 210 ff.), resurfaced once more in 2013, when Yuri Pushchaev published in Voprosy Filosofii an article trying to question once more the validity of the Zagorsk experiment (Pushchaev, 2013a, 2013b). He states, first, that the experiment and the publicity it received mirrored “the metaphysical spirit” of the late Soviet epoch (Pushchaev, 2013a).1 He then proceeds to the main ideological bias of the Zagorsk experiment, which he sees in the assertion of both Meshcheryakov as the actual realiser of the experiment, and Ilyenkov as their philosophical commentator, that they should confirm the Marxist thesis according to which labour creates Man. This view leads to some very definite practical precepts in working with deaf-blind children. The educator shall not first try to get them to understand words and symbols, but to induce them into practical activity in physical 1

“It is pertinent to say that the Zagorsk experiment mirrored the metaphysical spirit of the epoch, since it had a direct relation to the Soviet philosophical and psychologico-pedagocical thought. The experiments were at once carried out and interpreted (and the interpretation created in many respects the events themselves) by well-known Soviet philosophers, psychologists and pedagogists” (Pushchaev 2013 a, p. 134).

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contact with the outer world. The material practice is primary to the ideas expressed by language and signs—a view which according to Pushchaev has not been proved by the Zagorsk experiment.

Pushchaev reproaches the adherents of the “canonical version” in that they had ignored the fact that the deaf-blind children who participated in the experiment had in most cases at least some rudimentary hearing or sight. Pushchaev’s critique does not, however, seem to add much to what has already previously been said about the Zagorsk experiment. As a matter of fact, Meshcheryakov did not claim to have made his experiments with totally deaf and blind children. Instead, he had characterised them as “pedagogically blind-deaf”—a state which was defined as “whatever hearing and sight they possessed is insufficient to permit them to be educated in a way which relies on the exercise of those faculties” (Bakhurst and Padden, 1991, p. 203). So at least in this case Pushchaev’s argument loses its point, and one can agree with Bakhurst’s and Padden’s earlier comment that Ilyenkov’s reputation will surely survive this kind of critique (p. 214).

In this chapter, I discuss the philosophical implications of the Zagorsk experiment and show that similar questions already occupied the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century, such as Helvétius and Diderot. Ilyenkov seems to be astonishingly close especially to Helvétius and his thesis that people are entirely shaped by what he calls “education”. Ilyenkov’s proximity to Helvétius in this question is explained by a democratic motive which both of them share: since there are no innate differences between people, all are in principle equal. However, Ilyenkov differs from Helvétius and, generally, from the sensualism of the 18th century in that he stresses the social character of experience. The social interaction “evens out” the differences in the sensual experiences of people so that, e.g., a blind person can al pari communicate with seeing people on the conceptual level.

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The Significance of the Zagorsk Experiment For Ilyenkov, the Zagorsk experiment offered nothing less than indisputable empirical proof of the validity of the main theses of the cultural-historical school of Soviet psychology and its philosophical pendant, the so-called Activity Approach (dejatel’nostnyj podkhod).

“One of the leading scientists of our country,” he wrote, “compared the significance of the Zagorsk internate for the pedagogics with the significance of a cyclo-synchrophasotron in Dubna for present-day physics” (Ilyenkov, 1975, p. 80).

Ilyenkov of course wanted to “advertise” for his friend Meshcheryakov, who did not find sufficient support on the part of his superiors. Nevertheless, his enthusiasm seemed justified, since the success achieved by Meshcheryakov in teaching these severely handicapped children demonstrated, according to Ilyenkov, that the human consciousness, and personality in general, is constituted through an interiorisation process: The secret of the success obtained by this way consists of the fact that all education and learning was here realized as a process of a continuous transforming of the extrinsic objective operations into intrinsic ones, as an “interiorization” of the external activity. This applies in a like manner to all forms of activity—to intellectual, to moral as well as to emotional-aesthetic activity, and to every other form of activity. Not even do the mimics make any exception. I remember the plaster of Paris masks, which I.A. Sokolyanski used in teaching to deaf-blinds the human mimics. He regarded the mimics as a kind of language, a medium of communion. When the mimics became the instrument of expressing emotional states, it influenced in the most resolute manner to the whole organization of the emotional sphere. (Gurgenidze and Ilyenkov, 1975, p. 6)

According to this view, the material practice is primary to the ideas mediated by language and signs. This had been stressed already, before Meshcheryakov and Ilyenkov, by another Soviet psychologist and defectologist, Ivan Sokolyanski, in the early 1950s: Essentially, the first steps in the “humananisation” of a deaf-blind child do not consist in learning verbal speech, but primarily in the fact that he creates (forms) immediate and quite exact relations with the material surroundings in which he lives, that he takes over this milieu […], becoming able to

100 VESA OITTINEN orientate spatially (moving independently forward etc.) and in time (“today“, “yesterday“, “tomorrow“). (quoted from Pushchaev, 2013a, p. 140)

In the 1970s, when the results of the experiment were made public, they aroused great attention. Some particularly optimistic followers of Ilyenkov even claimed that “the mystery of human being”, the origin of consciousness and personality, had finally been solved and had found a scientific-materialist explanation, which did not suffer from reductionism, unlike the theories based on positivism or mechanical materialism of the Pavlovian kind.

The “Anthropological” Problem Remains At this point we must return to Pushchaev’s reproaches, since he dwells upon just this aspect of Ilyenkov’s materialist position, which boils down to the assertion that consciousness is born out of labour (trud) executed by hands on material objects. It may be that Ilyenkov and his followers saw this labour as social, not individual work; their main point of argument in every case persists, that the emergence of consciousness is not possible without concrete physical contact with objects of the outer world: According to Marxism, consciousness emerges thanks to labour (trud) and in labour. Using the deaf-blinds as an example, Ilyenkov tries, following the Marxist understanding, to solve the secret of how thought is born. Consciousness emerges from the work carried out by hands (social hands, as Ilyenkov, Mikhailov and their kindred spirits undoubtedly would add). As they are materialists, they see that the unity of the world and Man (who according to the materialist dialectics is the “highest form of organized matter”) is realized in labour—and in a certain sense, “in the fingertips”, by an immediate contact. (Pushchaev, 2013a, p. 141) 2

Thus, although the Zagorsk experiment was in the technical sense carried out correctly, a philosophical, or—to be exact—an “anthropological” problem remains. Pushchaev manages to touch on the wider question of how the concept of subjectivity was

2

The Mikhailov mentioned by Pushchaev is Feliks Trofimovich Mikhailov, author of several works defending the views of the “Ilyenkov school”, of which The Riddle of the Self (Moscow: Progress 1980) has been translated into English.

ILYENKOV AND THE SHADOW OF HELVETIUS 101 thematised in Soviet philosophy. Generally, the Soviet philosophers were content to say, in concordance with Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, that the human essence is constituted by activity framed in social relations. This is of course a correct observation, but it does not suffice to explain the phenomenon of human subjectivity, the emergence of the “inner world” of a person. Marx himself surely did not have in mind a reductionistic interpretation of the human essence as a mere passive product of social relations; on the contrary, ten years after having jotted down the Feuerbach theses he wrote in the Grundrisse that society, that social relations, are actually there for the all-round development of individuals.

To explain how socially organised work creates not only consciousness, but human subjectivity and personality in general, the Soviet philosophers and psychologists reverted to the concept of interiorisation. One could say that it was one of the central concepts in Ilyenkov’s “philosophy of Man”. The idea of interiorisation is in itself quite simple: it says that in the process of their individual development, people appropriate the social and cultural achievements of collective humanity and make them their own intellectual, moral and cultural property. In the process of interiorisation the objective forms of culture become the subjective possession of individuals.

However, although the thesis of interiorisation is able to describe the actual processes of socialisation, personal growth and education, one seeks in vain in Soviet philosophical and psychological literature for a more detailed reflection on philosophical problems connected with the idea of interiorisation. The main problem has to do with the philosophical materialism all notable Soviet thinkers— and especially Ilyenkov—were committed to. The interiorisation thesis says that the objectively existing figures and forms of the outer world and the culture are assimilated by the subject and made the ideal possession of a personality—in other words, “material” is turned to “ideal”. How is this possible? How should we explain this in a materialist way?

Because the Soviet philosophers and psychologists have—at least in the majority—not sufficiently reflected on the philosophical

102 VESA OITTINEN problematics inherent in the interiorisation thesis, their discussion in this respect falls back on the empiricist tradition of Enlightenment thought. There is nothing wrong in following the Enlightenment tradition; on the contrary, Marxism shares many central points with the materialism and sensualism of the 18th century.

However, the “empiricist anthropology” of the French philosophes produced ideas concerning the interiorisation and socialisation of Man which from the Marxist point of view must be seen as controversial. One of the most extreme of these controversial ideas was the assertion of Claude-Adrien Helvétius: “L’Homme est tout éducation”. For Helvétius, humans are born altogether nude and devoid of any innate faculties or ideas. Everything—literally everything— in a grown-up personality is a product of “éducation”, by which Helvétius meant socialisation in general.

Back to Enlightenment Discourses It is indeed perplexing to note that this discussion about the Zagorsk experiment pushes us back into the 18th century debates, as if almost nothing had happened in the two and a half centuries which separate us from those times. Not only does the Soviet optimism of the 1960s, towards which Pushchaev is so sniffy, remind us about the heyday of the Enlightenment in the latter half of the 18th century, when people thought that most problems of humanity could be solved reasonably. There are parallels in the methodological approaches, too, between the Soviet and the Enlightenment thinkers. Many Enlightenment thinkers were, as sensualists, interested in the role of senses and sense-experience in the process of cognition. They discussed the effects of sensory deprivation on human beings in a manner not very different from how the Zagorsk experiment was evaluated.

One of the central persons here was Denis Diderot, who published two treatises about the psyche of the people suffering from sense impairment: Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) and, a couple of years later, Lettre sur les sourds et les muets (1751). In these short writings, Diderot made many very acute and penetrating observations

ILYENKOV AND THE SHADOW OF HELVETIUS 103 concerning the psyche of the blind and the deaf, and his comments have, to my mind, certain relevance even for today’s discussions— despite his empiricist stance, Diderot had the rare ability to put his questions to the sensory deprived men so that they obtain the character of an experimentum crucis. Diderot describes his encounter with a blind-born man: Le nôtre parle de miroir à tout moment. Vous croyez bien qu’il ne sait ce que veut dire le mot miroir […] Je lui demandai ce qu’il entendait par un miroir: “Une machine”, me répondit-il, “qui met les choses en relief loin d’ellesmêmes, si elles se trouvent placées convenablement par rapport à elle. C’est comme ma main, qu’il ne faut pas que je pose à côté d’un objet pour le sentir.

(Diderot, 1875, pp. 281-282)3

Diderot comments on this surprising answer by noting that “our blind man does not have any knowledge of the objects other than by touching them” (notre aveugle n’a de connaissance des objets que par le toucher). And—which is equally important—the touch “does not give him other ideas than the idea of a relief”, so that he must conclude that the mirror is some kind of machine which creates reliefs of things.

According to Diderot, the absence of sight means that the blind have a different psychical constitution from those who can see. Not only do they interpret visual phenomena in analogy to spatial things, even their morality gets a different shape. For example, the vice blind men detest most strongly is theft, because they are more helpless and exposed to thieves than those who can see; on the other hand, the blind “do not make much of decency”, as naked or improperly clothed people cannot embarrass them.

At first, Diderot’s comments seem to confirm the point made

by Meshcheryakov and Ilyenkov: it is the concrete physical contact with the outer world which makes consciousness possible. However, Diderot insists that there is a difference between the mind of

3

“Our man speaks about the mirror all the time. But you may believe that he does not know what a mirror means […] I asked him what does he understand by a mirror. ‘It is a machine’, he answered to me, ‘which puts the things in relief outside of themselves, if they are put properly in relation to it. It is like my hand, which I need only to put next to an object in order to feel it’”.

104 VESA OITTINEN a blind and a seeing man, a difference which is created by their different sensual access to the surrounding world, and so they cannot have quite the same ideas. Diderot does not say so expressly, but from his position it clearly follows that if we had more than five senses—if we could, for example, sense electromagnetic radiation—we would, in accordance, have a mind and ideas which would differ considerably from those we have now. This is a direct consequence of his sensualistic position.

Already Bakhurst and Padden could note that Meshcheryakov and Ilyenkov do make a contrary claim, although they do not formulate it expressis verbis (see Bakhurst and Padden, 1991, p. 205 ff.).

Ilyenkov seems to think that, thanks to the social character of human labour, the mind (the psyche) of every individual participating in it assumes a form similar to the psyche of everyone else. Thanks to the similar character of the relations every individual creates in his process of activity, they will all have similar ideas, too. Diderot, however, does not admit any similar ideas arising in a seeing and in a blind man. When a seeing man says “mirror”, he has in his mind quite another idea than the blind has: the seeing man thinks of a light-reflecting surface, whilst the blind man thinks about a kind of “machine” which creates “reliefs”: Il ne se passe rien dans sa tête d’analogue à ce qui se passe dans le nôtre (Diderot, 1875, p. 291).

By stressing the decisive role of the social, collective component of human experience, Meshcheryakov and Ilyenkov were able to avoid the pitfall of an empiricist theory of the human mind, which could not explain how the similarities between individual experiences arise. The answer is that, despite profound differences in the form and content of subjective experience, the social character of human activity and communication “equalises” the ideas in which this subjective experience is expressed. Already Diderot had pointed to the fact that the blind man was able to convincingly discuss with seeing men matters of which he could only have a very distorted idea: Il discourt si bien et si juste de tant de choses qui lui sont absolument inconnues (Diderot, 1875, p. 281). In other words, in social activity we move on the field common to us all humans, whilst in the realm of the sense-experience we are part of Nature and have idiosyncratic subjective perceptions. But Diderot was not able,

ILYENKOV AND THE SHADOW OF HELVETIUS 105 because of his sensualism, to develop these insights further. Instead, he reverted to a naturalistic explanation, as we shall soon see.

The Problem of Helvétius The next question is whether human mind and consciousness emerge by social activity or whether there are some innate constituents, too. This issue too was much discussed by the Enlightenment thinkers. Here I cannot, of course, give any exhaustive summary of these debates, but must content myself with Diderot’s critique of Helvétius, as to my mind it is relevant even when discussing Ilyenkov’s and Meshcheryakov’s ideas of emergence of the psyche.

Before entering into the dispute between Helvétius and Diderot, let us recall some central points in Ilyenkov’s and Meshcheryakov’s concepts. Their position is of an interiorisation theory—that is, a theory according to which the human psyche (and later personality) is a result of an interiorisation of initially extrinsic operations. As such, this idea is not original, and it is a well-known concept in psychological literature. It is not, however, often noted that the interiorisation theory has a structural similarity with the radical empiricist theory of mind and cognition. Just as the empiricist stance in its most extreme form asserts that there is nothing in the mind (in the intellect), which has not beforehand been given in senses (the famous dictum reads: nihil est in intellectu, quod non prior fuit in sensu), so the interiorisation theory asserts, in a similar manner, that there is nothing in the mind which has not beforehand been given to it by the interiorisation. One might even claim that the interiorisation theory is only a slightly modified form of 18th century sensualism.

Seen from this point of view, Helvétius was a precursor of the interiorisation theories of 20th century psychology. It is well-known that he assigned to education the central role in the formation of Man. For Helvétius, as a radical empiricist, man is “born without ideas, without passions and without other needs than hunger and thirst; thus, he is born without a character” (Helvétius, 1776, p.

106 VESA OITTINEN 566).4 All which is human in us is a product of education; “l’éducation peut tout” (Helvétius, 1776, p. 523, rubric). For Helvétius, thus, the education (which he understands in a very broad sense, both as physical and cultural education) is the great “interiorising power”.

By means of education, the cultural goods which exist outside the individual, in objective form, are made his own, personal traits, i.e., “subjectivised”.

For Helvétius, as already for his predecessor Locke, Man was originally, before the education, nothing, a tabula rasa: “L’Enfant est comme homme sensible au plaisir & à la douleur physique; mais il n’a, ni autant d’idées, ni par consequent autant d’esprit que l’adulte” (Helvétius, 1776, pp. 82-83). Ilyenkov has, in his presentation of the Zagorsk experiment, expressed a similar view. According to him, the deaf-blind child: is a creature which, as a rule, is immobile and reminds one rather of a plant, of some kind of cactus or ficus, which lives only so long as it is in direct contact with food and water […] It makes no attempt to reach for food, even if that food is half a meter away from its mouth. It utters no squeak when it is hungry […] It is a human plant in the full sense of the word. (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 80)

Of course, the picture of Man presented by the Enlightenment materialists was in many respects insufficient. Both Helvétius and Diderot shared a common empiricist and sensualist starting point.

It is well-known that Diderot wrote an extensive refutation of Helvétius’s work on Man, when it was published posthumously. But it is revealing that Diderot’s critique concerns mainly the way that the differences between people are to be explained. For Helvétius, all differences between people in personality, manners and habits were created solely by education, whilst Diderot stressed the role played by the hereditary biological properties.

It is generally claimed that Diderot’s ideas foreshadowed the results of modern biology and are thus more appropriate from the scientific point of view. This was already the verdict of Jean

4

”… que l’homme naît sans idées, sans passions, & sans autres besoins que ceux de la faim et de la soif, par conséquent sans caractére” (Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’Homme…, London 1776, p. 566).

ILYENKOV AND THE SHADOW OF HELVETIUS 107 Rostand, when he compared Helvétius and Diderot in a wellknown article published in 1951. 5 However, Rostand was at the same time forced to admit that Diderot’s position, which attributed differences between men to biology, has something anti-democratic in it.6 In his Réfutation d’Helvétius, Diderot had compared different classes of men with different breeds of dogs and insisted that these differences were hereditary and biologically determined in both cases. Later European history has shown how dangerous such generalisations can be.

Historians of philosophy have mostly seen, in Helvétius’ insistence on the all-pervasive role of education, nothing but a token of his naivety and superficiality. For some reason they tend to forget that Helvétius lived and wrote under the oppressive conditions of the ancien régime, which was based on the principle of a hereditary inequality between men. It was this doctrine of an alleged fundamental inequality between humans which was his main target.

When Helvétius stressed the role of education in the formation of the person, his starting point was an egalitarian, if not directly democratic, view on mankind: all people are in principle equal, it is only education which makes differences. Even in this respect, Ilyenkov stays on Helvétius’s side, and this “democratic” conviction was, so it seems to me, one of the motives behind the “Soviet optimism” which nowadays looks suspect for so many critics of Ilyenkov.

What is Wrong with the Interiorisation Thesis?

Diderot did not manage to refute Helvétius in a satisfactory manner. His pamphlet against Helvétius remained a manuscript until it was published in its entirety much later, in the collected works 5

6

“Dans l’ensemble, on peut dire que la biologie moderne a donné raison à Diderot.

Il est aujourd’hui hors de doute qu’il existe, quant au faculties psychiques, des differences héréditaires entre les hommes. Le ‘machines’humaines ne sont rien moins qu’identiques par leurs capacities…” (Rostand, 1951, p. 220). ”…il est évident qu’on ne saurait comparer équitablement deux individus nés dans des classes, ou des castes, différentes: c’est ce qu’oubliait Diderot, quand il affirmait, très anti-démocratiquement, que le ‘portier’ d’Helvétius ne valait pas son maître, meme en puissance” (Rostand, 1951, p. 221).

108 VESA OITTINEN edited by Assézat. Diderot could not outrun Helvétius, because they both had the same methodological starting point, namely empiricist sensualism and the corresponding picture of Man resulting from it. Thus, he could not point to any credible alternative to Helvétius’s “interiorisation thesis”, according to which all that is interior in Man is initially brought from outside by education. Diderot did not want to revert to the rationalism of the previous century, the 17th, since it would have meant accepting the thesis of some innate ideas.

Helvétius shared his rejection of the old rationalism, and in our times Ilyenkov followed both of them. In an only seemingly incidental comment, Ilyenkov criticized Spinoza very harshly: “What Spinoza did not understand was that the first, incomplete ‘intellectual tools’ were products of material work, not products of nature” (Ilyenkov, 1997, p. 390).7 One need only change the words “material work” to “education” here to arrive at quite a “Helvétian” point of view!

But what is the problem with the interiorisation thesis? It seems to me that it is not the idea that the contents of the human mind—yes, the personality itself—are built up in a long process of absorbing influences, ideas and action models from outside. It is quite obvious that we are what we are thanks to the interiorisation of cultural and social goods which ontologically have existed outside the individual before becoming our “inner property”. The problem is, rather, that the interiorisation thesis, as defended by the psychologists and philosophers involved in the Zagorsk experiment, cannot explain how cultural and social goods, which as such are material (since they exist objectively outside the mind), can become ideal constituents of individual minds. Or, to express the problem in a Kantian way: that there is interiorisation is of course a fact; but the adherents of this doctrine have never asked the question of how the interiorisation is possible. And why is it only Man who is capable of interiorisation? Why do animals not develop a

7

The quotation is from the original manuscript of Ilyenkov’s 1961 book Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, published in Russian only in 1997 and not—yet—available in English.

ILYENKOV AND THE SHADOW OF HELVETIUS 109 consciousness and a personality in a similar way? Helvétius could not answer this question (indeed he does not pose the problem at all in his works), and nor does Ilyenkov discuss it anywhere at length.

It is, to my mind, rather startling that Ilyenkov, who otherwise had the reputation of being a “Hegelian” and who in every case stressed the significance of dialectics in overcoming fixed oppositions, in the question of interiorisation takes such a strongly empiricist position. He may have had good reasons to do so—for example, it is, as I hinted above, possible that he thought that principles of democracy and equality between people need to be backed with such a position—but a more “dialectical” view on these matters might have made his stance less vulnerable. A dialectician would recognise the relative validity of the opposite view, that of rationalism. As is well known, already Leibniz had added, to the empiricist formula Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prior fuit in sensu, a small clause: …nisi intellectus ipse. What Leibniz grasped—and Kant later developed more fully—is the fact that our inner states, even if they are sense-impressions caused by external objects, do not turn into something ideal if there does not exist a subject which receives them. To express it again in Kantian terminology, the emergence of ideality requires a subject, which is able to unite the manifold sensory impressions into a coherent whole. In this sense, the subject is an antecedent to its objects: the subject is not produced by interiorisation, but on the contrary, is the prerequisite which makes interiorisation possible.

Some concluding remarks The weak thematisation of the human subject is one of the most important flaws of Soviet philosophical tradition. It is a flaw recognised in critical research literature, and as even I have written about this elsewhere, it is not necessary to delve into the matter here. But it seems to me that all, or almost all, the main problems connected with Ilyenkov’s philosophy, which have aroused so much discussion, are more or less related to the problem of an insufficiently

110 VESA OITTINEN developed concept of human subjectivity. In Ilyenkov’s writings, one can discern a constant tendency to “immerse” Man as a subject in his social relations. It is a tendency which Ilyenkov does not, of course, bring into its final completion—on the contrary, he intensely disliked such theories of the “death of the subject” as expounded, for example, by Nietzsche, and which are widespread in Western philosophy. But his concept of subjectivity remains, nevertheless, somewhat vague. For this reason, I must confess that I do not find it at all surprising, for example, that Ilyenkov’s former friend Genrikh Batishchev later broke with him and accused him of not having fully understood the creative moment in human activity. Whatever else one may think about Batishchev’s philosophical roamings, it is obvious that his “anti-substantialism” is a reaction against the all-embracing significance of social relations in Ilyenkov’s philosophy.

Ilyenkov had the reputation of being a “Hegelian Marxist”. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that in interpreting the Zagorsk experiment he follows the path of 18th century empiricism and sensualism. One important reason for this seems to have been that the sensualist idea of Man as a tabula rasa which would be filled first by education was a good argument for democracy, since it rejected the innate differences between people. Thus, one can say that Ilyenkov’s social pathos was closer to the democratic traditions of Enlightenment thought than to Hegel’s rather conservative social philosophy.

References Bakhurst, D. and Padden, C. (1991). The Meshcheryakov Experiment: Soviet Work on the Education of Blind-Deaf Children. In: Learning and Instruction (vol. 1).

Diderot, D. (1875). Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient [Letter on the blind for those who see], in Assézat (Ed.), Oeuvres, 1875-1877 (vol.

I).

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1776). De l’Homme, de ses Facultés intellectuelles et de son Éducation [Of man, of his intellectual faculties, and of his education], Garnier.

ILYENKOV AND THE SHADOW OF HELVETIUS 111 Ilyenkov, E. V. (1975). Aleksandr Ivanovich Meshcheryakov i ego pedagogika [Aleksandr Ivanovich Meshcheryakov and his pedagogy]. Molodoi Kommunist [Young Communist] 2.

Ilyenkov, E.V. (1977). Stanovlenie lichnosti: k itogam nauchnogo eksperimenta [The Genesis of the Person: on the Results of a Scientific Experiment]. Kommunist [Communist], 2: 68-79.

Ilyenkov, E. V. (1997). Dialektika abstraktnogo i konkretnogo v nauchno-teoreticheskom myshlenii [Dialectics of the abstract and the concrete in scientific-theoretical thought], Rosspen.

Mikhailov, F. T. (1980). The Riddle of the Self. Progress.

Pushchaev, Yu. V. (2013 a and b). Istoriya i teoriya Zagorskogo eksperimenta. Nachalo (I) [The history and theory of the Zagorsk experiement. Beginning (I)]. Voprosy Filosofii [Questions of Philosophy] 3.

Pushchaev, Yu. V. Istoriya i teoriya Zagorskogo eksperimenta: byla li fal’sifikatsiya? [The history and theory of the Zagorsk experiement. Was there a falsification?]. Voprosy Filosofii [Questions of Philosophy] 10.

Rostand, Jean (1951). La conception de l’homme selon Helvétius et selon Diderot [The conception of man according to Helvétius and Diderot].

Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications, [Revue of the history of sciences and their applications] 4(3–4), pp. 213-222.

Suvorov, A. V. (2016). Lessons from the Zagorsk Experiment for Deaf-Blind Psychology. Russian Education & Society, 56(9/10), 650–673.

Part II Current Trends: Applications/Interventions

The Application of Activity Theory to Research on Learning and Education in Japan: The Case of Practical Research into Community-Based Disaster Prevention Learning Katsuhiro Yamazumi

Introduction In postwar Japan, Soviet literature on psychology and education was actively translated until the 1980s, influencing Japanese education research. This reception of Soviet literature on psychology ceased in the 1980s and was replaced by neo-Vygotskian learning and development theories from Europe and America. Despite the transition, however, the dominant paradigm did not change. The view of learning remained, that is, “the process of internalization viewed as individualistic acquisition of the cultural given” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 48). Moreover, even as the constructivist perspective on learning gained traction, it could not overcome the cognitivist limitation that viewed learning as the construction of knowledge inside the learner’s brain. They had yet to ask the fundamental question of “why do people learn?”

Against this historical backdrop, Yrjö Engeström’s Learning by Expanding: An Activity-theoretical Approach to Developmental Research (1987)—the Japanese translation of which was published in 1999— has radically impacted how cultural-historical activity theory is applied to Japanese education research in the 21st century. This is because it introduced a new theory of learning to Japanese education research, one that frames the “expansivity” of learning as “the generation of novel material forms of collective life” (Engeström, 2016, p. 9). It regards active participation in the collective design and transformation of activities as a learning process for the participants themselves.

115

116 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI Activity theory (Engeström, 1987/2015, 2008, 2016, 2018; Leont’ev, 1978, 1981; Sannino et al., 2009; Sannino & Ellis, 2013; Yamazumi, 2021) studies how people collectively design and transform their own activities. These activities have been culturally and historically constructed in educational settings, workplaces, and communities. Activity theory offers a conceptual framework for analyzing and designing an object-oriented collective activity system as the basic unit of analysis of human practices and development. Activity theory also highlights ideas and tools to transform the activity and expand the agency of the participants (Engeström, 2016; Sannino & Engeström, 2017b; Sannino et al., 2016; Yamazumi, 2009a, 2013, 2021).

This chapter reviews the background to the introduction of activity theory in Japan. It first examines the challenges and possibilities which continue to arise from the application of activity theory to research on learning and education in Japan; secondly, it examines activity-theoretical research related to the forms of new hybrid learning activity, which continues to emerge, introducing this chapter as one such applied case of activity-theoretical research.

In the age of humanitarian and ecological crises, it has become increasingly necessary to ensure that educational research and practice are actively involved in collective initiatives to reconstruct the common good in an equitable and sustainable way. The research case in question is activity-theoretical intervention research in a hybrid earthquake-related disaster prevention education program in Kobe City, Japan. Disaster prevention education can generate a new type of learning activity, increasing engagement in activities aimed at building an equitable and sustainable society. In the learning program and practice under study, an intermediary nonprofit organization has attempted to create a hybrid learning activity for the community in Kobe City’s Shin-Nagata area, one of the regions that suffered serious damage during the Great HanshinAwaji Earthquake (also known as the Kobe Earthquake) on January 17, 1995. This activity enables various participating groups and individuals to share their experiences, stories, and memories of the earthquake victims with young people and other citizens. The goal of the program is to build community support, disseminate

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 117 disaster-related knowledge, and create a new, mutually supportive culture.

From the viewpoint of expansive learning theory, educational activities should be reconceptualized as dialogically negotiated activities in which various agents can produce new collaborative interventions while transforming their activity systems. This chapter illuminates this kind of reconceptualization of education as a series of collaborative interventions. To achieve this, it takes an activitytheoretical formative intervention (Engeström, 2016; Engeström et al., 2014; Sannino & Engeström, 2017a; Sannino et al., 2016) related to the implementation of earthquake-related disaster prevention learning and considers it a new hybrid learning activity. This activity is carried out by a nonprofit organization in collaboration with youth, residents, and various other agents in the local community.

In the following section, the reception of Lev Vygotsky’s learning and development theory in Japan is examined to develop an understanding of the historical background to the introduction of activity theory in Japan. Moreover, the introduction of activity theory and expansive learning theory, which occurred after that of Vygotsky, is also discussed in terms of the impact these have had on learning and education research in Japan. Subsequently, questions regarding the activity-theoretical methodology of formative interventions are examined to enable a new form of educational research that goes beyond the boundaries of traditional interventions, standardized as those monopolized by the researcher, and thus reduced to a linear causality. In contrast, formative interventions based on activity theory assume that participants will take ownership of the initiative behind the intervention process by gaining and exercising their own agency, a basic principle.

Here, activity theory and formative interventions refer to the theoretical and methodological frameworks collectively created by scholars worldwide. They have aligned with and contributed to the Finnish tradition of scholarship in activity theory and formative interventions that Engeström and his collaborators developed jointly (inside and outside Finland).

118 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI Finally, a hybrid learning activity is proposed and analyzed to address collaborations and engagements with a shared objective in interactive relationships between multiple activity systems. In particular, the analysis focuses on collaborative intervention related to disaster prevention learning in Kobe City as an applied case, considering it from the expansive learning process perspective so that participants are able to form a new type of agency and simultaneously negotiate a site through dialogue.

Reception of Vygotsky’s Learning and Development Theory and the Impact of the Introduction of Activity Theory in Japan Vygotsky’s original theory of human consciousness and the development of personality is known as the cultural-historical theory of higher mental functions (such as voluntary attention, logical memory, abstract thinking, concept formation, scientific imagination, volition, etc., constituting the consciousness of life peculiar to humans). In this theory, Vygotsky clarified that human action is oriented towards objects, and its development is mediated by the creation and use of tools and language, and of instruments and means such as symbols, ideas, and technology. He characterized such actions by humans as “complex, mediated act[s]” (Vygotsky, 1978, p.

40) expressed by a triangular diagram composed of three groupings—subject, object, and auxiliary means—that mediate these acts.

Vygotsky proposed the concept of such mediated action as key to understanding the practical activities of human beings that are mediated by culture and that develop historically.

In Japan in the fields of the psychology of learning and educational methodology, Vygotsky’s theory had a major influence in the 1960s and the 1970s in terms of education, learning, and development, regarding the scientific concepts, thinking, and language of children. In Japan Vygotsky’s theory was considered from within a framework that examined the question of how to improve the academic achievement and abilities of a child from an individualistic standpoint. Thus, Vygotsky’s theory was reconfigured within the

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 119 context of the traditional learning paradigm of school education, and as such was ultimately reduced to a stage-by-stage method of instruction centered on teaching and transmission.

When Vygotsky stresses ideas related to learning, education, and development that emphasize the collective creative activities of children, however, these are not factors that can be reduced to an individualistic, stage-by-stage learning theory. He points out that school as an organization provides children with the “best stimulus of creativity” if it can collectively “organize their lives and environments so that it leads to the need and ability to create” (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 66). As an example of what this might look like, Vygotsky uses the “widespread form of the children’s magazine or newspaper” in schools, seeing it as an opportunity for children to pursue a deeper collective life and social environment.

[V]irtually the greatest value of the magazine is that it brings children’s creative writing closer to children’s life. The children begin to understand why a person would want to write. Writing becomes a meaningful and necessary task for them. School and class newspapers have the same if not greater importance because they also make it possible to involve children who have the most diverse interests and talents in a joint group effort, as do creative evenings, and similar activities that stimulate children’s creativity. (pp. 66– 67)

Here, it is obvious that Vygotsky redefines the role of the teacher from one that produces immediate effects in the children to one that (instead) indirectly affects them through their social environment (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 49). As Vasily Davydov (1995, p. 17) recalls, Vygotsky points out that “a teacher can intentionally teach children only through continual collaboration with them and with their social milieu, with their desires and readiness to act together with the teacher.” Thus, for Vygotsky, pedagogical practice simply amounts to collective activity or collaboration.

In 1999, a Japanese edition of Engeström’s epoch-defining work, Learning by Expanding: An Activity-theoretical Approach to Developmental Research (1987) was published in Japan. This publication provides a promising mediating artifact to enact activity theory for Japanese scholars and practitioners involved in new learning theories in the fields of human and social sciences. Thereafter, the

120 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI Japanese translations of his From Teams to Knots: Activity-Theoretical Studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work (2008) and Studies in Expansive Learning: Learning What Is Not Yet There (2016) were also published in succession. Expansive learning theory appears in striking contrast to the individualistic and stage-by-stage learning and development theory, which was prominent in how Vygotsky’s work was received in Japan. In the foreword of the Japanese edition of Learning by Expanding, Engeström clearly states his work’s central thesis: Learning by Expanding is a book about collective creative activity. My thesis is that we as human beings have to become able to transform our institutions and practices in a way that mobilizes the intellects and energies of all participants from the ground up. Creativity here is understood as involvement in such collective transformation of practices. Although theories of learning have tried to explain enduring changes in human behavior and cognition, they have not addressed the issue of how people can change themselves as they change their circumstances. That is why a new theory of expansive learning is needed. (Engeström, 1999, p. i)

Expansive learning theory differs fundamentally from the varied repertoire of standard learning theories. It has been creatively conceptualized by Engeström as learning that is inseparably linked to the creation of new realities, new activities, and new forms of human life. The following characterization of such expansive learning compels a radical reconsideration for learning that cannot be found in other learning theories in general circulation.

If the inherent expansivity of learning is taken seriously, the very idea of learning as a controlled process is shaken. The acknowledgment of expansivity means that we accept the possibility that learning leaves the hands of the instructors and takes a direction of its own. (Engeström, 2016, p. 9)

Learning is usually thought of as studying from an “instructor” who can skillfully manage and teach something that is fully known beforehand. In his proposal of expansive learning theory, however, Engeström says that, in the space of expansive learning, “[t]here was no readily available model for solving the problems; no wise teacher had the correct answer” (Engeström, 2001, p. 139).

This abstract verbal formulation effectively means that expansive learning involves “learning what is not yet there” (Engeström, 2016,

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 121 p. 9). More precisely, not only does such learning show “merely construction of novel ideas in the minds of learners,” but also implies “the generation of novel material forms of collective life” (p.

9). Thus, expansive learning is learning wherein the activity system in which an individual and collective agent is engaged themselves is converted qualitatively by their own hands, and oriented toward realizing new potential in everyday human activities.

Activity theory and expansive learning theory described previously have been collectively created by numerous scholars worldwide, who have aligned with and contributed to the Finnish tradition of scholarship in activity theory and formative interventions.

These theories represent knowledge, understanding, and ideas about human creative activities and learning produced through the convergence of international research movements. They are also powerful tools for collaboration between practitioners and researchers who intervene practically in the transformation and creation of human activities. In this sense, activity theory and expansive learning theory provide a common or shared resource for formative interventions in collective creative activities. This chapter focuses specifically on the impact that both theories can have on the study of learning and education in Japan. Moreover, although not explicitly addressed in this chapter, this impact in Japan should be regarded as a significant part of the global development of educational research based on activity theory and expansive learning theory.

The Methodology of Formative Interventions and Facilitating Participants’ Collaborative Interventions As Engeström (2000) points out, one lesson we can draw from intervention research is that change and development fail when imported from outside or implemented from above. The activity theory perspective holds that the process of implementing an intervention must, in turn, facilitate the process of expansive learning. “In expansive learning, learners learn something that is not yet there.

In other words, the learners construct a new object and concept for

122 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI their collective activity and implement this new object and concept in practice” (Engeström & Sannino, 2010, p. 2). Therefore, practitioners involved in and affected by an expansive learning process take the initiative to reforge the object of their current work—that is, their practices, goals, and understanding of why they do things the way they do. Even more than observation or analysis, intervention must consider the “human potential for agency, for intentional collective and individual actions aimed at transforming the activity” (Engeström, 2006, p. 4). This agentive layer focuses on the potential for agents to generate intellectual, emotional, and moral judgments on their own, which function as intentional transformative actions.

For example, in the field of schooling, traditional, standard intervention research is based on a linear causality in which policymakers and researchers create a grand design. This design is then applied or modified by teachers, resulting in a more positive change for students. In contrast, formative interventions based on activity theory assume as a basic principle that teachers themselves will seize the initiative behind the intervention process by gaining and exercising their own agency, and thus, create their own new agency. Here, the focus is on evoking and sustaining the process of transformation, which is directed and enacted by teachers.

Annalisa Sannino et al. (2016) summarize the three key differences of an activity-theoretical formative intervention approach opposed to a linear intervention in the context of design-based research in the learning sciences tradition: (a) [F]ormative interventions are based on designs created by the learners; (b) the collective design effort is seen as part of an expansive learning process including participatory analyses and implementation phases; (c) rather than aiming for transferable and scalable solutions, formative interventions aim to create generative solutions that can be developed over lengthy periods of time both in the researched activities and in the research community. (p. 599)

In this manner, activity-theoretical formative interventions attempt to transfer agency to participants and facilitate their expansive learning. As Engeström (2016) points out, if an intervention can be defined simply as “purposeful action by a human agent to create

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 123 change” (Midgley, 2000, p. 113), it is clear that “the researcher does not have a monopoly over interventions” (Engeström, 2016, p. 220).

Many kinds of outside agents can impose various interventions on organized activity systems such as schools. In the process of formative interventions, “the subjects gain agency and take charge of the process” (p. 219). This process is simply the self-education of learners, teaching them to create their own interventions. Using viewpoints such as empirical focus, location of development or change, and agent of intervention, Clay Spinuzzi (2018) offers an interesting distinction between the theories of Vygotsky, Aleksei Leont’ev, and contemporary activity theories (Engeström is also one of the representative scholars in contemporary activity theory whom Spinuzzi mentions). Thus, whereas Vygotsky and Leont’ev emphasized transforming individuals (via self-mastery for Vygotsky or state mastery for Leont’ev), contemporary activity theory approaches emphasize “transforming mediators through dialogic negotiation by collective subjects to produce new collective designs and interventions, consequently reforming adjacent activities” (p. 149). Although individuals transform themselves, according to Vygotsky, and the state transforms individuals, according to Leont’ev, they commonly focus on individuals’ capabilities and development. Unlike the aforementioned theories, contemporary activity theory focuses on individuals’ transformation activities, that is, the act of creating activity systems (external physical and symbolic instruments, as well as rules and divisions of labor). Spinuzzi distinguishes these as follows: “In ‘The Socialist Alteration of Man,’ Vygotsky locates the abilities in the individual.… Engeström, however, locates the abilities in the activity in which the individual is situated” (p. 132).

Therefore, formative interventions consider the participants, and not the subject and the state (political organization), as agents to produce collaborative interventions to collectively create their new activity system and their new agency at the same time. Thus, the researchers’ role is to facilitate collaborative interventions initiated by the participants themselves, who, in turn, are involved in the ongoing activity. Hence, the core mechanism of formative interventions is to enable participants to gain and exercise agency. In the

124 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI following sections, I will present an application of an activity-theoretical approach to research, namely research into the practice of earthquake disaster-related learning currently being tackled by a nonprofit organization together with children and young people in Kobe City.

Creating a hybrid learning activity and emerging knotworking agency in community-based disaster prevention learning The Kobe earthquake struck on January 17, 1995. It had a magnitude of 7.3, and a total of 6434 people were killed. The Shin-Nagata area in the southwestern Nagata Ward in Kobe City was one of the worst affected areas. This is also the area where the nonprofit organization Futaba Community Learning Center (hereafter, Futaba Center) is located. Since 2011, the Futaba Center has been conducting an earthquake-related disaster prevention learning program as a means of passing on the memories and stories of the residents of the surrounding disaster areas to the next generation.

The disaster prevention learning program at the Futaba Center is supported and encouraged by many groups and individuals from various backgrounds and organizations, including the Center’s staff responsible for the disaster prevention learning program, survivors of the earthquake who act as storytellers about their own suffering, earthquake disaster management and prevention professionals, local guides who show participants around the affected area, undergraduate and graduate students, architectural and town-planning experts, singers/songwriters and other artists, elementary school principals and teachers, municipal officers, firefighters, workers from electric and gas companies, municipal water department workers, storekeepers, and photographers. When using the developmental framework of activity theory, this method of education can be understood as generating a hybrid learning activity that goes beyond the encapsulated, traditional, formal school education and the narrow limits regarding its conceptualization of pedagogical practices. In addition, it expands to collaborate and exchange with external communities and organizations, realizing and creating solutions in the complicated context of everyday life (Yamazumi, 2008, 2009b, 2013).

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 125 The various purveyors of this method of education at the Futaba Center are exploring the possibility for the younger generations and people from outside Kobe City, who know very little about the earthquake, to engage in disaster prevention learning. To determine whether an educational innovation helps children and young people to generate agentive, future-oriented disaster prevention learning, it is particularly promising to apply Engeström’s notion of negotiated knotworking (Engeström, 2008, 2018; Engeström et al., 1999), located within the general framework of activity theory, to analyze the newly emerging method of disaster prevention learning at the Center. This method engages learners for the purpose of creating a new life through flexible, fluid, and impromptu collaboration.

One important aspect that enables the agentive, future-oriented disaster prevention learning of children and young people is thought to be the practice of knotworking. This practice creates flexible, fluid, and partially improvised forms of intense collaboration, as “knots,” without a single stable center of authority or control between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems (knotworking is a historically new form of collaborative work; see Engeström, 2008).

In the Futaba Center’s development and implementation of a hybrid learning activity on earthquake disasters, creative collaboration between many groups and individuals is not administered by a network in the sense of a set of relatively stable, closed connections between organizational units within a fixed framework and membership. Thus, a central function or agent that controls learning activities does not exist. This type of collaboration among partners transcends the limits of closed organizations, where the frameworks and members are often fixed, enabling flexible, fluid, and partially improvised activities. This is based on the principle of “distributed leadership” (Spillane, 2006), in which members play leadership roles on a rotating basis, taking the initiative in the face of emerging situations and issues related to their respective areas of specialization. In this way, knotworking-type collaboration forms to produce an expansive learning activity that increases the

126 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI agency of participants, including children and young people. The expanding agency in knotworking-type collaboration can be characterized as knotworking agency based on the nature of knotworking, in which the center of control or authority does not hold.

A hybrid learning activity for disaster reconstruction and preparedness through knotworking can expand the institutional boundaries of traditional school learning, characterized by the acquisition of correct answers as responses to given tasks in school texts and the classroom in socially isolated schools. Here, if we support the model of “collective activity system” (Engeström, 1987/2015, p. 63), which Engeström proposed as a basic framework for activity-theoretical research, the expansion of hybrid learning activities, such as the disaster prevention learning activity can be realized, as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1.

Expansion of learning through knotworking for disaster prevention learning

The activities that activity theory attempts to grasp are not discrete individual actions intended to accomplish a goal over a short term, but collective activity that shares an object and investigates it over the long term. In the activity system model, mediated by instruments (cultural artifacts, such as tools and signs, words and

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 127 symbols, concepts and models, ideas and visions, technology, etc.), the activity evolves historically and is motivated toward the object.

Meanwhile, activity, as the deep layer of social infrastructure, is also mediated by the various elements of “community,” “rules,” and “division of labor.” Using the model of this activity system, Figure 1 demonstrates with arrows how the encapsulated traditional school learning activity system expands through hybrid learning, such as disaster prevention learning. Through knotworking, hybrid disaster prevention learning can break through the boundaries of community, rules, and division of labor, set by the acquisition of correct answers and classroom walls.

In this kind of learning through knotworking, communities, organizations, and participants outside of school can become socalled providers of learning, initiating activities while changing and exchanging through time. Through connecting and interchanging potentially diverse resources within and without the classroom, knotworking brings new instruments in the form of outside providers of learning to the activity system (Yamazumi, 2013). These resources are equivalent to what Luis Moll and James Greenberg (1990) call “funds of knowledge.”

Beyond the Role of the Passive Victim: Toward Child- and Youth-Driven Disaster Prevention and Reduction In knotworking, participants connect and reciprocally share resources potentially related to the complex, multiple, and collectively generated learning trajectories of individuals, collectives, and whole organizations. The intention behind designing and implementing knotworking-type hybrid learning activities is to help foster more agentive learning for the future-oriented understanding of disasters and disaster preparedness. For example, a participating storyteller from the Futaba Center, a former teacher in charge of earthquake-related disaster prevention education at the Kobe Municipal Futaba Elementary School, gave the following response to

128 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI our research group’s question, “What are some of the qualitative changes that have occurred in earthquake-related disaster prevention learning at this center compared to in the past?”: Excerpt 1 Recently, I … have undertaken many trial-and-error experiments. Reflecting on the past 20 years, I think things are moving in the direction of my storytelling. After all, children possess incredible strength. Furthermore, they have the ability and power to engage in disaster mitigation. I think one future challenge will be for adults to establish spaces where elementary and junior high school students can engage in such activities.

(Interview, February 10, 2015)

Like the storyteller at the Center, Carol Mutch (2013b) focuses on and theorizes children’s engagement in disaster research in her studies on the role of schools in disaster response and recovery. She analyzes the findings from case studies on three state co-educational primary schools (for children aged 5–12 years) in Canterbury, New Zealand, which were invited to participate in a broader project that facilitated storytelling in school communities on experiences of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. Consequently, she found that “the schools’ stories had many commonalities,” but “one difference was … the extent to which children were given agency to determine the direction of each school’s project” (p. 449). Based on these case studies, she theorizes a “continuum of engagement of children in research” from “child-related research (research for children)” to “child-focused research (research on or about children),” “childcentered research (research with children),” and “child-driven research (research by children)” as children’s agency gradually increases (p. 449). In addition, she and her colleague emphasize that “schools have a role to play in providing opportunities for this emotional processing . . . through varying degrees of engagement in disaster-related research” (Mutch & Gawith, 2014, p. 64).

In common with “child-driven research (research by children),” the collaborative interventions (as activity-theoretical formative interventions) conducted in the practical implementation of knotworking-type hybrid disaster prevention learning at the Futaba Center must enable participants to gain and exercise agency.

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 129 They should take account of the “human potential for agency, for intentional collective and individual actions aimed at transforming the activity” (Engeström, 2006, p. 4). Beyond the role of the passive victim, giving children and young people knotworking agency and the ability to exercise their agency over knotworking-type hybrid learning activities can enable them to get out of school, engage in various and multiple activities, and make connections. This form of expansive learning can facilitate the creation of new, mutually supportive cultures and lives. Next, I take up and analyze the hybrid disaster prevention learning conducted at the Center as an applied case.

Between May 2014 and January 2015, the “College StudentLed Kobe Earthquake 20-Year Memory Flattening Project” was carried out at the Futaba Center as an inheritance/transmission operation, as part of the 20th anniversary of the Kobe Earthquake. The university students from multiple universities who participated in this project did not experience the earthquake. The objective of the project was to, at the 20th anniversary of the disaster, develop through “learning,” which is the responsibility of the students, a new type of system for transmission to re-examine how memories and lessons from the earthquake are inherited.

The project name, “Memory Flattening,” implies a way of synchronizing differences and gaps. First, it refers to the varying levels of awareness of memories of the disaster. Next, it refers to generation gaps. Students were recruited under the premise that while various other gaps relating to memory may exist, these gaps need to be filled in so that diverse memories of the disaster could be made more visible.

A total of 39 students participated, with 34 from universities in the Kansai region and five from Okinawa. The students participated in the learning themes decided in advance, but new groups were formed through a process of interaction with participants in activities such as training courses and study groups. In addition, themes were modified as learning deepened with a view to the final presentations on January 10, 2015.

130 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI The university students in this project, who possessed a desire to proactively face the possibility of earthquakes but had no such experience or memory, started from a position of having to confront this contradiction. In overcoming this challenge, expansive learning emerged, which aimed to create new ways of inheriting memories of the earthquake. In the hybrid learning activities mentioned previously, knots for the succession of earthquake memories and lessons were formed with various learning providers who participated from the regional community external to the universities.

Overall, activities such as experiencing evacuation centers, walking tours with people who have experienced disasters or firefighters from the Kobe City Fire Bureau, and attending lectures on lifeline restoration by employees of Osaka Gas acted as a mediating space for the diverse voices involved in the inheritance of memories.

What follows are excerpts from two university students’ reports on their participation in training courses as examples of their learning through joining the project. Both students were enrolled in a three-year, Elementary School Teacher Education Program course at a university as they wanted to become elementary school teachers.

Excerpt 2 UNIVERSITY STUDENT 1: Although I was born in Kobe, I did not know what happened in Nagata Ward since the Earthquake. …

I felt that when I become a teacher in the future, I would like to let my students see firsthand the records of the earthquake and the reconstruction initiatives in the shopping district. …

When I walked around the city, I could see burnt trees and burnt telephone poles. I wanted to show this reality to the students.

Excerpt 3 UNIVERSITY STUDENT 2: Over the course of these two days, I have felt strongly the importance of relationships within the community. Many times, more people are rescued by someone in the community than by the fire brigade or self-defense forces.

Even a firefighter clearly mentioned that during a large-scale disaster, one cannot expect to be rescued by firefighters. We need to find ways of

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 131 surviving ourselves. … I am from Aichi Prefecture, so when I hear about earthquakes, I am reminded of the Great Tokai Earthquake, which they say will reoccur someday. … I felt that there was too little disaster prevention awareness in my home community. … We should listen to the ideas of people from Kobe and put more effort into our disaster prevention.

The students used these experiences as the foundation for refining their own research themes in groups. For example, the group with the theme “A Proposal for Disaster Prevention Training for University Students” conducted opinion polls and questionnaire surveys, and participated in real disaster prevention training programs and other similar activities to produce the final output which took the form of a “Disaster Prevention Training Manual for University Students” pamphlet, which was distributed at universities within Kobe. At the final presentation on January 10, 2015, the unique and richly diverse projects from the 13 groups were presented to the Mayor of Kobe and approximately 200 citizens.

Conclusion The activity-theoretical formative intervention in the disaster prevention learning program focuses on how the participants can create new agency and thus simultaneously form a dialogically negotiated site—that is, how they can make their own collaborative interventions. Engeström (2009, p. 317) indicates that through such agentive actions, “we gain authority and become authors of our lives.” Therefore, the disaster prevention learning activity, as a dialogically negotiated site, enables the participants to transform the town and their everyday lived lives into “oeuvre, appropriation, and use value (and not exchange value),” as Lefebvre (1996, p. 180, emphasis in the original) suggests.

Sannino and Engeström (2017b) refer to the research focus of a formative intervention conducted in an elementary school in a rural area in the south of Italy as follows: “[A] formative intervention was carried out, and it focused especially on uncovering pupils’ learning potentials, which may remain unnoticed in regular classroom activities” (p. 62). It is obvious that this formative intervention

132 KATSUHIRO YAMAZUMI aimed to expand the participants’ agency in terms of both collaborative ability with pupils and the transformative ability to talk about “pupils’ learning potentials, which may remain unnoticed.”

Similarly, our intervention study tries to provoke participants’ knotworking agency by enabling them to shed the passive role of the victim and create a dialogically negotiated site where they can talk together about future town-planning to prevent or reduce disaster damage. Therefore, our intervention study focuses on a child/youth-driven disaster research project in which participants conduct their own research on disaster prevention and reduction. As Mutch (2013b, p. 446) points out, considerable child-/youth-related research is “adult-centric in both determining the problems and the solutions.” Furthermore, in the field of citizenship education, young people’s indifference to politics and declining civic participation have become the subject of discussion. However, the following theoretical shift should be granted more significance to promote a more youth-centric view of young people’s participation: “While their political actions are more likely to be framed around everyday actions and choices rather than formal politics, they do become actively engaged in relevant issues and make more use of the formal political system as they get older” (Mutch, 2013a, p. 96).

For disaster-affected areas, this kind of project can increase the power of author choices and the active agency of children and young people by enabling them to shed the passive role of the victim and construct their own stories. In this context, transformative agency is heightened by contributing to preparations for, coping skills, and rehabilitation and reconstruction activities related to possible future earthquakes. As Engeström et al. (2014, p. 125) foresaw, the future challenge of activity theory is closely tied to “the growing need for formative interventions in which children and adolescents take center stage as subjects with transformative agency.”

For these reasons, through such formative interventions, participants can break away from a community of practice, which gives rise to a subject (successful identity) and move into a community of agency. This ultimately gives them the power of speech to make their own collaborative interventions.

THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVITY THEORY 133 As a formative intervention study based on activity theory, this chapter emphasizes dialogue as a key component of any intervention, especially one in which the participants themselves acquire and exercise agency. However, dialogue is only one of the pillars on which an activity-theoretical formative intervention rests. In other words, it is more than a discussion. Participants work independently and collaboratively to analyze their own activity systems; identify contradiction using ideas, concepts, and models drawn from activity theory; and redesign new forms of activity by “breaking away from the given frame of action” (Engeström, 1987/2015, p. xxiii). The intervention studies discussed in this chapter were conducted such that participants took the initiative and worked side by side. To relate the intervention research to other globally tackled and developed activity-theoretical formative interventions, it is necessary to address the participants’ own collective work of analysis and redesign in the future.

Acknowledgements This chapter reports in part the results of research supported by the Mayekawa Foundation Home and Community Education Research Grant in FY2020 and FY2021, to whom the author would like to thank for their support. I sincerely thank Miriam McSweeney, Kyoko Murakami, and Annalisa Sannino for their productive and valuable comments on my manuscript.

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The Politics of Expansive Learning: A Study of Two Social Movements Yrjö Engeström, Mikael Brunila, Juhana Rantavuori

Introduction For social movements, a critical issue is their sustainability over longer periods of time. Durable movements are relatively rare.

Learning is a key factor behind durability. To overcome setbacks and sheer exhaustion, a movement needs to establish mechanisms of learning that allow it to renew, develop and transform its practices. Standard mechanisms of learning based on didactic instruction or apprenticeship-like peripheral participation are insufficient for this challenge. Some scholars have recently turned to expansive learning as a longitudinal and generative mode of learning that might be adequate for explaining and supporting resilience and sustainability in social movements (Caldwell et. al., 2019; Melendez, 2020; Zavala, 2016). The ideal-typical cycle of expansive learning includes seven learning actions (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The cycle of expansive learning (Engeström & Sannino, 2010, p. 8) 137

138 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI Systematic fostering of expansive learning involves deliberate political choices and actions—a politics of expansive learning. We will examine elements of such politics in two social movements, namely Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH)in Barcelona, Spain and the Herttoniemi Food Cooperative in Helsinki, Finland. We studied these movements within the project Learning in Productive Social Movements (2015-2017).1 Expansive learning is learning in activity, not learning about, learning for or learning added to activity (Engeström, 2022). A critical question is: How is expansive learning embedded in, or woven into, the activity system(s) of the given social movement?

PAH is a movement that emerged to prevent evictions and secure affordable housing for people from a broad range of backgrounds in the aftermath of the Spanish mortgage crisis in the late 2000s. PAH has developed an unorthodox combination of spectacular public action, emotional labor, and mutual aid to prevent thousands of home evictions and secure social housing for its members.

Our researchers spent three months documenting the regular Monday and Tuesday assemblies of PAH in Barcelona. The data collected consists of recorded assembly discussions, interviews, and recordings and fieldnotes of public actions. The analysis presented in this chapter is focused on the interview data.

The Herttoniemi Food Cooperative is located in the metropolitan area of Helsinki. The cooperative rents a field where a hired farmer produces vegetables for the cooperative. During the harvest season, vegetables are transported weekly from the field into the city to distribution points where members come and pick up their share. A member of our research team participated in and recorded 27 meetings of the board of the cooperative over a period of 13 months. The data consists of the recorded meetings and complementary interviews with key members of the cooperative.

1

The project was funded by the Academy of Finland (project no. 274244; PI Yrjö Engeström). Besides the two movements analyzed in this chapter, the project studied also the New York City Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI; see Caldwell & al., 2019) and the Abahlali base M’jondolo shack dwellers’ movement in Durban, South Africa. We are grateful to the numerous activists who gave us access to their movements and treated us with solidarity and trust.

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 139 In the analysis of the two cases, we identify expansive learning actions and examine to what extent they form expansive learning cycles (Engeström, Rantavuori & Kerosuo, 2013). The scale and scope of the focal learning process, as well as the way of embedding learning in the activity system(s) of the movement, were different in each case. In PAH, we consider the politics of expansive learning primarily through the transformation of the subject, a person, or a family who embarked on an emotionally turbulent journey to overcome the humiliation of eviction and to gain agency, with support from the assemblies and actions of the movement. We analyze the expansive learning trajectory of a subject named Mirea. In Herttoniemi Food Cooperative, we consider the politics of expansive learning through the transformation of the object, namely the field cultivated and the produce it yielded. As the board of the cooperative faced a potentially fatal problem of financial sustainability, it engaged in a one-year long learning effort to find and implement an expansive solution without compromising its object. Our analysis focuses on learning actions taken and expansive cycles formed in the recorded board meetings.

We conclude our analysis by comparing the findings of the two cases. We suggest that the deliberate fostering of expansive learning in social movements entails strategic choices related to the way learning is embedded and supported in the activity system(s) of the movement. These are also choices pertaining to who the key learners are and how their learning actions are distributed and punctuated in time and space.

Expansive Learning in La PAH In the years following the mortgage crisis of 2008, an unprecedented wave of evictions swept across Spain (Castellano et al., 2019). As the economic crisis turned into a housing emergency, a movement emerged to stop the evictions and challenge the narrative of the situation, shifting blame from indebted individuals to the financial system (Flesher Fominaya, 2015). The movement was spearheaded by la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH)

140 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI (Romanos, 2014), a group that is still active across much of Spain.

Since its beginning, PAH has stopped thousands of evictions through an unorthodox combination of spectacular public action and mutual aid (Colau & Alemany, 2013). PAH has also substantially formed the discourse in Spain around the crisis and the legitimacy of responses to it (Guillén Olavide, 2017; Quintana Pujalte, Castillo Esparcia & Carretón Ballester, 2018).

Based on three months of fieldwork with PAH Barcelona in the fall of 2015, we present in this section a summary analysis of how one person who came to PAH discovered the joy of collective power and transformative agency (Virkkunen, 2006; Sannino, 2022). We then discuss the case of this participant in PAH, presenting another possible use of activity theory in the context of social movements as a theoretical heuristic to understand learning events in retrospect, in dialogue with other perspectives.

The mortgage crisis in Spain brought to light the peculiar moral character of debt: anyone who has indebted themselves is seen to have done so voluntarily and at an equal footing with their creditor. Hence, the indebted person is also to blame for any problems in the payment of their debt and made to carry the guilt that comes with such failure (Graeber, 2012). As the Spanish mortgage crisis unfolded, mortgage holders, who were unable to continue paying interest and loan amortizations, had their apartments auctioned by their creditors, often for less than 50 percent of the original value (Colau & Alemany, 2013; López & Rodríguez, 2011; Sunderland, 2014). Due to biases in the Spanish legal system, a debtor only had his or her mortgage reduced by as much as the apartment had been auctioned for. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards had lost their homes (Castellano et al., 2019), while they still had debts valued in the tens or hundreds of thousands (Cano Fuentes et al., 2013). People who defaulted on their mortgages suffered through a dispossession not only of use but of use and property (Vives-Miró, González-Pérez & Rullan, 2015). While traditional conflicts around labor in the sphere of production bring together people through struggle around a shared activity (work) and subjectivity (the worker), conflicts in the sphere of circulation are more nebulous. Participants in these struggles do not necessarily have

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 141 any kinship but the very fact of their dispossession, visible to each other only through the act of struggle (Clover, 2016). Without collective struggle, the debtor faces the creditor alone, the former forced to accept the narrative and framing of the latter.

It is from this vantage point that we understand PAH as an organized effort to overcome the isolation that follows from debt insolvency. The bedrock of PAH consists of weekly assemblies (Mondays and Tuesdays in Barcelona), where people share their experiences and try to find solutions for their case (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, 2016; La Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, 2015; Colau & Alemany, 2013). These face-to-face meetings function as “spaces of transformation” where former victims become “activists and political subjects” (Álvarez de Andrés, Zapata Campos & Zapata, 2015, p. 257). When you come to a PAH assembly, you begin by listening to other people recounting their experiences of struggle, what kind of situation they started in, how they are fighting their case and, often, how they ultimately won it.

After that, an individual will usually speak up sometime between his or her first and third visit to the regular assemblies. The idea of PAH is that every person must take responsibility for their own case. Once they do so, the group supports them in most of their efforts, as long as they are non-violent and collectively decided upon (Colau & Alemany, 2013; Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, 2016; La Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, 2015). In a two-year ethnographic study with PAH, Ignasi Martí and Pablo Fernández (2015, p. 3) observed “the emergence of different forms of interactions, based on mutual interest, on shared empathy, and of doing things together.” These interactions formed “an alternative fabric of togetherness, with different, stronger, forms of social relations and political values.” In this sense, the power of the movement to not only stop evictions but to launch major “macropolitical” initiatives like changes in mortgage legislation, comes from the “micropolitical” capacity to work with people’s feelings and the “affective” dimensions of power (Tenhunen, 2016).

142 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI

Theory, Data, and Methods Our theoretical framework is a mix of activity theory (Engeström, 2015), anthropological theories of debt (Graeber, 2012; Aglietta, 2018) and a Spinozist understanding of “affect” (Deleuze, 1988; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Spinoza, 1994). Joy and sadness are, in this last framework, “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting” is increased (joy) or diminished (sadness) as well as “the ideas of these affections” (Spinoza, 1994, p. 154). In this sense, the concept of affect, and specifically the “cues” of joy and sadness, allows us to identify phases in a cycle of expansive learning (Engeström and Sannino 2010).

The data for our study with PAH was mainly collected between early October and late December 2015 in Barcelona, Spain.

Mikael Brunila and Kukka Ranta spent over three months with PAH, recording and participating in weekly assemblies and demonstrations, assisting in and documenting actions against evictions and occupations of banks, producing informational material with PAH and interviewing members of the group.

We have previously (Brunila, 2019) discussed the cases of two affected individuals and present here a condensed version of the analysis of one of these, that of Mireia.2 We conducted a semi-structured interview with Mireia in Barcelona in November 2015. We use thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2006; Ruusuvuori, Nikander & Hyvärinen, 2010; Salo, 2015) to find general themes along with moments of joy and sadness in the interview (Tenhunen, 2016).

Mireia moved from one activity system (life structured around mortgage payments) towards another (life structured around mutual aid and solidarity), herself changing through actions of transformative agency. In Spinozist terms, expansive learning and this type of agency can then be understood as the formation of “common notions” (Spinoza 1994; Deleuze 1988), “processes through which people figure things out together and become active in joy’s unfolding, learning to participate in and sustain new capacities” 2

The name of Mireia has been changed and the interview anonymized following guidelines from Saunders et al. (2015).

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 143 (Bergman and Montgomery 2017, p. 279). The hypothesis that this process with PAH can be understood as a cycle of expansive learning emerged through daily engagement with PAH, by our presence at actions and assemblies, and through the dozen interviews we conducted.

The Case of Mireia Mireia got her mortgage in the 2000s, together with her partner at the time, to pay for a home in which they lived together with Mireia’s daughter. At the time of our interview, Mireia had a day job working in health care in Barcelona. The mortgage activity system from that time relevant for our analysis is fairly clear (see Figure 2): Mireia and her former partner wanted to become homeowners. They had their own community of the family, instruments consisting of a regular income, a division of labor in paying the mortgage, constrained by the rules of Spanish laws, norms and customs.

Owning a home was a partial object for what Mireia repeatedly refers to as “normal life”: you work so you can pay your mortgage and focus on your family and a feeling of comfort.

Figure 2.

The mortgage activity system of Mireia and the crisis between its division of labor and instruments.

144 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI In 2010 or 2011, soon after she and her partner broke up, Mireia started facing problems with her mortgage. Around this time, Mireia learned that her partner had not been paying his share of the mortgage installments. As the division of labor in their activity system broke down, Mireia also lost the instruments to pay for her loan (see again Figure 2). Reflecting on this time, Mireia conveyed a paradoxical sense of despair and confidence (Spinoza, 1994, p. 190). She owned a plot of land with a small cottage outside of Barcelona and still had her job. However, the bank did not trust that Mireia would manage to pay her installments. At this point the rules of the activity system—the Spanish law—paralyzed her possibilities of solving the situation, even though Mireia still had her job. The outcome increasingly started to look disastrous. The collapse of the mortgage activity system created an acute need state (Engeström, 2015, pp. 132–34) that was shared by hundreds of thousands of people during the post-bubble years in Spain. At this point, Mireia risked losing her home while getting stuck with a large mortgage. As a result of this crisis, Mireia had to throw herself into an expansive and transformative learning process (Engeström & Sannino, 2010) that drastically changed her outlook on life.

In what follows, we analyze the seven learning actions in Mireia’s cycle of expansive learning.

Questioning The primary contradiction at play in the case of Mireia was clearly between use and exchange value (Marx, 1976). On the one hand, there was the bank that wanted to secure Mirea’s apartment as an asset; on the other hand, there was Mireia who needed to use the apartment as her home. However, while Mireia was initially aware of PAH, seeking out the group did not fit her idea of “normal life” or vida normal and her sense of being an ordinary, employed person with a decent salary. Within the mortgage activity system of Mireia, defaulting on her mortgage and going to PAH were two unacceptable or unimaginable alternatives, creating a double bind situation (Engeström, 2015, p. 131). Only once her bank offered

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 145 unacceptable terms for Mireia to continue to pay the mortgage and she “hit bottom” (Bateson, 2000, p. 329–331), did she seek out PAH.

Figure 3.

The mutual aid activity system of PAH and Mireia’s expanded object in it.

Entering PAH created a contradiction within the mortgage activity system and was as such a controversial resolution of a contradiction. On the one hand, PAH does not fit the idea of normal life.

On the other hand, this was also the first step into the mutual aid activity system of PAH (see Figure 3), which was the beginning of the difficult process of questioning and letting go of one activity system and adopting another. This plunge was not characterized by joy, but by doubt, fear and a sense of humility (Spinoza, 1994, p. 164, 182-182; Deleuze, 1988, p. 26).

Analysis When Mireia came to PAH, her initial reaction was hesitation and a sensation of shyness and shame (Spinoza, 1994, p. 193):

146 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI Mireia: –for me it caused terrible shame to talk, cry and explain my case. At first, I did not speak, I needed my time, at first, I listened, asked. This is PAH, it’s not a manager.

At PAH, she encountered other people who allowed her to start processing her painful experiences and her own sense of failure.

Mireia looked at the mortgage activity system in a new light but also made first contact with the mutual aid activity system that she would later adopt and develop around a new, expanded object (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). The contradiction that Mireia faced seemed to be related to her sense of failure at “normal life”. She had made a break with a fundamental part of the mortgage activity system and the sense of normalcy that gave that activity system meaning. She made this break under pressure, approaching PAH only as a substitute instrument within that system—in other words, she still had one foot in the old activity system. To break with the shame that follows a full rupture and the refusal to pay the bank, required that Mireia underwent the stressful process of leaving a world that was not working for her, while still fearing (Spinoza, 1994, p. 190) that the alternative might be even worse (Berlant, 2011).

For Mireia, “the mutual aid assembly” organized by PAH—a weekly meeting where people can process their emotions in a group led by a professional psychologist—offered a resolution to this contradiction: Mireia: We were few [of us] and I couldn’t explain, the second time there was more of us, and I continued crying, the third time I already stopped crying.

Sharing and listening to stories about the abuse conducted by the banks against Mireia herself and others made her realize that the mortgage bubble had systemic roots and was a “deception”.

This sharing of experiences, or of analysis (Engeström, 2015, xxi), is perhaps the most significant method and instrument developed by PAH, facilitating a transgression of the divisions between those that share “no necessary kinship but their dispossession” (Clover, 2016, p. 16) and the formation of common notions (Deleuze, 1988, p. 54– 58; Bergman & Montgomery, 2017). Sharing these experiences,

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 147 Mireia seems to have found power not only in herself, but also in others.

Modeling Going to the mutual aid assembly gave Mireia more trust in her own analysis of her case as a “deception” and power to challenge the bank. In the interview, she expressed anger (Spinoza, 1994, p.

175) and disbelief over the way she had been treated by her bank.

At this point, there occurred a joyful shift in Mireia’s conception of the situation. As her ideas became more “adequate” (Spinoza, 1994, p. 116; Deleuze, 1988), it seemed as if she could almost feel the power of others at PAH adding to her own power. This is the formation of common notions, the construction of something new, a shared reality between those that have been affected by mortgage related issues. Mireia gave up the idea of owning her home and was satisfied instead with merely staying in it, adopting the idea of having the right to affordable housing. In a sense she engaged in modeling “a newly found explanatory relationship” (Engeström 2015, p. xxi). The object of her activity system was transforming, but it was not yet the expanded object we will encounter later in the analysis.

Nonetheless, Mireia at this point seemed to have a clear and adequate idea of the right to use value over her home, even if it would go against the rules of the mortgage activity system. This old system now appeared as a “hoax”, although Mireia still dreamed of a “normal life”.

Examining the Model When Mireia came into PAH, she was very focused on just solving her own case. It is almost as if coming into PAH still happened within the framework of the mortgage activity system, where PAH simply became the substitute for the dysfunctional parts of that activity system, an instrument to use as a replacement for the income

148 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI she lost when she broke up with her partner. This instrumental approach is something Mireia also brings up herself.

Mireia: Well, so. I started there, especially on Mondays, to empower myself.

And this was me: “I come here, solve my case, and that’s it.”

At the outset Mireia seemed indifferent to the broader framework and goals of PAH, not engaging with the mutual aid activity system of PAH (Figure 3) more than in a limited sense, taking lead of her own case, using the mutual aid assembly as an instrument to find the strength to face off with the bank and staying focused on the goal of getting her debt released. However, after eventually winning her case, something shifted for Mireia: Mireia: In my case I had the problem, and I entered the movement and saw the number of people with problems in a similar process. And once I signed [my debt release and contract for social rent], that’s when I realized I can’t leave, because now I’m doing well and the life I was living and the apartment that I lost but really, I found something that fills me up. Because. . . because, I don’t know. I think I had been living a very empty life, that’s the truth.

Although Mireia had been a part of PAH for many months and participated in several actions and groups, her object and activity system shifted only at this point. Her gratitude and wonder (Spinoza, 1994, p. 189) towards PAH fostered a desire for continued engagement. She realized that her problem was systemic and she felt solidarity with those who still suffered from it. Now, an important tertiary contradiction (Engeström, 2015, p. 70) formed around the conflict between her old, ‘normal’ life and the adoption of a more collective activity. Mireia started to examine the new model that she had been adopting. Previously she dreamed of normal life, an object that came with a clear set of instruments and a certain division of labor between her and her partner. What would she dream of now and how would she be connected to those dreams? In other words, what would her expanded object be, beyond just getting a debt release?

To discover and enact a new expanded object, Mireia needed practical actions and artifacts (Engeström, 2015, p. 196, 122) that facilitated her participation in PAH. She progressively started getting

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 149 active in the press work of the group and in the facilitation of meetings.

Mireia 23: So, I said I will stay. Moreover, you have so many commissions and so many things to do, so many themes, that you can choose whatever you want. Whatever you like the most, you can do. Then it felt very unjust to leave, and moreover I felt comfortable continuing with [the tasks of] communication.

Beyond the abstract and more principled decision to stay with PAH out of gratitude, Mireia had to overcome different contradictions that related to concrete actions in the mutual aid activity system. She seemed to feel a strong degree of humility when faced with some of the concrete practices of press work and a sense of awe and wonder (Spinoza, 1994, p. 189) towards people who were capable of dealing with them. A similar fear (Spinoza, 1994, p. 190) came up when she discussed the assemblies. Mireia early on became involved in doing some parts of the assembly presentations. As she felt very insecure in front of large crowds, she needed instruments to overcome her fears. To build up her confidence (Spinoza, 1994, p.

190), different artifacts like workshops, social media management, and her own posters and notes for leading the assemblies assisted her in the process. When we visited PAH, she was one of the more frequent presenters at the assemblies and had also learned to not just manage but really enjoy running social media accounts for the group.

Through careful and initially timid steps, Mireia got a better sense of the model not only through her own case but also by practical involvement with different artifacts. She tried diverse practical actions in the group, found her place in the activity system and gained a sense of the collective activity.

Implementing the Model In 2015, several of the founders of PAH Barcelona left the group to build a political party at the municipal level. For the daily activities in PAH, this departure was a huge challenge.

150 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI Mireia: when Ada [Colau, one of the founders] gave up being the spokesperson of the group, we despaired. And I can speak as the affected person that I am but then even more, and I said: “Oh dear, what a horror, Ada is leaving, Ada is giving up being the spokesperson, what now?” And there was a moment in which we trembled. But little by little. . . what has happened little by little is that other people have risen. But first you are like, what, what do we do? Help!

While PAH is very egalitarian and horizontally organized, the group still builds on a division of labor that includes significant leadership efforts from some people. When Colau and others left, the division of labor in the group was threatened and with that the very core of PAH. For Mireia, the resolution of this contradiction appeared as a movement from affects of awe and wonder and even despair (Spinoza, 1994, p. 189–90) towards figures of authority towards a joyful sense of collective capacity and power, and a shared self-esteem or “us-esteem” (Brunila, 2019). This phase seems especially transgressive in the sense that it flags the moment when Mireia became truly involved in implementing the model of PAH: she focused her capacities on building the group collectively and taking the delicate process of making the assemblies work seriously.

Implementing the model of PAH, Mireia still also needed trajectories of personal growth. This came up as we discussed a press conference that was coming up, related to a campaign by PAH: Mireia: Well, this with doing a press conference for me it’s become like. . . I would like to see myself there, with the papers [physical, not press] secure and winning over this shyness, you know? It’s like a fantasy. Well, yes, yes.

Like, I didn’t know anything about anything and I’ve learned something. I will learn more.

Reflecting on the process PAH is a group that puts much focus on the small things, the micropolitical “inner life” of the group (Tenhunen, 2016). Nonetheless, our impression was that a lot of the central figures seemed to suffer from exhaustion. This came up with Mireia as well, when she emphasized that she also needs to limit her own engagement. Here, reflecting on the process, Mireia had moved to the final phases of the

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 151 expansive cycle when she considered the balance between her own well-being and PAH. The two were not opposed, rather, for Mireia to be able to lead the assemblies, she needed to be rested and feel good about herself. This insight reflects a fundamental tenet in the method of PAH; individuals must be empowered to take responsibility to make the individual and collective process sustainable.

Consolidating: New Practice, New Contradictions As the cycle came to completion and the new practice was consolidated, new contradictions emerged. While we stayed in Barcelona, a recurrent issue in the assemblies was that some people wanted to fast-track cases by delegating the process outside of the assembly.

For Mireia this was one of the most central challenges for PAH. Mireia: Because of this I said, that if it had happened to me, that I had fixed my [case] in three months, I would not have had time to discover what PAH is. Then my primary idea was to come and delegate my problem. . . I solve it, I leave, they have managed it for me, and what? The movement stays empty, because if we all do the same, what are the assemblies for then? For nothing.

There did not seem to be a clear resolution to this issue. Instead, the fact that Mireia worried about it felt indicative of her commitment to the mutual aid activity system. Her frustration might have stemmed out of a quaternary contradiction (Engeström, 2015, p. 70–71), i.e., a tension between two neighboring activity systems and two different ideas about what PAH should be.

Mireia: So, it’s a struggle that I also. . . I don’t like it, I don’t like it and let’s see if we can’t put an end to all of this. There is more than one person that does it.

Here “it” refers to solving cases outside of the process of the PAH assemblies.

In the final phase of the expansive cycle, Mireia as a part of PAH also paid special heed to the changing environment of housing in Barcelona, where at the time of the interview rental evictions were becoming increasingly common, and the challenges it posed

152 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI for PAH. Mireia described how she, becoming a part of PAH, consolidated a new practice of dealing with problems. Her expansive cycle coincided with the cycle of the group, which was also expanding and learning continuously. As part of the group as well as a renter, she experienced the issue of rent related evictions as something that was of her concern. The mutual aid activity system pushed her and others to study, learn, and develop new spaces and strategies for dealing with the issue.

Discussion In the above analysis, we used the case of Mireia to demonstrate a framework for explaining the formation of transformative agency as a collective and joyful learning process. We showed how PAH initiated a fundamental shift in relations that an indebted person had to themselves, others in a similar situation, and the institutions that manage and enforce the debt relation. This shift can be described as one from a mortgage activity system towards an activity system of mutual aid. In this sense, struggles among people who have “no necessary kinship but their dispossession” can flourish through a meticulous combination of macropolitical and micropolitical practices to cultivate an enacted ethic of mutual aid, which is not bound to a specific subjectivity in its generosity (Graeber, 2012), but is rather a “means to help one another on a daily basis through the process of a revolutionary becoming” (Tari, 2021, p. 10).

All this suggests that PAH is a highly complex social movement that acts as a space to change not just the world around it, but also the people in the movement. As noted above, these two types of change are inseparable. PAH is an activity-producing activity (Engeström, 2015, p. 98–99), based on the continuous refinement of common notions through cycles of expansive learning. Changing social and institutional structures becomes intertwined with collective learning and empowerment, that in turn changes the agents of that change. It is in this sense, that the movement is transformative (Engeström, 2007; Tenhunen, 2016; Read, 2015; De Smet, 2015). This process can be described in general terms through cycles of

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 153 learning, but must also always be understood in its specificity through paying attention to how different instruments and artifacts are mobilized by different people under different circumstances.

The affects that our informants expressed marked shifts within and between cycles, suggesting that the framework used here might be useful for studying social movements more broadly.

Expansive Learning in Herttoniemi Food Cooperative Alternative food movements aim at sustainable forms of production and consumption. At the same time, they have great difficulties to sustain themselves in the face of capitalist market pressures. The challenge is to learn to survive without succumbing to the logic of commoditization and capitalist value creation. Wilson (2013) characterizes these movements as autonomous food spaces situated in the broader context of communities seeking to build relationships of mutual aid and non-market exchanges.

The Herttoniemi Food Cooperative was founded in 2011 and is located in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland. The cooperative has about 200 members. It rents a field 30 kilometers from the center of Helsinki where a hired farmer produces vegetables for the cooperative. During the harvest season, vegetables are transported weekly from the field into the city to distribution points where members can come and pick up their share. Despite its growing popularity, the continuity of the food cooperative is constantly at risk. Small-scale ecological farming is very labor-intensive and must compete with the heavily subsidized farm products of large food store chains.

In this section, we use the theory of expansive learning for a detailed analysis of a systematically documented, one-year long process of collective learning in the food cooperative. The board of the food cooperative faced a recurring crisis with the financial sustainability of the cooperative. The standard solution thus far had been to organize annual drives to recruit new members whose membership fees would rescue the cooperative. As we started our fieldwork, the board members were becoming increasingly

154 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI uncomfortable with these repeated pressurized efforts to grow. A collective search for a new way out of the situation was emerging.

In 2015-2016, we followed and recorded 27 successive board meetings in which the challenge and potential solutions were discussed.

Theory, Data and Methods Expansive learning is triggered and driven by contradictions that demand solutions within and between the activity systems involved. Figure 4, based on our ethnographic fieldwork and historical interviews, presents a working hypothesis of the contradictions in the activity system of the board of the food cooperative.

Figure 4.

Working hypothesis of contradictions in the activity systems of the board of the food cooperative.

The two-headed lightning-shaped arrows in Figure 4 represent the key contradictions. The primary contradiction is located within the object: the board must ensure the production and delivery of sufficient amounts of diverse produce of good quality, and it must ensure that there are enough members whose membership fees cover the costs of production. This has proven very difficult, and the outcome has been a recurring shortage of money needed to pay the farmers’ salary and other expenses. This primary contradiction generated two secondary ones, namely between the object and

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 155 the rules of balanced budget on the one hand, and between the object and the instruments (land, labor, money) on the other hand.

The present analysis is focused on the board of the cooperative. The data consist of 26 audiotaped regular board meetings of the food cooperative, a videotaped planning day meeting of the board (counted as the 27th board meeting), three general meetings of the members of the cooperative, nine interviews of key persons of the cooperative (members of board and a main farmer), and archival materials of the food cooperative (including minutes of the board meetings). The discussions in the 26 regular meetings and in the planning day of the board were analyzed as primary data for this chapter. The recordings of the meetings were transcribed by a professional transcriber and translated from Finnish by the authors.

Our research project arranged an intervention in the form of a planning day for the board of the cooperative on November 14, 2015. Juhana Rantavuori served as facilitator on the planning day.

The purpose of the planning day was to find solutions to the challenges related to the financial sustainability of the cooperative. On the planning day, the main problems of the cooperative were defined, solutions to these problems were modeled, and a plan to implement the new solutions was formulated. After the planning day, the board continued to discuss and develop further the solutions identified.

Expansive learning generates tangible solutions that transform the collective activity in question. Tracing the emergence of such tangible solutions is critical for the understanding of the process and consequences of expansive learning. Complex problems and challenging contradictions often generate partial solutions that gain in impact as they come together and reinforce one another. In the discussions of the board, we identified five tangible solutions created by the participants for controlling the complex challenge of financial sustainability.

Besides tangible solutions, expansive learning typically leads to generative conceptualizations aimed at explicating the expanded object in the making (Engeström & Sannino, 2012). Conceptualizations may be initially enacted without verbal labels, or they may be named and verbally explained before practical implementation (Engeström, 2013). Conceptualizations may be regarded as partial

156 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI stabilizations of the newly emerging expanded object (Cussins, 1992).

As the first step in our analysis, the transcripts of all the meetings were divided into conversational episodes based on their substantive topical contents. As a second step, episodes containing tangible solutions to the financial viability challenge of the cooperative suggested by the participants were identified. As a third step, expansive learning actions were identified, following the procedure described in Engeström, Rantavuori & Kerosuo (2013). As a fourth step, discursive manifestations of contradictions were identified, following the procedure described by Engeström & Sannino (2011).

As a fifth step, we searched and identified attempts at integrative conceptualizations in the data. Two integrative conceptualizations were identified. The first one—which we call “degrowth”—was focused on the idea of giving up efforts to increase the size of the cooperative. The second one—labeled “network of cooperatives”— was focused on multiplying food cooperatives similar to the Herttoniemi one and nurturing cooperation among them.

As a result of the five steps, the phases and the structure of the entire learning process of the board of the food cooperative were constructed and examined in the light of the theoretical model of the expansive learning cycle.

Overview of Expansive Learning in the Herttoniemi Food Cooperative Figure 5 displays the temporal evolution of each one of our categories of analysis over the course of the 27 meetings of the board of the cooperative. The categories of analysis are: 1) tangible solutions; 2) expansive learning actions; 3) manifestations of contradictions; 4) integrative conceptualizations. The evolution of each category is presented in a separate line chart.

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 157

Figure 5.

Evolution of frequencies of tangible solutions, expansive learning actions, discursive manifestations of contradictions, and integrative conceptualizations in the meetings of the board of the cooperative.

The tangible solutions that were discussed most extensively were Reducing the workforce and Better organization of work in the field (347 times in 21 meetings) and Limiting the number of members (304

158 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI times in 24 meetings). Reducing the variety of species of plants and the field area was also discussed relatively often (177 times in 14 meetings). Changing the yearly rhythm of the cooperative (74 times in 13 meetings) and Purchases from outside (58 times in six meetings) were discussed less frequently.

The most common expansive learning action was examining, which occurred 380 times in 15 meetings. The second most common learning action was analyzing, which occurred 265 times in 14 meetings. The action of implementing occurred 96 times in 12 meetings, and the action of modeling occurred 38 times in five meetings. The action of questioning occurred in six meetings (ten times) and the action of reflecting on the process occurred once in one meeting.

Dilemmas were the most common discursive manifestation of contradictions; they occurred 114 times in 24 meetings. Conflicts were the second most common type of manifestation (62 times in 15 meetings). Double binds occurred 15 times in six meetings, and critical conflicts occurred three times in two meetings.

Integrative conceptualizations of degrowth occurred 35 times in eight meetings. Integrative conceptualizations of the network of cooperatives occurred six times in one meeting.

In Figure 6, the evolution of the total number of occurrences in each category of analysis is summarized in one chart. A significant number of tangible solutions occurred in most of the meetings—that is, in 19 meetings there were at least ten episodes where one or more tangible solutions were discussed. In two meetings, the number of episodes in which solutions were discussed was noticeably high: in meeting 18, tangible solutions were discussed in 200 episodes; in meeting 14, tangible solutions were discussed in 138 episodes. A similar pattern may be observed in expansive learning actions. In 18 meetings there were at least ten episodes in which one or more expansive learning actions were taken. Expansive learning actions occurred most frequently in meetings 14 and 18. Discursive manifestations of contradictions occurred at least ten times in eight meetings. Again, discursive manifestations of contradictions occurred most frequently in meetings 14 and 18.

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 159

Figure 6.

Evolution of frequencies of main types of each analysis category over the course of the meetings of the cooperative.

Based on the quantitative findings shown in Figures 4 and 5, meetings 14 and 18 seem to have played decisive roles in the expansive learning process of the board. The combined number of occurrences in all categories of analysis was exceptionally high in these two meetings: 286 in meeting 14 and 391 in meeting 18. For understanding what made these meetings so intense, more detailed qualitative analysis is needed.

Tangible Solution 1: Limiting the Number of Members In meeting 11, a recurring problem was raised: the cooperative had not reached the membership target which meant that it lacked funding needed to carry out the plans for farming. This represents a learning action of questioning, as the practices aimed at constant growth of membership were challenged.

Member 5: We can’t be every year at the end of June our hair standing up, asking “Do we get enough members?”

In the next speaking turn, a reason for this problematic situation was seen in the high membership turnover. A third of the members used to quit annually, confronting the cooperative with the difficult task of recruiting new members. This represents the learning action of analyzing.

160 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI Member 6: Because the problem is that we have a high turnover, and probably we can’t get rid of it.

Also, two manifestations of contradictions were identified in the episode. First, a conflict occurred as the current practice was criticized. Then, a double bind was expressed: “probably we can’t get rid of it.”

In the planning day (meeting 14), the participants decided that there was no need for the cooperative to grow anymore.

Member 6: …it is that the explicit goal would be to stay small, particularly not to grow over 200. Put a limit to the growth. Our point of departure would be more to try to encourage to generate sister organizations, some kind of networked model. It means that Finland would be full of cooperatives, each with 150–200 households.

This was identified as the learning action of modeling a new solution. The envisioned solution offered a way out from a deadlock situation where there was a constant need to recruit new members in the cooperative.

In meeting 18, a problem occurred. Calculations of a current budget showed that the fees from merely 200 members would not accrue enough income to cover the costs of the cooperative. This was identified as the learning action of examining. It seemed that the cooperative was back in a deadlock. Recruiting more than 200 members was considered too difficult, but 200 members were too few to cover the costs of the farming. As a discursive manifestation of contradictions, this was a double bind. This solution of limiting the number of members was not sufficient for solving the persistent discrepancy between incomes and expenses. Nonetheless, this solution gave a new perspective on the functions of the cooperative: growing the number of new members every year would not be a sustainable practice and new ways to support the continuity of the cooperative should be considered. Recruiting new members continued and in meeting 24 it was concluded that the cooperative had reached its new, limited membership target.

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Tangible Solution 2: Reducing Workforce and Better Organization of Work in the Field The solution of reducing the workforce and improving the organization of work in the field was discussed in 20 meetings of the board. In the first meeting, the participants realized that the current plan of work in the field was unsustainable. This represents the learning action of questioning. Without more paying members, the cooperative would have to reduce the workforce.

Member 5: We can’t afford to keep five paid workers in the field if we have so few members who have paid the harvest fee.

In meeting 11, the board discussed how planning the work in the field could be easier if the number of the paying members were known beforehand. This represents the learning action of analyzing.

The board encountered here the paradox that plans for the field work had to be prepared before the board knew if there were enough paying members to enable the intended farming. This represents another double bind where all the alternatives seem equally unacceptable.

Member 5: If we could find out as early as possible the number of members who will participate in next year’s harvest and then plan the farming accordingly.

Member 6: Then it would be a quite small number of people, about 100.

Member 3: But then we can’t do any farming that makes any sense.

During the planning day (meeting 14), an important principle was formulated. The starting point of farming should be disposable income. This represents the expansive learning action of modeling.

Member 1: We should not first plan what to grow and then say: “We need three farmers.” Our starting point should be the disposable income for farming and then we’d plan the farming accordingly.

This led to actions of examining the new model of planning the farming according to disposable income. During meeting 15, it was suggested that only a part of the field would be farmed and most of the products would be purchased from outside. In meeting 16, the

162 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI members of the board wanted the farmer to provide a plan, outlining how a reduction of the workforce and plant species could be carried out. The farmer said that such a plan was not easy to make.

In meeting 18, members of the board had to admit that it was impossible to change this farming activity into a profitable business.

In meeting 19, it was decided that the growing season would end in mid-November and the length of the main farmer’s work contract would be seven and a half months. This learning action of implementing led to a partial solution to the problem. However, the board still faced the same persistent dilemma: The income from the members did not cover the costs of farming.

Tangible Solution 3: Reducing the Variety of Species of Plants and Field Area The solution of reducing the number of plant species and the field area was discussed in 12 meetings. The farmers’ wish to grow a large variety of species of plants was challenged in meeting 6. This learning action of questioning revealed a conflict between the preferences of the farmers and the board regarding the appropriate number of plant species.

Member 1: If we have little time, little money, then we must give away some of the species. Farmers want to have so many different sorts of plants.

This comment instigated a discussion on how some of the vegetables delivered to the members were very small. Some members asked whether it was really necessary to grow so many different varieties of plants. Questioning turned into analyzing.

In meeting 14 (planning day), it was decided—an action of modeling—that the cooperative would give up plants that demand a lot of work, produce only little harvest and are vulnerable to the Finnish climate. In meeting 18, through actions of examining, it was confirmed that the cooperative will grow easier species and cut off those too laborious to farm. The board reached a consensus that there should be 10 species fewer than during the previous year.

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 163 Member 5: We try to use easier varieties and less of those which are laborious.

Member 7: Was it our aim that there would be 30–35 species? We will cut off 10 species.

At the end of the meeting, the farmer agreed to implement this decision and promised to plan the farming accordingly.

Tangible Solution 4: Changing the Yearly Rhythm of the Cooperative The solution of changing the yearly rhythm was discussed in ten meetings. In the first meeting, it was proposed—an action of modeling—that invoices could be sent to members already at the beginning of the year. The cooperative would know earlier which members will participate in the next year’s harvest.

Member 6: We can send the invoice at the turn of the year. Then the members must inform before the end of the year whether they are going to pay the harvest fee for the next year.

In meeting 14, the idea of sending invoices earlier was accepted through actions of examining. In meeting 17, an implementation decision was made to send invoices to the members on the very next day. In the same meeting, during a rare moment of reflecting on the process, the board concluded that its actions were appropriate in the current situation.

Member 5: This is the first time we are doing things in a normal way. There is no harm to our reputation if we are strict. I think it has been the other way round. There’s been more criticism that we have been negligent.

This tangible solution was developed without taking the learning actions of questioning and analyzing. Exceptionally, the process began with the learning action of modeling a new solution.

164 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI

Tangible Solution 5: Purchases from Outside The solution of purchasing products from other farms was discussed in six meetings. It was first mentioned and analyzed in meeting 6 as a back-up plan for situations where the field of the cooperative could not produce enough harvest for the members.

Member 6: If the summer is going to be bad…

Member 1: … then we can buy harvest from another farmer

In meeting 14 (planning day), a model was suggested for buying vegetables from outside suppliers, as this could be cheaper than producing them within the cooperative. This “mixed-model”, as the board members called it, would combine crops from two hired farmers with outside purchases.

Interventionist: What if you have one worker less? Then you would have two farmers. And you will buy the rest. Would it be possible?

Member 6: This would be the model, I think.

In meeting 19, there was a discussion about which products the cooperative should outsource. A decision was made to delegate this choice to the farmer. The final decision about carrying out purchases was left open, and this subject was not discussed anymore in the subsequent meetings.

Integrative Conceptualizations In meeting 14 (planning day), it was suggested in an action of modeling that a network of cooperatives could make it possible to keep each cooperative unit small and avoid indefinite growth.

Member 5: The idea is that the food cooperative as its own unit, as a core unit, stays small. But one can do networking in a way that there are several [cooperatives] which are similar.

In actions of examining the model, this idea was concretized by setting a limit to the number of members.

Member 5: With our current resources, 210 [members] is too much.

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 165 In meeting 17, it was realized that reducing the number of paying members would create the dilemma that income would not suffice for covering the salaries of the workers. This examination revealed that implementing the idea of the degrowth was not a simple or straightforward process.

Member 5: It’s a big job to try to get 210 harvest shares, members. On the other hand, the amount of money we need to pay the salaries of workers so that we can harvest all the crops, this is plus minus zero.

Member 6: All the time like a knife on the throat; do we have enough money?

In meeting 18, through examining the model, a decision was made to stop expanding the number of members to keep the production and workforce constant.

The solution of setting a limit to the number of members recurred in every episode related to the conceptualization of degrowth. The solutions of reducing the number of plant species and the workforce, changing the yearly rhythm and outsourcing some of the production also recurred in several episodes related to the concept of degrowth. The emerging concept of degrowth played an important role in the development of the new overall model of the cooperative, as several solutions became interconnected through it. The concept of network of cooperatives offered a possibility to expand the activities without abandoning the idea of degrowth.

The idea of networked cooperatives occurred only in the discussions of meeting 14 (planning day). At the beginning of the meeting, the researcher-interventionist introduced an interactive timeline tool for the participants. One member suggested that this tool could make visible the functions of the cooperative for those who would like to start building their own food cooperative. This represents the learning action of modeling.

Member 6: If we want to spread our activity, and there is someone somewhere in Finland who wants to start this kind of [cooperative], and then they are interested to go through the minutes of the meetings and think about if they have the resources and whatever is included in this. So, it’s good that all the information is there [in the timeline].

166 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI The idea of a network was developed further in small group discussions. Instead of growing, the food cooperative could encourage others to start their own cooperatives and give them advice on how to do it. In the end, there would be a network of several cooperatives supporting one another and each cooperative could specialize to produce certain products.

Discussion The expansive learning cycle of the Herttoniemi cooperative focused on the actions of questioning, analysis and modeling before the planning day. After the planning day, the actions of examining, implementing, and reflecting on the process occurred more frequently. Overall, the learning process of the board seemed to follow the logic of an expansive learning cycle.

Dilemmas were the most common manifestations of contradictions. Dilemmas were dispersed fairly evenly over the course of the meetings. Conflicts were also quite common in the learning process, especially between meetings 11 and 19. After that, conflicts did not appear anymore. This indicates that after the board was able to make important decisions, the implementation process was more equanimous and straight-forward.

Five different tangible solutions were identified in the data, each of them trying to tackle the problem of the financial viability of the cooperative. We were able to trace complete or nearly complete expansive learning cycles for each solution. The overall expansive cycle thus took the shape of five parallel and coalescing sub-cycles.

The emerging concept of degrowth played an important role as a binding integrative factor between the tangible solutions. The concept of network of cooperatives remained more isolated from the solutions and its integrative potential remains to be realized.

The solution of limiting the number of members was implemented successfully. The board could consequently reduce the workforce and the number of plant species, as well as reorganize the work in the field. The planning of farming was based on

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSIVE LEARNING 167 disposable income, and by sending the invoices to the members at the beginning of the season the annual rhythm of the cooperative was changed.

Conclusions Expansive learning may be triggered and fostered through any component of the activity system, depending on the historical circumstances. In PAH, the key entry point that we focused on here was the subject—the person or family threatened and mistreated by the banks. In Herttoniemi, the key entry point that emerged in the analysis was the object—the vegetables and the land that made possible their production.

Correspondingly, different intermediate conceptual instruments and methods of data analysis are appropriate in different expansive learning processes. In PAH, the analysis of affects was of central importance as it allowed tracing the transformation of the individual subject Mireia. In Herttoniemi, tangible solutions and integrative conceptualizations were important enrichments that allowed tracing the steps of a long collective effort of reconceptualizing the object of the activity. However, this is not to say that the question of objects in PAH or the issue of subjects in the Herttoniemi food cooperative is not important.

In both PAH and Herttoniemi, the durability of the expansive learning process was founded on continuous re-experiencing of contradictions, both as systemic forces and as personal or collective conflicts of motives. This “push” factor was organically connected to the “pull” of actionable and implementable models for the future of the activity. Mireia’s new activity of mutual aid (Figure 3) and the Herttoniemi board members’ model of degrowth combined with networked cooperatives were enacted utopias (Sannino, 2020).

Models of the new activity may be seen as a way to anchor the expansive learning “upward”. In both PAH and Herttoniemi, the process also needed to be anchored “downward” in practical embodied actions and artifacts. Mireia became involved in doing assembly presentations and working with workshops, social media,

168 YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM, MIKAEL BRUNILA, JUHANA RANTAVUORI and her own posters and notes for leading the assemblies. The Herttoniemi board began to implement the new model while they were still formulating it, first by changing the yearly rhythm and sending invoices to members.

The regularly repeated, carefully prepared, and scripted meetings were a particularly interesting feature in both cases. These meetings have qualities that remind us of Pickering’s (1995) notion of mangle of practice. In a mangle of practice, the initiative rhythmically shifts between the human operators and their instrument, generating almost machine-like momentum and continuity, a ‘dance of agency.’ The PAH assemblies and the Herttoniemi board meetings had this kind of suction, they drew the members into intense joint efforts time and again.

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Revolution as Learning: Tahrir in Terms of Activity and Instruction Brecht De Smet

Introduction Some ideas continue to reverberate in your thoughts, well after you have encountered them. In contrast to a sudden Aha-Erlebnis they subtly restructure the ways in which you approach your research.

Reading Vygotsky on child development has had such an effect on my research into social movements and the specific case of contemporary social struggles in Egypt. In this chapter I explore some of Vygotsky’s insights and how they can be translated to the field of social movement studies. I take the Egyptian January 25 uprising of 2011 and the occupation of Tahrir Square as a case study to illustrate their relevance. In order to translate Vygotsky’s views to the field of social movement studies I have drawn on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Despite its interdisciplinary ambitions, CHAT’s historical roots in child development and education and its later spillover into the domains of cultural psychology, pedagogy, communication studies, and anthropology have prevented the paradigm from being used extensively in social movement studies, which developed as a separate strand within the social sciences.

Hence, throughout my research I have used the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci as a political ‘translator’ of Vygotsky’s pedagogy, by connecting cultural-psychological concepts such as social situation of development, interiorization, prolepsis, neoformations, and zone of proximal development (ZPD) to key Gramscian notions such as intellectuals, hegemony, and (philosophy of) praxis (De Smet, 2012; 2014; 2015).

A key thread in my research program has been the age-old question of how the principle of self-emancipation can be ethically and practically united with the need for efficient organization and leadership. Johnson has defined emancipation as: “a political 173

174 BRECHT DE SMET process in which the oppressed author their own liberation through popular struggles which are educational, producing a cognitive liberation, and instrumental, enabling the defeat of their oppressors” (Johnson, 2001, p. 98). The idea that the only genuine form of emancipation is self-emancipation goes back to the founding principles of the First International in 1864 “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” (IWA, 1864). Real emancipation, i.e., liberation resulting in autonomy and self-determination, entails the development of the capacity of a group to emancipate itself—empowerment, but in its most radical sense.

Yet throughout history the developing social division of labor created a chasm between theory and practice, mental and material labor by separating a category of professional “ideologists” from the rest of society (Marx and Engels, 1976). The development of modern education and science in capitalist modernity brought Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the Second International, to the conclusion that the idea of socialism had to be brought to the workers from without. Workers were reduced to the passive receivers of complex “theory” from bourgeois intellectuals. As some of the great “thinkers” and “leaders” of the socialist movement emerged from the ranks of the (petty) bourgeoisie, how could and should they assist the development of the workers’ movement without appropriating it for their own benefit? From the perspective of the self-emancipation of the working class, what forms of “external” instruction and assistance were necessary, desirable, and ethical?

Furthermore, the question of leadership, theory, and authority did not only flow from a social division of labor—class boundaries separating worker activists from petty bourgeois leaders; within the workers’ movement itself there was a technical division of labor between organizers and organized, leaders and led. As Johnson suggests: “there are two reasons why we can’t get rid of leadership so easily: unevenness in the consciousness of the emancipatory subject, and the organised opposition of the adversary” (Johnson, 2001, p. 113). The question of leadership is entwined with, on the one hand, the problem of power, and, on the other, processes of education, learning, and instruction. I start by explaining how traditional

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 175 social movement theory is limited in explaining protests and other forms of struggle in terms of a development that is taking place, in which means and ends are fluid and change place. Within every social movement there is an implicit “pedagogy of revolt” at work, which governs relations of assistance, learning, and power between internal and external forces. I argue that Vygotsky helps us to understand this dynamic. By relying on Gramsci, I am able to extend Vygotsky’s argument pertaining to child development to the domain of social movements. I illustrate this logic of learning and development by the revolutionary episode at Tahrir Square in 2011. I discuss the role of instruction, assistance, and solidarity in the development of social movements as a system of activity—and how researchers themselves are connected to this process of learning.

CHAT and Social Movement Studies Evald Ilyenkov suggested that: where different stages in the development of science deal with different historical stages in the development of the object […] the history of science itself serves as a kind of mirror for the history of the object. Changes in the science reflect major historical changes in the structure of the object itself […] [T]his is […] characteristic of the social sciences. (Ilyenkov, 2008, p. 205)

Clearly the development of social movement studies is entangled with the development of capitalist modernity and that of the social sciences in general. The first sociologists considered social movements predominantly in negative terms, as “crowds” or “mobs” that were characterized by non-institutionalized, irrational, and often violent collective behavior (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991, pp. 10-11). Social movement studies emerged as a distinct research domain in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe when violent street mobilizations threatened the stability of bourgeois democracy. Research into these movements remained rooted in a psychological analysis of the motives and behavior of “the masses” (e.g., Freud, 1921), although others (e.g., Reich, 1933) paid more attention to social and political-economic dynamics as well.

176 BRECHT DE SMET During the “Fordist” 1950s and 1960s, political and trade-union militancy in the West became largely institutionalized and pacified, making way for different forms of contention such as student, women, civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and LGBTQ+ activism. These “new social movements” necessitated novel perspectives on the formative causes and developmental dynamics of collective action. Progressive academics conceived of social movements no longer in terms of unruly crowds, but as actors building a democratic civil society—or they even upheld them as a new “subject of history” in a period when the working class had supposedly become “bourgeoisified” (e.g., Marcuse, 1964, p. 36). Research into social movements shifted to the study of collective identities and resources of mobilization. Charles Tilly introduced the notion of a “repertoire of contention”: a “whole set of means [a group] has for making claims of different types on different individuals” (Tilly, 1986, p. 2). Authors such as Sidney Tarrow (1998) emphasized the role of “political opportunity”—the vulnerability or resilience of a system to change from below—in explaining the success and failure of social movements. In opposition to the interwar theories of irrational collective behavior “mature” social movement theory (SMT) conceived of actors as rational agents mobilizing resources to attain their political goals (e.g., McCarthy and Mayer, 1973).

From the 1980s onward SMT scholars tried to incorporate the role of the “cultural”, the “ideological”, and the “pedagogical” by borrowing concepts from symbolic interactionism and frame theory (Johnston, 2009, p. 3). However, frame theory has been criticized for being an apolitical, fragmentary, and superficial conception of how thoughts and artifacts mediate collective agency. Echoing Ilyenkov’s observation, Oliver and Johnston concluded that it is a “marketing approach to movement mobilization [that] arises precisely when marketing processes have come to dominate social movements” (Oliver and Johnston, 2000, p. 47). Furthermore, while Touraine’s (1985), Melucci’s (1989), and Jasper’s (1997) emphasis on collective identity formation addressed the lack of meaning, emotion, and agency in existing models, they moved away from the conception of a social movement as a collective means to change

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 177 society. Throughout the last two decades the theories of political opportunity, repertoires of contention, resource mobilization, and so on, have been consolidated as the field of Contentious Politics (e.g., McAdam et al., 2001).

Social movement theorization in the 1970s and 1980s was influenced not only by the dynamics and issues that arose from within the new social movements themselves, but also by new perspectives such as rational choice theory, neoclassical economics, social constructivism, and wider paradigms such as (post)structuralism and postmodernism. While this opened up unexplored avenues for social movement research, a negative side-effect was its “narrowing of the understanding of movements and their place in large-scale processes of social change” (Barker et al., 2013, p. 5).

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the emerging neoliberal narrative partly absorbed, appropriated, and pacified the anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical, and anti-bureaucratic agency that the 1960s movements represented (Barfuss, 2008; Fraser, 2013; Harvey, 1990).

With the emergence of alter-globalization movements (movements that resisted the social consequences of global financialization and the liberalization of trade and antiwar protests in the 1990s and 2000s), the Arab uprisings, and other local and global forms of mass struggle against political and social inequality and environmental collapse, there came a new necessity to understand social movements not only as communities, but as key actors in changing the current order. Leading social movement studies scholars such as Della Porta (2015) have argued to ‘bring capitalism back’ in the debate, to look beyond social movements in the Global North, and to widen the disciplinary horizon of SMT. Already at the start of the 1990s Eyerman and Jamison (1991) observed that: “There is something fundamental missing from the sociology of social movements, something that falls between the categories of the various schools and is left out of their various conceptualizations” (p. 45).

SMT lacked a conceptualization of movements as “processes in formation” and “forms of activity” with a “cognitive praxis” (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991, pp. 2-3). The notion of a social “movement” not only implies a simple “being in motion”, but also an internal

178 BRECHT DE SMET development from a certain phase, level, or state towards another one: “existing forms of activity and organization (and of passivity and disorganization) need to be understood as transitory, inwardly contradictory and open to large- or small-scale transformation” (Barker et al., 2013, p. 15). Through a struggle to change the status quo, social movements (and their participants) are themselves transformed, as in Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach. Moreover, social movements are specific forms of human activity, of people ‘coming together’ and collaborating around shared goals. Finally, social movements are sites of learning, of the production of practices, knowledge, and self-consciousness.

It is only logical then that in the past two decades heterodox social movement scholars have been drawn to Vygotsky and, to a lesser extent, activity theory (Cox, 2019). For the purpose of this chapter, I will merely remark that most of these authors tend to focus on individual and collective learning processes that take place within social movements rather than conceiving of social movements as a collective subject that goes through a learning process; a system of activity that transforms and develops itself.

The Revolution at and beyond Tahrir Already in the decades leading up to 2011, Egyptian workers, farmers, villagers, and political activists were involved in social movements that prepared the way for the January 25 uprising (Abdelrahman, 2014; Alexander and Bassiouny, 2014; Beinin, 2015; De Smet, 2015). Their protests remained limited in their geographical scope and political aims, until they acquired a qualitatively new dynamic when the masses entered the streets during the eighteen day-long uprising in 2011. The January 25 protests started as a series of demonstrations, advancing moderate, reformist demands toward the government. Despite the importance of protests happening in Alexandria, in provincial cities and in the countryside, the centre of gravity of the insurrection was undeniably Tahrir (Liberation) Square in the heart of Cairo. When street fights broke out between protesters and the Central Security Forces (CSF) riot police,

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 179 demonstrators began to occupy the square to protect themselves against tear gas and rubber bullet attacks.

On Friday January 28, social meetings after the Friday midday prayers morphed into political mass demonstrations, which turned into huge street fights with the police. The revolutionaries conquered spaces that were formerly controlled by the state, making room for governing structures that developed organically from below. From a means to an end occupation became a goal in itself: Tahrir “became the epicentre of a revolution. Protesters not only transformed it—they were themselves transformed by their presence in it. Tahrir became a revolutionary organism unto itself” (Khalil, 2012, p. 5). Artists, actors, cartoonists, musicians, and singers joined the occupation (Antoon, 2011). A revolution, however, is not only a “festival of the oppressed and exploited” (Lenin, 1962, p.

113), but first and foremost a confrontation with state power. The so-called ‘Republic of Tahrir’ (Khalil, 2012) began to organize itself: committees defended, cleaned, entertained, and governed the square (Bamyeh, 2011; Schielke, 2011). Leaders consisted of both experienced activists and capable men and women who emerged from within the ranks of protesters. The ‘18 Days’ transformed Tahrir into a ‘city of tents’ where injured protesters were treated, clothes were washed, toilets and stations for charging mobile phones were installed, nurseries were set up, and so on (Keraitim and Mehrez, 2012: 28). The occupation of Tahrir was a prefiguration, a social laboratory, of new ways to govern, create, live, and love (Van de Sande, 2013).

The uprising left the Egyptian state disorganized, and on the backfoot—but not defeated. The CSF was replaced by military troops who dug in and protected important sites of state power, such as parliament, the Maspero Radio and Television building, the presidential palace, and the stock exchange (Khalil, 2012: 208).

While the Tahrir occupiers began to create their own structures of self-governance, they did not dismantle the existing state structures. Revolutionaries still hoped that President Hosni Mubarak would simply resign like Ben Ali had done in Tunisia. Revolutionary occupation, which had been the motor of the revolution in the

180 BRECHT DE SMET previous days, now became a bottleneck for its further development. Despite its evocative prefigurative activity, the emerging collective will at Tahrir lacked necessary structures for coordination and direction (Chalcraft, 2020).

The ‘soft’ military coup that ended the 18 Days opened up a period of counter-revolution ‘in democratic form’ (De Smet, 2020), The military wanted to re-establish state power, but gradually, without provoking another uprising. The top-down process of ‘democratization’ was based on military-supervised elections, plebiscites, and constitution-making, which were deployed as weapons of restoration and state rebuilding. Forms of popular, direct democracy that were still being molecularly prefigured within the enduring demonstrations, occupations, and workplace protests were excluded from the military-led process of democratization, which emphasized procedure and representation within the narrow sphere of the state. This severed the connection between political and social struggles, and thus between liberal-oriented middle classes, industrial workers, peasants, and the urban poor. Strikes and social protests were reprimanded for being fi’awi (factional) and opposed to the national good (Sallam, 2011). The failure of the revolutionary camp to organize itself led to the foregrounding of the conflict between the military regime and the Islamist wing of the counter-revolution, and eventually Field Marshal’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s coup in 2013, which ended the revolutionary momentum.

Development of Tahrir What immediately strikes the observer of the “18 Days” is the “spontaneousness”, the “radicalization”, and “transformation” of collective action. When protesters first came into the streets on January 25, they did not expect that they would end up occupying Tahrir Square, calling for the fall of the regime, let alone defeating the feared police in the streets. Traditional social movement theory comes across as too static to grasp the process. “Mobilized resources” became new goals and achieved goals were turned into

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 181 new resources (De Smet, 2012). Historical collective identities—especially the notion of “the people”—were constantly rearticulated and charged with agency through mass activity from below (De Smet, 2016; Ismail, 2011). The unfolding process has to be understood in terms of a development that takes place.

Similar to Piaget, Vygotsky argued that the formation of a child’s mind moves through a number of stages in relation to a specific social context (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 198). Vygotsky’s novel approach was to conceive of the relation between the child and their social situation as a predicament from which the child has to emancipate itself. The child can only liberate themselves from the restraints of their social situation by making a development: “by a qualitative transformation of their own psychological structure and the structure of their relationship with those who are providing for their needs” (Blunden, 2010, p. 154). In other words, the child has to create those mental functions—neoformations in Vygotsky’s jargon (Roth, 2016)—which allow them to make a qualitative development that overcomes their condition. The conflict between—on the one hand—the child’s desire and will to overcome their current social situation of development, and—on the other—the constraints of this condition, is the ‘motor’ behind the creation of new psychological functions and mental development as a whole (Vygotsky, 2012). Vygotsky conceptualized this contradiction as a situation of crisis, induced by the need for a certain neoformation while this function has not yet been developed.

The concept of a social situation of development can be related to the notion of “opportunity” in SMT. SMT scholars have defined political opportunities largely in terms of systemic vulnerability— for example, because of decreasing state coercion, increasing political pluralism and/or elite opposition, which creates a feeling of collective strength, encouraging activists to start protesting (McAdam et al., 2001). The uprising in Tunisia, for instance, starting from December 2010, could be understood as a “political opportunity” for Egyptian activists to start mobilizing on the streets in January, 2011. While the political opportunity framework can help to explain, post festum, why protests emerged at a specific moment

182 BRECHT DE SMET in time, it conceives of these opportunities only as external to the emerging social movements, and not in terms of moments of structural crisis that provoke internal developments.

Vygotsky rejected the nativist argument that a priori structures allow a child to learn and perform certain tasks: not already existing capacities enable performance, but the activity of performance itself constructs capacities (Ratner, 1991; Wertsch, 2007). Simply put, a child develops speech by trying to speak. But how do “external” performances create “internal” competences? Vygotsky observed that: “An operation that initially represents an external activity is reconstructed and begins to occur internally” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 56).

The notion of interiorization or “ingrowth” posits that every neoformation appears twice: first “inter-mentally”, then “intra-mentally” (Bakhurst, 2007; Daniels, 2007; Meshcheryakov, 2007). Performance is not simply “copied” into an existing plane of consciousness as a competence, but it is precisely this interiorization of activity that is the process that develops such a mental plane. Activity is transformed during its interiorization, becoming similar yet different to its original objectification (Bakhurst, 2007).

Vygotsky’s observation that “performance creates competence” is echoed by Draper’s observation that “emancipation is…a process of struggle by people who are not yet ’ready’ for emancipation, and who can become ready for emancipation only by launching the struggle themselves, before anyone considers them ready for it” (Draper, 1971, p. 95). When Egyptians began protesting on January 25, they were performing revolutionary acts before they were conscious that what they were doing was revolutionary. They were not consciously prefiguring a new society in Tahrir, but came to realize that their material activity already imagined such an ideal form. Moreover, the whole of outward-oriented performances—the creation of organizational, deliberative, communicative, and artistic structures, signs, and leaders—were originally produced as external weapons in the struggle against the state. However, these tools and signs or “resources”, in the language of SMT, also turned inward, organizing and structuring the collaborative activity of the protesters, turning them into a collective subject. The occupation of Tahrir transformed an outward-oriented defense mechanism

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 183 against the state into a “collective identity” and a system of activity.

From the activities of protesting and occupying emerged prefigurative structures that in turn started to organize these mobilizations as a political subject.

Occupation as Neoformation Vygotsky observed that for each stage of development, one neoformation and one “line of development” play a central part in developing the entire mental structure. Central or leading neoformations and lines of development of a previous phase continue to exist in the current stage, but lose their decisive role in the maturation of the whole (Vygotsky, 2012, pp. 114-6). For example, the development of memory as a psychological function pushes forward the maturation of the whole mental structure, opening a new social situation of development for the child. In early school years the child “thinks” by remembering. When this line of development has run its course, another neoformation takes over this leading role, and, continuing the example, the child remembers by thinking. This also means that “learning” is different from “development”. Learning to ride a bike at a certain age may push forward the whole motoric development of the infant, whereas mastering the same activity at a later age in adolescence merely adds a new competence to the repertoire without the same developmental impact.

Similarly, during the 18 Days, the occupation of Tahrir played a central part in developing the whole revolutionary movement, serving as a national focus and imagination, and changing its social situation by forcing the state on the defense. However, the “Republic of Tahrir” and the activity of occupation itself lost their developmental function when the movement’s social situation transformed. In the end it was not the occupation of Tahrir that led to the fall of Mubarak, but the convergence of two other movements: demonstrations moving from Tahrir to sites of state power such as parliament, the presidential palace, and the army barracks; and the expansion of strikes and labor militancy, which posed a direct threat to the economic structure of the regime. When Mubarak was

184 BRECHT DE SMET forced to step down by the military thousands of euphoric protesters remained overnight in the square to celebrate his departure.

Even though revolutionary change had been embodied by the living activity of Tahrir, it was not articulated in a proper political programme with clear demands. Protesters faced the challenging task of grasping the meaning of their own revolutionary prefigurative activity, which went far ahead of their verbally expressed demands, as well as understanding the political and economic structures of the ‘system’ they wished to overthrow. To them the revolutionary uprising had been a collective perezhivanie, an emotional experience that directly emerged from their social situation (Vygotsky, 1994; Veresov, 2017). Once Mubarak had been removed the regime was no longer represented in a tangible, concentrated form, and its attributes—corruption, violence, authoritarianism, poverty, and so on—became much more difficult to criticise concretely. The military’s “soft coup” cut right through the protesters’ collective process of learning and organizing (De Smet, 2020).

The central neoformation of occupation had to be replaced by one that connected the experience of the square to the struggles waged by the masses outside its narrow borders. Tahrir had to turn itself inside out. Its revolutionary prefiguration had to be shared with neighborhoods, villages and workplaces all over Egypt, and turned back into outward-oriented tools to defeat state power. This process of expansion and integration had already started during the 18 Days. Tahrir had become a meeting and discussion place for protesters between different Cairene neighbourhoods, provincial cities, and rural areas. Representatives of the four new independent trade unions established the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU). Farmers who were not able to return home when the regime closed the roads joined in the protests at Tahrir (El-Nour, 2015: 203). When protesters returned to their own social spaces, they transposed their prefigurative experience to these local sites of protests, sharing and diffusing the experience of Tahrir.

However, these connections were anything but systematic and coherent.

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 185

Instruction and Intellectuals One of the most celebrated features of the January 25 revolt was its “spontaneity” and its “leaderlessness”. Indeed, the revolutionary process was not designed by any party or network of activists, but sprang from the activity of the people itself. However, when spontaneity is put in opposition to organization and leadership, the concept acquires a mystical character: thousands of people do not come together and sustain their protest for days, without any form of organizational mediation (Levant, 2012). Scholars such as Chalcraft (2012) underlined that the process was ‘leaderful’ rather than leaderless: that there were many local coordinators and organizers in the movement. This observation brings us back to my original problematic of leadership and social movements. Vygotsky’s notion of instruction is key in understanding social movements as developing systems of activity (De Smet, 2012; 2015).

Whereas Piaget argued that instruction should closely follow the autonomous and “natural” path of ontogenesis, Vygotsky argued that instruction had to lead development. There is a difference between the degree to which a child can solve a problem on their own, and their capacity to accomplish a task in collaboration with others (Vygotsky, 2012). Vygotsky described this tension as the zone of proximal development (ZPD): “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). The role of instruction in the learning process is to motivate development: to assist the child in creating those neoformations that allow them to overcome their social situation of development. Vygotsky emphasized that instruction is only effective when it is “proleptic”; when it anticipates or imagines competence through the representation of a future act or development as already existing: “the only good kind of instruction is that which marches ahead of development and leads it; it must be aimed not so much at the ripe as at the ripening

186 BRECHT DE SMET functions… [I]nstruction must be oriented toward the future, not the past” (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 200).

One could say that Vygotsky reiterated in the pedagogical domain Plekhanov’s and later Lenin’s adage that “the agitator should always be one step ahead of the masses” (e.g., Harding, 2009, p.

171). Meshcheryakov (2007) further distinguished between two forms of proleptic instruction: autoprolepsis and heterolepsis. Autoprolepsis is a form of self-instruction, whereby a child casts themself in the role of a future, more developed self. A classic example from ontogenesis is that of a child playing adult roles, projecting themself into a more advanced stage of their own trajectory. Heterolepsis, on the other hand, is the interpellation of a potential competence in a child by another agent. For example: a parent speaking to their young child as if they were a more mature conversation partner, even though they have not yet (fully) developed the capacity to engage in such a dialogue. The potential development of the child is called into being by the proleptic instruction of the parent— as long as it operates within the ZPD. Proleptic instruction also plays a crucial role in collective learning processes as it leads development: it assists in creating those neoformations that allow social movements to overcome their social situation of development (De Smet, 2015). As a concept, autoprolepsis highlights the agency of protesters to teach themselves through engaging in the activity of protesting and the pedagogical relation between experienced and neophyte activists. Heterolepsis, on the other hand, underlines the relation between participants in a system of activity and “external” instructors. Naturally, translating the ontogenetic notion of heterolepsis to social movement studies should avoid paternalist and elitist interpretations of emancipation. Protesters are not children—although children can be protesters—and a political “pedagogy” is qualitatively different from a typical teacher-student relation. To counter this paternalist approach, I have deployed Gramsci’s concept of “intellectuals” as a mediating term to understand instruction and assistance in social movements and the workers’ movement in particular.

Similar to Marx and Engels in “The German Ideology”, Gramsci posited that intellectuals do not constitute an autonomous

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 187 group, but that each class produces specialists in the domains of production, culture, and politics. Gramsci distinguished between organic and traditional intellectuals. Organic intellectuals are tied to the class from which they historically emerged (Gramsci, 1971, p.

5). Their instruction is autoproleptic, pushing forward the development of the whole group by moving “ahead” of the actual developmental level of the movement. Conversely, those specialists whom a rising class finds already existing, as relics from a previous social form, are traditional intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 6-7). From the point of view of the working class, the organic intellectuals of the bourgeoisie are traditional intellectuals, who can be won over.

Marx and Engels observed that “communist consciousness…may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class” (Marx and Engels, 1976, p. 52).

Non-proletarian intellectuals—politicians, journalists, lawyers and artists—may be drawn to the workers’ movement. Due to their position within civil and political society, they have developed directive, cultural, and technical capacities to assist the development of the workers’ movement and are able to offer heteroleptic instruction. Through the media progressive journalists share local class experiences with the whole workers’ community and other subaltern groups. Labor lawyers defend labor cases, which become precedents for the struggle of other workers. Artists, cartoonists, and writers universalize class subjectivities in an aesthetic form. Philosophers and academics combine disjointed stories of worker protests into a coherent narrative of class struggle. At Tahrir, experienced political and NGO activists, lawyers, journalists, famous actors, and singers mingled with organizers and leaders who emerged organically from the struggle. Both types of intellectual assisted the development of Tahrir’s system of activity, but not always in adequate and ethical ways.

Forms of Instruction Loosely following Gramsci, I distinguish three archetypical forms of instructive assistance. Firstly, directive instruction or leadership.

188 BRECHT DE SMET Leaders act as nodes in a system of activity as their individual and collective decisions mediate the movement of the whole. Leadership can be formal and hierarchical, or informal and loose, like the ‘leaderfulness’ of the 18 days. Gramsci considered the political party, in its broadest, non-electoral sense, as the highest form of leadership precisely because of its ability to intervene, lead, and educate as a collective will (Thomas, 2015). The challenges to and deficits of popular leadership in the Egyptian 25 January uprising have been discussed in detail (Abdelrahman, 2014; Beinin, 2015; De Smet, 2020). Bayat (2017) even goes as far as calling the uprising a ‘revolution without revolutionaries.’

Secondly, technical instruction mediates the procedural and organizational production and reproduction of the movement as a cohesive system. Activists shared their expertise in organizing demonstrations and sit-ins; football ultras advised demonstrators on how to deal with tear gas and the police; tech-savvy sympathizers supported the social media tools that served as platforms for information, communication, and organization.

Thirdly, cultural instruction mediates the creation and circulation of tools and signs. While directive instruction allows a group to move, cultural instruction allows it to develop. Artists, educators, philosophers, writers, and so on articulate the worldview and aesthetics of the movement. They integrate everyday experiences with historical traditions, texts, and signs, and imagine future lines of development. Gramsci famously claimed that: “all men are philosophers” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 323), in the sense that everybody engages in what he called spontaneous philosophy: the real, living, organic base from which advanced forms of consciousness are developed. Every thought already contains a conception of the world, but in spontaneous philosophy this is a “disjointed and episodic” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 323) awareness. Spontaneous philosophy is the gelatinous and ever-changing collection of everyday conceptions of social reality by that actor. It contains common sense worldviews and folkloristic forms of knowledge. Its flexibility allows for improvisation: “One’s conception of the world is a response to certain specific problems posed by reality, which are quite specific and ‘original’ in their immediate relevance” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 324). At

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 189 the same time, it impedes coherence of thought. Spontaneous philosophy is an uncritical consciousness, but it is not a “false” consciousness or “self-deception”. Often there is a kernel of political “good sense” that grants agency (Chalcraft, 2020). Similar to Gramsci, Vygotsky developed the notion of an “everyday” or “spontaneous” line of conceptual development that embedded the formation of concepts within the direct experience and lifeworld of the child.

A child first acquires everyday concepts within the setting of personal experience “which is immediate, social, practical activity as against a context of instruction in a formal system of knowledge” (Daniels, 2007, p. 31). There is an organic and experimental connection between thinking and activity (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 205).

Opposed to “spontaneous philosophy” Gramsci posited “philosophy proper”, and, in a similar vein, Vygotsky differentiated between “everyday” and “scientific” lines of development. For Gramsci, philosophy is the “criticism and the superseding” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 326) of everyday modes of consciousness: “To criticize one’s own conception of the world means therefore to make it a coherent unity and to raise it to the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 324). The key qualities of philosophy are “homogeneity”, “coherence”, and “logicality”. Vygotsky, for his part, conceived of the “scientific” line of development, in which concepts are “emancipated” from the “unique spatiotemporal context in which they are used” (Wertsch, 1985, p.

33). Scientific concepts are acquired through explicit instruction; they are culturally transmitted, systematized, and consolidated “everyday” concepts: “the absence of a system is the cardinal psychological difference distinguishing spontaneous from scientific concepts” (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 217).

Gramsci and Vygotsky argued that both modes of thinking are equally relevant and valuable. Vygotsky suggested that: “The strength of scientific concepts lies in their conscious and deliberate character. Spontaneous concepts, on the contrary, are strong in what concerns the situational, empirical, and practical” (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 206). Moreover, the relation between the two modes is characterized by a continuous exchange and interpenetration:

190 BRECHT DE SMET “Scientific concepts grow downward through spontaneous concepts; spontaneous concepts grow upward through scientific concepts” (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 205). This is precisely the function of cultural instruction in social movements: to “translate” a coherent worldview into everyday language while raising “good sense” to the level of critical thinking.

In the case of Egypt in 2011, “common sense” often entailed a mix of contradictory judgements and feelings. An example of “good sense” was the spontaneous and primarily moral critique of “the regime” as corrupt, criminal, and greedy (Chalcraft, 2020).

Cultural instruction had to assist in turning this popular sentiment into a scientific concept of the regime as a specific political and economic structure, a critique of the relations of power that would unmask the interests of the military, the Brotherhood, and other forces that claimed leadership in the post-uprising struggle for hegemony.

Adequate Cultural Instruction Leaning on Vygotsky I discern three forms of cultural instruction: connection, projection, and integration (De Smet, 2015). With regard to concept formation in ontogenesis, Vygotsky observed a transition from syncretism to thinking in complexes. Put simply, this developmental process contains the connection of objects on the basis of objective bonds and relations, based on association, function, sequence, and so on. Transposed to the domain of social movements, connective instruction brings experiences and “repertoires of action” from different spatial and temporal instances of struggle together, allowing protesters to share their views, tools, and methods. It mediates the horizontal, reciprocal learning process between activists, enabling them to instruct one another and push their mutual development forward. Such cultural instruction may also function as an auxiliary reservoir of the collective memory of a social movement, transferring past experiences, stories, and strategies to a new generation. For example, on Tahrir Fuad Negm and Shaykj Imam’s old protest songs of the 1970s were performed and adapted to the new revolutionary context (Antoon, 2011).

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 191 However, connection cannot replace direction: “there is no hierarchical organization of the relations between different traits of the object… the structural center of the formation may be absent altogether” (Vygotsky 2012, p. 124). Connective instruction creates relations between protesters, but it does not organize them as a cohesive whole, as a social force. This characterized the cycle of labor contention in Egypt that started in 2004 and peaked in 2012 and 2013. However, despite the founding of two independent trade union federations most workplace protests remained not only organizationally, but also discursively disconnected from these ‘structural centers’ (Abdalla, 2020). Their demands often did not go beyond immediate wage and working conditions issues.

Vygotsky noted that the “bridge” between thinking in complexes and thinking in real concepts was the pseudoconcept: “the appearance of a concept that conceals the inner structure of a complex” (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 127). When faced with a ready-made concept, children cannot directly absorb it, but they build complexes around it: “What we see here is the complex that, in practical terms, coincides with the concept, embracing the same set of objects. Such a complex is a ‘shadow’ of the concept, its contour” (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 130). Translated to the field of social movements projective instruction helps protesters to generalize their struggle from the local, particular to the national, general level. During the January 25 uprising protesters chanted “the people want the fall of the regime”. They identified themselves as “the people”, imagining themselves as a coherent and cohesive subject even though they were far from being organized as such a force. They were projecting the shadow of a popular collective will that still had to be concretely realized. Moreover, during their occupation of Tahrir protesters were practically projecting—prefiguring—the contours for a new kind of society that still had to be worked out. Finally, Vygotsky observed that: When the process of concept formation is seen in all its complexity, it appears as a movement of thought within the pyramid of concepts, constantly alternating between two directions: from the particular to the general, and from the general to the particular. (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 152)

192 BRECHT DE SMET Moving this insight to the process of sociogenesis, this form of cultural instruction can be described as integration. Integration represents the intertwining of everyday and scientific concepts of society: the development of good sense into a critical theory of society and, conversely, the materialization of this theory into practice. For Gramsci, the role of the political party was key in this process of collective, dialectical pedagogy. It was precisely this (f)actor that was absent during the Egyptian revolution. There was only a brief moment in which, for example, the independent trade union movement adopted a politicized “collective action frame”, bridging the distance between their particular economic demands and general demands for democracy and social justice put forward by the feeble Egyptian leftist parties (Abdalla, 2020).

Vygotsky’s method of “double stimulation” helps us to understand how instruction can be adequate: “the problem is put to the subject from the start and remains the same throughout, but the clues to solution are introduced stepwise” (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 112).

Likewise, the Egyptian revolutionaries faced their predicament— social exploitation and political domination—long before the January 25 uprising, but they could not immediately jump to a solution, they had to work their way ‘through’ the problem. The 18 days of the 2011 uprising represented a generative process of self-emancipating practices and ideas. Tahrir was but a moment in the development of a revolutionary movement. This development was determined by the specific solutions it offered for overcoming the obstacles that were thrown into its path. With every forward step in the struggle against the regime, Tahrir was itself transformed. The square’s prefigurative structures arose when it began to interiorize its outward-oriented tools, signs, and strategies. The new forms of organization, community, and decision-making protesters developed became ends-in-themselves, prefiguring an alternative society.

Vygotsky argued that instruction only leads (to) development when it fuels the maturation of the central neoformation and line of development of a subject at a certain point in its sociogenesis. There is only so much distance a subject can cross between its actual and potential development within a specific phase of its trajectory: the

REVOLUTION AS LEARNING 193 zone of proximal development (ZPD). For each concrete episode in its development, there is a “‘zone’ that delineates possibilities and constraints of further development depending on the actual circumstances” (Daniels, 2007, p. 209). The difficulty for a democratic and organic political pedagogy is to recognize the lower and upper boundaries of proleptic assistance, while avoiding the extremes of voluntarism (ignoring the upper limits of the ZPD) and tail-ending (ignoring the lower limits of the ZPD). This is probably the crux of any serious emancipatory politics: how to recognize, support, and improve those structures and concepts within social movements that push their development to their most advanced level. Voluntarism leads to a vanguardism that might be theoretically correct, but loses its organic connection with the everyday line of development and alienates itself from the existing system of activity. Tail-ending, on the other hand, merely echoes the actual or previous developmental level and follows or lags behind the movement. Unfortunately, in the Egyptian context “traditional intellectuals” either ran too much ahead of the real movement, isolating themselves from the masses, or lagged behind it, holding them back (De Smet, 2015).

The weakness of revolutionary leadership and the problematic common sense about the character of the Armed Forces in 2011 (Chalcraft, 2020) led to the abandonment of prefigurative politics and the need to construct a political center, able to offer adequate directive, cultural, and technical instruction to really transform society and politically and socially emancipate the masses.

Conclusion I argued that activity theory and more specifically Vygotsky’s understanding of learning processes and instruction are relevant to the study of social movements and revolutionary episodes such as Egypt’s 2011 uprising. Evidently one cannot simply transpose a theory of child development on the domain of social movement research. As a collection of individuals social movements are a fundamentally different type of actor than a maturing person. There is an interaction between the separate but entangled development of

194 BRECHT DE SMET the movement as a whole and the diverse developments and lifeexperiences of its individual participants—the element of perezhivanie—which should be investigated more in detail.

Here I suggested that Vygotsky’s work can lead us to a concept of learning and development that is useful to comprehend the life processes of social movements as a whole. I deployed Gramsci as a “translator” of Vygotsky’s ontogenetic insights into the domain of social protests and struggle. This approach pivots social movement theory away from static categories such as opportunity structure, repertoires of action, resource mobilization, and collective action frame to a more dynamic and genetic understanding of social movements as developing systems of activity, the motor of which are collective learning processes. Investigating these learning processes allows us to appreciate the possible directions, limits, and tasks for instruction and assistance of movements. This immediately posits the social scientist as an element of the equation instead of a neutral, outside observer. By exploring and imagining future lines of development, you offer proleptic cultural instruction, contributing to the actual prefiguration of a movement.

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Reduction Redux: Humanity as Code Bonnie Nardi Einstein said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Theories aiming for elegance and economy sometimes overshoot these aspirations, ending in reductionism that obscures rather than clarifies. In this chapter I examine two scholarly projects, one in philosophy and one in ecology, that attempt to explicate who we humans are, but infringe Einstein’s wisdom through sincere, but, in my view, misguided concepts. In philosophy, Rosi Braidotti’s disenchantment with the self-important “rational man” of the Enlightenment engenders a move toward the “posthuman,” that is, a being intimately linked in egalitarian relations to “intelligent,” “self-organizing” matter grounded in “informational codes.” In ecology, William Rees attempts to explain humans’ failure to act in the face of our self-inflicted environmental crisis by asserting a genetic propensity to “maintain the status quo” of growth. Both projects, from very different academic traditions, consult the genes for inspiration. In doing so, they locate the essence of what it means to be human at such low levels they are beyond our capacity to intervene. In the face of this bleak implication, I explore alternatives, specifically, recent work in cultural-historical activity theory that guides our attention to historically changing human activity with its complex consequences and potentials. As we struggle with the legitimate and crucial concerns raised by Braidotti and Rees, we must make things only as simple as they can be, grappling with culture and history as shaping forces. It is there that we can locate the gumption for change, with the possibility of addressing forces less simple than biocodes, but more pliable.

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200 BONNIE NARDI

Who is Rosi Braidotti and What is She Worried About?

Let us begin with Braidotti, a philosopher who teaches at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Professor Rosi Braidotti is a classically trained scholar, cultivated in the manner of old school European humanities traditions, deeply conversant with their rich intellectual heritage. She combines a tinge of the privilege of such a background (e.g., a degree from the Sorbonne) with the pugnacious underdog spirit of a feminist who feels the injustices of being a woman and refuses to backburner them to get on with life. I will examine the ideas from Braidotti’s book The Posthuman (2013), considering in particular Braidotti’s ideas about “smart matter” with its “informational codes.”

Braidotti’s book arises from a set of intellectual engagements she has woven together in a slightly rambly but always fascinating fashion. Braidotti’s key “engagements,” as I will call them, because they are passionately defended arguments, not mere themes, are: (1) her indignation at inequality and lack of respect for difference, (2) concern with the role of the humanities in civic life, and, (3) a version of posthuman philosophy that finds unity in all living matter by virtue of its “intelligent codes.” I will discuss why I think the text fails Einstein’s test while at the same time providing a provocative work that forces us to reexamine who we are as humans— surely a test of interesting philosophy.

The first engagement driving Braidotti’s work is outrage at the inequalities and presumptions of the “Eurocentric paradigm” (as she calls it) of male dominance, colonialism, and arrogance toward Others. Braidotti personifies this paradigm with a sort of avatar she names “Man,” whose features are “Eurocentrism, masculinism, and anthropocentrism” (p. 50). Man, a creature of the Enlightenment, is visually epitomized in da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man (whose image Braidotti cannot escape, discovering it everywhere, even on a Starbucks coffee cup). Man’s legacy is one of “unfulfilled promises and unacknowledged brutality” (p. 51). Man exemplifies “Europe’s imperial, fascistic and undemocratic tendencies” (p. 52).

Though thoroughly European herself, Braidotti speaks

REDUCTION REDUX 201 disparagingly of, for example, “Europe as the alleged centre of the world” and Europe’s “self-appointed missionary role” (p. 53).

The second engagement is a “profound sense of civic responsibility for the role of the academic today” (p. 10), wherein Braidotti champions, without noticing any irony, Euro-American inflected institutions: “schools, universities, books and curricula, debating societies, theatre, radio, television and media programmes…websites and computer environments” (p. 11). She describes her “dream” of “producing socially relevant knowledge that is attuned to basic principles of social justice, the respect for human decency and diversity, the rejection of false universalisms; the affirmation of the positivity of difference; the principles of academic freedom, antiracism, openness to others and conviviality” (p. 11).

So far, I see little in these two engagements that does not conform to the progressive political and philosophical zeitgeist of the 20th and 21st centuries. Braidotti says that her “dream” is a “posthuman” aspiration because it “avoid[s] the twin pitfalls of conservative nostalgia and neo-liberal euphoria,” although I don’t think it differs much from regular old progressive politics. She speaks of the need for “ethical evaluation, political intervention and normative action” (p. 51)—tried-and-true progressive stances.

Braidotti begins to delineate the distinctiveness of her view when she gets to the third engagement: “looking affirmatively toward new alternatives [for the posthuman subject]” centered on “sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire as core qualities [of the posthuman subject]” (p. 26). This ideal posthuman subject dwells within the context of a “post-nationalist approach” (p. 52); Braidotti is appalled at the way refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers have been treated with “xenophobic rejection” in Europe, giving rise to her belief that nationalism is ethically morbid, decrepit (ibid.). She looks instead to a new “cosmopolitanism and the forging of panhuman cosmopolitan bonds” (p. 53) such as “the cultural inter-mixity already available within our post-industrial ethno-scapes and the recompositions of genders and sexualities” (p. 54). This is familiar stuff but writ large: the variably sexualized, affective, empathetic subject is to cease being the Other, morphing to the panhuman

202 BONNIE NARDI successor to Vitruvian Man. I found myself drawn to this audacious alternative (while thinking it would have been more radical to include age, that last bastion of Otherness, as a core feature).

In sketching the type of posthuman she wants us to become, Braidotti is just warming up to throw out the first pitch (maybe a curveball!), upping the ante of culture/gender/affect/desire to something considerably larger: “vitalist materialism,” an idea derived from Spinoza and embedded in Braidotti’s signature claim that “matter is one, driven by the desire for self-expression and ontologically free” (p. 56, emphasis added). Matter, i.e., that stuff that everything is made of, possesses, in Braidotti’s eyes, “desire for self-expression” and freedom. I will say right here that I do not have a way to grasp that an eggplant or an earthworm desires self-expression, but we’ll return to this puzzle later.

One key purpose of Braidotti’s engagement with her version of Spinozan monism in which we all—“animal, vegetable, viral”— merge (p. 193) is to abolish “violent dialectical oppositions” (p. 56).

Marxian approaches are thus out for her because of the dialectics.

They are further spurned because they “arrogantly…place Man at the centre of world history” (p. 23), failing to “avoid anthropocentrism” (p. 56). This baby-and-bathwater move seems almost tragically misguided to me, depriving Braidotti of necessary analytical tools with which she might look more deeply at Man and how he got to be the sort of fellow he has historically been and how we can change the chaos he has wrought. That chaos didn’t just happen— the racism, colonialism, imperialism, the unacknowledged brutality: these are specific, analyzable processes of time and history.

Here I wish Braidotti had been more like one of her influences, Foucault, who never shied away from talking about “mechanisms,” forcing us to look under the hood at exactly how and why some particular social engine is running.

Adopting a monistic stance is a bold, eye-catching gambit, yet ultimately unsatisfying as it “simply collapse[s] the subject/object duality by subjectifying the object,” as Alex Levant explains (2017).

It is not clear why all living matter deserves the status of subject— but monistically speaking, even the “viral” does. Apart from cloudy logic, the bigger problem is that in order to tackle the first two

REDUCTION REDUX 203 engagements, monism necessitates a flipping back and forth between two registers of speech—one for humans and another for everything else. Braidotti does so throughout the text, without comment, taking Man (surely a distinctly human subject if ever there was one) to task, retailing his patently human sins, yet insisting that matter is one. I cannot imagine how studies of the humanities, and the importance Braidotti attaches to them, are anything but a product of humans.

Braidotti asks us to repudiate Man but to “trust women, gays, lesbians and other alternative forces” (p. 96). Apart from rejecting such an appeal for its essentializing, as a member of this group myself, I’m far from ready to trust me/us—we are heir to all the same dysfunctions of the larger culture and political economy that pervade society. We don’t stand outside that culture and economy— how could we? To say that we have been placed outside culture (by Man or anyone or anything) would be to deny us subjectivity. This view, in addition to downgrading us, would give far too much power to Man, who does not have it. If we behave as though he does, that’s reckless, in my view.

Braidotti’s idea that “matter is one” can be read in different ways: as a hope (maybe we will behave better toward the natural world if we accept some communion with it); as a sound rebuffing of that lousy boyfriend, Man, putting him in his place by turning our attentions to o(O)thers; or even as religious animism. I was surprised that Braidotti believes that spirituality can provide some of the healing we need. But her “post-secular” stance (p. 35) is consistent with rejection of the Enlightenment with its “critique of religious dogma and clerical authority” (p. 32). She declares that a postsecular approach “makes manifest the previously unacceptable notion that rational agency and political subjectivity can actually be conveyed through and supported by religious piety and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality” (p. 35). A turn to “piety” seems sentimental to me, or perhaps an act of desperation. In the monistic register Braidotti adopts, the pithy vague abstractions native to mysticism (“matter is one”) in which all religions trade (“God is Love” in Christian traditions, “jihad” as spiritual striving

204 BONNIE NARDI in Islam, “God is One” in Judaism) are little better than conventional religion with its abject failures. It is hard to trust these aphorisms (which one is right?) and the post-secular approach seems anachronistic.

I have taken some pains to outline Braidotti’s first two engagements, and to mention her affinity for spirituality (a lesser motif in her book but an important one), so that I can more clearly develop the argument that the self-organizing or “smart” structure of all living matter, which is supposed to make it kith and kin to us humans, does not bear the weight of the patently human phenomena Braidotti spends so much time writing about. She speaks freely of xenophobic rejection, cultural inter-mixity, political intervention, debating societies, Man, piety, spirituality…and much more, without committing these deeply historical phenomena to a historical philosophy or acknowledging that they are human productions (not the productions of animals, vegetables, or viruses).

Braidotti is not the first to seek elegance in flat, ahistorical narratives, accounts that boil down almost to imagistic models. Actornetwork theory’s conceit of reducing everything (human and nonhuman) to “actants” simplifies and beautifies in its way, but doesn’t do the theoretical job, soon requiring the taking of conceptual liberties. Latour (1992) declared that, “There is no structural difference between large and small actors, between a major institution or a single individual or even a thing as mundane as a door opener” (May and Powell, 2008 p. 145), but this assertion left little scope for the empirics of the famous studies of scientific laboratories which could not get by only on actants. As it happened, Man himself arrived to fill the actant-gap. As a Machiavellian prince! Or maybe it was not really fortuitous; a figure like the Prince underscores how right Braidotti is that Man, that ubiquitous masculinist fabrication, is a core imaginary in European thinking. Man appears not on a coffee cup this time, but in a fashionable theory that seemed so contemporary on its surface. Machiavellian princes were constructed as the innovators, managers, and politicians of science and technology (Callon, Law, and Rip, 1986). The constraints of the textureless network of interchangeable nodes (“no structural difference”) were set aside without comment to explain who assembled the networks,

REDUCTION REDUX 205 enrolled other actors in projects, and designed and forwarded agendas. As Reijo Miettinen remarked dryly, “These principles [generalized symmetry and Machiavellianism] contradict each other” (1999, p.172).

In my view, Braidotti should recognize that crumpling everything down to “smart matter” (or actants, or what have you) deprives us of a way to hold Man, and the powerful in general, to account for their projects and agendas. If we’re all just smart matter, desirous of self-expression and living in freedom, why should we punch back (as Braidotti vigorously does) against colonialism, neoliberal euphoria, racism, unfulfilled promises, or any of the rest of it? Leigh Star recognized the detached apolitical stance of science and technology studies as they took their cues from actor-network theory (1990) and critiqued the field’s neglect of power relations.

Despite good intentions, Braidotti succumbs to the seductions of philosophy constructed around an object built on a single striking image (“matter is one”). Levant observed of the material turn in social theory that, “This fetishism of the commodity produces a conception of the material world as smart, at the same time as it occludes the impact of human activity on that world” (2017). In other words, it is not that matter is immanently smart, but that we have so saturated it with human intention and action that we “may be conflating the object form with the commodity form” (Levant 2017).

We are not looking at “matter” but at our own image of matter as commodity, unable to escape our immersion in capitalist culture.

I am not sure how we can speak of phenomena such as inequalities on the one hand, and cultural diversity on the other, without dialectical analysis, (not to be confused with dualism as Levant 2017 cautions). Rather than merely being “distinctive features of our times,” phenomena such as science, technology, and the very idea of cultural diversity, flow from particular historical circumstances. Historical changes in political economy must be examined; we cannot assert, out of whole cloth, “distinctive features” as a deus ex machina (See Ekbia and Nardi 2017 for analysis of how capitalism and technology co-develop).

206 BONNIE NARDI I have been vague so far about what Braidotti says about why matter is smart. She’s a bit vague herself, but references Guattari: “Why is matter so intelligent, though? Because it is driven by informational codes, which both deploy their own bars of information, and interact in multiple ways with the social, psychic and ecological environments” (Guattari, 2000, p. 60). Living matter (animal, vegetable, viral) would imply genetic codes which are indeed infused with information. But how exactly do these codes interact with social, psychic, and ecological environments? This is the black hole created by Braidotti’s eschewing of theories such as Marxism and deep ecology, and not even considering theories such as culturalhistorical activity theory or ecological economics which have been laboring in these theoretical vineyards for a long time.

To summarize, Braidotti lucidly critiques the putative “progress of mankind through a self-regulatory and teleological ordained use of reason and of secular scientific rationality allegedly aimed at the perfectibility of ‘Man’” (p. 37), consistent with progressive perspectives developed in the past decades. She is less persuasive when squashing that science and rationality, along with a whole host of other distinctively human projects and patterns (racism, spirituality, debating societies, women, gays…), down into unified coded matter.

Let us now turn to a less challenging text, yet one that is potentially more influential with its gloss of scientific objectivism.

Braidotti’s construction of the posthuman subject remains a bit misty (try giving it as an elevator pitch), but William Rees has achieved headline-clarity—his arguments can easily be reeled off by the common person. I want to say that I admire Rees and am deeply sympathetic to his concerns about the environment. I cite his scientific work in other contexts. But in “What’s Blocking Sustainability?” he makes things simpler than they should be.

Who is William Rees and What is He Worried About?

Professor William Rees is an ecologist at the University of British Columbia. He is a celebrated Canadian scientist, having garnered

REDUCTION REDUX 207 many awards and honors such as Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Rees has fostered important policy conversations, bringing ecology to issues of governance and public awareness. His worry is sustainability—why is it that although we have done the science and know what we face regarding the environment, we humans are headed for disaster? Rees is as passionate about “the loss of ecosystem integrity”—i.e., the substrate on which the whole human ballgame depends—as Braidotti is about injustice toward Others. Rees asks the sensible and essential question: “Why is the global community so far unable to respond proportionately to the scale of the [ecological] crisis?” Rees has been following ecological decline for decades and he is stupefied at the human response. The work I analyze here is his widely read 13-page paper, “What’s blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition, and denial” published in the Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy Journal in 2010.

Some key differences distinguish Rees’s work and Braidotti’s.

Each belongs to a completely different academic community, and has probably never heard of the other. Braidotti’s style allows for playful ambiguity while Rees exercises the precision of the classically trained scientist. And yet, to cut to the chase, they both turn to genetic codes in articulating and defining what is at the core of humanity. Rees blames our sustainability problems on “innate tendencies” including denial (p. 15) and a “competitive drive” to consume habitat and resources. He claims that we “habituate to any level of consumption (once a given level is attained, satisfaction quickly diminishes) so the tendency to consume and accumulate ratchets up.” We are “unsustainable by nature” (p. 13), refusing to “face up to basic facts of human nature” (p. 15). “[U]nsustainability is an inevitable emergent property of the systemic interaction between contemporary technoindustrial society and the ecosphere (p.

13, emphasis in original).

Rees says that we are unsustainable by nature, but he does allow for human history and culture, speaking in his own two registers. (Rhetorically, it’s really hard to write as though people don’t have history as Braidotti and Rees demonstrate!) Although we supposedly habituate to any level of consumption, Rees cites the work

208 BONNIE NARDI of John Stutz who has documented that “99.9% of human history has been no-growth history” (p. 15, cited in Stutz, 2010). Although Rees doesn’t mention it, he must know that Stutz emphasizes that, “Birth rates have always been far below biological potential” (see also Polgar 1972)—hardly consistent with a “competitive drive” to reproduce that “depends on competitive superiority at high population densities under conditions of resource scarcity” (p. 15). Stutz points out that what he calls “explosive economic growth” only got going around 1820, when the industrial revolution kicked into high gear. He notes that most economic growth is, in fact, “packed into the period since 1950.” Apparently, it’s not necessarily our 2–4-million-year history as a species (during which time the biocodes developed) that is to blame for unsustainability, but rather events situated within a couple hundred years, with many key events occurring within living memory, if you start from 1950.

Thus, I am puzzled by Rees’s tale of genetic inevitability, his use of a “lens of human evolutionary biology” (p. 15) rather than a lens of human history to locate our current woes, given that he is well aware of historical patterns. He explains that “humanity’s technological prowess and society’s addiction to continuous material growth reinforce the biological drivers, making the problem particularly intractable” (p. 15). Like Braidotti who demurs from entertaining historical drivers and mechanisms, Rees’s phenomena such as “technological prowess” and “addiction to material growth” simply appear, without theoretical grounding. But how and why do we have so much technology? And why do we have the particular technologies we have? (I still don’t have that robot to clean my house.) Why are we “addicted” (a pointless word implying helplessness and failure) to material growth? Notions such as prowess and addiction are snatched from the zeitgeist without contextualization and explanation. Again, there are theories that could be of use: Marxian theory, cultural-historical activity theory, ecological economics, and deep ecology.

Saying that genetic codes result in intractable problems seems defeatist to me. Who can argue with the genes? Who can do anything about them? Genetic engineering is a fantasy; we have no idea how to rewire ourselves, and even if we did, unless we deliberately

REDUCTION REDUX 209 created posthuman zombies, there is no telling what kinds of unpredictable, uncontrollable mutants might appear. It seems incredibly unlikely that we are going to discover specific manipulable genes that could, for example, be reset to flip off the “competitive drive” to use up resources. Even something as simple as eye color has been shown to be the result of complex, unpredictable genetic interactions (my own particular shade of green eyes appears nowhere else in the family tree and my descendants have continued riffing on the color in new ways).

Let me be clear that Rees does not suggest genetic engineering as a solution. But it’s an obvious techno-fantasy based on his insistence that genetic codes make unsustainability nearly inevitable. On the social side, Rees blames “policies”: growth has become “the ‘supreme overriding objective of policy’ in many countries around the world” in the last few generations (p. 17). Policy is a vague term, leading us once again to ask: where do policies come from and how do they articulate with the culture and political economy? Rees is an ecologist so it might seem unfair to suggest that he be conversant with the theories I have mentioned. But he invokes notions such as policy outside his area of study, so it seems he can reasonably be expected to be accountable. In an ideal world Rees would collaborate with someone like Herman Daly, a prominent ecological economist, whom he does cite.

Rees’s own work on “ecofootprinting” is excellent. As he notes, “Ecofootprinting is a uniquely powerful sustainability indicator. Unlike monetary measures such as GDP per capita that have no theoretical limits, ecofootprints can be compared to finite supplies” (p. 18). Ecofootprinting has given us a way to speak cogently about physical planetary limits. But the human activity that is producing particular ecofootprints requires further theorizing—this is where Rees struggles to explain what’s happening. It is odd that there is no critique of capitalism or industrialization in his analysis since he points in several places to the work of Stutz who demonstrates the human pattern of economic growth very clearly: it has resulted from industrialization.

210 BONNIE NARDI Rees continues on in the paper to a discussion of the dominance of brain chemistry in producing our current problems, and even, rather unbelievably, to an argument that we don’t really have consciousness. “Humans think of themselves as exemplars of conscious self-awareness—after all, we ‘live’ in consciousness conferred by the human neocortex. It seems, however, that we greatly overestimate the role of mindful intelligence while remaining paradoxically unaware of unconscious influences over individual and group behavior that spring from the lower brain centers” (p. 19).

Reducing human activity to biology robs us of ways to think about the profound changes we must empower ourselves to instigate. It is almost as though we are locked in a Stockholm syndrome with capitalism/industrialization; though we see the problems, as Braidotti and Rees do, we adopt perspectives that make it impossible for us to challenge power structures we have come to identify with and do not wish to confront. Or maybe there’s no Stockholm syndrome; maybe we grasp what the culture will bear and don’t stray too far afield.

What’s a Better Way to Think about The Issues?

Reductive, innatist accounts of what it means to be human are ascendant at the moment. I have chosen two such accounts to discuss in this chapter—both well-intentioned, righteously critical of many aspects of contemporary society, and the life work of highly cultivated scholars. The bottom line of both accounts, calculated with very different methods yet producing remarkably similar results, is that we should fix our attention on genetic codes to understand what is happening in today’s chaotic, unjust world.

Luckily, these reductive narratives have some worthy foes. I have mentioned alternatives to genetic fixations including Marxian accounts, cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), ecological economics, and deep ecology. I cannot tackle them all here, but will single out CHAT as the most fully elaborated theory that strikes back at the reduction of humanity to biology and biocodes. Built on the basis of careful theory about human development and the mind,

REDUCTION REDUX 211 CHAT has been developed and refined for decades, and is continually evolving. In particular I will examine two recent works: Anna Stetsenko’s The Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky’s Approach to Development and Education (2017), and Igor Arievitch’s Beyond the Brain: An Agentive Activity Perspective on Mind, Development, and Learning (2017). In a nutshell, these books argue for the agentive person as the focal theoretical concept, and argue against reducing persons to either biocodes or passive followers of cultural programs.

Braidotti and Rees put possibilities for struggle and change out of our hands, at least within their theoretical formulations. Rees is a bit more upfront about it; when he looks at who we are genetically, things don’t look good, and he says so frankly. Braidotti keeps up a cheery demeanor, and often says she is optimistic and feels “positive.” Yet she does not actually explain how it is that we are going to manipulate or alter or influence the “informational codes,” the “smart matter,” we are all made of in order to move to the empathetic posthuman subject she outlines. It seems to me such alterations would require genetic engineering (unless we wait a few billion years for (unpredictable) evolutionary processes). The interactions-with-assemblages process remains completely unspecified.

More likely, the changes we need require intense political activity. Braidotti’s analyses do not invite or energize such options.

Indeed, it struck me as surprising that the seriousness of the problems she retails were met with such “positive passions” (p. 134).

Rees’s somberness at least bespeaks the collision course we are on even though I argue for different theoretical framings. At the end of his paper Rees suggests that the only certain way to address poverty while avoiding irreversible overshoot and ‘irretrievably mutilating’ our planetary home is to rejig the growth machine and to implement a world program for income/wealth redistribution.

I completely agree! But with Rees’s reductive emphasis on genes, inevitability, and the “basic facts of human nature,” he paints us humans into a corner. In that corner, the idea of income redistribution, which is actually doable and is being widely discussed, appears unrealistic, improbable, a kind of desperate

212 BONNIE NARDI afterthought to an argument that has emphasized how determinative genetic codes are.

Cultural-historical activity theory has been quietly laboring since the 1920s to produce sophisticated, non-reductionist accounts of the human mind and our expansive human potentials. One of the key principles of CHAT is that, as individuals, we develop and change through interaction with the world (other people, tools, nature, built environments…). The idea of development sounds so simple, so obvious, so uncontroversial! But when placed within the context of the innatist theories, it feels absolutely radical. We are not just the product of genes; we are actors constantly striving, struggling, learning, changing, growing, developing. Stetsenko argues that our primary theoretical focus should be to understand organism-environment interactions and to recognize our fundamental nature as striving persons. Don’t look to “innate tendencies” first; look to how the human organism is interacting with the environment. When you look at those interactions you find people are always changing and acting on visions of “sought-after futures” (p.

276). You find commitments and aims. These commitments and aims may be impoverished, politically unfavorable, or disappointing to us—but they are the wedge! The mechanism is there for change but we have to shape it actively. If one looks at genes, one sees intractable qualities such as denial and innate tendencies and competitive drives. If one looks at the mind, whole new vistas open up, in fact the person hoves into view, and now the question is: who is this person and what might he or she accomplish and how can we educate and nurture this person?

Stetsenko advocates what she calls the “transformative activist stance” (2017, p. 268), pushing us to take seriously Levinas’s dictum that “ethics precedes ontology” (p. 287). Theories are cultural creations; we actively choose problems, framings, and perspectives that recursively become part of who we are and the actions we undertake. If someone tells me I have to wait for the informational codes to throw the genetic dice in combination with unspecified assemblages of exogenous forces, I probably won’t know what to do next. If someone tells me that I should escape the “immediacy of the present” from time to time (Stetsenko, 2017, p. 292) and act in

REDUCTION REDUX 213 the context of “resistance and struggle, projectivity and ability to move beyond the given” (p. 293), then I am going to think of my own potential differently—more reflectively, actively, mindfully, agentively.

In a forceful critique (that is a page turner for those interested in the issues), Arievitch takes on “brainism.” Brainism is the current fashion of reducing the mind to the physiological processes of the brain—exactly the tack Rees takes as he proceeds in his argument.

There is a fundamental category error in brainism; Arievitch cites Ilyenkov who remarks that “[S]tudying the brain tells you as little about the mind as analyzing the physical properties of gold, silver, or banknote paper tells you about the nature of money” (Ilyenkov, 2002, p. 98; italics in the original, Arievitch, 2017, p. 10). Yet, due to aggressive “neuro-marketing”, and perhaps a desire for a quotable pop-neuroscience, the brain is flourishing as the centerpiece of theory in psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Arievitch carefully deconstructs the problems with reducing the mind to the brain, arguing that we should focus on “the embodied agent who acts in the world”—neither simply a brain nor a set of cultural practices: The core starting point…is that the main function of the mind is to…orient the individual’s interaction with the ever changing, uncertain, and unpredictable environment. It is on this ground alone that the mind cannot be in principle pre-programmed biologically or physiologically and automatically “unfold” from within the brain; instead, every individual needs to develop and learn…during [the] life course. (2017, p. 25)

Both Stetsenko and Arievitch remind us that human psychology is its own thing to be understood and explained in its own terms. We are not just “smart matter” like all other smart matter with coded “information bars.” Stetsenko observes that Vygotsky considered human development to have “its own logic that inheres in its own dynamics and contradictions” (p. 141). Arievitch depicts the evolutionary process that drove us toward what is uniquely human, pointing to “the emergence of the active agent (animal or human) at a certain evolutionary stage in contrast to the earlier, automatic-reaction-based form of adaptation (as in plants). It is this new

214 BONNIE NARDI entity, the active agent, not the brain, that employs all its bodily capacities, including the brain, to actively construct its interactions with the environment by using non-automatic, action-based (psychological) forms of regulation” (p. 27). Rather than conflating all living matter under the banner of “matter is one,” cultural-historical activity theory acknowledges that changes in life forms have occurred throughout evolution. These changes are important and require theorizing; in the course of millions of years, living beings have developed increasingly differentiated capacities to “act in the world.”

The brain cannot be isolated from that world as though it dwells in its own ontological bubble as so many “chemical/hormonal agents” as Rees calls them (2010, p. 19). Arievitch seeks to further elaborate relations between the brain, the person, and culture: [O]mitting the human agent as the defining part of the relationship between the brain and cultural factors makes a productive conceptualization of the role of the mind (psychological processes) very difficult, if not impossible…

Brains themselves do not ‘carry’ culture, neither do cultural conditions, nor cultural artifacts themselves carry culture. Rather, real people (enabled by human brains and bodies) as they engage in their cultural practices do. (Arievitch 2017, p. 16, emphasis in original).

As humans, we continued to evolve in patently social directions, with culture becoming a primary resource.

At the level of the human agent, the fundamentally social way of life further raises the demands for non-automatic regulation of one’s actions and excludes automatic response to any situation as totally inadequate while requiring each time to ‘think before acting’. (Arievitch 2017, p. 27)

Stetsenko also underscores the importance of social life—we live in “the communal world, [employing] cultural practices shared with others, mediated by cultural tools” (2017, p. 123). These careful, specific characterizations contradict Rees’s notion of humans in thrall to “lower brain centers” and the obscurantist notion of coded matter. I don’t think it’s even remotely possible that all the human culture we have produced in the history of homo sapiens—both good and bad culture—could ever have developed had we been the

REDUCTION REDUX 215 kinds of organisms Rees and Braidotti depict, sunk in codes out of our reach.

Stetsenko and Arievitch’s books are built on a foundation of thought reaching back to Marx (although there is much more than Marx in cultural-historical activity theory). It does take some time to grasp this literature, but I believe it is essential if we are to counter the problems that Braidotti and Rees write about so passionately. We won’t get anywhere if we despair at our genetic heritage or take comfort in an offbeat optimism that somehow we will, in the wake of unknown processes, become the right kind of posthumans. Braidotti says that, “The non-semiotic codes (the DNA of all genetic material) intersect with complex assemblages of affects, embodied practices and other performances that include but are not confined to the linguistic realm” (2013, p. 158). But a leap from DNA to the linguistic realm (and other “performances”) remains opaque without examples and detailed explanation of the putative processes. Cultural-historical activity theory’s evolutionary account of changes in living organisms and their evolving interactions with the environment provides firmer footing for grasping the complexities and potentials for human culture, and does not reduce what is human to “information bars.”

Reading Braidotti and Rees is easier than reading Stetsenko and Arievitch. The arguments are simpler, the theory shallower, the focal object (smart matter or the genetically-burdened human) more graphic—almost like the crisp images of well-honed brands.

But the arguments are, in my view, too simple (failing to explain/account for so much about human life and history). The endgame is powerlessness, however much Braidotti and Rees want change. Stetsenko and Arievitch, through cultural-historical activity theory, guide us in a different direction, to agentive notions of human persons, illuminating points of intervention. They do not leave us in an existential lurch when it comes to finding the power to affect the problems humanity faces.

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Conclusion Our situation is quite serious and requires serious, empowering theory. Levant looks at the reverberations of the current political economy, noting that increasingly we do not live in a human-centered world.

On the contrary, the centre is currently occupied not by the human, but by the human’s creation, namely capital. […] Increasingly, human society is becoming uninhabitable for humans and more of a home for capital. Like Frankenstein’s monster, capital is a human creation, which comes to dominate its makers. As our environment becomes more habitable for capital, it becomes less habitable for the human. (Levant, 2017, p. 259)

Braidotti’s notion that all living matter seeks “self-expression” is perhaps a cri de coeur that recognizes this reality, at some level, and seeks solace in embracing the non-human. If matter is to be subjectivized, it can have its own desires, “intelligence.” But this is, as Levant says, a “fetishized notion of matter that attributes properties to the nonhuman which arise from human activity” (2017, p.

260). Capitalism, as it makes the world “less habitable” for people, seems to cause us to become increasingly untethered from our own sense of worth as persons. Braidotti often says she is “anti-humanist” and can’t wait till the posthuman finally makes the scene. Although she specifically critiques “humanism” for its “Eurocentric core and imperial tendencies,” still, there is something dubious about taking a word referencing all human persons, reducing it to one stage of history in one part of the world (and that is Braidotti’s reading, not all who use the word humanism), and then rejecting the whole ball of wax. And, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about, we also have to become a new kind of being that is not even human!

Whenever I think about real change, I return to the same place: it’s going to be a lot of work. The transformative activist stance is no cake walk. I don’t think that only new narratives or philosophical categories are going to do that work for us. I am reminded of an article in Mind, Culture, and Activity, a journal devoted to culturalhistorical activity theory, in which the authors describe the

REDUCTION REDUX 217 painstaking processes of developing persons to take on the challenge of achieving food sovereignty in Central America (and elsewhere) (McCune et al., 2017). The goal is to wrest control of food production and distribution from multinational corporations (and, to Rees’s points, there are major ecological benefits in doing so).

McCune et al. discuss the nitty-gritty of trying to effect such change.

They apply the tenets of activity theory to their developmental processes and educational efforts, and analyze the new kinds of persons that must be nourished in order to attain fundamental change.

If we are to lament, as Rees and Braidotti do, the devastations of capitalism—poverty, ecological cataclysm, racism, war—we need to bring our A game to theory in order to meet the challenges.

Cultural-historical activity theory provides empowering entries into “sought-after futures” that consider history, political economy, and the complex, mediated ways in which embodied human beings act in the world.

References Arievitch, I. (2017). Beyond the Brain: An Agentive Activity Perspective on Mind, Development, and Learning. Sense Publishers. 10.1558/lst.37497 Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/1369118X.2020.1739733 Callon, M., Rip, A. and Law, J. (Eds.). (1986) Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Ekbia, H. and Nardi, B. (2017). Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1111/wusa.12434 Guattari (2000). The Three Ecologies. The Athlone Press, London and New Brunswick, 35. (The Three Ecologies [1989], Trans. from the French

by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton.)

Levant, A. (2017). Smart Matter and the Thinking Body: Activity Theory and the Turn to Matter in Contemporary Philosophy. https://doi. org/10.33280/2310-3817-2017-5-2-248-264 Latour, Bruno (1992). “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 225– 58. MIT Press.

218 BONNIE NARDI May, T., & Powell, J. (2008). Situating Social Theory. McGraw-Hill Education.

McCune, N., Rosset, P., Salazar, T., Morales, H. and Saldívar Moreno, A. (2017). The Long Road: Rural Youth, Farming and Agroecological Formación in Central America. Mind, Culture, and Activity.

10.1080/10749039.2017.1293690 Miettinen, R. (1999) The Riddle of Things: Activity Theory and Actor-Network Theory as Approaches to Studying Innovations. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 6(3), 170-195.

Polgar, S. (1972). Population History and Population Policies from an Anthropological Perspective. Current Anthropology, 13(2), 203-211. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2740972 Rees, W. (2010). What’s blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition, and denial. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy Journal 6(2), 13-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2010.11908046 Stetsenko, A. (2017). The Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky’s Approach to Development and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Activity Theory, Socratic Ignorance and Posthumanism Cathrine Hasse

Introduction Only a few of the planet’s many billions of people have created the new technologies and materials that have changed people's living conditions across the globe for better or worse. These many new materials and technologies have also, in the long term, led to the global warming that threatens the planet. Who made these technologies and materials? What human considerations, activities and material agency lead to people supporting or rejecting the development of new technology?

If we accept climate change as human made, we need theories that help us understand how, when, and where human activities either accelerate or stop the materials and technologies from being developed. Though it has not been explicitly formulated as the purpose of posthuman theories, this new approach is moving like a bushfire through the humanities and social sciences. Posthumanist theories can be seen as an attempt to make theories which will address the Anthropocene through a new focus on non-human agency.

If we connect posthuman theories (of which there are many; see Ferrando, 2013) with activity theory (of which there are equally many; see Levant, 2018) as I intend to do in this entry, we can find many similarities and profound differences. How can these theoretical approaches together help us understand how and why technology is developed? I shall suggest that “Socratic ignorance” (Bett, 2011) can unite diverse perspectives and help us to understand why climate change does not go away despite good intentions. In order to explore this, I shall draw on my fieldwork among technical people, primarily in the project REELER, which visited more than ten laboratories for robotic development and explored how engineers

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220 CATHRINE HASSE included and thought about the humans affected by and imagining their robots (www.responsiblerobotics.eu).

My attempt to connect the many different versions of activity theory (Levant, 2018) and equally many different strands of posthumanist theories (Ferrando, 2013) cannot do either approach full justice. The internal diversities and debates with all the nuances and ramified debates within each of these lines of thought seem widespread. In my crude contrast, I concentrate on the major differences and even conflictual interests between posthumanist theories and activity theory. As sketchy as it may be, I believe it is worth trying to connect these two ways of thinking as they both present important contributions for analysis that point towards my overall motive of finding social theories that help address why new materials and technologies are made in the Anthropocene. Nevertheless, taken in isolation, neither of the theoretical frameworks can find sustainable theoretical answers from which we can ask the questions about what causes humans to develop and use materials and technologies that are potentially harmful.

Let me begin by exploring some of the basic controversies between activity theory and posthumanist theories. The main differences that come to mind are the view on humans and the agency of non-humans including materials and tools. In activity theory, the focus is on humans as collective and cultural beings, who transform nature and thereby transform themselves in mediated activity. Activity theory views humans as collectively engaged in practices that are driven by to some extent shared motives (an object-oriented social practice). In contrast to mainstream psychology it does not assume mental changes to initiate in individuals but in a cultural collective engaged in activity. It is when individuals participate in collective activities that mental change takes place. Compared to the posthuman perspective, the focus is on humans and their activity, even if materiality is always present as formed by and forming human activity.

Activity theory has been around for decades and develops with the times it theorises. There is a consensus that activity theory is connected to sociocultural theory and cultural-historical theory and that all these approaches emerged from the work of a small

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 221 group of Soviet researchers in the 1920s and 1930s (Daniels, Cole and Wertsch 2007, Levant 2017). In the former Soviet Union, we can identify at least two main sources for this theoretical complex, which are both descriptive more than prescriptive.

At first, this group of researchers built on the theories developed by the Russian psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934), who proposed that the human psyche is formed in social activity and develops with culture. In the 1920s and 1930s, Vygotsky founded a school of thought that emphasised how humans are formed by social and material environments. Vygotsky emphasised that material phenomena, including material words, acquired conceptual meaning in continuous processes of learning and development. The meaning we learn is tied to the words (forming concepts) and material artefacts that surround us and embed our collective memories (e.g., Hasse, 2020).

The ground-breaking new ideas presented by Vygotsky placed learning in cultural surroundings through mediating tools and signs as a prerequisite for human development. The human way of thinking, remembering, and perceiving is thus at first formed in social activity, and not in isolated individuals. In human activity, the tools we use to mediate between our surrounding world and humans transform not only the material earth but also at the same time our own psyche. In this approach the smallest unit of analysis identified by Vygotsky is word-meaning (Vygotsky, 1987). His ideas were taken further—and it fell especially to Vygotsky’s colleague Aleksei Leontyev (Leontyev, 1978, also spelled Leon’ev or Leontiev) to develop what became known as activity theory: “In activity theory, it is joint-mediated activity that takes the centre stage in the analysis” (Daniels, Cole and Wertsch, 2007, p. 2).

Leontyev developed activity theory with an emphasis on human activities as object-oriented and motive driven (object understood as both an imagined outcome and a physical result, driven by a motive to reach the object). Leontyev furthermore discusses how human consciousness evolves through this kind of object-motivedriven activity. In the process, humans become attentive to their own active practices, which can be communicated and thought

222 CATHRINE HASSE during a historical development through mediating artefacts. It is not the material environment that makes one activity differ from another. What makes it possible to distinguish one activity from another is their different object-motives. The object may be a materially perceived object that motivates us to activity, or it may exist only in our imagination.

Therefore, different activities are distinguished by their motives. The concept of activity is necessarily bound up with the concept of motive. There is no such thing as activity without a motive; “unmotivated” activity is not activity that has no motive, but activity with a subjectively and objectively hidden motive. (Leontyev, 1977, p. 184)

In a social context of class divisions that make citizens unequal in their relation to the means of production and social abilities, Leontyev emphasises that “their consciousness experiences the influence of this inequality, this opposition. At the same time ideological notions are evolved and enter into the process by which specific individuals become aware of their reallife relations” (Leontyev, 1977, p. 190).

Thus, Leontyev in many ways assumes that the collective word-meanings so essential for Vygotsky are already in place in shared collective activities. Instead of an emphasis on how individuals learn what goes on in collective activities, people are, in activity theory, largely aware of what they do and the (material) effects of their actions (and bodily movements) are tied to the larger objectmotive driven activity.

Later, others followed, for instance the Finnish cultural-historical activity theoretician Yrjö Engeström (Leontiev, 1978; Engeström, 987; Engeström and Miettinen, 1999), the OSAT group at Oxford University, working on cross-institutional activities (Edwards, 2010), and the Danes Seth Chaiklin and Mariane Hedegaard, who stressed activity as taking place in institutionalised activity settings (Hedegaard, 2012). Within these groups of theoreticians, there were internal discrepancies, for instance, in how much emphasis was placed on activity as systems (e.g., Engeström), or as activity settings in institutions (e.g., Hedegaard). Engeström and his colleagues called for a new unit of analysis when, in 1999, they wrote:

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 223 In other words, there is a demand for a new unit of analysis. Activity theory has a strong candidate for such a unit of analysis in the concept of objectoriented, collective, and culturally mediated human activity, or activity system. Minimum elements of this system include the object, subject, mediating artifacts (signs and tools), rules, community, and division of labor.

(Engeström and Miettinen, 1999, p. 9)

In Vygotsky’s original formulation the “unit of analysis possesses all the basic characteristics of the whole” (Vygotsky, 1987, p.

46). When the cultural-historical focus shifted from the historically continuously formed psychological processes tied to thinking and learning in a material and social world to the collective object-oriented activity system, Vygotsky’s mediations no longer took centre stage. In my own work, I stay closer to Vygotsky’s psychological unit of analysis to explore whether and how meaningful mediation is shared or not shared by individuals in cultural activity (Hasse, 2020). Elsewhere, mediation has been taken up in the Vygotskyan legacy in different ways by others (e.g., Seth Chaiklin, Michael Cole, Harry Daniels, Anne Edwards, Mariane Hedegaard, Jean Lave).

Furthermore, Alex Levant and David Bakhurst have pointed to another source of inspiration for activity theory, also emphasising the humans and their activities as a focal point, namely in line with the Russian philosopher Evald Ilyenkov (1924-79). Ilyenkov, as noted by Levant (2018), also sees activity as the fundamental unit of analysis. Levant emphasises that for both Engeström and Ilyenkov, activity is the fundamental unit of analysis.

Whereas Engeström and his followers occlude the whole and focus on local activities, Ilyenkov focuses on the “whole” in a different manner. Ilyenkov writes: To comprehend a phenomenon means to establish its place and role in the concrete system of interacting phenomena in which it is necessarily realized, and to find out precisely those traits which make it possible for the phenomenon to play this role in the whole. ([1960] 1982, p. 177, Levant 2018, p. 104)

Ilyenkov’s understanding of the whole is a return to the Vygotskyan interest in understanding the possible evolving relation between a subject and an object in activity, inspired by Karl Marx’s notion of commodity form. The commodity form is not a

224 CATHRINE HASSE closed, finalised “whole” but rather a generator of the whole that in its core (or cell) can be used to analyse all kinds of capitalist contradictory relations.

In this respect, the focus is not so much on local activity systems, but on capitalism as such. The concept of Anthropocene (Clark and Yusoff, 2017) is not about every human on earth, but should rightly be renamed Capitalocene (Moore, 2015), and the unit of analysis is how some human activity, through contradictions, is generative of the whole capitalist system. “The commodity form is generative of the whole because it refers not to a thing but to a social relation, the ideal form of an activity, which in this case is the activity of exchange” (Levant, 2018, p. 104). When humans create a new commodity like a robot, it is not just a tool consisting of entangled and connected materials. It is a commodity to be sold and exchanged for money.

What is relevant for my discussion here is that human activity that creates new tools and materials cannot, from this perspective, be “occluded” to a whole focussing on local activity systems. It is rather that in the context of the whole we can identify practices beyond dualist essentialist dichotomies that place pristine nature on one side and evil humans on the other. Levant summarises: Ilyenkov’s approach invites us to understand humanity and nature as abstractions of a concrete reality, and hence takes us in a different direction than what is captured by the metaphor of the ecological footprint. Rather than lamenting what we do to it, this approach invites us to reflect on how human activity is organised where we appear as actors and nature appears as passive dirt. (2018, p. 105)

To recap, activity theory focuses on humans and addresses how their activities transform nature and themselves through mediating means. The unit of analysis is different in different approaches to human activity. It can be, for instance, word-meaning (Vygotsky), activity as systems (Engeström), or activity as generative of wholes (Ilyenkov). The collective aspect of joint mediated learning and development has in all cases been a prerequisite for activity theory analysis, even when the framework proliferated, and scholars began to disagree on how to grasp activities. In

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 225 relation to posthuman theories, we can note that humans and their systems or institutions are the main focal point of analysis in all versions of activity theory. However, in relation to climate change, activity theory faces the challenge of understanding how material agency (sometimes in conjunction with human activity) generates global warming.

What Do Posthumanist Theories Do? Posthumanist and new materialist theories, despite internal differences, have in common that they refuse to put human activity as a focal point and emphasise non-human material agency. What matters is a new perspective on nature, non-humans and humans. As per Levant, they reject essentialist dichotomies between nature and culture. However, they also dissolve borders between humans and technology, human and non-human. An early landmark contribution to posthumanist thinking came in the book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, written by Katherine Hayles in 1999. In her argument, a posthuman is not necessarily transformed by technology. What matters is a new way of conceptualising Homo sapiens, that moves away from: a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. (Hayles, 1999, p. 286)

In this sense activity theory has always been on the road to posthumanism—in so far as humans have never been seen as autonomous individuals in this theoretical framework. However, posthumanist theories put a much stronger emphasis on decentring humans, to the extent that they may entirely disappear from analysis. When, for instance, Ilyenkov, like the Vygotskyan School, emphasises that Man [sic] is a special creature that fundamentally differs from animals (Ilyenkov, 2009, p. 277), this would be strongly refuted by posthumanists.

226 CATHRINE HASSE Instead of taking humans as the pivotal axis for analysis, other living and material beings take centre stage in analysis. These materials and non-humans are often discussed as having human qualities in so far as terms previously only used when discussing humans are now used on materials and animals, e.g., agency and intentionality. Thus, we hear how the world looks from the perspective of mushrooms (Tsing, 2015), trees (Kohn, 2013), brittle stars (Barad, 2007), dogs (Haraway, 2008)—and sometimes how they entangle or disentangle with humans at the brim. There is also, in different ways, an emphasis on how matter takes an active part in creating human and non-human sociality (e.g., Barad, 2007; Latour, 2005; Braidotti, 2013)—with the emphasis on how human agency is involved and mediated as well (e.g., Rosenberger and Verbeek, 2015). The focus is on materials rather than on materiality (Ingold 2007). The analysis of agency is the dynamic agency of fluctuating things, rather than of bounded objects like tools used by humans.

For the feminist physicist Karen Barad, there is no history, no mediation, and no particularly relevant humanity. The posthuman is in itself the phenomena and boundaries between what we name as subjects (human) and objects (non-human), which come from within phenomena in an “agential cut” (Barad, 2007, p. 140). We are not separate from our tools, but part of the same apparatus. Like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gregory Bateson, she refers to the blind man with a stick, but in contrast to previous discussions, she focuses on the stick. Where Bateson and Merleau-Ponty focus on the human experience of shifting boundaries, in Barad the stick changes with the apparatus involved. It literally matters if the stick is embodied by the blind man searching for an opening in a room or scrutinized as a kind of wood (Barad, 2007, p. 154). All materials have agency, often unexpected, and are not controllable. Thus, materials act on humans just as much as humans act on materials.

Agency is not confined to humans alone but comes about in constantly shifting assemblages (Latour, 2005).

Furthermore, most of these theories refute mediated activity as mediation implies humans—and even more problematically (as seen from the posthumanist views), human psyche. We dethroned humans may try to use tools, but the tools have an agency of their

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 227 own in our amalgamations, just as our environments—including plants, stones and rivers—have agencies and rights of their own (Alley, 2009; Kopnina, 2012). Though postphenomenologists (e.g., Ihde, 2002; Rosenberger and Verbeek, 2015), especially, are still concerned with Human-Technology mediation, very few posthumanist theories look at how technological tools mediate collective human practical activity.

However, if we care about global warming, we need better theories that grasp the scope of human activities (as a particular scale chosen; Tsing 2000). Global warming is caused by human activity and therefore activity theory must evolve to understand human activity in this negative light.

[T]he recognition that generalized human activity at a species level is proving capable of transforming the global weather system in potentially catastrophic ways has begun to be identified by some scholars and policy makers to be the basis of a new social and political problematic. (Knox, 2014, p.

412)

Posthumanist theories do not address this “generalised human activity at a species level”, but maybe—in a combined effort with activity theory—we can get a better understanding of why we are encountering a rising emission curve.

To sum up: major differences between the two approaches are tied to how they respectively view human and non-human (including material) agency. Humans in activity theory are sometimes object-oriented, sometimes generators of wholes (whether local or at a larger scale) and they are always collectively engaged and shaped by cultural-historical activities, simultaneously transforming humans and environments. In contrast, the posthumanist decentres the human activity and emphasises the unexpected, unforeseen in networks, assemblages, and material agency. I do not believe the two approaches are so far apart as it could appear from this overview. I believe we need to explore how they enrich each other.

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Curve Making in Robotics The development of theories is often compartmentalised in the human sciences. Posthumanists do not read about activity theory, and vice versa. To address such a complex issue as global warming, we need to acknowledge that our theoretical approaches cannot stand alone. We need to be curious about what we do not know and that entails an acknowledgement of Socratic ignorance. We can learn from the Greek philosopher Socrates, who was recognised as the wisest person of all not because he knew it all, but because he opened himself to acknowledge that he did not know everything (Bett, 2011). To show how we may connect posthumanism and activity theory through Socratic ignorance I shall present an example of a particular tool, the robot Silbot.

Silbot is a robot originally developed in South Korea to help children learn English (a teleoperated robot under the name Engkey). Later, in a more autonomous version, it found its way into two rehabilitation centres under the name of Silbot: one in Denmark and one in Finland (Blond 2019). Here it was introduced in slightly different versions as an approx. 40-45 inches tall figure clad in white plastic, with a weight of around 46 lb, filled up with steel, wires, chips, actuators, etc.

In this version it was meant to train elderly citizens with dementia. After a test run in 2011-2012, where the South Korean engineers often went to Denmark and Finland to help with the implementation, the Danes decided to keep the robot, whereas the Finns discarded it. At the time that I, together with other colleagues from Aarhus University, studied the Danish version in Denmark, the robot was equipped with: a movable flat-screen that displays a pensive, but friendly Caucasian female face with 2 degrees of freedom, which means that the flat-screen is capable of moving, not unlike a human head, to the left and right, up and down. The personalised 3D graphic avatar displayed on the flat-screen is animated: it blinks its chestnut eyes, looks around in the Robot Room, raises its eyebrows, and moves its lips—sometimes in sync, and at other times asynchronous, with the tender and warm female voice that pours out of the robots’ high-powered speakers, once turned on. Silbot’ s shiny white plastic body is shaped like an hourglass. Its rounded shoulders extend into two arms with

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 229 3 degrees of freedom: they move up and down, stretch to each side, and are bendable (like a human forearm and upper arm). Just like the robot’s wheels, and the flat-screen constituting its head and face, these arms move with the help of actuators i.e., they do not move on their own—but must be activated via an electronic control signal to move. At first sight the arms, devoid of hands and fingers, resemble pectoral fins (as seen on sharks or dolphins).

Silbot never grabs or holds onto things. Yet, unlike marine mammals, ocean predators and other underwater creatures, Silbot is equipped with touch sensors at the tip of its fin-like arms. These sensors are designed to register human handshakes and lighten up and shifts colours during interaction.

(Blond, 2019, p. 84)

We followed the implementation of this robot through several studies (Hasse, 2015b; Blond, 2019), and found that both in Finland and Denmark there had been huge expectations of what a robot like Silbot could do. In Finland the staff at the rehabilitation centre had apparently expected an almost autonomous robot, as one can see them imagined in movies, which could free the local staff so they could concentrate their work on the elderly in need. Instead, engaging in practical activity with the robot, the staff realised that the robot was more of a prototype—and that the engineers had very little understanding of the actual work of elderly care. Instead of freeing hands, the engineers expected the local staff to put a lot of work into a local technological development of their robot. The Finnish elderly care staff, like the Danish staff, had to adjust their expectations and acknowledge they knew very little about actual robots compared to the expected human-like media robots. The robot they received was a mere machine that often broke down, spoke rudely to the elderly, and behaved erratically. In Finland, the staff ended up denouncing this “technology-driven” elderly care as irrelevant for their local activities in the rehabilitation centre and terminated the collaboration with the South Korean engineers after the end of the test period (Koponen and Laitinen, 2012). In Denmark, the elderly care staff realised that they knew very little about robotics and began to work with the engineers on developing the technology of the robot to the degree that this goal almost overshadowed the work on elderly care (Blond 2019).

In an EU-financed REELER project (2016-2019), we explored the construction of robots in several areas: autonomous transport,

230 CATHRINE HASSE logistics, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, inspection, cleaning, and consumer education. Overall, we saw that engineers seemed ignorant of the actual practices where they expected their robots to be used (Sorensen et al. 2019). From an activity theory analytical point of view, we could argue that the engineers and local staff were driven by different object-motives. The engineers wanted their robot to work technically, and their primary goals were tied to this overall motive. The local staff, on the other hand, wanted to improve whatever they were working on, in the case of Silbot, elderly care. In Finland the staff did not understand the technical concerns of the engineers and the engineers did not understand the concerns of the local staff. Once implemented, Finnish staff experienced the robot as an extremely volatile and unfinished technology, which took up a lot of the staff’s time. In the process of working across institutions (Edwards, 2010), the engineers gradually realised that they knew very little of local practices but in the Finnish context their interest in local work never seemed convincing. As staff realised how the robot had faults, the engineers reacted as if the local staff were the problem. Eventually the Finnish staff gave up and concluded that the robot was not worth the trouble (Koponen & Laitinen, 2012).

The local staff in Denmark, however, entered a steep learning curve, trying to make the robot work in the local setting (Blond, 2019). In both Finland and Denmark, the staff had met the robot with high expectations tied to cultural imaginaries of what robots are and can do (Jasanoff, 2015). In contrast to the Finnish staff, the Danish staff kept working with the South Korean team to improve the robot, believing the future of elderly care to be technology driven. Viewed from the wider perspective of capitalism, there was a belief that new technological commodities like robots would drive everything in elderly care in the future. The clashes between “workof-the-hand” and “work-of-the-robot” were an inherent contradiction that came to light in the different staff’s responses to Silbot.

From the point of view of global warming, we may ask how the engineers’ activity and the staff activity included a focus on the materials used. This involves, for instance, the polluting effects of the plastics to build Silbot as a tool and the many flights emitting

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 231 CO2 between Korea, Denmark, and Finland. In seeing activity as a closed system, we would be left without an answer, because this is not part of the analysis—a focus on materials was not part of the activity of either group. However, seeing Silbot as a commodity tied to a wider understanding of how technology and capitalism are connected as drivers of a joint techno-paradigmatic future, human activity is just as driven by internal contradiction between humans and technology. These contradictions indicate that robots are not tools, but are commodities tied to political and technical imaginaries with the power to transform local activities.

In a posthumanist approach, the whole analysis might differ completely, as the focus might not be on human activity at all, but on the materials of Silbot. Not only the plastics, wires, internet connections and computer power supplies, but also the travels of the engineers between South Korea and Denmark all contributed to rising greenhouse effects through human and non-human agency.

The vibrant materials in Silbot’s plastic, steel parts and sensors would make up what humans might call erratic behaviour. When Silbot, for instance, was exposed to sunlight, the sensors would respond by cutting the current, making the head of the nice female go black; disturbances would make Silbot leave its delimited space and end up stranded beyond its expected boundaries, while it exclaimed: “I don’t know where I am. Please move me on the game board” (Blond, 2019, p. 1). In a posthumanist analysis, what matters is the materials, humans, the floor, the wires, the South Korean government, and the Danish Municipality that all come together to create the robot’s agency. The post-humanist approach would not necessarily care for the diversity and contradiction in how staff and engineers viewed the local activity. However, they might look at how Silbot’s materials, the white plastic coating, which might end up being used in flame-retardants, and they might have followed the flame retardants to another small Danish town, where citizens have been discovered to have a high level of PFOS in their bodies.

PFOS are so-called fluorine-containing compounds that are typically used for impregnation and other special applications where a water and/or grease-repellent effect is desired. They are extremely

232 CATHRINE HASSE dangerous as they provoke different kinds of cancer and other diseases. Furthermore, such human-made material has shown to be very difficult to dispose of. It has been used in fire foam, and to prevent materials from catching fire—and may have been used in some plastic coatings.1 Following the materials of Silbot may reveal that disposing of Silbot’s materials may be just as harmful as disposing of a personal PC—an issue increasingly being thought of as relevant by people trying to combat the greenhouse effect.2 Robots are innovative and efficient tools that are often thought of as part of the solution to climate problems. They are, however, also acknowledged to have made it much easier to exploit nature.

Think of robots in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. All areas demanded a huge amount of human labour before the 18th century, often exploited and underpaid, involved mainly in emerging capitalist activities. Today we mine, grow food and cattle and manufacture things like cars and aeroplanes with unseen speed and efficiency thanks to robotic machines. This uptake of robots in all kinds of areas has made it possible to produce, and thereby to consume, more. This is known as the rebound effect, where technological innovations “bite back” with unforeseen consequences (Brulé and Munier, 2021). Therefore, even if robots are seen by some as part of the solution to the rising curve, they are certainly gradually also considered a major part of the problem. This development was not the decision of a particular group of evil-minded people. Activity theory gives us a much more nuanced view on how different human collectives with different object-motives came to develop and think with tools, which simultaneously changed their embodied minds and environments.

What makes robots meaningful in activities? One might think that robots, as tools, were mediating their functionality in a natural way once implemented in a practice. Our research showed this was 1

2

I have not been able to identify the actual components of the materials involved in Silbot—so this is just a thought experiment. There is no indication that PFOS was present in the Danish rehabilitation centre as PFOS was prohibited some time ago. e.g., https://www.epa.gov/chemical-research/tool-reduction-and-assessme nt-chemicals-and-other-environmental-impacts-traci

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 233 far from the case. On the contrary, though local practitioners had many expectations of robots, once robots began to move around, local staff were constantly surprised by the agency of the machines and began to question their functionality. Robots are commodities that come with imaginaries (Levant, 2020). However, when robots are implemented in local practices the robots are not just tools but active agents in transforming activities.

Socratic Ignorance and the Tech Paradigm Though posthumanist theories, with their decentring of humans and focus on materials, seem to get us closer to issues of pollution and greenhouse effects, I see it as a huge problem in this movement that they do not care about theorising the human psyche. This means the theories are not engaging in how humans collectively learn, and learn to perceive, remember, and even think and act in a material world co-created by an unequal collective of humans and non-humans.3 Some humans not only create living conditions for themselves, but their activity creates the living conditions for other humans and non-humans. The Co2 and PHOS created by the Silbot project may well affect many more humans and non-humans than the people in contact with the robot tool.

No matter how volatile, the materials in Silbot did not gather or assemble by themselves. Human engineers were concerned with how to make their technology work in Silbot.

While we acknowledge that some human activities contribute more to global warming than others, we also need to recentre the role played by humans. Recentring humans displaces them from their Enlightenment position as world masters and acknowledges how humans and dynamic matter are joint in activity. When Silbot suddenly stops in the middle of a sentence where it is supposed to help train elderly people with cognitive tasks, it may be due to a beam of sunlight coming between the sensors.

3

Aspects I have discussed extensively in my book on Posthumanist Learning (Hasse 2020).

234 CATHRINE HASSE In Finland, the staff did not use this insight for further learning, but in Denmark, the staff realized that there was something they did not know beyond their own local activity, which nevertheless influenced this activity: namely, how robots work. They displayed what is known as Socratic ignorance. I find the notion of Socratic ignorance to be a relevant bridge builder between posthumanist and cultural-historical activity-oriented theories. Socratic ignorance is in many ways a prerequisite for learning, and it is, as I have argued elsewhere, also a learning process to obtain Socratic ignorance (Hasse, forthcoming).

The notion of Socratic ignorance is often attributed to Plato’s Apology, where Socrates exclaimed: “I am wiser in that what I do not know, I do not even suppose that I know.” (McPherran, 2011, p. 114). The story is that Socrates was named the wisest man on earth by the Oracle of Delphi, which elicited jealousy among Athenian politicians. They would have thought they should have been mentioned as the most prominent thinkers of their day. When Socrates is brought to trial in Athens, he pondered over why he could be named the wisest man. After all, the Athenian politicians are right to claim they know so much more than Socrates does. However, they might be wise, but Socrates at least acknowledges that he does not know all they know (Bett, 2011). In this sense, Socrates outmanoeuvred the cleverest men in Athens by acknowledging his own ignorance.

In posthumanist theorising, the humans are decentred. There is a lack of interest in psychological processes, including how human ignorance about materials in activities contribute to global warming. In activity theory, there is a focus on how humans are driven by psychological processes. Humans can form imaginaries, they can remember historical processes, and they can think and learn in contradictory ways. Contradiction is not just tied to analysis, but is also a term that refers to a human capability of acknowledging and dealing with contradictions.

These contradictions may be about warm hands versus robots in elderly care. Nevertheless, there are also questions never asked, neither by engineers or staff (nor indeed by the social scientists at the time of the study of Silbot’s implementation) in their respective

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 235 activities. Robots mainly consist of steel, rubber, human made polymers and chemicals, aluminium, and synthetic fibres. Though biodegradable materials are increasingly being used, traditional robots like Silbot are made of materials that are not climate friendly.

How is the disposal of the materials of a robot (whether needed in elderly care or not) going to affect the emission curve? If that had been considered, would there have been a preference for warm hands among politicians instead of robots? New questions would have appeared from an acknowledgement of our ignorance of the issues lying beyond the immediate activity. This raises the question of how to learn that we “know there is something we do not know”.

As mentioned in Levant (2011), Ilyenkov took up the story recounted by Immanuel Kant of the “real” and “ideal” thalers (a Prussian coin used in Kant’s times). The thalers, Kant argues, do not actually exist, just because we can think of them; “it is one thing to have a hundred thalers in your pocket, and quite another to have one hundred thalers in your mind” (Kant, 1781, pp. 199, 567)4.

In the same way we may say that it is one thing to imagine robots—and quite another to encounter them in real life. It is when the staff encounter the real white plastic, the ill-connected and light sensitive sensors and wires that they become aware that they are ignorant of actual vs. imagined robots. However, these materials do not enter the thinking neither staff nor of engineers as potential polluters.

Kant argues that we cannot infer that something exists just because we can think it. The hundred thalers in the mind do not give us one single coin to buy bread with. However, implicitly Kant never questions the idea of a thaler. We tend to take our own conceptions for granted. Turning Kant on his head, we can say that we cannot think about unknown activities until we are aware of our own ignorance and begin to ask new questions and learn about how other humans think and non-humans act. We may be ignorant of how our coins, so valuable to us, have no meaning for our 4

In my version of Kant, thalers is translated as dollars, but thalers were the old type of Prussian coins found in Kant’s time, so I kept this phrase as in Levant's rendering.

236 CATHRINE HASSE colleagues in a neighbouring country. As noted by Ilyenkov, and repeated by Levant, Kant’s distinction between the ideal and the real is taken up by Marx, who asks: what would happen to Kant with his “real” thalers had he found himself in a country where thalers had no value? His real, actual, material thalers would, without any changes to their material form, metamorphose into ordinary pieces of paper. (Levant 2011)

In a way, this approach is tied to posthumanist and new materialist approaches, and more specifically to Ingold’s emphasis on dynamic materials rather than conceptualised materiality (Ingold, 2007). It is materials and their effects over time, not coins or robots, that create a rising emission curve. Looking at money as pieces of metal and paper or robots as chemical plastic compounds and steel may make us realise how activities are indeed entangling non-human materials with human relations.

A robot can change its meaning in human activity, as the conceptual meaning-making is not in the materials but in the activity.

Materials contribute to changes in what is meaningful in complex ways (as the concept of robot changes when practitioners learn that Silbot can be stopped by a beam of sunlight). This psychological process of meaning-making must be included in our analysis if we want to address complex problems like global warming. It is not enough to know what materials do to the environment. We also need to get new ways of thinking about materials into human activities—and this necessitates a re-centring of humans. Not as masters of a universe divided in culture and nature, but as thinking, remembering generators of the whole. The whole reiterates amalgamations of materials, non-humans, and human psychological and physical processes to create activities; these in turn affect materials, non-humans, and human psychological and physical processes in new activities.

Conclusion Human activities have taken a turn that has compelled geologists to name our time Anthropocene, but the human activity that causes

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 237 global warming is better caught with Jason Moore’s more specific neologism Capitalocene. Most of the globe’s indigenous people have not contributed to global warming because they have other values than generating a profit (Normyle, Vardon and Doran, 2022). The humans in the Silbot project engaged in activities in which the materials involved “bite back” as transformed living conditions for people—not just for the staff, engineers and elderly directly involved in the activity but in the whole of the Capitalist system affecting global warming. Materials are not passive resources we humans can use as we please to create tools that help us in objectdriven activities in a neutral way.

However, we do not have good enough theories in the human and social sciences to understand the complexity of how human activity causes global warming. I would have imagined that an acknowledgement of human-made global warming would have made the social sciences move towards a focus on the humans responsible for this development. Nevertheless, the strange thing is that the major new contributors to social theory, posthumanism and new materialism, have done exactly the opposite. Posthumanist theory tries to counter climate change by having materials and non-humans as its primary focus. It is as if the posthumanist theoreticians believe they know all there is to be said about humans when they dismiss studies of human culture and history in their theories. However, when materials, non-humans and their vibrant and dynamic agency take centre stage, we seem to lose perspective on the consciousness of collective human activity tied to these materials. Posthumanism does not care about how human psychology evolves as cultural-historical processes. The lack of acknowledgement of cultural and historical developments has, as one effect, a lack of interest in human learning and how human learning transforms how we think, perceive, and remember as collective beings.

All of this we find in activity theory. However, activity theory seems to overlook the materials and material agency involved in activity. The focus is on the meaningfulness of materials, which emphasises a distinction between natural objects like trees and manmade symbols like the crucifix or tools like a hammer (Zinchenko,

238 CATHRINE HASSE 1995, p. 44). However, connecting activity theory with posthumanism makes us realise the non-human agency involved in all activities, whether trees, crucifixes, hammers, or robots.

Socratic ignorance makes us acknowledge that we know we do not know enough about how human activity and the material effects of tools made, for instance, of plastic affect global warming.

Though global warming was never the motive nor the explicit goal of activities, the material agency of tools has effects beyond what is controlled by humans. Socratic ignorance can be used to discuss how engineers lack Socratic ignorance about other people’s motives for engaging in activities. Local staff lack Socratic ignorance of what tools are made of, which makes us use money and time in unsensible ways. The value of Silbot as a commodity is mainly tied to its promises of innovation of elderly care. It is not a tool that immediately improves elderly care from the point of view of the Danish or Finnish staff. However, neither staff nor engineers seem to relate to the Silbot project with global warming in mind. It seems that the Socratic ignorance involved came only from the Danish staff when they realised how little they knew about how robots worked. This acknowledgement seems to be spurred by the whole of a capitalist technology-driven ideology, with the inherent contradiction of warm hands vs. robots. Had the staff and engineers together acknowledged their Socratic ignorance of how the materials involved in robots may be sustainable from a point of view of the greenhouse effect, could the ignorance have spurred a new joint learning process? This may have made the Danes join the Finnish rejection of this tool, as it not only took time from elderly care but also increased CO2.

Finally, I must also acknowledge my own ignorance in all these matters connected by me in this analysis. I do not know enough of the many debates in circles of activity theory, posthumanism, engineering, elderly care, plastic, chemistry, or emission curves. Nevertheless, new research questions, which acknowledge how I am ignorant of how these things, can spur new learning. If we consider Socratic ignorance in our analyses, we can begin to ask new questions about how materials influence activities and activities influence materials. For all these reasons, Socratic ignorance

ACTIVITY THEORY, SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND POSTHUMANISM 239 seems a good connection point between posthumanist theories and activity theory.

Cultural-historical activity theoreticians may benefit from acknowledging Socratic ignorance of how posthumanists think about the world. This could lead to explorations of how we—in unison with posthumanism—could ask new questions about how the materials like plastic, steel, and aluminium used in tools (e.g., Silbot) can bring about changes in global warming. Posthumanism can make us follow these non-human materials used in tools beyond any occluded activity system, focusing on their effects in the world and in the end on global warming. Cultural-historical activity can help spur the Socratic ignorance about human psychological processes and activities in posthumanist theorising. New materialist and posthumanist theory challenge activity theory by decentring the humans and their activities, but activity theory may help focus on which activities create the Anthropocene in a capitalist world. Activity theories lead us to the core of what causes global warming: not the new materials and technologies in themselves, but their value-forms in a capitalist world, where innovation carries greater weight than practical use and global warming. The billions spent on developing new tools like robots, of which some may help get the emission curve down and many may contribute to a rise, can be discussed from these joint perspectives: the human activity combined with a posthuman emphasis on our material entanglements.

Socratic ignorance is a way, or even a method, to ask new questions, which will bring us closer to an answer as to why humans are apparently destroying their own and many non-humans’ living conditions … without acknowledging their own contributions to the process.

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Tracking the Object: A Case of a Small-scale Developmental Work Research-based Intervention Miriam McSweeney, Kyoko Murakami

Introduction As a full-time lecturer in Department A, the first author has had the opportunity to work in different schools and campuses across a university in the Republic of Ireland. The technology MOODLE, a virtual learning environment (VLE, hereafter) was installed at the University in late 2006 as a pilot project and made available to all staff in early 2007. The adoption of VLEs is now accepted as more or less universal among higher education institutions (Britain and Liber, 2004; Cosgrave et al., 2011; Walker et al., 2012). MOODLE was not very difficult to use; yet by early 2009 only a very small number of staff were actually using it. Academic staff viewed MOODLE with a certain level of discomfort, especially those not using it, although there was a general feeling that MOODLE should be employed. Department heads thought it would be beneficial for academic staff to use MOODLE, but they did not pressurise their staff in any way to do so. The University provided training courses in MOODLE-use, but they were often poorly attended. Also, adopting MOODLE was a complex issue for lecturers, an issue that seemed to go beyond the mere adoption of new technology. The Irish government’s investment (HEA, 2008) for the improvement of teaching and learning in higher education reflects a belief that the integration of technology with pedagogic practice can reform and modernise higher education. International trends also suggest that

243

244 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI technology has a central role in fundamental changes taking place in higher education (Schneckenberg, 2009; Walker1 et al., 2012).

The first author worked with those colleagues in question and observed that the reality was different at ground level. Lecturers could have regarded MOODLE as a starting point for the technological transformation of their practice, but their interest and motivation in doing so seemed low. As it is a straightforward educational technology, MOODLE itself does not seem to be the problem, but something about the lecturers’ work context may have been contributing to the problem. These observations relate specifically to the University, they are not unique; the low and slow (Arbaugh et al., 2009) uptake of teaching and learning technologies on the part of academics is well documented (Blin & Munro, 2008; Schneckenberg, 2009; Kirkwood and Price, 2014; Selwyn, 2007).

Furthermore, it is argued (Conole, 2010; Selwyn, 2011) that explorations of lecturers’ engagement with Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) have predominantly focused on the technologies themselves, driven by the belief that technologies are capable of improving education. Our interest goes some way towards responding to recent calls (Ehlers and Schneckenberg, 2010; Oliver, 2011), moving away from a potentially technologically deterministic approach to a more encompassing one, namely an activity theory (Engeström, 1987) perspective. Employing a Developmental Work Research-based intervention (Engeström, 2007), albeit not all, the lecturers moved to a position of critical engagement with MOODLE. Similar to Palmer (2009), the lecturers’ everyday work context did not afford the opportunity to participate in collaborative work, whereas the DWR-based intervention sessions enabled a collaborative working space where lecturers could share their experiences, understandings and practice. This is supported in other studies (Oncu, Delialioglu and Brown, 2008; Kopcha, 2010), which found that when lecturers meet with colleagues who are more adept in the 1

MOODLE is a free and open-source learning management system. It is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other online learning schemes in schools, universities, workplaces and other sectors. It can be used to create custom websites with online courses and allows for communitysourced plugins (https://moodle.org/).

TRACKING THE OBJECT 245 use of teaching technologies, they can relate the potential of the technology to their own practice: the collaborative effort enables development.

From an activity theory perspective, collaboration can be viewed as object formation. Similar to other studies (Engeström, 1987; Miettinen, 1998), when the lecturers engaged in collaborative discussion, they identified a shared object—to explore the potential of MOODLE to enhance their pedagogic practice. In the collaborative context, afforded by the DWR-based intervention, the lecturers explored historical tensions and contradictions, which in turn highlighted the shared object of the lecturers’ activity. Our analysis focuses on tracking the movement in the lecturers’ object throughout the Intervention. The shifting and developing object of the lecturers’ activity system was, as Daniels (2010b) suggests, related to the motive that drove it, i.e., the lecturers’ desire to explore the potential of MOODLE to enhance their pedagogic practice. Our point of departure was that the problem of low and slow uptake of MOODLE underlies how the university context shaped the nature of use and engagement with a learning technology such as MOODLE, rather than with any difficulty in actually working with the technology itself. Our activity theory-led research set out to understand how the lecturers’ context impeded engagement and to explore how the DWR would help change their engagement with MOODLE.

DWR-Based Intervention: Theory and Method DWR was developed by Yrjö Engeström and his colleagues at the University of Helsinki as an interventionist methodology for applying Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (hereafter CHAT or Activity Theory for shorthand) and, more specifically, the theory of expansive learning in the world of work, technology and organisations (Engeström, 1996). Central to DWR is the creation of an environment which provides and/or develops tools that allow individuals to move beyond themselves and the problematic situations in their workplace through a series of intervention sessions known as

246 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI the Change Laboratory (Engeström, 2007). Throughout the intervention sessions the facilitator and participants engage in a dialogic process, which enables the participants to focus on the work practices comprising their organisational routines. During this process the objects with which they interact are often reconceptualized, reframed and transformed. According to Engeström, [t]he Change Laboratory method develops work practices by the participants in dialogue and debate among themselves, with their management with their clients, and—not least—with the interventionist researchers. It facilitates both intensive, deep transformations and continuous incremental improvement. (2007, p. 370)

The main aim of DWR interventions is to resolve double binds that impinge on conducting functional organisational activities.

DWR interventions are based on two foundational methodological principles: double stimulation, which is based on Vygotsky’s idea of scientific experimentation, and ascending from the abstract to the concrete, which is drawn from the work of Davydov (Sannino, 2011). Together they make transformative agency a third principle of DWR formative interventions (Engeström et al., 2014).

Engeström (2007) draws on these two principles in theorising how humans mutually shape themselves and their environment through participation. The objective of double stimulation is the creation of a structured environment where the participants are presented with a problem as the first stimulus and provided with the analytical tools as the second stimulus, which are needed to develop a solution. As the participants engage with the object of their activity in a dialogic process, they emerge with a clearer understanding of their activity through a critical consideration of the contradictions in their activity system (Engeström and Sannino, 2010).

For example, the double stimulation in this study is giving a group of lecturers the task of assessing their engagement with MOODLE in their teaching practice (first stimulus) and then giving them the theoretical tools of activity theory (second stimulus), with which the lecturers are to make meaning and reframe the task. This should illuminate the nature of, and reasons for, the lecturers’ engagement, or lack thereof, with MOODLE.

TRACKING THE OBJECT 247 In Engeströmian Change Laboratories the spatial arrangement of the laboratory is specified for implementing interventions (see Figure 1). It focuses on a set of three surfaces which represent the work activity occurring in a historical context, using indicators from the past, present and future to contribute to the discourse as the participants work through the process of examining their problem space. The three surfaces are used as follows: 1.

2.

3.

A mirror surface displays problems and disturbances from the daily work activity that contribute to tensions and contradictions in the activity system.

A model surface represents the activity system. It is used for theoretical tools and conceptual analysis. It uses historical data to make sense of issues, but it also considers the potential for change and creates a vision for the future.

The third surface displays ideas and tools to create a model of the new emerging formation as a result of the cyclic process that takes place as the participants engage with the problem space.

Figure 1:

Prototypical layout (Engeström, 2007)

of

the

Change

Laboratory

248 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI Employing the principle of double stimulation, a Change Laboratory session begins with a collective analysis of the contradictions that limit current activity. This is done by an analysis of data such as video-recorded episodes of work, stories and interview data from the mirror surface. The researcher (hereafter the facilitator) then facilitates the participants by helping them to transform the everyday account of their understanding into a scientific account (concepts) using activity theory. As the process evolves, the problems are articulated in precise activity theory terms using Engeström’s (1987) triangular formation. The objective is to reveal the thinking that is entrenched in the practices and to illuminate the potential for change therein. Thus, in order to understand lecturers’ engagement with MOODLE, Engeström’s (1987) intervention process offers a basis for investigating the issue by giving the participants a space for exploring their needs and interests (Schneckenberg, 2009).

The Change Laboratory method provides instruments for developmental intervention to support collaborative learning in the transformation of work activities (Engeström, 1987). Since its inception, it has to be creatively applied in each individual case. Generally, the method has been applied in large-scale, heavily funded research projects run by a team of researchers (Kerosuo et al., 2010; Daniels et al., 2007; Engeström, 2007). In the current study, as an individual facilitator-researcher with limited resources it was not possible to conduct a Change Laboratory intervention, following the Engeströmian form employed in these large-scale studies. The main principles of the Change Laboratory intervention method were adopted to conduct an intervention into lecturers’ practice. It enabled us to explore if and how their cultural context impacts on their engagement with MOODLE. For this reason, we refer to our approach as a DWR-based Intervention method. The DWR-intervention method allows the facilitator to work with a group of participant lecturers as “flesh-and-blood dialogue partners who have their own emotions, moral concerns, wills and agendas” (Engeström & Kerosuo, 2007, p. 340). This type of investigation moves towards tackling issues of subjectivity, experiencing, personal sense, emotion, embodiment, identity and moral

TRACKING THE OBJECT 249 commitment, which Engeström and Sannino (2010) note as necessary for the future development of activity theory.

These data were collected in the following ways:   

Individual audio-recorded interviews carried out with the participant lecturers from Department A. Six video-recorded group sessions conducted with the participant lecturers.

The facilitator made observations and wrote field notes during the research period.

Using an activity theory-led analysis focusing on the tensions and contradictions experienced by the lecturers over a 12-month period, we have observed the transformations that took place in the lecturers’ activity system. The observed transformation is what Engeström (1987) refers to as expansive learning. We will explain in our analysis later how new forms of activity emerged as transformations in the lecturers’ activity system. The transformations entail participant lecturers working through contradictions that surface during the DWR-based Intervention sessions. This process of resolving the emergent contradictions drives forward new forms of activity. Multiple objects are associated with these new forms of activity and are explained later in the chapter.

In the following, we begin by describing the activity system that emerged from each intervention session. We then present an analysis of the data collected from the individual interviews conducted before the six video-recorded DWR–based Intervention sessions. This analysed data produced the mirror data which was used for the first Intervention session. Following this we present an analysis of the data from the DWR-based Intervention sessions in order to uncover contradictions in the lecturers’ discourse. Our analysis was guided by Engeström and Sannino’s methodological framework (2011), unveiling different types of discursive manifestations of contradictions. In the final section, we examine the process of the transformations by tracking the object—the transformations in the object of the activity system during the DWR-based Intervention.

250 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI

The Lecturers’ Activity System The lecturers’ activity system is a model of the real-life work environment of an individual or group of individuals and is under scrutiny in this study. This activity system, as defined by its elements, is outlined in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2:

Lecturers’ activity system adapted from Engeström (1987)

Central Issue: Transformations Our analysis focuses on understanding the transformation in the lecturers’ activity system, following DWR, which aims to furnish people with the instruments with which they can master a qualitative transformation of their activity system (Engeström, 1987). We analyse how transformation of the lecturers unfolded in their cultural context in following each DWR-led session. These transformations emerged in the lecturers’ thinking and constitute what Engeström (1987) calls expansive learning. What warrants expansive learning is to identify a transformation in the object of an activity system during each intervention session, i.e., what the lecturers focus on changes as their thinking changes. The object is not static or dead; it moves from one session to the other. By tracking the movement of the object of the activity system, we note evidence of a transformation in the lecturers’ activity system. The formative

TRACKING THE OBJECT 251 intervention, with the methodological tool that supports participants in gaining better agency, is aimed at gaining a better grasp of their own future through expansive learning. Working with the participant lecturers over a period of 12 months, the first author observed how their discourse changed over time. By analysing the discourse, we gained a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between cultural context and the lecturers’ engagement with the tool, in this case, MOODLE. Vygotsky’s concept of mediation is helpful for theorising how social, cultural and historical forces all play a part in the transformations that lead to expansive learning.

The analysis of the culture of the workplace, Department A, began by examining the data collected from the individual interviews with the 12 lecturers by the first author, who works as a fulltime lecturer in the department and led the DWR-based intervention sessions as the facilitator. From a combination of the exploratory study prior to the research and her day-to-day observations as a full-time lecturer it is fair to say that the introduction of MOODLE to the lecturers sparked disturbance in the culture of the Department. The exploratory study found that lecturers believed that MOODLE might be a changing force in their work practice, signalling a move towards a more technologically integrated pedagogic practice. This is consistent with the generally accepted view that new technologies will change the teaching and learning environment of the twenty-first century (Hunt, 2011).

Transformations in the lecturers' work practices as an activity system were examined by seeking out contradictions, tensions or disturbances through the use of mirror data from the activity system. They manifest as problem areas, which can ultimately drive change within the system. It is through deep analysis of these contradictions by the participants that resolutions can be found. The central assumption of activity theory is that development is driven through engagement with contradictions (Daniels, 2010a). By focusing on contradictions as dynamic forces of change, we tracked the object throughout the six intervention sessions and noted how it changed, thus enabling transformation within the lecturers’ activity system. In other words, tracking these contradictions enabled

252 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI us to illustrate how the use of MOODLE led to a shift in the object of the lecturers’ activity system.

Analysis of Mirror Data Prior to the workshop sessions, the first author conducted face-toface individual interviews with the 12 participant lecturers. Interview data were used as mirror data for the first workshop of the DWR-based Intervention. The activity theory checklist (Kaptelinin, Nardi and Macaulay, 1999) was used to design the interview schedule. The interview questions were open-ended, encouraging the lecturers to develop a narrative around their use of MOODLE. Aligned with the nodes of an activity system, the questions probed the lecturers’ views on the following issues: the use of MOODLE as a teaching/learning tool; rules in the teaching environment; division of labour; motives for acting on objects; and the objectives of MOODLE usage. Each interview took approximately 20 minutes and was audio-recorded in full and transcribed verbatim. The aims of the individual interviews with the participants were to determine:     

the wider institutional setting of the activity system the lecturer’s role, and whether it was changing as a result of the introduction of MOODLE the level of engagement with MOODLE how MOODLE mediates the lecturer’s teaching environment the tensions and contradictions that arise.

The analysis of the interviews was structured on a foundation of the aforementioned elements of activity theory. In the following, we elaborate on three major contradictions that emerged.

Object and Tool An analysis of the mirror data revealed to the first author that the object is the lecturers’ pedagogic practice using the tool MOODLE. The lecturers believed that technologies such as MOODLE could

TRACKING THE OBJECT 253 help them to enhance their teaching in a way that was appropriate for the 21st century. However, eight of the 12 lecturers interviewed said that they had used MOODLE, but stressed that they used it mainly as a data repository for storing class notes and other material designed for student access. While there was no pressure or mandate from the University to use Moodle there was a consensus among the lecturers that MOODLE was not being used to its full potential, and they saw this as an issue which they needed to address. The four lecturers who had not used MOODLE realised the importance of using it. A contradiction arises here; whilst believing that MOODLE has potential to enhance their teaching environment and that they should be using it in a more advanced way, the lecturers as a group were not using the tool to achieve the object.

Subject and community The subject—i.e., the DWR-based intervention’s twelve participant lecturers—indicated that they are not connected to the community of lecturers across the School. They said that they operated largely in isolation when it came to their use of MOODLE. They spoke of the individualistic nature of their work setting as if it were an everpresent and unchangeable fact of their working lives, for example: “we don’t have a culture of working together.” Although they did not overly object to this individualistic environment, they communicated their frustration at how it inhibited their progress with MOODLE. A contradiction arises here. The lecturers believed that they would eventually have to use MOODLE, but they could not envision how this would happen. They felt that they were constrained in their individualistic environment in a way that was counterproductive to moving forward collectively with the new tool, MOODLE.

Division of Labour and Tool The tool—i.e. MOODLE‚—made the lecturers’ work (labour) more complicated and time consuming than before. In other words, the

254 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI introduction of the tool (MOODLE) impacted on the division of labour. The lecturers who used MOODLE stated that it had increased their workload and also changed their relationship with their students. Furthermore, they spoke of the need to have class notes prepared up to five days in advance in order for the students to have access to them before classes. Lecturers photocopied less for students as the students could now print material themselves from MOODLE. It became the students’ responsibility to get the relevant class notes before class. This suggests that the tool brought about some change in the division of labour. The ability to make class notes available on MOODLE in advance was one feature of this change. This indicates a contradiction between the division of labour and the tool.

In summary, the mirror data were generated from an activity theory analysis of the information gleaned from the individual interviews. They were subsequently used to probe the participants further in the first session. In the following, we will illustrate how the problem of the lecturers is collectively resolved with the DWRbased Intervention sessions.

Analysis of Data from DWR-Based Intervention Sessions There were six sessions held by the facilitator, the first author, in total (January to December, 2010); the sessions varied in length from 90 to 135 minutes. In the first session the facilitator presented the mirror data to the lecturers, both orally and in written format, and opened a discussion by asking their opinions on that data. To provoke discussion during the session she wrote quotes from the interviews on sticky notes and placed them on the wall (see Figure 1). The session focused on the object of the lecturers’ activity system, i.e., their pedagogic practice. The facilitator asked the participants probing questions that were formulated using the elements of Engeström’s (1987) triangular formation (see Figure 2). Towards the end of the session, the lecturers as a group concluded that they needed help to develop their competencies in the use of MOODLE.

TRACKING THE OBJECT 255 They decided that an expert who was external to the University would best suit their needs.

Subsequently, an expert (Matt, a pseudonym) was invited and attended the second session. The lecturers engaged in further discussion and explored the potential of MOODLE with Matt. At the end of that session, they asked Matt if he would partake in subsequent sessions and provide them with customised training. He agreed, and, as a result, ensuing sessions (three, four and five) concentrated on the lecturers developing their competencies in MOODLE. They worked collaboratively to learn the functions and features of MOODLE, which they subsequently tried in their own teaching practice and afterwards shared the results with the rest of the group in subsequent sessions.

During Session Three the participants bonded strongly and identified themselves as a group. They named their group the ‘MOODLE User Group’ or the ‘MUGs’ (hereafter MUGs) as they became known to themselves and also within the wider setting of the Department. During Session Six, lecturers reflected and discussed how they would sustain the MUGs group and continue to work together to explore new ways of using both MOODLE and other relevant technologies to enhance their pedagogic practice.

The facilitator used the conceptual tools of activity theory to help the lecturers analyse the historical development (see the Middle Surfaces of Figure 1): the current contradictions and the future potentials of the pedagogic practice. The introduction of the tool (MOODLE) prompted a change in the pedagogic practice, which, in turn, emerged in the form of tensions and contradictions in the existing activity system. Drawing on Engeström and Sannino’s (2011) methodological framework, we identified contradictions, which emerged in the lecturers’ activity system (McSweeney, 2015).

Tracking the Object The contradictions highlighted in the previous section are brought about by changes in the object of the activity. The object of an activity system is its motive. The object is driven by the motivation of

256 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI the subject (the lecturers). The object of the activity system is extremely difficult to pin down as it shifts dynamically while being acted upon. Engeström (1999b) states that the object determines the horizon of goals and actions in an activity system, but it is truly a horizon itself in that, once an intermediate goal is reached, the object escapes and it must be reconstructed with new intermediate goals and actions. In this study, the original object of the lecturers’ activity system was to teach modules successfully, but the presence of MOODLE changed that, and the lectures became focused on developing technological competency (see also Chapter 8 by Hasse).

Activity theory serves as a tool for mapping contradictions, and, when combined with formative interventions, it enables the participants to find ways of solving those contradictions, which become the driving force of transformation (Murphy and Rodriquez-Manzanares, 2008). Figure 3 below illustrates the transformation in the object of the lecturers’ activity system throughout the DWR-based Intervention between January and December 2010.

TRACKING THE OBJECT 257

Figure 3:

Changes in the object of the lecturers’ activity system throughout the DWR-based Intervention sessions

Multiple Objects A line of development can be traced throughout the DWR-based Intervention sessions. Contradictions emerged quickly in the first session. The lecturers were eager to technologically enhance their

258 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI pedagogic practice but they felt that their individualistic environment inhibited them. It was by resolving these contradictions that the lecturers expanded and further determined the object. The development of the activity took place as contradictions rose to the surface and were debated, negotiated and finally resolved during the period of the DWR-based Intervention. Our analysis shows how the object of an activity can be difficult to catch, as the participants moved through multiple objects (Foot, 2002; Puonti, 2004; Kaptelinin, 2005). Having traced indications of change and potential expansions in the object of the lecturers’ activity system, the following changes in the participants’ focus are played out in multiple objects:      

pedagogic practice connecting with colleagues appropriate training group formation customised training collaborative practice In the following, we will elaborate on each of these objects.

Pedagogic Practice At the beginning of the Intervention, there was a sense that the lecturers were uncertain about the use of MOODLE in their pedagogic practice. This accords with Engeström (1987), who talks of ‘grey areas’ or a ‘no man’s land’ which are created because of the increasing complexity of work processes where no one quite masters the work activity. At the beginning of the first session, the first author noted that the object was the lecturers’ pedagogic practice. As their discussion progressed the first contradiction arose—the lecturers wanted to deliver their modules and also engage their students, but they experienced difficulties in doing this. As one lecturer opines: L3: I don’t think it’s what we teach at all, it’s more how we do it, and I think this is really the focus of what we’re trying to do here, and how we could do it differently. (Session one, March 2010)

TRACKING THE OBJECT 259 This lecturer believes that his own and the other lecturers’ current pedagogic practice is not entirely appropriate for engaging the twenty-first-century students; no other lecturer refuted his statement. A discussion of the historical nature of lecturers’ activity was necessary in order for them to consider the activity’s future development (Engeström, 1999c). The following excerpts illustrate the lecturers’ views, revealing a key contradiction between old and new conceptions of their pedagogic practice: L4: I think students want to be engaged with it, you know? They want to engage with the technology rather than being dormant receivers of knowledge. (Session one, March 2010)

The discussion on MOODLE facilitated the lecturers’ re-evaluation of their relationship to knowledge and how best to deliver this knowledge to their students. The object of the activity system is, therefore, changing and expanding as the lecturers envision the outcome of their activity differently—they aim to move from transmission pedagogy to a more interactive one.

Until now, the object for the lecturers is to cover course content and develop students’ understanding of the material. However, the introduction of MOODLE (tool) highlights a subject-tool contradiction because the lecturers do not have the technical knowledge to use the tool as an enabler of learning. The lecturers need to learn how to use the tool in different ways. The following excerpts show the lecturers’ difficulties with the technology: L10: […] we are saying we need to be shown what to do, [pleadingly] because we didn’t grow up with the technology.

L8: It is yeah, and we have to recognise that we are scared of technology to a certain extent.

L7: […] I’m at a basic level myself. I can’t do anything. I’m just stuck, and I just feel that I’m limited, whereas I’m sure there are more avenues or it’s more user-friendly than I can see.

(Session two, March 2010)

This is an example of a shift in the object of the activity from the pedagogic practice to the need to develop their technological skills. While the lecturers are aware of the necessity for change, they are unsure how to implement this change. MOODLE disrupted the

260 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI lecturers’ pedagogic practice in that it demanded that they gain a new expertise. Lecturers are not sure of how they should be acting on the object. This indicates a subject-object contradiction.

Connecting with Colleagues The discussion moved to considering how the lecturers would gain competence in the use of MOODLE. A contradiction emerged between the lecturer and the community. The object then became the need for collaboration as a reaction to the individualistic nature of their setting. This is evident in the following excerpt: L3: I’d love to know what you’re doing, what you’re doing [pointing to different participants]. I mean, even at an elementary level, and let others know what I’m doing.

Facilitator: But, why don’t you know that?

L3: Well, we don’t talk to one another.

L10: We don’t have an informal situation [in which] to meet.

L4: I think, as a community, we’re very loosely coupled. We’re normally very, very loosely coupled. We bump into one another in the corridor. We have anecdotal chats, and for us to develop MOODLE as a community, that goes against it. We need to be coupled.

(Session one, March 2010)

A further shift was noted in the object to the subject (the lecturer) when the lecturers discussed the fact that they did not have a designated space to meet and interact with one another. The first author did note that the lecturers had referred to an earlier time when they had “some sort of structure. It was a very informal situation”, and they reflected on how at a previous time they “talked about different things”. This suggests that their community became more individualistic over time. The individualistic nature of the lecturers’ community was contradictory to their needs as they expressed the need to connect with each other in order to move forward.

TRACKING THE OBJECT 261

Appropriate Training A further contradiction arose between the lecturer and the community, and the IT training support across the University. The object became how to gain appropriate training when the discussion moved to how the lecturers would develop competence in the tool (MOODLE). The lecturers talked of how the training provided by the University did not meet their needs. The following excerpt highlights these contradictions: Facilitator: So, the training doesn’t fit, is that correct?

L9: It doesn’t do anything L2: I suppose […] the training is very generic, and that it possibly won’t deal with the questions that I need answered.

(Session two, April 2010)

This excerpt suggests that the lecturers did not place great value on the MOODLE training that was provided by the University, although it emerged that four of the 12 participants had not attended any of the MOODLE training sessions provided. If MOODLE is so easy to use, this seems justified. Perhaps, MOODLE is easy to use for the people who already have technological literacy and it may have been sold to the senior management as an intuitive tool (Hasse, 2017). As the Intervention progressed, the focus of the object moved from the inappropriate level of in-house training to the pressing need to find appropriate MOODLE training. When asked their opinions on solutions to the training problem (in activity theory terms, this is a division of labour question), the following sequence is the lecturers’ response: L3: It comes from the factory floor; it’s communities of practice—a group of people just get their heads together and say we are going to make this happen. I don’t think it will come from the management layer. I don’t think it will come from the Institute layer. It won’t come from the School. It won’t come from the Department. And, even if it did come from one of those, I don’t think we as a staff would do it. It needs to come from the floor.

L8: But, does the plan not come from the strategic level, really?

L3: It will never get done. It just won’t be in place, though. [emphatically] It will happen if we want it to happen.

(Session one, March, 2010)

262 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI L3 opines the undisputed belief that the lecturers needed to act themselves to find a solution. The group decided that they wanted an expert from outside their own University to help them to progress with MOODLE. This raises a contradiction between the subject (lecturer) and the division of labour. The provision of MOODLE training was a task that belonged to the Computer Services Department at the University, but the lecturers decided to take this task on themselves. Reconstituting this in activity theory terms, the subject became the object as a result of the introduction of a new tool (MOODLE). The lecturers (subject) focused on themselves to improve their MOODLE use (the object). For the new object, the lecturers specifically wanted to source an external expert in MOODLE who had both lecturing experience and competency in MOODLE, preferably in the same discipline as themselves. They felt that such an individual would have an understanding of their specific needs. Matt, mentioned earlier, fitted this profile and was invited to join the group for the second session.

This is a shift in the division of labour because the lecturers took responsibility for organising their own training, as the following quotes illustrate: L1: [speaking to Matt] And can you come here [i.e., the University] and show us how to do some of these things with MOODLE? That’s a lot of our problem, too. We don’t have any good practical training in using the technology.

L7: Yes, for us, it’s finding out how to use MOODLE efficiently.

(Session two, April 2010)

The MOODLE use session with Matt was successful, having a positive impact on the lecturers, as the following comment recorded in field notes after the session shows: L10: [to the facilitator] You know that session with Matt was excellent. He really gave us hope. It doesn’t seem so daunting now. If we just take one bit at a time, as he said, we will improve. I really found that helpful, and, you know, we are all in the same boat. It’s great to have someone that understands where you are coming from. (Field notes, April 2010)

The initiative shown by the lecturers is an example of subject agency. It is central to formative Interventions (Engeström, 2007).

TRACKING THE OBJECT 263 The lecturers were becoming “masters of their own lives” (Engeström, 2007). Towards the end of the second session, the lecturers seemed to have become less frustrated and much more positive and at ease as they began to understand the possibilities of MOODLE. The facilitator asked the lecturers what was preventing them from using MOODLE in the way Matt had explained. The replies illustrated a change in their thinking: L10: Well, not knowing that these things are possible, really, and the environment here…nobody here is using it like this, that I know of anyway.

L9: Yes, I just didn’t know that you could actually do these things with MOODLE. (Session two, April 2010)

Group Formation Towards the end of the third session a collegial bond was being established between the lecturers as they collaborated and developed a positive attitude towards using MOODLE. The participants began to view the Intervention sessions as a self-support group. Significant to show their group formation is that they named themselves MUGs (the acronym of MOODLE User Group) and, within Department A, they were seen as having competency in the use of MOODLE, distinguishing themselves from the rest of the department.

The sentiment that built in the group was recorded in field notes in June 2010 as follows: L9: [to the facilitator] I was really busy on Wednesday, but I just dropped everything to attend the session because I wanted to end the academic year on a positive note. You know, being part of MUGs has given me something really positive in my work environment. It’s great, and I’m learning so much. (Field notes, June 2010)

For L9, the intervention was a positive experience and being part of the group had provided more than just developing MOODLE competencies. It had also created a social connection. Lompscher (1999) explains that objects become emotionally significant for an individual when the individual represents them cognitively and they satisfy a need for that individual. Thus, objects can become the

264 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI real motive for goal directed, object-oriented activity. As such, L9’s motivation for attending the session was two-fold: to be part of the group and to learn to use MOODLE. The MUGs grew from strength to strength. Another lecturer requested the facilitator to continue the sessions in the new academic year as she felt she was progressing with MOODLE and liked being part of the MUGs group. The lecturers were motivated and empowered by the control they had taken over their own training in the use of MOODLE, which they believed enabled them to enhance their pedagogic practice. Two lecturers remarked after session four (October 2010) that they had arranged to meet informally to discuss ideas they gleaned from the sessions.

The participants bonded and developed a new interest in other teaching technologies beyond MOODLE. In October, 2010 five of the MUGs group attended a national teaching-technologies conference together. The object had broadened from developing MOODLE competency to gaining knowledge about other teaching technologies. While the lecturers initially saw the MUGs as a mechanism to develop their MOODLE skills, it was evident that the group became a tool; in activity theory terms it became an instrument which the lecturers used to mediate their individualistic work environment.

Customised Training By the end of the second session, it was evident that lecturers took responsibility for their own MOODLE training. They then worked with Matt, the external expert. Since the intervention began, the focus of the third (June 2010), fourth (September 2010) and fifth (October 2010) sessions was the development of MOODLE competency. In activity theory terms the tool had become the object at this point as the lecturers focused on their learning and application of MOODLE’s technological features. They learned how to create and run quizzes, forums and chats and to set up groups, etc. Some tried out these features in their classes and reported their experiences to the MUGs group. There was a shift in the division of labour of the

TRACKING THE OBJECT 265 lecturers’ activity system where different lecturers undertook to learn different features of MOODLE and report back to the group.

By Session Six the lecturers’ concerns with the individualistic nature of their environment, appropriate pedagogic practice and their subject position were no longer foregrounded in their discourse.

Learning the features of MOODLE became the object of these sessions. The lecturers themselves took control of the content, direction and pace of their learning. For example, they wanted to learn how to use MOODLE to run quizzes with large student groups. The following excerpt illustrates how they worked together to achieve this: L8: I’ve got a quiz here for one of my modules. Would it be okay to have a look at it as a group? We can use it as a sample, if people are okay with that?

There are a few specific things I need to find out about quizzes before I run it with the students.

(Session four, September 2010)

The group began to learn from each other after session three.

This is expansive learning as the focus is on learning processes during which the subjects of learning are transformed from isolated individuals to collectives and networks (Engeström and Sannino, 2010).

Collaborative Practice By the final session the lecturers in the MUGs group had become a strong cohesive unit. Movement and transformation of the object had taken place throughout the Intervention. It was important for the lecturers to keep the group (MUGs) together as it had served them in transforming the object of their activity throughout the Intervention. As L1 remarked: L1: Yes, being part of the group has actually, I think, given me confidence.

That’s what I didn’t have 12 months ago—to have the confidence to set up a quiz, to look at other aspects. Like, there’s loads of other things I want to do with the Audacity (referring to other software), and I want to look at presentations, and I want to look at more YouTube-type presentations rather than physical in-class presentations. Again, that’s something that’s come out. So, I think the main thing is being part of a group like this, where we’re all in it

266 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI together, we’re all at a certain level, but it’s just given us confidence, particularly if you feel that you’re not really an IT type of person, but yet you want to embrace the technology.

(Session six, December 2010)

L4’s echoing of this sentiment captured how the lecturers viewed their participation in the Intervention: L4: I think a significant momentum has been built up because of the project that you’re doing [referring to the facilitator and this research], right, and it would be a shame for it to stop because even this actually goes beyond MOODLE. I know MOODLE could become the support, but there’s so many new technologies coming on all the time, like Audacity and Turnitin [that] I experimented with here with this group this year. (Session six, December 2010)

During the final session (December, 2010) lecturers also spoke of their desire to keep the MUGs together and to continue to learn other technologies. The MUGs activity system and its transformations can be explained by Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD hereafter) as follows: The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86)

Engeström (1987) further refined the ZPD to account for development at the level of collective rather than individual activities as follows: The distance between the everyday actions of the individuals and the historically new form of the societal activity that can be collectively generated as a solution to the double bind potentially embedded in the everyday actions. (p. 174)

The MUG’s activity system is an example of this new form of collectively generated activity (Engeström, 2001). It was formed as the lecturers worked to resolve the double bind that arose from the contradictions. The lecturers interacted with MOODLE, a tool in their activity system, during the DWR-based Intervention, and this served to transform the object of their activity system from learning MOODLE competency to engaging with students via technology.

TRACKING THE OBJECT 267 A notable difference was observed in how lecturers perceived MOODLE by the end of the Intervention. In the first session the participants were negative and frustrated, but by the end their attitude had changed and they appeared more confident and positive towards it.

Despite the lecturers’ positivity, a division of labour tension arose and was discussed for a considerable time during Session Six. The participants were concerned that other colleagues and management in their department would exploit their competency in the use of MOODLE, and that they would be called upon to train others.

They argued that they were not willing to act in a training role, as they themselves were still learners in the use of MOODLE, and that they had invested their time by participating in the Intervention and setting up MUGs. The Intervention brought about a change in the division of labour in that the participants, through the subject’s collaborative effort, worked on an object in a way that they had not done before. The individualistic workplace context characterised by those participants in the earlier stage of the Intervention had broken down and a change in the division of labour emerged. At the last intervention session, the lecturers jointly constructed a new model of their own activity.

In Closing This chapter has presented an analysis of the DWR-based Intervention conducted in Department A at a University in the Republic of Ireland. The activity theory-led analysis began with a description of transformations in the lecturers’ activity system, uncovering how their view on engaging with MOODLE changed. Drawing on Engeström and Sannino’s methodological framework (2011), we have identified the discursive manifestation of contradictions in the lecturers’ activity system. This has illuminated tensions that the lecturers experienced in their work practices, including their engagement with MOODLE. Next, we tracked the changes in the object of the lecturers’ activity system throughout the DWR-based Intervention, highlighting how a transformation in lecturers’ thinking

268 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI occurred as they worked collaboratively to bring about a new form of activity. The shift reported here is akin to the findings from the Danish project called Technucation (Hasse, 2017). With regards to ‘technological literacy for teachers’ (p. 365), Hasse suggests that in school practice the ability to handle and understand technology is not an isolated skill tied to the individual teacher, (2017). Similarly, our research addresses the question of how intricately the adoption of the new technology affects relations between students and teachers and managers in the University.

Our activity theory-led analysis on tracking the object reveals the pervasive nature of emotions in the lecturers’ work practice.

The objects of the lecturers’ activity system—including teaching, developing MOODLE competencies, forming a close working group that the lecturers represent cognitively and which satisfies a particular need—became emotionally significant for the lecturers.

In order to fully understand the lecturers’ position in relation to their engagement with MOODLE, we suggest that it is necessary to take cognizance of their emotional needs.

As shown in the above analysis, the affective dimension of the lecturers’ Activity System was evident (Daniels, 2012; for a fuller discussion, see Burkitt, 2021). On one hand, the lecturers were angry, anxious, frustrated and dissatisfied; on the other, they were eager to improve by expressing a desire to learn more about MOODLE and other relevant teaching technologies. Using Engeström’s term (1987, p.125), the lecturers frequently find themselves in a “no man’s land” when faced with a disturbance, often as a result of the introduction of a new technology in their work practice. The ATled analysis has enabled us to see the cognitive need for lecturers’ professional learning emerged in tandem with the need to understand its accompanying affective issues. This concurs with the view that the regulation of social relations in institutions has cognitive and affective consequences for those who inhabit them (Daniels, 2012).

In order to understand the lecturers’ professional learning, it is necessary to understand the ‘regulating effect of emotion’ (Leont’ev, 1978, p. 27). Although there seems to be a concentration on studying the structural dimensions of activity as presented in

TRACKING THE OBJECT 269 Engeström’s (1987) triangular formation, we have recognized a need to consider how human activity embodies our emotions as we analysed the data. Arguably, affective issues are always at play, even if invisibly, in these settings, as they become manifested through the motives of the lecturers. In future work, we would like to follow this argument and pay more attention to the agentic dimensions of human activity, which include emotions, identity, morality and motivation (Burkitt, 2021; Holodynski, 2013; Roth, 2009).

Our analysis illuminates the need to forge a link between situations, emotions, and motives by revealing how lecturers make sense of the introduction of a new technological tool into their professional context. With the cultural historical conception of motive, we come to understand emotion and cognition in a non-dualistic frame (Daniels, 2010b, 2012) and Engeström and Sannino (2010).

Our future work will build on the duality of cognitive and affective dimensions, highlighting the need to look more closely at the largely taken-for-granted dimension of affect in the activity system.

Contributing to the debate on educational technology, our analysis reveals the affective dimension of the workplace transformation.

When attempting to understand lecturers’ uptake of teaching-related technologies, searching under the technological or cognitive lamplight will not reveal the full picture; rather, we must also consider the potentially darker and messier (Selwyn, 2014) arena of the affective dimensions. In a recent publication Burkitt (2021) explores the limits of Vygotsky and Leontiev’s legacy in providing a contemporary understanding of emotion. However, Burkitt (2021) looking at more recent work on emotions in the field of CHAT, argues that emotions and feelings occur along with the development of cognition within tool mediated activities. We note that Engeström and Sannino (2010) call for future studies of collective activity systems to avoid splitting the theory in a way that would separate the cognitive and affective dimensions of human activity While activity theory analysis enabled us to capture needs, both cognitive and affective, in the activity system under study, it did not offer the scope and method for in-depth analysis of the affective dimensions. Our future work following this chapter can contribute to advancing activity theory, being mindful of Sannino’s

270 MIRIAM MCSWEENEY, KYOKO MURAKAMI (2011) warning that mechanical applications of Engeström’s (1987) conceptual model of activity systems could be considered sterile representations of abstract interconnected elements. We must take heed of these suggestions as Roth (2009) asserts that without articulating and theorising needs, emotions and feelings, we are hard pressed to arrive at more than a reductionist image of activity generally. Indeed, only by including these needs, emotions and feelings do we capture the activity system as a whole, thus ensuring a more inclusive analysis (Sannino, 2011).

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Thinking with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: Examining Science Education Key Issues Juliano Camillo, André Machado Rodrigues, Cristiano Mattos

Introduction It is a turbulent time for science education. Scientific knowledge is at the heart of several societal disputes that run from the effectiveness of vaccines to actions that mitigate environmental catastrophes. The well-reported growth in distrust in science and institutions (Gallup, 2019) adds layers of complexity to the existing challenges facing science education. For instance, Osborne (2007) argues that among a series of values taken for granted in science education and sanctified with time the tension between training the future scientist and educating those who will not become scientists is the most fundamental. The former is essentially foundationalist, aiming to present to the novices all the theories and concepts of the field in which they would work. Assuming the perspective that scientific knowledge is cumulative, each new generation has more to learn during the same amount of time, leading to school science courses organized around simple memorization of facts or encyclopedic presentation of information from different scientific areas, increasingly specialized. Thus, science education would be nothing else than a process in which students gather pieces of information about natural things, rarely understanding the wholeness of what has been produced as scientific knowledge. Similarly, students try to learn word by word from a giant dictionary produced exclusively by the scientific community, leaving little room for their own agency.

Furthermore, Osborne (2007) underlines that the persistent view of a science detached from society, value-free, and committed 275

276 J. CAMILLO, A. MACHADO RODRIGUES, C. MATTOS to the simple pursuit of truth bears little resemblance to scientific development under 20th-century capitalism. Such underlying tenets are reflected in science education across different levels and contexts, from primary education to higher education. Such values have been consolidated in science education practice over the last century gaining momentum in the last decades, which can be seen in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the educational arm of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and in educational reform movements such as STEM education (as discussed below).

In a similar vein, Gilbert et al. (2011) point out that science education is still based on an overload of fragmented concepts and facts that are rarely relevant to students’ lives. The present criticism of science education resonates with Ilyenkov’s (2007) considerations on problems in education in which memorization of fragmented facts and the presentation of unproblematic products of science, and absolute truth are preferred at the expense of critical examination of concrete reality. Moreover, as examined by Auler (2011), there is a technocratic ethos rooted in the notion of superiority and neutrality of technological models, scientific determinism, and the redemptive view of science and technology, which leads to a fatalist posture and paralysis in the face of scientific and complex societal problems, reinforcing the expectation that scientific and technological development by itself would bring effective solutions to social and political turmoil.

In this chapter, we draw on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to analyze several related problems in the field of science education. Specifically, we challenge approaches to science education that disregard the historical nature of the production of scientific knowledge, underestimate local knowledge, and reinforce the bourgeois conception of individuality. Further, we contend that a linear understanding of the concept of history in science education supports a similarly linear understanding of science itself, which takes away the possibility of people’s agency. Our analysis is guided by what we term two foundational principles of CHAT: historicity and the purposeful (object-oriented) nature of any human activity (Leontiev, 1978), which enable us to grasp science

THINKING WITH CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY 277 education’s object in its processual nature (historically situated) and coming into existence only in a complex net of human practices permeated by values, power dynamics, interests, and committed to a vision of the future. We believe that this approach offers possibilities for an agentive engagement with knowledge production in science education from an emancipatory perspective, not committed exclusively to the adaptation to a future that simply unfolds from the present.

Science Education Research Even though scientific disciplines were introduced in curricula in Europe and the United States during the 19th century (DeBoer, 1991), science education, as an international field of research, is a more recent event. Before the 1960s, the USA was the only country that had institutionalized science education research beyond incidental or isolated studies, advanced courses, or doctoral degrees (Fensham, 2004). It was only during the 1960s and 1970s that science education flourished in other countries (such as the UK, Italy, Israel, and Brazil) and new journals, conferences, and courses dedicated to research in science education emerged (Jenkins, 2002).

Throughout the years, science education research has established itself as an interdisciplinary field (Duit, 2007), incorporating varied research paradigms, theories, and methodologies (other than those of the natural sciences) from areas such as psychology, philosophy of science, sociology of science, cognitive science, and linguistics (Schulz, 2009). Kind (2013) identifies three successive trends permeating science education research in the last decades.

The first trend was influenced by cognitive psychology and arose in the late 1950s as a reaction to behaviorism. While for the latter, the focus was the observable behaviors to avoid the “murkiness’ of the mental world” (p. 675), under the influence of the cognitive perspective, the mental world and students’ internal representations of natural phenomena became a key topic in science education. According to him, the study of the language, for example, would open up the possibility of understanding what is going on inside

278 J. CAMILLO, A. MACHADO RODRIGUES, C. MATTOS students’ heads to promote better ways to teach mental processes employed by scientists while formulating and testing hypotheses.

The second trend emerged under the influence of a Kuhnian perspective of science. From that, it was expected that a person’s understanding of science evolves through time and, in certain conditions, revolutionizes from simple to more advanced concepts.

Learning, instead of being focused on abstract thinking and the transference of mental processes across contexts, became associated with the possibility of understanding in-depth domain-specific knowledge (Kind, 2013). A third, and more recent movement, calls upon sociocultural perspectives (including Vygotsky’s works) to analyze science teaching and learning. This has pushed researchers to conceptualize teaching and learning as a social practice instead of something happening exclusively inside people’s minds (Kind, 2013). Learning would have much more to do with participating in communities of practice than acquiring some sort of static and idealized knowledge. In addition, the understanding of how scientific knowledge is produced has also evolved, suggesting a much more interconnected relationship between the dynamics of the scientific community and the knowledge that is produced (e.g., Latour and Woolgar, 1986).

Following the sociocultural perspective, science education research started focusing on the participation of students and teachers in discursive practices or epistemic communities (Kelly, 2014) and in argumentative tasks (Kuhn, 2010). Additionally, objectives of science education (and curricular reforms around the world) have been stated in terms of the participation of individuals in science-related issues. Scientific literacy, 1 for instance, has become compatible with the idea that students should be able to develop “a

1

According to van Eijck and Roth (2013, p. 99) “Scientific literacy serendipitously entered the academic debate on curriculum reform through three different works in the late 1950s. Scientific literacy was poorly defined in terms of knowledge and learning; it was more of a slogan than anything else; it was coined in response to a publicly felt confusion about the aims of science education. On the one hand, there was a general agreement that science education had to contribute to a higher output of highly specialized scientists and engineers.”

THINKING WITH CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY 279 broad understanding of how science works to interpret the reliability of scientific claims in personal and public decision making” (Allchin, 2013, p. 4).

It is noteworthy that social and ethical concerns have emerged as a focus of research in science education, although being sidelined in the conventional curriculum (Zeidler and Sadler, 2008), as well as issues such as emotions and motivation, social justice, gender, indigenous knowledge, intercultural curriculum, and many others, within what can be framed as a “sociocultural turn”, “political turn” or “activist turn” in science education (e.g., Alsop and Bencze, 2014; Gutiérrez, 2013; Tobin, 2015).

Up to this point, moving beyond the well-established research program on verbal interactions, meaning-making processes, and conceptual teaching and learning, without neglecting these specific and relevant contributions, it is legitimate to reaffirm the need— and possibility through CHAT, as delineated before—of an alternative account in order to explore beneath the surface of the so-called innovations in current science education. Here we use the term CHAT in the sense delineated by Stetsenko and Arievitch (2010) to “refer to a project launched by Lev Vygotsky in the 1920s –1930s, in collaboration with Leontiev and Luria (and several other scholars) and later continued (after Vygotsky's untimely death in 1934) and expanded within what became known as Vygotsky's “school” (p.

232). CHAT is an ongoing project able to carry on an ethico-ontoepistemology (Stetsenko, 2020b) aimed at challenging the traditional tenets of neutrality, individualism, and passivity with an ahistorical attitude that underlies much of the mainstream in science education.

Moving Forward with CHAT in Science Education We proceed from what we consider to be a fundamental methodological standpoint of CHAT: In studying any new area, it is necessary to begin by seeking and developing a method. In the form of a general position, we might say that every basically

280 J. CAMILLO, A. MACHADO RODRIGUES, C. MATTOS new approach to scientific problems inevitably leads to new methods and ways of research. (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 27)

‘Method’, hence, does not refer to any pre-given particular set of procedures within a research design, nor to a particular theoretical approach. Instead, it might be taken as a rationality within an ethico-onto-epistemological system2, inasmuch as “science is always and inherently... socio-politically saturated, historically situated, culturally specific, and, therefore, also and inevitably, ethically responsive and responsible” (Stetsenko, 2021, p. 35). This comprehensive and complex view of “method” entails a radical positioning of history and purposefulness as constitutive of any activity (in its process of becoming) in place of mere chronological narratives or the characterization of supposedly unessential ethico-political influences in the development of the phenomena under analysis. Inevitably, no complete predefined set of procedures could grasp, in concrete terms, the actual movement of the object of science education. In this sense, a method is “simultaneously a prerequisite and product, a tool and a result of the research” (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 27).

In order to “radically refresh the current view on science, science education practice, and research in science education” (Rodrigues et al., 2014, p. 583), our first challenge is to overcome the purely formal affiliations with CHAT and its underlying principles.

Some of the difficulties encountered in appropriating CHAT are due to its dialectical materialist ontology, which does not allow easy integration into the non-dialectical logic that underlies much of Western thinking and, consequently, most accounts in science education (Roth et al., 2009). A formal commitment would fit dialectical logic into a dualistic worldview and expunge their transformative nature. To counterpose the positivist perspective and empiricist theories that take the world as it is (Levant, 2016), in CHAT—through its progressive theoretical formulation—“reality is given in the act of taking it up (co-authoring and realizing) in moving beyond the status quo” (Stetsenko, 2020a, p. 10). This means that people are continuously and “simultaneously creating

2

A similar position we have taken elsewhere, see Rodrigues et al. (2014).

THINKING WITH CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY 281 themselves and the world—by co-authoring community practices, always in collaboration with others, creatively using sociocultural tools that these communities provide, and in light of the soughtafter future” (p. 10). Such a position challenges much of the science education mainstream, which circumvents the problem of the historical nature of reality and reinforces the bourgeois conception of human beings. The principles of historicity and purposefulness radically point to the intentional, collective, and future-oriented nature of human activity, in addition to requiring, also in a radical way, a historical understanding of reality.

Historicity History does not simply refer to changes that might occur over time or a “corpus of ascertained facts,” which “are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fishmonger’s slab” (Carr, 1990, p. 9). On the contrary, it stands for the very dynamic of complex systems of human activities that evolve in a nonlinear and multicentral way (Kohan, 2003). Vygotsky wrote, “[t]o study something historically means to study it in motion” and “only in movement does the body exhibit that it is” (1997, p. 43). In doing so, the difficulty is to prevent objects from being reified as independent entities with qualities governed by their inherent laws rather than as components of a dynamic system of interactions.

Assuming a similar perspective, Engeström (2001) points out that “activity systems take shape and get transformed over lengthy periods of time. Their problems and potentials can only be understood against their own history” (p. 136). Moreover, at first glance, any concrete phenomenon might be seen as a syncretic amalgamation of agents and events. Through analysis, however, such a phenomenon can be comprehended, establishing “its place and role in the concrete system of interacting phenomena in which it is necessarily realized” (Ilyenkov, 1982, p. 177). This allows us to overcome the perspective according to which the facts of the past can exist in “pure form” and “speak for themselves” (Carr, 1990, p. 11), or through which a godlike position can be assumed, transcending

282 J. CAMILLO, A. MACHADO RODRIGUES, C. MATTOS space and time, to narrate history from nowhere (Dazinger, 1997).

Turning to the past as a collection of facts in themselves is indeed not neutral. It can be related to an ideo-methodological3 stance according to which historical development follows rigid and immutable laws over which human beings have little or no agency, except suffering them. In addition to being part of reductionist methodologies—in opposition to complex, nonlinear and systemic approaches—such a position can be used to justify the supposed inexorable unroll of the capitalist mode of production and its oppressive nature, which would lead us to no other fate than accepting it as the final and most developed stage of human history (Mészáros, 2008). It is only from a complex/concrete perspective that historical development can be taken as multilayered, multidetermined and full of potentialities.

In science education, oversimplification of history can be thematized in recent initiatives within the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (hereafter, STEM) education movement (Rodrigues et al., in press). Despite providing some criticism on what is widely recognized as traditional and uninteresting practices in science education, the so-called teaching innovations (such as project and problem-based learning, interdisciplinarity, handson activities, etc.) appear as completely new solutions to persistent issues without providing any rigorous analysis of the structural and historical dimensions of such issues. On the one hand, this leads to ignoring the fact that these supposed innovative practices share profound relations to others already being developed. On the other hand, the lack of analysis (and of a consistent theoretical formulation, which the current literature on STEM education cannot provide) might drive the adoption of uncritically instrumentalists’ perspectives on science and science teaching, and salvationist views of STEM. The consequences for school practices are tragic. Despite

3

“Standard narratives about science tend to avoid the ideological dimension and do not (many times deliberately) grasp how methodological and ideological (or I would say ideo-methodo-logical) dimensions are entangled.” (Camillo, 2019, p. 100).

THINKING WITH CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY 283 necessarily being historically and contextually situated,4 STEM education initiatives (and consequently some of their solutions) picture themselves as universal and supra-historical. This perspective overpasses local practices and—without affording any analytical account to the historical problems we face today—provides readymade, unrealistic solutions to be applied, giving little space to the agency of the school community but blaming teachers, students and other school actors for inefficiency when they fail to implement them (see McComas and Burgin, 2020; Toma and García-Carmona, 2021; Zeidler, 2016). No less important is the affiliation of these ready-made solutions to neoliberal practices that pervade education nowadays—among other things, through large-scale international assessments, like PISA (discussed ahead).

On another level, the oversimplification of history within science education practice can be found in the literature that analyzes the obstacles to implementing an effective historical approach to teaching scientific concepts. Höttecke and Silva (2011) point out that among the core obstacles—that stem from several sources—are the written materials and the textbooks available to educators and students. Moreover, science educators usually face friction with the established curriculum and school culture when adopting and carrying out historical approaches (Henke & Höttecke, 2015). Although the acknowledgment of the importance of moving beyond simplifications, anecdotal accounts, and presenting history as a collection of dates and facts, it remains unclear to researchers and educators how to develop sustainable practices based on historical approaches in science education.

Usually, the anachronic account of the history of science undertakes that “anything in the scientific past that does not conveniently fit into the present scientific canon is debunked as stupidity or pseudo-science” (Leahey, 2002, p. 16). Despite considering actual historical facts, these facts are commonly taken as anticipations of

4

The STEM education emerged within the U.S. context in the 1990s with the support from institutions like National Science Foundation (NSF), and to a great extent is grounded on tenets of market-driven skills, national economic competitiveness, and technological utopianism.

284 J. CAMILLO, A. MACHADO RODRIGUES, C. MATTOS the present, i.e., the inexorable determination of the past that ends in the present. This perspective is typically manifested in science textbooks—which undoubtedly play a pivotal role in science classrooms (Pellegrino et al., 2018)—through flashcards, text boxes, and footnotes under the label of “history of science” but formed by no more than a pile of factual information (names, dates, places, and so on) without any effective historical and developmental analysis (Dagher and Ford, 2005; Leite, 2002; Pellegrino et al., 2018). Moreover, the way science textbooks are often organized helps to crystallize the perspective through which the success of current scientific theories can be used as the standard to evaluate the past—i.e., as a “glorious successful progress from ignorance to truth” (Leite, 2002, p. 339). As discussed by Whitaker (1979), As quasi-history insists on easy understanding and agreement to convince the reader of the undoubtful truth, it can not take as relevant the social aspects of science that would become evident through the analysis of past controversies. The discoveries are then presented either as almost trivia or almost mystical and the scientists are shown as solvers of trivia or supermen conjuring up answers from thin air, and suddenly presenting and making prevail their own theories. (p. 339)

In this vein, historical facts are taken as proof of absolute truth, based on a metaphysical realism that would unquestionably determine scientific knowledge and on a method that univocally connects science and reality. Consequently, historicity in this perspective has no other role than expressing the path of trial and error of the scientists toward the already established truth of the world as it is.

Despite the well-established tradition defending the value of promoting discussions about history, philosophy, and sociology of science in science education 5 , much of the historical approach is closer to “intellectual history than with the analysis of scientific

5

For a comprehensive account of this perspective, see Hodson (2014). Rader (2020, p. 569) points out that “since the 1990s, some scholars have foregrounded a more explicit goal of using the history of science to enhance science education—in particular, to imagine how history can most effectively inform teaching the methods and practices of scientists, a subject later called the ‘nature of science,’ or just NOS."

THINKING WITH CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY 285 processes as an integral part of economy, politics, culture, social issues” (Gandolfi, 2019, p. 559). Additionally, the dissent and contradictory nature of the scientific production is replaced by a consensual version through which science provides the ultimately right principles. The elimination of contradictions and controversies, far from dialectics, reinforces the idealistic approach as the main subside of scientific practice and conception of reality. Conclusively, the effort to reframe a historical approach reflects the effort to recover the condition of agency in science education. Neither science education nor science can be framed without an agent that historically produces it.

Object-Oriented and Purposeful Activity We proceed from the view that the first historical act is the production of material life, which is only possible through collective activity, relying on a set of cultural tools with an ever-increasing complexity throughout history (Marx and Engels, 1978). As part of such a system, human beings cannot be conceived as isolated atoms.

From the very beginning, real individuals are entangled in the network of social relations (Mészáros, 1995), which means that every single individual is potentially related to the totality of humanity.

Additionally, limits to human development are not imposed by rigid inborn structures nor by immutable laws of historical development, instead, they are imposed by an oppressive social formation, i.e., by the very form through which society deliberately produces and reproduces itself (Mészáros, 2008; Stetsenko, 2015).

Within this perspective, in methodological terms,6 the investigation of human phenomena cannot be exclusively focused on individual actions, but it should include the broad societal activity in order to understand not only what is happening/changing but also why, by whom, by what means and under what historical

6

Or, in “ideo-methodological” terms, to be fully loyal to the perspective we discuss here.

286 J. CAMILLO, A. MACHADO RODRIGUES, C. MATTOS purposes/intentionalities (Lee, 2014). As pointed out by Kaptelinin (2005, p. 5), [T]he object of activity can be considered the “ultimate reason” behind various behaviors of individuals, groups, or organizations. In other words, the object of activity can be defined as “the sense-maker,” which gives meaning to and determines values of various entities and phenomena.

One well-known example is the influence exerted by institutions such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on educational goals and curricula in several countries. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), OECD’s educational arm, has been guiding several policies throughout recent years. Even though it may count for countries that represent 80% of the global economy, controversially, it is not representative of the global population (Sjøberg and Jenkins, 2020).

Although supposedly designed to inform countries in their educational policymaking, PISA has incessantly failed to shed any light on the core issues of science education. Rather, they are, at best, untouched, if not aggravated by the analysis and recommendations of OECD. To illustrate, according to PISA data, there is a consistent mismatch between students’ performance and their interest in science and scientific careers. What OECD considers successful science teaching has little impact on forming a science-based workforce once skillful students disregard science as a possible career (Ainley and Ainley, 2011). Additionally, the same data show that inquiry-based teaching and student-centered approaches, which science education researchers consider good teaching practices, are generally negatively correlated to the performance of the students on the test (Aditomo and Klieme, 2020; Cairns, 2019). Besides that, in some cases, OECD neoliberal recommendations and consequent implementations by some countries represented a backlash in the results of subsequent assessments (Sjøberg, 2015; Trumberg, 2019). Ultimately, all these previous considerations indicate that science education goals, embedded within the neoliberal vision, barely find support in their own assessment instruments and educational benchmarks.

THINKING WITH CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY 287 Through PISA, we can also portray another problematic aspect of science education that Osborne (2007) nominated as “the homogenous fallacy,” to refer to the widespread and fallacious conception that “all children should have the same science education” (p. 174). Assuming the perspective of promoting “fair tests” across different countries, cultures, and languages, in which the same items evaluate all students, PISA ends up relying on notions of science and science education that exclude current, local, and contextual aspects. Even though some science education researchers have been arguing for a more localized curriculum and to bring historical, political, and ethical aspects to conceptualize science as a human activity, PISA materializes quite the opposite. This is entirely significant since PISA is not simply a crystalline and passive reflection of society’s ideas about science, science education, and scientific careers. On the contrary, PISA and OECD are purposefully acting toward a science education framed by competitiveness in the global market.

Although the contradictions that we just delineated are well documented in the literature (Biesta, 2015; Sjøberg, 2015; Sjøberg and Jenkins, 2020), the public discussion around PISA, which might eventually impact science teachers, remains a hostage of the international competitiveness depicted by the PISA ranking. Despite any good intentions that may be found in the PISA documentation, from the current state of things it is possible to assume that programs and organizations like PISA and OECD are unable to offer any solution to core contradictions within the science education object. On the contrary, they drag the problem around and the necessary inquiry, questions, and discussions on the science education object, remain untouched. Through the scrutiny of the object of science education—and its complex, multilayered, multivocal, historical, and purposeful nature—we advance the consolidation of a transformative agenda for research and practice, not only by identifying the already present agents and intentionalities, but also acknowledging that this very same object (of science education, in this particular case) can be agentively and consciously produced toward a more emancipatory project.

288 J. CAMILLO, A. MACHADO RODRIGUES, C. MATTOS

Conclusion Science Education is a unique research field that deals with phenomena that vary from the macrocosm of educational policy to the microcosm of specific science classrooms with singular individuals, a system of interrelated processes that confront different aspects of the production of knowledge, values, and power relations. In science classrooms, universal scientific knowledge meets the local, contextual, and sometimes ephemeral everyday knowledge, embodying diverse commitments and intentionalities. In these confrontations, we identify solutions that stand as innovative, completely disregarding the history of the phenomena they seek to transform.

Our theoretical contribution to a new version of science education (and also science education research), fully committed to human emancipation (Camillo, 2015), is to carry out critical and radical analysis that allows us to engage in an agenda of concrete and relevant problems to be faced. We are also continuously challenged to critically look at our own work to scrutinize our ethico-onto-epistemology and to what purposes we are moving toward—our object within science education. By drawing on CHAT, science education can engage in an emancipatory education, i.e., an education that is not about a set of crystallized knowledge to be learned but the engagement in a project for the future that potentially enables the emergence of problem-posing activities in which students can fully develop their agency, and embrace the authorship of the historical process (Camillo, 2019).

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Foundations of Educational Studies of Agency: An Activity-Theoretical Critique Annalisa Sannino

Introduction This chapter engages the dialectical rationale of contradictions from cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in critical dialogue with three theories of agency from psychology and sociology, which are frequently used as foundations of educational studies of agency and which seem to have transferred somewhat uncritically to the field of education: social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 2001, 2005), realist social theory (Archer, 2003) and the chordal triad approach (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). The perspective developed here suggests that the use in the field of education of these three theories has led to dominant conceptions of agency primarily being seen as an inherent quality residing within the individual (e.g., Deil-Amen and Tevis, 2010), or as an outcome of a vaguely defined interplay between individuals and their social contexts (e.g., Eteläpeltö et al., 2013). These views of agency are problematic for a domain which is so crucial to fostering agency in the making of a just and sustainable world.

The borrowed conceptualizations from the three theories mentioned above build on the classic rationale of non-contradiction, which has significant limitations to contributing to formative and transformative endeavours in society. This is in fact a rationale that prioritizes the identification of fixed and pure categories. As such, in contrast to the rationale of contradiction, it does not account for movement and for relations among seemingly incompatible and contradictory terms. To illustrate a key difference between the two rationales, let’s take the example of a person who is showing no agency at all. A rationale of non-contradiction would lead this person to be considered a passive agent. A rationale of 295

296 ANNALISA SANNINO contradiction instead would lead us to consider the circumstances that prevent this person from undertaking agentive actions and to explore ways in which these circumstances could be overcome. Educational scholarship on agency must be able to inform concretely lived processes and socially productive relations.

As an alternative to the status quo, this chapter proposes a CHAT perspective in which a dialectical rationale of contradiction is seen as a useful means to develop conceptualizations of agency that lend themselves to the actual fostering of transformative capacities, i.e., contributing to the creation of conditions to concretely enact agency. With the lenses of CHAT dialectics, agency (Sannino, 2015a, b, 2022; Sannino, Engeström & Lemos, 2017; Kerosuo, 2017) is an inherent feature of human action, embedded in and interacting with historically developing activities as a process through which human beings change themselves and the history of the activities they inhabit. This means that instances in which agency may seem not to be occurring can actually be instances of agency after all (Sannino, 2015a), and that even those who may be considered least agentive can exert agency if suitable conditions are developed that may support this development (Sannino, 2022).

The aim of the critical dialogue proposed in this chapter is threefold: 1. to question the suitability of the conceptualizations stemming from these psychological and sociological theories for the field of education; 2. to offer arguments in favor of a renewal of inquiries on agency in educational research; 3. to present CHAT’s dialectical rationale of contradictions as a possible means to develop conceptualizations of agency which are fit for educational research and practice.

In the following, the conceptualizations of agency in the works initiated by Albert Bandura, Margaret Archer, Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische will be comprehensively summarized and critically discussed one by one in the first three sections of the chapter.

Then a CHAT led dialectical rationale will be presented in the

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 297 fourth section of the chapter as a perspective which could be more suitable to educational inquiries on agency. Continuing the critical dialogue started in the first three sections, the fourth section elaborates on the differences between the rationale of non-contradiction informing the three theories discussed and CHAT’s dialectical rationale of contradiction. The conclusion summarizes the arguments put forward in the chapter and its contribution to the way in which the CHAT rationale of contradiction can inform future research on agency.

The Psychological Conceptualization of Agency in Social Cognitive Theory Four core features characterize human agency within social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 1989, 2001): intentionality, forethought, selfreactiveness and self-reflectiveness. Intention is both a representation of and a commitment to an action plan. Forethought is the cognitive function by which human beings anticipate outcomes, operating in conjunction with personal standards, which ensures continuity and coherence of direction. Self-reactiveness is the ability to shape the course of action by monitoring, evaluating and possibly correcting it. Self-reflectiveness is the metacognitive capability to reflect upon and examine one’s own functioning. These features of human agency are all rooted in the central mechanism of belief in self-efficacy, that is, the belief in or perception of one’s own capability to produce the desired results, despite obstacles.

Self-efficacy beliefs or perceived self-efficacy consist of judgments of one’s capabilities to arrange and put forward actions aimed at a specified goal (Bandura, 1997). This is the key determinant of human behavior from which self-regulatory incentives derive. People with low efficacy negatively differ from people with high efficacy, in cognitive performance as well as in motivational, affective and decision-making processes. In other words, the more confident one is to participate in certain actions, the more likely it is that one will engage in goal-focused pursuits. When self-efficacy

298 ANNALISA SANNINO is highly perceived, higher goals are set and there is increased likelihood of agency development (Bandura, 2002, p. 5).

One of the key tenets of social-cognitive theory is the role models play in changing behavior and in learning new ways of behaving (Bandura, 1973). Bandura demonstrated the origins of children’s aggressive behavior in exposure to the violent conduct of others. His well-known controversial Bobo doll experiment is part of this line of research. Bandura later on investigated how modeling can help when facing phobias and traumas. These studies, including—among others—natural disaster survivors and veterans, demonstrate that the implementation of self-efficacy-based beliefs and self-regulatory strategies result in relief from these disorders.

Modeling, for Bandura (2005), is not merely mimicry nor the antithesis of creativity. It involves learning the guiding principles behind the modelled behavior, which—in turn—leads to transcendence of the model by creatively personalizing it and adjusting it to novel circumstances.

The social-cognitive theory of human functioning (Bandura, 1997) confronts the limitations of views according to which human beings react to the external environment that molds them. For Bandura, human beings are distinctively characterized by the capacity to influence and exercise control over their cognitive processes, their actions and their environment. This is a core aspect in which social-cognitive theory comes close to a dialectical rationale. Within this perspective, freedom and control are not incompatible opposites: freedom is seen as control exercised on oneself (Bandura, 1989, p. 1182). Self-generated influences are in part determinants of human actions. That is why, Bandura explains, there is compatibility between the social-cognitive notion of human agency and determinism understood as the deliberate initiation of causal relations affecting oneself, others and the environment. The critical dialogue which will follow the presentation of the theory initiated by Bandura will focus in particular on these features of agency, which have also been salient in CHAT ever since the work of Vygotsky (1997).

The presentation of the core features of social-cognitive theory would not be exhaustive without triadic reciprocal causation,

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 299 which is the conceptual model on which the theory is based. The model (Fig. 1) conveys that human beings and their environment are causally related to one another in mutually influential and functionally dependent ways. That is, both actions (A) and environment (E) mutually influence one another, and in turn mutually influence cognitive processes (CP)—understood broadly as internal personal factors, including affective and biological factors.

Fig. 1:

The model of triadic reciprocal causation (Adapted from Bandura, 1997, p. 6)

To understand how this model works, let’s take the concrete example of Elise, an excellent student preparing for a difficult exam. Her actions influence the environment (AE) if she demands that the class works on a specific task which students have not sufficiently practiced so far and which is likely to appear in the exam. Conversely, the environment influences her actions (EA) when Elise does the assignments given by the teacher, carefully aligned with the curriculum guidelines. Elise’s actions influence her cognitive processes (ACP) when she successfully accomplishes a preparation task and this makes her feel confident that she can pass the exam with flying colors. Conversely (CPA), Elise’s cognitive processes influence her actions when her strong belief in her capabilities enhances her focus, discipline and persistence in the exam

300 ANNALISA SANNINO preparation. The social environment influences Elise’s cognitive processes (ECP) when she is praised for her ability to prepare for the exam. Conversely (CPE), Elise’s cognitive processes influence the environment when, in the very noisy classroom, she enhances her concentration efforts, disregarding the distracting elements.

Several conceptual problems arise if one turns to social-cognitive theory by employing the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradiction from a standpoint specific to educational scholarship, i.e., to understand and support education, human learning and development. In the following, four critical areas are mapped: 1. Despite clear degrees of variation, modeling in social-cognitive theory is primarily a reproductive mode of acting and learning, far from being truly emancipatory. To be able to meaningfully address the acute transformative challenges of our time—related to climate change, unemployment or poverty, for instance—agency cannot primarily rely on reproducing what is mostly already known or established.

2. The split between cognitive processes or personal factors and actions in the model of triadic reciprocal causation marks a rather artificial divide between “what one is” cognitively, affectively and biologically, and “what one does”. If personal agency, as Bandura explains, originates in observations of others producing effects by their “actions”, as well as in the recognition that one can “do” the same, on which grounds then do self-efficacy beliefs gain the primacy in explaining agency? In other words, while social-cognitive theory acknowledges the primacy of action in human development, for instance the initiatives Elise takes to advance with her studies, it does emphasize the role of beliefs of self-efficacy as if they were the “causa finale” or foundational determinant of human agency.

3. The reciprocal movements in the model of triadic reciprocal causation seem to run quite smoothly without indication of glitches between the components. This is of particular importance if one turns to the model to identify areas where support is needed to foster agency, especially in cases of individuals and collectives who are not high performers like Elise or who are confronted with unprecedented demands for which there are no models to turn to.

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 301 4. The model does not consider mediating instruments or material artefacts (Vygotsky, 1997; Sannino, 2015b, 2022). These play a role in the way in which agency emerges and develops, by human beings using them to affect their behavior, as well as the world around them. The conception of human beings influencing themselves and the environment is not new. Vygotsky (1997) put forward a similar conception long before Bandura. There are well-documented historical reasons that may explain why Vygotsky’s perspective—formulated decades earlier—is not thoroughly discussed in social-cognitive theory, although it could significantly enrich it.

Unlike in Bandura’s theory, which is devoid of historicity and materiality, however, Vygotskian agentive tools of self-influence are not strictly mental states. Although social-cognitive theory does bring into focus the neglected human action, it does so by purging it of all operationalizable historical and material features. In this way, the very process of developing control over life circumstances becomes abstract.

For Bandura, human beings exert control and influence over significant aspects of their lives by means of their thoughts and beliefs, especially thoughts and beliefs concerning self-efficaciousness and self-regulation. Social-cognitive analyses consequently emphasize the sense of agency rather than the enactment of agency. Furthermore, the modeling and exercise of self-influence disregard instances in which internalization has not yet occurred and human beings stumble with their limited material resources into complex and newly evolving historical circumstances. Thus, what socialcognitive theory of agency offers is a cognitively self-contained notion of agency according to which the motivators and regulators of our action reside in the mind, expanded to an abstractly defined conduct, and in an environment which is to a great extent vaguely defined.

People with highly perceived self-efficacy within a social-cognitive theoretical perspective do not seem to be vulnerable to the historical contradictions of the time they live in. Their beliefs in themselves and their models enable them to make sound decisions and persevere till successful accomplishment of the set objectives.

Although sensitive to the socio-economic conditions that obstruct

302 ANNALISA SANNINO and facilitate agency (e.g., see more recent developments on moral agency in Bandura, 2018), social-cognitive theory does not offer the conceptual tools to grasp such conditions. Agency resulting from a reciprocal interplay between personal and social influences requires a theory which at least points to such tools.

The Sociological Conceptualization of Agency in Realist Social Theory Other influential conceptualizations of agency stem from the field of sociology in the works of Archer (2003, 2007, 2012, 2014) and Emirbayer and Mische (1998). This section is devoted to the former, while the following section will focus on the work of Emirbayer and Mische. Archer’s conceptualization of agency builds on the notion of realist social theory, according to which structure and agency are different layers of reality, each bearing its own properties and powers, and yet both reciprocally influence one another. In particular, realist social theory claims that structural powers are mediated through agency as they are established and maintained by people.

Archer’s contribution is to explicate this as a double-edged transmission and mediation process: structure is on the one hand transmitted, for instance, from one generation to another and, on the other hand, agents themselves fully or partially embrace structure or, in some cases, even reject it.

In Archer’s work, this double-edged process is depicted as a necessary step for realist social theory “to give due recognition to the personal powers of human agents” (Archer, 2003, p. 9). In this, realist social theory and CHAT are perfectly aligned, as both theories emphasize that human beings can make a difference in their lives and in the world. For Archer, however, these powers are essentially of a reflexive nature. It is with the help of reflexivity that agents influence themselves, the society and the relation between the two. The agential process of mediation mentioned above—i.e., when people mobilize their personal powers, and impact social structures—is named “the internal conversation” (p. 1). It consists in the articulation to ourselves of our place in society, our interests

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 303 and our future perspectives. The internal conversation is “a model of internal deliberations through which the reflexive agent could actively mediate his or her objective social structure” (p. 64).

Archer’s conceptualization of agency can be seen as an attempt at redeeming the agency people exert while making their way through complex and influential social structures. Yet, her perspective might be asking too much of individuals, by claiming that their agency builds primarily on their capability to carry out internal conversations. Can one really perform efficacious projects on one’s own and by primarily mobilizing mental reflexive powers?

Archer’s core claim is that “the private life of the social subject holds the key to resolving the problem of structure and agency… The private lives of social subjects are indispensable to the very existence and working of society” (Archer, 2003, p. 52). Yet such a stance entails crucial methodological and ethical considerations which will be elaborated in later paragraphs of this section, when a critical perspective on realist social theory will be outlined by building on the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradictions. For instance, to what extent can we access the private life of the mind to research agency?

And do researchers of agency have the right to do so if their inquiries end up with analytical categories that can in turn negatively influence those who generously lend themselves to their scrutiny?

For now, to continue presenting Archer's theory, her clear-cut categories of agency must be introduced. These distinguish people who are capable of reflexive internal conversations, and therefore are capable of agency, from people who are not, due to the impediment or suspension of their powers of reflexivity. Active agents or active reflexives employ three types of reflexivities—communicative, autonomous and meta-reflexivity—to form projects which can be accomplished by linking to and relying on social structures themselves, i.e., respectively engaging in evasive, strategic and subversive actions. These reflexivities are “stances” (Archer, 2003, p.

300) active agents deliberately take to pursue their interests. This creates chances of success, although there is no guarantee of success. In contrast with these people who are capable of agency, Archer claims that there are also passive agents who are condemned to random actions at the mercy of the external

304 ANNALISA SANNINO environment and have forfeited control over their lives after circumstances they could not effectively face.

Archer’s analyses of passive agents or passive reflexives lead to the identification of “displaced persons” (Archer, 2003, p. 298) and “impeded persons” (p. 298), contained in the broad category of fractured reflexives. What characterizes these types of agents is that “their self-talk provides them with no instrumental guidance about what to do in practice” (p. 299), making them incapable of exerting active agency in society. Being wrapped up in their affective issues, these people are seen as practically ineffective: “the ‘fractured’ subject merely dwells with increasing misery and frustration upon the impossibility of realizing any of his or her concerns… Their inner dialogues go round in inconclusive circles, which increase the subjects’ disorientation” (p. 303). The adjective “fractured” is said to have been purposefully selected to refer to “‘fractures’ that can often be mended” (p. 299). Realist social theory, however, does not explain how this mending may happen.

One of the cases given by Archer as an example of passive agents is eighteen-year-old Lara, who is living in sheltered accommodation for youth at risk (Archer, 2003). She faced great obstacles when making decisions and instead remained tangled up in indecision. At age seventeen, after escalating arguments with her mother, Lara became homeless, and she was then housed by the social services in sheltered accommodation. Lara, according to Archer’s analysis, is a passive agent, providing only ambiguous answers when the researcher asks her to say what her top concerns are. Yet Archer reports that in her current life in the youth foyer, Lara is of assistance to others when they have problems, “by talking to them and helping them out” (Archer, 2003, p. 309). Archer also reports that Lara wants to become an amateur DJ and one day to own her own club. In one interview Lara remarks “I like making people happy and seeing them happy” (p. 310) and “I think that’s what I like about being a DJ, because everyone’s out having a good time on the dance floor… So, I wouldn’t mind, like, giving that sort of pleasure” (p. 310). Also, Archer reports that Lara, by following the encouragement of her case officer and advisers, shows openness

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 305 to their suggestions and has obtained a place in college to study the field of her interest, i.e., performing arts.

Archer’s categories seem to weigh too heavily on informants such as Lara, by confining them to fixed negative categories which do not leave room for new openings, such as, in the case of Lara, the expressions of her desire to become a DJ and the initiative to apply for college. Yet we do not find, in realist social theory of agency, conceptual instruments offering a developmental perspective for passive agents to overcome their conditions of inability to exert agency. Realist social theory therefore offers categories that appear rather like conceptual prisons from the viewpoint of pursuing the educational purpose of supporting the development of agency. Passive agents, as in the example above of becoming homeless, or in other examples Archer gives of losing a job or suffering discrimination, are characterized as being unable to devise agential projects and to prevent the occurrence of problematic events, which remain as if they were just happening to these vulnerable people.

This seems an instance of sociological categorizations which do not lend themselves to informing and supporting processes and relations for change.

To return to the methodological and ethical considerations mentioned earlier, can the misery that happens to people really be attributed to this extent to their own responsibility or to their lack of agency? And would it not be possible that fractured reflexives look stuck specifically because they are deliberating in an active manner, only with much more depth and concern for social structural implications than reflexives who immediately manage to engage with practical agentive solutions? Furthermore, how can the role of the researchers be accounted for when the categories deriving from their theory might further reinforce the stigmas our societies too often inflict on the most vulnerable? These are questions that the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradictions encourages us to raise when discussing the example of Lara and the characteristics of realist social theory.

Some of these methodological and ethical questions resonate with Hung and Appleton’s (2015) study of young people leaving care, whose analysis shows that active agency comes into being in

306 ANNALISA SANNINO combination with passive forms of agency. Archer’s analysis implies that Lara can rise from the ashes rapidly, primarily relying on her own reflexivity. Instead, the dialectical perspective adopted in this chapter emphasizes that vulnerable youths with a history of lack of support are test cases for the reflexivity and agentive abilities not only of Lara herself, but also of the social structures that have the responsibility to provide to Lara and to youth like her the necessary support. When applying the CHAT rationale of contradictions, the support Lara received from the professionals in the shelter and from other social structures does not take anything away from Lara’s agentive capabilities and is actually a necessary condition for these capabilities to define themselves.

Also in relation to the CHAT rationale of contradictions, it can be stated that for social structures to take on agentive responsibilities, the work of the academics themselves has a role to play. While reading Archer’s analysis, I could not help wondering how Lara would feel if she read such a leading scholar reaching the conclusion that “Lara has lost strict personal identity because she does not have a definite configuration of concerns” (Archer, 2003, p. 312).

Was Archer’s interview with Lara a missed opportunity for a representative of academic social structures to exert the agentive responsibility these structures carry with them? Instead, what Lara gets in return for offering her life story to scholarly posterity is to be let down once more. The lack of a developmental dimension in Archer’s theorizing comprises a self-defeating element, if this approach leaves behind interviewees like Lara, depicted as passive agents, to whom the sociological analyses performed by the author can only wish them “the best of luck” (p. 341).

The Sociological Conceptualization of Agency in the Chordal Triad Approach Another sociological perspective on agency which has been very influential in educational research is the one developed by Emirbayer and Mische (1998). As I did for the two theories discussed in the first and second sections of this chapter, here I will

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 307 also proceed by first giving a concise presentation of the theoretical approach in question, before proceeding with a commentary engaging with the CHAT dialectical rationale. Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) approach is motivated by the necessity to situate agency within the flow of time. They look at both actions and structural contexts of actions which evolve across the past, the present and the future. Temporality is therefore seen as essential to reconceptualizing agency beyond the limitations of free will vs. deterministic views, as well as rational choice vs. norm-oriented approaches. Starting from this key premise, agency in this approach is analytically disaggregated into components and sub-components. The aim is to demonstrate ways in which these components merge with various forms of structure and how morally responsible actions unfold.

This analytical framework builds on George Herbert Mead’s theorizing of temporality in The Philosophy of the Present (1932). The framework focuses in particular on the notion of emergent events continuously refocusing past and future, and on the notion of consciousness constituted through sociality. These notions highlight human beings’ ability to simultaneously inhabit different temporal and relational systems. Agency is defined as: a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment)” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 963).

Agency is “an internally complex temporal dynamic” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 964) in which each element is simultaneously oriented toward the past, the present and the future, while at the same time having one of these temporal orientations more pronounced than the others. Historical variability (“agency as a historically variable phenomenon”, p. 972) is also mentioned as a distinctive feature of agency in this approach.

The authors use the metaphor of “the chordal triad” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 970) to characterize agency. In musical terms a chord is a combination of three or more simultaneously

308 ANNALISA SANNINO played notes, also called tones. The chordal triad of agency is a composition of “three constituent elements of human agency: the iteration, projective, and practical-evaluative tones of the chordal triad” (p. 974). These tones make a triadic chord because they form a unity of separate but not always harmonious elements, discernible in each concrete empirical instance of action, with primary orientations and secondary orientations toward the past, the present, or the future. Furthermore, each of the three main tones (iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation) is in itself a composition of subelements which reflect this triadic internal chordal structure. The chordal triad of agency can be summarized with the help of Table 1.

Iteration

Practical evaluation Projectivity

Table 1.

Past Selective attention Recognition of types Categorical location Characterization

Anticipatory identification

Present Maneuver

Future Expectation

Problematization Decision Execution Experimentation

Deliberation

Narrative construction Symbolic composition Hypothetical resolution

Emirbayer and Mische’s chordal triad of agency

The tone of iteration comprises three primary past-oriented subtones: 1. Selective attention: Every day, to respond to unfolding circumstances, we selectively pay attention to what appears relevant to us, on the basis of criteria established through our past experiences and of which we are not necessarily conscious.

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 309 2. Recognition of types: We recognize similarities between the newly unfolding events and types of experiences stemming from the past.

3. Categorical location: We locate these typifications in categories concerning evolving social relations.

As to the secondary present- and future-oriented sub-tones, present orientation in iteration displays itself in the maneuvers we make to select among our repertoires of routines and habits to face situational contingencies, rather than acting routinely and habitually in a mechanical way. Future orientation in iteration displays itself in expectations that types of experiences will reproduce themselves in the future, providing sustainability and continuity of social interactions and relationships. The tone of iteration is foundational because it provides the necessary grounds for shaping novel patterns of action which ultimately characterize agency. However, iteration, as such, is basically limited to the repetition of such patterns without challenging, reconsidering, and reformulating them.

The tone of practical evaluation concerns judgments about alternative possible actions when present circumstances challenge our routines with demands, dilemmas, and ambiguities. For this tone there are three primarily present-oriented sub-tones: 1. Problematization is the recognition that current circumstances are ambiguous, unsettled, or unresolved.

2. Decision is the resolution to concretely act.

3. Execution is the capacity to act.

Secondary sub-tones of practical evaluation consist of characterization relating the current situation to prior patterns of experiences, and deliberation, considering alternative hypothetical scenarios and the consequences of their practical implementation.

The tone of projectivity focuses on “how agentic processes give shape and direction to future possibilities” (p. 984). It conveys that the future is shaped with the help of projects which are interactively formed and culturally embedded, and which, in this way, receive “their driving impetus from the conflicts and challenges of social

310 ANNALISA SANNINO life” (p. 984). This tone comprises three primary future-oriented sub-tones. When confronted with problematic situations, 1. narratives are constructed, 2. meaning is decomposed and recomposed in novel symbolic combinations, and 3. alternative patterns of actions are hypothesized reflecting our visions, goals, and pathways, starting from where we stand. The past orientation of the tone of projectivity displays itself in anticipatory identification of possible developments for a vague and indefinite future. The present orientation of projectivity displays itself in experimentation with which alternative courses of action are tentatively enacted to respond to evolving circumstances.

This analytical framework has the ambition to address the intricacies and dynamics of the interplay between agency and structure. Key insights in this direction are summarized in the notion of double constitution of agency and structure. This notion conveys that temporal and relational features of structural contexts constitute patterns of response which lead to different agentic orientations, and these agentic orientations in turn form different structuring relationships to established structures. Some contexts establish conditions which favor the development of specific agency tones. Some structural contexts encourage the reproduction of routinized patterns of actions stemming from the past, others favor imaginative projections of alternative futures, and yet others support deliberation on and resolution of emerging problematic circumstances.

Agency is variably oriented toward these structural orientations, making sure that human action will never be completely assimilated to structure. The variability of agency orientations lies in the temporal nature of human experience.

This approach to agency stands out with its emphasis on temporality and with its reference to problematic contradictory circumstances which at the same time challenge and define agency. Within this perspective, human beings, through agency, reconstruct and transform norms and values, as well as themselves, by confronting, with others, contradictory, ambiguous or otherwise problematic circumstances in the pursuit of a common good. In these respects, Emirbayer and Mische’s approach is the closest to a CHAT dialectical rationale of contradiction. Several limitations can, however, be

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 311 outlined in the approach of Emirbayer and Mische with the help of dialectics: 1. The authors adopt a dissecting procedure, arguing that it is necessary to have access to the dynamic possibilities of human agency at the interplay between the reproduction and transformation of patterns of actions and structural contexts. But how to reach back to a process of agency as a whole and as it manifests itself empirically, that is, to the holistic interconnectedness of the different components functionally operating in concrete circumstances, after having torn it apart? In other words, how is agency defined as a process compatible with a dissecting analytical procedure? 2. All the tones refer to mental operations, even the sub-tone of execution, which is defined as a capacity to act (i.e., the possession of means or skills to act), rather than as action in itself. In other words, it seems that the model does not account for concrete actions. This mentalism is perhaps also what precludes the inclusion of material artefacts and mediating instruments in this approach to agency, which is a main distinguishing feature between this approach and the CHAT dialectical approach. 3. Temporality is at the core of Emirbayer and Mische’s approach. Temporality, however, is not the same as historicity. As an approach based on temporality, it has the virtue of bringing in a time perspective, which makes it possible to look at movements and dynamics. This approach, however, remains significantly limited as it cannot account either for the intrinsic dynamics of the historical development of structural contexts, nor for the extrinsic tool-mediated dynamics of individual and collective development. For a CHAT dialectical rationale, without situating agency and its relation to structure within history, the chordal triad of agency remains too abstract to build robust conceptual and empirical frameworks for educational studies of agency.

Toward Dialectical Inquiries of Agency in Educational Research and Practice After a careful reading of these major psychological and sociological conceptualizations of agency and the criticisms formulated for each of them, one is surprised to discover an interesting

312 ANNALISA SANNINO commonality between the three theories, despite their different disciplinary origins. From the perspective of the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradictions, these conceptualizations appear to be reducing or “dissecting” agency to mentalistic features divorced from the historically developing socio-economic circumstances in which the concrete actions of individuals and collectives are formed. As will be elaborated in this section, the differences in disciplinary origins of these approaches are transcended by one and the same rationale of non-contradiction they build on, which imposes abstract categorizing on lived processes and productive relations, making these approaches unsuitable sources from which to pursue agency for education.

Abstract categories of agency escalate the distance between academic theorizing and concrete occurrences of agency in practical contexts of learning and in the struggles of agency exacerbated under capitalism. The ravaging effect of theories of agency based on the non-contradiction rationale becomes apparent when conceptualizations of agency travel from psychology and sociology to the educational sciences. This is so because, differently from other social sciences, the broad domain of education has direct influence on and access to major formative endeavors in society. At their best, these borrowed conceptualizations, when they do not directly interfere with or fail to recognize hidden efforts at achieving agency, have little or no impact on learners, who continue stumbling on their own with the complications of their daily activities.

The ecological approach of Biesta et al. (2015) is an example of how Emirbayer and Mische’s sociological conceptualization of agency translates in studies aimed at understanding and contributing to teachers’ agency in their work. The ecological approach is primarily built on the three chordal dimensions of agency from Emirbayer and Mische (1998): 1. the iteration dimension, concerning the past as it translates in life experiences and professional histories; 2. the practical-evaluative dimension, concerning the hereand-now enactment of agency under cultural (beliefs, values,

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 313 discourses, etc.), material (physical environment) and structural (social relations, roles, power etc.) influences; 3. the projective dimension, concerning short- and long-term orientations toward the future.

The ecological approach positions itself in contrast to views on agency seen as residing in individuals. Instead, agency in this framework is understood as the emergent way in which teachers’ actions critically shape their responses to problematic situations in the interplay with “temporal-relational contexts-for-action” (Biesta et al., 2015, p. 626). From the dialectical perspective adopted in this chapter, the agenda of the ecological approach to focus on actual actions is sensible and compatible with a CHAT focus. However, one is left puzzled by looking at how this agenda is to be implemented with the help of the model derived from Emirbayer and Mische (1998). The model is used as a guide in all phases of the inquiry from design to data collection, analysis, and interpretation of the results. The dynamics of teacher agency and the factors that contribute to its promotion and enhancement are traced largely on the basis of how they are verbally expressed in interviews in which general questions are asked, such as “what education is for?” and “what school is for?” One wonders if the aim of accounting for what teachers “do” and the ecological conditions in which their actions are performed can be satisfactorily fulfilled by only listening to general accounts. A discussion, however, of how Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) chordal apparatus of categories is operationalized in interview data and how such data give credit to what teachers actually do is not as important as to notice the unflattering conclusions to which the analysis leads for the teachers involved, as in the case below: Our data suggest strongly that many teachers struggle to locate their work within deep consideration of the purposes of education. Teachers are driven by goals in their work, but such goals often seem to be short-term in nature, focusing on process rather than longer-term significance and impact. Where long-term effects are considered, they tend to be fairly narrowly conceived.

Such a framing of purpose has, we believe, implications for the ways in which teachers achieve agency. The comparative lack of a clear vision about what education is for seems to seriously limit the possibilities for action to

314 ANNALISA SANNINO develop a good education. Purposes that are narrowly framed inevitably narrow consideration of what is possible, and frame subsequent action accordingly. (Biesta et al., 2015, pp. 636-637).

These conclusive remarks exemplify how analyses based on abstract categorizations lend themselves to the risk of reinforcing the already pressing alienating tendencies constraining agency among individuals and in communities, work and educational activities. In fact, similarities between the outcomes of Biesta et al.’s and Archer’s analyses discussed earlier in the case of Lara are easily noticeable. Biesta et al.’s analyses bypass concrete instances in which teachers’ struggles with prescribed instructional procedures lead to local experimentations and innovations. These are not necessarily actions which are very visible or easily accounted for in interviews, but they are prevalent in the work of teachers and these actions embody renewed visions about what education is for. There is a wealth of insights in these practical initiatives to push forward studies of agency. The problem is to develop conceptual and methodologically suitable ways to have access to them, identify them and build on them as they are concretely taking shape in action. This is not an easy task, as these initiatives from teachers are often critical of imposed procedures and are emotionally loaded with feelings of violations of the strong beliefs in the purposes of education which might have brought them to choose the teaching profession in the first place. Instead of denouncing the narrowness and ineffectiveness of teachers’ goal pursuits, scholarly work would best contribute to their fields of inquiries and to society by at least attempting to grasp how the lived drama of individuals and professionals in today’s capitalism translates into their actions and how research can contribute to supporting these actions.

The dialectical rationale of contradictions adopted in this chapter positions itself beyond the traps of abstract categorizations with its focal orientation toward functional connections and the historical development of concrete processes of agency formation. Yet such a rationale is a practically unexplored resource for rethinking agency and ways to investigate it, despite having been put into use systematically within the activity theoretical and formative

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 315 interventionist tradition (e.g., Sannino, 2008; Sannino, Engeström & Lemos, 2016; Sannino, 2022 for examples among some of the most recent works) for several years now. The remaining sections of this chapter are devoted to presenting this rationale, explaining what it entails for studies of agency and why it can also actually support the enactment of agency.

Contradictions consist of two terms which—by virtue of reciprocally excluding one another—form an inseparable unity. This category is usually considered incompatible with a central tenet of the classical logic rationale of non-contradiction. The principle of noncontradiction states, in fact, that two terms cannot contradict one another at the same time and under the same relation. Dialectics is a form of thinking in terms of contradictions which plays a key role in popular culture and in everyday life. The contrast that the Marxist philosopher Lucien Sève (2014) makes between dialectics and informatics is helpful in grasping the status of this body of knowledge in our daily lives. Dialectics, according to the French thinker, is not like informatics, which is unknown at the beginning and requires acquiring the mastery of a practice. Dialectics is the opposite. It is a practice that we already have without knowing it, and of which one must acquire the knowledge to be able to master it. In its unknown form, it is a confusing practice which is not of much use. In being raised to awareness, dialectics provides access to advanced forms of thinking and learning.

Dialectics can contribute to rethinking agency by identifying the limitations of available categories, as attempted in the first three sections of this chapter, and by developing categories that can both inform current theoretical debates as well as create conditions for enacting agency. These categories are “directions to conceptually apprehend reality” (Sève, 2014, p. 607, translation from French AS).

They are not ready-made conceptual tools that can be directly applied to empirical data. They are historically formed categories emerging from practical and theoretical experimentation. Dialectics relates to concrete and empirically documentable events in a different way than the formal logical rationale of non-contradictions.

While the latter achieves analytical demonstrative rigor by operating freely from concrete events, dialectics derives its categories

316 ANNALISA SANNINO from life. Life is the source of the logical legitimacy and objectivity of dialectics. The theoretical culture of dialectics does not offer theses based on formally rigorous inferences. It does, however, offer fertile hypotheses to understand and act beyond logically determined views and practices (Sève, 2014), hence its relevance against the background of criticisms presented earlier in this chapter.

One central dialectical principle often referred to in CHAT scholarship is the principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. As explained by the activity-theoretical philosopher Ilyenkov (2008), this is by no means an artificial procedure, a manner of presentation for already existing knowledge, or a formal method for combining available abstractions in a systematic manner. This is first and foremost a philosophically established procedure of theoretical development which can also serve as “a consciously applied method of development of theory” (p. 166). Abstracting consists of isolating an aspect of a phenomenon from its complex reality. This aspect has the peculiarity of embodying something essential of this complexity in that its contradictory features find unity in their processes of becoming and by relating to one another. The concrete is this unity of contradictory features that over time tend to become generative and in this way also tend to affirm their necessity.

The pervasive influence of classical logic has overshadowed and often generated resistance against contradictions. Ever since the founding of classical logic with Aristotle, the rejection of contradictions has been considered essential to ensuring civic order. In his Politics the Greek philosopher makes it clear that non-contradiction guarantees the permanence of the law and the perennial validity of contracts. Yet numerous influential authors in the history of ideas have claimed that there can also be truth in contradictions, in particular when one is confronted with the task of apprehending the concreteness of the lived complexity of reality. Resignation to the thinking of the immobile identity, constant permanence and perennial validity are prone to disillusionment because “all great human activities overflow of assumed, mastered or effectively exploited contradictions” (Sève, 2014, p. 533, translation from French AS).

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 317 Contradictions, far from necessarily being evidence of nonsensical, careless thinking, can be intentional forms of advanced thinking (Sève, 2014) that make a significant step forward from classical logical thinking. The French philosopher refers to the classic contradiction allegedly formulated by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, also known as the philosopher of becoming, according to which the way up and down is one and the same. The statement of these contradictory terms does not deny the accuracy of the formal principle of non-contradiction. However, if one person walks the road one time going upward and one time going downward, it is undeniable that this is one and the same road appropriated in the concrete process of walking it and under the two different relations of its directions. In other words, Heraclitus’ dialectical statement is pointing out the possibility of appropriating reality (the road) by making the significant step forward to including lived processes of such a reality (for instance, actually walking on this road) and lived relations with reality (such as the one between the person walking on the road and the direction in which the person is walking).

A rationale based on the logic of non-contradiction limits the focus, for instance, on the abstract category of “the way up” as fixed and isolated from what is actually happening on this road, what a person who might be on this road is in fact doing. The following quote by Ilyenkov (2007) further illustrates how fixed abstract categorizations can alienate life and its complexity from processes of learning and development, and even from scientific endeavors: A person brought up to regard ‘two times two is four’ as an indubitable truth over which it is impermissible even to ponder will never even become a mathematician, let alone a great mathematician. He will not know how to conduct himself in the sphere of mathematics as a human being… the connection between science and life will always remain for him mystically incomprehensible, beyond his grasp and reach. (Ilyenkov, 2007, p. 29)

A classic text by Hegel (1966), “Who thinks abstractly?”, includes an example which is useful for grasping the advantages of moving away from abstract modes of inquiry. The example tells of a person found guilty of murder and brought to execution. For

318 ANNALISA SANNINO those watching, he is nothing but a criminal. At some point someone remarks that he is a strong, handsome and interesting man, and this remark is met with great indignation. For Hegel it is characteristic of undialectical abstract thinking to see only the crime in the person brought to execution. The ways in which the social sciences have engaged with controversial issues throughout their history is similar to this. Ilyenkov (2007) explains that this way of thinking about the person brought to execution would not satisfy a dialectician because the label of “criminal” precludes the observer from seeing features of the person or related to the person that would collide with the notion of crime. This is why the positive remarks on the person brought to execution provoke indignation in Hegel’s example. Instead, dialectics celebrates the complexity of reality by welcoming the scrutiny of contradictory features in what is observed. In this way one can access concrete dynamic relations and processes in the observed phenomenon.

By revealing the historical and contradictory essence of agency as it empirically manifests itself, dialectics can shake off tenacious views based on invariance and lead to examining the conditions to overcoming such tenacious views. Beyond creating the conditions for a novel scientific comprehension of agency, a dialectical rationale also creates the conditions to concretely enact agency.

As pointed out by Ilyenkov (2007), when a teacher tactfully guides the pupil to a contradiction, she creates the conditions for the child to actively use her previous knowledge and to produce something more of her own. Within this perspective, dialectics serve as a “methodo-logique of rational comprehension and transformative appropriation” (Sève, 2014, p. 562, translation from French AS).

Adopting this CHAT dialectical perspective on agency as a topic of inquiry requires investigators to engage their scholarship with tangible processes of the creation of instruments for change (e.g., Sannino, 2022). In other words, studying agency dialectically is similar to handling a double-sided mirror, with which we can trace what happens out there in the world, but which at the same time forces us to look at our own way of engaging with it (Prokopis et al., 2022).

From the CHAT dialectical perspective presented here, agency is at play when human beings struggle with challenging

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 319 phases in their lives and activities which require action but nevertheless lack clarity on the actual steps to undertake. Tangled up between already consolidated modes of actions and new demands, people must apprehend and establish new modes of action by rethinking the activities they inhabit as historically developing entities. The central dialectical category of contradictions is essential to engaging with this way of conceiving agency. This is because contradictions open up spaces for thinking and acting in terms of relations and processes rather than in the classic logical terms of static identity and invariance typical of fixed categories. Dialectical culture is fertile because it makes us realize that nothing is permanently certain and unpaved paths can be pursued; this is why the dialectical rationale of contradiction can serve as an essential resource to pursue inquiries of agency that can serve educational purposes, which are essentially purposes of transformation, becoming, learning and developing.

Conclusion This chapter started by setting for itself the tasks of: 1. questioning the suitability of psychological and sociological conceptualizations of agency for the field of education; 2. offering arguments toward the renewal of inquiries on agency in educational research; and 3. presenting the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradictions for such a renewal of educational studies of agency.

The first section of the chapter presented the psychological conceptualization of agency in social-cognitive theory, initiated by Bandura (e.g., 1989, 2001). This approach is centered around the focal concepts of self-efficacy beliefs and modeling, and the model of triadic reciprocal causation (Fig. 1). People who perceive themselves as having high self-efficacy tend to set higher goals and to develop agency (Bandura, 2002). The opposite is affirmed for people with low self-efficacy. Modeling can play a key role in behavioral change and in developing agency. This is how human beings make use of the external environment and self-generate influences, which allow them to control themselves and therefore free

320 ANNALISA SANNINO themselves from their own limitations. The coexistence of freedom and control, seen not as opposites but as complementary features of human agentive functioning, may appear as a dialectical statement. However, agency through the lenses of social-cognitive theory is primarily a psychological capacity residing in the mind. By means of this capacity, human beings can exert control over their cognitive processes, their actions and their environment, in line with the binary processes depicted in the triadic reciprocal causation model in Fig. 1, as in the example of Elise.

By mobilizing the CHAT rationale of contradictions, the following conceptual problems were highlighted, which question the suitability of social-cognitive conceptualizations as foundations for educational studies of agency: 1. the primarily reproductive mode of acting and learning which characterizes modeling is not emancipatory in that it could go beyond already known or established ways of acting; 2. the role played by concrete actions in defining agency is further weakened in this perspective because of the emphasis it puts on the belief of self-efficacy as a foundational determinant of human agency; 3. the smooth process of reciprocal causation between actions, cognitive processes and the environment seems too abstractly neat to be convincing, as if glitches do not need to be taken into account; 4. the environment is not a context filled with instruments and material artefacts which play a role in the way that agency emerges and develops.

Social-cognitive theory appears, through the lenses of the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradiction, to be devoid of historicity and materiality. These latter offer tools of self-influence which are not strictly individual mental states, but collective artefactual resources distributed across generations, beyond the brain and the body and expanding into the world with concretely enacted agency.

This is a process which is far from devoid of glitches, as human beings continuously stumble with their limited material resources in complex newly evolving historical circumstances.

The second section of the chapter presented the sociological conceptualization of agency in Archer’s realist social theory (2003), which distinguishes structure and agency as different yet interrelated layers of reality, each bearing specific powers. The powers of

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 321 social structures are to a large extent transmitted to and influencing people. Yet agency has the power to mediate social structures, as these are ultimately established, maintained and also changed by people. Realist social theory and CHAT are perfectly aligned in this emphasis on the possibility for human beings to exert power over social structures and therefore also over themselves. For realist social theory, however, these powers essentially consist of varieties of reflexive deliberations, also referred to as internal conversations and presented as clear-cut categories which are used to differentiate types of actors. There are people who are capable of reflexive internal conversations and therefore are capable of agency, and people who are not. The former use communicative, autonomous and meta-reflexivity, which have high chances of success. The latter, in contrast, are essentially passive agents, defined as “displaced” (Archer, 2003, p. 298) and “impeded” (p. 298), under the broad category of fractured reflexives. These people are classified as being at the mercy of the external environment and unable to exert control over their lives, as in the example of eighteen-year-old Lara, who became homeless, and was then housed by social services in sheltered accommodation.

Realist social theory appears through the lenses of the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradiction as weighing too heavily on informants such as Lara by confining them to fixed categories which do not offer developmental openings for supporting agency formation, in particular in the cases of people such as Lara, considered passive agents. The critical dialogue with Archer's work led to the formulation of methodological and ethical questions pertaining to the feasibility of having access to internal conversations, to the consequences of labeling people with the help of negative categories which may reproduce and reinforce stigmas, as well as to the responsibility of both informants and researchers in inquiries on agency. A CHAT perspective shows that not only Lara herself but also the social structures that have responsibility for providing her and youth like her with the necessary support for agency formation account for one and the same agency process. Furthermore, the critique formulated against realist social theory emphasized the agentive societal responsibilities of academics themselves when they

322 ANNALISA SANNINO present analyses as in the case of Lara and do not even attempt a developmental perspective.

Section 3 focused on the sociological conceptualization of agency in the chordal triad approach of Emirbayer and Mische (1998), which situates agency within the flow of time. In its premise that people’s agency manifests itself simultaneously in different temporal and relational systems, this approach comes rather close to the CHAT dialectical rationale. Agency in the chordal triad approach, however, is disaggregated into components and sub-components, each oriented toward the past, the present, and the future, while at the same time each having one of these temporal orientations more pronounced than the others. The musical metaphor of the tones making a triadic chord indicates that these components and sub-components form a unity of separate but not always harmonious elements discernible in each concrete empirical instance when people perform an action.

This analytical framework appears, through the lenses of the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradiction, as the closest to CHAT among those discussed in this chapter. This is because of its emphasis on temporality, as well as on the problematic contradictory circumstances which at the same time may challenge and define agency. A number of limitations were, however, also outlined in the approach of Emirbayer and Mische, discussed through the lenses of the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradiction: 1. the framework dissecting procedure brings about the problem of how to reach back to a process of agency as a whole and as it manifests itself empirically, in its holistic interconnectedness, after having been torn apart; 2. at a close look, all the tones refer to mental operations rather than to concrete actions, which could include material artefacts and mediating instruments, which are not part of this conceptualization of agency; 3. temporality, at the core of Emirbayer and Mische's approach, is not the same as historicity, which characterizes the CHAT dialectical rationale, allowing us to account for the dynamics of the historical development of structural contexts as well as for the tool-mediated dynamics of individual and collective development.

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES OF AGENCY 323 The fourth section summarizes, as the main similarity between the three theories discussed, the fact that their conceptualizations of agency basically appear as mentalistic features, divorced from the historically developing socio-economic circumstances in which the concrete actions of individuals and collectives take place.

This similarity between the three theories is explained in that they build on one and the same rationale of non-contradiction, which favors the imposition of abstract categorizations on lived processes and relations. Abstract categories and the rationale they derive from are unsuitable sources from which to pursue agency for education, as they further increase the distance between academic theorizing and the concrete struggles of agency exacerbated under capitalism. The ecological approach of Biesta et al. (2015) is discussed as an example of how one of the theoretical approaches discussed, that of Emirbayer and Mische, has translated into studies aimed at understanding and contributing to the agency of teachers in their work. The example indicates how little credit Biesta and his colleagues give to what teachers actually do in their daily work, and points to how analyses based on abstract categorizations lend themselves to the risk of reinforcing already pressing alienating tendencies among teachers in this case.

Instead of bypassing the concrete processes through which individuals and collectives struggle with structures, prescriptions, and procedures, the CHAT rationale of contradiction invites us to dig into what people actually do. This may lead us to notice local experimentations and innovations that may be disregarded under abstract categories that do not allow us to account for them. The chapter encourages educational researchers to turn to the CHAT dialectical rationale of contradiction, presented in the fourth section, to explore how the lived drama of agency in today’s capitalism translates into everyday instances of enacted transformative agency and how their research can contribute to support this type of agency (e.g., Sannino 2022; Hopwood & Sannino, 2023).

The traps of abstract categorizations lie with a central tenet of the classical logic rationale of non-contradiction, according to which two terms cannot contradict one another at the same time and under the same relation. This is the dominant way of thinking

324 ANNALISA SANNINO taught for centuries in schools which prioritize immobile identity, constant permanence, and perennial validity. In everyday creative endeavors—as in the development of popular culture—instead of abstract ready-made conceptual tools, historically formed categories are in use which emerge from practical and theoretical experimentation. In the central dialectical principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, often referred to in CHAT scholarship (Ilyenkov, 2008), these historically formed categories are concrete in that they embody lived contradictory features which disclose unity in their movement of becoming and in their interconnectedness. As in Hegel’s example, one can see that the features of a criminal in the person brought to execution may coexist with the features of a victim if the inquiry opens up to the process and relation which led to the criminal actions. The core point of this chapter is that the adoption of the CHAT rationale of contradiction lends itself to studies of agency which can renew this field of inquiry in educational sciences. The CHAT rationale of contradiction supports perspectives according to which nothing is permanent and even what appear to be strong instances of a lack of agency may be revealed to carry features of their opposite, and may one day turn into strong manifestations of agency.

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Part III Pasts and Futures

Encountering Cultural Historical Psychology and Activity Theory: An Interview with Michael Cole Alex Levant with Michael Cole Michael Cole is distinguished Professor of Communication, Psychology & Human Development Emeritus and Director Emeritus of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, University of California, San Diego.

His involvement in activity theory began in the late 1950s and continues in the present. In this interview, he recounts some of the most significant moments in his career, such as discovering A.R. Luria in the Soviet Union in 1959, and the impact this had on developing his own cross-cultural approach to psychology in the context of his work in Liberia, and subsequently through research conducted at the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC), which he established at the University of California in San Diego in 1978. He also offers insights into the origin of the term CHAT and on Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie.

The Interview was conducted over several email exchanges in July-August, 2022.

Alex Levant: You were one of the first psychologists who participated in the Soviet-American exchange program when it began in 1959. What stimulated your interest in Soviet Psychology and the work of the Vygotskian School? What sort of preparation did you have?

Michael Cole: My involvement in cultural historical psychology and activity theory began quite by accident. In 1959, I entered Graduate School at Indiana University far from my home in California.

My goal was to obtain a degree in mathematical learning theory under the direction of William Estes, a student of B.F. Skinner. Unbeknownst to me, Indiana University was an unusual choice in 329

330 MICHAEL COLE several respects. First, it required all graduate students to pass a proficiency examination in two foreign languages and to complete a minor degree outside of their major field, practices that were quite unusual at the time and are completely gone now. I passed the examination in French soon after arriving, but I did not know another foreign language. Second, Indiana University (IU) required all Ph.D. students to complete a minor outside of their field. Third, IU had just been made the administrative center of the newly initiated academic exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. On my way to meet my wife one afternoon, I happened upon an announcement that Ph.D. students would be provided a generous stipend if they would study Russian and complete a set of courses in Soviet studies. It was an offer that I couldn’t refuse— it could complete two key requirements and get me a boost in pay at the same time. For the next two years I combined language studies with a set of courses in the history, politics, and culture of Russia and the Soviet republics. There was little time remaining to study Soviet Psychology, so I arrived in Moscow a curious third generation Skinnerian with a fine education in behavioral studies of learning, the laws of which were assumed to be universal across species.

I discovered Alexander Romanovich Luria on my own. As a part of my language studies, I was assigned to investigate contemporary Russian research in my field. Since I was a beginning learner of Russian, I began my search in journals related to my interests in learning which led me to research that Alexander Romanovich had carried out using conditioned reflex methods to study the acquisition of word meaning. I then obtained a copy in Russian of his monograph on language development among twins, which served as my first primer. ARL’s book interested me because it pointed to a way to understand the development of word meaning based learning mechanisms that were familiar to me. When I wrote to ask if he would accept me on the exchange program when I completed my Ph.D., he readily accepted my request, I successfully completed my studies, and in the fall of 1962 my wife and I arrived in Moscow to spend the year learning about Soviet Psychology and Soviet Life.

Although I found ARL’s work very interesting, I soon learned that he was no longer pursuing the lines of work that attracted me

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COLE 331 to him. Graciously, he arranged for me to gain a broad familiarity with different areas of empirical research so that my days were filled with visits to laboratories, in some of which I was privileged to conduct research that was subsequently published in Russian.

When we left for home in the summer of 1963, I had no intention of pursuing any of the lines of research that I had learned about in Moscow, although the year learning firsthand about Soviet society was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

AL: How is it, then, that you became so involved with Soviet psychologists in later years?

MC: My continued involvement with Soviet psychologists also began unexpectedly.

Shortly after I returned to the United States, quite contrary to my plans, I was asked by my academic mentors to consult with a mathematics teacher, John Gay, at a small missionary college located in rural Liberia. John was seeking to understand why not only his students, but elementary school children, experienced extraordinary difficulties learning mathematics in school. My task was to help design experimental studies of mathematical knowledge to understand the causes of the difficulties.

A Focus on Local Cultural Context MC: My own naivete about the study of cultural variations in learning served me well. When I first arrived in Liberia, I spent a good deal of time traveling around the countryside asking people about the source of the mathematics difficulties which had prompted my trip. The answers I got from people who spent time around children (teachers, doctors, American mothers who had observed African children playing with their offspring) were consistent with expectations I had brought with me. The list of things that the tribal children could not do, or did badly, was very long indeed. They could not tell the difference between a triangle and a circle because they experienced severe perceptual problems. This made the child's task

332 MICHAEL COLE almost hopeless when it came to dealing with something like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, explaining why “Africans can't do puzzles.”

I heard a lot about the fact that “Africans don't know how to classify” and, of course, the well-known proclivity of African schoolchildren to learn by rote came in for a lot of discussion.

When I enquired about the source of these difficulties? A college physics teacher suggested that AID buy tinker toys for every child in Liberia. Almost everyone had a favorite deficit in the child's experience which, if rectified, would greatly benefit the educational products of Liberian schools. Both the collection of assumptions that I brought to Liberia as a result of my graduate education and the diagnoses of my hosts concerning the learning difficulties of Liberian children were very much a part of the times. This was the era in which America "discovered" the disadvantaged child. In language, very much like that applied to Kpelle children in Liberia, American scholars and educators offered explanations for the school difficulties of American minority groups and the poor.

Pushed beyond our professional experience, my colleagues and I approached these problems with two assumptions that were not a part of my psychological training and were not shared (or at least not taken into consideration) by the educators and psychologists of the time. First, we assumed that although the local children lacked particular kinds of experiences routinely encountered by children in the United States, they were by no means lacking in experience. We explicitly began with the proposition that “we must know more about the indigenous mathematics so that we can build effective bridges to the new mathematics that we are trying to introduce” (Gay and Cole, 1967). This commonsense approach led us to seek tasks where Kpelle adults measure quantities, engage in arguments, construct houses, weave cloth, organize situations for the education of their children.

A simple corollary of this approach was the Idea that people develop skills when they confront tasks they have to engage in often. This statement may seem patently obvious or trivial, but its methodological consequences are neither. By starting, so to speak, by a focus on everyday activities, it led us to discover that Kpelle, although non-literate, have a numerical system that is deployed

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COLE 333 where it matters: in monetary exchanges. The people are masters at measuring amounts of rice in a range from a sack to a pint can. Rice is the staple of their diet and in short supply for a few months after harvest every year. For the cultural practices involved in growing and selling rice, people have a highly developed vocabulary and a system of measurements that is completely consistent. Moreover, they are more skilled than American college students when assigned the task of measuring amounts of rice in bowls of different sizes. By contrast, when people asked to measure lengths of cloth or wood beams, their use of the number system is less detailed, and the associated numerical practices less uniform, commensurate with the measurements they mediated.

At the same time, we also took seriously the testimony of the teachers who lamented lack of perceptual skills, inability to categorize, and a reliance on rote learning. For example, when it was suggested that a lack of perceptual skills made it difficult for people to put together jigsaw puzzles, we set out to see for ourselves. We created a task with a children’s jigsaw puzzle that we painted in three colored sections. Here indeed we observed people whose first encounter with the puzzle proved extraordinarily difficult. In each session, the experimenter, a local young man who was attending college, showed people the assembled puzzle, slowly took it apart and laid the pieces on the table. When asked to reassemble the puzzle, many people totally ignored the fact that the puzzle was a rectangle in a manner that astonished us. Even when there was only one remaining piece to be inserted, their attempts routinely violated the rectangular frame of an almost-complete puzzle. However, given a few trials to familiarize themselves with the task, errors rapidly diminished.

Reciprocally, they found it difficult to believe that we had difficulty distinguishing the various flora that were central to local dietary and medicinal practices.

I began my education in Soviet activity theory in the summer of 1966. As John Gay and I were preparing a new and greatly enlarged, interdisciplinary project, ARL invited me to Moscow to assist him in organizing the upcoming international psychology conference to be held that summer. American Pragmatism grounded

334 MICHAEL COLE in everyday activities meets Russian activity theory, grounded in Marxism.

Luria’s cross historical approach MC: I spent an eventful summer in Moscow where I was able to meet regularly with ARL to begin my education in the larger theory that linked his research in Central Asia to the research on the restoration of brain functions following traumatic brain injury. His general purpose was to study what he referred to as “the sociohistorical shaping of mental processes”. He chose Central Asia because these remote parts of the Soviet Union were experiencing radical restructuring of their socioeconomic system and culture at the time of his project in 1931-32 (1976, p. 4).

Before the revolution, he wrote, The people of Uzbekistan lived in a backward economy based mainly on the raising of cotton. The kishlak (village) elders displayed remnants of a once high culture together with virtually complete illiteracy and also showed the pronounced influence of the Islamic religion.

When the socialist revolution eliminated dominance and submission as class relations, people oppressed one day enjoyed a free existence the next period and for the first time they experienced responsibility for their own future…. The appearance of a new economic system brought with it new forms of social activity: the collective evaluation of work plans, the recognition and correction of shortcomings, and the allocation of economic functions. (p. 16)

It should be clear from these passages that unlike us, Luria approached cross-cultural research with a strong theory of history based on Marxist Historical Materialism that distinguishes high and low cultures with corresponding high and low levels of economic activity and mental development. He did not seek to model his experimental tasks on the local cultural practices that shaped local systems of activity as John, and I, had sought to do. Rather, he chose experimental tasks that had been designed to assess cognitive development among European children and in clinical populations.

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COLE 335 Working through interpreters, Luria used a clinical approach when presenting his tasks, probing people’s responses with followup questions to clarify their understanding.

For example, in one series of studies he presented adults with four cards on each of which was drawn an object, three of which were members of a taxonomic category (e.g., saw, ax, shovel), the fourth of which was an object that is not a tool, such as a piece of wood. Each person was asked to select three cards that “go together” or objects that could be named by a single word and to place the fourth card to the side. He found that people who were engaged in Soviet educational institutions and collective agriculture quickly produced the expected category—tools. By contrast, illiterate farmers who were still engaged in traditional agricultural practices thought in terms of a concrete practical situation. For example, a person would respond “The log, the saw and the ax, they go together.” When asked why, the response would be “You have to cut down the tree and cut it up. The shovel does not relate to that, it is only needed in the garden.” Luria would then follow up with a question such as, “One man said that it is the saw, the axe, and the shovel that go together” only to be told that such a man “lacked good sense.”

In study after study, involving such psychological processes as perception of illusions, categorization pictures of object, logical reasoning, imagination and self-awareness, ARL reported a shift from concrete “graphical/functional” thinking focused on the concrete features of everyday life to a more advanced, more abstract mode of thought required by the more advanced (e.g., complex) systems of activity required of the new form of life. This pattern of changes, it was emphasized, were the result of a combination of schooling and the technologically more advanced tools that had been created in the process of cultural historical change represented

by Soviet socialism.

My reaction to learning about ARL’s research and the theory behind it was complicated by my limited experience in Liberia. We had also found evidence of improved performance linked to schooling on several of our tasks, but—at the same time—we had clear evidence that in activities central to daily life, non-literate adults

336 MICHAEL COLE outperformed not only children with an elementary school education, but Yale undergraduates as well. We conceived of schooling as but one of the everyday activities that children engage in, on a par with other activities such as clearing farms, building houses, selling and buying rice to everyday activity as institutionally distinctive of each other, albeit connected. We were particularly worried by the fact that the tasks used by Luria were themselves samples of the kinds of instructional content children had been learning about for one or more years in the activity they were supposed to become competent in. An adult who has never been to school would be unfamiliar with every aspect of the experimental situation.

What Luria interpreted as the acquisition of new, pervasive, higher modes of thought we were more inclined to interpret as changes in the application of previously available modes of thought to the new and thus unfamiliar problems presented in an alien form of discourse common to the test circumstances and schooling practices.

Very fortunately, I was able to carry out three additional research projects, each of which built upon the idea that one should begin one’s analysis by analyzing people’s everyday activities, including, of course, the everyday activities of children who spend hundreds and thousands of hours in classrooms with a single teacher and sometimes many dozens of children in a class, and its distinctive form of activity.

The idea in each study was to begin the research with a firm ethnographic and linguistic foundation upon which to create experimental models of indigenous practices. This ideal was most fully realized in our study of a unique indigenous, Liberian, writing system that had developed in the 19th century, long before Europeanstyle schooling arrived on their doorstep. Here we succeeded in separating knowledge of reading and the writing system acquired informally to deal with everyday life from schooling in English and the Quran.

It was not until we had published our final cross-cultural monograph that I read Leontiev’s writings on the principles of activity

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COLE 337 theory. In it I was excited to encounter his description of the kinds of activity he had in mind: Human psychology is concerned with the activity of concrete individuals that takes place either in conditions of open association, in the midst of people, or eye to eye with the surrounding object world—before the potter‟s wheel or behind the writing desk. (1978, pp. 84-5)

This focus seemed to capture well our use of the term, “activity”, which we adopted at the outset of our research.

Bringing the Research Home MC: During the late 1980s I had reached the limits of my ability to advance our understanding by conducting additional research in Liberia. These limitations combined with the practical difficulties of raising a family on two continents encouraged me to continue the research in a culture we know well, our own.

Within the United States I created the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) as a research program as a means of gathering the human expertise required to pursue the implications of our research in Liberia. Transferred to the US context, we focused on the inequalities produced by experimental and standardized testing, now applied to questions of ethnic & social class variations.

On the Roots of CHAT as a Unifying Approach AL: Can you say something about the origins of CHAT in relation to the broad field of cultural-historically oriented research inspired

by Vygotsky?

MC: The term is an acronym for Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. Cultural-historical is the term currently used by those who claim Vygotsky as their inspiration. It combines two different terms: cultural-historical and activity theory. The central concept in Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory was sign/semiotic/cultural

338 MICHAEL COLE mediation. The term Activity is the central concept used by A.N. Leontiev, Vygotsky’s junior colleague, as their inspiration. Bringing the two terms together is a commitment to the idea that mediation and activity are complementary aspects of a single life process.

AL: When did you first use the concept of CHAT? MC: The origin of the acronym, CHAT, and its use in cultural-historical discourse can be traced back to a conference in Utrecht in 1985 where I first met Yrjö Engeström. My talk adopted a “cultural context theory” to the relationships between learning, culture, and education in post-colonial countries. I illustrated this approach using a typical Vygotskian triangle to represent “culturally mediated action in social context.” Yrjö and Marianne Hedegaard gave a paper on the use of models in the teaching of history. They employed the “expanded triangle” to represent mediated classroom activity.

Figure 1. Engeström’s “expanded triangle” I immediately recognized my habitual representation of a “mediational triangle” as a subset of their more inclusive approach. It included mediated action that I was interested in as part of a systemic whole. It linked the concepts of activity and context in a manner that allowed Yrjö several years later to declare that “the activity is the context” (Engeström, 1993). Yrjö’s formulation of a convergent

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COLE 339 cultural historical (Vygotskian) activity theory (Leontievian) way of thinking promised a way to synthesize the two poles of a binary, stimulus-response formulation, a common goal for both Vygotsky and Leontiev. As luck would have it, during this period I was engaged with Russian psychologists and educationalists on the design of computer mediated instructional activities for elementary school children, which allowed me to visit Finland en route. These visits permitted us to work on the many questions that needed resolution if we were to successfully articulate the relationship between these competing approaches.

In the late 1980s Yrjö joined the faculty at UCSD; not long after that, we initiated the first international journal addressing these issues, Mind, Culture, and Activity. Over the decades, we have each developed our different “flavors” of CHAT. Both rely on the method of dual stimulation which we elaborate upon differently in ways appropriate to research questions we focus on and the populations and institutions we study. Yrjö and his colleagues in Finland developed the idea of developmental work theory via the Change Laboratory focused on the work practices of adults. I focused on the general question of culture’s role in development and the influence of formal education during ontogeny and social history. In this work, carried out as part of the overall LCHC remit to study the social causes of social inequality, issues of cultural diversity and educational equity have been a focus of concern. It has been a long and productive professional collaboration.

AL: What is the significance of Vygotsky’s concept of “perezhivanie” in relation to Leontiev?

MC: At the most general level I believe it is fair to say that all of those who engage in some form of Vygotskian-inspired approach to learning and development are anti-dualist in general, and anti-Cartesian, in particular. This is certainly true of Vygotsky, who is famous for his ideas about the fusion of language and thought as well as thought and emotion.

The dualism that gave rise to the division between Vygotsky and Leontiev is an apt example of how difficult the problem can

340 MICHAEL COLE become. Both worked within a tradition that drew upon Marx & Engels, Hegel, and Spinoza, yet they and their intellectual progeny parted ways in their interpretations of the role of the environment in human development.

Shortly before his death, Vygotsky characterized the issue as follows: We admit in words that it is necessary to study the personality and the environment of the child as a unit but we must not think that the influence of the personality is on one side and the influence of the environment on the other side, that the one and the other act the way external forces do. However, exactly this is actually done frequently: wishing to study the unity, preliminarily investigators break it down, then try to unite one thing with another. (1933-34/1998, p. 292)

He found his own answer to this problem by arguing that experience (perezhivanie),1 is the unity of person and environment, a unit of analysis in which emotion and thought, thinking and speaking are united as constituents of “the actual dynamics of the unity of consciousness.” Some idea of the complexity of these dynamics is indicated in his summary of the process he is referring to: To state a certain, general, formal position, it would be correct to state that the environment determines the development of the child through the child’s perezhivanie of the environment. (1998, p. 294)

This formulation placed perezhivanie at the center of a variety of hot button ideological issues, not the least of which was the relationship of the ideal and the material, central to any cultural-historical theory. Stalin had strong views about the politically correct understanding of this issue, consistent with his own form of totalitarianism. One cannot understand the arguments among academics that ensued without taking seriously into consideration the historical moment in which they occurred.

Six months after Vygotsky died, Stalin used the excuse of the murder of a popular Party leader from Leningrad to consolidate his power initiating the Great Purges. In 1936, the Committee of the

1

For one of many discussions of the Russian term, perezhivanie, see Cole and Gajdamaschko (2016).

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COLE 341 Communist Party issued a decree abolishing Pedology, Vygotsky’s home discipline, as a recognized science. Leontiev’s critique of Vygotsky’s paper was written in 1937, when terror was at its height (in Russian the purges are often referred to simply as “37” [The Year of “37”]). This historical context, which brought terror to the entire society makes it difficult to interpret and evaluate Leontiev’s criticisms. As his son noted many decades later, it was an existential necessity for Leontiev to offer some form of criticism of Vygotsky using the offensive language of Stalinist politics- not only his job, but his life was at stake (Leontiev, 2005). The article itself, despite its critical tone to Pedology as a whole, did not vilify Vygotsky. After an extended discussion of the key theoretical concepts in dispute, Leontiev ends with the following summary of Vygotsky’s work. Note its internal incoherence. In the first half of the final paragraph, he writes: Of course, we are far from believing that the concept of perezhivanie is an empty concept. On the contrary, we believe that this concept, along with the concept of meaning, as well as numerous other concepts introduced into Soviet psychology by Vygotsky, truly enrich it and bring an essential vitality and concreteness to our psychological analysis. It would be crude nihilism to simply discard the beneficial content that they represent. (Leontiev, 2005, p. 27)

He then undercuts these sympathetic evaluations with the caveat that: These concepts must be introduced into psychology, but they absolutely must be introduced differently from the way that Vygotsky did. Each concrete proposition, each fact lying at their basis, must first be critically refined and interpreted from the position of a coherent materialistic psychological theory. (p. 27)

The contradictory messages within the final paragraph illustrate the problem of separating legitimate (if eventually incorrect) criticism from ideologically driven character assassination. Under other circumstances (the Oxford debating society, for example), Leontiev’s essay might be interpreted as normal, even mild, academic argumentation. (e.g., you have almost the right parts, but you are not organizing them according to the proper whole). In its historical context

342 MICHAEL COLE of the Great Terror, however, it signaled publicly that he was separating himself from Vygotsky and all of his colleagues who adhered to their Vygotskian roots (which he had already done, de facto, several years earlier on similar philosophical, not political, grounds).

For our present purposes, it is sufficient to comment that the serious points in dispute between Leontiev and Vygotsky—about the dynamics of development—exist to this day, more or less stripped of their Soviet ideological and historical context (Zavershneva, 2014, p. 90ff).2 Superseding the dualism between Vygotsky’s “sign-o-centrism” and Leontiev’s “activity-o-centric theory” remains a just-out-of-reach goal; worthy—perhaps even, an essential motive—for developing a coherent science of human development.

References Cole, M. & Gajdamschko, N. (2016) The Growing Pervasiveness of Perezhivanie. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23(4), 271. https://doi.org/10.

1080/10749039.2016.1201515.

Engeström, Y. (1993). Developmental Studies of Work as a Testbench of Activity Theory: The Case of Primary Care Medical Workers. In S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context (pp. 64-103). Cambridge University Press.

Gay, J. & Cole, M. (1967). The New Mathematics and an Old Culture. A Study of Learning among the Kpelle of Liberia. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Leontiev, A. N. (1978). Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Prentice Hall.

Leontiev, A. A. (2005). The Life and Creative Path of A. N. Leontiev. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 43(3), 8-69.

Leontiev, A. N. (1937/2005). Study of the Environment in the Pedological Works of L.S. Vygotsky. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 43(4), 8-28.

Luria, A. R. (1976). Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations.

Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1998). The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Vol. 5. Child Psychology. Plenum.

2

From archival notes it is also clear that Leontiev was a lot closer to Vygotsky than he publicly admitted to (A.A. Leontiev, 2005).

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COLE 343 Zavershneva, E. (2014). The Problem of Consciousness in Vygotsky's Cultural-Historical Psychology. In A. Yasnitsky, R. van der Veer, & M. Ferrari (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology (pp. 63-97). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/CBO9781139028097.005

Leontyev’s Activity Theory and Social Theory Andy Blunden A. N. Leontyev, the younger of Vygotsky’s closest colleagues, is widely recognised as the founder of Activity Theory as distinct from Vygotsky’s Socio-cultural Theory. Vygotsky had approached the cultural formation of the mind in terms of how artefacts—including language—originating in the wider culture, are used by individuals to resolve situations—also the product of the wider culture. Vygotsky did not, however, investigate how these situations, including a person’s motivation—which is a key element in constituting a situation—originate in the social environment itself. This issue was taken up by Leontyev. Vygotsky had recognised “activity” (i.e., social practice) as the substance of Psychology—its most fundamental, irreducible category. His most important discovery was the (molecular) units of activity: artefact-mediated actions. Further, an artefact-mediated action only makes sense in relation to the concept the actor has of the object of the action, and Vygotsky focused his further research into activity on concepts rather than activities.

Actions make sense only in the context of the whole series of actions an individual carries out and the interrelated actions of other individuals. To extend the theory so as to analyse the individual’s situation as part of a wider community it was necessary to determine a ‘molar’ unit of activity—a meaningful aggregate of many artefact-mediated actions, whose internal unity would reveal the motivation for individual actions. Psychological investigation of activities was Leontyev’s task. Leontyev’s ideas led directly to an approach to social theory, and he did not shy from taking activity theory into that domain, but Leontyev always remained a Psychologist, and his contributions to social theory are problematic.

345

346 ANDY BLUNDEN

Leontyev’s Genetic Conception of Activity Leontyev genetically reconstructed Vygotsky’s concept of an action as follows. He began his analysis by considering an organism whose behaviour is directly controlled and motivated by its object.

Because of the organism’s evolution as an integral part of its evolving ecosystem, its perception of the object is internally linked to the processes driving its activity. In the course of evolution, creatures develop “portable” forms of behaviour which adapt to conditions, and these he calls “operations”. Although not completely stereotyped, neither are operations consciously controlled by the organism. Even more elaborate forms of behaviour develop entailing a whole chain of operations to achieve a goal and these are called “actions”. The motive of an action at this stage is identical to its goal.

So, an action is controlled by its goal, which meets some need of the organism, found in its environment. All the operations making up the action are motivated by the same goal which is achieved only by the complete action. So long as everything goes smoothly, the component operations are regulated by the conditions without conscious control.

More elaborate forms of behaviour entail a whole series of actions to achieve the motive or object, each achieving an intermediate goal, so that the goal of an action is no longer identical to its motive.

And this is the definition of a fully developed action—a form of behaviour the motive for which is not identical to its goal—an action is done for a reason, so to speak, the object of the whole series of actions.

Once behaviour has evolved to this point, social creatures utilise a division of labour to achieve their objects by dividing actions between members of the group. These combinations of actions are called “activities”. An individual can execute a chain of actions achieving intermediate goals while constantly having the motive in mind. But when these intermediate goals are divided up according to a social division of labour, “motive” being a psychological category, is not really an appropriate term for the object of an activity, because it does not act as the really effective motive of each

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 347 individual’s actions, even though the “motive” is understood by each individual. The “motive” of the activity is called its object and object is a social category, and only indirectly a psychological category. The object of an activity is implicit in the activity, and is represented in the psyche of an individual in the personal sense of the activity—the object a person expects to gain by means of participating in the activity.

Leontyev’s Units of Activity Leontyev defined a three-level structure of activity—operations, actions and activities—each representing activity at a different level of analytical abstraction. Leontyev defined the molar unit of activity, “an activity,” as follows: Thus, the principal “unit“ of a vital process is an organism’s activity; the different activities that realise its diverse vital relations with the surrounding reality are essentially determined by their object; we shall therefore differentiate between separate types of activity according to the difference in their objects. (2009, p. 29)

Within this English translation of Leontyev’s Russian there are two points of confusion. The Russian language does not use articles such as “an” or “the”. In contrast, the English language uses articles, and moreover nouns may be used with or without articles, and have different meanings accordingly. In general, when an English noun is used with an article or in the plural, it is a countable noun; when an English noun is used in the singular without an article, it is a mass noun. So “an activity” and “activities” are countable nouns and “activity” is a mass noun. Units are essentially countable nouns, so “an organism’s activity” in the above excerpt must to refer to “an organism’s activities,” but the first line of the excerpt seems to be saying: “The unit of activity is activity” which is senseless.

An activity is an aggregate of actions which combine to achieve some shared object. Leontyev tells us that “we shall therefore differentiate between separate types of activity according to the difference in their objects.” But the leap from activities to “types of activity” masks a further elision, and this time the confusion lies with

348 ANDY BLUNDEN Leontyev himself. As is confirmed by Kaptelinin (2005), when Leontyev says “an activity” he often means “a type of activity.” If I say “He was motivated by his work,” that seems to be a clear explanation of the person’s actions, but not so. To understand the content of an action one must know what the person’s work is and what their role is at work. So, to make sense of a person’s actions, we must take “an activity” to be the specific activity, not a general type of activity. But according to his son, A.A. Leontyev (2006), Leontyev remained vague about the concept of “unit”: Throughout, even within the framework of activity theory itself, an ambiguous understanding of the units and levels of activity organization can be seen. […] As is well known, A.N. Leontyev does not provide an explicit definition of it; as a rule, he puts the term ‘unit’ within quotation marks, […]

And this is justified: after all, as it applies to his point of view, the concept of unit has little applicability to activity, action, or operation, since it presumes their discrete nature. […] In A.N. Leontyev’s conception, the only thing that can be called a ‘unit’ in the strict sense is [an] activity (an activity act). (p. 30 & p. 32, ‘an’ inserted by Blunden)

As Vygotsky believed, to make sense of a person’s action, you have to know what concept the person themself has of the activity. In Leontyev’s words: “that actual need is always a need of something, that at the psychological level needs are mediated by psychic reflection” (1978, p. 161).

The Object of Activity for Leontyev People have different concepts of the activity in which they are engaged, but each of the actions composing it is objective. For Leontyev, the object lies outside the activity, determining it, while the object itself is determined by the place of the activity in the whole system of objective social relations. This reification of the object of activity is a significant problem in Leontyev’s elaboration of activity theory.

Fedor Vasilyuk (1988) showed that a person’s actions are not motivated by the object as such, as Leontyev claims, but by the concept the individual has of the object, how it figures in the subject’s life. Leontyev’s method of genetic derivation meant that he began

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 349 from the activity of primitive organisms as part of their ‘livedworld’; tracing this forward he has in mind at all times individuals whose species has co-evolved with their environment. Moving on to human life, Leontyev does not overlook the fact that the environment, the needs of individuals, and consequently the objects of their activity have all historically evolved as products of human life-activity. However, a person’s relation to the objects of their activity is not innate, it has to be socially constructed and learned by individuals. However, Leontyev retained the ontology with which he began with single-cell organisms. Vasilyuk argues that for Leontyev: An object is thus not simply a thing lying outside the life circuit of the subject, but a thing already absorbed into the subject’s being, which has become an essential feature of that being, has been subjectivized by the life process even before any special appropriation (cognitive, exploratory, informational, etc.) takes place. (Vasilyuk, p. 89)

Vasilyuk puts it this way: objects are units of the world, the ‘lived world’ which the subject inhabits—“the sole stimulator and source of content for the creature living in it,” while activities are units of life. And Vasilyuk continues: To base a psychological theory on the statement that the object is the motive of activity is to start from the conviction that life is ultimately determined by the world. (p. 90)

Objects in the life-world stimulate and determine activities; this “primary ontological picture” in effect places activities in the subordinate role in a life-world in which objects are the primary units.

My response to this is to argue for a thoroughgoing activity theory, one in which activities are what is given to the subject and the researcher; activities create objects, are the source of a person’s concepts and which orient his activity, as opposed to a theory of objective needs “stimulating” activities.

This brings us to Leontyev’s dualism. Vasilyuk presumes that when the individual forms a concept of the object of an activity that concept is the product of subjective reflection, so the view that the concept a person has of the object determines their actions therefore presumes independent subjects and object coming into external

350 ANDY BLUNDEN relation with one another. But this is not the case. When an individual forms a concept of Newton’s Law of Gravity, for example, this concept is just not the product of mental reflection, but of the individual acquiring a pre-existing concept; this concept has an objective existence in the activities of human beings and the artefacts they use (words, signs and tools). When a person forms a concept of the object of an activity this concept is acquired through participation in already-existing activities. It is activities which are the units of life and both the subjects and the objects of activities are products of those activities. We should not have a dualism of units, one unit for life and another unit for the world, but just one unit, activities, for the life-world.

Activities and Practices I also want to look at another difficulty with Leontyev’s concept of the “object”. The object is both objectively existing and the object of the subject. Leontyev begins his genetic derivation of his concepts with a micro-organism as subject and the object being its food, with which the organism has co-evolved. This relation continues up to the individual human being engaged in an activity which has a social object. This object is realised by the activity and following consumption has to be recreated as part of objectively existing social processes which include the activity as a part, not simply in the imagination of the subject. The activity thus continuously reproduces itself: it is a social practice. Leontyev puts it clearly in this excerpt: In reality, however, we have to deal with concrete, specific activities, each of which satisfies a definite need of the subject, is oriented towards the object of this need, disappears as a result of its satisfaction and is reproduced perhaps in different conditions and in relation to a changed object. (2009, p. 5)

According to Leontyev, an activity is specified by the object to which all the actions composing it are aimed, whether directly or indirectly, and in the light of which these actions can be made sense of. A person’s actions are part of an activity which exists objectively and involves the actions of other people. There is no such thing as a truly individual activity.

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 351 Leontyev recognises the fact that one and the same activity reproduces itself despite changes in its object. However, Leontyev has blurred the distinction between an activity and a type of activity— a practice. We have institutionalised social practices aimed at reproducing the world rather than projects aimed at changing the world.

Social Position The distinction between the motivations behind an activity and the goal of each action is illustrated by the well-known scenario involving a primeval group of hunters.

When a member of a group performs his labour activity he also does it to satisfy one of his needs. A beater, for example, taking part in a primeval collective hunt, was stimulated by a need for food or, perhaps, a need for clothing, which the skin of the dead animal would meet for him. At what, however, was his activity directly aimed? It may have been directed, for example, at frightening a herd of animals and sending them toward other hunters, hiding in ambush. That, properly speaking, is what should be the result of the activity of this man. And the activity of this individual member of the hunt ends with that. The rest is completed by the other members. This result, i.e. the frightening of game, etc. understandably does not in itself, and may not, lead to satisfaction of the beater’s need for food, or the skin of the animal. What the processes of his activity were directed to did not, consequently, coincide with what stimulated them, i.e. did not coincide with the motive of his activity; the two were divided from one another in this instance. Processes, the object and motive of which do not coincide with one another, we shall call “actions”. We can say, for example, that the beater’s activity is the hunt, and the frightening of game his action. (2009, p. 187)

In a modern economy, however, a person’s needs are always met by a highly mediated process of distribution, so this may turn out to be more complex than it appears at first sight—it cannot be taken for granted that a person knows what tribe they belong to, so to speak, nor that they will receive a fair share of the object.

Let us return to Leontyev’s genetic derivation of the concepts of meaning. In the first stage of development of human society, the use of tools and spoken language—each material objectifications of human modes of action—facilitate a division of labour, but there are not yet class divisions or differences in social position.

352 ANDY BLUNDEN Consequently, he says, the psyche develops through two sources— the immediacy of an individual’s own sensuous interactions with the world and their interactions with the system of signs used in communication. By means of sensuous images constructed through participation in social practices people get to know about their own world, and by means of the meanings carried by language (and other cultural artefacts) they get to know about the world beyond their immediate horizons. Neither the “image” (in Soviet writing, the word “image” does not imply a visual image like it does in English) of the world presented to the individual by the senses nor the ‘image’ of the world presented by signs are psychological, that is, they do not form parts of the individual’s psyche—they are social phenomena. Both, however, figure together in the formative processes of an individual’s consciousness. In this way the abstract meanings contained in words, for example, are filled with sensuous content by means of their association with the individual’s concrete experiences, and socially developed modes of action are introduced into the individual’s interactions with Nature. The constellation of meanings encoded in words Leontyev calls ‘social consciousness’, and these meanings are characterised as objective. Social consciousness is a social and not a psychological category, and alongside the practical activity of individuals is one of the formative components of their psyche.

Personal Sense This analytical conjuncture can be expressed by saying there is not yet an opposition between the objective meaning of things and their personal sense. But simply because of contingent differences from one individual to another, personal sense and therefore consciousness, always differs from one person to another. With the introduction of class divisions, people’s experiences are conditioned by their social position so personal senses express social positions. Social consciousness enters into the formation of the consciousness of every individual, but systematic differences in consciousness arise because of the divergence in people’s class position. With the

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 353 growth of inequality and in particular the emergence of wage labour and capital, alienation arises and personal sense may find itself not merely different from but in opposition to social consciousness. For example, the worker knows intimately how a commodity is made, but relates to it only as work; on the other hand, the capitalist owner knows nothing of the production process, but sees in the product an object which can be sold for a profit. As Leontyev saw it, for both ends of this scale the personal sense of the activity is divorced from its objective meaning—that is, from the social process in its entirety, which is manifested as alienation.

However, people cannot resolve this contradiction by producing a “personal language” of their own, having access only to the “ready-made” objective meanings encoded in social consciousness, so if social consciousness is unable to express personal senses a fundamental contradiction is created in the person’s consciousness.

Leontyev says that people acquire words and concepts via interaction with their circle of associates, and these may include ‘ideological’ notions which are at odds with social consciousness and enter into the conflict between personal senses and social consciousness. He talks of the ideological struggle in society in which people strive to acquire concepts and words to interpret and express their personal senses.

Individual or Particular?

Leontyev formulates this problem as follows: on the one hand, personal senses arising from a person’s unique experiences in their world, which are concrete, personal and subjective, and on the other hand, objective abstract meanings, encoded in words, but which can be more or less adequate to a person’s life experiences. In fact, however, rather than differences in consciousness arising from incidental differences in experience or personal development, differences in meaning borne by ideology express systematic differences in social position. In seeking to resolve conflicts in their comprehension of the world, people effectively choose not between meanings, but between social positions, expressed and comprehended

354 ANDY BLUNDEN through meanings (i.e., concepts). Leontyev says that ideologies obey socio-historical laws and, at the same time, the inner logic of their own development. But my concern is that he sees all the meanings expressed by ideologies as objective and as more or less adequate to the lives of individuals.

This approach to handling the problem of the objectivity of systems of concepts or ideologies has some virtues. It is never useful to claim that such-and-such a theory is objectively simply true or false; it is always a question of how adequate a theory is for someone faced with certain tasks and problems, or to put it somewhat differently, how much of a basis does the theory have in the reality of a certain kind of life: a substantial basis or a very slight one?

So, although some meanings are more adequate than others, whether those of ‘social consciousness’ or those of ‘ideologies’, all meanings are objective, he says. Objective meanings interact with personal senses (tied up with a person’s individual life experiences) in the formation of a person’s consciousness, which is psychological, subjective and personal.

Universal or Objective?

The relation between the individual and the universal is thus rendered on to the axis of the subjective and the objective, and in the deployment of Leontyev’s theory in Psychology the idea of an objective meaning being more or less adequate is rarely utilised. Invariably, problems of learning and behaviour are posed in terms of personal, subjective meaning versus objective, “societally agreed” meaning.

Consider the following illustration offered by Leontyev himself: For example, all older schoolchildren know the meaning of an examination mark and the consequences it will have. Nonetheless, a mark may appear in the consciousness of each individual pupil in essentially different ways; it may, for example, appear as a step forward (or obstacle) on the path to his chosen profession, or as a means of asserting himself in the eyes of the people around him, or perhaps in some other way. This is what compels

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 355 psychology to distinguish between the conscious objective meaning and its meaning for the subject, or what I prefer to call the “personal sense”. In other words, an examination mark may acquire different personal senses in the consciousness of different pupils. (1977, p. 19)

It corresponds to the consciousness of many teachers and psychologists to neglect the fact that what Leontyev calls “objective meaning” is also determined by ideologies corresponding to social positions and may be more or less adequate to the needs of someone according to their social position. Differences in “personal sense” are taken to be just that: personal. No mention of ideology and social position. Conflicts between the individual and the universal are rendered along the axis of subjective-objective, and the teacher or psychologist takes themself to be guardians of the objective. This is a false dichotomy, and in fact, throughout Leontyev’s theory, we find distinctions wrongly rendered into dichotomies rather than mediated relations, and this is the case here. Rather than introducing “degrees of adequacy” to the concept of objectivity, the relation between the individual and the universal must be seen as mediated by the particular and not confused with the subjective/objective relation. The relation of individual, particular and universal is both simpler and more rational than subjective and more-or-less objective. The particular is the activity by means of which the subject realises the object.

Concepts belong to “ideologies” (systems of concepts) which in turn express the needs of certain social positions. But this is just as true of concepts which claim the mantle of “social consciousness” except that “social consciousness” means the concepts of the hegemonic ideology. A better word for this hegemonic subject position is “universal”. “Universal” does not mean “general”—what every single one of us believes—and nor does it mean the standpoint of the boss or the Prime Minister, but rather that of the community as a whole, represented in law and institutionalised knowledge; it is akin to the concept of “public reason” or the terms of a peace treaty, conventional knowledge.

Leontyev has explained that “ideologies” express different social positions, but everyone in a social formation occupies some social position and what is more, shares to one degree or another the

356 ANDY BLUNDEN viewpoint of numerous social positions. Nonetheless, it is inescapable that the various groupings of concepts found in social life express one or another social position. But looking at it more closely, and in the spirit of Leontyev’s own approach, we can be more specific. Each ideology found in a community represents the system of concepts associated with a specific activity directed at resolving some social problem or task generally characteristic of some social position. A scientific concept flows from the pursuit of science, a religious concept flows from the pursuit of religious observance, and so on. Although there are also developmental differences and contingent, individual differences, systematic differences in meaning are associated with particular interests and particular activities.

Individual ideas and actions reflect contingent individual differences as well as particular differences and what is universal in the culture. What is distinctive in an individual’s consciousness arises from individual experiences, but contingencies aside, these experiences reflect in large measure the particular activities in which an individual participates as well as their relation to other social positions and their exposure to ideologies. In short, the particular (i.e., various activities) mediate between the individual and the universal. The universal exists only thanks to those activities in which all individuals participate in some way.

This means that in dealing with a child’s learning, it is not just the child’s personal interests and proclivities on one side and objective truth on the other; rather, the child comes to the universal and the dominant culture as a participant in a certain culture and social position, in addition to the various developmental and incidental issues they face. For example, teachers may become frustrated that students find classical literature uninteresting and impenetrable.

Teachers overcome this by finding some need that the child has which provides a motive for struggling with a text which can lead them to an appreciation of literature which is otherwise foreign to them. The key to finding that bridge is often not the personal attributes of the child but the child’s culture and social position. Unless we understand this, activity theory occupies a position of dogmatism: “your opinion is subjective but my opinion is objective.”

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 357 The universal is something objective in the sense that it confronts every individual, but in its content the universal is far from objective. “Objective” indicates the material or even ideal properties of processes and situations, etc., which are not subject to change according to one’s point of view, whether social or individual.

“Subjective” indicates those features which are dependent on one’s point of view and its limitations, including but not limited to inner processes of the mind. The difference between the subjective and the objective is relative, because with the development of social practice, the limits of human knowledge are continuously changing: what was objective may turn out to be a mere appearance, subjective.

In relation to the example of the examination mark, the mark itself is something objective, but it would be wrong to insist that the marking of the student’s exam paper was objective or that its significance for the student was objective, even though—being the results of institutionalised practices—both are universal. It may be the case that within the student’s cultural community the topic under examination was viewed very differently, and its teaching held in such contempt that a poor mark would have been worn as a badge of honour, or, the examination result may have been meaningless for progress in the student’s chosen trade. These are not individual factors, but social factors, representing particular social activities, which rank on the same level as the factors which motivate particular other students to strive for a good examination result.

When our aim is social changes, these are vital distinctions.

My point may be summed up by saying that Leontyev did not fully work out these relations in terms of an activity theory. His treatment of ideology in terms of objective meanings which are more or less adequate, that is to say, particular rather than general, suggests that the relation between the individual and the universal is mediated by activity, in logical terms:

358 ANDY BLUNDEN

Individual

Universal

Particular Figure 1: An activity as a logical figure

The Problems with Leontyev’s Activity Theory Leontyev’s Dualism There is in fact a pervasive dualism in Leontyev’s writing. The rendering of the relation of the individual to the universal as subjective vs objective is the most serious but there are others. For example, classical Cartesian dualism: the object of activity appears in two forms: first, in its independent existence, commanding the activity of the subject, and second, as the mental image of the object, as the product of the subject’s ‘detection’ of its properties, which is effected by the activity of the subject and cannot be effected otherwise.

(1977, p. 3)

What Leontyev means by the object “commanding the activity of the subject” is the “hard necessity” of life, that one must work to live, and that collectively a community must produce a certain range of goods, and by one or another social arrangement individuals find themselves obliged to participate in activities which regularly produce the given object. The “mental image” refers to the socially constructed consciousness which a person has of their participation in the activity. But it is not as clear cut as that for there may be social differences of motivation and interpretation of the object in play, and it is the sum total of these particular social relations which

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 359 determines both the “independent” existence of the object and the subject’s ‘image’ of it.

Quite aside from the remuneration a worker gets from employment at the Post Office, for example, or the service a resident gets from the deliveries, some workers see the Post Office as a public service and some residents see the Post Office as a profit-making enterprise while competitors may have an object of closing the Post Office down. Employees of a capitalist firm might see the firm solely as a means of earning a wage, but others will not “merely understand” the role of the company but have a genuine commitment to it. And these are social, not personal, differences, differences mediated by participation in activities and flowing from an individual’s social position. So, between individuals’ actions and the outcome of the activity, there are a number of particular, socially constructed concepts of what it is all for, not just one. Leontyev refers to: the problem of the specific nature of the functioning of knowledge, concepts, conceptual models, etc., in the system of social relations, in the social consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other, in the individual’s activity that realises his social relations, in the individual consciousness. (1977, p. 16)

Here Leontyev mystifies this relation, reducing it to a dichotomy of the individual versus “society”, neglecting an important distinction in the constitution of social consciousness, i.e., on one hand the material conditions including the technical means of production, land, built environment and the literature, language and human material, and on the other the activities by means of which these material conditions (artefacts) are put into motion and penetrate individual consciousness. In other words, this is actually a three-sided relation: universal material conditions, particular social activities and individual actions.

Leontyev takes “social consciousness” to be an objective, material category; on the other hand, individual consciousness is a subjective, psychological category. The process which “bridges” or mediates between these two is activity, and activity is both material and psychological. If activities are to be units for social theory there must be no ambiguity as to whether activities are psychological or

360 ANDY BLUNDEN material entities. They are both, and this is given concrete content by the fact that activities mediate between the material conditions, including the ideal properties of artefacts, and human consciousness, just as consciousness mediates between material conditions and human activity and material conditions mediate between consciousness and activity. Material conditions do not determine activity; faced with one and the same problem, people will seek different solutions, reflected in different activities, all aimed at resolving the same problem.

Dogmatism It is generally recognised that there may be a number of legitimate opinions on any given question arising in social life and, if our interlocutor has a different opinion, we do not normally recommend they visit a psychologist. We understand that one’s social position, commitments and the activities in which one is engaged will give a person a different angle on things and sometimes it is quite impossible to find an answer to some question which is genuinely satisfactory to everyone regardless of their social position. To deny this, and on the contrary suggest that there is only one “objective” meaning to something and cast other views as biased and partial, as Leontyev does, is dogmatism. Within the context of a specific activity or institution, such as a certain branch of science, such an insistence may be justified, as it may be in the context of education and child development. Nevertheless, to cast the universal as objective is a category mistake.

Further, an activity may be oriented to a certain object at one moment, but contradictions and problems will emerge, and the concept of the object will change. The concept which participants have of the object of an activity (which will differ from person to person) develops over time; activities are learning processes. To insist at the outset on a certain definition of the object would be misplaced dogmatism.

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 361

Functionalism The social theory which flows from Leontyev’s theory is functionalist. Functionalism sees the society as an organism in which all the constituent parts have “functions”, i.e., answer to the question “What is this for? What is its role?”. It also posits that—like biological organisms—social organisms have an inherent tendency towards stability; disturbances to its functioning stimulate new processes which restore the status quo.

Leontyev sees social activity in terms of various objects, each of which answer to a certain social need and every social formation has evolved social arrangements such that these objects “command the activity of the subject,” and thus determine the actions of everyone in the community.

But who determines the needs of society? And is “the needs of society” even a coherent notion? One gets the impression that in Leontyev’s world, which had supposedly surpassed class differences, “anarchy of production”, and alienation of capitalism, it was the Politburo who determined all the needs of the society and set objects for the various industries in Five Year Plans. But it is widely accepted now that such a view is idealistic, and the real object was always the conception of a stratum of administrators. In the case of a liberal capitalist society, the situation is even worse: rarely does the government or anyone else give consideration to the needs of the whole community; anarchy of production and supply and demand reign.

Every existing activity is by Leontyev’s definition directed at a social need, and these social needs therefore include war, drug smuggling, advertising, cigarettes and obesity-producing foods.

The theory simply fails as an explanatory tool. The market is not a process for determining and balancing the needs of the community.

Certainly, demand regulates the economy, but “demand” is conceptually quite distant from “need”. Need places limits on human behaviour, but these are very elastic limits indeed.

362 ANDY BLUNDEN

Productivism In common with all social theory in the Soviet era, human “activity” is rendered as “labour” with the strong suggestion that a certain kind of labour has a determining function. The genetic derivation of the theory, beginning from micro-organisms and working its way up through early humans to class society justifies a productivist explanation. As useful as this Marxist approach might be for historiography this by no means justifies its place in Psychology, or for social theory in a post-Fordist world. Language co-evolved with the production of tools so there is no reason to privilege labour over communication in the foundations of Psychology. By developing a foundation for social theory from a Psychology which has surreptitiously introduced a productivist theory of history into its foundations, risks misleading social theory.

Further, although signs do figure throughout as mediating communication, and artefacts in general remain the mediators of all actions, Leontyev seems to have put a distance between himself and Vygotsky by emphasising labour, i.e., tool-mediated activity, rather than sign-mediated activity with communication. Leontyev’s productivism is an upshot of this marginalisation of sign mediation. In today’s world, it is difficult to draw a line between communication and production, especially in advanced economies. This problem can be corrected by removing the bias toward “labour” and sticking with “activity”.

Leontyev’s Theory of the Personality “Personality” (lichnost) is a complex and chameleon concept— which attributes of an individual are to be counted under the heading of ‘personality’ and which not? Leontyev relegates to the category of ‘substructures’ of the personality “such various traits as, for example, moral qualities, knowledge, habits and customs, forms of psychological reflection, and temperament” (1978, p. 154). What he sees as composing the structure of a personality are units that I will call ‘motives’, and it is these motives which both express and give

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 363 meaning to a person’s life, or more generally form the structure of meaning for the person. What is more usually understood as “personality” nowadays more closely approximates what Leontyev calls “forms of psychological reflection and temperament”, but—as I hope to show—it is precisely the structure of meaning as understood by Leontyev which is of importance in connection with framing a social theory, even if it is only partially explanatory in the domain of Psychology.

During the first phase of development of a personality the child or youth is just an expression of the class fraction and cultural group in which they have been raised.

The subject’s belonging to a class conditions even at the outset the development of his connections with the surrounding world, a greater or smaller segment of his practical activity, his contacts, his knowledge, and his acquiring norms of behaviour. All of these are acquisitions from which personality is made up at the stage of its initial formation. (1978, pp. 178-9)

At this stage it cannot properly be said that there is a personality because the person is merely an object of their social group; “later this situation is turned around, and they become a subject of their social group, unconsciously and then consciously, […] decisive or vacillating […] at every turn of his life’s way he must free himself of something, confirm something in himself, and he must do all this and not simply ‘submit to the effect of the environment’” (1978, p. 179).

What were formerly the traits of a person of their kind become later merely the conditions for the formation of a personality properly so called. The subject gradually frees themself from their biography, discarding some aspects of their “indigenous” personality while consciously developing others.

Personality thus no longer seems to be the result of a direct layering of external influences; it appears as something that man makes of himself, confirming his human life. He confirms it in everyday affairs and contacts, as well as in people to whom he gives some part of himself on the barricades of class struggles, as well as on the fields of battle for his country, and at times he consciously confirms it even at the price of his physical life. (1978, p. 185)

364 ANDY BLUNDEN A person’s motivation is represented to the person in the shape of the activities to which they are committed, so to the extent that the subject actively commits themself to an activity, acquiring in the meantime the knowledge and skills, the norms and all the attributes associated with the activity, these motives, represented by the object of the activity become a stable part of the person’s personality. The activities themselves wax and wane, prove successful or fail—their fate depending on factors in the wider social world; the personality however constitutes a stable base in the inner world of the subject. Development of the personality is tied up with the development of the subject’s will and the subject’s emotional life is linked to the fate of these activities, but the personality remains a relatively stable psychic formation.

In the next phase of development, the subject arranges the units of their personality into a structure. The units of this structure are the “motives”, so this life-world could also be called a “motivational structure”. Some motives make their way to the top of a hierarchy, dominating and leading others, which become conditional upon it. Sometimes, the personality becomes split with some motivations dominant in some situations while others predominate in others. There will also be conflict between motives and development of the personality entails resolution of these internal conflicts, either sublating a motivational conflict into more profound motives which transcend the conflict, or by relegating or discarding one motivation.

The final phase of the development of a personality is entailed in the raising of motivations from the material needs tied up in maintaining their life in their social group up to more abstract motivations and ultimately, following Aristotle, “the good life for humanity” becoming the leading motive, conditioning and leading other motivations in the subject’s life and personality.

In the earliest stages of personality development, development is driven by need. Needs develop of course, and never remain at the animal level, but in conditions where motivations are driven by needs the person is an object for their environment. “Personality cannot develop within the framework of need; its development necessarily presupposes a displacement of needs by creation, which

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 365 alone does not know limits” (1978, p. 186). Once the subject begins to free themselves from subordination to the needs and norms of their social group, and their personality is composed of ideal social motives, Leontyev refers to these motives as otnosheniya (отношение, pl. отношения) rather than motives (мотивов). ‘отношения’ is usually translated as ‘relations’, but it is also used to mean “priorities” or “attitudes” or “orientations”. “[T]he personality of man also ‘is produced’—it is created by the otnosheniya, into which the individual enters in his activity. (1978, p. 152) These priorities or relations are the commitments the person makes to activities, and which take up more or less leading positions in the structure of their motives. What is indicated is an ideal motive, which I would prefer to call a “life-project” inasmuch as in the fully developed personality it does not represent a “need” so much as a commitment to an ideal or some kind.

Although Leontyev correctly emphasises the subjective side in the formation of personality, his theory lacks a satisfactory explanation of how the subject adopts motives and discards others in the early formation of the personality or how and why a person might change their life-world. The formation of a person’s otnosheniya are punctuated by perezhivaniya (переживания)—the concept used by Vygotsky and later by Fedor Vasilyuk, meaning deeply-felt or possibly life-changing events in a person’s life together with the person’s response to them. Perezhivaniya transform a person’s lifeworld, creating and destroying otnosheniya. There was no place in Leontyev’s dualistic activity theory for perezhivanie, however, according to Vasilyuk (1988, p. 15-16).

A ‘Project’ as an Activity A Project is an activity, that is, a unit of activity characterised by a shared universal object-concept. Projects are unambiguously discrete entities, and I shall call the unit of activity a “project” both because the word has connotations which are helpful in clarifying the concept of a unit of activity, and so that I can outline a version of

366 ANDY BLUNDEN activity theory without conveying the impression that I have merely misunderstood Leontyev.

Ideal-typically “project” denotes a future-oriented, collaborative endeavour in which people work together towards some objective, despite the fact that not every participant holds exactly the same notion of the project’s object and the object keeps changing as the project unfolds, like a design project. (“Design” and “project” are the same word in Russian). Projects often end up producing something which is quite unexpected for all of the participants.

That is, rather than first defining some social function as an object or motive and then defining the project as that aggregate of actions directed towards that object, I say that projects exist, and they are constituted by collaboration towards a shared object, but what this object is has to be determined by analysis of the project.

It is quite feasible, for example, that more than one individual project could be directed at one and the same object, just as many different motives could coexist within the same project. The relations of collaboration between the actions mark out the extent of a project.

A project is launched to solve some social problem, a problem that has arisen for some category of individuals. Members of this group form a concept of what has to be done and begin to act together to realise that concept. Usually, this is past history. Once the project is launched it takes on an identity and a life of its own, so to speak. The project becomes a kind of social movement (in the broadest sense); it adopts an identity representing the concept it aims to realise, but this object-concept is subject to on-going revision, according to both its inner logic and the events engendered by the project activity. Individuals can participate in the project, but the terms on which they participate are quite diverse, taking into account their other commitments. To the extent that the project makes headway in realising its object, it eventually becomes institutionalised and progresses from an institution in which people work on a more or less instrumental basis to becoming an indistinguishable component of everyone’s daily life. So, the concepts people use to orient their individual actions, all are the products of projects, beginning life as the object-concepts of new projects.

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 367 A project progresses through a number of distinctly different phases, and people’s relation to participation in the project is diverse. Through all the changes in the forms of activity and objectconcepts, we can distinguish between phases of one and the same project and what are distinct projects. The inner logic of the objectconcept is what is decisive, but the collaborative coherence and continuity of the component actions and continuity of the participants help us trace the logic of that development.

Everything that Leontyev says about the role of activities in the formation of consciousness remains true for projects with the qualifications which have already been outlined. Our conception of activities as projects has to give a higher profile to ideology critique, rather than accepting the dominant social consciousness as ‘objective’ and mentioning ideologies as alternatives to social consciousness as an afterthought. The formation of a project is not a passive response to need, but a creative process of problem solving which also involves the construction of identities and meaning in life and testifies not to the subordination of human being to need, but rather to human freedom and the capacity of human beings to change the world they live in.

Summary The project approach is a more thoroughgoing activity theory because it takes projects (i.e., activities) as its main unit, rather than taking social functions, so called needs, as the primary substances, which are deemed to be the causes of social action. I believe that Leontyev’s theory of personality as a structure of meanings each related to a collaborative project captures how projects enter into the formation of the personality. However, an investigation of perezhivanie is needed to clarify how people come to be committed to projects, for which Vasilyuk’s psychology of perezhivanie is particularly useful. Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory and Hegel’s science of logic provide the resources for cultural and ideological analysis of project development.

368 ANDY BLUNDEN

References Kaptelinin, V. (2005). The Object of Activity: Making Sense of the SenseMaker, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 12(1), 4–18. http://lchc.ucsd.ed u/MCA/Journal/pdfs/12-1-kaptelinin.pdf Leontyev, A. A. (2006) “Units” and Levels of Activity. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 44(3), 30-46.

Leontyev, A. N. (2009). The Development of Mind. Erythrós Press and Media. http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/activity-theory/leon tyev/development-mind.pdf Leontyev, A. N. (1977/1978). Activity and Consciousness. In The Development of Mind, (pp. 395-409). Erythrós Press and Media. http://www. marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/activity-consciousness.pdf Vasilyuk, F. E. (1984). The psychology of experiencing. The resolution of life’s critical situations. Progress Publishers Moscow. English translation (1988), Harvester-Wheatsheaf.

Reclaiming the Tools of the Past for Today’s Struggles: Radicalizing Vygotsky, via Marx, in Dialogue with Audre Lorde Anna Stetsenko Assimilation within a solely western european herstory is not acceptable.

Audre Lorde Has his work any defects? Hundreds of them. But he is too creative and original a thinker to be surrendered to the vulgar stereotypes of his enemies.

Terry Eagleton on Marx

Introduction This chapter contributes to the goals of taking stock of, and charting possible futures for, Activity Theory (AT)—a unique interdisciplinary framework that is increasingly influential in psychology, education, and a number of related fields. 1 This is achieved by

1

Activity theory (AT) is one of several terms used to describe research directions rooted in Vygotsky’s works—cultural-historical theory (CHT), cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), sociocultural theory (SCT) and Vygotsky’s project/school. This diversity reflects varying emphases either mostly on Vygotsky’s works (when CHT and SCT are typically used), or on a collaborative project/research school advanced by a group of scholars under Vygotsky’s leadership (when CHAT and Vygotsky’s project/school are typically used). A related research line, currently quite prominent, focuses on advances after Vygotsky, especially by A.N. Leontiev, as the second generation of CHAT (or of AT), later developed by Y. Engestrom (e.g., 1987) and colleagues in what is termed the AT third generation. There are plenty of ambiguities, overlaps, disagreements, and exceptions in this terminology (e.g., AT sometimes refers exclusively to Leontiev’s works). This is not unexpected given that these frameworks, now internationalized, are still emerging and undergoing significant permutations through time, especially due to the drastic sociopolitical events that accompanied and shaped their developments. For clarification, in my works, I use CHAT, AT, and (most often) Vygotsky’s project interchangeably to refer to the works of Vygotsky and his colleagues, later continued and expanded in various research directions.

369

370 ANNA STETSENKO considering the contemporary relevance of this approach to today’s scholarship and, more broadly, to present-day sociopolitical contexts, currently in great turmoil and crisis, in the light of this theory’s conceptual-philosophical and ethical-political foundations. In particular, I address and problematize the legacy of Marx and Vygotsky (and the latter’s collective project inclusive of A.N. Leontiev, A.R. Luria and several other scholars) that lies at the foundation of AT and strongly shapes all of its leading assumptions and orientations.2 The legacy of these scholars is addressed and problematized specifically vis-a-vis difficult questions having to do with their affiliation with Eurocentric traditions of scholarship and related possible charges of colonialism, racism, and elitism. Given the profound social transformations currently taking place in our “world on fire” (Moraga, 1983a, p. 3), both literally and metaphorically—with direct effects on academia, though these are not yet sufficiently reflected upon—I consider such a problematization to be urgently needed as we ponder the future of AT and related approaches that aspire to be critical and activist.

It is quite challenging to reflect on Vygotsky’s legacy—and on related strands of Marxism more broadly, both arguably belonging to the European tradition of thought—at this time, when the world is in the grip of an earth-shattering crisis and turmoil, likely on the brink of a collapse. The very foundations of societies and our lives are in a state of painful transition and transformation—being almost suspended in time and space—in a shaky twilight zone between the exhausted old and the uncertain new. Arundhati Roy (2020) compares this time with “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” In her powerful words, “[t]he tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new.

It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years.”

2

On how the works of Vygotsky and his colleagues, especially A.N. Leontiev, can be viewed as one collaborative project, with common philosophical-conceptual foundations and theoretical orientations, see Stetsenko (2004, 2005; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004, 2010).

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 371 Is it possible to draw on Marx and Vygotsky at such a critical time, as allies in the struggle for a next world—against neocolonialism, hegemony, planetary devastation, and racism—in the United States and globally? In this context, it is hard not to think of Audre Lorde’s (1984/2007, p. 110) wise words cautioning that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.” Lorde boldly questioned accepted canons, pointedly asking “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” (ibid., pp. 110-111). The question posed by Lorde is highly significant, and clearly urgent in the present situation. Indeed, can we get rid of problems, especially those as grave and paramount as oppression, racism, imperialism, and inequality, by using the same approaches (such as Eurocentric notions and theories) that were responsible for creating these problems in the first place?

Indeed, we have to seriously ponder using Marxism and Vygotsky’s theories as a foundational framework—including and especially for all subsequent developments in Activity Theory— given that they are associated with European history and heritage, and as such might bear many of their marks. Do colonialist, supremacist, hegemonic, and racist assumptions possibly permeate these frameworks? Caution is especially warranted given the proliferation, through the past several decades, of a radically critical scholarship that has exposed the pitfalls and grave dangers of Eurocentric approaches, as associated with Western imperialism and colonialism including epistemic violence (Dotson, 2013), systematic ignorance as the methodology of the privileged (Sholock, 2012), the hubris of the zero point (Castro-Gómez, 2007; Mignolo, 2009), and other types of exclusionary practices of knowledge production. Interestingly, Marx (1852/1978, p. 595), too, has warned about the pitfalls of leaning on traditions when facing a revolutionary crisis: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when people seem engaged in revolutionising, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present

372 ANNA STETSENKO the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.

It is likely in the same spirit in which Marx said, “All I know is that I am not a Marxist” (see Engels, 1890/1956, p. 496). These words are stunningly relevant today, cautioning against holding on to “the spirits of the past” exactly and especially when we aspire to engage in revolutionising ourselves and the world, as I believe many of us—those working in the Marxist and Vygotsky’s (de-domesticated) frameworks—presently are.

To me, these quotes read as a stark warning against indoctrination and mindless following of the canons—any canons including Marxism—stressing instead the need to create space for openended and imaginative adventures of knowing-being-doing, infused with continuous innovation and daring. Indeed, to continue into the future with the habitual, established ways, including in theorizing and research, while taking them for granted—without radical breaks, innovations, and critical re-evaluation and re-appraisal—appears to be impossible or, at least, counterproductive.

To reiterate the question, can Marx and Vygotsky be useful at such a critical time? My answer is positive for a number of concrete reasons which I discuss in this chapter. Clearly, this answer needs to be predicated on a substantive, creative, and—above all—critical engagement with Marx and Vygotsky. This includes critical analysis of possible implicit connotations (if not overt positions) associated with Eurocentrism, anthropocentrism, colonialism, teleology, and other potentially pernicious effects and harmful implications which—if left unaddressed—could put Marx and Vygotsky at odds with the goals of the anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist struggles of today. All the importance of a critical examination of these authors notwithstanding, the answer to these difficult questions needs to be worked out with much attention to relevant detail, context, culture, politics, and historical timing. One may disagree with both Marx and Vygotsky—and, moreover, one should push beyond their legacies since this is the only way to move forward (as I have insisted for quite a while; see Stetsenko, 2005)— but it is of utmost importance to do so for the right reasons. False,

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 373 disparaging, piecemeal, and misleading interpretations and construals of Marxism especially—so common in the Western literature and overall thinking—make it easy to dismiss and refute it.

Such interpretations, however, offer no genuine insight into the problems this approach tried to solve or the value of the provocative yet stimulating solutions it outlined.

A full treatment of these multiple nuances, details, and dimensions is beyond the scope of the current chapter, since the topic is charged with stark political and ethical-ideological connotations and implications, not to mention an array of factual-historical and conceptual complexities. Therefore, I will be able to provide only a brief outline of several core positions which, to my mind, are useful in addressing the question posed by Audre Lorde. First, in the next section, I will sketch the sociopolitical background (with elements of autobiography) to my stance on the issues at stake. The following section highlights several specific tools that can be creatively borrowed from Marxism for the struggles of today—focusing on its origins in the struggles for social justice and representing an instrument of such struggles, more than any abstract theory. The following section will consider Vygotsky’s legacy specifically in its connections to the scholarship of resistance, highlighting resonances with works by scholars of color and those from the Global South.

Vygotsky’s positioning as an “outcast” (or an “exile”) and how it led to his desire to overturn major canons of Eurocentric science will be the focus. The final section will feature several methodological points that can be applied in considering Audre Lorde’s challenge.

As a preamble to what follows, my positive answer to the question about using Marx and Vygotsky in the present context of crisis does not have to do with any dogmatic principles that supposedly could be taken on from these scholars. In my view, no dogmas withstand the test of time and no movement forward is possible based on any dogmas. Moreover and more critically, instead of (or at least, above) any conceptual-theoretical considerations, my positive answer is grounded in a politically motivated conviction, or stance, that a radical change of the current course is needed because

374 ANNA STETSENKO the capitalist sociopolitical system based on profit extraction, competition, and self-interest inevitably leads to conquest, exploitation, and war, with structural racism and systemic economic injustices denying people their fundamental human rights and literally killing many. Capitalism is unfit for the challenges of today, which require cooperation, planning, equality, and solidarity on a global scale. As W.E.B. DuBois (quoted in Diggs, 2017, p. xx) presciently formulated decades ago, Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism —the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.

All of this is immediately relevant to the original AT and Vygotsky, who aspired for psychology to follow in Marx’s footsteps so as to create its own Capital—that is, a radical critique of the status quo and a path to science that can support social change for a better world. Their works are uniquely and exceptionally important, especially if we take the stance that the collapse of capitalism is impending, and hence the transition to a society based on principles of collectivity and solidarity is an urgent task. In my view, Marx and Vygotsky have much to say to those who want to work for a different and better society. As Haug (2018, p. xvi) has put it, “even if there are no easy recipes for change offered by Marx today, what we find in his work is the outline of a […] global human project, a project that might, in the end, be the only one that is actually sustainable.”

Another point that needs to be stated from the outset: there is no one “correct” answer to assessing these legacies and evaluating their potential for joining today’s struggles. There is not even one Marxism, or one (“true”) Vygotskian framework—because the rich traditions developed in association with these are not uniform. Instead, they entail fierce debates and passionate discussions, featuring not much by way of a consensus (with few exceptions such as canonical Marxism, now defunct, developed in the Soviet bloc, though even these works were not homogenous nor scripted; e.g., the works of Ilyenkov). Any answers to questions of this sort must

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 375 not be abstract pronouncements delivered from nowhere, in a historical vacuum and out of context—as if from a detached and neutral point of observation, or from a hubris of a zero point. Instead, these answers themselves need to be acts of taking a stance from within a particular sociopolitical context and history, as typified by specific struggles taking place in a given context at a given time, and with concrete, future-oriented goals and ethics—a specific sociopolitical ethos—in mind. Any and all answers of this kind are themselves steps in taking sides and, thus, in advancing specific projects of a sociocultural and sociopolitical nature. This is consistent with viewing theories to be not merely abstract pronouncements on the world from a position of some presumed neutrality and exteriority. Instead, theories are living parts of sociopolitical practices and struggles on the ground, the tools of these struggles (Stetsenko, 2015; 2016), the “living and breathing reconfigurations of the world” (Barad, 2012, p. 207).

Since I am offering my answers from a particular stance, a brief personal note about its contextual, historical and sociopolitical embedding and background is warranted, as addressed in the next section.

Taking a Stance: A Brief Personal Reflection The question as to whether Marx and Vygotsky can be recruited for today’s struggles, and also the sense of crisis expressed by Arundhati Roy, both mentioned in the introduction, are things that I have grappled with for quite some time. In a strong resonance with Roy’s powerful words, my own sense of a deep crisis emerged some three decades ago, when I started my research career in the west in 1991 (first in western Europe and then in the US)—right at the time of the Soviet Union’s dramatic dissolution and the start of the post-Cold War era that lasted approximately till the 2008 global financial collapse. In my perception, this was a time marked by a highly celebratory atmosphere in the Western world, conveyed by the infamous “end of history” metaphor (invented by Fukuyama, who later had to retract it), that extended for almost two decades.

376 ANNA STETSENKO At that time, for the Western elites (including in academia), history itself, and with it the need for large social projects and political imagination premised on radical possibilities for change, had all supposedly come to an end. Yet for me—through the lens of my immigration experiences and having to straddle the starkly divergent contexts, histories, and political discourses during this time of considerable turmoil and strife—things looked quite different.

My sense of crisis then, in the early 1990s, initially had to do with encountering an atmosphere of a profound hubris and arrogance, indeed an irrational exuberance, expressed by Western colleagues, politicians, and in the mass media of the time across the board—the cheering of the “victory” in the Cold War. This cheering was combined with a blatant disregard for the enormous challenges facing humanity, especially in terms of growing inequalities on the global scale, the immigration crisis, and an impending environmental disaster (already ongoing though largely ignored at the time). I sensed the west’s reluctance to look at itself in the mirror, a vast complicity in exercising its de facto imperial (or neo-imperial) colonial power and privilege, now extending over the Eastern European bloc, resulting from the “extreme militarization of American discussion and policy” (see Kennan,3 1992), and the overall gated community mentality of the privileged strata in the west. All of this was an expression of a particular self-congratulatory attitude—that of ignoring problems affecting millions of people, especially in the Global South, and the planet itself, all while expanding its belligerent hegemony.

Already in the early 1990s, and especially with the move to the US in 1999, it was becoming clear to me that a huge price was to be paid for militarism, hubris, and expanding hegemony, inevitably heading into an open crisis and even collapse of the existing sociopolitical model. This is because I was struck by the poverty and social inequalities in the US, clearly intersecting with racial ones, and a huge gap between these realities on the ground and the

3

George Kennan (1904–2005) was one of the most famous American diplomats of the 20th century and a preeminent expert on the Cold War who gave a sobering account of its ending (in the piece quoted herein and his other writings).

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 377 celebratory discourses of American exceptionalism. This gap was clearly on display, especially in urban areas such as Jersey City, where my family first settled. Though situated in close proximity to Manhattan, with its glossy veneer and hordes of tourists, Jersey City was a stark and painful contrast to it. With a population of mostly immigrants and people of color (only 20% white), and an official poverty rate around 20% (see https://www.welfareinfo.org/poverty-rate/new-jersey/jersey-city), Jersey City exposed the true destitution of common America (the U.S)—its dilapidated schools and roads, rundown public housing, sparse and outdated medical facilities (accessible only to the lucky ones with medical insurance), and a great number of homeless people sleeping in the streets even in harsh winters, with many parts of the city resembling a situation during or right after a war conflict. With these stunning first-hand experiences sharply contrasting with celebratory dominant discourses (especially in the mass media), I remember saying (including in my conference talks) that, in my view, “America was collapsing,” only to get a reaction of disbelief and astonishment. I also wrote, already early on, about the need to be attentive to the crisis building up behind the facades of the seemingly stable and immutable contexts, insisting on the need “to discern the impending social changes … in our ever-dynamic world that perhaps only appears to be stable and fixed” (Stetsenko, 2002, p. 153).

After the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, which was an especially egregious instance of American neo-imperialism, I realized that capitalism is literally killing the planet and its inhabitants, especially the poor and marginalized and particularly in the Global South. The following expansions of militarism to ever more countries, the 2008 world economic collapse that soon followed, and then the recent pandemic and a clearly worsening environmental catastrophe—all accompanied by a deplorable epidemic of racism and anti-immigrant discrimination that was becoming more and more visible—provided further palpable evidence of exactly such devastating effects. With these experiences, and from a dual lens of straddling historical and political contexts, rather than belonging to one place, I became convinced that the politics of war,

378 ANNA STETSENKO discrimination, and global havoc is the powerful inner drive of capitalism, in the spirit of “Après moi le déluge [after me, let it flood]” (Marx, 1967/1978, p. 375), that would not stop until this system destroys all of life on the planet and the planet itself. It gradually became incontrovertibly clear to me that “either we act now, or capitalism will be the death of us all” (Eagleton, quoted in Stetsenko, 2017a, p. 372).

The Relevance of Marx: The Tools for Social Justice Struggles Politically non-neutral, in-depth historical accounts—focused on the complex ethics and politics of capitalism versus socialism— have not been part of discussions on Vygotsky’s works. As a result, unfortunately, the historical-political meanings of these works, the passionate egalitarian and liberatory ethos at their core—especially as related to their grounding in the Marxist framework—remain blurred.

In the climate of apathy and acquiescence with the status quo, especially since the 1980s and until just recently, a dismissive attitude toward Marxism is not surprising. Indeed, as noted by Bensaïd (see May, 2012), it was in the 1960s in the US and other parts of the west that the radical political struggles were embraced, rallied by the Civil Rights and anti-colonial movements. In contrast, the following decades became defined by superficial postmodernism, neo-liberal triumphalism, and political quietism (ibid.). In an even more critical take on this topic, Fraser (2015) writes that in the US, there is a lack of a truly radical and lasting culture of resistance to capitalism and, therefore, one should look toward the “long nineteenth century” for inspiration in constructing such a culture anew.

However, while references to Marx were rare in the 1980s and 1990s, the new social movements, especially since the world economic crisis in 2008, rejuvenated the intellectual and social left and—with it—an interest in Marx. Furthermore, just in the past few years the situation is further dramatically changing in front of our eyes. The global politico-economic upheaval of recent years—

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 379 especially since the start of the pandemic and the racial justice protests — has required not only a renewed political engagement by academia, both in research and theorizing, but also an “urgency of agency”—that is, an urgent demand to prioritize the agency of people to take charge of events on the ground and of their destiny, in order to tackle the historical and material conditions that produce oppression. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) are in fact in a strong resonance with Marx in terms of an unapologetic commitment to a radical social change, in recognizing, as did Marx, that overturning capitalism is a matter of life versus death, requiring a transition to a new society where relations among people and their well-being, rather than profit making, are at the forefront. As one of the organizers of BLM said in a recent interview, “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories” (Cullors, 2015).

What makes Marxism so appealing to radical social movements at this time of profound socioeconomic and political crisis?

Arguably, though Marx did not provide ready-made blueprints for enacting revolutionary social changes, he did offer powerful intellectual tools for exactly such changes. Importantly, Marx insisted that such tools need to be used creatively and based in the concrete realities and struggles of the day. As he wrote, “I am […] not in favor of setting up any dogmatic flag. […] [W]e shall confront the world not as doctrinaires with a new principle: ‘Here is the truth, bow down before it!’ We develop new principles to the world out of its own principles” (1844/1978a, pp. 13-15).

There are several types of such tools offered by Marxism that I will briefly outline. First, most of Marx’s writing was focused on critiquing capitalism and it is the exposition of its workings and historical dynamics—concealed from view before Marx and still de facto mired in mainstream economics and other sciences—that is of great use today. The nuances of Marx’s critique are beyond the scope of this chapter, but the crucial point, briefly, is that capitalism is characterized by a major conflict between those who own the means of production and employ them for profit extraction (the class of capitalists or bourgeoisie) and those who sell their labor for

380 ANNA STETSENKO wages (the class of workers). This system is inherently hierarchical and based in stark inequality, exploitation, and alienation, including its radical expressions in racism, imperialism and colonialism.

It is a system subordinated to the interests of the ruling class (the elite), who control material production, natural resources and human lives in accordance with profit making rather than broad societal interests, especially the long-term ones.

Importantly, Marx also showed that capitalism, in its profound effects, is not limited to the economic sphere. Instead, it spawns certain types of relationships, institutions, social structures and ideologies that support its workings while justifying inequality, oppression and exploitation. In positing such effects, Marx provided theoretical explanations for why capitalist societies inevitably produce ideologies that are hegemonic, oppressive, alienating and racist. Thus, Marxism offers ingenious ways to expose and critique sociocultural products such as ideologies, political systems, sciences, theories and philosophies from the vantage point of their origination and functionality in supporting capitalism. All of these bourgeois formations are infused, at their core, by distortions, deformities and biases resulting from contradictions inherent in capitalism. For example, according to Marx, these contradictions shatter the basis for all morality, turning everything on its head such as by transforming “fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue…" (Marx, 1844/1978b, p. 105). The predominance of socioeconomic relations does not imply any vulgar “economism”—a reduction of all social dynamics to material production forces. In fact, all aspects in these social dynamics, including economics, social institutions, culture and human relations, stand in a recursive relationship and represent an ontological totality (see Bannerji, 2005; Stetsenko, 2005).

Thus, one of the useful tools offered by Marxism is that of the socioeconomic and political critique of the flaws, excesses and contradictions of capitalism, and attendant sociopolitical formations and cultural institutions such as ideology, education, science and so on—all especially as regards capitalist oppressive conditions and exploitation of the absolute majority of people.

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 381 Second, what is perhaps most essential and original about Marxism is that this critique also pointed to the inevitability of capitalism’s demise, indicating that at a certain time in history, the need arises for capitalism to be replaced with another socioeconomic and political system. Marx predicted that capitalism will fail due to its inherent contradictions and grave structural flaws—such as the inevitable concentration of capital leading to monopolies that ruin even the free market competition (the supposed staple of capitalism, which is actually one of its casualties); the ruthless exploitation of workers and the disastrously growing inequality resulting in the undermining of society’s well-being, including the erosion of social institutions and human relationships; the short-term focus on immediate profit extraction in disregard of long-term effects, resulting in disastrous consequences such as militarism, neo-imperialism and planetary destruction. In other words, Marx posited that capitalism results in the undermining of the very bases of societies, human lives, and the existence of the planet itself—and, concurrently, of itself.

Further, according to Marx, the grave failures and the ultimate collapse of capitalism will eventually compel those on the losing end of this system, that is, the absolute majority of people, to seek alternative ways of organizing society. Notably, this position on the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse was not based in any messianic teleology or some dreamy utopian thinking. Rather, it was based in a sober exploration of the actual dynamics of capitalism, primarily in the economic sphere. Thus, the second tool offered by Marx is the knowledge of not only the flaws and shortcomings of capitalism but of its inevitable collapse.

Third, Marx did not write in great detail about exactly when and how capitalism will be replaced—reserving the greatest role in its demise for the working-class people—but he did put the emphasis squarely on the need to constantly resist and rebel against capitalism. He provided only general outlines for how societies would operate after the collapse of capitalism, since he was harshly critical of the abstract prognostication typical of utopian approaches (for details, see Stetsenko, 2019). Marx did take the view that the best

382 ANNA STETSENKO substitute for capitalism would be a communist socioeconomic and ethical-political system. This system would abolish the private property of the major means of production and, therefore, also the class structure and resulting exploitation—instead organizing society on principles of fundamentally equal rights and opportunities (especially as regards equal access to means of production but also to education, etc.), and the ethics of solidarity. In his words, “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx & Engels, 1848/1978, p. 491).

In other words, and quite crucially, the advance of communism was not posited by Marx by way of some abstract prophecy, that is, as a quasi-religious expectation that the paradise on earth will be delivered, as if on a silver platter. In fact, Marx never implied any pre-ordained “iron laws of history” or a rigid telos that history must presumably somehow arrive at, automatically, based in some immanent and transcendental historical laws that mysteriously apply to human lives and societies. Instead, according to Marx, history has no master plan; it is people themselves who make history and who have to take matters of transitioning beyond capitalism into their hands. In his words, “the emancipation of the working classes will be the work of the workers themselves” (quoted in Balibar, 2013, p. 18). For Marx, history and the advance of communism are directly and immediately contingent on the class struggle for economic emancipation. There is nothing automatic or preordained about such struggle; instead, it is the matter of everyday effort and organizing, including through workers unionizing to fight their “masters”, and of a relentless activism against exploitation in all of its forms. Marx’s own life was a testament to such struggles as he was greatly preoccupied with political activism and emancipatory struggles on the ground. In this regard, it is significant that the Communist Manifesto ends neither with a logical summary nor with abstract conclusions, but with a passionate and directly practical call: “Workers of the world, unite!”

It is in view of these grave flaws and crimes of capitalism, of its pernicious effects throughout its existence, and of its impending

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 383 collapse, that the struggle for alternative forms of organizing societies is taken as the prime (though historically contingent) ontological reality and its major driving force. This is about no less than the “world-historical struggle” (Marx & Engels, 1845–1846/1978, p. 163) to overturn capitalism and replace it with a humane and fair society. In a sense, this is about “building radical democracy as a perpetually unrealized project requiring constant critiques, as an always and necessarily ongoing, prolonged struggle for a fairer, more liberating shared social existence” (Fujino et al., 2018, p. 69).

Thus, another—and arguably the most useful—tool offered by Marx is the revelation about the need to commit to working out socioeconomic and political alternatives to capitalism, across the board— from activism on the ground to theoretical and conceptual constructions (see Stetsenko, 2019). That is, to be a Marxist de facto means, most crucially, working with an understanding that the status quo is unsustainable and that a different organization of social institutions, economies and human relations, including in education, is absolutely necessary as a matter of life and death, in terms of the very survival of the human species and the planet itself.

Many aspects of Marxist philosophy and its overall worldview are predicated (however tacitly) on such a future-oriented and transformative, indeed revolutionary, activist orientation—a commitment to radical social change beyond the capitalist status quo.

This position is brilliantly captured by Marx (1845/1978) in his famous words that “[t]he philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however, is to change it” (p. 145).

This statement actually stands for a radically novel philosophical position, which has not been well understood till now in its overarching consequences (see Stetsenko, 2022). This is about a novel transformative worldview—a coherent system of political, ontological and epistemological principles, all united on the premise of moving beyond the status quo in a struggle for a better world, as a unified ethico-ontoepistemology (Stetsenko, 2019, 2020a, b, c). A number of concomitant tools include the following propositions: facts and values are not separable and instead, form aspects of the same reality; passive contemplation cannot provide an adequate grasp of

384 ANNA STETSENKO reality, which is changing even as we attempt to understand it; researchers’ positionality is inherently a part of research methodologies and phenomena; theory and practice are inseparably blended; and critique/change and explanation need to be carried out together, as one unified endeavor.

Fourth, as already touched on in my previous points, Marxism developed not as a disinterested, neutral approach delivered from “a hubris of a zero point”. Instead, Marx’s analysis has moral and ethical underpinnings of caring for, and solidarizing with, those on the losing end in current societies. Indeed, his works are brimming with a moral outrage aimed at the exploitation and misery spawned by capitalism. That is, in Marx’s writings, all analytical discussions of capitalism are strongly colored with valuations against the horizon of what could and should be, as per Marx’s fierce sense of social injusticess and oppression and his no less fierce ethical commitment to a struggle against them.

Importantly, Marx exposed and staunchly critiqued the mortal ills and grave crimes perpetrated by capitalism from the time of its inception, while highlighting slavery as their primary instance.

As he wrote, slavery is: the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns. […] It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. […] Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance for capitalism. (Marx, 1847/1976, pp. 94-95; my emphasis)

Furthermore, in his words, The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. (Marx, 1867/1978, pp. 435-436)

The acerbic irony in referencing “the rosy dawn” and “idyllic proceedings” of capitalism reaches a crescendo in Marx stating that capitalism enters the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (ibid., p. 435), as people and nature itself

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 385 become subordinated to the needs of a ruthless exploitation and extraction of profit at any cost. Also significantly, Marx insisted that the eventual emancipation of the working class depends upon the elimination of slavery, observing that “Labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded” (Marx, 1967, p.

301).

Importantly, Marx clearly takes the side of the oppressed and develops his approach bottom-up, from the standpoint of “the wretched of the earth” (Fanon, 1963)—as a manifesto for all who are exploited and dispossessed. In this approach, critique and analysis converge with an ethical stance of solidarity with the oppressed and the commitment to social change in practice, whereby theory turns into a tool in struggles towards the free social order. It is in this linkage to the struggles on the ground, to pain and suffering, with a conviction that things should be different, that Marxism is radically critical and, therefore, also practical, effectively merging theory and practice in one unique blend. It is a “practical-critical activity in which theory is already revolutionary praxis, and practice is loaded with theoretical significance” (Löwy, 2003, p. 109).

Fifth, and finally, one more tool offered by Marxism is that it highlights and de facto celebrates (though not always consistently) human agency, open possibility and activism—especially by those who are marginalized, oppressed, and discriminated against— even in the face of insurmountable obstacles. Marxism is de facto about the need for committing to a struggle against all forms of oppression even in circumstances where positive change might seem impossible, that is, against all odds. The idea about working people becoming agents of history and creating a new society, however difficult that might be, is absolutely central in this approach. This is well expressed by Ernst Bloch: “We must believe in the Principle of Hope. A Marxist does not have the right to be a pessimist” (quoted in Giroux, 2022, p. 177). Importantly, this sentiment goes beyond facile notions of hope—indeed, as well put by Deleuze, “There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” (quoted in Bazzul & Kayumova, 2016, p. 284). Thus, what marks Marxism as a unique philosophical system and worldview is fidelity to an event

386 ANNA STETSENKO that has not yet happened (cf. Thompson, 2016) and, even more critically, in my view, fidelity to a struggle for this event—a transition beyond capitalism.

It is hard not to notice a profound similarity between Marxism and the audacity of anti-racist and other liberatory movements in the US and around the globe. As brilliantly captured by James Baldwin (1998, p. 347): I know what I’m asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and the American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.

Or, in Audre Lorde’s words, adding a feminist theme to this message: it is in looking to the nightmare that the dream is found. There, the survivor emerges to insist on a future, a vision, yes, born out of what is dark and female. The feminist movement must be a movement of such survivors, a movement with a future. (conveyed by Moraga, 1983b, p. 32)

To summarize, Marxism emerged and developed, through its history, as a revolutionary and uncompromising critique of the capitalist status quo, coupled with passionate activism for social change and a staunch commitment to its realization, which are its true hallmarks. All of Marx’s philosophy, economic analysis and political writings are aimed at revealing the deadly flaws and traps in the dynamics of capitalism through history and into the future, and its inevitable demise. This is combined with a firm philosophical foundation of an original activist, transformative ethico-ontoepistemology and worldview, premised on changing the world rather than understanding/contemplating it, or merely adapting to it (see Stetsenko, 2008, 2017a, 2019).

Marxism can be considered (cf. Hobsbawm, 2011) to be by far the most influential and dominant among such critiques, having inspired the workers’ and other oppressed groups’ movements and emancipatory struggles over more than a century and all over the world, from Europe to Shanghai. Until today, it remains the primary and most quintessentially activist outline of social revolution, the

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 387 tool of social justice movements. Importantly, there is a strong affinity between Marxism, with its activist-transformative methodology, and the wider tradition of the scholarship of resistance, discussed in the next section.

Making Vygotsky and AT Dangerous Again Transitioning to Vygotsky, his works bear many marks of Marxism as outlined in the previous section, in turn shaping many of the core assumptions in subsequent versions of AT. Significantly, Vygotsky’s works, just like those of Marx, grew out of struggles for emancipation and equality, as is clear from his political commitments, such as his work with homeless and impoverished children, and his advocacy for those deemed dis/abled (see Stetsenko, 2017a, 2020c; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004; Stetsenko & Selau, 2018).

Indeed, Vygotsky’s project was part and parcel of the revolutionary struggle that aimed, on its own territory of conceptual and theoretical battles, to change the world for the better, including by means of overturning the tired canons of traditional science. Like Marx, Vygotsky was deeply engaged in the struggles for a new society, especially in the context of devising new philosophical and psychological foundations that could support strategies for educational practices with a radical agenda of social justice and universal access to education for all. Vygotsky’s work, too, was infused with a radical social justice agenda in concrete and tangible ways, permeating all of his specific concepts, such as the zone of proximal development, his methodology of active/transformative engagement, and the very gist of his radically novel approach to topics such as, perhaps especially, nature versus nurture (e.g., Stetsenko, 2017b, 2018, 2020).

Though belonging to a broadly understood European tradition, at the same time, Vygotsky’s approach, in the footsteps of Marx, de facto goes against many of its core postulates and central pillars. Briefly, theirs is a call for a philosophically grounded revision—indeed an overhaul—of all major assumptions about human development, mind, the nature of knowledge, science, objectivity,

388 ANNA STETSENKO and—ultimately—of reality, away from assumptions of individualism, passivity, neutrality (aka objectivity), accommodation, and adaptation to the status quo, all of which permeated Western canons from their inception and until today.

The postulates that Vygotsky challenged (and this is also present in many versions of AT) include especially the dominant conception of the person, that is, no less than the very cornerstone of Western philosophy, psychology, and worldview. This conception posits human beings as being isolated individuals (the “sovereign selves”) developing in a vacuum, each basically alone and alienated from the world. Supporting the whole edifice of Western societies is the notion of a solitary, autonomous individual not only unrelated and unattached to others but in a constant antagonism with them, impelled to avoid and resist social forces that are intrinsically alien to some putatively “primordial human nature”. This conception was closely associated with the cultural, sociopolitical and economic valuing of individual autonomy—prizing a “self-made man [sic]” who is pursuing individual self-interests in competition with others, driven by the narcissistic gratification of desires via market opportunities. The link to the capitalist economy and its attendant ideology is quite obvious. For example, American pragmatists expressed it quite directly (thus supporting a quintessential American philosophy)—drawing on Darwinism and statistical theory, they proclaimed “that things regulated themselves” (Menand, 2002, p.

194), just as markets were supposed to do. That conclusion “was taken to confer a kind of cosmic seal of approval on the political doctrines of individualism and laissez-faire” (ibid.; emphasis added).

Quite crucially, given the focus on individuals competing for advantage against others, a hierarchical sorting of people is inevitably built into this sociopolitical and philosophical system. Importantly, because the doctrine of individual rights developed during “the same era as European colonial ventures to serve expanding capitalist economies in western Europe,” such hierarchies became racialized at their very core (Adams-Wiggins & Taylor-Garcia, 2020), coinciding with the rise of modern imperialism and white supremacy. Thus, the European colonization of Asia and Africa provided the impetus and justification to create a cultural “other”

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 389 that not only exhibited supposedly “primitive” qualities of intelligence but was in need of civilizing by Western colonizers (Said, 1979; cf. Shields & Bhatia, 2009). Along the way, “the attribution of Whiteness as normative served to justify all forms of discrimination against those who were classified as non-White” (Lee, 2008, p. 272).

Moreover, Western canons developed requisite scientific tools to suggest that “the non-Western ‘Other’ as a native subject was infantile, feminine, immoral, irrational, and uncivilized […] and therefore in need of the governance of wise, powerful, civilized, responsible Western colonizers” (Shields & Bhatia, 2009, p. 117).

The focus on individualism and solipsism, combined with the principle of competition of all against all—and with some human beings elevated above others, especially along racial lines—has aligned with and even demanded ahistorical and contextless treatments of human development and social dynamics, leading to a burgeoning biological reductionism, along with all sorts of dualisms such as that of body versus mind, action versus thought, theory versus practice, and individual versus society. Eurocentric Western science, at the very core of its construction, erected barriers between knowledge versus the world (and knowing versus doing), between everyday concerns versus abstract rationality, between those deemed to be of some putatively “higher” stock—no doubt, of the same origin, ethnicity and color as those who theorized such approaches—versus the rest of the world. This system of views was developed based on a series of strategic conceptual moves under the banner of scientific objectivity and neutrality, which in fact were complicit with imperialism, exploitation, colonialism, racism, and subjugation. These conceptual moves relegated issues of history, society, culture, and power—and, quite critically, of the human social practices that encompass all of these—to the periphery of knowledge production. The result was, and continues to be, an “amputated” version of such fundamental notions as the individual, society, mind, consciousness, and life itself.

All of these topics are treated with much critique, vigor, creativity, and innovation by Vygotsky, so that they all are cast in a new (I would argue, de facto non-Eurocentric) light, and much of this is

390 ANNA STETSENKO reflected in subsequent research within Vygotsky’s tradition, including various versions of AT. In particular, Vygotsky’s approach, in essence, restores connections between human development (in all forms of knowing-being-doing) and collaborative social practices in their concrete materiality, collectivity, and historicity.

Vygotsky’s works mark the first explicit attempt, at the intersection of psychology and education, to advance a non-individualist and non-reductionist account of human development. This is evident in that Vygotsky promotes alternative notions that human development is a sociohistorically situated and culturally mediated process, contingent on collaborative pursuits of meaningful activities, always shared with others, and intricately linked to teaching-learning, including via the zone of proximal development in which new horizons of development, stretching into the future, are jointly cocreated. Development not being guided by anything on either the inside or the outside of human beings is a remarkable insight by Vygotsky—much ahead of both his time and the present discourses, given that contemporary psychology is still mired in brainism and reductionism (cf. Arievitch, 2017; Stetsenko, 2018). To reiterate, much of this novel approach, which challenged mainstream psychology and neighboring fields for their mentalism and solipsism, has been carried on in all subsequent works in AT. Importantly, Vygotsky’s core ideas are permeated with a passionate quest for equality and justice (this aspect has been all but ignored in Western interpretations that tend to domesticate Vygotsky; see Stetsenko, 2020; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004b)—in stark contrast to traditional approaches permeated with the ethos of adaptation and the so-called value neutrality canons of objectivity.

This is amply demonstrated especially in his works on dis/ability (e.g., Vygotsky, 1993), directly challenging deficit-based views (some outdated language notwithstanding; see Stetsenko & Selau, 2018). No wonder Vygotsky’s works are met with staunch resistance and perceived as “alarming” by those who profess positivism and value neutrality (e.g., McQueen, 2013), while in fact representing conservative ideology in support of the status quo.

Absolutely critically, Vygotsky and his colleagues were developing their approach in the midst of a deeply political and activist

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 391 involvement in the broad sociopolitical and ideological project of establishing a new psychology along with a new, post-capitalist society itself. Many important themes indicative of Vygotsky’s activism and even partisanship come across in his most explicitly political work, The Socialist Alteration of Human Being 4 (1994a). In it, Vygotsky directly takes up from Marx in critiquing capitalism and its “corruption of the human personality” (p. 176), due to it being “based on the exploitation of enormous masses of the population […] which failed to raise humanity as a whole and each individual human personality to a higher level” (ibid., pp. 178–179; my emphasis). Vygotsky is unequivocal in his commitment to, and aspiration for, a more just future, stating that in post-capitalist society, “along with the liberation of the many millions of people from oppression, will come the liberation of the human personality from its fetters” (ibid., p. 81). In this agenda, he follows almost literally with the project charted by Marx, writing that: “Collectivism, the unification of intellectual and physical labour, a change in the relationships between the sexes, the abolition of the gap between physical and intellectual development, these are the key aspects of …alteration of a human” (ibid., p. 182).

Note that in envisaging this “new human being,” Vygotsky is actually in sync with many 20th-century prophets from the Global South and scholars of color, who “predicted a revolutionary form of a human who rises from the ruins of previous social orders: from Fanon and Césaire to Bhabha and Said; from Haraway and de Lauretis to Anzaldúa and Lorde, the list goes on” (Sandoval, 2000, p.

159).

Also importantly, Vygotsky openly challenges biological reductionism and thus, de facto battles with no less than incipient forms of fascism and racism—quite literally (rather than metaphorically), since this form of reductionism has fueled eugenics, forced sterilization, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust and other unspeakable crimes of exactly this order. In his work Fascism in Psychoneurology 4

Note that human being is taken here as the translation of chelovek [Russian], which is a gender-neutral noun (grammatically masculine), often translated erroneously as “man”.

392 ANNA STETSENKO (1994b), Vygotsky directly confronts the rising tide of eugenics interlinked with starkly discriminatory, racist forces in policies and discourses. These forces gained power precisely at the time of Vygotsky’s works in the 1920s and 1930s, taking hold not only in Germany but also the US, including at leading universities such as Harvard (Cohen, 2016). Many prominent academics of the time all over the Western world embraced scientific racism, immigration restrictions, and the suppression of the “unfit.” The rise of eugenics came about on a foundation of a long-standing and deeply entrenched racism and was no historical accident.

Quite critically, this was not just an attack on eugenics— Vygotsky directly and unequivocally repudiates all of “bourgeois [read Western] psychology” as afflicted with “the profound crisis during the past few decades [in] acute, ugly and repulsive forms” (1994b, p. 327). He does not mince words in stating that the openly racist works advocating eugenics in fact expose, in “their most cynical form” (ibid., p. 328), no less than an “unprecedented and extremely intense degeneration of bourgeois scientific thinking” (ibid.). His piercing analysis reveals that these tendencies were present in German psychology long before they became “assigned the mission of serving the German nationalist [=fascist] movement” (ibid.). Indeed, many German authors focused on “essential traits which are inherited along with race and blood, and which are necessary for the development of ‘pure German ideas’” (ibid., p. 329)— which Vygotsky sees as representing the language of “real fascist politics” (ibid.). These directly racist ideas are seen by Vygotsky as a “monstrous raving” (ibid., p. 331) “moulded among the debris of a resuscitated Middle Age” (ibid., p. 335). Vygotsky concludes by stating the urgency of a “final and decisive battle, the greatest and the most just which humanity has ever known throughout its history…for the liberation of all humanity” (ibid., p. 335), in which all oppressed nations and peoples will participate.

Such a radical appraisal of the Western science—likely alien to many in academia at the time and to this day—is actually in tune with what Cedric Robinson (2000) later called the “Black construction of fascism” (see Toscano, 2021). Indeed, many Black radical thinkers, such as Angela Davis and George Jackson, writing on the

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 393 heels of W.E.B. Du Bois, revealed “fascism as a continuation of colonial dispossession and racial slavery,” seeing the U.S. as “the site of fascism, originating from liberal democracy itself” (quoted in Toscano, 2020).

This similarity of Vygotsky’s assessments of bourgeois science with the Black radical thinkers’ position is no accident. Indeed, an aspect that deserves much attention is that both Marx and Vygotsky can be seen to belong to a broadly understood radical strand of critical thinking and, moreover, to the scholarship of resistance, as also developed by activist scholars of color, Chicana epistemologies, and the decolonial and anti-hegemonic scholarship of the Global South.

Both the works of Marx and Vygotsky, and the scholarship of resistance, are born of struggles for dignity and equality, in a stark contrast with the “not fully critical” theorizing that tends to fall in line with the dominant interests of the ruling elites. Still not sufficiently attended to, the works of scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sylvia Wynter, and Stuart Hall—among many others—provide a stunning contrast to the insufficiently critical-political tenets of alternative theorizing (e.g., by postmodernists), typically from the hubris of a zero point.

The overall spirit of the scholarship of resistance is that it engages with the actual world right on the ground where oppression, hegemony, and systemic racism are at the forefront. The true hallmark of this scholarship is that it is situated in lived struggles— “U.S. peoples of color have long acted, spoken, intellectualized, lived out what Cherríe Moraga calls a ‘theory in the flesh,’ a theory that allows survival and more, that allows practitioners to live with faith, hope, and moral vision in spite of all else” (Sandoval, 2000, p.

7). In Audre Lorde’s (1984) words, this is about the need for those “who have been forged in the crucibles of difference” to “descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being” (pp. 111-112).

The striking similarity between Vygotsky and the scholarship of resistance might have to do with the fact that Vygotsky was an

394 ANNA STETSENKO outcast, even an exile (to use Said’s 1979 expression), in a country that was itself a sort of outcast. He and his fellow Russian Jews, like Osip Mandelstam (see Cavanagh, 1994), uprooted from their own culture and heritage, were not at home in their adoptive nation either. Moreover, [Russia] was itself “the orphan of nations” [… as it] has always stood at an uncomfortable remove from the centers of European culture, [with] a profound ambivalence toward the continent and the tradition to which it both does and does not belong. (Cavanagh, 1994, pp. 7, 15)

Vygotsky was straddling traditions of both east and west, while generalizing from the dilemmas and disruptions of his dislocation and addressing his paradoxical legacy of disinheritance. He was responding to this complicated legacy while taking it up in his own unique way, which resulted in a complex, ambitious, and challenging approach to “a resilient tradition that draws power from the very sources it is intended to combat” (Cavanagh, 1994, p. 11; my emphasis). It is further quite significant that those working in Russia in the early 20th century lived through unprecedented disasters framed by an extraordinary tumult of no less than three radical revolutions (1905, March 1917, October 1917), followed by years of civil war and foreign interventions (see Trickey, 2019), and then a trying period (marked by extreme poverty and dispossession) of constructing a new society on the ruins of the old world.

It is this positioning of an outcast who had to struggle for recognition, while developing new approaches for a new society during revolutionary times, at great personal costs, that probably fueled Vygotsky’s passion, in unison with the oppressed and subjugated, for striving for revolutionary changes in society at large and specifically in psychology and education. Vygotsky, working within the crucible of the revolution—with its great impulse for, and a powerful unleashing of, individual and collective agency (all its tragic failings notwithstanding)—offered an outline for a truly radical approach. This approach is about reading into the ultimate nature of reality, including all ways of knowing-being-doing, not only the existing models of democracy and placid social reforms (as arguably did Dewey), but a passionate revolutionary activism—a

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 395 quest for and commitment to a just and truly democratic society that still needs to be created. In this sense, Vygotsky’s voice resonates with the very gist of Marxism and with other critical approaches of resistance, as expressed by Freire (1998): My voice is in tune with a different language, another kind of music. It speaks of resistance, indignation, the just anger of those who are deceived and betrayed. It speaks, too, of their right to rebel against the ethical transgressions of which they are the long-suffering victims. (p. 93)

Overall, Vygotsky’s approach, at its core—just like that of Marx—is predicated on, first, associating all of human development and social dynamics with our dependency upon each other for our very survival and, moreover, casting this dependency as an anthropological position infused with clear politics and values, at the intersection of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Second, this approach is marked by a future-directed and transformative, revolutionary orientation. Most significantly, such an orientation is understood to be the prime condition for all forms of effective—that is, life-sustaining and life-saving—human existence and knowing-being-doing. This approach cancels no less than the major pillar of traditional attitudes and ways of thinking including mainstream philosophies and sciences. Namely, what is canceled is the contemplative (de facto, passive) stance of adaptation—that is, of accepting the world “as is”, acquiescing with what exists, and thus resorting to merely describing the world in its fixed and presumably unalterable “givenness”. For both Vygotsky and Marx, instead, nothing is fixed in place, nothing can be taken for granted as a “given”, to be accepted and adapted to. Rather, all existence comes down to challenging “what is” and moving beyond it, including and especially as regards the sociopolitical and economic status quo and its supporting ideologies. It is the resistance and rebellion against the grim realities of the present, and the movement beyond the status quo, in a transformative-activist mode, that constitutes the sine qua non of both Marxism and Vygotsky’s (de-domesticated) framework.

Some of Vygotsky’s themes and insights discussed herein are present in contemporary AT works. However, most of the recent developments in works continuing Vygotsky’s legacy coincided

396 ANNA STETSENKO with the “end of history period” (from the late 1980s until quite recently). This period of time was marked (as already mentioned in the Brief Personal Reflection section) by political quietude, an ethos of adaptation, Western hubris, and a naïve belief that there was no more need for social projects and theories premised on radical possibilities of change. This context could not and did not leave approaches rooted in Vygotsky’s legacy untouched, including in dulling its political and activist edge and domesticating it (Sawchuk & Stetsenko, 2008; Stetsenko, 2004, 2014, 2017a, 2021; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004). Now that we find ourselves in a very different situation of a seismic turmoil and deadly crises on many levels at once, we might want—or, I believe, we are powerfully compelled and called upon—to radically and unequivocally reconsider, reevaluate, and refashion many of our received notions and ideas.

One element of such a radicalization of Vygotsky and AT, in making them dangerous again, as I see it, consists of taking a stand and being clear as to which socio-political causes and commitments we champion, while clarifying positions we occupy in the sociopolitical struggles of today (as the path to rendering theory critical/radical and therefore, also and simultaneously, practical; see Stetsenko, 2022).

In Conclusion: The Methodology of Reclaiming Historical Legacies As is probably quite transparent from the discussion so far, my position is that Vygotsky’s project—due to its unique features, context, and history, and as the first attempt to apply Marxism to human development and education—can be recruited to develop psychology and education, while building on anti-colonialist, anti-hegemonic, and anti-racist premises and agendas. And indeed, scholars engaged in research with exactly such agendas align with Vygotsky, for example, stating that “to date, the most productive theory of human development from our perspective—one that aligns with a decolonizing perspective—is cultural–historical activity theory” (Tejeda, Espinoza, & Gutiérrez, 2003, p. 8). However, to

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 397 move further in this direction also requires many critical upgrades, specifications, corrections, and expansions of this project (for examples of such work, see Bang, 2016). This is of the utmost importance and the present chapter can be seen as setting the stage for further pursuing such a task.

Notably, this conclusion is in sync with Vygotsky’s own strategy that insists on continuing with a given tradition, while, at the same time, also insisting on critically and radically challenging and even overturning any and all traditions—in striving to overcome their tired postulates and instead aiming at developing novel, and quite daring, approaches and ideas. There appears to be a dialectical tension reflected in this strategy—a complex and nuanced methodology that neither rejects the past wholesale nor accepts it as a given. Indeed, on the one hand, Vygotsky (1997) firmly believes that “one must look at science in a very mechanical and unhistorical manner not to understand the role of continuity and tradition at all, even during a revolution” (p. 333). In the same vein, he writes that “We do not want to deny our past. We do not suffer from megalomania by thinking that history begins with us. […] We want a name [for our discipline] covered by the dust of centuries” (ibid., p. 336).

Yet, on the other hand, Vygotsky is staunchly critiquing practically all existing psychological and philosophical postulates and assumptions of his day. In his works, there is no acceptance of any established conventions, canons, or standards—what Vygotsky terms “age-old prejudices” (ibid., p. 336)—especially as regards the very foundations of human development. Instead, the method is that of inventing a new system of categories, methods, and principles that overthrow the existing ones, along with the whole edifice of traditional science. Vygotsky (1997) is self-conscious and self-reflective about his methodology. To illustrate, he writes about the need for a new psychology that has to be developed to meet the needs of a new society that will emerge in the future: In the future society, psychology will truly be the science of new human beings. […] Now we hold its tiny thread in our hands. It is of no trouble [problem] that this [future] psychology will resemble the present one as little as

398 ANNA STETSENKO […] the star constellation Canis Major [from canis—dog (Latin)] corresponds to a dog—a barking animal. (ibid., p. 343)5

The meaning is that the future psychology needs to be and will be completely different from the traditional one, resembling its current form only to a small degree (just as the real dog only vaguely resembles the star constellation bearing its name).

This is a very peculiar take on tradition and continuity, whereby there is no blind following of the past but, instead, a struggle to overcome it. This is true even though, dialectically, the process of overcoming the past entails that this past is not ignored, nor simply left behind, because there is no and cannot be any mechanical break with the past. Instead, what can be discerned in Vygotsky’s approach is an authorial, creative mastery of the past so that, most critically, there is a claiming of the past for the struggles of today, entailing its radical overhaul and transformation. In this methodology nothing is taken for granted and accepted “as is”, and this is exactly and explicitly at the core of Vygotsky’s approach, as transpires when he writes: We regard this as our historical right, as an indication of our historical role, our claim to realize psychology as a science. We must view ourselves in connection with and in relation to the past. Even when denying it we rely upon it. [...] That is why we accept the name of our science with all its age-old delusions as a vivid reminder of our victory over these errors, as the fighting scars of wounds, as a vivid testimony of the truth which develops in the incredibly complicated struggle with falsehood (Vygotsky, 1997, pp. 336-337; my emphasis)

In this strategy, there is a parallel with Edward Said’s (1979) creative use of European heritage. Said (1979) observed that Shakespeare is most often used as a means of colonial and imperial authority. In contrast, his own use of these classical works undermines their Western interpretations. For example, to comment on experiences of exile and displacement, Said creates a black-haired, 5

This is my translation, correcting an error in the published English version, where the translator apparently confused two meanings of the word “нужда”—need versus problem or trouble (the latter being correct in this context), distorting the meaning of the sentence by changing it to the exact opposite.

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 399 Palestinian Hamlet who is “out of place” in an alternative world that allows him to escape the perils of colonialism (Hamamra & Abusamra, 2021). Importantly, “[c]olonial masters imposed their value systems through Shakespeare, and in response colonized people … answered back in Shakespearean accents” (Loomba & Orkin, 1998; quoted in Hamamra & Abusamra, 2021, p. 93). Similarly, both Marx and Vygotsky can be seen as “exiles” who are weaving diverse themes and heritages into their own unique synthesis without giving in to colonial and imperialist legacies. This is achieved from a unique cultural location fraught with earth-shattering contradictions and conflicts in the turmoil and cataclysms of history they both witnessed, and due to them being “excommunicated from history” (Mandelstam’s phrase; see Cavanagh, 1994, p.

5)—that is, not belonging to a single place, while taking the side of the oppressed.

The suggestion to use Marx and Vygotsky’s approach critically and in the light of the present challenges is one way to address the conundrum so well formulated by Audre Lorde about the tools of the past. Arguably, as N.J. Robinson (2017), a journalist and socialist activist, wrote: a more powerful approach than shunning the master’s tools is saying that they were never the master’s tools to begin with. They were ours. The tools of science, for example, have often been used to further violent and racist causes, [… yet science] is a tool that should be seized and deployed for good.

That means Lorde is right, though: the master’s tools won’t destroy his house, because they’re only his tools so long as he controls them. Once they are reclaimed, they belong to all of us. And our tools can do anything.

It is in tune with the notion of reclaiming the tools of the past that I have suggested (in a series of works since the early 2000s) strategies to navigate the two opposite notions about historical legacies and traditions: the notion that “none of the systems, none of the doctrines transmitted to us by the great thinkers may be convincing or even plausible” anymore (Arendt, 1977, p. 12), on the one hand, and the notion that “our classics are like a powder keg that has not yet exploded” (Mandelstam, quoted in Stetsenko, 2020d, p. 8), on the other. In this approach, no legacy is taken for granted as a canon to

400 ANNA STETSENKO be faithfully followed. Instead, all theoretical work presumes an activist stance on sociopolitical and conceptual issues, which are always intertwined (see my take on this topic in Stetsenko, 2020a, c).

This is in sync with Stuart Hall’s (1992) insistence on “working on marxism, working against marxism, working with it, working to try to develop marxism [or any other legacy]” (p. 264). In Hall’s words, this is about “the deadly seriousness of intellectual work” (p. 273) “which demands a different metaphor—that of struggle [since] the only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off…” (p. 265). As Hall further insists, we are dealing with: the politics of theory. Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges [and tools], which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But also as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect. (p. 274; emphasis and insert added).

My take on these issues is based in worldview-level reflections about ethico-ontoepistemology, including especially about how the past, present, and future are actually intertwined so that the present always inevitably continues the past within it, as if carrying it forward across imaginary time divides, without there ever being a chance to completely break with the past. At the same time, the future is also directly implicated in the present, since it is exactly the future that is being made and realized, at every moment, within the actualities of what is going on now, so that the future is always already in the making, by us, now (for details, see Stetsenko, 2017a, 2020a, b, c, d) Perhaps, above all, this strategy is consonant with James Baldwin’s (1998) powerful illumination on history. In his words: History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read.

And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, …and history is literally present in all that we do. […] [I]t is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. […]

[O]ne enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating: one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history. (pp.

722-723; emphasis added)

RECLAIMING THE TOOLS OF THE PAST FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLES 401 Indeed, the strategy is not merely to read Marx and Vygotsky’s works but, instead, to read them with the goal of moving beyond them, while critically reclaiming some of the tools they offered for the struggles of today. Just like broader Marxism, Vygotsky’s approach came about as a tool for revolutionary, radical-progressive social transformations—embedded within anti-capitalist struggles and aimed at the goals of radical equality and social justice. Given the present dramatic crisis of the capitalist world order, their ideas are truly timely, yet only if we actively and critically take them on and move past their “banal, biscuit-box” (domesticated and “amputated”) versions, in a more radical vein, while making Vygotsky and Marx—and all versions of AT—dangerous again, that is, useful in our struggles for a better world today.

Audre Lorde’s wisdom is indispensable in this task and it is best to finish with her words (1984/2007, pp. 38-39; my emphasis and insert, in the spirit of a dialogue), Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. […] But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage.

In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only our poetry [and all forms of our activist daring–AS.] to hint at possibility made real […formulating] the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real.

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Index activity as unit, 35, 88, 116, 223, 224, 345–50, 359, 365 collective, 36, 78, 88, 116, 119, 122, 126, 148, 149, 155, 220, 222, 269, 285 concept of, 59, 63, 70, 73, 75, 78, 80 everyday, 24, 61, 332, 334, 335, 336 systems, 33, 123, 188, 194, 223, 224, 250, 270, 281, 335 activity theory development of, 33, 38, 41, 43, 46, 75, 76, 78, 85, 357 in Japan, 115–20 practical applications, 32, 33, 38, 43, 217 terminology, 43, 83–85, 337, 346, 347, 362, 365 Western reception of, 32, 83, 85 actor-network theory, 44, 204, 205 affect, 142, 150, 202, 268, 269 agency, 22, 43, 116, 118, 122, 133, 139, 189, 211, 213, 282, 296– 98, 300–303, 309–12, 315, 318– 22, 323, 379, 385 collective, 176, 181, 186, 394 in education, 45, 122, 123, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 275, 276, 277, 283, 285, 287, 288, 295–97, 306, 311– 14, 319, 320, 323, 324 individual, 225, 251, 262, 300, 303, 313 material, 219, 225–27, 231, 233, 237–39

non-human, 44, 219, 220, 226, 227, 231, 237 passive, 295, 303–6, 321 transformative, 123, 132, 140, 142, 152, 246, 323 Anthropocene, 22, 44, 219, 220, 224, 236, 239 Aristotle, 316, 364 artifacts, 32, 149, 153, 221, 223, 301, 311, 322, 345, 350, 352, 359, 360, 362 assumptions ontological, 79, 82, 84, 90 origin of consciousness, 81, 82 sociohistorical, 79, 82 autoprolepsis, 186–87 Bakhurst, David, 24, 25, 42, 51, 52 Braidotti, Rosi, 44, 199–206, 211, 215–17 brainism, 213, 390 capitalism, 153, 174, 177, 205, 209, 210, 216, 217, 224, 230– 32, 239, 282, 312, 314, 353, 359, 361, 373, 374, 377–85, 385, 386, 388, 390, 401 Change Laboratory, 245–48, 339 chordal triad of agency, 295, 307, 308, 311, 312, 322 Cole, Michael, 29, 32, 33, 46, 51, 54, 329 collaboration, 119, 125, 185, 245, 255, 260, 266, 268, 279, 366 colonialism, 200, 202, 205, 370, 371, 372, 377, 379, 384, 388, 389, 398 communism, 374, 382 consciousness

407

408 INDEX development of, 22, 24–28, 31, 86, 100, 105, 188, 352 human, 21, 25, 26, 29, 38, 39, 42, 99, 118, 210, 221, 353, 360 individual, 23, 356, 359 social, 27, 352–55, 358, 359, 367 contradictions, 41, 45, 145, 149, 151, 154–60, 166, 167, 224, 234, 245, 246, 248, 249, 251– 53, 255, 258, 261, 266, 267, 285, 316 CHAT rationale of, 297, 295– 97, 300, 303, 305, 306, 310, 312, 314, 318–24 non-contradiction, 295, 297, 312, 315–17, 323 cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), 33, 38, 40, 45, 115, 173, 175, 199, 210, 212, 214, 245, 269, 276, 279–81, 288, 295–97, 298, 302, 307, 313, 316, 318, 321, 322, 329, 337–39 Davydov, Vasili, 54, 55, 64, 83, 246 deaf-blind education, 23–26, 55, 60–62, 97–100, 103, 104, 102– 5, 106 deep ecology, 206, 208, 210 degrowth, 156, 158, 165, 166, 167 democracy, 110, 175, 180, 192, 383, 392, 394 development conceptual, 189, 191, 221, 350 cultural, 23, 30, 34, 101, 106, 188–92, 194, 214, 339, 356 of agency, 296, 298, 305, 306, 314, 321 of language, 27–30, 99, 118, 182, 221, 222, 330 of personality, 82, 363–65 of pointing, 30, 34

psychological, 24, 29–31, 34, 38, 40, 43, 60–63, 74, 76, 81, 181, 183, 185, 186, 334, 336, 340 social, 24, 26, 30, 101, 102, 181, 221, 357, 363, 389 Developmental Work Research Intervention (DWR), 45, 244– 46, 248–58, 266, 267 dialectics, 57, 109, 202, 205, 280, 285, 296, 311, 315, 318, 397 dialogue, 118, 133, 246, 248 Diderot, Denis, 43, 98, 102–8 disaster prevention learning, 43, 116–18, 124–32 double bind, 144, 158, 160, 161, 246, 266 double stimulation, 192, 246, 248, 339 dualism, 91, 205, 339, 342, 349, 358, 389 education. See also pedagogy and activity theory, 44, 115, 300, 338, 339, 396 assessment, 32, 286, 287, 337 mathematics, 32, 331–33 of person, 98, 106, 107, 110, 185, 212 research in, 115, 117, 121, 128, 277, 278, 280, 286, 314, 335 school, 119, 122, 336 science, 45, 275–88 emancipation, 173, 174, 182, 186, 192, 193, 288, 382, 384, 387, 391, 392 empiricism, 105, 110 Engeström, Yrjö, 33, 45, 117, 222, 224, 245, 338, 339 expanded triangle, 37, 269, 338 Learning by Expanding, 33, 37, 115, 119, 120 Enlightenment, 44, 98, 102, 105, 106, 110, 199, 200, 203, 233

INDEX 409 environment cultural, 33, 331, 332, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 345 human, 24, 25, 58, 59, 61, 76, 86, 119, 213, 214, 216, 222, 246, 298, 299, 340, 345, 349 environmental crisis, 46, 177, 199, 206, 207, 219, 225, 227, 228, 230–35, 236–39, 300, 370, 375–78, 396, 401 equality, 40, 374, 387, 390, 393, 401 ethico-ontoepistemology, 280, 288, 383, 386, 400 evolution, 39, 40, 158, 214, 346, 351, 362 expansive learning, 43, 115, 117, 118, 119–22, 125, 129, 130, 137–39, 142, 144, 151–59, 161, 166–68, 245, 249, 250, 265 politics of, 138, 139 freeze-frame thinking, 15–17, 18, 19, 30, 42, 45 functionalism, 361 genetics, 40, 199, 206, 207–12, 215, 348, 350, 362 Gramsci, Antonio, 44, 173, 186– 89, 192, 194 growth. See also degrowth economic, 208, 209 personal, 101, 150 Hegel, G.W.F., 63, 69, 91, 110, 317, 324, 340, 367 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 43, 98, 102, 105–9 heterolepsis, 186, 187, 193 higher mental functions, 29, 30, 118, 336 historicity, 41, 276, 281, 284, 301, 311, 320, 322, 389, 398, 400 human mind, 26, 28, 31, 58, 62, 86, 104, 105, 108, 210, 212, 213 hybrid learning activities, 116– 18, 124–30

ideal, 18–22, 51, 58–59, 61, 64, 66, 101, 109, 236 identity, 53, 248, 306, 366 collective, 176, 183 ideology, 353–57, 367, 380, 395 Ilyenkov, Evald, 15, 19–24, 25, 27, 38, 51, 55–69, 97, 99, 104, 108–10, 223, 224, 374 individualism, 279, 387, 388, 389 inequality, 107, 177, 200, 222, 339, 353, 371, 379, 380, 381 informational codes, 199, 200, 206, 208, 211, 212, 215 instruments, 118, 126, 143, 144, 147–49, 153, 155, 167, 248, 250, 264, 301, 311, 322 interiorization, 30, 31, 43, 65, 99, 101, 102, 105, 108, 109, 115, 182 internal conversation, 30, 302, 303, 321 internalization. See interiorization interventions, 33, 45, 247, 248 collaborative, 117, 118, 123, 128, 131, 132 formative, 117, 121, 122, 128, 131, 132, 133, 246, 251, 256, 262, 315 Kant, Immanuel, 63, 69, 109, 235, 236 knotworking, 124–29, 132 Kpelle people, 32, 332 labour, 36, 41, 88, 97, 100, 104, 140, 351, 353, 362, 379, 391 division of, 36, 37, 143, 144, 148, 150, 174, 223, 252, 254, 262, 264, 267, 346, 351 Lampert, Eugene (Genia), 52, 53 leadership, 173, 174, 182, 185, 188 learning actions, 137, 139, 144, 158, 163

410 INDEX Lektorsky, Vladislav, 54, 55, 66, 68, 69 Leontiev, Aleksey, 28, 33, 35–37, 42, 46, 63, 64, 75, 76–79, 82, 83, 88, 221–22, 279, 336, 338, 339–42, 345–67, 370 Liberia, 32, 329, 331, 332, 335, 337 Lorde, Audre, 371, 373, 386, 393, 399, 401 Luria, Alexander Romanovich, 28, 32, 51, 64, 65, 279, 329, 330, 333–36, 370 Marx, Karl, 370, 372, 382, 399 Theses on Feuerbach, 63, 77, 92, 101, 178 Marxism, 38, 41, 58, 370–74, 378–87, 394–96, 399, 400 and psychology, 77 materialism, 58, 74, 76, 100, 101, 202 new, 44, 225, 236, 239 materiality, 18–20, 220, 226, 236, 301, 320 mediation, 34, 185, 223, 226, 227, 251, 302, 338, 362 memories, 116, 124, 129, 130, 190, 221 Meshcheryakov, Alexander, 23– 26, 43, 55, 60–63, 97–99, 104, 105, 186 methodology, 41, 121, 245, 280, 387, 397, 398 in activity theory, 39, 87, 92, 117, 118, 397 Mikhailov, Felix, 51, 52–55, 63, 68, 69 modelling, 147, 158, 160, 161, 162–66, 298, 300, 301, 319, 320 monism, 202, 203, 205, 214 MOODLE, 45, 243–45, 246–48, 251–68 motives, 35, 36, 80, 88, 89, 90, 91, 167, 221, 222, 230, 252, 255, 264, 269, 346, 351, 362–66

mutual aid, 138, 140, 142, 145– 49, 151–53, 167 needs, 79–80, 269, 348–51, 355, 361, 364, 367 neoformation, 181–84, 186, 192 non-humans, 22, 29, 44, 108, 204, 220, 225, 233, 235–39 objectivity, 19, 316, 352–57, 360, 387, 389, 390 peculiar, 15, 17–19, 23, 25, 31 objects, 35, 79, 118, 139, 154, 167, 221, 223, 245, 252, 255, 258, 260, 262, 263, 264, 268, 276, 286, 346–51 expanded, 145–49, 155, 156 otnosheniya, 365 pedagogy, 173, 243, 245, 251, 252, 254, 255, 257–60, 264, 265, 286 political, 175, 186, 192, 193 perezhivanie, 46, 68, 184, 194, 329, 339–41, 365, 367 personality, 51, 77, 78, 82, 99– 102, 105, 108, 118, 340, 362– 65, 367, 391 person-environment relation, 76–78, 89, 92, 212, 232, 299, 319, 340, 364 posthumanism, 44, 199–202, 206, 209, 211, 215, 216, 219– 20, 224–28, 231, 233, 236, 237– 39 practice, 89, 90, 92, 351 productivism, 362 project (as activity), 46, 365–67 protests, 175, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 191 racism, 201, 202, 205, 217, 370– 72, 374, 376–80, 388, 389, 391– 93, 396, 399 realist social theory, 295, 302–5, 320, 321 reductionism, 20, 40, 100, 211, 282, 390, 391

INDEX 411 Rees, William, 199, 206–10, 211, 215, 217 reflexivity, 302, 303, 306, 321 robots, 220, 224, 228–36 Rubinshtein, Sergei L., 63, 75 scholarship of resistance, 373, 386, 393 self, 24, 46, 53 self-efficacy, 297, 298, 300, 301, 319, 320 sensory deprivation, 98, 102, 103 sensualism, 98, 105, 108, 110 smart matter, 200, 204–6, 211, 213, 215 social class, 174, 187, 222, 352, 351–54, 355, 361 social constructions, 20, 59 social justice, 40, 192, 201, 279, 373, 379, 384, 386, 387, 396, 401 social movements, 137, 378 Egypt, 44, 173, 184, 190, 191, 192, 193 Finland, 43, 138, 153, 165 social movement theory, 37, 44, 173, 175, 174–78, 180– 82, 186, 193, 194 Spain, 43, 138, 139, 142, 152 social-cognitive theory, 295, 297–302, 319 socialism, 65, 66, 174, 334, 378 Socratic ignorance, 219, 228, 234, 238–39 Sokolyansky, Igor, 24, 43, 61, 99 Soviet philosophy, 42, 52, 54, 55, 56, 64, 65, 68, 69, 101, 221 Soviet psychology, 23, 28, 35, 38, 64, 76, 99, 115, 329, 331, 341 Soviet Union, 28, 31, 32, 33, 38, 42, 51, 52, 54, 67, 73, 97, 221, 329, 330, 334, 342, 375, 394 special reality, 15, 18, 21, 23, 25, 31, 32, 39, 42, 44 spirituality, 58, 203–4

Stalin, Joseph, 340 Stalinism, 56, 64, 65 stimulus-response, 34, 37, 339 storytelling, 124, 128 subjectivity, 36, 39, 40, 100, 101, 104, 110, 140, 152, 203, 216, 248, 349, 354, 357 subjects, 139, 167, 223, 253, 260, 262, 349, 350 sustainability environmental, 207, 209, 238, 374 of social movements, 43, 137, 139, 151, 153, 155, 160 tangible solutions, 155, 156, 155– 64, 166, 167 teachers, 119, 122, 130, 243–45, 246, 250–68, 283, 312, 313, 318, 323, 331, 332, 336, 355, 356 technological breakthrough theory of mind, 27, 31 technology, 22, 28, 65, 205, 208, 219, 220, 225, 229–31, 238, 243–45, 251, 259, 262, 268, 269 temporality, 17, 190, 307, 310, 311, 322 thinking in film, 18–20, 39, 42 tools, 79, 80, 188, 221, 226, 232, 237–39, 252–55, 259, 285 touch (sense of), 60, 62, 103 transformations, 115, 122, 123, 139, 141, 179, 180, 216, 244, 248, 249, 250, 251, 256, 265, 266, 267, 401 triadic reciprocal causation model, 298–300, 319, 320 universals, 354–60 Vygotsky, Lev S., 28–31, 35, 37, 46, 51, 55, 63–65, 68, 76, 77, 118–19, 181, 186, 189–94, 221, 224, 266, 279, 298, 337–42, 345, 370–74, 387, 389–401

412 INDEX workers, 36, 140, 174–76, 178, 180, 186, 187, 359, 379–82, 384–86 Zagorsk experiment, 23, 43, 61, 63, 97–100, 102, 106, 108, 110

zone of proximal development, 173, 185, 186, 193, 266, 387, 390

Contributors Bakhurst, David David Bakhurst is the George Whalley Distinguished University Professor and Charlton Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Ontario. His book Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (Cambridge, 1991) represents the first critical history of Soviet philosophical culture, for which the primary research was conducted in Moscow under the mentorship of Felix Mikhailov. Since then, in addition to continuing his work on Russian thought, Bakhurst has written on epistemology, metaphysics, Wittgenstein, ethics and philosophy of education. Recent publications include The Formation of Reason (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Education and Conversation (Bloomsbury, 2016), the latter co-edited with Paul Fairfield, and The Heart of the Matter: Essays on Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and the Courage of Thought (Brill, 2023). Bakhurst has held visiting positions at All Souls College, Oxford, UCL Institute of Education and the Australian National University, Canberra. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the executive editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education.

Blunden, Andy Andy Blunden is an independent scholar in Melbourne, Australia.

Andy has published on Activity Theory, concept formation, collaborative projects, collective decision making and Hegel for social movements. Andy’s interest is in developing Activity Theory as a theory of social change.

Brunila, Mikael Mikael Brunila is a doctoral candidate in Geography at the Platial Analysis and Urban Politics and Governance labs at McGill University. His dissertation focuses on the translation of meaning into 413

414 CONTRIBUTORS information in modern AI models of language and the challenge that the notion of “place” introduces into this process. Before his PhD studies, he completed an MA in Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences at Columbia University and an MSc in Political Science at the University of Helsinki. His master’s thesis at the latter institution was co-supervised by Professor Yrjö Engeström and explored the relationship between affect and expansive learning through a case study on the housing movement, la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) in Barcelona, Spain.

Camillo, Juliano Juliano Camillo is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching Methodology and in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Education at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. He received his PhD in Physics Education from the University of São Paulo. He is interested in developing a philosophy of science education and understanding the relations between human development and science education from a critical and emancipatory perspective.

Chaiklin, Seth Seth Chaiklin was educated as an experimental research psychologist (University of Pittsburgh, 1984). Research interests include dialectical approaches to subject-matter teaching and learning, especially in the developmental teaching and learning tradition (e.g., teaching experiments in mathematics, natural science and social science, at primary and secondary levels); conceptual and methodological issues in cultural-historical psychology, especially Vygotsky’s theory of development, theory of activity and personality development; theoretical approaches to analyzing practice (e.g., analyses of practice for preschool education, nursing and social pedagogy); and interventions for developing practice (e.g., practice-developing research in relation to nursing education).

CONTRIBUTORS 415

Cole, Michael Michael Cole is the Emeritus Distinguished University Professor of Communication, Psychology and Human Development at the University of California, San Diego. He is the founder and Director Emeritus of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition. His work over the past 50 years has been focused on the social origins of human inequality. He has focused particularly on the inappropriate use of standard psychological research methods as a form of symbolic violence that props up cognitive deficit theories of ethnic, gender and social class differences in academia. He brings to this inquiry an interest in the development of cultural-historical, activity-based approaches inspired by the work of L.S. Vygotsky, A.R. Luria, John Dewey, and a number of Anglo-American cultural anthropologists. He is the author or co-author of several books, including The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking (1971), The Development of Children (1989), Cultural Psychology (1996) and The Fifth Dimension: An Afterschool Program Based on Diversity.

De Smet, Brecht Brecht De Smet is a postdoctoral researcher in the Middle East and North Africa Research Group at Ghent University and a visiting fellow at the Middle East Centre of the London School of Economics.

Brecht has conducted fieldwork research on the relation between political activists and trade unionists in Egypt between 2009 and 2015. His research has combined a Vygotskian comprehension of collective learning processes with a Gramscian understanding of hegemonic politics and the role of intellectuals. Of his numerous publications on the Egyptian revolution and counter-revolution, his books A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt (Brill, 2015) and Gramsci on Tahrir (Pluto Press, 2016) have been cited and discussed the most.

Brecht is currently working on a project about politics in and of the margins in North Africa.

416 CONTRIBUTORS

Engeström, Yrjö Yrjö Engeström is the Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Helsinki and the Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is Director of the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE) in Helsinki, and visiting professor at Rhodes University, South Africa, and University West, Sweden. He applies and develops cultural-historical activity theory and the theory of expansive learning in studies of transformations in education, work and social movements, using the methodology of formative interventions and the Change Laboratory. His recent books include Learning by Expanding (2nd Edition, 2015), Studies in Expansive Learning (2016) and Expertise in Transition (2018), all published by Cambridge University Press.

Hasse, Cathrine Cathrine Hasse is a professor at Aarhus University in the Department of Anthropology at the Department of Education. She heads the research group Future Technologies, Culture and Learning and conducts research into technologies and cultural learning processes. She is the author of the books Posthumanist Learning: What Robots and Cyborgs Teach us About Being Ultra-social (2020) and An Anthropology of Learning: On Nested Frictions in Cultural Ecologies (2015). She is an active participant in the 4S network of science and technology studies, with several workshops on technology, postphenomenology and anthropology.

Levant, Alex Alex Levant is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. He specializes in critical media theory and emerging/future technologies.

His work has appeared in various journals, including Historical

CONTRIBUTORS 417 Materialism, Critique, Stasis and Educational Review. He is co-editor (with Vesa Oittinen) of Dialectics of the Ideal (Brill, 2014).

Mattos, Cristiano Cristiano Mattos is an associate professor at the Institute of Physics at the University of São Paulo and the leader of the Research Group in Science and Complexity Education (ECCo). He received his PhD in Physics from the University of São Paulo. He investigates artificial cognitive systems and works on philosophical and psychological fundamentals of teaching and learning processes, with an emphasis on science education research to establish theoretical-methodological foundations based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory from a Freirean perspective. Through this framework, he has investigated topics related to the teaching and learning processes of scientific and quotidian concepts, models of dialogic interaction, situated cognition, interdisciplinarity and complexity, and has developed practical educational activities using science as an instrument to develop citizenship and democratic education for social and economic equity.

McSweeney, Miriam Miriam McSweeney is a lecturer in the Business School at the Galway Campus of the Atlantic Technological University in Ireland.

She completed a PhD at the then Centre for Socio-Cultural and Activity Theory (CSAT) at the University of Bath, UK. She attended the summer school held at the Centre for Research on Activity and Learning (CRADLE) at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests focus on the social and psychological impacts of learning environments in tertiary education. She has investigated how management might be supported to understand the use of learning technologies by academic staff.

418 CONTRIBUTORS

Murakami, Kyoko Kyoko Murakami is a lecturer in Psychology at the Department of Psychology, the University of Westminster, London and an honorary research fellow at the University of Bath. UK. Previously, she held an associate professorship in Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She received her PhD in Psychology at Loughborough University. Her research topics include social remembering, reconciliation, learning in collaboration, dialogism and ageing. She is an executive committee member of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology and a member of the editorial board of Culture & Psychology. Her previous books include Discursive Psychology of Remembering and Reconciliation (Nova, 2012) and Dialogic Pedagogy (Multilingual Matters, 2016).

Nardi, Bonnie Bonnie Nardi is Professor Emerita in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. She is interested in political economy, planetary limits and how people interact online. She is a senior editor at Mind, Culture, and Activity, the Taylor and Francis journal devoted to cultural-historical activity theory. She co-edits the MIT Press Series Acting with Technology.

Oittinen, Vesa Vesa Oittinen is Professor Emeritus at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published works on the history of philosophy (Spinoza, Hegel, Kant) and edited books on Soviet philosophy, e.g. Dialectics of the Ideal with Alex Levant (Haymarket Books, 2014). The most recent publication is Stalin Era Intellectuals (Routledge, 2022) with Elina Viljanen.

CONTRIBUTORS 419

Rantavuori, Juhana Juhana Rantavuori is a doctoral candidate at the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE) at the University of Helsinki. His dissertation focuses on analyzing expansive learning in education, workplaces and social movements.

He published two articles, ‘Expansive learning in a library: Actions, cycles and deviations from instructional intentions’, co-authored with Yrjö Engeström and Hannele Kerosuo, in Vocations and Learning (2013); and ‘Learning actions, objects and types of interaction: A methodological analysis of expansive learning among pre-service teachers’, co-authored with Yrjö Engeström and Lasse Lipponen, in Frontline Learning Research (2016).

Rodrigues, André Machado André Machado Rodrigues has a PhD in Physics Education from the University of São Paulo and is an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Physics at the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His research focuses on science teacher education and scientific concept formation within the cultural-historical activity theory framework.

Sannino, Annalisa Annalisa Sannino is a professor at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on collective learning and transformative agency for equity and sustainability in educational settings, workplaces and communities. Her work is recognized as a contribution to the field of learning sciences from the perspectives of cultural-historical activity theory, formative interventions and cross-sectoral participatory analyses and design. Her research has been published in edited books by Cambridge University Press (2009 and forthcoming) and Routledge (2013). She is a visiting professor at Monash University in

420 CONTRIBUTORS Melbourne, Australia, at University West, Sweden and at Rhodes University, South Africa.

Stetsenko, Anna Anna Stetsenko is a professor in the Psychology and Urban Education PhD programs and the Chair of Developmental Psychology at the City University of New York (with previous work experience in Russia, Germany and Switzerland). Her research is situated at the intersection of human development, philosophy and education, with particular interest in agency and social transformation. Rooted in Marxism and its extensions in the Vygotsky/CHAT project, her work advances CHAT, illuminating its political edge, while connecting it to a contemporary scholarship of resistance. She has proposed the Transformative Activist Stance—an approach that captures the politically non-neutral nature of knowing-being-doing and of research, including in education, culminating in her proposal for a pedagogy of daring. This is reflected in her recent book The Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky’s Approach to Development and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which critically examines a wide spectrum of approaches to situating and further developing activist agendas of social justice.

Yamazumi, Katsuhiro Katsuhiro Yamazumi, PhD, is a professor of Education at Kansai University, Japan. He is also a program officer of the Research Center for Science Systems, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He served as the Director of the Center for Human Activity Theory (CHAT) at Kansai University. Drawing on the framework of cultural-historical activity theory and its interventionist methodology, he investigates historically new forms of educational activities as collaborative interventions in expanding learning so that learners and practitioners can collectively transform their activities and expand their agency for themselves. His recent book is entitled Activity Theory and Collaborative Intervention in Education:

CONTRIBUTORS 421 Expanding Learning in Japanese Schools and Communities, published

by Routledge in 2021. He received the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) “That’s Interesting!” Award in 2013.

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