Question: What’s it like to participate in an academic conference taking place in China and on the topic of contemporary capitalism?

Answer: An academic conference.

Which is to say that you have to do the work to create human connection/conversation outside the rigid conference structure of one person after another lecturing. It’s hard work, especially when you don’t speak the language of 90% of the participants!  But it’s well worth it in the new friends you make and the new learnings you gain.

The conference banner

This past weekend I was one of four non-Chinese guest speakers (the “Western Marxists”) at the Third International Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studies in Hangzhou, China.  The sponsors were the Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory, Department of Philosophy, and School of Marxism at Nanjing University, and the Center for Marxist Studies at Hangzhou University, About 70 people were there in total, “senior” and “junior” scholars, postdocs, and graduate students in philosophy, social theory and Marxist studies. While the presentations were all over the place with regard to topic, the challenge many of the Chinese presentations tried to engage was understanding how China is (and/or should be) facing capitalism: Do Marxian concepts shed some light on this question and, if so, which ones? What role do traditional Chinese values play in China’s growing economy; are they hindering or helpful, both or neither?  Are we witnessing capitalism ‘s (“inevitable”) collapse; if we are, then what’s next?

My presentation, on Fred Newman and the Practice of Method introduced Newman to the Chinese scholars and explicated our development community’s work as the postmodernizing and therapeutization of Marx. The other Westerners—Neil Harding from Wales, David McNally from Toronto and Ian Parker from Britain—introduced new conceptual tools as ways of seeing current class struggle, building socialism and engaging in resistance.

Unfortunately, there was little dialogue that might have led to us creating some new understandings. But informally I had some wonderfully lively and moving conversations with “the younger generation” who were eager to explore what it means to practice method (and not just do theory), to create emotionality, and to build community. Some of these took place at the spectacular West Lake and the park that surrounds it, and at extraordinarily delicious banquet meals.

New Friends Jayson and Lily

From Hangzhou we went to the city of Nanjing, where I led a class for philosophy postdoc students on Marx, Vygotsky, Wittgenstein and Social Therapy. I began with a brief introduction of how I came to Marx, philosophy and therapy as a political organizer (and developmental psychologist). Then I asked them to perform part of the play, “The Myth of Psychology” in which Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are in therapy and talking about Karl Marx. Just as participants in my Thought Leadership of Fred Newman class in NY, those in Nanjing really got into it. They asked how could we speak of fetishization outside of political economy, what Social Therapy looks like, what to do about “objective” unhappiness in the world, and the relationship between changing the world and changing ourselves.

I thank the students for their willingness to create a playful and open learning environment with me and for their great questions. Professor Huaiyu Liu and Dr. Jing Wu  (who translated for me) were fabulous “completers” of my thinking and my English words. All in all, a great time was had by all! I later found out that I had given No. 88 in the Marxist seminar series of the Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory!

Last week in The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman we played with the Newman play in which Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein are in therapy with a social therapist (referred to in my last post). I asked folks to break up into four groups and perform the readings of the play in any way they wanted. I said that plays are meant to be performed and that inviting them to perform it together would, I hoped and expected, create an open and creative environment for ensuing conversation. One group broke themselves up into the three characters and commented that it was lovely to hear and relate to multiple Wittgensteins and Vygotskys and Brauns. Another group played with pitch and loudness, and ended with whispering the lines into each other’s ears. There was no shortage of creativity among the groups!

The conversation we wound up creating meandered (my favorite kind) with, in hindsight, a continued focus on what it means to understand and how we create understanding, both as individuals and as a group. Specifically, we spent time speaking about “will” and “motivation” and the activity of doing the unexpected and its relationship to playing like children (what does it mean that, as one participant said, “Everyone was willing to go into the groups and perform”); about reading/performing when you have no idea what you’re reading (the assumption being this is not a good thing, but we questioned that in light of assumptions about what language is); and about the experience of appreciating what they created.

Tonight is the final week. The reading is an article by Newman and Ken Gergen, expanded from an APA presentation the two of them made in 1995. It’s titled, “Diagnosis: The Human Cost of the Rage to Order.” (It’s a chapter in my edited book, Performing Psychology.) I’m looking forward to helping the class with this challenging and important academic piece that argues for a move away from both pictorial and a pragmatic views of language to one of relational activity—and the democratization of diagnosis. Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are, again, characters. As is social therapy, this time with Newman himself.

I’m currently leading the second phase of my ongoing series, “The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman,” at the East Side Institute. For this coming Monday’s session we’re going to play around with two of Newman’s “Psychology Plays”—written expressly for performance at APA (American Psychological Association) annual conventions during the 1990s. Titled “The Myth of Psychology”, the play consists of two acts, each one a therapy session with Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein and a social therapist.

I love these plays! They are delightfully comic and educative, no matter whether you are familiar with the characters or get the many, many in jokes or not. Of course I’m rereading the text of the play in preparation for my class and thought I’d share a favorite section from Act 2.

Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are now the best of friends and have come to understand each other well except on one issue: they can’t understand how the other is (in Vygotsky’s case) and is not (in Wittgenstein’s case) a revolutionary. We pick up at the point in the session where they ask the therapist Bette what she means by being a revolutionary.

BETTE: To me, being a revolutionary has more to do with how you believe or understand than with what you believe. Now, of course, the two are connected in complex and ever-changing ways. Still, how you connect or relate your subjective life with the world determines what I mean by being a revolutionary.

WITTGENSTEIN: So revolutionary refers then to a way of looking at things?

BETTE: Yes, you might put it that way, Dr. Wittgenstein.

VYGOTSKY: But doesn’t how we look at things depend at least to some extent on how those things are?

BETTE: Yes, Lev. But how those things are also depends on how they are looked at.

WITTGENSTEIN: So you’re saying that things — or whatever — have no objective nature independent of their being related to by conscious beings? Doesn’t that simply raise the old idealistic philosophical saw about whether the tree falls in the forest if no one sees or hears it?

BETTE: Well, Dr. Wittgenstein, I’m not saying that things — or whatever — have no objective nature independent of their being related to by conscious human beings. I’m saying — following your work on these matters — that the language game of objective-subjective can be and often is a no-win game — a metaphysical confusion.

WITTGENSTEIN: Well, tell that to your comrade — and my friend — Vygotsky over here. Because he believes in some Marxian notion of objective historical laws.

VYGOTSKY: I do, Bette. He’s right. I cannot accept that everything is subjective.

BETTE: Nor can I, Lev. Nor can I. But I also cannot accept that everything is objective. Indeed, I can’t even accept that everything is. And no one has made that clearer than Karl Marx and … Lev Vygotsky. Psychology, you insisted — if I understand you correctly — is a cultural understanding of becoming, not a pseudo-scientific understanding of what is.

WITTGENSTEIN: So the puzzle, if you will, has to do with that funny little verb “to be.” “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

BETTE: I think not, Dr. Wittgenstein. That is the problem. Shakespeare’s Hamlet gives us, perhaps, the purest expression of modernist alienation when he says, “To be or not to be.” For if we are, like everything else, becoming, then “to be or not to be” denies what we are by apparently exhausting all the possibilities (being or not being) without realizing that we are both — and neither — namely, we are all forever becoming.

I’m eager to see what I and 30 ordinary people from many different walks of life—all “non-philosophers”—make out of this.

I was delighted to come across this Amazon reader review of my book Vygotsky at Work and Play. The author is David R. Cross, Ph.D.

Thanks, David!

 A Transformative Book Reflecting on a Transformative Life, July 2, 2011

Every now and then you get lucky, and find the book that is just the book you need at that point in your career to take the next step forward. (I used “book” in this opening sentence, but the same could be said for “article” or “presentation,” but here we are concerned with books.) Lois Holzman’s Vygotsky at Work and Play is just that sort of book. Up until reading it, I had been unaware of Lois Holzman’s work, and this book is a great introduction. It is a kind of intellectual autobiography, a conceptual reflection on her several decades of good work. The book is short, well-written, and a great lead-in to the work Holzman has done, mostly in partnership with Fred Newman. Their work is both multifaceted and highly innovative, and it challenges some traditional conceptions about how science is done. Their work is multifaceted because they have made significant contributions to therapy (social therapy), schooling, out-of-school (youth) programs, and the workplace (organizations). The same conceptual principles underly all of this work, which derive mainly from Vygotsky and Wittgenstein. Their work is innovative for a number of reasons, not the least of which is their methodology. Part of their innovation is their (re)conceptualization of Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development,” and another part is their emphasis on performance, both as a product and a process of development in context. This is a book worth reading.

If you have an idea for an article to submit, let me know. I’m on the editorial board….

Call for Papers: Electronic Journal of Communication

Social Construction:

Re-Opening the Conversation, Re-Constituting the Possibilities

Issue Editor:

Mariaelena Bartesaghi

University of South Florida

Over the last five years, members of our field have intensified their discussion of social construction with renewed force and purpose. The 2006 National Communication Summer Institute on Social Construction, the creation of a “Communication as Social Construction” division at NCA, a new handbook, an edited collection, and a chapter in Communication Yearbook are all examples of re-engagement with the ideas of social construction since, almost 20 years ago in their Communication Yearbook contribution, Shotter and Gergen claimed it as the central paradigm for Communication.

The issue invites authors to reflect on and reformulate the options for social construction as a theoretical and practical approach to studying communication that is continuously emergent in relationships, constitutive of social reality, consequential to communicators, experienced through the bodily senses, and afforded by their material circumstances. Authors are encouraged to take stock of our predicted and actual accomplishments, consider the tensions between the promised and actualized changes brought about by social construction work in Communication, and project the impact of social construction on the discipline in the next five to ten years. The focus is not only critical, but reflexive: How do we wish to reconstruct social construction?

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• the anxieties of relativism provoked by notions of the constructed world
• the separation of discourse from materiality and embodiment
• issues with the social construction of race, gender, sexuality and difference
• social construction and the limits of the discursive
• pushing the envelope of social construction
• social construction by any other name in practical or theoretical applications

Papers may take pedagogical, philosophical, theoretical, interpretive, empirical, critical, or cross disciplinary perspectives. Papers should be approximately 7,000 words in length, excluding notes and references, in APA form, and submitted as a MS Word document, WordPerfect (wpd), or Rich Text (rtf) format, with MS Word preferred. Submit as an attachment to mbartesaghi@usf.edu by September 6, 2011. Authors who would like to discuss paper ideas are encouraged to contact the editor.

I had the pleasure of hosting Stephen Cowley, a philosophopically-inclined developmental psychology professor from England, last evening at the East Side Institute. Stephen was in NYC for a conference on “biosemiotics” at Rockefeller University and enthusiastically accepted my offer to visit and have a more informal setting for conversation about his work. I invited a small mixed grouping of colleagues who I thought would be interested in talking about “why languaging makes us special (for each other).”

Stephen is a proponent of the distributed language view and, in fact, started The Distributed Language Group, an international “geographically distributed” association of scholars from diverse fields (some of whom I got to know in 2006 when invited to one of their conferences in Norway). Here is a brief statement from the website on what challenge to psychology distributed language makes:

This distributed view challenges the assumption that language-behaviour depends on a language faculty. In such approaches, the ‘use’ of language is assumed to centre on what an individual or brain allegedly knows. Debate thus pits theories that posit disembodied cognitivism against ones which, rejecting formalism, invoke cognitive embodiment. While one group focus on manipulating and processing forms, the other traces linguistic knowledge to an embodied mind. In both cases a single brain or person is the locus of linguistic control. The distributed language group reject all forms of cognitive centralism.

Last night, Stephen shared some of the roots and features of the distributed language orientation as an alternative to the dominant view that language is a system that human beings put to use. That language is distributed means that it is not in our heads, but rather is in the world—it’s ecological, dialogical and non-local, according to Stephen. Nearly everyone was unfamiliar with Stephen’s biological and systems discourse, and he did a lovely job playing with it and finding ways to make it accessible to everyone, all the while engaging tough questions about modern science, postmodernism, history, culture, activity, Vygotsky and Wittgenstein. I greatly admire his work as good modernist science that supports my postmodern cultural-performatory approach to these issues and aspects of human live-as-lived.

Stephen’s current research centers around health and changing our understanding of it as located in bodies. How bodies work needs to be studied in consort with studying the distributed nature of human interaction and cognition (and language) as part of the process of transforming health care practice.

I’m happy that I’ll be hosting more visiting scholars this summer: Fernanda Liberali, Vygotskian educator from Brazil, and June Boyce-Tillman, composer and music educator from the UK.

At the East Side Institute we’ve conducted online courses for almost ten years now. They’re not conventional, didactic courses but rather exercises in creating conversation and a conversational relationship while simultaneously playing with concepts. Sometimes these courses work beautifully and sometimes they work less well. My colleague Gwen Lowenheim just began a course this week and I think it’s going to be one of those beauties.

Gwen’s five-week course is entitled “Creating the World: How to Foster Creative Community.” An educator, consultant and community organizer, Gwen is hoping to involve participants in building their conversational group and studying the latest discoveries in creativity and play theory. A special feature of the course is that creativity expert Keith Sawyer will be a guest faculty member for a week.

“Creating the World” has 19 people in it from about a dozen countries and several professions. Even before they began to formally introduce themselves or discuss the assigned readings, they’ve started to create together.

Here’s a delightfully relational series of posts that, to me at least, bodes well for the five weeks:

Gwen sends a brief post:

“Hello all, This is a test for our Google group.  You will be receiving your first post shortly.”

A woman from Nigeria responds:

“Great! Waiting!”

Then a man from Bangladesh:

“What is waiting?

Waiting without expecting

Expecting without demanding

Demanding without desiring

Desiring with deserving

I am confused with definition and perception!

But all are knocking me romantically!

So, I can put the simple math:

Waiting = Romance!”

Then the woman in Nigeria again:

“Hi everyone.? Come to think of it, what is the big deal with definition? For instance what is the definition of definition? Does definition really define? Do things matter or have meaning apart from the meaning we make of them? I think the want of definitions inhibit our understanding of phenomena. So why don’t we discard definitions and move on?”

Yes! Just imagine…

Celcilia Magalhães, Lois Holzman, Carrie Lobman, Fernanda Liberali

November 22, 2010

With friend and colleague Carrie Lobman, I just returned from a ten-day trip to Brazil as the guests of two wonderfully talented educator/researchers—Fernanda Liberali and Maria Cecilia Magalhães from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Carrie and I were guest presenters at two events they organized, a symposium in Fortaleza and a course at their university in São Paulo.

For about a decade, Fernanda and Cecilia have been developing a Vygotskian, socio-cultural pedagogy and a creative community of researcher-educator-activists who advance, expand and inform the pedagogical approach. They do this through several programs and groups with names that include the words citizen, collaboration, creativity, social activity, and performance.  We became friends and began to collaborate in 2006, with one prior trip I made to Brazil and three they made to NYC (presenting at Performing the World conferences and visiting the East Side Institute, the All Stars Project and NYC schools).

First stop was the northeast city of Fortaleza for the 4^th annual Symposium on Acting as Citizens (Simpósio Ação Cidadã), held at the 7th of September University. It was a great conference experience—about 500 Brazilian professors, teacher educators, and university, high school and primary school students presented their work on developing social activities and performances in schools across the country. Carrie and I led off the first day sharing our play and performance approach to learning and development and its practice in the US and internationally. The first day ended with Multiple Worlds-All Stars, a three hour talent show featuring dance, song and skits performed by children and adults. It was wonderful! Some highlights were dancers from from public and private schools, and a charming performance of a scene between Piaget and Vygotsky from Fred Newman’s play, “Life Upon the Wicked Stage.”

Fabio, us and some of the production crew of SIAC

On our third day we played outdoors! With Cecília we drove to three gorgeous beaches, took a roller coaster dune buggy ride, and had a great lunch on the beach. Before we left Fortaleza, we visited the 7th of September School with our host Fábio Delano Vidal Carneiro, who supervises the educational development at the school and teaches at the university, and the impressive youth dance school, Edisca.

Poster of educational influences at entrance to 7th of September School

In São Paulo, Carrie and I visited a public preschool and a private pre-through-middle school, both innovatively performatory. We led a two-day course, Performance: Creativity and Collaboration, for about 40 faculty, graduate students and teachers (many of them teachers of English). Among the hot topics were different views of “mediation,” instrumentalism and tool-and-result methodology, and performing and acting. In light of our particular understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the Brazilian people right now, Carrie and I—as postmodern Marxist internationalists from the US—presented who we are and the kinds of activities we have found effective in building community and creating developmental opportunities, both inside and outside of schools.

Classroom in a public preschool

The large grouping in Fortaleza and the smaller one in São Paulo are very special, comprised of lovely, talented, creative people, who are building something unique that, I think, hás the potential to influence the direction of Brazilian education and youth development. It is a privilege to know them and to participate in their ongoing “search for method.”

Some of the São Paulo Group

I recently finished a revision of a chapter on social therapy, by Fred Newman and me, for a book being put together by Tom Strong (University of Calgary) and Andy Lock (Massey University), two long-time postmodern colleagues of ours. The book, Discursvie Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice, is scheduled for publication sometime in 2011 by  Oxford University Press. Here’s a little taste…

Social therapy is the social-cultural-historical activity of groupings of people collectively creating environments in which they can and do perform therapy. They create both the environment and the performance simultaneously. Therapeutic talk, in social therapy as in all discursive therapies, begins as individuals telling their stories. The work of social therapy is to transform the culturally and institutionally overdetermined psychological and truth-referential environment-and-talk into a “theatre without a stage” upon which the therapy group, qua group, creates a play (in this case, their therapy play).

Why? Because we are interested in human development and engage in activities that we believe help people to grow and transform qualitatively. Theatre and therapy can be developmental/transformative because both are opportunities for people to experience life in new ways, in ways other than those we have been socialized to—i.e., without a problem-solution or conflict resolution paradigm, but rather seeing life’s uncertainty and unknowability.

To read Activity and Performance…

One evening last month I had a terrific time creating conversation on language, speaking and thinking with five young performers—members of an all-youth cast that recently performed Macbeth on one of the stages at the All Stars Project in NYC. I was blown away by the show. It was unlike what I envision as the typical wooden and stilted high school production, and equally unlike the youth versions of Shakespeare that make his plays contemporary and “relevant” (of which a very successful example is the American film Hamlet 2000 with Ethan Hawke). The young people I saw made the play—especially and importantly, the language—their own. They didn’t seem to be speaking memorized lines, but rather to be saying things they actually wanted to say. They talked the talk.

Since I’m fascinated by language and language-learning and have spent much of my adult life studying them, I wanted to talk with the young people about their experience learning this new language and performance of speaking. I came in with a few ideas but no expectations about where we might take the conversation. Here’s some highlights that I’m still pondering.

I began by sharing with them pretty much what I just wrote above. I asked if any of them remembered learning to speak when they were babies. No one did (me either), although they had family stories of their “first word.” We all thought it was interesting that none of us remembered…

I asked them what it was like to learn this new language (Shakespeare’s) and how they did it.

“I looked at first, how do I say this, then what it means, then different performances of it.”

“You have to get the language in your mouth. We didn’t get bogged down in meaning.”

“We drilled section by section. It was athletic.”

“It was easier for me to memorize than contemporary work. Maybe the rhythm…”

“The language sounds so nice but some of it is saying some really mean stuff.”

Fascinating! So much like our earliest language activities as babies—sounds, repetition, rhythm, and meaning comes later…speaking without knowing how to speak! Perform as a Shakespearian speaker and you become one! How Vygotskian!

They spoke about how language opportunities were very different at school and at the youth theatre. Most of them said there wasn’t much opportunity for them to speak in school, and when they did it was just rote, that in class you can’t put yourself in what you say.  And for some, “If I say it out loud, I get it” but it’s a rare class where that happens. They went on to share stories of different classes and teachers and which ones they learned from. One of them said that teachers in teachers colleges should all have to study acting and improvisation. They all agreed.

I’ve had the fantasy off and on for years that teacher training should be done by the young people teachers are supposed to teach. My lovely conversation with these teen actors fueled my fantasy.