Zdravo da Ste Weekend

December 29, 2011

I returned from Serbia a few weeks ago, energized from six very performatory days with friends old and new. Nearly every year since 1997 as winter begins I’ve made the journey to work and play with the extraordinary people of Zdravo da Ste (“Hi Neighbor”). They’re a group of psychologists, educators, social and youth workers who’ve created a Vygotskian-influenced approach to performance and group creativity, and take it into collective centers, schools and cultural institutions in villages, towns and cities across the country. Above all, they are developmentalists. They’ve devised elegantly simple ways to engage children, youth and adults in creating common joint activity—whether that takes a musical, artistic, poetic, dance, performance or conversational form, there is no goal external to the activity. Such a non-instrumental, tool-and-result method is dear to my heart.

So are the hundred or so people of Zdravo da Ste that I have come to know through the common joint activity we create one weekend a year. We have great love for each other as both comrades and family members can—love grown from mutual passion for a better world, fierce commitment to each other, and ever-growing understanding of and respect for each other’s uniqueness born of historical and cultural difference.

This year, we spent the weekend Vrnjacka Banja—a small town in the south known for its healing mineral waters—in workshops creating performances around the topic of identity as an individual and collective process. On Monday, workshop leaders (myself, Lina Kostarova-Unkovska, Paul Murray and Tim Prentki) brought the topic and conversation to Belgrade, as panelists hosted by psychologist Bojana Skorc at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Belgrade.

In 2009 Zdravo da Ste and publisher Dragan Stojkovic of MOSTART released the Serbian edition of Fred Newman’s Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth (translated by Bojana and Zdravo da Ste founder psychologist Vesna Ogjenovic). Social workers, psychologists, youth workers and educators in Serbia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia have a way to be introduced to Newman, social therapeutics, the performatory approach developed and practiced at the Institute, and to Zdravo da Ste’s unique way of generating development.

While in Serbia, I also led two workshops, one in Belgrade and the other in Novi Sad, organized by 2010 graduates of the Institute’s International Class Tamara Borovica, Bojan Drmonjic, Tamara Maksic and Milovan Savic. It was fun and challenging and especially rewarding to spend several hours creating with nearly 60 new performance playmates. I hope to see many of them, along with my old Zdravo da Ste friends, in New York City in October at Performing the World 2012: Can Performance Save the World?

Regarding the topic of identity, I invited those in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Vrnjacka Banja to challenge the hold our societal identities have on us by embracing (or, at a minimum, considering) our historical “identity” as creators and transformers of how things happen to be at any given societal place and time. It’s a common joint activity the world needs very much right now.

Part of a Performance in Nov Sad

New Performers in Belgrade

Please check out the latest issue of the East Side Institute’s newsletter, Reports from the Field, for news on what our friends, colleagues and alumni are up to. You’ll hear from Annalie Pistorius and her new social therapy practice in Pretoria South Africa, the synergy between Elina Lampert-Shepel and Brazilian educators at a Vygotsky research conference, and much more.

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.

In my work as a developmentalist, I am an advocate of, doer of, and studier of play. I grapple with both implementing and understanding what Lev Vygotsky said: “In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself” —and its practical applications and implications for people of all ages.

Having begun a three-session East Side Institute Revolutionary Conversation last night (where we touched on play quite a bit) and preparing today for a keynote address on play, performance and pretense that I’ll give in a few weeks at the Association for Experiential Education international conference, I’ve been playing with play today. Here’s some thoughts to ponder and comment on—and aid me in my thinking/speaking!

Vygotsky tells us that it’s the interplay of imagination—which frees us, and rules—which constrain us, that makes play potentially developmental. The action created in the “imaginative sphere” frees the players from situational constraints and, at the same time, imposes constraints of its own. In this way, “play creates a zone of proximal development of the child… Action in the imaginative sphere, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary intentions, and the formation of real-life plans and volitional motives – all appear in play and make it the highest level of preschool development.”

This freedom from environmental constraints (“reality”) in free play has similarities with theatrical play, or performance, especially the unscripted, improvisational kind. In both free and theatrical play, the players are more directly the producers of their activity, in charge of generating and coordinating the perceptual, cognitive and emotional elements of the play. When I look at children’s free play with this performance lens, I see the value of play in a new light.

For most psychologists and educators the value of play is that it facilitates the learning of social-cultural roles. Through acting out roles (play-acting), children “try out” the roles they will soon take on in “real life.”

I get this, but I think it skips over the paradox of pretend play—when children are pretending, they are least like what they are pretending to be! When they play school they are least like teachers and students because teachers and students in school are not playing at being teachers and students, but rather acting out their societally determined roles. Children playing school, or Mommy and Daddy, or Harry Potter and Dumbledore, are not acting out predetermined roles. They are creating new performances of themselves—at once the playwrights, directors and performers. They are creating culture. This is how I make sense of Vygotsky’s understanding that in play the child acts as though a head taller —that the developmental potential of play is as performed activity and not as behavioral acting. Not only for chidren but for us all.

I share this news with deep sadness.  My dear friend, mentor and colleague Fred Newman passed away a few minutes before July 3 turned to July 4, Independence Day in the USA. Fred was nothing if not fiercely and passionately independent culturally and politically. But not psychologically or socially. He lived his life joyously collectively and helped thousands of others do the same.

Fred had a long and serious illness, but he worked and gave and led and taught until his last days. I and hundreds of others will miss him terribly. His passion and commitment live on in the global community Fred gave his life to building.

Below is Fred’s obituary placed in the New York Times by the All Stars Project , which Fred co-founded with Lenora Fulani. In addition to his work with the All Stars, Fred co-founded the East Side Institute with me as a place to develop and share social therapeutics and postmodern Marxist performance practice/theory and, in turn, be developed by those with whom it is shared, no matter their culture, class or continent. This work, and all that Fred set in motion, continues unabated.

FREDERICK D. NEWMAN

NEWMAN–Frederick Delano. The All Stars Project Board of Directors and staff are deeply saddened by the passing of the All Stars’ extraordinary and much loved co-founder, Fred Newman, Ph.D. He was 76. Dr. Newman was born in the South Bronx, grew up in the shadow of the old Yankee Stadium (becoming a lifelong Yankees fan), and served in the U.S. Army in Korea. Upon his return he completed his undergraduate studies at City College and went on to earn his Ph.D. in analytic philosophy and foundations of mathematics from Stanford University in 1962, where he was mentored by the renowned analytic philosopher Donald Davidson. All who knew him will remember him as a fierce champion for giving the best, most sophisticated, most far- reaching tools of postmodern philosophy to ordinary people. He taught at several colleges and universities in the 1960s before dedicating himself to community organizing and the creation of numerous independent education, health, mental health, cultural and political projects in New York and nationally. Dr. Newman was a practicing therapist for more than 30 years and was the founder of a new humanistic psychology known as Social Therapy. The author of numerous books and articles on postmodern, Vygotskian, and performatory psychology, he and his colleagues worked to develop and popularize their breakthrough discoveries about human development. He co-founded the All Stars Project with Lenora Fulani, Ph.D. in 1981 to bring this new science of development to the lives of inner-city young people. He was the chief designer of the All Stars Project’s performance- based development approach, which has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor, Black and Latino youth across the country and is providing a new theoretical and practical framework for eliminating poverty and underdevelopment. Dr. Newman was artistic director and playwright-in-residence of the All Stars’ Castillo Theatre from 1989 until 2005. Often a lightning rod for controversy, Fred Newman was a relentless champion for a new style of progressivism. He was also a pioneer in the development of independent politics in the United States, starting in the 1970s, and had a major hand in the creation of the Independence Party of New York, playing a key role in the party’s endorsement of Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2001, 2005, and 2009. Despite serious illness, Dr. Newman was unflagging in his work. He will be deeply missed by the Board of Directors, staff, volunteers and countless young people and their families in our poor communities whose lives he and his work have touched. We extend our deepest condolences to Dr. Newman’s life partners Gabrielle L. Kurlander, who so ably serves as the All Stars President and CEO, and Jacqueline S. Salit, and to his children Elizabeth and Donald and granddaughter, Jane. As we mourn the passing of our founder and friend Fred Newman, his legacy of radical humanism, his commitment to community, to development and to creating ensemble performances live on through the work of the All Stars Project.

Published in The New York Times on July 5, 2011

 

 

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.

May 31, 2011

May is one of my favorite months of the year, with light lasting into the evening hours, baby green tree buds turning into adult green leaves, and bursts of color (both flowers and people’s clothing) dotting the city streets. But this year I spent the middle of the month far far away from New York City’s spring awakening. I was in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh conducting workshops on effective education for the 21st century, which introduced university faculty and students to performatory and playful learning and development approaches. And while there was no feel of spring in the very hot and very humid city air, the human awakening to the joy and intimacy of creating together was palpable.

I was invited to Dhaka by Daffodil International University, instigated by Syed Mizanur Rahman (“Raju”), an economist and drama educator who heads up the university’s Career Development Center. As a graduate of the East Side Institute’s International Class and participant in our Performing the World conferences, Raju has embraced performance as how to live one’s life developmentally and, being in a position to breathe life into the rigid and static British-based educational system of his country, he asked to partner with the Institute to help advance his work and socialize performance broadly within the school’s community. I was happy to agree and added my workshop facilitation partner Carrie Lobman, who is the Institute’s director of pedagogy and on the faculty of Rutgers University School of Education, as co-leader of the training week.

All told, Carrie and I worked and played with about 200 students, faculty and administrative personnel in six different workshops. Our broad thematic was that the shift underway from past centuries to the 21^st century is from questions about things (What is “X”?) to questions about process (How does “X” work?). We had prepared an overall plan of discussion topics and improv exercises but needed to hear what the specific issues were that people wanted to work on so we could work off them. Students and faculty alike were unhappy with the formality and rote nature of the learning environment they felt compelled to recreate and said they wanted to change. We worked with each group offering ways they could do so as well as, perhaps more important, ways they could create together outside the formal classrooms (which would, we believed, have a big impact on what happened in the classrooms). Working with the students was pure joy! They threw themselves into doing so many things they never dreamed they could do together. The faculty was a more conflicted grouping. While many willingly went along with our invitations to create and imagine, some could not move beyond “tell us exactly what to do”—rejecting the very stance we were trying to get them to consider giving up, holding on to their own authority as experts and the institutional authority of knowing.

We also met with the high-level dignitaries of the university, had a lovely dinner with the chair of the board of the Daffodil Group (founders of the University), and watched a moving performance by the Daffodil All Stars of a play written by Raju.

Raju and his assistant, Md. Ziaul Haque Sumon (Sumon), were exceptional hosts and great organizers—gracious, relaxed, reassuring and proud of what they’re doing and our relationship. In addition to our work at Daffodil, they took us to Raju’s alma mater, Jahangimagar University, where we were treated to a great performance by the current members of the theatrical group he founded there many years ago; to the new campus site of Daffodil outside of the city, where this August Raju and Sumon will orient the 500 incoming students (performatorily) to university life; to villages and monuments and a heartbreakingly poor section of the city to meet a remarkable woman who cares for children of sex workers.

Back in New York, May’s spring is transitioning to June’s summer and I to the luxuries of American life and to the work at hand. I feel humbled and privileged that this work now includes this new relationship with Daffodil University, dozens of new friends, and the opportunity to contribute in unknowable ways to the development of the people of Bangladesh.