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 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.

Please help me publicize a unique program—The International Class. I began this seven years ago and had no idea how much it would help me and all its participants grow, or how powerful the impact would be on community organizers and talented educators and peformers, or what a continuous activity of generating hope it would be.

“The activity based-theory, the performative approach, and the emphasis in community building are the key elements of a psychology that blurs the distinctions between clinic, politics and the arts.” Murilo Moscheta, psychologist and therapist, Brazil

It’s a Global Learning Community

Since 2004, more than 60 community and university based practitioners from across the US and 16 other countries have enrolled in The International Class of the East Side Institute. Among them are psychologists from India, Brazil and Denmark; applied theatre practitioners from Kenya and Canada; educators, scientists and doctors from Pakistan, Serbia and the United States; community organizers from Uganda and Taiwan; psychotherapists from South Africa and Argentina; and youth workers from Nicaragua and Mexico.

Coming from different places and professions, they share a desire to change the world—and an eagerness to take advantage of the unique opportunity The International Class offers them to create a global support network, to engage the philosophical, political and psychological issues of their practice, and to study and train as developmentalists with the creators of social therapeutic methodology.

It’s a Zone of Development

The International Class is a course of study in postmodern and activity-theoretic approaches to human development and learning. Emphasis is on social therapeutics, a methodology utilized in diverse mental health, educational, youth development and community organizing settings in the US and internationally. A recognized approach within both the postmodern and the cultural-historical activity theory movements in psychology, psychotherapy, education and community and organizational development, social therapeutics is a philosophically informed, practically oriented method in which human beings are related to as creators of their culture and ensemble performers of their lives.

Designed and led by Institute director Lois Holzman, the program provides a unique opportunity for practitioners and scholars from the US and countries around the world to

• study together and learn the Institute’s cutting edge developmental methodology
• work directly with Holzman, social therapy’s creator Fred Newman, leading practitioners Lenora Fulani, Christine LaCerva and Carrie Lobman, and others
• participate in innovative educational, cultural and community-building programs throughout New York City,
• build ties and support for themselves and their communities.

In this creative playground/postmodern academy, participants build a dynamic zone of development in which they can engage the philosophical, political and psychological questions emerging from their practice.

Being part of a group that is intelligent, talented, diverse and committed to making a difference in their own parts of the world has revolutionized my work, my personal growth, and my way of relating with others. Introducing performance to our after school programs with kids, our work with youth groups, and our broader community work has opened new possibilities for the growth of everyone. Miguel Cortez, youth worker and psychotherapist, CASA, Juarez Mexico

The International Class has made me learn to challenge some of my old beliefs and to peel off the rigid self-image that we all try to portray in our life. The cultural and economic differences of all the countries of the student have made us get an even broader viewpoint on all the topics that were discussed. Ishita Sanyal, psychologist, Turning Point, Calcutta India

It’s different from other learning processes and institutions. It is an enjoyable, enthusiastic, academic environment where you may develop your emotions, thinking and speech. It is a zone where you may improve your human skills to help others to perform a better world. Ignacio Dalton, educational researcher, Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires Argentina

For the last eight years, I have studied welfare policy and have been an advocate for more humane services in New York City. I applied to The International Class out of recognition that my understanding of poverty was limited – and in some ways, provincial. My colleagues taught me about anti-poverty programs around the world, which helped to broaden my understanding. As an American and an anti-poverty advocate, this experience has been invaluable. Becca Widom, sociologist and anti-poverty advocate, New York New York

It Has a Flexible Structure and Curriculum

The ten-month program combines residencies in New York City and seminars, supervision and project development sessions conducted online. Students come together to work with Institute faculty and others in a broad development community and advance their programs and research.

Residencies. The International Class meets at the Institute three times during the academic year (in September, February and June) to work together as a group with Institute faculty and associates. Site visits, observations, participant observations and experiential learning activities supplement daily seminar activity.

At Home. In between residencies, students study the social therapeutic method in relation to socio-cultural activity theory, theories of performance, postmodernism, group process and community development. Learning formats include on-line seminars, mentoring, dialogues with guest colleagues of the Institute, supervision and conference calls with faculty and mentors.

The International Class is cross-disciplinary and open to practitioners and scholars with a broad range of educational and life experiences—and a passion for innovation. Applications for the 2011-2012 program will be accepted through May 2011. Tuition is $3400. A limited number of full and partial scholarships covering tuition are available.

For more information, including dates, applications and scholarship forms, contact: Lois Holzman, Director, East Side Institute, email lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org, tel. 212-941-8906, ext. 324. To read more about the program and its graduates, or to download an application, go to http://www.eastsideinstitute.org/IC.html

In the early 1990s I edited a journal, Practice: The Magazine of Psychology and Political Economy (culture, sociology and economics were also covered and many issues included poetry and photos). No computer files exist and so any article has to be scanned if it’s to be available to new audiences. We recently scanned a piece from 1990 entitled, “Lev and let Lev: An interview on the life and works of Lev Vygotsky.” Twenty-one years after it appeared, I found it  pretty interesting. It’s compiled from interviews I conducted with an international group of Vygotskian scholars and practitioners from the fields of education, philosophy, psychology and history: David Bakhurst, Guillermo Blanck, Mariane Hedegaard, David Joravsky, Christine LaCerva, Siebren Miedema, Luis Moll, and James Wertsch. See if you agree.