Gordana Jovanovic

The aim of this article is to explore the ways and forms in which history is present, represented and used in Vygotsky’s theorizing. Given the fact that Vygotsky’s theory is usually described as a cultural-historical theory, the issue of history is necessarily implicated in the theory itself. However, there is still a gap between history as implicated in the theory and an explicit theorizing of history – both in Vygotsky’s writings and in Vygotskian scholarship. Therefore it is expected that it would be fruitful to shed light on some possible pathways that can bridge this gap. The prevailing theoretical role of history in Vygotsky’s theory is to serve as a general framework which provides tools for the development of higher psychic functions. Thus, history is recognized as a formative context of psychic life. Further, history appears in Vygotsky’s writings also as a projected better future. All these uses of history presuppose an idea of history as linear progress. But Vygotsky also argues for a stronger epistemological claim – that history is the most powerful explanatory principle. After conceptual and theoretical reflection on history, some limitations of Vygotsky’s historicizing of the history of psychic development will be pointed out and related to general epistemological problems of historicizing. Finally, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, an edifice built up in the 1930s but relying on the rich philosophical and psychological legacy available up to that time, will be positioned against the pluralistic, postmodern and hermeneutic turn in contemporary social and human sciences.

My first aim is to examine place, status, and forms of aesthetics in the context of emerging psychology in the German academic world during the second half of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the sake of historical contextualization, some additional aesthetically relevant views from a broader context of modernity will also be analyzed.My further purpose would be to explore an interpretive hypothesis on whether a different historical relationship between aesthetics and psychology, which means a different role of aesthetics and more importantly different choices than those that have been dominantly made, either originally or in reception of psychological ideas, could have brought about a psychology that would be better able to conceptualize human experience and activity in the existentially relevant human world.In an overview of subjectivist, psychological approaches and objectivist approaches to aesthetics, the forms of encounter between aesthetics and psychology will be examined.Additionally, aesthetics could be used as a strong argument against atomism and in favor of holism and perspectivism in understanding human experience. Another important historical lesson is an insight that subjectivism is compatible with universalism.From a historical reconstruction, I will try to derive some lessons relevant to aesthetics, and more specifically to my interpretive hypothesis that aesthetics could have served as a fruitful source for more encompassing psychological conceptualizations of human experience and activity. This historical lesson could be relevant to further developments in psychology and aesthetics.

The aim of this article is to explore the ways and forms in which history is present, represented and used in Vygotsky’s theorizing. Given the fact that Vygotsky’s theory is usually described as a cultural-historical theory, the issue of history is necessarily implicated in the theory itself. However, there is still a gap between history as implicated in the theory and an explicit theorizing of history – both in Vygotsky’s writings and in Vygotskian scholarship. Therefore it is expected that it would be fruitful to shed light on some possible pathways that can bridge this gap. The prevailing theoretical role of history in Vygotsky’s theory is to serve as a general framework which provides tools for the development of higher psychic functions. Thus, history is recognized as a formative context of psychic life. Further, history appears in Vygotsky’s writings also as a projected better future. All these uses of history presuppose an idea of history as linear progress. But Vygotsky also argues for a stronger epistemological claim – that history is the most powerful explanatory principle. After conceptual and theoretical reflection on history, some limitations of Vygotsky’s historicizing of the history of psychic development will be pointed out and related to general epistemological problems of historicizing. Finally, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, an edifice built up in the 1930s but relying on the rich philosophical and psychological legacy available up to that time, will be positioned against the pluralistic, postmodern and hermeneutic turn in contemporary social and human sciences.

Cultural psychology as a human science / Gordana Jovanovic -- Natureculture in a transformative worldview: moving beyond the "interactionist consensus" / Anna Stetsenko -- Nature unveiling herself before science: the relationship between mind and culture in the perspective of Giambattista Vico / Luca Tateo -- Völkerpsychologie as cultural psychology: the place of culture in Wundt's psychological project / Saulo de Freitas Araujo -- Wilhelm Dilthey's conception of a descriptive and comprehensive psychology / Hans-Ulrich Lessing -- Ernst Cassirer's cultural theory: culture as symbolical practice / Jan Weyand -- Roots and rise of cultural psychology / Lars Allolio-Näcke -- Culture and personality: a once and future research program? / Christian G. Allesch -- Bruner's lectures: cultural psychology in statu nascendi / William R. Woodward -- Ernst E. Boesch and his symbolic action theory / Lars Allolio-Näcke -- The repression of cultural psychology in the history of psychology / Gordana Jovanovic -- Contingent universals as the expression of a culture / Rom Harré and Jean-Pierre Llored -- The place of culture in psychology: a social constructionist standpoint / Kenneth Gergen -- Light through a cultural lens: decolonizing the history of psychology and resilience / Wade E. Pickren -- Narrative psychology as cultural psychology / Csaba Pléh -- Towards cultural psychology: links, challenges and possibilities / Kopano Ratele -- The self in Japanese culture from an embodied perspective / Shogo Tanaka -- The moving body / Elisa Krause-Kjær, Jensine I. Nedergaard, & Jaan Valsiner -- Toward a vygotskian analysis of emotions: theoretical and methodological bases for a critical social psychology / Gisele Toassa -- Aesthetics and cultural psychology / Christian G. Allesch -- Let one person's tears not be infectious: Efik proverbs as emotion regulation exemplars / Vivian Dzokoto, Eyo Mensah, Eunsoo Choi, and Melissa Washington-Nortey -- Cultural-historical hyperobjects / Cathrine Hasse -- The genesis of macro cultural psychology's culture theory from traditional cultural psychology / Carl Ratner -- The genesis of macro cultural psychology's political orientation from other approaches to cultural psychology / Carl Ratner -- Thinking with cultural psychology about the future / Gordana Jovanovic, Luca Tateo, and Csaba Pléh.

I propose to take a more proximate and micro-contextual approach to the history of cultural psychology, by focusing on the 1960s. In this historical snapshot, Jerome Bruner emerges as a consummate experimental scientist, organizer of scientific knowledge, and entrepreneur in education. Looking ahead, his work continued to evolve: from perceptual readiness and values in perception (1950s) to thinking and educational psychology (1960s). Then came developmental psychology and spiral curriculum (1970s), language as social interaction (1980s), the narrative turn to meaning (1990s), and legal psychology (2000s). His scientific biography resembles a prism, refracting myriad persons and cultures in which he moved. Within that context it is possible to trace several pathways to cultural psychology.

Angesichts der konstitutiven Bedeutung der Symbolisierung sowohl für die individuelle Entwicklung des Menschen als auch für die historische Entwicklung der Menschengattung wird die Frage nach den Wandlungen der Symbolisierung in der Postmoderne gestellt. Es wird gezeigt, dass hinter dem postmodernen Karneval der Zeichen und Ekstase der Kommunikation eine tiefgreifende Desymbolisierung sowohl des Subjektiven als auch des Sozialen sich vollzieht. Als Folgen dieser Prozesse werden Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der Reflexion und gesellschaftlicher Kritik abgeschafft. Das animal symbolicum hat sich im Zuge der Postmoderne schrecklicherweise in ein animal desymbolicum verwandelt, das in einer verwüsteten Gesellschaft lebt, das seine lokale Erfahrung nicht transzendieren kann, weil es die Begriffe aufgelöst hat und die symbolische Ordnung in Gefahr gebracht hat und nach allem, was es begangen hat, in eine tiefe historische und soziale Amnesie gefallen ist

There are plausible academic as well as social indicators that qualitative research has become an indispensable part of the methodological repertoire of the social sciences. Relying upon the tenets of the qualitative approach which require a priority of subject matter over method and a necessary socio-historical contextualization, I reconstruct some aspects of a social history that have shaped the quantitative—qualitative dichotomy and the quantitative imperative; these include modern individualism, monological rationality, manufacture operating on the grounds of common human labour, mechanics as the first science, quantification as a technology of distanced objectivity and a search for certainty realized at the expense of qualitative attributes. The so-called renaissance of the qualitative approach starting in 1960s, understood as a kind of a return of repressed qualities, is also socio-culturally contextualized. Both anthropogenetic and sociogenetic reconstructions as well as a microgenetic analysis of the research process demonstrate that choices of subject matter and of methodology are socially and culturally embedded and necessarily linked to broader interests and beliefs