Paula Towsey was one of us. In fact, she was one of a very few of us who have not just read Vygotsky’s Thinking and Speech, but tried to get inside it, to bring it back to life and remake it with living and breathing, thinking, and speaking children. Like most of us, I know very little about her life before this; I know she was a teacher, that she rejected teaching under apartheid and spent at least part of her career in exile in Botswana, and that somewhere along the way she must have learned lots about music and South African wine and Milan Kundera and wildlife. But mostly I know that she knew a lot—an awful lot, if I can use the 18th-century “awesome” sense of the word—about Chapter Five in Vygotsky’s Thinking and Speech.
We never met face to face, and I don’t even remember who contacted whom first. I suppose it was me; I was trying to do the same kind of thing with Chapter Six that she had done with Chapter Five, with rather more limited success (Vygotsky never really did the research that would have allowed him to finish the “parallelogrammes of development” that are indicated by dotted lines in Chapter Six). We soon referred to each other as “Chapter Fiver” and “Chapter Sixer.” But if I thought that this meant I could criticize her the way that Chapter Six criticized Chapter Five and that she could not talk back—well, I was wrong. Paula was a living, fire-breathing Chapter Fiver; as far as she was concerned, Vygotsky knew exactly what he was doing when he put Chapter Five first.
Paula thought that Chapter Five was an integral part of Thinking and Speech. In the symposium that she organized in which Mike and I took part, she points out that Chapter Five is referred to the Kozulin’s Introduction to Thinking and Speech more than any other chapter and that “none of it is flattering.” She might have said the same thing about Vygotsky’s text as a whole. Van der Veer and Yasnitsky have shown that the book was half written on Vygotsky’s deathbed (Chapters Six, Seven, and One) and half thrown together from work that dates from the midpoint in Vygotsky’s career (Chapters Two, Three, Four, and Paula’s beloved Chapter Five). There are, of course, no references to the later chapters in the earlier ones, and also very few references to the earlier chapters in the later ones. But Vygotsky does refer back to Chapter Five in Chapter Six—in a highly critical and disparaging way.
In the “Symposium on Vygotsky’s Concepts Part One,” which Paula not only initiated, but largely curated, Paula talks about how these criticisms surprised and puzzled her. She then describes her dismay at discovering that Vygotsky’s letters seem to be even more critical: At one point, Vygotsky seems to refer to Sakharov’s work, that is, the blocks test on which Chapter Five, as a dead end: “We cannot go on this way.” But Paula was prepared to defend Chapter Five against Vygotsky himself. With the help of her Ph.D. supervisor, René van der Veer, Paula succeeded in demonstrating that Vygotsky’s letter actually suggests that Chapter Five is what Paula demonstrated it was, and what Vygotsky introduced it as: an unconscious and spontaneous, empirical demonstration of the intrinsic need for a system when children struggle against the limits of what Paula always referred to as “complexitive” thinking (this word is not in any dictionary, and I am pretty sure that she made it up).
Later, I realized that Paula had probably had Vygotsky lined up on her side all the long. The criticisms of Chapter Five that are made in Chapter Six are actually criticisms of “pedology,” which had been condemned and banned by the Soviet Government. But we know that Vygotsky never repudiated pedology while he was alive: the very last lectures he delivered to students, which we are now working on translating into Korean, were a course called “Foundations of Pedology.” So we have good reason to be suspicious of these criticisms, and there is even some doubt as to whether Vygotsky himself wrote them. After all, we know that the Soviet editors of the book had no compunction whatsoever about making changes to Vygotsky’s text, even in the first edition.
Next, Paula set out to show how the “system” that children are seeking for in their struggle against the limitations of complexitive thinking is there not only in the social science instruction of Chapter Six or the algebra curriculum, but also in children’s games. She wanted to gather a huge amount of data on the Internet using an online version of the Sakharov block test. Instead of blocks that varied in height in diameter, she used animals, which brought the work very close to the acquisition of real academic concepts. More playfully, she used a set of trolls, which varied in hairiness and whether they were right handed or left handed.
She called me up and shared this work, and I wondered aloud whether hairiness and right-or-left handedness was really comparable to the height and diameter. It seemed to me that the former are somehow inherently graphic-visual and perceptual, whereas the latter have not only a graphic-visual character, but also a much more abstract dimensionality, which allows them to be reduced, through measurement, to a number. Let me share part of her response with you:
An important word before closing is the issue of the elephant in the room, the looming issue in the form of the Vygotskian modes of reasoning that give rise to this discussion of the nuts and bolts of methodology. Whether employed at various ages as one grows into adulthood or whether employed when one is learning something utterly new or solving a problem, these modes of reasoning involve the increasing ability to abstract the essential characteristics in addition to holding them in one’s mind’s eye, to keeping them firmly in mind, to assigning them a hierarchical position above the other characteristics or elements under consideration. It is the ability to take what one has abstracted, to hold onto it consistently, and then to generalise it across to other items within the system. In the ability of learning how, and what, to abstract and to generalise, the products of generalisation and abstraction come together in the potential concept that is soon, with consistent, hierarchical ordering, to become the concept proper.
In conclusion, it could be said that any of the characteristics of the items of the blocks’ and trolls’ activities could be swapped around and only allowable characteristics could then emerge in items which would then carry the meaning of, for example, ‘colour and height’ or ‘smiley and righthanded’. All this being said, however, it is obvious that the beauty and delicate precision of the blocks of Sakharov are, to put it plainly, a hard act to follow.
Actually, Paula herself is a hard act to follow. But she was one of us. Of course, that means that without her we are all one fewer: our work is going to necessarily be poorer for her passing, at least until some other Paula steps up to try to take her place, to finish her work on Chapter Five, and maybe even Chapter Six. But it also means that we have a chance to try to do for her what she was trying to do for Vygotsky.
David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies