Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: Toward a Social Psychology from First Principles

In the early part of the 20th century, a form of (social) psychology emerged that is entirely grounded in a dialectical materialist method. The dialectical materialist approach leads to a non-dualist, non-reductionist account of culture, cognition, and consciousness that begins with single-celled organisms and ends up with present-day science. In this paper, I present such an account initiated particularly by A. N. Leont’ev and K. Holzkamp, who constructed a form of psychology that operated with categories consistent with evolution rather than reifications of common sense. The account is based on an approach whereby quantitative changes in the individual organism and the surrounding environment lead to qualitative changes in the evolutionary process, e.g., new dominant structures or functions. In other words, the account is based on a method that explains the emergence of structure (morphogenesis) that ultimately leads through anthropomorphosis and the associated qualitative shift to culture (society) as the carrier of knowledge. I show, drawing on some simple examples, how this verbally articulated transformation of quantitative into qualitative changes is consistent with mathematical models of morphogenesis as these were developed in catastrophe theory (René Thom). The problem of the biological and social is decisive for a scientific psychology. (Leontyev 1981, p. 132) One of the big questions of science as a whole is how life on earth has evolved from being environmentally determined through evolutionary processes to eventually give rise to anthropomorphosis, whereby cultural history and human cognition have come to be the dominant mode of our species to interact with the natural environment. Cultural-historical activity, founded and developed by such psychologists as Lev S. Vygotsky (1896–1934), his student Alexei N. Lenot’ev (1904–1979), and Klaus Holzkamp (1927– 1995)—who implemented the program that the former had begun in the most consequential way— has actively sought answers to these questions. Today cultural-historical activity theory is mostly known in the version created and propagated by Yrjö Engeström (1987), especially as captured in the now emblematic mediational triangle (Figure 1c), which articulates the structures of productive human activity. My representation actually retains four 1 Here, the term “activity” denotes collectively motivated life sustaining (Ger. Tätigkeit, Rus. деятельность [deyatel’nost’]) rather than doing tasks that keep a person busy (Ger. Aktivität, Rus. important concepts grounded in Karl Marx’s thought that motivated the development of the theory (production, consumption, exchange, and distribution). Although these concepts are not used in most research today, they have played an important role in the change over from evolution to culturalhistorical development. Engeström also provided a brief description and associated representations of how the structure of human work-related activity has emerged from the relations that existed among animals and their natural environment (Figure 1a) with the emergence of tool making and tool use, the rudiments of cultural practices (patterned actions as observable among chimpanzees and orangutans), and division of labor (Figure 1b). What Engeström does not provide are the reasons and mechanisms for such a turnover from a system regulated by evolutionary pressures to one that develops because of cultural-historical principles. This version of the theory therefore does not explicate why the human psyche and mind aктивность [aktivnost’]). There are other difficulties with the English translation, for example, when it does not make the distinction between “социально” and “общественно,” which are rendered in the German translation as “sozial” and “gesellschaftlich,” but as “social” in the English translation rather than in terms of the corresponding “social” and “societal.” History and Philosophy of Psychology Bulletin Volume 20, No. 1, 2009 9 fundamentally are collective phenomena—to tweak the title of Vygotsky’s (1978) book, society is in the mind because mind is in society. This version of cultural-historical activity theory also does not articulate and address a major problem that has beleaguered psychology, the separation of thought and affect: “their separation as subjects of study is a major weakness of traditional psychology, since it makes the thought process appear as an autonomous flow of ‘thoughts thinking themselves,’ segregated from the fullness of life, from the personal needs and interests, the inclinations and impulses, of the thinker” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 10). This separation, whereby affect is only a factor external to cognition rather than an internally constitutive one, also leads to the fact that psychology does not have a way of theorizing or studying “the influence of thought on affect and volition” (p. 10). There is a different lineage of work much less known and yet more important for the purposes of this symposium and for the elaboration of a viable theory of mind, consciousness, and affect: Vygotsky– Leont’ev–Holzkamp. In this lineage, theorists were concerned with establishing psychology as an objective, materialist science that is based on first principles rather than using mundane concepts operationalized scientifically. Vygotsky (1986) had noted that language is (a) a generalized reflection of reality, (b) as old as consciousness itself, and (c) a practical consciousness-for-others and consciousnessfor-myself. Language therefore is “a direct expression of the historical nature of human consciousness” (p. 256). Grounding himself in Karl Marx, Vygotsky wrote that scientific concepts are unnecessary if they reflect “mere appearances of objects, as empirical concepts do” (p. 173). In the eyes of critical ethnographers, psychologists, and sociologists, traditional forms of research in their respective domain fall prey precisely to this observation: It would be easy to show that this half-scholarly science borrows its problems, its concepts, and its instruments of knowledge from the social world, and that it often records as a datum, as an empirical given in dependent of the act of knowledge and of the science which performs it, facts, representations or institutions which are the product of a prior stage of science. In short, it records itself without recognizing itself. (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 236, original emphasis) Bourdieu, as Leont’ev (1978) before him and other sociologists of the critical school after him, is especially critical of Western scientism. For Leont’ev it was Vygotsky’s (1986) Thought and Language that had framed the theoretical approach to a truly Marxist psychology, a science that has as its major task to reconstruct those categories that are foundational to creating a non-self-contradicting system explaining the emergence, function and structure of the psychic reflection of reality, which mediates the lives of individuals. The categories to be reconstructed in such a program are concrete activity, human consciousness, and personality. Critiquing traditional psychology for merely reifying mundane, everyday (empirical) concepts, Leont’ev and, following him, Holzkamp (e.g. 1983) and colleagues established a program—Critical Psychology—that realized Vygotsky’s intuition about scientific concepts: they require categorical reconstruction that takes into account how the phenomena they describe could have arisen as part of evolutionary and subsequently cultural-historical processes. This therefore required the same dialectical materialist approach that Marx had chosen for the reconstruction of political economy: beginning with some very basic form—in Capital, this was “value,” which expressed itself as use-value and exchange-value—a system evolves until eventually it gives rise to the human psyche. Thus, “we must create our own Das Kapital” for “Das Kapital must teach us many things—both because a genuine social psychology begins after Das Kapital 1 Not surprisingly, Holzkamp (1983) entitled his book Grundlegung der Psychologie (“Laying the foundations of psychology”). Figure 1. Cultural-historical activity theory as per Yrjö Engeström (1987). a. The animal world. b. Anthropogenesis and the emergence of labor. c. Structure of human activity systems. History and Philosophy of Psychology Bulletin Volume 20, No. 1, 2009 10 and because psychology nowadays is a psychology before Das Kapital” (Vygotsky, 1927/1997, p. 330, 331). Accordingly, “the historical approach to human psychology, a concrete psychological science of consciousness as a higher form of the reflection of reality, and the study of activity and its structure were developed” (Leont’ev, 1978, p. 12). Fundamental for Marx had been the idea that cognition is the product of the development of human activity in and on an objective (societal and material) world. For Vygotsky internalization constitutes internal structure rather than projecting activity onto an already existing structure. In his concrete human psychology, it was life that was the foundation of consciousness rather than meaning and consciousness that constituted the foundations of life: “it is clear why everything that is internal in higher function was necessarily once external: i.e., it was for others what today it is for itself” (Vygotsky, 1989, p. 56) and “the relation between higher psychological functions was at one time a physical relation between people” (p. 56, original emphasis), and “To paraphrase Marx: the psychological nature of man is the totality of social relations shifted to the inner sphere and having become functions of the personality and forms of its structure” (p. 59). For a truly Marxist psychology, it is insufficient to articulate and provide evidence for the societal mediation of mind; a truly scientific psychology has to show how evolution brought forth society, how societal-historical factors become dominant over evolutionary processes, and how the mind became societal.