Journal
of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 50, no. 1, January–February 2012,
pp. 50–64.
Interview with
Laszlo Garai
on the Activity Theory of Alexis
Leontiev and his own
Theory of Social Identity as referred to the meta-theory of Lev Vygotsky
Academician V. Lektorsky, who has been the
editor-in-chief of Voprosy filosofii,
a journal
of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, since 1987, and the new
editor-in-chief who is replacing him just at this time, V. Pruzhinin,
conducted a joint interview with the Hungarian scientist László
Garai, a theoretical psychologist and researcher in
problems of social and economic psychology.
Academician Lektorsky: Professor Garai, Your psychological research has always had a clearly
expressed philosophical meaning. It is no accident that we have published your
writings in our journal.1 Allow us to ask you a few
questions, the answers to which may be of interest to readers of Voprosy filosofii.
You were influenced by the
cultural-historical theory of L.S. Vygotsky and the
psychological theory of activity of A.N. Leontiev.
Today interest in the activity approach has been revived among both our
psychologists and philosophers. Some link the activity approach to philosophical
constructivism. What do you think about the prospects for the
cultural-historical theory and the theory of activity in psychology and, more
broadly, in the human sciences?
Professor Garai: These prospects stem from
the fact that psychology, ever since it split off from philosophy in the
nineteenth century, has investigated problems that are multiaspected.
Rubinstein, for example, based on Marxism before it got
violated, cited the aspect of activity, the aspect of objectness, the aspect of community, and the aspect of historicity. Psychology itself,
however, was only interested in one of these aspects at a time. At first it was
the object: how we sense it, how our memory imprints and retains it, etc. Then
came new times, and behaviorism, with its exclusive interest in activity, became the mainstream
of psychology. Behavior, after all, is activity; except it is a kind such that,
in order to study it, the object does not exist. The object has been reduced to
a single point, which is occupied by a stimulus rather than an object. And
incidentally, when behaviorism found itself removed
from its mainstream status, to which cognitivism had been assigned, the
exclusive focus was again on the object, which was ostensibly reflected by the
consciousness without the participation of any activity. So the theory of
activity of Leontiev, Galperin,
and Luria actually discovered for our science not activity as such, but activity mediated by an
object, and,
in turn, activity
that mediates an object. Thus, instead of single-aspect psychologies, a psychology was
invented that organically synthesizes two of the four Rubinstein aspects.
Of course, one might think
that two instead of four is a step back. But the point is that Rubinstein
derived from Marx’s writings not merely a methodology for an integrated
psychology (“merely”—yet after all, he accomplished a great feat in doing
this), and Leontiev and his associates worked out
specific procedures for experiments that applied the theory of activity to
various fields. Single-aspect psychologies had very narrow capabilities: within
these frameworks it was not possible to explain even such phenomena as
attention or memory, although attention and memory had been the oldest topics
of the new science as it emerged in the 1860s. The psychologists of those years
(and some to this day) applied the principle of reflection to both topics.
According to this, if a contemplated object whose properties are reflected
through sensation or perception is distinguished somehow from its space-time
surroundings, this distinct image is reflected in attention. Memory, meanwhile,
ostensibly reflects the association of objects with one another in space-time.
So we psychologists began to truly understand attention when its single-aspect
interpretation was replaced by the concept of the theory of activity on the orientational basis of activity.
The fate of the psychology
of memory developed in a more unfortunate way, since the theory of activity was
only able to rescue it to a lesser degree. For the simple reason that memory is
unquestionably associated with the aspect of historicity, and today we already
know that it is also intimately associated with the aspect of community, the
theory of activity regarding this pair of aspects is not doing anything like
the research that has been done regarding the first pair…
Pruzhinin: May I interrupt you? I
would like you to focus on your original theory of identity. How does it tie in
with this tradition?
Professor Garai: When I became acquainted with Leontiev’s
theory of activity, I discovered a curious contradiction. Both community and
historicity were predefined for the theory as a self-evident definition of
everything that was investigated, but they themselves were never investigated
as problems. The experiments of thee theory of activity always focus on the
fact that a specific individual confronts a specific object. Needless to say,
the latter has a background, and this cultural background, at least as long as
the focus is on an individual child, is mediated for him by the company of
another individual. But is that all there is to the aspect of historicity and
the aspect of community? And even if it is, how are they related to each other?
In the late 1960s (when I
was interning in Leontiev’s department, and immediately
afterward was invited under a Keldysh grant to the
Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology of the USSR Academy
of Sciences, where I did research in the Scientific Discoveries Sector) I began
to deal with these issues. Under Leontiev I did an
experiment (the first social-psychological one in the history of the Psychology
Division)
By that time Henri Tajfel had already issued his appeal “for a more social
socialGL1 psychology.” He pointed
out to us that our test subject did not come to our laboratory out of a vacuum
but as a representative of the place that he actually occupied in an actual
social structure, and that society had been predefined for him, accordingly,
not in the form of another isolated individual but in the structure off their
relationship. There is likewise more to historicity than to the history of the
objectification of production and the passive presence of that history in
de-objectifying activity. Freud allowed us to understand that in the course of
a biographical history there is often a reversion not only to stages of that
individual history that were already traversed but
also to archaic points in the generic history of humankind (see, e.g., the
Oedipus complex). At the same time, Tajfel’s social
psychology and Freud’s anthropological psychology, as I ventured to point out
earlier, are mutually exclusive, just like behaviorism and cognitivism.
So I set myself the goal
of copying the methodological feat of the creators of the synthesis that
emerged from the theory of object-based activity, and in this manner to create
a methodology on a parallel track for the synthesis of this other pair of
psychologies. And then, out of this synthetic methodology, to work out
procedures for research efforts and for applied psychological research, as Leontiev, Gal’perin, Luria, Davydov, and hence their coworkers, did in their time and
for their scientific purposes.
Social
identity for us is different from how it is generally represented by the
scientific and laymen’s idea regarding it. For these ideas, social identity is
an internal cultural-biological certainty: whether I am a Hungarian or a
Russian, Eastern Orthodox or Muslim, a man or a woman, a black person or a
white one. Here social identity is depicted perhaps even as a cultural
definition, but in any case as the same kind of definition as it is in nature
to be a dog or a turtle, to be carbon or ammonium hydroxide: in any of these
instances an internal property of the individual units will determine how each
of them will react to random events in the environment. Nothing like this is
found in our theory, for which social identity is determined not by people’s property but by relationships.
Relationships like
similarity and difference. I will show in a brief example what I mean:
Let us assume that we are
living in Germany in the early 1930s; I am a German proletarian, so I am, without
question, a carrier of the sociological property or
definition of a German, and equally so the
property of a proletarian. Can the social identity of a German or a
proletarian be ascribed to me? This will depend on how my relationships with
others evolve and how all of us interpret these relationships. Assume that
Peter is also a German, but a bourgeois, and Paul is also a proletarian, but a
Jew. Here we have shadings and similarities and differences both with Peter and
with Paul. So then social categorization transforms these
contradictory shadings into categorical unambiguousness. I categorically
exaggerate my similarity to either Peter or Paul and, accordingly, my
difference from the other, and what draws me together with the latter and would
separate me from the former is simultaneously understated. So this
categorization results in the identity of “workers of all countries,” or, in
terms of our example, the identity of Germans who represent and, accordingly,
represent to themselves “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (a single people, a single
empire, a single leader). From what is predetermined sociologically, the
categorization produces social identity, and social categorization holds sway
in the background of history, in this case in the background of the Führer’s accession with a Nazi dictatorship.
Pruzhinin:
May I interrupt you with a question? This is what I’d like to ask you: you
have written about the crisis in psychology in regard to its split into
research, how should I put it, of a natural-scientific
perhaps, and hermeneutic nature. Can we assume that this split is been overcome
today? This is why I am asking: this question takes us back to Vygotsky. He has a work about the crisis in psychology, but
his followers, as they evolved during the Soviet period, focused on activity,
which they understood more as a material, labor-related kind. Does this provide
a way out of the crisis? Did this emphasis precisely on the material,
labor-related aspect of activity not lead to an even more vigorous
confrontation between physiological psychology and, so to speak, hermeneutic
psychology, which, incidentally, we have today. Tell us, how do you see it?
Professor Garai: Unfortunately, I can only agree with what was
already implied in your question as an answer to it. This is indeed the case.
The point is that, as a
faithful heir of enlightenment, I thought: if psychology is suffering from
something, in this case from the fact that it is split into a natural hemi-science and a historical hemi-science,
then as soon as a remedy for this illness is offered, the patient will grab at
it with both hands. But I did not take into account that the psychologist is
not predefined as an abstract being. He received a behaviorist education at a
university, and his confrere was molded at another university as a cognitivist.
They have lived half of their professional lives, and they did not wish to know
about each other. It turns out that I was wrong to expect them to be happy at
the news I am giving them that there is a possibility of becoming reunited
under the umbrella of Vygotsky’s theory . . . Which
to them means starting everything from scratch.
During the 1970s I
revisited the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in
I am
exaggerating very little here.4 And
at the same time I am not being ironic in the least when I say that while I was
among these Parisian psychologists I got to know colleagues who were
brilliantly gifted. They had simply reached the limit of the framework in which
a psychologist cultivating his plot of partitioned psychology can think.
Regarding the future of our science I am still optimistic, not because a third
of a century has passed since the above-mentioned incident. Time may not change
anything. The same goes for space. Thirty years after that
If I am still optimistic
about the future of our science, it is because psychology has been given not only
an opportunity
to get
rid of its partitions. It has also been assigned the necessity of carrying out this
historical scientific procedure.
The point is
that if, just as for Hamlet, “The time
is out of joint” for us as well, then I should note that in this case it is not
the Danish prince who is confronted by “cursed spite,” and “to set it right”
psychology must act. Just take the example of international conflicts. They
have traditionally been handled by states, and in order to cope with this task,
while they have resorted from time to time to psychology, they did not need it:
they maintained an army without it, they manifested their
intelligence-gathering interest in the army of a potential or actual adversary
without it, and they knew, basically, how to identify each soldier in terms of
whether they belonged to our or to the enemy’s army. But how does one manage
without psychology where potential wars, or wars that suddenly break out, are
waged by suicide terrorists? By people who do not wear their fascist or
American, Polish, Swedish or Tatar-Mongol uniforms, but dress like us, eat like
us, live in the same cities as us, are students at the same universities, are
viewers of the same television programs, travel in the same subways and the
same planes as us—but for another purpose. How do we figure out that purpose,
how do we foresee its implementation, how do we ensure the survival of our
society without the assistance of psychology? But how can our science begin to
solve this problem without being born? Without being born as a science. A synthetic science that is synthesized from its components.
Pruzhinin: Professor Garai, in connection with the question about the prospects
for psychology another that is very relevant today comes up: about the status
of applied psychological research. You are the founder of economic psychology
in
Professor Garai: You are putting a
very important question. As in the past,5 to this day I have no doubt that it is
cultural-historical psychology that put forth a needed integrative idea when it
made a case in favor of equivalence, or at least mutual causality,
between tool and symbol. Tools are undoubtedly associated with man’s object-based
activity. Symbols, meanwhile (if we advance along the path with Vygotsky from the famous knot in the handkerchief to
language and speech), become historically embedded in structures, the paradigm
of which is the structure of language; which in every act of communication
reproduces this history. Aleksei Alekseevich
Leontiev declared that such an act of communication
is nothing other than a variation of acts of activity. Frankly, his views on
this point were shared by nearly all the adherents of activity theory.
To a certain
degree one can understand this approach. After all, what makes an utterance
within communication similar to objectifying activity is the fact that the
object-product also retains its activity history. But only in
a condensed form. Subsequent activity initiated by a tool does not
reproduce the activity’s prehistory that engendered this tool: a Paganini does
not act at all like a Stradivarius. When we apply language in our speech, we
behave, on the contrary, precisely this way: we imitate our ancestors who
created the language with their verbal practice. True, while Paganini does not
replicate Stradivari’s activity, later Stradivaris
specifically emulated their brilliant predecessor. In doing so, however, they
compressed the emulated activity as much as possible. Previous searches and
delusions are not replicated. We exercise in various acts of activity and cram
information about an object, but when we have already assimilated what we
needed, we no longer insist on the prehistory of this knowledge. For rational
reasons we condense it.
But when the issue
concerns acts of activity or an exchange of symbols of various kinds of
cultural structures, then, conversely, we actively resist condensing, which is
so reasonable in object-based activity. When we interact in the field of
cultural history, we reproduce with nearly eidetic precision all of history, we
ritually replicate it, we play out the Passions of
Christ with his crucifixion, death and the subsequent mourning and burial of Jesus’s body…
The
treatment of ritual is the highest personification of man’s historicity. I will
stipulate right off that we assign this importance not to reproduction of the
ritual but to the treatment of this cultural legacy, which in addition to
playing out the rituals includes their, so to speak,
establishment, as well as, if that is the outcome, their rejection. This
stipulation makes it possible to identify a highly important relationship: the
treatment of ritual makes manageable the contacts that unite certain
individuals into small or large groups, with certain groups demarcated from
others. It is enough to realize that one variety of the treatment of ritual is
the given of cultural history in which we see the most powerful means precisely
of such social functioning, regarding which L. Wittgenstein, with good reason,
came up with the term “language game.” In this connection it is interesting to
cite a find by Margit Köcski, who has been my
coauthor more than once. She was studying the social-psychological development
of children’s speech, and while observing the development of the children we
have in common she discovered that from the earliest age the children took a
liking to language rituals: if, purely by a chance, a brief dialogue occurred
between a child and some family member, the child insisted endlessly on playing
out a repetition of the model.
So I cannot
agree with those who maintain that communication is nothing more than a variant
of activity.
On the contrary, if we
assume methodologically that there is mutual causality between tool and symbol,
then psychology can look for Vygotsky’s
dyad in every phenomenon, without exception, of the world under its purview.
Here is an example of what
I mean. This example is not my find but comes from the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Somewhere he writes about ancient agriculture, the
nature of which necessitated that the father cooperate with the son, but, he
notes, it was not the nature of agriculture that necessitated that precisely
the father
and son cooperate
rather than the mother’s brother and the sister’s son or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. So (and this is no
longer Sahlins’s conclusion but mine) in the first
necessity the tool aspect is manifested, while in the second necessity it is
the aspect of the symbol. And these two aspects are predefined each time in
their mutual causality in Vygotsky’s dyad.
And thus we
have arrived at the other half of your multipart question: you asked me about
the specific nature of the theory in economic psychology that I developed.
Well, this theory was constructed entirely on Vygotsky’s
dyad. The mainstream of economic psychology is interested exclusively, so to
speak, in Sahlins’s first necessity: How do they
cooperate there? No matter who cooperated with whom. To be fair, I must state
right off that in the context of this necessity the mainstream is interested
not only (and even not so much) in the technological aspect of the matter but
in the financial aspect as well. During the 1990s a Nobel Prize was twice
awarded to scientists who, it is true, were not developing economic psychology
but economics, for the fact that they discovered the world of transaction costs. These are the costs by
which I ensure that a potential collaborator, no matter who, cooperates not
with just anybody, but specifically with me. In the world of transaction costs,
money is the mediating factor, as it is in the market itself. So then, my
theory in economic psychology asserts that, in addition to money, social
identity can also be such a mediating factor. While money
ensures that the cooperation is not just with anyone but with me, social
identity ensures that the collaborator will turn out to be not just anyone but
precisely potential collaborators of my choosing. Figuratively speaking,
I’ll put it in terms of the earlier, highly simplified example: I am counting
on cooperating with Peter, since he is also a “German,” or, accordingly, with
Paul, because he is also a “proletarian.” Here social identity acts like a twin
to money. In the matter of mediating cooperation social identity and,
accordingly, money can mutually buy out each other: our brother the
“German”/“proletarian” may agree more eagerly to cooperate with me, and this
way I can save a portion of the transaction costs—conversely, in order to
circumvent the embargo imposed on cooperation with me, it may cost me quite a
lot of extra money.”6
Lektorsky:
You apply your original psychological theory of identity to many different
worlds as an explanatory theory. Today a number of researchers, both
internationally and in our country, maintain that the problem of identity, as
it was understood in the past, has lost meaning, because modern man’s identity
is being eroded. Some speak of multiple identities, while others even say that
identity is disappearing altogether. What do you think in this regard?
Professor Garai: I do not believe the declarations that the concept
of identity per se is obsolete, and here is why. The first Nobel Prize in
economics in our new century was awarded a scientific discovery according to
which the market functions properly (i.e. by selecting the most profitable of
all possible options) only to the extent that the social identity of the
persons operating in the market is clearly designated for one another. Absent
this condition, that is, if the market bears in mind only monetary
relationships (at one pole, a commodity belonging to no matter whom; at the other, money belonging to no
matter whom),
such a market makes, contrary to expectation, a counterselection:
it provides for the sale only of the lowest grade of commodity, while the
highest grade of commodity drops out of the market.7
The problem is not that
the concept of identity per se is obsolete but that its interpretation as a property, and as one that is predefined, is out of date. Earlier we
already discussed what factors prompted me to orient myself more in the
direction of relationships rather than property. These factors were mostly psychological. Now we can also
take into account (I would even say: we cannot avoid taking into account) the testimony of
economic scholars as well: the trio awarded the Nobel Prize, of a liberal persuasion,
note with satisfaction that the functioning of the labor market depends
relatively little on whether it is a black or a white person who is offering his
services; on the contrary, they are disconcerted by their own observation that
the functioning of the market depends heavily on whether it is a black person or
someone indeterminate who is applying (e.g. on the phone) for a job. Here is the difference: whether I
am specifically a black or a white person is a matter of identity as property; on the other hand, whether I
am a black person or someone indeterminate, here the question concerns identity
as relationship. In point of fact, what is
disappearing outright is not identity per se but ready-made, mass-produced
identity as property. And at that, eroding
identity (or multi-identity) is a starting point for the creative molding of
identity as relationship. The less defined a predetermined identity is, the
more it calls for categorization.
In 2003 I published the
book Identity
Economics,8 which examines how the macroworld
of mass reproduction handles social categorization for social identity. Two
years later I published another book, The Multiple Identities of József Attila9: A Study in the Psychology of Creativity,
which
examined the same thing in the microworld of
creativity.
The macroworld
of mass reproduction and the microworld of creativity
are two worlds that are absolutely opposite to each other. To deal with both,
and within a period of two years to boot, is probably a matter of either
brilliance or cheating. I myself am convinced, without false modesty or
justifying myself, that for such an accomplishment there is no need either to
be a genius or to expose oneself as a cheater. Back in 1931 Kurt Lewin formulated his appeal to psychology to emulate
physics, which had replaced its Aristotelian way of thinking, applying one
theory to celestial bodies and another to earthly ones, a third to falling
bodies, and a fourth to airborne ones, with the Galilean method, which brings
its worlds to a common denominator of interpretation.
For a very long time
psychology not only did not find but did not even look for this common
denominator, it rather tended to push Lewin’s comment
out of its scientific consciousness. That is why it came to a dead end
(sometime between its 1966 Congress in
So Vygotsky’s
dyad is clear.11 Embodying the entire legacy of
Rubinstein’s tetrad: both the object with activity and the aspect of history
with the aspect of society.
Notes
1. “Istoricheskii
materialism i problema lichnosti,” Voprosy filosofii,
1968, No.
9, pp. 19-30.
“Eshche
odin krizis v psikhologii! Vozmozhnaia prichina shumnogo uspekha idei L.S. Vygotskogo” (co-author: Margit Köcski),
Voprosy filosofii, 1997, No. 4, pp. 86-96.
“Netipichny
akademik,” Voprosy filosofii,
2005, No.
1, pp. 67-69.
2. “La regulation
communicative de la relation sociale et le devenir conscient des contenus de mémoire.” In J. Janousek, ed., Experimental Social Psychology: Papers and Reports
from the International Conference on Social Psychology
(Institute
of Psychology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague, 1969).
3. Or at least marxisant (gravitating toward
Marxism).
4. Cf. Chadwick-Jones, J.
“The Debate Between Michel Plon
and Morton Deutsch: Some Related Comments,” European Journal of Social Psychology,
Vol. 6,
Issue 1, pp. 129-137.
5. See “Eshche
odin krizis v psikhologii! Vozmozhnaia prichina shumnogo uspekha idei L.S. Vygotskogo” (co-author: Margit Köcski),
Voprosy filosofii, 1997, No. 4, pp. 86-96.
6. Economic psychology has
worked out a special calculation for the reciprocal conversion of monetary
costs and social identity (see Garai, L. “The Price
of Excellence.” In Inquiries Into the Nature
and Causes of Behavior. Proceedings
63 64
journal of russian and east european
psychology of the XXIV Annual Colloquium of the International
Association for Research in Economic Psychology, 1999, pp. 750-759.
7. “Behavioral
Macroeconomic and Macroeconomic Behavior.” Nobel Prize Lecture of George A. Akerlof (December 8, 2001).
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-lecture.html.
Another laureate in the same area showed that the impetus that can be observed
nowadays toward second, third and more diplomas is attributable not to a desire
for extra knowledge but to the forced signaling of social identity in the labor
market.
8. Identity Economics: An
Alternative Economic Psychology. Available at
www.staff.u-szeged.hu/~garai/Identity_Economics.htm.
9. Attila József was a great Hungarian poet (1905-1937). Cf. Garai, L. “The Case of Attila Jozsef:
A Reply to Gustav Jahoda,” New Ideas in Psychology,
1988, Vol.
6, No. 2, pp. 213-217.
10. The just-mentioned
Attila József, in addition to being a great poet, was
also a brilliant theorist of cultural-historical social studies, and advanced a
theory, in particular, that a creator, by creating a work of literary fiction,
at the same time creates a new symbol and thereby re-creates the integrity of
the language that he used.
GL1. Sic! Not a
typographical error!