Revisiting vygotsky for social change bringing together theory and practice new york

9 While neoliberalism has been introduced by many governments in various countries and geographical regions as the only solution to the contemporary crisis Dafermos, 2013, Vygotsky’s wor

Instead of an Epilogue “We Are

on Fire”: Crisis as Turning Point,

Vygotsky and Social Change

MICHALIS KONTOPODIS, MANOLIS DAFERMOS,

AND ADOLFO TANZI NETO

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008 came as a shock to the peace-ful daydreaming of middle- and upper-class people around the globe In a world of hyperconnected capital and money markets, the financial crises that started in the United States spread quickly, even disrupting economies that until that point seemed to represent stable and continuous economic growth Like the financial crisis spread across the globe in 2008, so did the flames of the most destructive wildfires on record in 2018, spreading across California, one of the richest areas of the world A total of 8,527 fires scorched an area

of 1,893,913 acres, the largest amount of burned acreage recorded in a sin-gle fire season.1

The rapacious appetites of the global finance industry have supported a harrowing depletion of our natural resources Burning through these resources have led to a human-induced climate change, which in turn increases the risk

of extreme weather events such as forest fires We are on fire, both literally

and metaphorically The US national debt currently exceeds $22 trillion and

is constantly increasing With 90% of global transactions in foreign currency and 60% of global currency reserves in US dollars, the debt of the United

States is also exported to other national economies, all of which are also in

debt , as well, as calculated with precision by so-called national debt clocks 2

The world’s total debt is around $244 trillion, which is more than three times the size of the global economy, according to a recent analysis by the Institute

of International Finance.3 As these pages are being written and more than ten years since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the fact that a multi-faceted crisis is occurring becomes more and more apparent This crisis affects global

and local economies, ecologies and communities as much as it affects people’s personal trajectories and everyday lives This crisis is not a temporary, geo-graphically limited and exceptional condition, but a long-lasting one: $244 trillion of debt will never be paid off, no matter how intensively natural and human resources are exploited

A crisis (from ancient Greek κρίσις, meaning discerning, evaluating and

making a decision)4 indicates a period of intense difficulty It can also be understood as the turning point when a difficult or important decision must

be made This may entail danger and taking risks, but it also involves the possibility that novel ways of being and acting in the world may emerge In other words: a crisis indicates the moment in which a new world must be built on the ruins of the old The book in your hands desires to support that moment by proposing a conceptual shift across disciplines towards under-standing the future as an essential dimension of human activity (cf Nadin, 2015) Vygotsky’s project entails a concrete vision of a future society and goal-oriented activity (Stetsenko, 2017; Dafermos, 2018):

It is precisely human creative activity that makes the human being a creature oriented toward the future, creating the future and thus altering his own present (Vygotsky, 2004, p 9)

While neoliberalism has been introduced by many governments in various countries and geographical regions as the only solution to the contemporary crisis (Dafermos, 2013), Vygotsky’s work offers us the possibility to imagine how the impossible becomes possible in the course of future-oriented creative and collaborative human activity Imagination plays a central role in recontex-tualising the current state of affairs, and in revealing the spectrum of possibil-ities for radical social change (Kontopodis, 2014) even if creating alternative societal futures may seem impossible from the perspective of the neoliberal

“there is no alternative” thinking (Mould, 2018)

Within the contributions of this collective volume, the careful reader may find the seeds of this imagination in a wide variety of contexts In the beginning of this volume, Manolis Dafermos argues that cultural-historical

theory is a future-oriented rather than a past-oriented theory That human

creative activity is oriented towards the future is intrinsically connected with

“the active transformations of existing environments and the creation of new ones through collaborative processes of producing and deploying tools” (Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004, p 65) From this perspective, creative i.e transformative activity interrupts the linear, continuous, accumulative tem-porality of transition from the past to the present and from the present to the

future Imagining the future offers the opportunity to remember and re-write the past, as well as to change and transform the present

The next contributions to the collective volume examine the topic of

agency , i.e active and transformative subjectivity An important idea in cul-tural-historical psychology indeed, active subjectivity is the idea that humans

actively participate in and contribute to defining how signs and tools are

used and how social relations are shaped Active subjectivity enters in a

dia-logue with the future and transforms a given social situation so that new prac-tices emerge Indeed, it is quite difficult to imagine social change without an advanced reflection on agency as the force that resists, reorients and trans-forms social relations As Anna Stetsenko argues in Chapter 2, the issue of agency entails a question about who we are and what our position is in our environments, contexts and realities From the perspective of a transforma-tive activist stance, Anna Stetsenko first reflects on the limitations of certain relational approaches to agency, such as habitus and structuration theories, actor-network theory, social constructionism, etc She then explores the development of radically transformative agency within collaborative projects

of social transformation

Fernanda Liberali’s contribution in Chapter 3 reflects the experience of the struggle for social justice in Brazil, a country permeated by social inequal-ities, the exploitation of natural resources and the growth of racism Liberali maintains that it is possible to promote agency for social change through

perezhivanie: repertoires and habits established within previous contexts can

be reconstructed in new trajectories and paths Echoing Fernanda Liberali’s argumentation, in Chapter 4, Yrjö Engeström and Annalisa Sannino

high-light the importance of Vygotsky’s understanding of double stimulation, and employ the metaphor of knotworking as a way to grasp social change The

existence of conflictual forces that break away from each other through the reorganisation and reconfiguration of the situation are crucial moments in the process of social change

The volume proceeds with in-depth analyses of how Vygostkian theory may be adapted and expanded for use in the contemporary critical context Lois Holzman proposes social therapeutics as a group-oriented psychotherapy

from a post-modern perspective in Chapter 5 She presents this as a new

psy-chology of becoming through play, performance and creativity Creative imita-tion and performance are examined as ways of promoting both learning and human development Moving from clinical practice to education, in Chapter 6 Adolfo Tanzi Neto highlights the need to examine the social spaces of schools from the perspective of various forms of mediated practices, social positionings

of power and control, and discursive relations Understanding the complex social architectures of school practices is a precondition for promoting creative activity in a school’s community and its relation to wider society

The dialogue on Vygotsky’s theory continues with Peter E Jones’s actional- integrative view of sign-making Peter E Jones demonstrates the problems in the transition from Pavlovian signalisation to Vygotsky’s signifi-cation in Chapter 7 As he argues, for an alternative perspective on the active capacity for creation of signs by human subjects which is crucial for their development and conscious action In turn, in Chapter 8, Nikolai Veresov explores identity as a sociocultural phenomenon while exploring the individ-ual sense of belonging in view of complex and dramatic dialectics of being and becoming

Sueli Salles Fidalgo and Cecilia Magalhaes explore the notion of social

compensation in Chapter 9 as a way of promoting the development of children with special educational needs A social learning process organised around the creation of signs is examined as a kind of creative activity that provides alter-native paths of development In a similar mode, Wanda Maria Junqueira de Aguiar, Maria Emiliana Lima Penteado and Raquel Antonio Alfredo reveal the Marxist underpinnings of Vygotsky’s theory in Chapter 10, and explore

the importance of a set of concepts, that is, historicity, totality, contradiction and mediation for educational research Bader Burihan Sawaia, Lavinia L S

Magiolino and Daniele Nunes Henrique Silva explore in Chapter 11 how cre-ating imaginary situations is a way to promote emancipation from situational constraints: social theories that neglect the imagination become sterile and infertile Imagination and emotions are a crucial part of social transformation processes, and the human ability to imagine is examined as a condition of freedom that assures the revolutionary power of subjectivity

In the final chapter, Gordana Jovanović provides an overall reflection on the topic of social change and its relation to Vygotsky’s theory She demon-strates that naturalistic, individualistic and interactionist interpretations of human relations are not able to change society as a whole Society cannot

be reduced to a sum of individuals and their interpersonal interactions The dominance of naturalism, individualism and atomism as forms of reduction-ism is not irrelevant to the bureaucratization of society and its lack of revolu-tionary change

The contributions in this collective volume reflect the diversity of inter-pretations of Vygotsky’s legacy as well as the complexity of social change Social change is intrinsically connected with future-oriented, creative activ-ity that challenges the dominance of the commercialization of social life and

consumer individualism While dominant social forms are often perceived as universal, eternal, and immutable qualities of “human nature,” Vygotsky’s project questions this view of “human nature” as related to competitive indi-vidualism Challenging the systemic inequalities and injustices of “creative capitalism” and “market-based social change” (Kinsley, 2008) is crucial for achieving social change and social justice

Even if, as Jameson (2003, p 76) noted, “it has become easier to imag-ine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” the radicalization of the imagination can be seen as a way of overcoming today’s crises Grappling with dramatic conflicts and contradictions and imagining alternative forms

of societal organization beyond privatization and commodification is at the source of social change and human development in the present critical moment Vygotsky’s project is highly relevant and inspiring in this context,

as it fundamentally challenges mainstream understandings of human

develop-ment as adaptation, instead envisaging human engagedevelop-ment with the world as

future-oriented i.e creative and transformative

Notes

1 Cf 2018 National Year-to-Date Report on Fires and Acres Burned National Interagency Fire Center, https://www.predictiveservices.nifc.gov/intelli-gence/2018_statssumm/2018Stats&Summ.html (date of access: May 21, 2019)

2 Detailed overview is provided on https://usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock html (date of access: May 21, 2019)

3 Cf Global Debt Monitor, Institute of International Finance, January 15, 2019: https://www.iif.com/Research/Capital-Flows-and-Debt/Global-Debt-Monitor (date of access: May 21, 2019)

4 Cf https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crisis (date of access: May 21, 2019)

References

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Dafermos, M (2018) Rethinking Cultural-historical Theory A Dialectical Perspective

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Jameson, F (2003) Future city New Left Review, 21, 65–79.

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Kontopodis, M (2014) Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development London:

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Vygotsky, L (2004) Imagination and creativity in childhood Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1), 7–97.