“Instance,” in our grammar of multimodality, stands for one thing. “Concept” stands for more than one thing, linked to each other by means of generality.

Soviet psychology is a useful place to begin to explore the notion of “concept.” The key thinkers whose ideas we want to examine are Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky and Aleksandr Romanovich Luria.

Vygotsky and Luria offer a cultural-historical account of the ontogenesis of concepts in the lives of children, and the phylogenesis of concepts in the course of human history.

As Jews, Vygotsky and Luria would have found it near impossible to have become researchers and university professors in the Russia of the Tsars. The revolution of 1917 opened new possibilities for them both. In gratitude, they embraced its secular faith. “My entire generation was infused with the energy of revolutionary change,” says Luria, looking back on his life from the vantage point of the 1970s, “the liberating energy people feel when they are part of a society that is able to make tremendous progress in a very short time.”⁶²

The stifling conditions of the tsarist period are difficult for modern people to understand. Prerevolutionary Russian Society comprised strictly divided classes: workers and peasants, intellectuals (physicians, teachers and engineers), merchants and businessmen, and the gentry (aristocrats and high government officials). The repressive nature of the regime was reflected in the educational system, which was designed to see to it that everyone stayed in his or her “natural” station in life and nothing changed … Of course, the revolution changed all this. It broke down the barriers between classes and gave all of us, no matter what our social class, new perspectives and new opportunities.⁶³

Luria started work as a laboratory assistant at the Institute for the Scientific Organization of Labor in his home city, Kazan. There he studied the effect of hard work on the mental activity of foundry workers. His work soon attracted the attention of Professor K.N. Kornilov, the director of the Moscow Institute of Psychology. Moving to Moscow in 1923, he “joined a small group of scholars who were charged with reconstructing Russian psychology in order to bring it into accord with the goals of the Revolution.”⁶⁴ Vygotsky joined the Institute in 1924, and the two began a close working relationship which lasted a decade, until Vygotsky died of tuberculosis in 1934, aged 37. The rest of Luria’s life and work was a homage to his friend and colleague.

Luria and Vygotsky’s starting point was a critique of the “bourgeois” schools of psychology in the West, and an attempt to create a new, Marxist psychology. On the one hand, American behaviorists^§MS3.1.2d limited themselves to what Luria and Vygotsky considered to be mechanistic interpretations of elementary behavioral phenomena, many of which humans shared with animals. On the other hand, there was a tradition of philosophical idealism starting with René Descartes^§MS3.1.2g in the seventeenth century and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth.^§MS3.3e This tradition posited an abstract humanism where “the loftiness of man’s ideas are present in the child at the moment of their birth,”⁶⁵ which subsequently became manifest in consciousness. The distinguishing feature of the human mind was its unique capacity to classify and categorize sensory experience, then to reason on the basis of these conceptualizations. And this, as if it were a purely voluntary act of the individual.

Unlike the American behaviorists, Vygotsky and Luria wanted to be able to examine “higher psychological processes, including consciously controlled action, voluntary attention, active memorizing, and abstract thought.”⁶⁶ However, unlike the metaphysical speculations of philosophers about intrinsic human consciousness, they wanted to start with the everyday conditions of material existence and to consider individual consciousness as a phenomenon of human history. Here, “material conditions [are] constantly changing, ceaselessly in movement, although this movement sometimes experiences leaps, breaks, discontinuities.”⁶⁷

Two such leaps are the leap into conceptual thinking by the growing child (the ontogenesis of conceptual meaning), and the historical development of conceptual thinking (the phylogenesis of conceptual meaning). The latter^§MS1.1.3d proved to be more problematic than the former.^§MS1.1.3b

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⁶² Michael Cole, Karl Levitin, and Alexander R. Luria, 1979 [2006], The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 17.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 18.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 28.

⁶⁵ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1930 [1999], “The Problem of Practical Intellect in the Psychology of Animals and the Psychology of the Child,” pp. 3–26 in Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 6, edited by R.W. Rieber, New York, NY: Kluwer Academic, p. 80.

⁶⁶ Michael Cole, Karl Levitin, and Alexander R. Luria, 1979 [2006], The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 41.

⁶⁷ Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, 1925 [1977], “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology,” Soviet Psychology 16(2):7–45, p. 9.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103-105. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Lev Vygotsky and Aleksandr Luria’s "Higher Psychological Processes" §MS1.1.3a