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Metaphoric, Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”

Vygotsky’s notion of “neoformation” was itself a neoformation. This is not because it was the new formation of a word or even a new formulation of a concept. As the author says, the word was already a familiar term in the physical sciences when Vygotsky picked it up, and the concept was becoming current in the literature on pedology, the science of the development of the whole child, which Vygotsky read and to which he contributed the bulk of his scientific output (Schneuwly & Léopoldoff-Martin, 2012). In that holistic science of child development, the concept of “neoformation” served as a placeholder, an unknown, a stand-in for the appearance of some new accomplishment in the developmental process, typically, he eventually concluded, realized in the area of social contact and realizing some new form of consciousness. Examples he foregrounded included the individual instinct of the newborn, the joint consciousness of the infant, and the proto-speech of the 1-year-old. Because these new formations were all different and each specific to a particular age period, Vygotsky needed an algebraic variable that would stand for the whole class. Just as the specific value of this variable would depend on the child’s age-specific social situation of development, the age-specific development of the child’s central and peripheral psychic functions, and the age-specific next zone of development for its practical significance, Vygotsky’s notion of “neoformation” relied for its theoretical value on the theoretical specification of several general concepts—“social situation of development,” “line of development,” and “zone of proximal development.” It’s in that sense—the sense that a true neoformation requires a whole network of concepts to explain its new content—that “neoformation” is a true neoformation. So to really understand what it means to say that “neoformation” is itself a neoformation, it is important to first grasp what “neoformation” meant in its own specific context of child development. Only then can it be generalized to other forms of development, for example, to the development of Vygotsky’s thinking, or to scientific thought more generally. I think that in the same way, clarifying what neoformations meant in child development might—or might not—enable their generalization to changes of consciousness in adults as Wolff-Michael Roth seeks to do in his article “Neoformation: A Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change.” It is, alas, true that Vygotsky died before he could fully carry out this theoretical elaboration. Yet this does not necessarily mean that Vygotsky failed to elaborate the dialectical method for doing this in a systematic way, or that his concept lacks a grounding in dialectics as Roth claims in his abstract. Let’s find out. In the space of this short commentary, let’s try to use the work Roth cites here to fashion a kind of yardstick with which we can compare attempts like Roth’s with Vygotsky’s original aims. Then we may suggest an approach to developmental change that measures up to the yardstick and to Vygotsky’s true goals. In conclusion, we may see that Vygotsky’s own approach to child development and its neoformations is already thoroughly and quite concretely “dialectical” after all—that is, it is concerned with the child’s individuation of a social dialect. Still, wemay find that Roth’s attempt at re-reelaborating Vygotsky’s notion of neoformation was worth publishing for another reason—it is part of the dialogue of misunderstandings and re-understandings that allows concepts apparently from long ago to appear suddenly far in our future.