Advancing the Topics of Social Reality, Culture, and Subjectivity From a Cultural-Historical Standpoint: Moments, Paths, and Contradictions

This article discusses how the topics of social reality, culture, and subjectivity have evolved throughout a cultural-historical tradition in psychology and links these processes to the first steps taken by Soviet psychology in this direction. Despite Soviet psychology being the birthplace of cultural-historical psychology, the topics of culture and social realities were treated in a narrow way because of the ideological dogmatism of the different dominant theoretical trends that characterized its short existence. The author discusses some of the factors that prevented a closer attention to the topics of subjectivity, symbolical processes, communication and the social genesis of human consciousness in the Soviet psychology, despite the numerous antecedents that some of its more dialectical thinkers brought into light on such topics. Advancing on some of Vygotsky's latest concepts, like perezhivanie and sense, the author proposes to redefine the topic of subjectivity from a cultural-historical standpoint. In doing so, the author emphasizes the unity of symbolical and emotional processes that emerge during living experiences, centering on the concepts of subjective sense and subjective configuration to focus on the subjective side of any social experience. The concepts of social and individual subjectivities that support this theoretical proposal transform subjectivity into a quality of every human experience or event. Culture, in turn, would be a subjective system within which new subjectivities are continuously renewed and reinvented in an endless development that characterizes human existence.