[Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion

[Andy Blunden]

So David, when you read Chapter 5 of Thinking and Speech, what do you 
call those combinations of sign-mediated actions which Vygotsky 
describes with words such as "complex" or "pseudoconcept" or "heap"?
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


David Kellogg wrote:
> This morning I had the great pleasure of waking up in my own bed and
> listening to Yo-yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Itzhak Perlman playing this:
>
>  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRkWCOTImOQ
>
> It's the D Major Cello sonata number two by Mendelssohn, played, as
> Yo-yo Ma tells us, on the Davydov (no, that THAT Davydov) Stradivarius
> that was probably used to perform the sonata for the very first time
> in front of Mendelssohn himself. Now, throughout this concert, Ma has
> been something of a stickler for "the original", and Perelman has been
> pulling politely but pointedly towards a more personal interpretation.
>
> So at around 6:45 on the clip, Perelman tells Ma that if Mendelssohn
> himself had heard the sonata played on that very cello, then he,
> Perelman, was sitting in the very seat that Mendelssohn had occupied,
> and that therefore his freer interpretation was really closer to
> Mendelssohn than any attempt to recreate the sonata with period
> instruments. Mercifully, at this point, Ax interupts them and starts
> to play.
>
> Back in Sydney, Seth Chaiklin and I found ourselves in a somewhat
> similar argument, with Seth in Perelman's chair, and me clinging
> rather obstinately to a paleo-Vygotskyan interpretation which actually
> rejects "activity" as a unit of analysis for anything but behavior,
> and most certainly as a unit of psychological analysis. Seth's
> argument was pragmatist: for certain practical applications, we need
> new interpretations, including revisionist ones. Mine was an argument
> in favor of species diversity: when the revisionist account supplants
> the original to such a degree that Vygotsky's original argument is no
> longer accessible to people, we need to go back to original texts (and
> this is why it is so important to make the original texts at least
> recoverable--once they are gone, it is really a whole species of
> thinking that has become extinct).
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
> PS: Andy, what shocked me about Bonnie Nardi's plenum in Sydney was
> not her use of "society" or "object": actually, I think I would have
> liked it better if she had used those terms a little more imprecisely,
> in their folk meanings. In fact, a little more IMPRECISION might have
> made it even clearer to us the sheer horror of what she was
> contemplating.
>
> For those on the list who missed it, the plenary focused on a world
> without jobs--that is, a world where five-day forty-hour jobs are
> replaced by "micro-work". Nardi admitted that this was a rather
> dystopian state of affairs--but she also showed us what she called the
> "bright side": more leisure, less greenhouse gases, and also human
> identities less narrowly tied to work. As one person in the conference
> pointed out, and Nardi confirmed, it would also mean more time for the
> spiritual side of life.
>
> What was not pointed out was the effect of all this on the "object" of
> "society", using both terms in their folk senses. The working class is
> being ground down into the economic position of short term sex workers
> and atomized into the social position of housewives. Inequality is now
> at levels not seen since 1820. Even a cursory study of history tells
> us that the result of this is not going to be individual spirituality
> but rather more violence. The only "bright side" I can see is if that
> force is organized, social, and directed against social equality
> rather than against fellow members of the working class.
>
> dk
>   
>