[Xmca-l] Re: XMCA discourse

[mike cole]

:-)

typical of me to type as sloppily as I think. To continue, for the moment.

As my recent posts have indicated, i have been concerned that the
conversations were
becoming so difficult to follow that it was becoming very difficult for me
to follow what people were trying to say. The discussion with Paul is
exemplary in this regard. We were drawing on such different domains of
scholarship, with such very different experiences and personal projects,
that I struggled to find a common object to focus on. with not much
success. I suggested that perhaps we were simply confused because we were
drawing upon disjunct (for our group, at least) discourses and could not
translate usefully across them for each other.

Where XMCA discussions have recently been most interesting to me is when we
pick a common article that is published in MCA to discuss *and the
author(s) engage in discussion about the article with us readers. * That
was the original idea of XMCA -- to allow authors to get lots of feedback
quickly so that we did not end up with 3 year delays in next turns in a
discussion that is supposed to be relevant to current professional concerns
and be relevant to our actions.

By picking the two articles that I suggested for conversation --
1. LSV on perezhivanie as a unit of analysis for understanding the role of
the environment with respect to development of persons (I really think it
helps to substitute person or personhood for personality as the Russian
term, lichnost, is used in these conversations)
2. AN Leontiev's (ANL) 1936(?) critique of LSV's views on perezhivanie.

I selected these two article for several reasons.

1. There is an ongoing discussion with Russian psychologists on Facebook
about key concepts and their confusions, with perezhivanie a topic for some
6 months.
2. From this discussion, I have learned about divergences between LSV and
ANL that have a strong bearing on the degree on the overall relationship
between the cultural-historical (LSV) and AT (ANL) halves of CHAT.
3. David Ke's note about this article talks about units of analysis not
only for emotion/cognition but thought/word/meaning (as i recall, I cannot
find that message either!), so i thought it would amp our understanding of
how the term is being used and why and to what effect.

This is an unsupervised discussion forum. Anyone can join and in a long
history, there are very occasions when one gets the feeling that someone is
there simply to make life miserable for others.... to the contrary...
people try to be helpful if/when they can. I personally have no interest in
sifting through notes as gatekeeper for the group.

So, I will follow the lead of Holly, Katie, Rod, Andy and others overnight
and suggest that we try out a close reading of the two, competing, article
on perezhivanie. Everyone has downloadable access to the articles.

In addition, I am going to attach a cut and paste summary of some
highlights I gleaned from the LSV article. It reflects my own reading and
concerns and the formatting in not consistent. But at least for those who
have not read the article and have too many papers to grade or lessons to
prepare, it might be a help "leg up" in following the conversation, if
there is one.

I would welcome others taking my half-baked summary-cum-cut/paste/comment
and filling it out, but keeping it brief. We could post those on the xmca
page for future reference.

I have some doubts of my own about some of LSV's ideas here, before taking
on ANL's critique and later Andy's essay about all of this and other
comments. But enough for this morning. Now back to my local life world.

mike


On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 9:15 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues-
>
> For some time now, I have been uncertain about how best, or even whether
> to continue, xmca discussions.
>
> --
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>
>
>


-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
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