[Xmca-l] Re: Perezhivanie and Organic

[David Kellogg]

The Russian word that Vygotsky uses for "organic" is the same as the word
we use, and I assume that the same thing is true of the word that
Stanislavsky used. It is "organic" transliterated into Cyrillic, rather
than translated into Russian.

What really makes this problem new-thread-worthy is that the meaning of the
word "organic" at the end of the nineteenth century is not the same as the
word meaning that we use in several important ways.

Take, for example, the crudest possible way: semantic prosody, or the "good
vibes" of some words (e.g. "organic food") vs. the "bad vibes" of others
(e.g. "artificial flavor"). The nineteenth century began with a romantic
movement towards nature and towards holism ("Gestaltism"), against dogmatic
rationalism and atomism. So "organicism" had a semantic prosody that
involved not only naturalism (which it still does) but also a form of
proto-structuralism. Organic structure involved a complex whole with parts
that are interdependent like organs and not independent like ball bearings.

Today, this semantic prosody falls on deaf ears. If anything, it's the
other way around: we know all about cells, and we know that they are
independant and dispensible in large numbers (you slough off millions every
day). But mechanical parts are precisely engineered to fit each other, and
for the want of one, the whole machine comes to a grinding halt.

Nevertheless, we can still see this older meaning of organicism in
Toennies' distinction between Gemeinschaft (community, mechanical
solidarity) and Gesellschaft (society,organic solidarity) and also in the
work of Bernsetin (workers have a mechanical solidarity based on likeness
while middle class people have organic solidarity based on mutual
instrumentality).

(Of course, there's the same problem. Even working class families have an
organic solidarity, while it is sometimes hard to believe that white collar
office workers sitting at computers in cubicles are anything bt
mechanical....)

David Kellogg
Macquarie University

On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 4:20 AM, Edward Wall <ewall@umich.edu> wrote:

> Stanislavisk seems to consider what is termed ‘organic’ in his taking up
> of perezhivanie. Vygotsky also uses the term ‘organic,’ although as near as
> I can tell, without regard to perezhivanie. However, what seems to be being
> called ‘organic’ is very different (or so it seems) in these two cases. Is
> the Rusiian different?
>
> Ed Wall
>
> > On Feb 2, 2017, at  11:15 AM, lpscholar2@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > Beth and Monica explore the phenomena occurring in playworlds generating
> perezhivanie.
> >
> > Playworlds are performance worlds and these worlds may be exploring the
> relation of ‘unity’ and ‘difference’.
> >
> > Another term that may have relevance when Beth and Monica refer to
> negating the negation is the operation of ‘apophasis’.
> >  William Frank (On What Cannot Be Said) describes the apophatic :
> >
> > *In apophasis, which empties language of all positive content, absolute
> difference cannot be distinguished from absolute unity, even though the
> respective discourses of difference and unity nominally stand at the
> antipodes. BOTH configurations, unity and difference, are exposed as
> relatively arbitrary and, in the end, equally inadequate schemas for
> articulating what cannot be said. (Franke)
> >
> > Claire Chambers in her book (Performance Studies and Negative
> Epistemology) comments on the above Franke citation :
> >
> > *If unity and difference cannot be distinguished from one another (we
> cannot KNOW what makes them distinct), then it is impossible to determine
> what either ‘is’ – meaning that knowing and being, epistemology and
> ontology, are also impossible to distinguish from one another.(Claire
> Chambers Chapter 1)
> >
> > I am not sure how far to go with this theme of : Negating the negation?
> > I hear this theme in playworlds.
> >
> > If this seems relevant, i can post the first chapter of Claire Chambers
> book. I will just mention that Vygotsky’s Judaic childhood and adolescence
> would have encountered this apophatic ‘tradition’.
> > Enough for one probe or possible pivot?
> >
> >
> >
> > Sent from my Windows 10 phone
> >
>
>
>