[Xmca-l] Re: Perezhivanie and Organic

[mike cole]

Your own work ought to provide an example of a long-standing program that
could serve as a model for people to consider, Lois.
mike

On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Lois Holzman <
lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org> wrote:

> Here are two links to two videos in which Richard Schechner addresses
> politics and performance studies. He is a pioneer and friend of performance
> activism.
>
> in 2012—https://vimeo.com/54675823 <https://vimeo.com/54675823> (begins
> around 57 minutes)
> in 2016—http://www.performingtheworld.org <http://www.
> performingtheworld.org/> click on PTW 2016 Plenary Part 1. It’s a
> conversation between Schechner, Ken Gergen, me and two inner city young
> women. The set up is long but interesting. The conversation begins with
> Schechner at around 20 min.
>
> Lois Holzman
> Director, East Side Institute for Group & Short Term Psychotherapy
> 119 West 23 St, suite 902
> New York, NY 10011
> Chair, Global Outreach, All Stars Project, UX
> Tel. +1.212.941.8906 x324
> Fax +1.718.797.3966
> lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org
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> LoisHolzman>
> Blogs
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> author/lois/>
> Websites
> Lois Holzman <http://loisholzman.org/> | East Side Institute <
> http://eastsideinstitute.org/> | Performing the World <http://www.
> performingtheworld.org/>
> All Stars Project <http://allstars.org/>
>
>
>
> > On Feb 5, 2017, at 1:30 PM, lpscholar2@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > Another scholar of ‘performance studies’ is Richard Schechner who posits
> a continuum for ‘performance’ that spans 5 categories: play, games, sports,
> theatre, ritual.
> > Play is ‘free’  where ritual is ‘strictly’ programmed or designed, while
> games, sports and theatre MEDIATE between these extremes as more play-like
> or more ritual-like.
> > This continuum is basically an elaboration of how performances are
> variations on ‘ritual’ as an encompassing category.
> >
> > This allows Schechner to extend the values of ritual into creation of
> symbolic reality that pervades the analysis of other performance genres:
> play, games, sports, ritual.
> >
> > Shechner explains performance studies in the preface to his book
> [Performance Studies: An Introduction]:
> >
> > Performance studies – as a practice, a theory, an academic discipline –
> is dynamic, UNFINISHABLE.  Whatever it is, it wasn’t exactly that before
> and it won’t be exactly that again.
> >
> > One dominant metaphor by which performance studies has been figured is
> ‘the unmapped terrain’.
> > This metaphor figures uncertainty,  ambiguity, navigating the
> incomprehensible, the ungraspable, the unsaying at the heart of the
> certain, the graspable, the comprehensible, the saying.
> >
> > This unmapped terrain may be ‘’exhilarating’ for those scholars and
> persons who relish “not knowing” that is hard to pin down. So too is the
> study of ‘performance’ exhilarating and privileges open-ended questions.
> >
> > The potential to illuminate, instruct, an inspire, is enhanced not
> diminished by this ever present ‘uncertainty’. Don’t try to fix performance
> studies down is its central value and if you do the symbolic realm will
> become a mere idol.
> >
> > By insisting that performance studies cannot be fixed or defined,
> performance studies is situated as a NEGATIVE discipline trafficking in
> ‘denials’ and the unsaying of speech.
> >
> > This gives a flavour of the way performance studies is posited in
> apophatic terms of the unmapped terrain in the fashion of Schechner’s
> explorations of the continuum of ritual, play, games, sports, theatre.
> >
> > Beth and Monica exploring playworlds and perezhivanie can be put in
> dialogue with Schechner.
> >
> > I was channelling Claire Chambers above who is deeply engaged with this
> performance thematic playing out through historical epochs and becoming
> secularized in modern  performance studies.
> >
> >
> > Sent from Mail for Windows 10
> >
> > From: Edward Wall
> > Sent: February 4, 2017 4:10 PM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Perezhivanie and Organic
> >
> > David
> >
> >     Yes, that was the difference I was noting. Vygotsky in the passages
> I was reading seems to using ‘organic’ as denoting something ‘natural,'
> while Stanislavsky seemed to using it s somewhat more holistic fashion.
> >
> > Ed
> >
> >> On Feb 2, 2017, at  3:01 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> 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
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> >
> >
>
>