[Xmca-l] Re: Perezhivanie and Organic

[Lois Holzman]

I’ll take a stab at summarizing it later this week, Mike.

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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Lois Holzman <http://loisholzman.org/> | East Side Institute <http://eastsideinstitute.org/> | Performing the World <http://www.performingtheworld.org/>
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> On Feb 5, 2017, at 6:42 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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
>> Social Media
>> Facebook  <https://www.facebook.com/lois.holzman.5>| LinkedIn <http://www.
>> %20linkedin.com/pub/lois-holzman> | Twitter <https://twitter.com/
>> LoisHolzman>
>> Blogs
>> Psychology Today <http://www.psychologytoday.
>> com/blog/conceptual-revolution>| Psychology of Becoming <
>> http://loisholzman.org/> | Mad in America <http://www.madinamerica.com/
>> 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
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>>