[Xmca-l] The Becomeliness of the Young

[David Kellogg]

Both van der Veer and Zavershneva are textual historians; this creates a
strong bias, in the article recently circulated, towards what is OLD in
Chapter Seven of Thinking and Speech and makes them overlook precisely what
is NEW and those precisely what is most interesting and specific to the
text. But in my previous rather incoherent comments, I simply focused on
the obvious fact that they left out my own reading of the chapter: how the
different planes of feeling, thinking, self-directed speaking and other
directed speaking fit into the overall argument of the book, which is first
phylogenetic, then ontogenetic, and at last logogenetic.

Here's a better example. When I re-read Chapter Seven, what strikes me is
the emphasis on concepts as process not product, as energy and not entity.
In the Pedology of the Adolescent, there's something similar: Vygosky is
trying to show how all of the contradictions of the young are linked in
some way to a "Central Contradiction" which he will later call the Social
Situation of Development. That central contradiction is "the
non-coincidence of sexual, general organic, and sociocultural maturation";
in other words, the fact that in humans the ability to reproduce is getting
earlier and earlier but the ability to produce is getting later and later.
This produces a phenomenon we might call the "becomeliness of the
young"--the fact that the adolescent is always becoming and never
quite being.

Mike promised us an anecdote on ergativity in Russian--that is, processes
that simply unfold through a medium, like "the door opened", where the
opening is something that unfolds by means of a door rather than the
product of an action on an object. In a weird way, this problem seems
related to me. English and other Standard European Languages (SAEs, as
Whorf called them) underwent a big transition in the sixteenth century,
from sentences based on heroic transformative actions ("We reached India"
or "We conquered America" or "We colonized Africa") to sentences based on
something like equations: "The angle of refracted light was in proportion
to the plumpness of the lens," as Newton wrote.

But as Halliday points out, the Newtonian solution is not a stable one: in
the typical "to be" sentence on which scientific writing in English is now
based, "being" is construed as a process requiring two "be-ers" which are
iin some way equal but not redundant ("The rate of crack growth is equal to
the pressure exerted on the receptive surface"). This Newtonian solution
addresses but doesn't solve the problem of describing the environment as a
process unfolding in itself and in that process transforming us, not simply
an object to be transformed by us. The ergative transformation of English
is one way to try to solve this problem, it suggests, as Vygotsky did iin
Chapter Seven, a concept based on becoming rather than being. Adolescence,
like any other concept, is a process unfolding through a medium and not an
object being acted upon by a subject.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full