[Xmca-l] Re: The Becomeliness of the Young

Tue Apr 3 15:00:04 PDT 2018

Thanks, Henry--you read a lot better than I write: I didn't actually
mention free will, but of course that IS the highest form of behavior and
the Central Neoformation of adolescence! I also much appreciated the links
to reviews, as I never watch Western movies (not because I can't stay awake
but because they sometimes trigger a recurring nightmare of my own--I guess
we have all led interesting lives somewhere...).

I do hope that Peter (Feigenbaum) hasn't ghosted on this conversation,
because I think that the emergence of free will in adolescence ("coming of
age", in most cultures) is related to the issue he raised earlier, the
issue of whether conscious awareness precedes or follows decision making
and all of its consequences. In the days of Chomskyan hegemony in
linguistics, this was thought of in terms of "performance before
competence", as opposed to "competence before performance".This way of
posing the problem, however, inevitably introduces an unhelpful dualism.
Since competence is really only accessible through performance, it is (as
Laplace remarked to Napoleon a propos the use of God in his cosmology) a
hypothesis of which we have no need. All we really need is the notion of
meaning potential, something that is constantly being made meaning actual
and thus activating new potential in turn. Awareness isn't something
separate from this cycle; it forms part of it at every point. This is not
just Halliday; it's the way that Vygotsky introduces "deliberate
semantics" in Chapter Seven of Thinking and Speech, and thus forms another
important NEW point that is lost when we focus only on what is OLD in
Vygotsky.

Why does Vygotsky distinguish between "phasic" and "semantic" aspects of
speech? It turns out that the "phasal" properties of language are ALL the
syntagmatic ones--not just syntax, but also the stringing together of
morpho-phonemes into lexeme-syllables, of  lexeme-syllables into
clause-utterances, and even of clause-utterances into paragraphs. It is all
the stuff that "follows on" in language, including transitivity and
ergativity. But the way you "follow on" is by choosing stuff that "fits
in". You get to choose (for example, you get to choose whether you will say
"Let's play a game", as adults do, or just "Let's play" as little children
do, and if you choose the "game", you can choose to name the game or leave
it to others. Both choosing and not choosing are choices, and such choices
happen at every level: when we spell a word, when we make a sentence, when
we write a posting for xmca. It's free will, because at every point there
is a recognition of necessity.

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

On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 12:54 AM, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> David,
> I was thinking about ergativity, free will and the becomliness of the
> young thanks to your post and the movie that my wife and I watched last
> night (at home): Lady Bird. Here’s a review of the movie:
>
> http://www.indiewire.com/2018/03/lady-bird-the-florida-
> project-coming-of-age-movies-oscars-1201936864/ <http://www.indiewire.com/
> 2018/03/lady-bird-the-florida-project-coming-of-age-movies-
> oscars-1201936864/>
>
> I was wondering whether you or others find this triangle (ergativity, free
> will and the becomliness of the young) compelling, or even interesting.
> Lady Bird is about the coming of a girl in her senior year at a Catholic
> high school in Sacramento, California, coincidentally where I went to
> college as an undergraduate. The movie resonates with Stand By Me, a coming
> of age movie I liked a lot.The difference is that Lady Bird is about an
> adolescent-to-adult transformation of a someone becoming a woman and Stand
> by Me is a boy-to-adolescent transformation of a boy. Another big
> difference is that adults are majorly present in Lady Bird and non-existent
> in Stand By Me. My wife thinks Lady Bird was too long and fell asleep
> during several scenes. I’m glad I stayed awake, though the movie wasn’t the
> roller coaster ride of Get Out. (Which, by the way, is a coming of age in
> adulthood.) Anyway, I am very interested in what is called free will and
> making choices. All three of the movies I cite are about making choices,
> choices made by characters with agency, but would you call their choices
> out of free will. Or is it more an ergative process? Becoming, a form
> and/or a noun logogentically. It is not a subject acting on an object, as
> in “My mother made me do it". In Lady Bird both mother and father are major
> parts of the girl’s Social Situation of Development, but she is certainly
> making choices that conflict with the wishes of her mother. Yet, at the end
> of the movie, you can see her mom had a huge influence on her choices. Lady
> Bird was free in the sense of coming to understand these influences AND,
> arguably, free because she worked through the crises unalienated from her
> mother. I think I like this movie most because of how parents are an
> integral and positive (thought troubled) part of the becomilness of this
> young Lady Bird, somwhere between a girl and a woman. Perhaps you, or
> others, can think of other movies about the becomliness of other girls/boys
> becoming women/men . Or books. Or whatever.
>
> I realize now that your new subject line resonates totally with previous
> posts on activism out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjory_Stoneman_Douglas. <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjory_Stoneman_Douglas> I want to
> remember her name, just as I remember the name of Amy Biehl, the name of a
> highschool in Albuquerque where my son is now teaching. (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Biehl <https://en.wikipedia.org/
> wiki/Amy_Biehl>). Marjory lived to be old. Amy died young in South Africa
> in the fight against aparteid. I would live to tell anyone listening how
> she died. It will make you cry in joy and pain. But that’s for another
> post, if anyone cares.
>
> Herny
>
>
> > On Apr 2, 2018, at 3:40 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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
>
>