[Xmca-l] Re: sense and emotion

Mon Apr 9 02:42:17 PDT 2018

"Those engaged in the propagation of knowledge of all kinds,
in particular those whose appointed task is teaching, have
as their specific function and duty (above all in the case
of the positive sciences, the doctrine of a church, the
study of positive law, &c.) the repetition of
well-established thoughts, taken up /ab extra /and all of
them given expression already. The same is true of writings
devised for teaching purposes and the spread and propagation
of the sciences. Now to what extent does the new form which
turns up when something is expressed again and again
transform the available stock of knowledge, and in
particular the thoughts of others who still retain /external
/property in those intellectual productions of theirs, into
a private mental property of the individual reproducer and
thereby give him or fail to give him the right to make them
his /external /property as well? To what extent is such
repetition of another’s material in one’s book a plagiarism?
There is no precise principle of determination available to
answer these questions, and therefore they cannot be finally
settled either in principle or by positive legislation."
(Hegel, 1821)

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
ttp://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 9/04/2018 5:45 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
> You know, in a funny, weird way, I think the problem of who wrote what in
> Chapter Seven is related. Take, for example, that great quote from
> Dostoevsky's diary that appears verbatim, more or less, in Voloshinov. Did
> Vygotsky take it from Voloshinov, or did he take it from Dostoevsky? I used
> to think this was terribly important (and I used to think it was terribly
> important that who said what when in Mind in Society was terribly
> important). What made me give this up was precisely the argument that
> because Vygotsky relied on and even made free use of the words of others to
> construct his argument, that argument lacks the originality and importance
> that we have imputed to it. As Sonia Sotomayor says that Andre Gide says,
> "Toutes choses sont deja dites, mais puis'qu'on n'ecoute rien, il faut
> recommencer."
>
> So when you are reading a translation, there is always the
> possibility--nay, the certainty--that you are reading the translator and
> not the translatee. This is because language isn't just made of ideational
> meaning; it's not just about what was said but about who said it and when.
> In Halliday, this "who" is called "interpersonal meaning", and it is just
> as important as the representational, or informational meaning: for many
> purposes, including first language acquisition, it is more important. If
> you are reading Vygotsky in English, you are probably reading something
> somebody else wrote after reading Vygotsky. That person may be quite close
> to us in time (if you are reading the translations done by the late
> Francois Seve or those being done by Irina Leopoldoff-Martin) or they may
> be lost in the mists (if you are reading "Tool and Sign"). But that person
> is not actually Vygotsky, which is why you can understand it at all and do
> something with it yourself. I don't think "tongue" is such a bad
> translation of "yazik" for my purposes, actually: it corresponds pretty
> exactly to what we call "mother tongue" or "our word" in the Korean
> curriculum. It's the system of the native language, with all of its meaning
> potential and its context of culture.
>
> But I do believe, as Halliday does, that meaning is made at all levels,
> from semantics right down to phonetics and back again. Of course, some of
> these levels are more resilient to death than others. Interpersonal meaning
> is, as Halliday says, "field like": what  he means is that it is not about
> constructing a representation out of particle like words (SVO or SOV or
> Participant-Process, etc.) but rather about giving and getting
> (propositions and proposals, goods and services, sense and emotion). This
> is quite literally wave like: it is largely conveyed through sound waves,
> through intonation and through stress, and so it doesn't weather quite as
> well as ideational meaning does when the speaker dies. But this should not
> make us think there was never anything there except ink and paper,
> information and logic, dictionary words and grammar book rules
>
> Because I am teaching phonology today, I was trying to make the point that
> the consonants and vowels are not equally vehicles of intonation and
> stress: vowels are far more intonio-extressive than consonants. That's why
> you can write a telegramme with all consonants, but not with all vowels.
> And it's also why you can sing with all vowels but not with all consonants.
> It stands to reason, then, that the vowels, which as the name suggests,
> carry so much voicing, should carry the burden of sense rather than
> signification. When I was in my twenties, for reasons that need not concern
> us here, I spent fifty five days in solitary confinement; I was allowed out
> for a piss once a night, and so I had to regulate my water intake very
> carefully to make sure that I didn't get caught short. When I was finally
> released, into a cell which had it own toilet, it was better than freedom,
> even better than food. Summer was coming (it was in a very hot country) and
> here suddenly I could drink as much water as I wanted and even take diluted
> coffee and sugared tea with breakfast! Even now, thirty years later, when I
> have to get up in the middle of the night, I can almost hear the prisoners
> in Fidelio singing "O Welche Lust!": (Out here is life, back there was the
> grave!) (Notice how much of this song is vowels, and how much you can
> understand the interpersonal meaning with out any of the words!)
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdB0roPqg7Q
>
> (It turns out, by the way, that Vygotsky and Voloshinov BOTH got the
> Doestoevsky passage, not from Dostoevsky, but from Jakubinsky! Somehow, the
> idea of Vygotsky and Voloshinov reading some third text together as they
> rode the tram to the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, makes it even more
> wonderful than if one had just read it in the work of the other.)
>
>
> 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 Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 1:35 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>
>> Here's how it appears in MiS, in two places. First as the tool of thought,
>> then as tool of tools. No more tongues in the volume.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@
>> mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
>> Sent: Saturday, April 7, 2018 6:49 PM
>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>> Cc: VEER@FSW.leidenuniv.nl
>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: sense and emotion
>>
>> Peter-
>>
>> I have put of reading Rene's article, but will try to get it to the top of
>> the always-growing stack of "must read nows."
>>
>> Just a quick comment to say that the use of the term, tongue, with respect
>> to Dewey is almost certainly a mistranslation of the term, язык which in
>> this context should be translated as language. Another casualty of
>> collective editing of the translator's work.
>>
>> mike
>> editing.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> I had an opportunity to read the article by Rene van der Veer and
>>> colleague on the last few chapters of Thinking and Speech, and found
>>> it interesting for a number of reasons. First, he does some historical
>>> work to argue that it was more a compilation of earlier work and ideas
>>> borrowed heavily from other sources than an original culminating
>>> statement on human development, an issue obscured by editors who
>>> removed quotation marks from appropriated material. The ways in which
>>> Vygotsky as we now know him was shaped by those who produced the volume
>> is interesting in and of itself.
>>> I can't say exactly how I came to what follows, but it was something
>>> that occurred to me throughout the article's discussion of meaning and
>> sense.
>>> Below, I'll paste in something I wrote nearly 20 years ago on this
>>> smysl/znachenie distinction, and I think I still believe what I wrote
>> then.
>>> What struck me this time around is how smysl:sense has a deeply
>>> emotional foundation, consistent with LSV's insistence that cognition
>>> and affect can't be separated. This was the first time I ever saw how
>>> that process might work. Emotion, as I'm thinking about it right now,
>>> produces the material through which ideas/thoughts take shape on their
>>> way to articulation via speech (or other mediational tool).
>>>
>>> [as an aside, I recently reviewed Mind in Society prior to using it in
>>> a class I taught in Mexico, and was struck by the quote about how "the
>>> tongue is the tool of tools"....I'd forgotten the "tongue" part
>>> because I typically see this phrasing accorded to speech, not the more
>>> alliterative tongue. Very nice.]
>>>
>>> In any case, I posted Rene's article, so feel some obligation to
>>> follow up with the group, and so am offering this notion, which I find
>> interesting.
>>> Am I on the right trail?
>>>
>>> http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/RER/RER2001.pdf
>>> The Russian term smysl has been translated as sense (i.e.,
>>> unarticulated inner speech), while the term znachenie has been
>>> translated as meaning (i.e., the articulation of thought through a sign
>> system such as words).
>>> Vygotsky, however, viewed both smysl and znachenie as constituents of
>>> the meaningful whole. I next explain each of these two zones of
>>> meaning in greater detail.
>>>             Smysl is the set of images and associations one makes with
>>> a sign such as a word in the area of consciousness Vygotsky (1987)
>>> called inner speech, that is, the abbreviated syntax and
>>> stream-of-consciousness properties of unarticulated, inchoate thought.
>>> Smysl corresponds to what Rosenblatt (1978) refers to as the initial
>>> zone of meaning in a reader's evocation, or what Gallas (2001) refers
>>> to as imagination. Rosenblatt describes this experience as
>>>
>>> a penumbra of "memories" of what has preceded, ready to be activated
>>> by what follows, and providing the context from which further meaning
>>> will be derived. Awareness-more or less explicit-of repetitions,
>>> echoes, resonances, repercussions, linkages, cumulative effects,
>>> contrasts, or surprises is the mnemonic matrix for the structuring of
>>> emotion, idea, situation, character, plot-in short, for the evocation of
>> a work of art.
>>> (pp. 57-58)
>>>
>>>             Smysl is as yet unarticulated, being instead the storm
>>> cloud of thought that produces the shower of words, to use Vygotsky's
>>> (1987) metaphor. One great limitation of the concept of smysl is that
>>> it cannot be empirically demonstrated, only inferred. Vygotsky's
>>> formulation of inner speech came from his observations of egocentric
>>> speech in young children, which he theorized became internalized as
>>> inner speech. Once speech (or another tool) is articulated and thus
>>> observable, it appears in the zone of meaning that is the shower of
>>> words (or other signs) that Vygotsky calls znachenie. Znachenie, then,
>>> is the zone of meaning available in represented form, corresponding to
>> the notion of a sign, regardless of modality.
>>>             Because these two zones compose a meaningful whole,
>>> referring to znachenie as "meaning" can be misleading. I retain the
>>> translation of sense for smysl: "the aggregate of all the
>>> psychological facts that arise in our consciousness as the result of
>>> the word. Sense is a dynamic, fluid, and complex formation which has
>> several zones that vary in their stability"
>>> (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 275). For znachenie, I use articulation:
>>>
>>> It is the most stable, unified, and precise of these zones. In
>>> different contexts, a word's sense changes. In contrast,
>>> [articulation] is a comparatively fixed and stable point, one that
>>> remains constant with all the exchanges of the word's sense that are
>>> associated with its use in various contexts. (p. 275)
>>>
>>>